Main currents in American thought : $b An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
American literature -- History and criticismPhilosophy, AmericanUnited States -- CivilizationUnited States -- Intellectual lifeUnited States -- Politics and governmentUnited States -- Religion
Main Currents in
American Thought
AN INTERPRETATION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO 1920
_Vernon Louis Parrington_
VOLUME ONE • 1620-1800
The Colonial Mind
VOLUME TWO • 1800-1860
The Romantic Revolution in America
VOLUME THREE • 1860-1920
The Beginnings of Critical Realism
in America
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927, 1930, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
_All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE MEMORY
OF
J. ALLEN SMITH
SCHOLAR TEACHER DEMOCRAT GENTLEMAN
_Omnium Amicus erat
qui
Justiciam ament._
Foreword
It is with a certain feeling of temerity that I offer the present
study of a field of American letters which has been pretty largely
neglected. That feeling springs from no sense of the slightness of the
materials treated of, or their remoteness from present-day interests.
To one who has dwelt for any length of time amidst the polemics of
colonial debate, a conviction of the greatness of the issues and the
intellectual honesty and masculine vigor of the disputants, comes
home with compelling force. The subjects with which they dealt are
old-fashioned only in manner and dress; at heart they were much the
same themes with which we are engaged, and with which our children
will be engaged after us. The feeling springs rather from a sense
of the complexity and many-sidedness of the materials, with their
ramifications into theology and politics and economics, and with
backgrounds that conduct to remote origins in European systems of
thought; and it is quickened by the realization that the interpretation
here offered, runs in many points counter to that frequently given.
The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the
materials, is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather
than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I
went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.
Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes,
and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life
again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and
prejudices of the times I have dealt with may have found an echo in my
judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my
interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.
Of the present volume portions of Book One have already appeared
in a much abbreviated form in the _Cambridge History of American
Literature_, and certain passages of Book Three have appeared in
_Selections from the Connecticut Wits_, of the _American Authors
Series_; and I am indebted to the courtesy of G. P. Putnam’s Sons and
of Harcourt, Brace and Company for the privilege of reprinting them
here. My obligations to many students are too great to be adequately
acknowledged in a few words; they appear at large in the footnotes. I
find myself especially indebted to the critical historians who for the
past score of years have been working with such fruitful results in the
Revolutionary and Constitutional periods of our development. Without
the assistance of their searching investigations the difficulties
in the way of understanding those complex times would have proved
insuperable. To the sane and acute scholarship of my friend and
colleague, Prof. Edward McMahon, and to the generous counsel and
encouragement of the late Prof. J. Allen Smith, I am under particular
obligations; but in those instances in which I may unwittingly have
gone astray, the fault is mine. In a study dealing with so long a
period of time and with such diverse and difficult fields, I can
scarcely hope to have escaped the many traps laid for the unwary.
Perhaps I should add that the seeming neglect, in the present volume,
of southern backgrounds, has resulted from the desire to postpone the
detailed consideration of the mind of the South to a later volume.
V. L. P.
_Seattle, January 1, 1926_
Introduction [to Volume One: The Colonial Mind]
I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development
in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be
reckoned traditionally American--how they came into being here, how
they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining
the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In
pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our
political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower
belletristic; and the main divisions of the study have been fixed by
forces that are anterior to literary schools and movements, creating
the body of ideas from which literary culture eventually springs. The
present volume carries the account from early beginnings in Puritan
New England to the triumph of Jefferson and back-country agrarianism.
Volume II concerns itself with the creative influence in America of
French romantic theories, the rise of capitalism, and the transition
from an agricultural to an industrial order; and Volume III will
concern itself with the beginnings of dissatisfaction with the regnant
middle class, and the several movements of criticism inspired by its
reputed shortcomings.
Such a study will necessarily deal much with intellectual backgrounds,
and especially with those diverse systems of European thought that
from generation to generation have domesticated themselves in
America, and through cross-fertilization with native aspirations and
indigenous growths, have resulted in a body of ideals that we reckon
definitively American. In broad outline those germinal contributions
were the bequests successively of English Independency, of French
romantic theory, of the industrial revolution and _laissez faire_,
of nineteenth-century science, and of Continental theories of
collectivism. Transplanted to American soil, these vigorous seedlings
from old-world nurseries took root and flourished in such spots as
proved congenial, stimulating American thought, suggesting programs
for fresh Utopian ventures, providing an intellectual sanction for new
experiments in government. Profoundly liberalizing in their influence,
they gave impulse and form to our native idealisms, and contributed
largely to the outcome of our social experience. The child of two
continents, America can be explained in its significant traits by
neither alone.
In the present volume, I have examined with some care the bequests of
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe to the colonial settlements,
and in particular the transplanting to America of old-world
liberalisms. In the main those liberalisms derived from two primary
sources, English Independency and French romantic theory, supplemented
by certain contributions from English Whiggery. From the first came
the revolutionary doctrine of natural rights, clarified by a notable
succession of thinkers from Roger Williams to John Locke, a doctrine
that destroyed the philosophical sanction of divine right, substituted
for the traditional absolutism the conception of a democratic church in
a democratic state, and found exemplification in the commonwealths of
Rhode Island and Connecticut. But unfortunately the liberal doctrine
of natural rights was entangled in New England with an absolutist
theology that conceived of human nature as inherently evil, that
postulated a divine sovereignty absolute and arbitrary, and projected
caste divisions into eternity--a body of dogmas that it needed two
hundred years’ experience in America to disintegrate. From this clash
between a liberal political philosophy and a reactionary theology,
between English Independency and English Presbyterianism, sprang the
broad features of the struggle that largely determined the course of
development in early New England, with which Book One is concerned.
Book Two deals with new beginnings from the raw materials of European
immigrants, in other colonies than New England, who came hither singly
and unorganized, and took immediate imprint from the new environment,
creating during the eighteenth century the great body of yeomanry that
was to determine in large measure the fate of America for a hundred
years or more. It was to these scattered and undistinguished colonials
that French romantic theory was brought by a group of intellectuals
in the later years of the century, a philosophy so congenial to a
decentralized society that it seemed to provide an authoritative
sanction for the clarifying ideals of a republican order, based on the
principle of local home rule, toward which colonial experience was
driving. Exploring the equalitarian premises of the doctrine of natural
rights, it amplified the emerging democratic theory by substituting
for the Puritan conception of human nature as vicious, the conception
of human nature as potentially excellent and capable of indefinite
development. It asserted that the present evils of society are the
consequence of vicious institutions rather than of depraved human
nature; and that as free men and equals it is the right and duty of
citizens to re-create social and political institutions to the end that
they shall further social justice, encouraging the good in men rather
than perverting them to evil. Romantic theory went further and provided
a new economics and a new sociology. Since the great desideratum is
man in a state of nature, it follows, according to the Physiocratic
school, that the farmer is the ideal citizen, and agriculture the
common and single source of wealth; and that in consequence the state
should hold the tillers of the soil in special regard, shaping the
public policy with a primary view to their interests. And since social
custom is anterior to statutory laws, since the individual precedes
the state, government must be circumscribed in its powers and scope by
common agreement, and held strictly to its sole concern, the care of
the social well-being. The political state, rightly conceived, must
be reckoned no other than a great public-service corporation, with
government as its responsible agent.
But while French romantic theory was spreading widely through the
backwoods of America, providing an intellectual justification for
the native agrarianism, another philosophy, derived from English
liberalism of the later eighteenth century, was taking possession of
the commercial towns. Realistic and material rather than romantic and
Utopian, it was implicitly hostile to all the major premises and ideals
of the French school. It conceived of human nature neither as good nor
bad, but as acquisitive; and it proposed to erect a new social and
political philosophy in accordance with the needs of a capitalistic
order. It was concerned with exploitation and the rights of trade,
rather than with justice and the rights of man. Its aspirations were
expressed in the principle of _laissez faire_, and in elaborating this
cardinal doctrine it reduced the citizen to the narrow dimensions of
the economic man, concerned only with buying in the cheapest market
and selling in the dearest. It would reduce the political state to the
rôle of policeman, to keep the peace. With humanitarian and social
interests, the state must not intermeddle--such functions lie outside
its legitimate sphere. An expression of the aspirations of trading and
speculating classes, it professed to believe that economic law--by
which term it glorified the spontaneous play of the acquisitive
instinct--was competent to regulate men in society, and that if freedom
of trade were achieved, all lesser and secondary freedoms would follow.
In the light of such over-seas bequests to the American venture, the
choice of materials for the present volume is predetermined. The
line of liberalism in colonial America runs through Roger Williams,
Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The first transported to
the new world the plentiful liberalisms of a great movement and a
great century; the second gathered up the sum of native liberalisms
that had emerged spontaneously from a decentralized society; and the
third enriched these native liberalisms with borrowings from the late
seventeenth-century natural-rights school and from French romantic
theory, engrafting them upon the vigorous American stock. Over against
these protagonists of liberalism must be set the complementary figures
of John Cotton, Jonathan Edwards, and Alexander Hamilton, men whose
grandiose dreams envisaged different ends for America and who followed
different paths. The Carolinian Seeker and the Jacobean theocrat,
the colonial democrat and the colonial Calvinist, the Physiocratic
republican and the capitalistic financier, embody in concrete form the
diverse tendencies of primitive America; and around these major figures
lesser ones will group themselves, parties to the great struggle of
those early years, the eventual outcome of which was the rejection of
the principles of monarchy and aristocracy, and the venturing upon an
experiment in republicanism continental in scope.
That our colonial literature seems to many readers meager and
uninteresting, that it is commonly squeezed into the skimpiest of
chapters in our handbooks of American literature, is due, I think, to
an exaggerated regard for esthetic values. Our literary historians
have labored under too heavy a handicap of the genteel tradition--to
borrow Professor Santayana’s happy phrase--to enter sympathetically
into a world of masculine intellects and material struggles. They have
sought daintier fare than polemics, and in consequence mediocre verse
has obscured political speculation, and poetasters have shouldered
aside vigorous creative thinkers. The colonial period is meager
and lean only to those whose “disedged appetites” find no savor in
old-fashioned beef and puddings. The seventeenth century in America
as well as in England was a _saeculum theologicum_, and the eighteenth
century was a _saeculum politicum_. No other path leads so directly
and intimately into the heart of those old days as the thorny path
of their theological and political controversies; and if one will
resolutely pick his way amongst the thorns, he will have his reward
in coming close to the men who debated earnestly over the plans and
specifications of the Utopia that was to be erected in the free spaces
of America, and who however wanting they may have been in the lesser
arts, were no mean architects and craftsmen for the business at hand.
The foundations of a later America were laid in vigorous polemics, and
the rough stone was plentifully mortared with idealism. To enter once
more into the spirit of those fine old idealisms, and to learn that the
promise of the future has lain always in the keeping of liberal minds
that were never discouraged from their dreams, is scarcely a profitless
undertaking, nor without meaning to those who like Merlin pursue the
light of their hopes where it flickers above the treacherous marshlands.
Contents [Volume One]
Introduction: The theme stated; part played by European
intellectual movements; influence in colonial America of old-world
liberalisms--English Independency, French romantic theory; incoming
of a diverse philosophy--English _laissez faire_; significance of
theology and politics in colonial America iii
Book I: Liberalism and Puritanism
New England a product of old-world custom and institutions,
modified by new-world environment. Emergence of two classes:
yeomanry, gentry; and two ideals: Puritan and Yankee 3
Part I
The Puritan Heritage--1620-1660
I. English Backgrounds
I. Carolinian liberalism an attempt to create a new social system
to replace the feudal, resulting in the doctrine of natural
rights, democracy, and equalitarianism. The result of changing
economics. Puritanism primarily middle-class. Types of church
polity--monarchical, aristocratic, democratic. Separatism the left
wing of Puritanism 5
II. Diverse theologies of Luther and Calvin. Reactionary nature of
Calvinism: established in absolutism--universality of moral law,
determinism, reprobation--denial of natural rights 11
II. The Transplanting of Ideas
I. The settlement of New England came in the middle period of the
Puritan movement. Pilgrim and Puritan 16
II. The Puritan Presbyterian: Social station--aristocratic, yet
with middle-class ambitions. Hostility to ideal of Separatism.
Sanctions of the oligarchy, of the theocracy. A Utopian venture 17
III. Certain Mistakes: The Plymouth covenant-principle--stages in
the nullification of the Separatist principle: the fellowship of
the churches; statutes erecting a state church; the climax reached
in the Cambridge Platform. The adoption of a freehold tenure of
land. Webster’s interpretation 22
III. The Chief Stewards of Theocracy
I. Master John Cotton--Priest: Representative of priestly
stewardship. Scholar and intellectual. Doctrine of an ethical
aristocracy and carnal liberty. A scripturist, seeking to check
the drift towards democracy. His _Model of Moses his Judicials_.
Rejection of natural rights, of hereditary aristocracy. _The
Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared._ Debate with Roger
Williams--freedom to follow the law of God 27
II. John Winthrop--Magistrate: Lay representative of theocracy. A
cultivated gentleman. Reasons for removal. Influence of the Bible.
His leadership; conception of magistracy ennobled by Puritanism.
Implied absolutism--political philosophy. Struggle with the
deputies; distrust of democracy. Absolute authority of law--the
Little Speech. Liberty to the good, just, and honest.
Consequences 38
IV. The Contributions of Independency
I. The clash between Presbyterianism and Independency--the right
of individual freedom. Liberal leaders--Hooker, Williams. Two
commonwealths--Connecticut, Rhode Island 51
II. Thomas Hooker--Puritan Liberal: A moderate. Sprung from low
social origins. As a preacher in England; removal to Hartford.
Democratic order of the commonwealth due to Hooker. His _Survey of
the Summe of Church Discipline_ 53
III. Roger Williams--Seeker: Embodiment of radical Independency,
and forerunner of later generations. A provocative figure. Stages
in his intellectual development. A mystic and Christian democrat,
concerned with a new social order. His political theory: the
compact theory and theocratic absolutism; conception of the
state--of government; the compact a constitution, government an
agent, and the end the common well-being. Theory of toleration. A
great political thinker. The constitution of Rhode Island 62
V. Other Dreamers in Israel
I. Nathaniel Ward--Elizabethan Puritan: A Puritan wit and belated
Euphuist. The _Simple Cobler of Aggawam_--a mingling of satire and
politics. A constitutionalist, pleading for a written compact to
delimit prerogative and popular rights. His body of law 76
II. John Eliot--A Theocratic Utopia: _The Christian Commonwealth_.
Ordered to be suppressed. His plan of a Christian state. A rigid
social order 81
Part II
The Twilight of the Oligarchy--1660-1720
The spread of provincialism and the consequences. Formalism in the
church; superstition. The psychology of the Salem outbreak. The
muddling of the oligarchy and the end 85
I. Samuel Sewall--Yankee--First representative of the new order.
The Sewall of tradition; the real Sewall: middle-class, governed
by a prudential morality. Uncreative, conservative, conventional.
The other side--generous, kindly, the first embodiment of village
friendliness 88
II. The Mather Dynasty
I. Difficulties involved in attempting an estimate. Certain Harvard
contributions 98
II. Increase Mather: An arch conservative, bred by a conservative
environment. His sympathy for the Genevan system; attempts
to strengthen discipline; steps in his Presbyterianizing.
Intolerant--his biographer quoted. Unread in political
theory--dictatorial. As agent at the English court. His bitterness.
Not a great Puritan--compared with Samuel Hopkins. His _Illustrious
Providences_--not scientific. The last of the New England
Presbyterians 99
III. Cotton Mather: Victim of a provincial environment. Subject
for a psychologist. His egoism; his quarrels. The _Diary_. His
venture into politics. A natural Tory. His writings: _Wonders of
the Invisible World_; the _Magnalia_. The futility of his dream 106
III. Stirrings of Liberalism
I. John Wise--Village Democrat: Before Dudley; at Quebec.
Character--a liberal. His _Vindication of the New England
Churches_--based on the doctrine of natural rights. Defense
of democratic Congregationalism against the movement to
Presbyterianize. Comment of Cotton Mather. His contribution to the
paper-money controversy. His later influence 118
II. Social Drifts: Economic forces--a chasm opening between old
England and New England. The village and Toryism: Joseph Dudley
and the carters. First newspapers: _News-Letter_; _New-England
Courant_; _New-England Weekly Journal_ 125
Book II: The Colonial Mind
The middle eighteenth century undistinguished, yet it created the
individualism that was the source of a new democratic psychology 131
Part I
The Mind in the Making--1720-1763
I. Colonial Backgrounds
I. New Stock: Economic motive of immigration. The Scotch-Irish
influx; indented servants--the Germans; diary of John Harrower 133
II. The frontier--Lubberland: _Journal_ of Madam Knight--frontier
leveling, poverty. _History of the Dividing Line_, Col. William
Byrd--the backcountry, lubberland, impatient of law 137
III. The frontier--Land of Promise: _Letters_ of Crèvecœur: A
French Physiocrat; his travels in America; first interpretation
of the influence of the frontier in economic terms--_Ubi panis
ibi patria_; a new type; influence of the middle settlements,
the frontier. _More Letters_: Crèvecœur the Loyalist--dislike of
American Whiggery 140
II. The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards
I. Backgrounds: Decay of Calvinism; beginnings of rationalism. A
free environment and the dogmas of total depravity and election.
The major question of determinism 148
II. Edwards a Puritan mystic. Sought to establish theology
in philosophy. Idealistic philosophy. Desire to magnify
God--interpreted in terms of will. Defended threatened dogmas. _On
the Freedom of the Will_--the triumph of the theologian. _Narrative
of the Surprizing Works of God_ and the psychology of conversion.
The Great Awakening. Father of later Congregationalism. The tragedy
of his position 152
III. Benjamin Franklin--Our First Ambassador--A Democrat in an
aristocratic world. A free soul; product of environment. Compared
with Defoe. His rise. Enters politics. Agent in England. Corruption
of English politics. A sociologist; our first economist. Economic
theories: _A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a
Paper Currency._ Labor the measure of value. Accepted Physiocratic
views: _laissez faire_, agrarianism. Distrust of industrialism.
_Principles of Trade._ Political views: imperial federation,
Whiggery. In the Constitutional Convention--a unicameral system. A
child of the eighteenth century 164
Part II
The Awakening of the American Mind--1763-1783
I. Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule
I. Background Facts: Causes of the Revolution obscure. Home rule
and imperial centralization. Native liberalism. Three areas and
three diverse interests. The imperial problem. Grievances of
merchants, planters, yeomanry 179
II. Argument and Propaganda: American case based on the British
Constitution; on natural rights. Theories of representation,
English and colonial. Powers of Parliament. Natural rights and
Locke--reasons for his appeal 186
III. Certain Social Consequences: Emergence of republicanism.
Attitude of upper class. Expulsion of Loyalists. Influence on
American culture. Rise of middle class; political centralization 190
II. The Mind of the American Tory
I. Thomas Hutchinson--Royal Governor: The House of Hutchinson.
Character and intellectual attainments. Insincerity of the Tory
philosophy. Situation on his accession to the governorship.
Prerogative and democracy. Proposals for remodeling Massachusetts
government. The Town Meeting. Affair of the letters. The problem of
sovereignty. Government by ministerial instructions. Comment on his
enemies. His failure 194
II. Daniel Leonard--Tory Lawyer: Character. _Massachusettensis._ A
follower of Hobbes--the leviathan state. The sin of rebellion and
the law of treason. Groundlessness of American sedition--the virus
of republicanism. On the right of revolution 207
III. Jonathan Boucher--Tory Priest: Character. _A View of the
Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution._ Influence
of Filmer’s _Patriarcha_. Doctrine of obedience. Evil effects of
republicanism. Government a divine institution--the patriarchal
nature of kingship. An extreme Tory 214
III. John Dickinson--The Mind of the American Whig--A
moderate--spokesman of the colonial Whigs. Essence of Whiggery--the
rule of property. His social position; conception of political
stewardship. A constitutional lawyer. Accepted parliamentary
sovereignty, right to regulate trade. Taxation and Whiggery--a tax
and an imposition. Not a republican. His _Two Letters on the Tea
Tax_. In the Constitutional Convention. _Letters of Fabius._ His
views old-fashioned 219
IV. Samuel Adams--The Mind of the American Democrat--An agitator
and practical politician. Member of the opposition. Advocate
of home rule. Understood the ways of Tory government. Master
of political theory. Three lines of argument: natural rights,
constitutional rights, the charter compact. Influence of Locke, of
Coke. Reliance on public opinion. Use of publicity, organization,
town meetings. Newspaper articles. Motive of attacks on royal
officials. Faith in the people. A democrat. The cost in reputation 233
V. Literary Echoes
I. The Whig Satirists
1. John Trumbull: A lover of _belles lettres_ drawn into the
strife. _M’Fingal._ The note of humor. A potential intellectual;
a moderate liberal. An echo of Connecticut opinion 248
2. Francis Hopkinson, Esq.: The state of Philadelphia culture.
A dilettante. A potential Tory turned Whig. _The New Roof;
Objections to the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government._
A Federalist 252
II. The Tory Satirists
1. Jonathan Odell: A bitter nature. His satires--an embodiment
of class prejudice. _The American Times._ Estimate of Whig
leaders 255
2. Samuel Peters: His curious ambition. His _History
of Connecticut_. Explanation of the cause of the
Revolution--ministerial neglect. The cure--establishment of a
colonial aristocracy 259
Book III: Liberalism and the Constitution
Part I
The Agrarian Defeat--1783-1787
I. Agrarianism and Capitalism
I. Background of Ideas--English and French contributions. The
struggle between political realists and humanitarian liberals.
Influence of English middle class. Puritan ethics of work and
capitalism. Attitude towards current liberalisms--the state.
Influence of Harrington, Locke, Adam Smith. The new individualism.
Rousseau and French humanitarianism--decentralization and the
paternalistic state. Reasons why English influence prevailed 267
II. The Political Situation: Party alignments. Weakness of
agrarians. The composite group of Federalists. Odium attaching
to democracy--confused with Populism. Shays’s Rebellion.
Reaction from natural rights to economic realism. The return to
seventeenth-century republicanism 273
II. The Great Debate--Inadequate theory of republicanism. Earlier
English liberalism undemocratic. Democratic theory undeveloped.
First debate: republicanism and the majority rule--Madison’s view;
the Whig doctrine of property rule. Second debate: opposition
to checks on majority will. _The Federalist_--its repute, the
augmented state, theory of faction, economic basis of government.
_Letters_ of R. H. Lee--analysis of economic conditions, the
Constitution undemocratic. Emergence of parties 279
III. Political Thinkers--The English Group
I. Alexander Hamilton--The Leviathan State: Representative of
conservative interests. A master of finance, administrator rather
than thinker. Inadequate intellectual equipment. A political
realist: men are swayed by self-interest; the rule of the strong.
Undemocratic. The doctrine of _vox justiciae_. His plan of
government--the fallacy of his argument. As a statesman: necessity
of allying the wealthy with government: position on funding,
taxation, the tariff, the industrial revolution. Statesman of the
rising capitalism 292
II. John Adams--Realist: Compared with Dr. Johnson--apostle of
common sense. Shift from earlier position. Intellectual qualities.
His early constitutionalism--a federated British empire. _A
Defense of the Constitution of Government_, and _Discourses on
Davila_. Opposition aroused by latter. His political philosophy:
theory of human nature, doctrine of rivalry, the class struggle,
natural aristocracy. Foolishness of French doctrines of equality
and fraternity. Faction the weakness of democracy--the end anarchy
or absolutism. The fact of property rule. Hence need for system
of checks and balances. Sources of his philosophy--Harrington.
Hostility to Hamilton. A notable political thinker 307
Part II
Political Democracy Gets under Way--1787-1800
I. The Impact of the French Revolution--Stirred party passions
afresh. Popularized democracy in America and provided a body of
philosophy: doctrines of the majority will, expediency, local
self-government. Later party divisions. Democratic clubs. The
_odium theologicum_. Paine’s _Rights of Man_ and J. Q. Adams’s
_Publicola_. The shift of positions 321
II. Political Thinkers--The French Group
I. Tom Paine--Republican Pamphleteer: An internationalist. Odium
attaching to his name. A social inefficient. _Common Sense_--appeal
to expediency; attack on monarchy and the British Constitution.
Political philosophy: doctrine of continuous compact, of the _res
publica_. _The Rights of Man_--a reply to Burke’s theory of civil
contract and the expediency of aristocratic rule. The business
of the revolution. _Agrarian Justice_: civilization and poverty;
relation to Babeuf; theory of unearned increment; a tax proposal.
_Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance_--an attack on
funding. A pacifist. Sources of his philosophy. His position in
contemporary American opinion 327
II. Thomas Jefferson--Agrarian Democrat: Position. His
inconsistencies due to a slowly clarifying philosophy. An
intellectual, holding to American experience. Chief doctrines:
the social compact, the _res publica_, the diminished state--a
philosophy of decentralization. Belief in the excellence of an
agrarian economy--a Physiocrat; fear of cities and industrialism.
Suspicious of appeal to past experience: the evils of the past
due to leviathan state; consolidation would repeat those evils
in America. Excellence of home rule; the majority will. Fear of
judicial encroachment, the Common Law. Class rule serves class
interests. Faith in the common people. The industrial revolution
and a new centralization 342
III. The War of Belles Lettres
I. The Federalist Group 357
1. The Hartford Wits: Arch conservatives. Sources of Connecticut
Federalism--Calvinism and business. The Connecticut fear of
democracy. Members of the group. Theodore Dwight. Timothy
Dwight--his contemporary reputation, likeness to Increase Mather,
a clerical Federalist. His literary work 357
2. _The Anarchiad_: Political writings of the Wits. Character of
Lemuel Hopkins. The theme of the work--an attack on populism and
democracy 363
II. The French Group 367
1. Philip Freneau--Poet of Two Revolutions: A revolutionary
volunteer--effect on his reputation. A radical advocate of all
liberal movements. Effect on his poetic career. Spirit of his
satire--attack on England. His desire to strip colonial loyalties
from the American. Influence on Freneau of the French Revolution.
_The National Gazette_--a leader of anti-Federalism. The
consequences. His growing reputation 368
2. Joel Barlow--Jacobin: Early career: his experience abroad and
his adoption of Jacobin views. Cost to his reputation. _Advice
to the Privileged Orders_: the doctrine of _res publica_; social
responsibility for the individual. _Letter to the National
Convention of France_, and the machinery of a democratic state.
_The Columbiad_--a republican poem 382
3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge--Free-Lance Democrat: An independent
critic of the shortcomings of democracy. _Modern Chivalry_--a
frontier book, a satire of current manners. Democracy must not be
sacrificed to selfish individualism--the folly of the political
climber and of the electorate. A notable book 390
Conclusion 397
Bibliography 399
Index 405
Book One • Liberalism and Puritanism
Common report has long made out Puritan New England to have been the
native seat and germinal source of such ideals and institutions as
have come to be regarded as traditionally American. Any critical study
of the American mind, therefore, may conveniently seek its beginnings
in the colonies clustered about Massachusetts Bay, and will inquire
into the causes of the pronounced singularity of temper and purpose
that marked off the New England settlements from those to the south,
creating a distinctive New England character, and disciplining it for
later conquests that were to set a stamp on American life. The course
of its somewhat singular development would seem from the first to have
been determined by an interweaving of idealism and economics--by the
substantial body of thought and customs and institutions brought from
the old home, slowly modified by new ways of life developing under the
silent pressure of a freer environment. Of these new ways, the first in
creative influence was probably the freehold tenure of landholdings,
put in effect at the beginning and retained unmodified for generations;
and the second was the development of a mercantile spirit that resulted
from the sterility of the Massachusetts soil, which encouraged the
ambitious to seek wealth in more profitable ways than tilling barren
acres. From these sources emerged the two chief classes of New England:
the yeomanry, a body of democratic freeholders who constituted the
rank and file of the people, and the gentry, a group of capable
merchants who dominated the commonwealth from early days to the
rise of industrialism. And it was the interweaving of the aims and
purposes of these acquisitive yeomen and gentry--harmonious for the
most part on the surface, yet driving in different directions--with
the ideal of a theocracy and the inhibitions of Puritan dogma, that
constitutes the pattern of life to be dealt with here. The Puritan
and the Yankee were the two halves of the New England whole, and to
overlook or underestimate the contributions of either to the common
life is grossly to misinterpret the spirit and character of primitive
New England. The Puritan was a contribution of the old world, created
by the rugged idealism of the English Reformation; the Yankee was a
product of native conditions, created by a practical economics.
Part One: The Puritan Heritage • 1620-1660
Chapter I • English Backgrounds
I
The body of thought brought to America by the immigrant Puritans, and
which gave a special cast to the New England mind, may be summed in
a phrase as Carolinian liberalism. It was the confused bequest of a
hundred years of English idealism, struggling with the knotty problems
of a complex society in transition from the old static feudal order to
the modern capitalistic; and it took a particular form and received a
narrow ideology from the current ecclesiastical disputes concerning the
nature and governance of the true church. It was exclusively a product
of the Reformation, unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance. But
though English Puritanism was wholly theological in its immediate
origins, it gathered about it in the century and a half of its militant
career all the forces of unrest fermenting in England. Economics and
politics joined hands with theology; the center of gravity of the total
movement tended to sink lower in the social scale; and in the end all
England was involved in the great struggle.
In its deeper purpose Puritanism was a frank challenge of the
traditional social solidarity of English institutional life by an
emergent individualism, and far-reaching social readjustments followed
inevitably in its train. If the evolution of modern society is
conceived of as falling into two broad phases, the disintegration of a
corporate feudal order into unregimented individual members of society,
and the struggles of those free individuals to regroup themselves
in new social commonwealths, the historical significance of English
Puritanism may perhaps become clear: it was one of the disruptive
forces that disintegrated the traditional solidarity of church and
state by creating a revolutionary philosophy of individual rights that
purposed to free the individual, both as Christian and subject, from
subjection to a fixed corporate status. The sixteenth century had
announced the great doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and
the seventeenth century was engaged in adapting the forms of social
and political institutions to that revolutionary principle. It was
concerned to discover a new system of social organization that should
adjust equitably the rights of the individual to the needs of the
political state and to society. To that end the whole theory of the
origin and functions of the political state must come in for review,
and a new conception of the rights of the individual subject-citizen
must be evolved.
This is the sufficient explanation of the close interweaving of
theology and politics that marked the broadening movement of English
Puritanism. Unless one keeps in mind the social forces that found it
convenient to array themselves in Puritan garb, the clear meaning of it
all will be lost in the fogs of Biblical disputation, and some of the
ablest men the English race has ever bred will be reduced to crabbed
theologians involved in tenuous subtleties and disputing endlessly over
absurd dogmas. But tenacious disputants though they certainly were,
pursuing their subtleties into the last refuge and cranny of logic,
those Puritan dogmatists were very far from being vain practitioners of
eccentricity. It is the manner and dress and not the matter of their
argument that is strange; and if we will resolutely translate the old
phrases into modern equivalents, if we will put aside the theology and
fasten attention on the politics and the economics of the struggle, we
shall have less difficulty in discovering that the new principle for
which those old Puritans were groping was the later familiar doctrine
of natural rights; and the final end and outcome of their concern
for a more equitable relation of the individual to society, was the
principle of a democratic commonwealth, established in the conception
of political equalitarianism. Here are liberalisms in plenty to reward
the search for the inner core of Puritanism. There was gunpowder packed
away in Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, and the
explosion that resulted made tremendous breaches in the walls of a
seemingly impregnable feudalism. An intellectual like Roger Williams,
who had thought his way resolutely to the logical outcome of the
reforming principles, could not fail to be reckoned a firebrand by his
generation. The doctrine of “thorough” was dangerously revolutionary.
If the economics of England had not been in a state of flux during the
century following the accession of Elizabeth, the Puritan movement
would not have moved forward by successive stages to the explosion
of the Civil War. But because, as later in France, a rising economic
order was restive under the restrictions of an outworn order, the
Puritan protest found capable allies at hand, and supported by the
money and arms of the commercial interests, it passed under the control
of the latter and set about the great business of making England over
in accordance with the new plans and specifications. On the whole
it is no mistake to regard the Puritan revolution as primarily a
rebellion of the capable middle class, whose growing trade interests
demanded a larger measure of freedom than a paternal king and a landed
aristocracy were willing to grant; and its significant contributions
to the modern world were the two systems it did so much to further:
the system of capitalism and the system of parliamentary government.
From the Puritan conception of the stewardship of talents came a new
ethic of work that provided a sanction for middle-class exploitation,
by supplanting the medieval principle of production for consumption
with the capitalistic principle of production for profit; and from the
conception of the dignity of the individual came the sanction for the
self-pride of the merchant that sustained him in his encounters with a
domineering aristocracy. A prosperous merchant who accounted himself
a son of God and who was persuaded that he was fighting for a freer
England was no mean foe to be awed by the rustlings of a Cavalier. The
London burgesses were the backbone of Puritanism in the days before the
movement passed into the extremer form of Independency and was taken
over by the sectarian radicals; and the Presbyterian middle-phase of
Puritanism spread widely amongst the middle class throughout central
and southern England. But in unloosing the traditional social bonds
Puritanism awakened aspirations that in the end proved hostile to the
middle-class program. It created bitter partisan divisions; it set the
social underling and the aristocrat apart from the middle-class core,
and created those major political parties that have since carried on
the parliamentary struggle. Inevitably it sharpened class alignments,
and the reactions of those alignments vitally affected the development
of New England. The struggles in Massachusetts can scarcely be
understood unless they are set against the greater struggles then going
forward in England.
The three parties that emerged from the theological disputes, Anglican,
Presbyterian, and Independent, followed, in the main, broad social
cleavages and corresponded roughly to the later political divisions
of Tory, Whig, and Democrat. The first stoutly upheld the absolutist
principle in church and state. It stood for Bishop and King. Numbering
probably a large majority of the English people, and led by the
hereditary masters of England, it was dominated by the feudal spirit of
corporate unity. It believed that social order, the loyal subjection
of subject to ruler, was possible only through a coalescence of
church and state. The subject-citizen was born into the one as he
was born into the other, and owed allegiance both to his spiritual
and temporal overlords. Authority, whether in church or state, was
of divine origin, and Bishop and King were the Lord’s anointed,
answerable for their stewardship only to God. The second party was
a compromise between aristocracy and democracy. It substituted the
principle of elective stewardship for divine right. Rejecting the
absolutism of the hierarchy, it turned to the system newly brought
over from Geneva, a system that retained the principle of a state
church, but which yielded control of the parish to the eldership, a
select body of the best and wisest chosen by the laity, with final
authority in doctrine and discipline vested in the synod. It drew its
support largely from the London burgesses, but with a considerable
following of country gentlemen. As the party developed it tended to
merge with the nascent capitalism, restricted the doctrine of natural
rights to property rights, and prepared the way for the later Whiggery
of Pitt, or capitalistic imperialism. The third party was more or
less consciously democratic in spirit and purpose, the expression of
the newly-awakened aspirations of the social underling. Numbers of
rebellious individualists appeared who wanted to be ruled neither by
bishop nor elder, but who preferred to club with the like-minded and
set up an independent church on a local, self-governing basis. They
took literally the command of Paul, “Come out from among them, and
be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.”
That only was the true church, they asserted, which withdrew from all
communion with sinners and rejected the authority of a sinful state;
and so they called themselves Separatists.
Separatism, quite evidently, was the extreme left wing of the total
Puritan movement, concerned to explore all the logical deductions
from the revolutionary premise of the Reformation. It was the final
expression of the disintegrating gospel of individualism implicit
in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Its unworldly
sincerity was as uncompromising as its unworldly scripturism. Not
finding sanction for them in the Bible, it rejected the established
ecclesiastical authorities, and laid rude hands on the garments of
Mother Church. Counsels of social expediency were accounted as dust in
the balance against the explicit commandment of the Lord to separate
from the sins of the world; and clinging to the text of the Scripture
the Separatist was led straight to the conception of a Christian
democracy. If the true church was a Congregation of the Saints, and
if the Saints were equal in the sight of God, why should not the
principle of equality prevail in the rule of the congregation? And
if it were a brotherhood in Christ, owning allegiance to the King
of Kings, by what Scriptural right did profane authorities exercise
control over the tender consciences of the brethren? The autonomy
of the congregation was a fruitful conception, certain to appeal to
vigorous natures; and out of the loins of Separatism came a numerous
and often ungainly progeny that greatly scandalized the conservative
Carolinian: Anabaptist, Digger, Fifth-Monarchy man, Quaker, Seeker,
Congregationalist--to name only a few--each following his particular
path to his divinely sanctioned Utopia, regardless of social ties,
denying the worth of social conformity. Imperious individualists, the
Separatists were certain to prove an offense to all respectable folk,
who demanded in the name of common sense that they be put down.
It was the doctrines of Separatism, quite as much as the principle
of the independency of the congregation, that aroused the fierce
antagonism of Presbyterians equally with Anglicans. In the main those
doctrines did not derive from John Calvin; they go back rather to
Wittenberg than to Geneva, to the principles of Luther and certain
German sects. The Anabaptist and the Digger, clearly, were of German
descent and of somewhat ancient lineage, offspring of late medieval
communism and other primitive enthusiasms. The Quaker was a mystic,
sprung from the New Testament, who denied the Scriptural validity of
a Hebraized Calvinism and a hireling priesthood, and accepted the
Holy Spirit as the sole guide to his feet. The Seeker, on the other
hand, who may perhaps be regarded as the completest expression of
Puritan radicalism, was an open-minded questioner who professed to
have found no satisfactory answer to his inquiry concerning the nature
of the true church, and was awaiting further light. The Seekers were
individuals rather than a sect, few in numbers yet greatly influential,
men like Roger Williams, Sir Harry Vane, Cromwell, and perhaps Milton,
outstanding figures of a great age, who embodied the final results of
Puritan idealism before it was submerged by the Restoration.
During the long years of rule by divine right under the first Stuarts,
the Anglicans held the Puritan unrest in strict control. Nevertheless a
hundred years of debate and changing economic conditions had rendered
the attempt to erect in England a counterpart of the French centralized
state, no better than an anachronism. The Presbyterian opposition
grew rapidly in numbers and prestige, and the early years of the Long
Parliament marked the culmination of Presbyterian power. The bishops
were overthrown and the elders were in a fair way to seize control of
England. But unfortunately for Presbyterian hopes, the radical sects
thrown up out of the war clashed with the moderates and finally broke
with them; whereupon followed the “root and branch” revolution that
had been long preparing. The left-wing Independents secured control of
the army and set about the work of erecting a government that should
be a real commonwealth of free citizens. The voice of the underling,
for the first time in English history, was listened to in the national
councils, for the excellent reason that his sword was drawn to enforce
his demands. But they were too small a minority to leaven the sodden
mass of a people long subject to absolutist rule. The psychology of
custom was against them. They could strike down their armed enemies in
the field, but they could not liberate the minds of men unfit to be
free. Militant Puritanism was overthrown and its idealisms became the
jest of every drunken tapster in London. But fortunately, not before
its political principles, long obscured by theology, were sufficiently
clarified to be laid open to the common understanding of Englishmen.
Out of the debates around the camp fires of the army had come a new
philosophy that rested on the principle that the individual, both
as Christian and citizen, derives from nature certain inalienable
rights which every church and every state is bound to respect. This
far-reaching doctrine of natural rights, to the formulation of which
many thinkers had contributed and which received later its classic
form from the pen of Locke, was the suggestive contribution of
Puritanism to political theory, with the aid of which later liberals
were to carry forward the struggle.
II
The far-reaching liberalisms implicit in the rejection of a
hierarchical organization of the church were to discover no allies in
the major premises of the system of theology accepted generally by the
English Puritans, and by them transported to New England. Calvinism
was no friend of equalitarianism. It was rooted too deeply in the Old
Testament for that, was too rigidly aristocratic. It saw too little
good in human nature to trust the multitude of the unregenerate;
and this lack of faith was to entail grave consequences upon the
development of New England. That the immigrant Puritans brought
in their intellectual luggage the system of Calvin rather than of
Luther must be reckoned a misfortune, out of which flowed many of the
bickerings and much of the intolerance that left a stain on the pages
of early New England history.
Two divergent systems of theology, it will be remembered, were
spreading through northern Europe during the years of the Reformation,
systems that inevitably differentiated in consequence of certain
variations of emphasis in the teachings of Luther and Calvin. Both
thinkers accepted the adequacy of the Scriptures to all temporal needs,
but Luther was at once more mystical and more practical than Calvin,
deriving his inspiration chiefly from the New Testament, discovering
the creative source of the Christian life in the spiritual union
of the soul with Christ, and inclining to tolerance of differences
of opinion amongst believers; whereas Calvin was ardently Hebraic,
exalting righteousness above love, seeking the law in the Old
Testament and laying emphasis on an authoritarian system. The one
was implicitly individualistic, the other hierarchical in creative
influence. The teachings of Luther, erected on the major principle
of justification by faith, conducted straight to political liberty,
and he refused to compromise or turn away from pursuing the direct
path. If one accepts the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers,
one can scarcely refrain from following Luther in his conception of
Christian liberty. If the mystical union of the soul with Christ has
superseded all lesser loyalties by a higher and more sacred, the
enjoyment of spiritual freedom must be reckoned the inalienable right
of every child of God. Neither the political state nor the official
hierarchy can justly coerce the individual conscience. “One thing and
one thing only,” said Luther in his _Treatise on Christian Liberty_,
“is necessary for Christian life, righteousness and liberty.” And
from this he deduced the conclusion that “neither pope nor bishop nor
any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a
Christian man without his consent; and if he does, it is done in the
spirit of tyranny.”[1] Clearly, this is the spirit of uncompromising
individualism that would eventually espouse the principle of democracy
in church and state; and it was their native sympathy with such
liberalism that led the radical Separatists to turn more naturally to
Luther than to Calvin. Many of the differences that set Roger Williams
so greatly apart from the New England brethren must be traced to the
Lutheran origins of his thinking.
There was scant room in the rigid system of John Calvin for such
Christian liberty. The Genevan thinker was a logician rather than
a philosopher, a rigorous system-maker and dogmatist who knotted
every argument and tied every strand securely into its fellow, till
there was no escape from the net unless one broke through the mesh.
To the formalist who demanded an exact system, and to the timid
who feared free speculation, the logical consistency of Calvinism
made irresistible appeal; and this perhaps suffices to explain its
extraordinary hold on the rank and file of middle-class English
Presbyterians. More original minds might break with it--men like
Richard Hooker and Roger Williams and Vane and Milton--but academic
thinkers and schoolmen, men whom the free spaces of thought frightened
and who felt safe only behind secure fences, theologians like John
Cotton and his fellows, made a virtue of necessity and fell to
declaiming on the excellence of those chains wherewith they were bound.
How narrow and cold was their prison they seem never to have realized;
but that fact only aggravated the misfortunes that New England was to
suffer from the spiritual guidance of such teachers. In seeking for
an explanation of the unhappy union of a reactionary theology and a
revolutionary political theory, Harriet Beecher Stowe suggested in
_Poganuc People_ that the Puritan immigrants were the children of two
different centuries; that from the sixteenth century they got their
theology, and from the seventeenth their politics, with the result that
an older absolutist dogma snuggled down side by side in their minds
with a later democratic conception of the state and society. In England
the potential hostility between Calvinist dogma and individual freedom
was perceived by the more liberal Separatists, but in America it was
not till the rise of the Revolutionary disputes of the next century
that Calvinism was discovered to be the foe of democratic liberalism
and was finally rejected. It is a fruitful suggestion, and in its major
contention that the liberalisms implicit in the Puritan revolution were
ill served by a reactionary theology, it is certainly in harmony with
the facts.
That Calvinism in its primary assumptions was a composite of oriental
despotism and sixteenth-century monarchism, modified by the medieval
conception of a city-state, is clear enough today to anyone who will
take the trouble to translate dogma into political terms. In recasting
the framework of the old theology, Calvin accepted as a sovereign
conception the idea of God as arbitrary and absolute will--an august
_Rex regum_ whose authority is universal and unconditioned; and this
conception he invested with Hebraic borrowings from the Old Testament.
The principle of absolutism, indeed, he could scarcely have escaped.
It came down to him through the Roman Empire and the Roman Church,
from the ancient oriental despotisms, and it was interwoven with all
the institutions and social forms against which the Reformation was
a protest. But unhappily, instead of questioning the principle, he
provided a new sanction for it and broadened its sway, by investing
it with divine authority and erecting upon it a whole cosmology. That
the ancient Hebrew thinkers, in seeking to give concrete form to their
speculations on the nature of Jehovah, should have made use of the
political ideas of primitive Israel, that they should have used all
the wealth of oriental imagery in describing the regal attributes of
their God, was inevitable. They knew only oriental potentates, and so
Jehovah became a greater Ptolemy, with Cherubim and Seraphim, Angels
and Principalities and Powers, duly ranked about the heavenly throne.
So saturated with monarchical and caste ideas is the Old Testament,
that it is almost impossible today to put the old phrasing out of mind,
and we talk as naturally of the Kingdom of God as did the men of that
older world who knew no other political phraseology. Calvin rejected
the individualism of Luther and followed in the footsteps of older
thinkers like Duns Scotus. The monarchical principle was everywhere
gaining ground in Europe. He had a lawyer’s love of law, and law
reposed in the absolute will of the prince. Hebraize this fact, erect a
cosmology upon it, and we have the vital principle of Calvinism.
From this cosmic absolutism, that conceived of God as the stable Will
sustaining the universe, binding together what otherwise would fly
asunder, two important corollaries were derived: the universality of
the moral law, and the necessity of divine judgment. From the former
flowed that curious association of God’s will with natural causes which
induced Cotton Mather, when suffering from toothache, to inquire what
sin he had committed with his teeth, and which left no free spaces
or non-moral impulses in the lives of men. From the latter flowed
the doctrine of theological determinism. If time is embedded in the
eternity of God’s mind, if to Him past and future are here and now,
foreknowledge is an inevitable divine attribute, and predestination is
only a finite way of expressing God’s understanding of how human fate
works itself out. Ally this doctrine of determinism with the Biblical
account of the fall of man, and the doctrine of the elect becomes the
theological complement of the class prejudices of the times. Bred up in
the current aristocratic contempt for the sodden mass of the people,
Calvinist theologians easily came to regard them as stupid, sensual,
veritable children of Adam, born to sin and heirs of damnation. Only
the elect shall be saved. That there was a remnant in Israel whom God
had chosen, Isaiah had long before pointed out; and the doctrine of
the remnant was confirmed for Calvinism by the sinful herd whose daily
actions testified to their lost estate.
According to such a theology, the individual clearly is in no
effective sense a free soul. There is no room for the conception of
human perfectibility. The heritage of natural freedom was long since
cast away by the common forefather; and because of the pre-natal sin
which this act entailed on all mankind, the natural man is shut away
eternally from communion with God. He is no better than an oriental
serf at the mercy of a Sovereign Will that is implacable, inscrutable,
the ruler of a universe predetermined in all its parts and members
from the foundation of the earth. Except for the saving grace of divine
election, which no human righteousness can purchase, all must go down
to the everlasting damnation that awaits the sons of Adam. In the eyes
of such a philosophy it is sheer impertinence to talk of the dignity
and worth of the individual soul. Men are no other than the worms of
the dust. The boon of eternal life is not included in God’s enumeration
of natural rights; it is a special grant from the Lord of the universe
who is pleased to smile on whom he is pleased to smile. In the hard
words of Paul, “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and
whom he will he hardeneth.” And those on whom he hath had mercy are his
Saints, and they are gathered into his church, as the free city-states
had risen out of the muck of medieval despotism. They are the stewards
of his righteousness and are called to the great work of rulership on
earth that God’s will may be done and righteousness may prevail over
iniquity.
It was an ambitious program, and so long as the Presbyterian party
maintained its ascendency in England it endeavored to thrust its
Calvinism down every throat, no matter how unwelcome; but with the
passing of power from its hands, and the growth of a common-sense
spirit of toleration, Calvinistic dogma lost its authority and the
minds of Englishmen turned to more humane philosophies. In New England,
on the other hand, by virtue of a rigid suppression of free inquiry,
Calvinism long lingered out a harsh existence, grotesque and illiberal
to the last. In banishing the Antinomians and Separatists and Quakers,
the Massachusetts magistrates cast out the spirit of liberalism from
the household of the Saints.
Footnotes
[1] See “The Babylonian Captivity,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 233
(Philadelphia, 1915).
Chapter II • The Transplanting of Ideas
I
The Great Migration, it will be remembered, fell in the time of the
Laudean reaction, when the Presbyterian Utopia seemed remote and the
hopes of the Puritan dreamers were fallen low. The Boston leaders
quitted England ten years before Charles summoned the Long Parliament,
and twelve before the royal standard was unfurled at Nottingham.
The armed struggle for supremacy was far below the horizon, and the
outlandish philosophies that later sectaries were to propagate so
diligently were as yet little known in the land. The generous grain
of liberal thought was still in the milk, its fruitful doctrines
unripened. The immigrant gentlemen who came to Massachusetts Bay were
Puritan Anglicans who professed a hearty love for the mother church and
were no friends to the principle of Separatism. They were potential
Presbyterians who rejected alike the Arminianism of Laud and the
autocracy of the bishops. It is reasonable to suppose that as strict
Calvinists, trained in the ordinances as well as in the doctrine of
the French theologian, they came hither with the conscious purpose of
setting up the complete Genevan discipline in the new world. If such
was their plan--and certainly before their coming over they seem not to
have entertained any thoughts of Separatism--it received a check from
the Plymouth influence and the Puritan experiment was turned aside from
the path of its natural development.
It was a somewhat curious misadventure that was to entail unforeseen
consequences. Except in matters of doctrine Pilgrim and Puritan
consorted ill together. Their social antecedents were as unlike as
their views on political and religious institutions. The intellectual
leaders of Plymouth--whatever may be said of the London adventurers who
joined the Holland group--had been nurtured in Elizabethan radicalism.
They were Brownist-Separatists of plebeian origins, who had arrived
at their conception of the true church from a close study of Biblical
texts, with perhaps some admixture of Anabaptist influence, nearly
a generation before the Stuarts came with their divine-right theory.
During their years on the continent they lived remote from the current
of events in England, and under the guidance of the tolerant Robinson
they had been disciplined in the theory and practice of primitive
Congregationalism. On their removal to America they brought with them
a consciously democratic church order, that met their simple needs and
had taken shape from the experience of daily life. This democratic
model of church government was spontaneously supplemented by the
plantation covenant of civil government drawn up aboard ship, which
was to serve as the organic law of the new commonwealth. Two cardinal
principles--which at bottom were one--thus found their way to New
England in the _Mayflower_: the principle of a democratic church and
the principle of a democratic state. When ten years later the Boston
leaders were faced with the problem of erecting a social order, they
accepted the Plymouth model of Congregationalism, but rejected the
plantation covenant. They saw no need for the latter as they were
already provided with an organic law. The charter which Winthrop was
insistent upon bringing with them out of England was asserted to be the
constitution of the commonwealth and, meticulously interpreted, was to
determine largely the form and scope of the new political state. It was
construed to grant a legal sanction to government; but as the charter
of a Carolinian trading company it quite naturally restricted authority
to the managing heads, and granted powers to its directors that were
useful in managing trade ventures but might easily become intolerable
if interpreted as the organic law of a commonwealth. With such
enlargement of powers the directors of the corporation would constitute
a political oligarchy. There was a striking difference, certainly,
between the covenant of Plymouth and the charter-constitution of
Massachusetts Bay, and a political philosopher could readily enough
have foreseen the course that events would take in the Puritan
commonwealth, given the men and the ideals in control.
II • The Puritan Presbyterian
To make clear what was involved in the attempt to adapt the Plymouth
model of church government to the charter commonwealth, it is necessary
to consider somewhat particularly the body of prejudice and principle
brought to the new world aboard the _Lady Arbella_, as the Puritan
contribution to New England. The capable leaders who created the early
institutions of Massachusetts Bay colony were Jacobean Englishmen of
middle station, halfway between the aristocrat and the burgess, with
certain salient characteristics of both. Fashioned by a caste society,
they transported to the little commonwealth an abundant heritage of
class prejudice. They aspired to be reckoned gentlemen and to live in
the new world as they had lived in the old, in a half feudal state,
surrounded by many servants and with numerous dependents. They honored
rank, were sticklers for precedence, respected class distinctions,
demanded the hereditary rights of the gentry. They had been bred up
in a static order where gentlemen ruled and the people obeyed, and
they could not think in terms of the Plymouth plantation covenant,
subscribed by all heads of families. To the modern reader of his
journal there is something almost childish in Winthrop’s insistence
on public deference to his official position and his grief when the
halberd-bearers refused to provide the usual formality to his little
progresses. But if they aspired to be rated as gentlemen, there
was much also of the burgess nature in them. They were potential
capitalists, eager to accumulate ample landholdings, keen to drive a
bargain, given to trade and with as sharp an eye to the main chance as
any London merchant. The community of goods that marked the early days
of Plymouth they disliked so greatly as to account it almost sinful. In
the infancy of the settlement they entered upon an active mercantile
life, building their ships for the West Indian trade, joining in the
fisheries off the Newfoundland coast, venturing far in pursuit of gain.
Active, capable men, excellent administrators rather than speculative
thinkers, stewards of the public interests as well as their own, they
would take it ill to have their matured plans interfered with by
busybodies and incompetents. Their own counsel sufficed them and they
wanted no help from outsiders.
Endow such men with religious zeal; let them regard themselves as
particular repositories of righteousness; give them a free hand to work
out their program unhampered by rival policies; provide them with a
handbook elaborated in complete detail by a master system-maker; and
the result was certain. Their Utopia must be a close-knit church-state,
with authority reserved to the aristocracy of Christian talent. It
is needless to inquire whether a definite conception of a theocracy
was in their minds before their coming over; some such order was
clearly implicit in their religious fervor, their Hebraic theology,
their Genevan discipline, their aristocratic prejudices. They might
nominally accept the Plymouth model of church-government, but they
would meddle with democracy in church and state no more than necessity
compelled. Circumstances, as well as their own promptings, would
counsel quite an opposite course. They were engaged in a difficult and
perilous undertaking, begirt by wilderness enemies, and fearful of
hostile interference by the home authorities. If the venture were to
survive, a drift towards centralization of power was as natural as it
was inevitable. The common security would not suffer any dispersion of
forces or domestic bickerings over authority. Dissatisfied members must
be held in subjection and dangerous swarmings from the mother-hive must
be prevented. The principle of Separatism was too disruptive to insure
cohesive solidarity; the parts must be welded into a protective whole;
and for such business what ideal was more efficient than a theocracy
with Jehovah substituted for King Charles--not openly and seditiously,
but quietly, in the hearts of the people. The historian need not
wander far in search of the origin of the theocratic principle; it
is to be found in the self-interest of the lay and clerical leaders.
Ambitious men could not have devised a fitter means to weld together
the two groups of magistrates and ministers, and endow their charter
prerogatives with divine sanction. The Stuarts were bunglers at the
business in comparison with Winthrop and Cotton. But if they worked the
metal to such shape as they chose we must not forget that it had been
well heated in the smithy of John Calvin. Overlook that fact and the
theocracy becomes incredible.
There are perhaps sufficient grounds to assume that some plan of
minority control was worked out before the migration took place. The
preliminary discussions in England had been long and the terms of
the charter were carefully seen to. By its provisions the right of
franchise rested with the freemen of the corporation, in number about
a hundred and ten. Of the total body of freemen it was known that
only a small group would undertake the venture; probably fewer than
a score came over with the emigrants, and through removals and death
the number was speedily reduced to about a dozen. This handful of
freemen constituted the court, and chose the governor, deputy governor,
and the assistants or magistrates. These latter were to number
eighteen according to the charter provision; but with more offices
than eligible candidates, the number was necessarily reduced, and six
assistants with the governor came to be reckoned a quorum of the court
with sovereign powers.[2] It was a patriarchal undertaking, and to
Carolinian gentlemen there was nothing unusual or unjust in a handful
of leaders exercising plenary powers over the lives and fortunes of two
thousand members of the commonwealth. If the charter could not have
been construed as granting such powers, it is reasonable to assume
that they would not have entered upon the business. The lay leaders
were practical men. They had ventured their estates in the hope of
bettering their condition, both spiritual and material, and with their
personal fortunes at stake they were in no mind to intrust the fate of
the undertaking to other hands than their own. They loved power quite
as much as did the ungodly, and accounting themselves God’s stewards
they reckoned it sin not to use it in his name. As Puritans they would
not keep a weather eye on the majority will. God did not speak in the
Scriptures through majority votes; his chosen were a minority, the
remnant in Israel.
A further sanction was at hand. If these Hebraized Englishmen created
a close corporation and ruled magisterially, if the order in the new
church-state was inquisitorial and stern, it was in strict conformity
with the teachings and example of Calvin. Men deeply read in the
_Institutes_, familiar with the Genevan Ordinances and the practices
of the Consistory, were not likely to discover in them any lessons
in democratic toleration. Righteousness may be fearfully relentless,
and John Calvin had been a tyrant on principle. Iron-willed and
masterful, he had risen to power in the turbulent city-state of Geneva
in sixteenth-century fashion. A few splotches of blood on the white
garments of the Church did not greatly trouble him. He was never
squeamish about ways and means of furthering the Lord’s work. He
violated the right of refuge to bring to the stake the pantheistic
Unitarian Servetus, and he thanked God when the bungling of the
executioner prolonged the sufferings of certain others of his victims.
The Genevan discipline was rigorous, and the clerical inquisitors were
more relentless than the lay. The tyrannies that have been freely
charged upon the New England oligarchy are easily explained in the
light of the Calvinistic Ordinances. There were no whippings or
banishments or hangings in early Pennsylvania where Quaker and Lutheran
dwelt together in peace if not in fellowship. But they were New
Testament men and not out of the Old, like the Saints in Massachusetts
Bay. They worshiped a God of love rather than a God of wrath.
Granted the conception on which the theocratic experiment went forward,
namely, that Jehovah was the sole lawgiver and the Bible the sufficient
statute-book; granted also that these priests and magistrates were
stewards of God’s will; and the centralization of power in the
commonwealth becomes invested with a higher sanction than the terms
of the charter. It was an oligarchy of Christian grace. The minister
was the trained and consecrated interpreter of the divine law, and
the magistrate was its trained and consecrated administrator; and
both were chosen by free election of the Saints. If unfortunately the
Saints were few and the sinners many, was not that a special reason for
safeguarding the Ark of the Covenant from the touch of profane hands?
Hence all legislative experiments by annually elected deputies, no
matter how exactly those experiments might fall in with the wishes of
the majority, were sternly frowned upon or skillfully nullified. Not
only were such popular enactments, it was held, too often prompted by
the carnal desires of the natural man, but they were no better than an
insult to God, as implying the insufficiency of the Scriptures to every
temporal need. Unregenerate and sinful men must have no share in God’s
work. The Saints must not have their hands tied by majority votes. This
explains, quite as much as mere love of power, the persistent hostility
of the leaders to every democratic tendency. Such institutions as grew
up spontaneously out of the necessities of the situation, were sharply
hedged about by restrictions. The town meeting, which was extra-legal
under the charter, was safeguarded by limiting the right of voting
to freemen, except in a few trivial matters; and the more popular
deputies, who inclined to become self-willed, were forced to accept the
principle of magisterial veto on their actions. When a law was passed,
it was purposely left vague as to penalties, in order to give a free
hand to the judges to punish as they wished; and it was not till 1641,
after much insistence from the representatives of the people, that
Ward’s Body of Liberties was finally adopted.
Later critics of Puritanism discover in the theocratic experiment of
Massachusetts Bay a preposterous attempt to turn back the pages of
history, and refashion Englishmen after an ungainly Hebraic pattern.
But to the leaders of that experiment it seemed rather a Utopian
venture to create in the new world a nobler social order than elsewhere
existed. Whether such a society was either possible or desirable, has
long since become only an academic question; what is more suggestive
is the fact that in spite of some bitterness on the part of a small
minority, the stewardship of an oligarchy remained the accepted
principle of government in Massachusetts Bay until the vacating of the
charter in 1684. That it lingered out so long a life is a testimony to
the skillful opportunism of the leaders. They early adopted a strategic
policy which the British ministry foolishly refused to adopt a hundred
years later; they cautiously undermined any potential disaffection by
admitting the wealthiest and most influential to the rights of freemen,
thus allying the ambitious and capable members of society with the
ruling group, and laying the foundations of a provincial aristocracy,
which in the course of time would secularize the government and
substitute an economic for a theocratic basis of authority. The loss of
the charter only hastened what in the nature of things must have come
about eventually.
III • Certain Mistakes
Skillful as were the theocratic rulers and logical as was their
course, it seems plain in the light of later developments that they
fell into certain grave mistakes at the very beginning of their work
that were to hamper them seriously in after days. Those mistakes
were the adoption of the covenant-principle of church organization
borrowed from Plymouth, that started the new churches on the road
to Congregationalism, and the granting of the land in fee-simple
to non-freemen, that was to create an independent yeomanry. Of the
two the second was far graver, for it threw the economics of the
developing commonwealth on the side of local home rule and provided a
substantial foundation for the erection of a democratic opposition to
the oligarchy. If the plantation system of Virginia, or the Patroon
system of New York, had been adopted, the covenanted church would
naturally have followed the path of Genevan Presbyterianism in harmony
with the desires of the leaders, and the democratic opposition both in
church and state must have been starved into submission. But with the
system of small holdings and the development of a vigorous yeomanry,
the eventual development of Congregationalism into a federated group
of self-governing churches, was predetermined more rigidly than by any
logic of John Calvin. The defeat of the Presbyterian program of the
theocrats was implicit in a decentralized land system.
The decision of the Salem church in 1629 to adopt the Plymouth model,
and the acceptance of that decision by later churches in Massachusetts
Bay, has been abundantly commented upon, but the significance of it
has been somewhat inadequately explored.[3] Very likely it was a deep
hatred of episcopal rule that opened the mind of Endicott and his
fellows to the reasoning of Dr. Fuller of Plymouth, and persuaded them
to take this first step towards Separatism; nevertheless as disciples
of Calvin, desirous of establishing a Bible commonwealth, they must
soon discover that a system centrifugal in tendency and decentralizing
in spirit, unless closely restrained, was certain to lead them far
from the Canaan of their hopes. Separatism was the negation of a
state church, and the rule of the congregation was the negation of an
official creed and ecclesiastical unity. If Congregationalism were
suffered to develop its democratic potentialities, the leaders must
eventually find themselves in like position with Laud, with schismatics
disturbing the orthodox harmony and rending the church from within. The
authorities early began to feel, what the Anglican Lechford pointed out
in 1641, that the system was dangerously democratic, and the principle
of centralizing conformity was set to work. The spirit of Calvin’s
Consistory was invoked. Under the guise of brotherly counsel, or church
fellowship, the principle of consociation was developed, a principle
that opened a convenient door to official coercion. Brotherly counsel
that comes armed with the weapon of excommunication, that points its
argument with the threat of banishment or hanging, is certainly not
the pure spirit of Christian fellowship that Congregational historians
have chosen to see in the principle of consociation. The most ardent
apologist has hard work in discovering the democratic principle of
Congregationalism in the theocratic application of the methods of
the Genevan Consistory. The early churches of the theocracy were
Presbyterian in spirit and rule, in spite of the official promulgation
of the covenant-principle in the Cambridge Platform. Certainly real
Separatists like Roger Williams, who suffered from too much brotherly
counsel and did not want a Christian fellowship imposed by magistrates,
were under no illusions in regard to the coercive spirit that lay
behind the principle of consociation.
More open and above board were the successive statutes that effectively
nullified the principle of Separatism by erecting an official state
church. The law of 1631, restricting the franchise to church members,
and the law of 1635, making attendance at church compulsory on
all, were followed in 1636 by a law requiring the approval of the
magistrates and elders before a new church could be set up, and in
1638 by the institution of a system of state support for the ministry.
The principle of the covenant was being pretty effectively whittled
away. Equally Presbyterian was the movement for the establishment of
a definitive state creed. In consequence of the Antinomian schism
effected by the eloquent tongue of Mistress Anne Hutchinson, the
first general synod was convened at Newtown in 1637, which sat for
four and twenty days and drew up a list of eighty-two heretical
opinions, “some blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsafe,”
together with “nine unwholesome expressions,” which were alleged to be
disturbing the peace of the community. Whereupon the synod broke up,
the members congratulating themselves “that matters had been carried
on so peaceably and concluded so comfortably in all love.” How much
Christian love was awakened by such brotherly counsels in the heart of
Mistress Hutchinson, who was banished and later slain by the Indians,
is not revealed, but her sin was made of record as a warning to other
schismatics. It was this: “He hath let me distinguish between the voice
of my beloved and the voice of Moses,” which being interpreted, meant
an appeal from the Old Testament to the New, from Mosaic authority to
the inner light.
With the promulgation of the Cambridge Platform by the synod of
1646-47, and the acceptance of the Westminster Confession of Faith,
the work of creating the organism and creed of an authoritative
state-church was completed. According to Williston Walker, the
Cambridge Platform “pictures with great clearness the abiding
principles of Congregationalism”--the covenant origin of the local
church, the autonomy of the congregation, the sole authority of the
Bible, and the fellowship of the churches.[4] But it needs the sharp
eyes of an apologetic historian to discover the spirit of democratic
Congregationalism in a discipline that sanctions the power of the state
to intervene in ecclesiastical matters and requires the magistrate to
enforce uniformity in creed and worship. “Idolatry, Blasphemy, Heresy,
Venting corrupt and pernicious opinions, are to be restrayned and
punished by civil authority,” the Platform states. “If any church one
or more shall grow schismaticall, rending it self from the communion
of other churches, or shall walke incorrigibly or obstinately in
any corrupt way of their own, contrary to the rule of the word; in
such case, the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive power, as the
matter shall require.” If such be Congregationalism, how greatly have
the later churches departed from the primitive faith! To the layman,
wanting in insight, it would seem rather to be stark Calvinism, that
reveals how completely the coercive spirit of the Ordinances and
Consistory of the French theologian had come to dominate the theocratic
mind of New England. The reluctant adoption of the Cambridge Platform
by the suspicious deputies was the grim prelude to Baptist whippings
and Quaker baitings, and the setting-in of the dark days of militant
intolerance. “Yourselves pretend liberty of conscience,” wrote Roger
Williams in 1670, “but alas! it is but self, the great god self, only
to yourselves.”[5]
But while the covenant principle was thus being effectively whittled
away by the theocratic leaders, another principle, likewise of Plymouth
origin, was silently working to the overthrow of the theocratic power.
Following the example of the Pilgrims the several towns apportioned
their lands in fee to their members; and if so acute a political
thinker as Daniel Webster is to be trusted, it was from the creative
influence of freehold tenure that the political institutions of New
England became later democratized. As a disciple of James Harrington,
accepting the doctrine of economic determinism as it had been
elaborated in the _Oceana_, Webster traced the spontaneous rise of
republicanism in New England to the wide diffusion of property; and
in the light of his economic interpretation the harsh intolerance of
the Cambridge Platform is seen to be only the aberration of a passing
bigotry. In his anniversary speech at Plymouth he said:
Their situation demanded a parceling out and division of the
lands, and it may be fairly said, that this necessary act _fixed
the future frame and form of their government_. The character of
their political institutions was determined by the fundamental
laws respecting property.... The property was all freehold ...
alienation of the land was every way facilitated, even to the
subjecting of it to every species of debt. The establishment of
public registries, and the simplicity of our forms of conveyance,
have greatly facilitated the change of real estate from one
proprietor to another. The consequence of all these causes has
been, a great subdivision of the soil, and a great equality of
condition; the true basis, most certainly, of a popular government.
“If the people,” says Harrington, “hold three parts in four of the
territory, it is plain there can neither be any single person nor
nobility able to dispute the government with them; in this case,
therefore, _except force be interposed_, they govern themselves.”[6]
With such a clue it is easier to understand how the liberalisms
implicit in Plymouth Congregationalism--its theory of compact in
church and state--should find support from an independent yeomanry
and eventually rise against the oligarchical rule. The new world
would ultimately throw off the old-world repressions and explore the
reaches of those generous idealisms that were the bequest of English
Separatism. The fathers were engaged in an impossible undertaking.
Sanctuaries were close at hand for all dissenters from the theocracy,
in Connecticut for the Congregationalists, in Rhode Island for the
Separatists, along the Maine frontier for the rebellious individualist.
Seated securely in these regions beyond the reach of the Massachusetts
magistrates, the diverse liberalisms that were being stifled by the
oligarchy prospered and brought forth after their kind. Differentiation
in the provinces was the natural counterpart of coercive conformity
at the capital; and from very early days New England divided into
three diverse groups journeying to their Utopias by different roads.
Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, were variant
answers to the question of what might be expected to result from the
domestication in a free environment of the inchoate idealisms of
English Puritanism. How they differentiated themselves from the norm,
and why, will perhaps become clearer from an examination of the diverse
philosophies of their intellectual leaders.
Footnotes
[2] See James Truslow Adams, _The Founding of New England_, Chapter VI.
[3] See Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches in
the United States_, Chapter IV.
[4] _Ibid._, p. 162.
[5] _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 133.
[6] _Works_, Vol. I, pp. 35-36.
Chapter III • The Chief Stewards of Theocracy
I • Master John Cotton • Priest
The most authoritative representative in New England of the ideal of
priestly stewardship was the excellent John Cotton, first teacher to
the church at Boston. While pastor of the church of St. Botolph, in
old Boston, he had dreamed of a Utopia of the Saints, unharassed by
tyrannous prelates; and while sweetening his mouth with a morsel of
Calvin, as he was fond of doing, no doubt he turned over in his mind
the plans and specifications of that Utopia. “When God wrappes us in
his ordinances,” he said in his sermon to Winthrop’s company on the eve
of its departure from England, “and warmes us with the life and power
of them as with wings, there is the land of Promise.” Left behind by
the departing brethren, he lingered for a while in an England that was
every day becoming colder for such as dreamed of other Canaans than
Laud’s, until urged by many invitations, at the age of forty-six he
followed overseas to devote his remaining life to the great work being
done there. For more than a score of years he labored faithfully, and
the New England which the emigrant generation bequeathed to its sons
bore upon it the marks of John Cotton’s shaping hand more clearly than
those of any other minister.
It is not easy today to judge fairly the life and work of John Cotton.
No adequate biography has been written, and his dreams and aspirations
lie forgotten in the grave of lost causes and forsaken faiths. But
to the Boston freemen of his own day, Master John Cotton was a very
great man. Of excellent family and sound university training, he was
both a notable theologian and a courteous gentleman. “Twelve hours in
a day he commonly studied, and would call that a _scholar’s_ day,”
his grandson reported of him. From the hour when he entered Trinity
College, Cambridge, at the age of thirteen, to his death in 1652,
he was a bookman, and in sheer bulk of acquisition probably no man
of his time outdid him. In Cotton Mather’s judgment he was “a most
_universal scholar_, and a _living system_ of the liberal arts, and a
_walking library_.” His intellectual equipment was so highly regarded
that many excellent persons “believed that God would not suffer Mr.
Cotton to err”; and that “if ever there be any considerable blow given
to the Devil’s kingdom,” Master Cotton was the man for the business.
No other New England champion was so renowned for “beating out the
truth in controversie”; and when he turned to the work of answering
Roger Williams, the latter exclaimed: “I rejoice it hath pleased [God]
to appoint so able, and excellent, and conscionable an Instrument to
bolt the Truth to the bran.” But though he was bred in Elizabethan
days and entered college in the year when Shakespeare’s _Henry IV_
and Jonson’s _Every Man in his Humour_ first appeared on the stage,
there is no touch of Renaissance splendor in his crabbed style and
ascetic reasoning. That was early washed out of him by the rising
tide of Hebraism which was slowly submerging the England of poets and
playwrights.
But however much he loved cloistered scholarship, the immediate source
of his great influence was the spoken rather than the written word.
By the universal testimony of his generation he was “a soul-melting
preacher,” whose reasoned eloquence swayed congregations trained to
solid argumentative discourse. When he ascended the pulpit on Sundays
and lecture days, he spoke as a prophet in Israel; and on occasions
of public ceremonial, or when dissensions arose touching the polity
of church or state, he was summoned by the magistrates to convince
with his logic and persuade with his eloquence. The strong-minded Anne
Hutchinson was but one of many who chose exile in New England rather
than lose the edification of Mr. Cotton’s preaching. Good men were
drawn to him by his sweetness of temper, and evil men were overawed
by his venerable aspect. He seems to have been an altogether lovable
person, with white hair framing a face that must have been nobly
chiseled, gentle-voiced, courteous, tactful, by nature “a tolerant man”
who placidly bore with a dissentient and gladly discovered a friend in
an antagonist. If his quiet yielding before opposition suggests that he
may have been given to opportunism, or his fondness for intellectual
subtleties drew from his grandson the comment “a most excellent
casuist,” we must not too hastily conclude that he served the cause of
truth less devotedly than the cause of party.
For a score of years before his coming over, his position in the
rising Puritan party had been honorable. Few among the dissenting
ministers were better known, none more esteemed. He had shone as an
intellectual light at the university, he had long been pastor of one of
the loveliest churches in England, he counted among his friends some of
the ablest contemporary Englishmen. To Cromwell he was one “whom I love
and honour in the Lord”; to Lord Say and Sele, to the Earl of Warwick,
the Earl of Lincoln, and a notable company of Puritan gentlemen, he
was a trusted friend and lieutenant; to thousands of the substantial
burgesses who were drawing together to form the new Puritan-Whig party,
he was “a fixed and conscionable light.” That such a leader should
have been received with thanksgiving by the Boston congregation was to
be expected; that he should have taken high place at once among the
members of the Massachusetts oligarchy was equally to be expected.
Thenceforth his busy career was no more than a reflection of the
ambitions of the theocracy.
Unfortunately his daily contact with narrow-minded and intolerant men
gave an unhappy bias to his later career. Cotton seems to have been
something of a Puritan intellectual, with an open-minded curiosity that
made him receptive to new ideas and tempted him to play with doctrines
that were intolerable to his bigoted associates. It was possibly this
native sympathy with free speculation that drew him into the camp of
Mistress Hutchinson with her doctrine of the inner light. When the
schism became serious, dividing the commonwealth into warring camps,
Cotton seems to have become frightened and broke with the Boston
Antinomians. In this matter he came near to being a shuffler. The
Hutchinson trial with its resulting banishments was the turning point
of his career in America as it was a crisis in the history of early
New England. He was not a man to persecute and harry, nor was he one
to stand in isolated opposition to associates whom he respected, and
he allowed himself to be coerced by narrower-minded men like Endicott
and Dudley. After 1637 the better nature of John Cotton was submerged
by the rising intolerance, and “the most tolerant, as he was the ablest
of the Massachusetts divines,” was brought so low as to defend the
meanest and crudest acts of the oligarchy. He descended to disgraceful
casuistry in defense of the first whippings of the Quakers, and he
urged the death penalty upon King Philip’s son and the enslavement of
the remnant of Philip’s tribe, against the plea of John Eliot that “to
sell soules for mony seemeth to me a dangerous merchandize.” The sins
of the oligarchy rest in large measure on the head of John Cotton, and
the judgment of the most recent historian of New England must stand:
With a broader mind and wider vision than any of the other clergy
of the colony, he had not the courage to stand alone, beyond a
certain point, against their unanimity in intolerance. The higher
promptings of his nature were crushed by the united voice of the
priesthood, as Winthrop’s had been so short a time before, and the
noblest of the colony’s leaders, lay and clerical, from that time
tended to sink to the lower level of their fellows.[7]
An apologist--and whoever has felt the charm of John Cotton’s
personality easily becomes an apologist--will perhaps find some grounds
of excuse for his later conduct. He was in an unhappy position. He
was ill at ease in his mind, and his frequent tacking in the face of
adverse winds was characteristic of the intellectual who sees all
sides of a question. He heartily approved of the theocratic ends that
his associates were seeking, and his influential position made him
the defender of acts which his better nature must have disapproved.
The historian, however, will seek a more adequate explanation in the
roots of his environment. The idealism of John Cotton was the fruit of
his training, and his theocratic dreams were conditioned by the facts
that he was both a Calvinist and a Carolinian gentleman. The fusion
of these two influences resulted in the unique political theory of an
ethical aristocracy, consecrated to moral stewardship in the state. A
lifelong student of Calvin’s _Institutes_, he found there a system of
social organization that responded to every demand of the theologian
and the aristocrat. The very texture and pattern of Cotton’s political
philosophy is exemplified in such a passage as this, over which he must
have brooded much:
When these three forms of government of which philosophers treat,
are considered in themselves, I, for my part, am far from denying
that the form which greatly surpasses the other is aristocracy,
either pure or modified by popular government; not indeed in
itself, but because it very rarely happens that kings so rule
themselves as never to dissent from what is just and right, or
are possessed of so much acuteness and prudence as always to see
correctly. Owing therefore to the vices or defects of men, it is
safer and more tolerable when several bear rule, that they may thus
mutually assist, instruct, and admonish each other, and should
any he disposed to go too far, the others are censors and masters
to curb his excess. This has already been proved by experience,
and confirmed also by the authority of the Lord himself, when he
established an aristocracy bordering on popular government among
the Israelites, keeping them under that as the best form, until He
exhibited an image of the Messiah in David.[8]
As a Carolinian gentleman, this was as far as Cotton would go on
the path of liberalism. The elders were responsible to God for the
spiritual well-being of the people, and the state must aid and not
hinder them in their leadership. The doctrine of unlimited popular
sovereignty was for him no other than a thistle in the garden of the
Lord. The desire for liberty he regarded as the sinful prompting of
the natural man, a denial of the righteous authority of God’s chosen
rulers. If democracy were indeed the best form of government, was it
not strange that divine wisdom should have failed to discover the
fact? In the history of the chosen people nowhere does God approve
the democratic as the best form, but the theocratic; was He now to be
set right by sinful men who courted popularity by appealing to the
selfishness of depraved hearts? To the scripturist the logic of his
argument was convincing:
It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting
forth of God’s house, which is his church: than to accommodate the
church frame to the civill state. Democracy, I do not conceyve
that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or
commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?
As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely
approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the
soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the
best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the
church.[9]
If John Cotton, like other Carolinian gentlemen, was a confirmed
aristocrat, he was at the same time a social revolutionary, who would
substitute an aristocracy of the Saints for the landed aristocracy, and
refashion society upon ethical rather than economic lines. At what time
the ideal of a Presbyterian Bible commonwealth took shape in his mind,
it is impossible to determine; but it was a natural outcome of his most
cherished beliefs. A devout scripturist, he accepted the Bible as a
rule of universal application, perfect and final. The sufficiency of
the Scriptures to all social needs was axiomatic with him; “the more
any law smells of man the more unprofitable,” he asserted in his draft
of laws offered for acceptance by the commonwealth; and at another
time he exclaimed, “_Scripturae plenitudinem adoro._” He chose exile
rather than yield to what he regarded as the unscriptural practices of
Laud, and now that he was come to a new land where a fresh beginning
was to be made, was it not his Christian duty to “endeavour after
a _theocracy_, as near as might be, to that which was the glory of
Israel, the ‘peculiar people’”? The old Common Law must be superseded
by the Mosaic dispensation; the citizen of the commonwealth must become
the subject of Jehovah; the sovereignty of temporal authorities must
serve the higher sovereignty of God.
Holding to such views the duty devolving upon him was plain: to assist
the magistrates in checking the dangerous drift towards a democratic
organization of church and state, which the new environment encouraged;
and to defend the theocratic ideal against all critics. The first he
sought to accomplish by creating a more perfect theocratic machinery.
As we catch glimpses of him moving tactfully back and forth through
the brisk little scenes, he seems always to have a finger in some
magisterial affair. Three months after his arrival in Boston he
preached a sermon, the purport of which Winthrop noted in his _Journal_:
After much deliberation and serious advice the Lord directed the
teacher Mr. Cotton, to make clear by the scripture, that the
minister’s maintenance, as well as all other charges of the church,
should be defrayed out of a stock, or treasury, which was to be
raised out of the weekly contribution: which accordingly was agreed
upon.[10]
In his first election sermon, preached in the May following, he joined
issue with the democratic spirit of the deputies, by supporting a
principle which was flagrantly oligarchical:
That a magistrate ought not to be turned into the condition of a
private man without just cause, & to be publicly convict, no more
than the magistrates may turn a private man out of his freehold,
etc., without like public trial, etc.[11]
Unrebuffed by the rejection of this curious doctrine of the freehold
tenure of magistrates, Cotton made a more ambitious attempt to
theocratize the state, when at the October court of 1636, in response
to the persistent pressure for a fundamental law, he presented his code
for adoption by the commonwealth, the scriptural origin of which is
revealed in the title, “Model of Moses his Judicials.” Cotton Mather
tells of this venture in constitution making, in the following glowing
but inaccurate words:
On Mr. Cotton’s arrival he found the whole country in a perplexed
& a divided state, as to their _civill constitution_.... It was
then requested of Mr. _Cotton_ that he would, from the laws
wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an _abstract_ of
such as were of a moral and a lasting equity; which he performed
as acceptably as judiciously. But inasmuch as very much of an
_Athenian democracy_ was in the mould of the government, by the
royal charter.... Mr. Cotton effectually recommended it unto them
that none should be _electors_, nor _elected_ therein, except such
as were _visible subjects_ of our Lord Jesus Christ, personally
_confederated_ in our churches. In these, and many other ways, he
propounded unto them an endeavour after a theocracy, as near as
might be, to that which was the glory of Israel, the “peculiar
people.”[12]
Cotton’s code was rejected in favor of one, somewhat less Hebraic,
prepared by Nathaniel Ward, but he continued to be the chief guide
and mentor to the magistrates in political as well as theological
matters, and his theocratic philosophy determined in large measure the
policy of the oligarchy. To found an Hebraic state in which political
rights should be subordinate to religious conformity, in which the
magistrates should be chosen from a narrow group, with authority beyond
the reach of the popular will, and with the ministers serving as court
of last resort to interpret the divine law to the citizen-subjects of
Jehovah--this was the great ambition of John Cotton; and the untiring
zeal and learned scriptural authority which he dedicated to that
ambition justify us in regarding him as the greatest of the New England
theocrats. In the categories of the Puritan philosophy of ethical
stewardship there was no recognition of the profane doctrine of natural
rights. Freedom was the prerogative of righteousness; the well-being of
society required that the sinner should remain subject to the Saint.
Nowhere does he lay down this principle more unmistakably than in an
important state paper:
Now if it be a divine truth, that none are to be trusted with
public permanent authority but godly men, who are fit materials
for church membership, then from the same grounds it will appear,
that none are so fit to be trusted with the liberties of the
commonwealth as church members. For, the liberties of this
commonwealth are such, as require men of faithful integrity to God
and the state, to preserve the same.... Now ... these liberties are
such as carry along much power with them, either to establish or
subvert the commonwealth, and therewith the church, which power, if
it be committed to men according to their godliness ... then, in
case worldly men should prove the major part, as soon they might
do, they would readily set over us magistrates like themselves,
such as might ... turn the edge of all authority and laws against
the church and the members thereof, the maintenance of whose
peace is the chief end which God aimed at in the institution of
magistracy.[13]
This, quite evidently, is the negation of democracy, and it has been
freely charged against his reputation by later critics. But in fairness
it must be added, that it is equally the negation of the principle of
hereditary aristocracy; and to reject the latter was a severer test of
his integrity than to deny the former. He wanted neither a democracy
nor an aristocracy to control the church-state. “Hereditary honors
both nature and scripture doth acknowledge,” he argued cautiously in
reply to “Certain Proposals made by Lord Say, Lord Brooke, and other
Persons of quality, as conditions of their removing to New-England.”
“Two distinct ranks we willingly acknowledge ... the one of them called
Princes, or Nobles, or Elders (amongst whom gentlemen have their
place), the other the people.” To the former he willingly accorded the
right of rulership so long as they were of approved godliness, faithful
to their stewardship. But “if God should not delight to furnish some of
their posterity with gifts fit for magistracy, we should expose them
rather to reproach and prejudice, and the commonwealth with them, than
exalt them to honor, if we should call them forth, when God doth not,
to public authority.” It must be set down in John Cotton’s accounts
that he discouraged the transplanting of English aristocracy to the
soil of Massachusetts.
There remains to consider how he conducted himself in another weighty
matter that was laid upon his shoulders--the defense of the New England
polity against old-world critics. Congregationalism had been somewhat
caustically handled by the English Presbyterians, as smacking both of
democracy and Separatism; and John Cotton was called to justify to them
the apparent innovations. His most notable work in this field was his
celebrated volume, _The Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared_,
a treatise crammed, in the language of a contemporary admirer, with
“most practical Soul-searching, Soul-saving, and Soul-solacing
Divinitie”; “not Magisterially laid down, but friendly debated by
Scripture, and argumentatively disputed out to the utmost inch of
Ground.” Into the subtleties of this learned work we need not enter;
its main thesis alone need detain us, and that thesis was an implied
denial of the democratic tendencies of the “New England way.” Cotton
was greatly concerned over the charge of Joseph Baillie, a vigorous
Scotch Presbyterian, that Congregationalism was only a different form
of lower-class Brownism, “a native branch of Anabaptism”; and that
in resting ecclesiastical sovereignty upon “the particular, visible
Church of the Congregation,” it was Separatist in principle as well as
in practice. The charge was true, but John Cotton was too thoroughly
a Jacobean gentleman to concede it; dishonor would come upon the New
England churches, he believed, if it were conceded. So he was driven
to casuistry: “No marvall, if Independents take it ill to bee called
Brownists.... He separated from Churches and Saints: we, onely from
the world, and that which is of the world”; and then to a categorical
denial, “for New England there is no such church of the Separation at
all that I know of.”[14] From this it was a natural step to a downright
rejection of the democratic principle of Congregationalism:
Neither is it the Scope of my whole Book, to give the people a
share in the Government of the Church.... Nay, further, there be
that blame the Book for the other Extreme, That it placeth the
Government of the Church not at all in the hands of the People, but
of the Presbyterie.[15]
The same note of disingenuous casuistry runs through his well-known
controversy with Roger Williams over the question of toleration. In
seeking to parry the thrust that the Saints, after quitting England
to escape persecution, had themselves turned persecutors, he argued:
“There is a vast difference between men’s inventions and God’s
institutions; we fled from men’s inventions, to which we else should
have been compelled; we compel none to men’s inventions.” From which
it followed, that “if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate
compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the
sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian
duty.”[16] The brethren of Massachusetts were not singular in believing
that they were very near to God and privy to His will; nor were the
dissenters to their policy singular in their skepticism concerning
such infallibility; and when skepticism blows its cold breath upon it,
the logic of John Cotton turns to ashes. Not freedom to follow the
ways of sin, but freedom to follow the law of God as he expounded that
law--such was Cotton’s restriction upon the “natural liberties” of the
subject of Jehovah. Let there be freedom of conscience if it be under
no error, but not otherwise; for if freedom be permitted to sinful
error, how shall the will of God and John Cotton prevail upon earth?
After the battle has been fought and lost it is easy to see the
strategic mistakes; but it is not so easy to keep one’s head in the
thick of the struggle. As John Cotton looked overseas at the social
revolution then threatening to submerge, not only Presbyterianism, but
the very social order in which he had been nurtured; as he considered
the logical implications of the strange, heretical doctrines that
were bandied about in pamphlet and sermon, he was put almost in a
panic. The solid foundations of church and state were threatened by
mischievous men, not only in England but in the new Canaan which had
cost so much in prayer and sacrifice; should he keep silent while, in
the name of toleration, the gunpowder was being put in place for the
work of destruction? Even today we can feel the anxious concern of John
Cotton’s mind in such a vibrant passage as this:
I confesse we ... have cause to admire, and adore the wisdome, and
dreadfull Justice of God herein, That seeing Mr. _Williams_ hath
been now as a branch cut off from the Church of _Salem_ these many
yeares, he should bring forth no spirituall good fruit: and that
in such a season, when the Spirit of Error is let loose to deceive
so many thousand soules of our English Nation: So that now their
hearts are become as Tinder, ready to catch and kindle at every
sparke of false light. Even so, O Father, because thy good pleasure
is such, to let loose this Spirit of Error in the mouth of this
Backslider, in the very houre and power of darknesse: for these are
the dayes of vengeance: when the Antinomians deny the whole law;
the Anti-sabbatarians deny the Morality of the fourth Commandement;
the Papists deny the Negative part of the second Commandement.
It is a wofull opportunitie that God hath left Mr. _Williams_
to, now to step in.... For, take away (as Mr. _Williams_ doth)
all instituted worship of God, as Churches, Pastors, Teachers,
Elders, Deacons, Members, Publick Ministery of the Word, Covenant,
Seales of the Covenant (Baptisme, and the Lords Supper), the
Censures of the Church, and the like, what is then left of all the
institutions, and Ordinances of God, which the Lord established
in the second Commandement, against the Institutions, Images and
Inventions of men in his worship.[17]
How easy it is for good men, in presence of the new and strange, to
draw back in timid reaction; and failing to understand, or fearing for
their prestige, to charge upon the new and strange a host of evils
that exist only in their panic imaginations! In this great matter of
toleration of conscience, it is quite clear today that the eyes of the
troubled theocrat, “so _piercing_ and _heavenly_ (in other and precious
Truths of God)”--as Roger Williams acknowledged--were for the moment
sadly “over-clouded and bloud-shotten.” For this the age was more to
blame than the man. It was no fault of John Cotton’s that he was the
child of a generation reared under the shadow of absolutism, fearful
of underling aggression, unable to comprehend the excellence inhering
in the democratic faith. He reasoned according to his light; and if
he rather too easily persuaded himself that the light which shined to
him was the single divine light, he proved himself thereby an orthodox
Puritan if not a catholic thinker. It is a pity that the priest in his
later years overcame the intellectual, nevertheless the epitaph carved
on his headstone does no violence to truth:
JOHANNES COTTONUS
_Cujus Ultima Laus est,
Quod fuerit inter Nov-Anglos Primus._
To have been accounted by his fellows first among the notable company
of Puritan emigrants was no slight testimony to the sterling qualities
of Master John Cotton.
II • John Winthrop • Magistrate
If John Cotton embodied the ideal and polity of the theocratic
ministry, John Winthrop represented the ideal and polity of the
theocratic magistracy. Rulership in the new church-state, while
nominally the function of lay officers, in reality was quite as much
ecclesiastical as political. The civil authorities were chosen by a
narrow body of orthodox electors with a single view to theocratic ends.
To the traditional conception of magistracy, in which the gentlemen
of the Migration had been reared, was now added a special function,
the care of the church, “the maintenance of whose peace,” John Cotton
asserted, “is the chief end which God aimed at in the institution
of magistracy.” The career of John Winthrop in Massachusetts must
be judged, therefore, from this twofold point of view. He was not
exclusively, or chiefly, a civil governor, but a magistrate-elder; and
his political conduct was determined by this dual character of his
office. Unless one keeps in mind the theocratic framework of the early
Massachusetts commonwealth, one cannot understand the limitations of
his authority, or judge his conduct intelligently.
John Winthrop was a skillful executive upon whose shoulders largely
rested the success or failure of the undertaking during the difficult
early years. But he was very much more than that; he was a Puritan
steward of temporal affairs, who accepted his stewardship as a
sacred duty lying upon his conscience. A cultivated gentleman,
“browghte Up amonge boockes & learned men,” with a tender and
sympathetic nature--inclining overmuch to mildness, as he confessed
apologetically--by every right he belongs with that notable group
of Puritans, with Eliot and Vane and Hutchinson and Milton, in whom
the moral earnestness of Hebraism was tempered to humaner issues by
a generous culture. There was in him not a little fruitful sap of
Elizabethan poetry to quicken his thought, lifting him out of the
petty world of Jacobean lawyer and landed gentleman, and opening his
eyes to a vision of the future significance of the great venture to
which he dedicated his later years. Grave and dignified, he looks
out at us from his portrait with a certain stoic calm not untouched
with sadness, as if this life had proved a serious business, filled
with responsibilities and weighty matters, and darkened by sorrow and
disappointment. The pagan _joie de vivre_ of Elizabethan times is gone,
and in its stead is a serious intelligence that must grapple with
realities and shape them to its will.
He had lived amply in England before his removal, with much that was
feudal lingering in the habits of his patriarchal household; and in
the little village of Boston he kept twenty male servants, some of
them heads of families. A decay of fortune had come upon him during
his last years on the family estate, and the hope of recouping his
losses may have been an additional reason for venturing to remove to
the new world. In his _Considerations for J. W._ he explains that “he
cannot live in the same place and calling (as before) and so, if he
should refuse this opportunity, _that talent which God hath bestowed
upon him for publick service were like to be buried_.” Something to the
same purpose is suggested in another passage, which touches upon the
economic disturbances of the time, with the attendant extravagance and
ostentation of the new rich:
This Land growes weary of her Inhabitants.... We are growne to
that height of Intemperance in all excesse of Riott, as noe man’s
estate allmost will suffice to keepe saile with his æqualls.... The
fountains of Learning & Religion are soe corrupted as--men straine
at knatts & swallowe camells, use all severity for mainetaynance of
cappes & other accomplyments, but suffer all ruffianlike fashions &
disorder to passe uncontrolled.[18]
Writing to his wife Margaret in 1629, he gave expression to
apprehensions that were very likely quickened by his own failure to
keep pace with his neighbors:
My dear wife, I am veryly persuaded, God will bringe some heavye
Affliction upon this lande & that speedylye.... The Lorde hath
admonished, threatened, corrected, & astonished us, yet we growe
worse & worse, so as his Spirit will not always strive with us, we
must needs give way to his furye at last.[19]
But material considerations alone scarcely suffice to explain the
motives of one who wrote: “It were happy for many if their parents
had left them only such a legacy as our modern spirit of poetry
makes his motto, _Ut nec habeant, nec careant, nec curent._” Such
consolation--that the Christian should possess nothing, desire nothing,
trouble about nothing--may have been only the refuge of the stoic
from the impending loss of material possessions; but the conscious
discipline in ascetic Hebraism which was to change the Jacobean
gentleman into a militant Puritan had already created a temper to
which such stoic abnegation must appeal. Winthrop’s diary, running
from his fourteenth to his thirty-second year, is a homely record
in self-discipline, not unlike Bunyan’s _Grace Abounding_. It is
introspective and tediously moralizing, but it reveals how long and
arduous was the training before he felt confident that he was “improved
in all the points of experimental Godliness.”
But Winthrop was the child of a great age before he was born into
the fellowship of the Saints; and when we come upon the natural man
beneath the theological wrappings, we discover a many-sided, rich and
sympathetic human nature. He had gone to school to the English Bible,
and the noble Hebrew poetry stirred the poetic imagination that was
his Elizabethan birthright. Like so many of his fellow Puritans he
delighted in the Book of Canticles, and the rich oriental imagery
flowed easily from his pen. In one of his last letters before he
quitted the old home, he took leave of a friend in these words:
It is time to conclude, but I know not how to leave you, yet since
I must, I will put my beloved into his arms, who loves him best, &
is a faithful keeper of all that is committed to him. Now, Thou,
the hope of Israel, and the sure help of all that come to thee,
knit the hearts of thy servants to thyself in faith and purity.
Draw us with the sweetness of thine odours, that we may run after
thee--Allure us, and speak kindly to thy servants, that thou mayest
possess us as thine own, in the kindness of youth, and the love
of marriage--Seal us up, by that holy spirit of promise, that we
may not fear to trust in thee--Carry us into thy garden, that we
may eat and be filled with those pleasures, which the world knows
not--Let us hear that sweet voice of thine, my love, my dove, my
undefiled--Spread thy skirt over us, and cover our deformity--Make
us sick with thy love--Let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy
kingdom--The souls of thy servants, thus united to thee, make us
one in the bonds of brotherly affection--let not distance weaken
it, nor time waste it, nor changes dissolve it, nor self-love
eat it out; but when all means of other communion shall fail,
let us delight to pray for each other: and so let thy unworthy
servant prosper in the love of his friends, as he truly loves thy
good servants ... and wishes true happiness to them and to all
theirs--Amen.[20]
When his heart was touched Winthrop’s tenderness flowed out in a wealth
of affectionate sympathy, that lends a rich and lovely cadence to his
English prose. To a sister who had suffered the loss of her husband, he
wrote:
Go on cheerfully (my good sister), let experience add more
confidence still to your patience. Peace shall come. There will
be a bed to rest in, large and easy enough for you both. It is
preparing in the lodging appointed for you in your Father’s house.
He that vouchsafed to wipe the sweat from his disciple’s feet,
will not disdain to wipe the tears from those tender affectionate
eyes. Because you have been one of his mourners in the house of
tribulation, you shall drink of the cup of joy, and be clothed with
the garment of gladness, in the kingdom of his glory. The former
things, and evil, will soon be passed; but the good to come shall
neither end nor change.[21]
At another time, writing to his son of the death of his father, Adam
Winthrop, he said:
He hath finished his course; and is gathered to his people in
peace, as the ripe corn into the barn. He thought long for the day
of his dissolution and welcomed it most gladly. Thus is he gone
before; and we must go after in our time: This advantage he hath
of us--he shall not see the evil which we may meet with ere we go
hence. Happy those who stand in good terms with God and their own
conscience: they shall not fear evil tidings; and in all changes
they shall be the same.[22]
A lovable man was John Winthrop, richly endowed and admirably
disciplined, gracious in manner, persuasive in speech, generous in
action--in all England there could scarcely have been found a leader
better equipped for the work in hand, when at the age of forty-three
he became head of the emigrant church-state, which by reason of its
charter and the removal of the corporation to New England, was become
effectively an independent commonwealth, free to shape its domestic
polity as seemed best. During the score of years that remained to him,
he was the guiding spirit of the Massachusetts settlements, impressing
his will upon others by sheer force of character. It was inevitable
that in so strange and unprecedented an experiment, undertaken in
an environment so unfamiliar, serious and often bitter divisions
would arise touching the fundamental principles of government. In
the frequent discussions Winthrop bore a leading part; he marshaled
his arguments with the skill of a lawyer; he separated the broad
principle from the special circumstance; and in the end he usually
carried the assent of his fellow counselors to his proposals. His
social and political philosophy, in consequence, greatly influenced
the development of Massachusetts Bay during the early years when its
institutions and polity were taking shape, and throws much light on the
spirit and purpose of that development.
Winthrop’s political bias was unconsciously shaped by his experience,
of which the determining fact was the principle and practice of
Jacobean magistracy. As an English squire he had long served as
magistrate, and this experience he brought to New England as a legacy
from an autocratic past. In that old world the magistrate exercised
a patriarchal police power well-nigh absolute, sanctioned by ancient
custom, upheld by the church, and acquiesced in by subjects well
trained in subordination. Transported to New England and adapted to
theocratic ends, the principle of magistracy was both augmented in
power and ennobled in conception. To the police power over things
temporal was added a police power over things spiritual. In the
Bible commonwealth the legislative function was regarded as of minor
importance. The law being already set down in the Scriptures, the chief
authority in the commonwealth naturally rested with the magistrates who
were responsible for its strict fulfillment. As stewards intrusted with
a divine stewardship, they exercised absolute legislative and judicial
powers; in their councils the ministers were summoned to participate,
but no others. It was the duty of the magistrates to debate and
determine, and the duty of the people to obey.
To a modern this is no other than sheer absolutism, but it was deeply
embedded in Calvinistic theory and practice, and was justified by the
Puritan principle of special talents. God calls to the post of duty
those best fitted to serve. As a devout follower of Calvin, Winthrop
must have often pondered upon the passages in the _Institutes_ which
set forth the nature of magistracy and the duties of the magistrate,
and in particular this: “If they remember that they are the vicegerents
of God, it behooves them to watch with all care, diligence, and
industry, that they may exhibit a kind of image of the Divine
Providence, guardianship, goodness, benevolence, and justice.”[23]
To a devout Jacobean like Winthrop, this patriarchal conception of
stewardship would appear as a noble ideal, worthy of a Christian. The
potential absolutism implied would scarcely trouble one who had grown
up in a society where absolute authority was interwoven with everyday
life. The Christian magistrate was still a magistrate, but with the
great difference that his hands must be kept clean and his conscience
clear. This nobler spirit of Calvinistic stewardship is revealed in
Winthrop’s _Modell of Christian Charity_, written on shipboard during
the voyage out. A sense of profound responsibility devolving upon the
leaders imparts dignity to the thought: they must bear and forbear,
knitting themselves together in a common purpose, and seeing that “the
care of the public” should “oversway all private interests.” And this
“care of the public,” remained in theory if not always in practice, the
guiding principle of Winthrop’s official activities.
The bearing of this doctrine of magistracy upon the early movement of
democracy in Massachusetts is not far to seek. If magistracy was a duty
laid upon those of fit talents, they would serve God ill who should
turn a willing ear to popular protests against magisterial policy. On
this point Winthrop was adamant. He would have no meddling on the part
of those who had not been called. When it was attempted to bring him
to account before the congregation for an unpopular judicial decision,
he denied the competency of the congregation in such matters, and then
as he often did in cases of doubt, he made a “little book” in which he
elaborated the thesis, “That a Church hath not Power to call any Civill
Magistrate to give Account of his Juditiall proceedings in any Court
of Civill Justice: and what the Church may doe in such Causes.”[24]
The shoemaker should stick to his last, Winthrop believed, and he
would suffer no interference by the congregation with his duties as
magistrate. On another occasion when difficulties had arisen in certain
negotiations with the Connecticut settlements, he noted in his journal:
These and the like miscarriages in point of correspondency were
conceived to arise from these two errors in their government: 1.
They chose divers _scores_ men, who had no learning nor judgment
which might fit them for those affairs, though otherwise men holy
and religious. 2. By occasion hereof, the main burden for managing
of state business fell upon one or other of their ministers, (as
the phrase and style of these letters will clearly discover),
who, though they were men of singular wisdom and godliness, yet
stepping out of their course, their actions wanted that blessing
which otherwise might have been expected.[25]
The political philosophy which underlay Winthrop’s theory and practice
of magistracy, was a Puritan modification of the commonly accepted
English theory of a “mixt aristocratie.” He had been trained in the
law but was little given to speculative thought. There is evidence
that he read somewhat in the fast accumulating political literature
of the times, but little indication that his reading modified his
theory or influenced his conduct. He was an administrator rather than
a philosopher, and from the fragmentary records that have survived
it is difficult to piece together a consistent political theory. As
a magistrate under the dominance of the English Common Law, he seems
to have accepted the constitutional theory of Coke, who sought to
interpose the customary and ancient law of the land between the growing
absolutism of the Crown, and the increasing importunity of the Commons,
with sovereignty inhering in the judiciary. As a Puritan, however, he
superimposed the law of Moses on the law of the land, and by ignoring
the King on the one hand, and denying power to the representatives of
the people on the other, he created the framework of a magisterial
theocracy.
The two chief sources to which we must turn for his political views,
in addition to his letters and journals, are: _A Replye to the Answ:
Made to the Discourse about the Neg: Vote_, and _Arbitrary Governmt
Described: & the Governmt of the Massachusetts Vindicated from
that Aspersion_, both of which have been preserved in the form of
heads of argument.[26] The principle that underlies these skeleton
arguments is the theory of a state held static by exact constitutional
arrangements. King and people represent the great supplementary
functions of constitutional government, sovereignty and liberty; both
are necessary in a well ordered society, and neither may encroach
upon the other. This Winthrop regarded as the vital principle of the
English constitution, which had been embodied in the government of
Massachusetts.
The Government of the Massachusetts consists of Magistrates &
Freemen: in the one is placed the Auth’ye, in the other the Lib’tye
of the Com: W: either hath power to Acte, both alone, & both
togither, yet by a distinct power, the one of Lib’tye, the other of
Auth’ye: the Freemen Acte alone in all occurrences out of Court: &
both Acte togither in the Gen’ll Court: yet all limited by certaine
Rules, bothe in the greater & smaller affaires: so as the Governm’t
is Regular in a mixt Aristocratie, & no wayes Arbitrary.[27]
In settled times and places this nice balance between sovereignty and
liberty is maintained by use and wont; but in periods of disturbance,
such as then existed in England, and in new experiments, such as marked
the setting up of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, there was certain
to be much pulling and straining between these antagonistic principles;
and his refusal to accept this fact, and his stubborn insistence on
transferring to New England the old English static order, brought on
Winthrop’s head many of the difficulties that greatly troubled his
administration. Both in the old world and the new, the principle of
liberty was encroaching on feudal authority. With the rise of the
middle class, many Englishmen, and particularly the colonial New
Englanders, were fast outgrowing the old paternalisms, and coming to
regard them as no other than tyranny. The freemen of the Massachusetts
towns were restive under the strict rule of the magistrate-elders, and
a growing party of democratic deputies was eager to try its hand at
government. All such democratic pretensions Winthrop held in contempt,
although he was at pains to deny the arbitrary nature of magisterial
rule.
Some of the deputies had seriously conceived, that the magistrates
affected an arbitrary government.... For prevention whereof they
judged it not unlawful to use even _extrema remedia_, as if _salus
populi_ had been now the transcendent rule to walk by, and that
magistracy must be no other, in effect, than a ministerial office,
and all authority, both legislative, consultative, and judicial,
must be exercised by the people in their body representative.[28]
If government were regular it could not be arbitrary--this was
Winthrop’s brief reply to the deputies. In his arguments he
deliberately avoided the difficult question of sovereignty; in part,
no doubt, because of the delicate situation resulting from fear of
royal interference, but chiefly because he was unwilling to bring into
jeopardy the unlimited powers of magistracy. That he denied sovereignty
to the people is abundantly clear from his actions, as well as from
specific comment. By the law of the corporation, namely, the written
terms of the charter, authority was vested in a limited body of
freemen; and he saw no reason in expediency or otherwise to extend that
authority. Thus he argued, “it is well proved & concluded by a late
Juditious writer, in a booke newly come over, intituled an Answ: to Dr
Ferne, that thoughe all Lawes, that are sup’structive, may be altered
by the representative bodye of the Com:w: yet they have not power to
alter anythinge w’ch is fundamental.”[29] What delimitations were to be
drawn between “superstructive” and “fundamental,” he was not careful
to make clear; but it is certain that he regarded as fundamental not
only the charter terms and the British constitution but the will of
God. Doubtful as this last may seem to students of political science,
and difficult to determine, it was neither doubtful nor difficult to
Winthrop and his fellow magistrates and ministers. The Mosaic law was
specific. Back of the citizen-legislator was the subject of Jehovah,
and he was politically free only to do the will of God. There must be
divine sanction for all human law; lacking such sanction all majority
votes and legislative enactments were null and void. Sovereignty
inheres finally in God, and it is by his fundamental law that all
superstructive laws and institutions must be judged.
In theocratic philosophy, therefore, the magistrate became no other
than God’s vicegerent, with authority beyond popular limitation or
control. No English squire presumed to exercise the magisterial
powers which Winthrop and his associates quietly usurped. Among
other innovations they early claimed the right of veto on the acts
of the deputies, and in reply to the dissatisfaction voiced at such
arbitrary encroachment, Winthrop argued that the magisterial veto was
no infringement on the liberties of the people, but was a means to
“preserve them, if by any occasion they should be in danger: I cannot
liken it better to anythinge than the brake of a windmill: w’ch hathe
no power, to move the runninge worke: but it is of speciall use, to
stoppe any violent motion, w’ch in some extraordinary tempest might
endanger the wholl fabricke.”[30] The convenient weapon of divine
sanction Winthrop did not scruple to use at need. Thus when a petition
was presented for the repeal of a law which arbitrarily decreased the
number of deputies, he denied the lawfulness of the procedure:
When the people have chosen men to be their rulers, now to combine
together ... in a public petition to have an order repealed ...
savors of resisting an ordinance of God. For the people, having
deputed others, have no right to make or alter laws themselves, but
are to be subject.[31]
The old English right of petition, in short, was not a right in
theocratic Massachusetts, and any unauthorized joining together of
citizens for political purposes was a conspiracy against the will of
God. The practical result of this doctrine of magisterial vicegerency
was that a small group of freemen set up an unlimited oligarchy over
some four or five thousand of their fellow Englishmen, even going so
far as to advance the novel doctrine of a freehold tenure of power.
Winthrop’s extreme jealousy of popular power cannot be explained
away by the doctrine of stewardship. Hooker of Hartford had no such
distrust of the people, but he was not a gentleman, like Winthrop,
and had not grown up with an aristocratic contempt for democracy.
The preposterousness of democratic aspiration was a stock jest among
English gentlemen, and in seeking to refute the arguments of the
deputies for greater popular power Winthrop did little more than give a
Hebraic twist to his aristocratic prejudices:
Where the chief Ordinary power & administration thereof is in
the people, there is a Democratie ... the Deputies are the
Democraticall p’te of o’r Governm’t. Now if we should change
from a mixt Aristocratie to a meere Democratie: first we should
have no warr’nt in scripture for it: there was no such Governm’t
in Israell. 2: we should heerby voluntaryly abase o’rselves, &
deprive o’rselves of that dignitye, w’ch the providence of God
hath putt upon us: w’ch is a manifest breach of the 5th Com’t: for
a Democratie is, among most Civill nations accounted the meanest
& worst of all formes of Governm’t: & therefore in writers, it is
branded w’th Reproachfull Epithets as Bellua multorū capitū, a
monster, &c: & Historyes doe recorde, that it hath been allwayes of
least continuance & fullest of trouble.[32]
In an often quoted letter to Thomas Hooker, then engaged in erecting
a democratic commonwealth in Connecticut, Winthrop diplomatically
moderated his terms and put the aristocratic doctrine in more
attractive form. “I expostulated about the unwarrantableness &
unsafeness of referring all matter of counsel or judicature to the body
of the people, _quia_ the best is always the least, & of that best part
the wiser part is always the lesser.”[33] But he must have agreed
heartily with another English gentleman, who writing to Winthrop under
date of July 9, 1640, remarked pithily:
I say agayne noe wise man shoud be soe folish as to live whear
every man is master, & masters must not correct theyr servants:
Where wise men propound & fooles determine, as it was sayde of the
citties of Greece.[34]
As the responsible steward of God’s plan for New England, Winthrop
would not flatter the people by pretending to the doctrine of _vox
populi, vox dei_. The multitude he regarded as factious, overswayed
by expediency and self-interest, incapable of governing wisely. Law,
by its nature, was ethical, the expression of God’s absolute and just
will; and this law, the magistrates were called of God to enforce.
From this conception of the absolute nature of law, came the famous
discussion of liberty and authority, known as the “little speech,”
which is the most highly praised of Winthrop’s utterances. In a certain
police-court matter that had loosed the class prejudices of all
parties, he had held against the popular feeling, and was impeached
before the general court. Upon his acquittal he rose and addressed the
court in words which he afterwards set down in his journal. No other
episode in his varied career reveals so well the admirable poise of the
man--the dignity, the self-control, the fair-mindedness, despite an
attack that hurt him to the quick.
For the other point concerning liberty, I observe a great mistake
in the country about that. There is a twofold liberty, natural (I
mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal. The first
is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as
he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he
lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is
incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure
the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and
maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time
to be worse than brute beasts: _omnes sumus licentia deteriores_.
This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which
all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue
it. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; and it may
also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and
man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions
amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object
of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty
to that only which is good, just, and honest. This liberty you are
to stand for, with the hazard (not only of your goods, but) of
your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this, is not authority,
but a distemper thereof. This liberty is maintained and exercised
in a subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty
wherewith Christ hath made us free.... On the other side, ye know
who they are that complain of this yoke and say, let us break their
bands, etc., we will not have this man to rule over us. Even so,
brethren, it will be between you and your magistrates. If you stand
for your natural corrupt liberties, and will do what is good in
your own eyes, you will not endure the least weight of authority,
but will murmur, and oppose, and be always striving to shake off
that yoke; and if you will be satisfied to enjoy such civil and
lawful liberties, such as Christ allows you, then will you quietly
and cheerfully submit unto that authority which is set over you, in
all the administrations of it, for your good. Wherein, if we fail
at any time, we hope we shall be willing (by God’s assistance) to
hearken to good advice from any of you, or in any other way of God;
so shall your liberties be preserved, in upholding the honor and
power of authority amongst you.[35]
The doctrine of aristocratic stewardship has never been more skillfully
presented. It is John Cotton’s reply to Roger Williams, translated into
political terms; the philosophy of natural rights whittled down to a
covenant between God and man. It rests on the assumption of an absolute
law, superior to expediency. But may not honest men disagree as to what
constitutes the good, just, and honest? and may not godly authority
imperceptibly slide over into plain tyranny? Although the Saints may
have professed themselves satisfied with Winthrop’s doctrine, the pages
of early Massachusetts history bear ample record of the dissatisfaction
of the sinners. Most of the difficulties experienced by Winthrop in his
administration of the commonwealth had their root in this assumption
of arbitrary power, the immediate outcome of which was a spontaneous
development of incipient democracy. How far such an assumption of
divine custodianship may lead a generous man from the path of justice,
appears in his summing up of the case against Mistress Anne Hutchinson,
who because she insisted upon her own interpretation of the good, just,
and honest, was adjudged “A woman not only difficult in her opinions,
but also of an intemperate spirit.” “The ground work of her revelations
is the immediate revelation of the spirit, and not by the ministry of
the Lord ... and this hath been the ground of all these tumults and
troubles; and I would that those were all cut off that trouble us.” The
kernel of the offense for which Mistress Hutchinson was banished, is
then laid bare: “We see not that any should have authority to set up
any other exercise beside what authority hath already set up.”[36]
In this arbitrary judgment of Winthrop’s--the natural fruit of the tree
of theocratic stewardship--the “little speech” discovers its suitable
commentary. Urged on by his bigoted associates, the kind-hearted
governor descended to their level, and began the unhappy business of
playing the tyrant under pretense of scourging God’s enemies. The
lords-brethren served notice upon all dissenters that henceforth there
must be no dissent in New England. The admirable courage of Mistress
Hutchinson availed no more against the magisterial interpretation
of the good, just, and honest, than the boldness of Roger Williams
before her; or later, the zeal of the Baptists who were sent away by
Endicott; or later still, the piety of the Quakers, who were whipped
at the cart-tail and hanged, men and women both. The policy of the
political stewardship of the best and wisest never had fuller trial,
with abler or more conscientious agents, than in Massachusetts Bay; and
its failure was complete. Such progress as Massachusetts made towards
freedom and tolerance was gained in the teeth of theocratic opposition;
New England democracy owes no debt to her godly magistrates.
Bred up in a half-feudal world, the leaders of the Migration remained
patriarchal in their social philosophy, unable to adapt old prejudices
to new conditions. Human motives are curiously mixed, human actions
rarely consistent; and if the shortcomings of John Winthrop show
blacker by contrast with the excellence of the ideal which he
professed, the fault must be charged against his time and associates
and not against his manly, generous nature. Most English gentlemen of
his day were steeped in a sodden Toryism, yet he earnestly desired to
be a faithful steward of church and state. If as a gentleman he held
firmly to the privilege of rulership, as a Christian he endeavored
to rule honorably and in the fear of the Lord. If he followed the
beaten path and tried to shape the great experiment by the traditional
principles of his class; if his zeal at times led him into indisputable
tyrannies; it was because he was led away from the light, not because
he sought selfish ends. Godliness has its own special temptations, and
it would be ungenerous to bear ill-will against so lovable a man.
Footnotes
[7] James Truslow Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 170.
[8] _Institutes_, Book IV, Chapter XX, Paragraph 8.
[9] “Letter to Lord Say and Sele,” in Hutchinson, _History of
Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. I, p. 497.
[10] Vol. I, p. 116.
[11] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 125.
[12] _Magnalia_, Vol. I, p. 265. Compare with this Cotton’s own words:
“The law, which your Lordship instanceth (in that none shall be chosen
to magistracy amongst us, but a church member) was made and enacted
before I came into the country; but I have hitherto wanted sufficient
light to plead against it” (Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay
Colony_, Vol. I, p. 498).
[13] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. I,
Appendix 2.
[14] See _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. II, p. 203.
[15] _Ibid._, Part II, p. 15.
[16] See Hutchinson, _Papers_, Vol. II, pp. 131 ff.; quoted in Adams,
_Founding of New England_, p. 261.
[17] “Master John Cottons Answer to Master Roger Williams,” in
_Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. II, pp. 22-23.
[18] _Life and Letters of John Winthrop_, Vol. I, p. 310.
[19] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 296.
[20] _Life and Letters_, Vol. I, pp. 397-398.
[21] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 288.
[22] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 179.
[23] Book IV, Chapter XX, Paragraph 6.
[24] The heads of argument are given in _Life and Letters_, Vol. II,
pp. 211-214.
[25] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 236.
[26] Both are given in the appendix to Vol. II of the _Life and
Letters_.
[27] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 454.
[28] _Journal_, Vol. II, p. 240.
[29] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 438.
[30] _Discourse about the Neg: Vote, Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 434.
[31] _Journal._
[32] _Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 430.
[33] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 237.
[34] _Letter of Lord Say and Sele_, in _ibid._, Vol. II, p. 426.
[35] _History of New England_, Vol. II, pp. 279-282.
[36] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. II, pp.
482-520.
Chapter IV • The Contributions of Independency
I
Other ideals than those of Winthrop and Cotton, fruitful or feculent
according to the special bias of whoever judges them, came out of
England in the teeming days of the Puritan revolution to agitate
the little settlements. A Hebraized theocracy could not satisfy the
aspirations of advanced English liberals who were exploring all the
avenues to freedom, and who, now that the old feudal bonds were
loosening, were projecting a more generous basis for the reorganization
of society. The democratic elements were beginning to make their voices
heard in England; the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was
bearing fruit in the minds of obscure Independents; and the eventual
outcome would be the shouldering aside of a snug Presbyterian order,
and the clarification of a program for a democratic commonwealth. In
those excellent words commonweal and commonwealth--words much on men’s
tongues in the creative later years of the Puritan revolution--was
fittingly summed up the political ideal of Independency. English
liberalism had come to believe that social conformity, established in
the practice of coercion, with its monarchical state and hierarchical
church, must give way to an order founded in good will, that conceived
of the political state as a public-service corporation, concerned
solely with the _res publica_, or public thing, careful of the
well-being of all, allowing special rights or grants to none. The
state, it was coming to be argued freely, rightly understood, was
no other than society organized to further the great end of the
commonweal; no longer must it remain a private preserve for gentlemen
to hunt over.
But before that should come about a great battle must be fought, in
New England as well as in old England. The principle of individual
freedom must first be established securely in the public mind, and
to that business the party of Independents devoted its energies. In
the theory and practice of Independency two fundamental rights were
implied: the right of the individual to determine his own belief,
uncoerced by external authority; and the right to join freely with his
fellows in the institutional expression and spread of such belief.
In order to realize the first, it was a necessary preliminary to
establish the right of free inquiry on a firm constitutional basis--the
principle that the state shall safeguard the citizen in the exercise
of such right, and not hinder or thwart him; and in order to realize
the second, it was necessary to establish in social practice a much
more fiercely disputed principle, namely, the right to proselytize,
to spread one’s views freely, to endeavor to make them prevail over
contrary views. Certainly neither right would be freely granted; they
must be won in the teeth of supposedly divine sanctions to conformity.
However intimately the two are related, it is over the second that the
long fierce battle has been waged in modern history. Liberalism faces
no severer test than in its attitude towards the right of unpopular
minority propaganda. The broad principle of toleration of differences,
so vital to a democratic society, searches out and lays bare every
insincerity of liberal professions. The will to power is so universal
in appeal, it is so quick to attack every threatening nonconformity,
that no other social right has traveled so arduous a road, or lags so
far in the rear of the liberal advance. The principle of religious
toleration that was involved in the movement of Independency was the
ecclesiastical form of a struggle, which, shifting later to the field
of politics and then to economics, is still raging about us. The long
battle is still far from being won. In few countries today do more than
a small minority regard the principle of toleration otherwise than as a
social luxury to be indulged in only when times are settled.
It was in the nature of things that a clash should soon come in
Massachusetts Bay. There Independency would certainly be looked
upon as no better than a weed from the devil’s wilderness, and in
the name of God and the theocracy it would be trampled under foot.
Liberalism and the Cambridge Platform would no more mix than oil and
water. But the more immediate and narrower question of religious
toleration was only incidental to the broader divergencies that lay
in antagonistic principles of church and state, and that brought on
the clash. A general engagement was preparing between the principles
of Presbyterianism and Independency, and the real issue at stake
was the future form of society in New England--whether it was to be
aristocratic or democratic. The free environment was a strong stimulus
to idealists who looked upon the new field as a heaven-sent opportunity
for their own special Utopias to take root, and who would bitterly
resent any intrusion by a rival. Commonwealth building is a great
adventure, and the Independents with their carefully elaborated plans
would not sit quietly by and permit the Saints to preëmpt the land for
their inhospitable theocracy without a struggle. In such a contest the
more liberal party was fortunate in its leaders. Thomas Hooker and
Roger Williams were men of creative ability, of inflexible purpose,
of fine idealism, the ablest amongst the entire group of Puritan
immigrants, in whom the great principles of Independency found worthy
stewards; and the long struggle they carried on, each in his own way,
with the theocratic leaders of Massachusetts was to affect profoundly
the later development of New England. In the end the Presbyterianism
of Boston was to surrender to the Congregationalism of Hartford. From
Connecticut and Rhode Island, it must be recalled, rather than from the
Bay colony, came those democratic principles and institutions that were
to spread widely in later years, and create the New England that after
generations have liked to remember.
II • Thomas Hooker • Puritan Liberal
Among the Englishmen who came to Massachusetts were some to whom the
“New England way” seemed to promise a democratic organization of
the church, and who looked with disapproval upon the Presbyterizing
policy of the oligarchy. Of this number the congregations of Newtown,
Dorchester, and Watertown were noteworthy for the quiet determination
with which they seceded from the theocratic commonwealth, and set
up for themselves in the Connecticut wilderness. Their leaders were
liberals who believed that everything should be done decently and
in order, but who were determined that the outcome of such decent
orderliness should be a free church in a free state; and so while Roger
Williams was engaged in erecting the democracy of Rhode Island, Thomas
Hooker was as busily engaged in erecting the democracy of Hartford.
Concerning the “grave and judicious Hooker” surprisingly little is
known, in spite of the important work that he did and the influence
that he wielded during a masterful life. He was evidently a man
regardless of fame, who took small pains to publish his virtues for the
edification of posterity; what record he left behind bears evidence of
being the expression of a man to whom desire for celebrity was nothing
in comparison with the needs of his Master’s work. Unlike his fellow
ministers he was not much given to making books. The works that bore
the name of Thomas Hooker on the title-page were put through the press
usually by other hands than his, and were taken from shorthand notes.
His great contribution, _A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_,
published anonymously and in an imperfect form, was written against
his will in consequence of his having been drafted for the service
by his fellow ministers. In removing from Newtown he cut himself off
from the group of diarists who diligently recorded the happenings of
the day, and so failed of being portrayed and praised by divers busy
pens. Lacking exacter information, we are forced to rely mainly upon
such hearsay reports as have come down to us, pieced out by Puritan
tradition; and these reports make Thomas Hooker to have been a strong
and resourceful man, a better democrat than his fellow ministers, the
father of New England Congregationalism as it later came to be when the
Presbyterianizing tendency was checked--a practical leader who rejected
equally the reactionary theocracy of John Cotton, and the leveling
radicalism of Roger Williams.
For the pronounced democratic sympathies of this “light of the western
churches”--a sympathy quite unusual in his day and world--some grounds
will be discovered in his commonplace origin. Unlike John Cotton, who
had a “descent from honourable progenitors,” Hooker was sprung from
a plain yeoman family that had made no stir in the world. His native
hamlet, Marfield in Leicestershire, numbered no more than six houses,
tucked away in a secluded countryside. His schooling was got by the
aid of scholarships: at Market-Bosworth and later at Cambridge, where
he entered as sizar, which meant among other things that he was waiter
on tables in the Hall. When he was settled in a forty-pound living
at Esher, in Surrey, he married a “waiting-woman” to the wife of his
patron; and when he died, after a laborious life spent in the cause
of righteousness, he left an estate appraised at 846 pounds, 15
shillings, exclusive of his books, more than half of which modest sum
was represented by the Hartford homestead.[37] Which scanty information
is sufficient to tell us that Thomas Hooker was a simple man in worldly
ambitions as well as in origin, not given to climbing or feathering his
own nest, with none of the great associates or aristocratic ties of
Winthrop and Ward and Cotton, a churchman more inclined to the ways of
Independency than to Presbyterianism.
In his professional work he was rather the pastor than the teacher,
caring more for experimental religion than for theological disputation.
He was an embodiment of the moral fervor of the Reformation that
protested against the scandal of “dumb priests.” He seems to have been
the most stimulating preacher of early New England, and it was as a
lecturer that he had made a name for himself before he was driven from
his English charge by Laud. The lecturer was a characteristic Puritan
innovation, much hated by the Anglicans. Translated into a modern
equivalent, it meant an agitator who used the pulpit to spread the
new gospel of free judgment in religious matters, and other gospels
displeasing to absolutism. That such men were not liked by Charles
and his Archbishop goes without saying; they were “the people’s
creatures”--a certain Tory churchman complained to the King--and “blew
the bellows of their sedition.” Such being the case it seemed but
common prudence to muzzle them, and as early as 1622 James laid down
an orthodox program, forbidding any of lesser rank than “a bishop or
dean [to] presume to preach in any popular auditory on the deep points
of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality,
efficacy, irresistibility of God’s grace,” and restricting Sunday
afternoon sermons to such innocuous themes as the “Catechism, Creed,
or Ten Commandments.”[38] It was an endeavor to stop men’s thinking by
putting the crown of martyrdom on the lovers of truth. To forbid the
Puritan to talk of such things, to shut up the Word of God from him,
was to blow the bellows of his sedition indeed.
That Thomas Hooker was not a man to be muzzled must have been clear
to all who knew his stubborn English will. In his homely vigor he was
not unlike Hugh Latimer, direct and vigorous in speech and action,
not easily turned aside from the path of duty, possessing much of
the old bishop’s courage in dealing with great men and their follies.
He knew a fool and a tyrant in high places, and was bold to call them
by their true names. “He was a person,” said Cotton Mather, “who
while doing his Master’s work, would put a king in his pocket.” He
was the more dangerous because he had put his own temper under strict
governance--“For though he were a man of cholerick disposition, and had
a mighty vigour and fervour of spirit ... yet he had ordinarily as much
government of his choler as a man has of a mastiff dog in a chain; he
‘could let out his dog, and pull in his dog, as he pleased.’”
So ardent a temperament, joined to remarkable powers of oratory, gave
to Thomas Hooker very unusual popular influence, some measure of which
is revealed in a letter of a certain sycophant of the court party, who
wrote to Laud’s tool, Chancellor Duck, under date of May 20, 1629, as
follows:
All men’s eares are now filled with ye obstreperous clamours of his
followers against my Lord ... as a man endeavouring to suppress
good preaching and advance Popery. All would be here very calme
and quiet if he [Hooker] might depart.... If he be suspended its
the resolution of his friends and himselfe to settle his abode in
Essex, and maintenance is promised him in plentifull manner for
the fruition of his private conference, which hath already more
impeached the peace of our church than his publique ministry. His
genius will still haunte all the pulpits in ye country, where any
of his scholers may be admitted to preach.... There be divers
young ministers about us ... that spend their time in conference
with him; and return home and preach what he hath brewed.... Our
people’s pallats grow so out of tast yt noe food contents them
but of Mr. Hooker’s dressing. I have lived in Essex to see many
changes, and have seene the people idolizing many new ministers
and lecturers, but this man surpasses them all for learning and
some other considerable partes and ... gains more and far greater
followers than all before him.... If my Lord tender his owne future
peace ... let him connive at Mr. Hooker’s departure.[39]
Clearly the England of Laud with its pursuivants and tattling tongues
of “dumb ministers”--who might well be jealous of his eloquence--was no
fit place for the activities of Thomas Hooker. Even though he should
be suspended, he would still be reckoned dangerous to prerogative with
his private conferences and his following of young ministers. So he
was driven overseas into Holland, whence after a few years’ experience
with the Archbishop’s spies, and dislike of the Presbyterian system
there practiced, he set forth for America where he arrived on the same
boat with John Cotton and Samuel Stone, and was inducted as pastor of
the church at Newtown which had been awaiting his coming over. Shortly
thereafter began the open dissatisfaction of the Cambridge congregation
with the policy of the oligarchy, which resulted three years later in
the removal of Hooker and his church to Hartford. The causes of this
removal--an event that profoundly agitated the colony--have been much
discussed, but they have never been cleared of what may have been
an intentional vagueness. Possibly, as Hubbard suggests, there were
jealousies between Hooker and Cotton, Winthrop, and Haynes, which it
would have been unseemly to expose in open court;[40] but the likelier
explanation would seem to lie in the incompatibility of political
views, which at bottom was a division on the question of aristocracy or
democracy in church and state. The Cambridge men seem to have disliked
the oligarchic rule of the magistrates; they doubtless sympathized with
the popular party and may have encouraged the counter aggressions of
the deputies, whose assertiveness fills so much space in Winthrop’s
journal and betokens his concern. It is likely that there was more
dissatisfaction than got into journals, either private or official;
and it is equally likely that Thomas Hooker was a prime force in
quickening the democratic unrest. “After Mr. Hooker’s coming over,”
said Hubbard in an often quoted passage, “it was observed that many of
the freemen grew to be very jealous of their liberties.” Nevertheless,
Hooker was not a contentious person, to spread a clamor through the
commonwealth and endanger the success of the plantation. He believed
that “Time, Place, Outward Decency and Comelinesse” were desirable in
the management of public affairs; and so instead of descending to sharp
dispute with men whom he respected and loved even though he disagreed
with them in political views, he chose to remove quietly out of their
jurisdiction, making as little cause for embroilment as possible.
After all, the most illuminating commentary upon the causes of
the removal is the spirit of the institutions set up in the new
settlement. While we need not go so far as to assert, with the
historians of Connecticut, that “the birthplace of American democracy
is Hartford,” we must recognize in the Fundamental Orders adopted by
the General Assembly, January 14, 1639, a plan of popular government
so broadly democratic as to entitle it to be called “the first written
constitution of modern democracy.”[41] Concerning the important part
played by Hooker in this work there can be no doubt. His influence
was commanding, and the sneer of old Samuel Peters--“Hooker reigned
twelve years high-priest over Hertford”--scarcely overstates the
fact. And this great influence was thrown persistently in favor of
democratic procedure in church and state. He definitely rejected the
Boston practice of magisterial autocracy. In opposition to Winthrop,
who asserted, “Whatsoever sentence the magistrate gives, the judgment
is the Lord’s, though he do it not by any rule prescribed by civil
authority,” Hooker argued:
That in the matter which is referred to the judge, the sentence
should lie in his breast, or be left to his discretion, according
to which he should go, I am afraid it is a course which wants both
safety and warrant. I must confess, I ever looked at it as a way
which leads directly to tyranny, and so to confusion, and must
plainly profess, if it was in my liberty, I should choose neither
to live nor leave my posterity under such a government.[42]
At another time, replying to Winthrop’s justification of oligarchic
rule on the ground that “the best part is always the least, and of that
best part the wiser is always the lesser,” Hooker frankly rested his
case for democracy on the good sense of the people as a whole:
It is also a truth that counsel should be sought from counsellors;
but the question yet is, who should those be. Reserving smaller
matters which fall in occasionally in common course, to a lower
counsel, in matters of greater importance which concerns the common
good, a general counsel chosen by all, I conceive, under favour,
most suitable to rule and most safe for relief of the whole.[43]
Before the General Court, on May 31, 1638, eight months before the
Fundamental Orders were adopted, Hooker preached a remarkable sermon
on popular sovereignty. Taking for his text Deut. 1:13--the passage
on which John Eliot later erected his fantastic Utopia--he elaborated
the thesis that “the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in
the free consent of the people,” and therefore that “the choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance,”
and “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it
is in their power also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power
and place unto which they call them.”[44] This was Hooker’s reply to
the oligarchic policy of the Bay in limiting the number of freemen
in order to maintain the supremacy of the magistrates; and it throws
light on the comment written out of England in the spring of 1636,
to John Wilson, that “there is great division of judgment in matters
of religion amongst good ministers & people which moved Mr. Hoker
to remove”; and that “you are so strict in admission of members to
your church, that more than halfe are out of your church in all your
congregations, & that Mr. Hoker befor he went away preached against
yt (as one reports who hard him).”[45] In the new commonwealth there
was neither a property qualification nor a religious test limiting the
right of franchise; the admission of freemen was reckoned a political
matter and left to the several township democracies. The reaction
against the oligarchic policy of Massachusetts Bay carried far.
If we had Hooker’s sermon in full we should know much more about
his political theory; yet even from the meager and tantalizing
notes that have been preserved, we can deduce fairly certainly the
major principles of his philosophy. Three creative ideas seem to
have determined his thinking: the compact theory of the state, the
doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the conception of the state as a
public-service corporation, strictly responsible to the will of the
majority--ideas that Roger Williams elaborated in detail and during
many years of service reduced to a working system in the commonwealth
of Rhode Island. That Hooker should have grasped so firmly the
essentials of the new democratic theory will surprise no one who is
acquainted with the political speculations of English Independency.
They were all implicit in the new theory of church and state that such
thinkers as Williams and Vane and Milton were clarifying, and since the
days of Robert Browne they had been familiar in one form or another
to the young Puritan radicals at the universities. The compact idea,
which held in solution the doctrine of natural rights, had established
itself firmly in New England with the coming of the Pilgrims. The
Mayflower compact and the church covenant provided the basis for the
social organization of Plymouth; and the covenant idea had taken so
strong a hold on the popular mind of Massachusetts Bay that the astute
leaders of the oligarchy were quick to see the advantage of investing
the charter, in the popular imagination, with the sanctity of the
compact idea; and by a subtle process of idealizing, they transmuted
the charter of a trading company into a fundamental organic law, that
was reckoned an adequate written constitution to safeguard the rights
of the people. It was a clever political move, but it seems not to have
satisfied Thomas Hooker, who was too liberal in his views to accept the
shadow for the substance. As a left-wing Independent he would have a
real compact, and a popular fundamental law to safeguard the liberties
of the people; and he saw to it that the new commonwealth was broadly
based on the common will, rather than narrowly on the rule of the
gentry. The democratic order of Connecticut was English Independency
transplanted to the new world.
To Hooker New England Congregationalism owes as great a debt as
does New England democracy. The last great work he undertook was a
defense of the New England way against the criticism of the English
Presbyterians. He was to prove a powerful advocate, for not only was
he intellectually equipped to write a knotty book in answer to other
knotty books, but unlike Cotton and Davenport and Mather, he was
wholly in sympathy with Congregationalism, and had no mind to conceal
or equivocate concerning its democratic tendencies. He would write
no apology, but a frank and vigorous defense. His church polity, as
elaborated in his _Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_, is
professedly Hebraic. “Ecclesiastical Policy,” he asserts baldly, “is
a skill of ordering the affairs of Christ’s house, according to the
pattern of his word,” and he then proceeds to postulate the principle
of absolutism by accepting a divine sovereign will. But this divine
sovereignty was a blow struck at all temporal absolutisms, for it spoke
through no vicegerent of pope, bishop, presbytery or magistrate, but
only through the voice of the individual subject. It is the priesthood
of all believers. “The _Supreme_ and _Monarchicall_ power resides onely
in our Saviour, can onely be given and attributed to him, and to none
other.” There remained, then, the difficult business of determining
how the sovereign will of Christ is to be wrought on earth, and into
this Hooker delved with such convincing thoroughness that, in his own
words, “no man that hath supped on Logick, hath a forehead to gainsay”
his conclusions. He was bold in innovation--“a cause is not the lesse
true, because of late discovered”; but after quieting “the stomachs of
such, whose expectations are not answered in any opinion, unless it
be moldy with age,” he proceeds to explain the true nature of church
organization thus:
But whether all Ecclesiasticall power be impaled, impropriated,
and rightly taken in to the Presbytery alone: Or that the people
of the Particular Churches should come in for a share, according
to their places and proportions; This is left as the subject of
the inquiry of this age, and that which occasions great thought of
heart of all hands: Great thoughts of hearts in the Presbytery, as
being very loth to part with that so chief privilege, and of which
they have taken possession so many years. Great Thoughts of heart
amongst the Churches, how they may clear their right, and claim
it in such pious sobriety and moderation, as becomes the Saints:
being unwilling to loose their cause and comfort, meerly upon a
_nihil dicit_: or forever to be deprived of so precious a legacy,
as they conceive this is, though it hath been withheld from them,
by the tyranny of the Pope, and prescription of times. Nor can they
conceive it lesse, then a heedlesse betraying of their speciall
liberties, and not selling but casting away their inheritance, and
right, by a careless silence, when the course of providence, as
the juncture of times now present themselves, allows them a writt
_Ad melius inquirendum_.... These are the times when people shall
be fitted for such priviledges, fit I say to obtain them, and fit
to use them.... And whereas it hath been charged upon the people,
that through their ignorance and unskilfulnesse, they are not able
to wield such priviledges, and therefore not fit to share in any
such power, The Lord hath promised: To take away the vail from all
faces in the mountain, the _weak_ shall be as David, and David as
an Angel of God.[46]
The church of Visible Saints confederating together to walk in the
fellowship of the faith ... is _Totum essentiale_.... Election
of the People rightly ordered by the rule of Christ, gives the
essentials to an Officer, or leaves the impression of a true
outward Call, and so an Office-power upon a Pastor ... _there is a
communicating of Power_ by Voluntary Subjection when, though there
be _no Office-power, formaliter_ in the people, yet they willingly
yeelding themselves to be ruled by another, desiring and calling of
him to take that rule; he accepting of what they yeeld, possessing
that right which they put upon him, by free consent; _hence
ariseth_ this Relation and authority of Office-rule.[47]
It is crabbed prose, not altogether worthy of a man who kept the
thorns crackling under the pot when he stood face to face with his
congregation, and though we may feel inclined to accept the challenge
of a certain old Puritan, and “lay a _caveat_ against the author’s
sweet and solid handling” of his matter, we shall be little inclined
to lay a _caveat_ against his doctrine. Here is no casuistry like John
Cotton’s, denying Congregationalism while ostensibly defending it; but
a frank acceptance of the supreme power of the people. “The Lord hath
promised to take away the veil from all faces”--in this faith Thomas
Hooker walked all his days, and what he could himself do to remove
the veil from the faces of the common people, he did heartily as unto
the Lord, thereby proving his right to be remembered among the early
stewards of our American democracy.
III • Roger Williams • Seeker
The gods, it would seem, were pleased to have their jest with Roger
Williams by sending him to earth before his time. In manner and speech
a seventeenth-century Puritan controversialist, in intellectual
interests he was contemporary with successive generations of prophets
from his own days to ours. His hospitable mind anticipated a surprising
number of the idealisms of the future. As a transcendental mystic he
was a forerunner of Emerson and the Concord school, discovering an
indwelling God of love in a world of material things; as a speculative
Seeker he was a forerunner of Channing and the Unitarians, discovering
the hope of a more liberal society in the practice of the open mind;
as a political philosopher he was a forerunner of Paine and the French
romantic school, discovering the end of government in concern for the
_res publica_, and the cohesive social tie in the principle of good
will. Democrat and Christian, the generation to which he belongs is not
yet born, and all his life he remained a stranger amongst men. Things
natural and right to John Cotton were no better than anachronisms to
him. He lived and dreamed in a future he was not to see, impatient
to bring to men a heaven they were unready for. And because they
were unready they could not understand the grounds of his hope, and
not understanding they were puzzled and angry and cast him out to
dream his dreams in the wilderness. There was abundant reason for his
banishment. A child of light, he came bringing not peace but the sword.
A humane and liberal spirit, he was groping for a social order more
generous than any theocracy--that should satisfy the aspirations of
men for a catholic fellowship, greater than sect or church, village or
nation, embracing all races and creeds, bringing together the sundered
societies of men in a common spirit of good will.
Roger Williams was the most provocative figure thrown upon the
Massachusetts shores by the upheaval in England, the one original
thinker amongst a number of capable social architects. An intellectual
barometer, fluctuating with every change in the rising storm of
revolution, he came transporting hither the new and disturbant
doctrines of the Leveler, loosing wild foxes with fire-brands to ravage
the snug fields of the Presbyterian Utopia. He was the “_first rebel_
against the divine _church-order_ established in the wilderness,” as
Cotton Mather rightly reported. But he was very much more than that;
he was a rebel against all the stupidities that interposed a barrier
betwixt men and the fellowship of their dreams. Those who found such
stupidities serviceable to their ends, naturally disliked Roger
Williams and believed they were serving God by undoing his work. There
is a naïve passage in the _Magnalia_ that suggests how incomprehensible
to the theocratic mind was this stormy petrel that came out of England
to flutter and clamor about Boston and Salem, until he was driven forth
to find such resting place as he might, there to bring forth after his
kind.
In the year 1654, a certain windmill in the Low Countries, whirling
round with extraordinary violence, by reason of a violent storm
then blowing, the stone at length by its rapid motion became so
intensely hot as to fire the mill, from whence the flames, being
dispersed by the high winds, did set a whole Town on fire. But I
can tell my reader that, above twenty years before this, there was
a whole country in America like to be set on fire by the rapid
motion of a Windmill in the head of one particular man.[48]
And John Cotton, worsted in his bout with his brilliant antagonist,
and perhaps frightened at the latter’s free speculation, found
such satisfaction as he could in epithets. Roger Williams was an
“evill-worker”; his “head runneth round”; “it would weary a sober
minde to pursue such windy fancies,” such “offensive and disturbant
doctrines”; when “a man is delivered up to Satan ... no marvell if he
cast forth fire-brands, and arrows, and mortall-things”; “it is such a
transcendent light, as putteth out all the lights in the world besides.”
The open facts of Roger Williams’ life are known to everybody. Born
in the year 1603,[49] he became a protégé of the great Coke, was
educated at Cambridge, and destined for the law, but forsook it for the
ministry. He was well advanced in his studies and coming to conclusions
that must have disturbed his conservative friends, at the time of the
Great Migration. Beginning as an Anglican, then turning Separatist,
then Baptist, and finally Seeker,[50] he is perhaps more adequately
described as a Puritan intellectual who became a Christian freethinker,
more concerned with social commonwealths than with theological dogmas.
He passed rapidly through successive phases of current thought
to end as a Leveler. Before quitting England he had embraced the
principle of Separatism, and on his first coming over he refused the
teachership of the Boston church--the position given to Cotton two
years later--because it had not broken wholly with Anglicanism. He went
to the more liberal Salem, where his inconvenient questioning of land
titles and his views on the charter brought him into conflict with the
Boston authorities. Refusing to be silenced he was banished and made
his way to Rhode Island--“sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks, in a
bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean”--there to
found a commonwealth on democratic principles.
Yet how inadequately do such meager facts reveal the deeper sources
of his militancy! He lived in the realm of ideas, of inquiry and
discussion; and his actions were creatively determined by principles
the bases of which he examined with critical insight. Instead of being
a weather vane, blown about by every wind of doctrine, he was an
adventurous pioneer, surveying the new fields of thought laid open
by the Reformation, and marking out the several spheres of church and
state in the ordering of a true commonwealth. He was the incarnation of
Protestant individualism, seeking new social ties to take the place of
those that were loosening; and as a child of a great age of political
speculation his religion issued in political theory rather than in
theological dogma. Like other Separatist-Levelers he had penetrated
to the foundations of the New Testament and had taken to heart the
revolutionary ideals that underlie its teachings. It was the spirit of
love that served as teacher to him; love that exalted the meanest to
equality with the highest in the divine republic of Jesus, and gave
an exalted sanction to the conception of a Christian commonwealth. He
regarded his fellow men literally as the children of God and brothers
in Christ; and from this primary conception of the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man, he deduced his political philosophy. Like
Channing two hundred years later, he sought to adjust his social
program to the determining fact that human worth knows neither Jew nor
Gentile, rank nor caste; and following the example of his Master he
went forth into a hostile world, seeking to make it over.
With this spirit of Christian fellowship, warm and human and lovable,
repudiating all coercion, there was joined an eager mysticism--a
yearning for intimate personal union with Christ as symbolized in the
parable of the vine and the branches, a union as close as that of the
bride and her husband. Running through his writings is a recurrent echo
of the Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with a glowing
mysticism: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among
the lilies.... I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets,
and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.” But when he
went out into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world as a land where the lover might dwell
with his bride. Yet upon his arrival there he found the churches still
“implicitly National,” and “yet asleep in respect of abundant ignorance
and negligence, and consequently grosse abominations and pollutions of
Worship, in which the choicest servants of God, and most faithfull
Witnesses of many truths have lived in more or lesse, yea in maine and
fundamental points, ever since the Apostasie.” Which “abominations and
pollutions of Worship,” he now proposed to sweep away altogether.[51]
It was not an easy program, nor one entered upon lightly. Better
than most, Roger Williams understood how closely interwoven were the
threads of church and state. Separatism, with its necessary corollary
of toleration, could not be unraveled from Carolinian society without
loosening the whole social fabric. It was a political question even
more than ecclesiastical; and it could justify itself only in the
light of a total political philosophy. No other man in New England
comprehended so fully the difficulties involved in the problem, as
Roger Williams, or examined them so thoroughly; and out of his long
speculations emerged a theory of the commonwealth that must be reckoned
the richest contribution of Puritanism to American political thought.
The just renown of Roger Williams has too long been obscured by
ecclesiastical historians, who in emphasizing his defense of the
principle of toleration have overlooked the fact that religious
toleration was only a necessary deduction from the major principles
of his political theory, and that he was concerned with matters far
more fundamental than the negative virtue of non-interference in the
domain of individual faith. He was primarily a political philosopher
rather than a theologian--one of the acutest and most searching of
his generation of Englishmen, the teacher of Vane and Cromwell and
Milton, a forerunner of Locke and the natural-rights school, one of the
notable democratic thinkers that the English race has produced. Much
of his life was devoted to the problem of discovering a new basis for
social reorganization, and his intellectual progress was marked by an
abundant wreckage of obsolete theory and hoary fiction that strewed
his path. He was a social innovator on principle, and he left no system
unchallenged; each must justify itself in reason and expediency or be
put aside. Broadly the development of his thought falls into three
stages: the substitution of the compact theory of the state for the
divine-right theory; the rejection of the suppositious compact of the
earlier school and the fictitious abstract state--still postulated by
many thinkers--and the substitution of a realistic conception of the
political state as the sovereign repository of the social will, and
the government--or agent of the state--as the practical instrument of
society to effect its desired ends; and finally, the difficult problem
of creating the necessary machinery of a democratic commonwealth, as
the exigencies of the Rhode Island experiment required. Throughout, the
inspiration of his thinking was social rather than narrowly political
or theological, and the creative source would seem to have been the
middle ages with their fruitful principle of men in a given society
enrolling themselves voluntarily as members of bodies corporate,
finding in such corporate ties a sufficient and all-embracing social
bond.[52]
In his substitution of the compact theory for divine right, Williams
was brought face to face with the fundamental assumption of the
Massachusetts theocracy, based on numerous passages of Scripture,
that the political state is established and sanctioned by the God
of the Hebrews--an assumption that was freely used to justify the
engrossing of authority by the magistracy. As a theologian he
critically examined the Scriptural authorities, and while conceding
the divine source of government in general, he was careful to cut
away all autocratic deductions from the Pauline assertion that “the
powers that be are ordained of God.” “Government and order in families,
towns, etc., is an ordinance of the Most High, Rom. 13, for the peace
and good of mankind”[53] he admitted; but he agreed with Richard
Hooker in discovering this order of government to be no other than
natural law. The state is divine in origin because it is natural,
and what is natural is of God. The Hebraic commonwealth had been
established immediately in an ordinance of Jehovah, but Christ and
his disciples regarded the state and God as distinct authorities,
not to be confused--“Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The conclusion
at which he arrived, then, from the merging of divine ordinances and
natural law, was expressed in a doctrine that sets apart the individual
citizen in all his spiritual and intellectual rights, from the subject
of the commonwealth, and provides the basis for his principle of
toleration. “A Civill Government is an ordinance of God, to conserve
the Civill peace of the people, so farre as concerns their Bodies and
Goods,” and no farther.[54] From this position he never retreated.
Every lawful Magistrate whether succeeding or elective, is not only
the Minister of God, but the Minister or servant of the people
also (what people or nation soever they be all the world over),
and that Minister or Magistrate goes beyond his commission who
intermeddles with that which cannot be given him in commission from
the people....[55]
Having thus reduced the divine-right field within narrow limits and
translated it into an abstraction, he preëmpts all the ground of
practical politics for his compact theory. In accord with a long line
of liberal thinkers running back through Richard Hooker to Augustine
and the earlier Roman school, he accepted the major deductions from the
compact theory of the state: that government is a man-made institution,
that it rests on consent, and that it is founded on the assumed
equality of the subjects. He had only to translate these abstractions
into concrete terms, and apply them realistically, to create a new and
vital theory. The covenant idea of church organization had long been
familiar to Separatists. To this the Pilgrims had added the Mayflower
compact and Thomas Hooker had drawn up the Connecticut compact.
Government resting on consent and authorized by written agreement was
then no untried novelty when Roger Williams began his long speculations
on the nature and functions of the political state. With Hobbes he
traced the origin of the state to social necessity. The condition of
nature is a condition of anarchy--a war of all against all; and for
mutual protection the state takes its rise. “The World otherwise would
be like a sea, wherein Men, like Fishes, would hunt and devoure each
other, and the greater devour the lesse.”[56] But unlike the fiction
assumed by Hobbes and Locke, this was no suppositious contract between
ruler and ruled in prehistoric times, but present and actual, entered
into between the several members of a free community for their common
governance; nor on the other hand, like Burke’s irrevocable compact,
was it an unyielding constitution or fundamental law; but flexible,
responsive to changing conditions, continually modified to meet present
needs. It is no other than a mutual agreement, arrived at frankly by
discussion and compromise, to live together in a political union,
organizing the life of the commonwealth in accordance with nature,
reason, justice, and expediency.
From this conception of the flexible nature of compact law came the
sharp delimitation between state and government that he was at pains
to make clear, and that constitutes a significant phase of his theory.
Having rejected in his thinking the fictitious abstract state, the
repository of an equally fictitious abstract sovereignty, he located
sovereignty in the total body of citizens embraced within the community
consciousness, acting in a political capacity. The state is society
organized, government is the state functioning--it is the political
machinery devised by the sovereign people to effect definite ends. And
since the single end and purpose for which the body of citizens erect
the state is the furtherance of the communal well-being, the government
becomes a convenient instrument to serve the common weal, responsible
to the sovereign people and strictly limited by the terms of the social
agreement. “The Sovereign power of all civill Authority,” he asserted,
“is founded in the consent of the People that every Commonwealth hath
radically and fundamentally. The very Common-weales, Bodies of People
... have fundamentally in themselves the Root of Power, to set up what
Government and Governors they shall agree upon.”[57] Since governments
are but “Derivatives and Agents immediately derived and employed as
eyes and hands and instruments,” the state or sovereign people can
make their “own severall Lawes and Agreements ... according to their
severall Natures, Dispositions and Constitutions, and their Common
peace and wellfare.”[58] Final appeal is to “the Bar of the People or
Commonweal, where all may personally meet, as in some Commonweales of
small number, or in greater by their Representatives”--a system that
suits with the “Nature, Conditions and circumstances of the People,”
according to the “Circumstances of time and place.”[59] In a well-known
passage he puts the matter more compactly, thus:
From this _Grant_ I infer ... that the _Soveraigne, originall_, and
_foundation of civill power_ lies in the _People_.... And if so,
that a People may erect and establish what _forme_ of _Government_
seemes to them most meete for their _civill condition_: It is
evident that such _Governments_ as are by them erected and
established, have no more _power_, nor for no longer time, then the
_civill power_ or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them
with. This is cleere not only in _Reason_, but in the experience
of all _commonweales_, where the people are not deprived of their
naturall freedom by the power of Tyrants.[60]
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience and
reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure of
freedom and well-being. It is armed with a potential power of coercion,
but only to secure justice. In such a state government can subsist only
by making proselytes to sound reason, by compromise and arbitration,
and not by force. But if sovereignty inheres in the majority will, what
securities remain for individual and minority rights? What fields lie
apart from the inquisition of the majority, and by what agencies shall
the engrossing of power be thwarted? The replies to such questions, so
fundamental to every democratic program, he discovers in a variety of
principles; to the former in an adaptation of the spirit of medieval
society that restricted political functions by social usage, and to the
latter by the application of local home rule, the initiative and the
referendum, and the recall. In the large field he ascribes to social
custom, he was a follower of Luther and a forerunner of French romantic
thinkers. His creative conception was an adaptation of the medieval
theory of the corporation, or group of persons voluntarily joining for
specific purposes under the law; and this idea he applies to the vexed
question of the relation of church and state. The legal status of the
church, he argued, is identical with that of a trading company; it is a
corporate body with corporate rights, and the several members enjoy all
the freedoms and privileges that inhere in them by law and nature in
their civil capacity. The character of its membership and the content
of its creed are of no different concern to the civil magistrates than
those of any other corporation. “The state religion of the world,”
he asserted, “is a Politic invention of men to maintain the civil
state.”[61] Elaborated at greater length, his thesis is this:
The _Church_ or company of _worshippers_ (whether true or false)
is like unto a ... _Corporation, Society_, or _Company_ ... in
_London_; which Companies may hold their _Courts_, keep their
_Records_, hold _disputations_; and in matters concerning their
_Societie_, may dissent, divide, breake into _Schismes_ and
_Factions_, sue and implead each other at the _Law_, yea wholly
breake up and dissolve into pieces and nothing, and yet the
_peace_ of the _Citie_ not be in the least measure impaired or
disturbed; because the _essence_ or being of the _Citie_, and so
the _well-being_ and _peace_ thereof is essentially distinct from
those particular _Societies_: the _Citie-Courts, Citie-Lawes,
Citie-punishments_ distinct from theirs. The _Citie_ was before
them, and stands absolute and intire, when such a _Corporation_ or
_Societie_ is taken down.[62]
Having thus effectively secularized the church on its institutional
side, he laid down twelve theses, of which these reach to the heart of
the matter:
(1) _God_ requireth not an _uniformity_ of _Religion_ to be
_inacted_ and _inforced_ in any _civill state_; which inforced
_uniformity_ (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of
_civill Warre, ravishing_ of _conscience, persecution_ of _Christ
Jesus_ in his servants, and of the _hypocrisie_ and destruction
of millions of souls. (2) It is the will and command of _God_,
that ... a _permission_ of the most _Paganish, Jewish, Turkish_,
or _Antichristian consciences_ and _worships_, bee granted to
_all_ men in all _Nations_ and _Countries_: and they are onely
to bee _fought_ against with that _Sword_ which is onely (in
_Soule matters_) _able_ to _conquer_, to wit, the _Sword_ of
_Gods Spirit_, the _Word_ of _God_. (3) True _civility_ and
_Christianity_ may both flourish in a _state_ or _Kingdome_,
notwithstanding the _permission_ of divers and contrary
_consciences_, either of _Jew_ or _Gentile_.[63]
Abhorrent as such doctrine was to the Massachusetts theocrats, Roger
Williams did not cease to press it home to their minds and consciences.
“I know and am persuaded,” he wrote Winthrop on July 21, 1637, “that
your misguidings are great and lamentable, and the further you pass
in your way, the further you wander, and the end of one vexation will
be but the beginning of another, till conscience be permitted (though
erroneous) to be free amongst you.”[64] It was not toleration in the
narrow sense of benevolent non-interference by an authority that
refrained from exercising its reserved right, that Roger Williams was
interested in; it was rather religious liberty as a fundamental right,
that had never been surrendered to the civil power, that lay beyond its
jurisdiction and was in no way answerable to it, that he upheld in his
great work _The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience_;
and the long dispute with John Cotton was, in its deeper significance,
a dispute between two schools of political theory and two experiments
in commonwealth building. In that notable debate aristocracy and
democracy joined issues, and the vital question of the rights and
liberties of the individual citizen in the political state for the
first time was critically examined in America.
From the foregoing analysis of his political theory it should be
clear that Roger Williams was a confirmed individualist who carried
to its logical conclusion the Reformation principle of the right of
private inquiry. Only Vane and Milton of his generation of Englishmen
went so far along that path. He had seen the liberalisms involved
in Luther’s premises submerged by the rising nationalism which
ambitious princes found useful for selfish ends; and he had seen the
policy of the Massachusetts magistrates driving boldly in the same
direction. That Rhode Island should not repeat the old unhappy mistake
of coercive absolutism, was a matter therefore of vital concern to
him. A great experiment in democracy was to be tried, and to that
experiment he devoted his life. Into the form and structure of the new
commonwealth went the best thought of English Independency. It was
founded on the principles of “liberty and equality, both in land and
government,”[65] and established in the sovereignty of the people.
That government should not engross its powers, the compact entered
into provided for frequent elections, a single-chambered legislature,
joint and individual initiative of laws, compulsory referendum, the
right of recall of all laws including the constitution, and appeal
to arbitration. A rigid constitution, augmenting in authority with
age and veneration, Roger Williams feared as acutely as did Paine
or Jefferson. To vest sovereignty in the courts through the right
of review and interpretation was repugnant to his whole political
theory. The fundamental law could be interpreted only by the power
that created it originally, namely, the sovereign people acting in
a political capacity. Within the larger framework of the state the
several towns retained the right of home rule in local matters. They
were corporations, erected like the church in the spirit of medieval
corporate law, competent to rule themselves, yet not infringing
on the sovereignty that granted them their powers. In short, to
adapt the words of a modern student, the state of Rhode Island as
erected by Roger Williams in accordance with the principles of his
political philosophy, was “nothing so much as a great public-service
corporation.”[66] Or, as another student has put it, “If democracy ...
in its ultimate meaning be held to imply not only a government in which
the preponderant share of power resides in the hands of the people, but
a society based on the principles of political and religious freedom,
Rhode Island beyond any other of the American Colonies is entitled to
be called democratic.”[67]
It was a hazardous experiment to undertake in an age when the ark
of the democratic covenant found few places of refuge. Its friends
were only a handful and its enemies many and powerful, and had it not
been for a group of defenders in Parliament, the Rhode Island venture
would have been brought to a speedy end. English Independency saved
for America what English Presbyterianism would have destroyed. To Sir
Harry Vane Rhode Island owes a debt of gratitude second only to that
due Roger Williams. But though its godly neighbors were not permitted
to destroy Rhode Island, they were free to slander and spread evil
reports, and so thoroughly did they do their work that for upwards of
two hundred years the little commonwealth was commonly spoken of in
such terms as Rogues Island and the State of Confusion; not indeed,
till it left off following agrarian and Populistic gods, till it had
ceased to be democratic, did it become wholly respectable. It was not
so much the reputed turbulence of Rhode Island that was disapproved by
the Boston magistrates; but rather the disturbing example of a colony
at their very doors, which, in denying the right of the godly to police
society, gave encouragement to evil-disposed persons in their own sober
commonwealth. Every democracy, they believed, was so notoriously mad
and lawless--as both sacred and profane authorities had sufficiently
demonstrated--that the Boston oligarchy never forgave Parliament
for refusing them permission to establish a mandatory over their
self-willed neighbors.
It was to prevent such meddling that Roger Williams had been at pains
to secure a Parliamentary charter; and he saw to it that the charter
terms should not restrict the democratic liberties. His faith in the
sobriety and good sense of the people of Rhode Island was never shaken.
In spite of many difficulties that grew out of the sharp individualism
of vigorous characters, the colony proved to be a good place to dwell
for those who were content to share the common rights and privileges.
In a letter to Vane, written in 1654, the founder apologizes for some
of the things reported of them, but the apology does not detract from
the just pride with which he contemplated the solid achievements of the
Rhode Island experiment:
Possibly a sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton. We have long
drunk of the cup of as great liberties as any people we can hear of
under the whole heaven. We have not only been long free (together
with all New England) from the iron yolk of wolfish bishops, and
their popish ceremonies ... but we have sitten quiet and dry from
the streams of blood spilt by that war in our native Country. We
have not felt the new chains of Presbyterian tyrants, nor in this
colony have we been consumed with the over-zealous fire of the
(so called) godly christian magistrates. Sir, we have not known
what an excise means; we have almost forgotten what tithes are,
yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth. We could name
other special privileges, ingredients of our sweet cup, which your
great wisdom knows to be very powerful (except more than ordinary
watchfulness) to render the best of men wanton and forgetful.[68]
England gave her best when she sent us Roger Williams. A great thinker
and a bold innovator, the repository of the generous liberalisms of
a vigorous age, he brought with him the fine wheat of long years of
English tillage to sow in the American wilderness. How much America
owes to him is perhaps, after all the intervening years, not adequately
realized; the shadow of Massachusetts Bay still too much obscures
the large proportions of one who was certainly the most generous,
most open-minded, most lovable, of the Puritan emigrants--the truest
Christian amongst many who sincerely desired to be Christian. He
believed in men and in their native justice, and he spent his life
freely in the cause of humanity. Neither race nor creed sundered
him from his fellows; the Indian was his brother equally with the
Englishman. He was a Leveler because he was convinced that society
with its caste institutions dealt unjustly with the common man; he was
a democrat because he believed that the end and object of the political
state was the common well-being; he was an iconoclast because he was
convinced that the time had come when a new social order must be
erected on the decay of the old. “_Liberavi animam meam_,” he said with
just pride; “I have not hid within my _breast_ my _souls_ belief.” “It
was more than forty years after his exile that he lived here,” wrote
Cotton Mather, “and in many thinges acquitted himself so laudably, that
many juditious persons judged him to have the root of the matter in
him, during the long winter of this retirement.” Since those words were
written increasing numbers of “juditious persons” have come to agree
with the reluctant judgment of Cotton Mather, and are verily persuaded
that Master Roger Williams “had the root of the matter in him.” In his
own day he was accounted an enemy of society, and the commonwealth
of Massachusetts has never rescinded the decree of banishment issued
against him; yet like so many unshackled thinkers, he was a seeker
after a better order, friend to a nobler and more humane society.
If he transported to America the democratic aspirations of English
Independency, it is perhaps well to recall the price that was exacted
of him for his service:
Let the reader fancy him in 1640, a man of thirty-four, of bold and
stout jaws, but with the richest and softest eyes, gazing out over
the Bay of his dwelling, a spiritual Crusoe, the excommunicated
even of Hugh Peters, and the most extreme and outcast soul in all
America.[69]
Footnotes
[37] See Walker, _Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder, Democrat_.
[38] _Ibid._, pp. 40-44.
[39] _Ibid._, pp. 45-46.
[40] The testimony of Roger Williams seems to imply as much: “Mr.
Haynes, Governor of Connecticut, though he pronounced sentence of my
long banishment against me, at Cambridge, then Newtown, yet said to me
... ‘I think, Mr. Williams, I must now confess to you, that the most
wise God hath provided and cut out this part of His world for a refuge
and receptacle for all sorts of consciences. I am now under a cloud,
and my brother Hooker, with the Bay, as you have been, we have removed
from them thus far, and yet they are not satisfied.’” (_Letter to Major
Mason_ [1670], in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 133 ff.)
[41] Borgeaud, _The Rise of Modern Democracy_, p. 123.
[42] Quoted in J. T. Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 194.
[43] Walker, _Thomas Hooker, etc._, p. 122.
[44] _Ibid._, p. 125.
[45] _Ibid._, p. 88.
[46] _Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline_, Introduction.
[47] _Ibid._, Part II, pp. 66, 72.
[48] _Magnalia_, Vol. II, p. 495.
[49] For the date, see _Rhode Island Historical Society_, Vol. VIII, p.
156; _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 599.
[50] The Seekers were thus described by a contemporary English pen:
“Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have
quite lost it, and go under the name of _Expecters_ and _Seekers_,
and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any
ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and
they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of
the Temple, and that they are groping for it there--where I leave them
praying to God.” (Paget, _Heresiography_; quoted in Masson, _Life of
Milton_, Vol. III, p. 153.)
[51] The Biblical authority for Separatism Williams found in
both general and specific injunctions. The former, in the second
commandment, in the third chapter of Daniel, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth chapters of Revelation--the “wine of her fornication” being
the ceremonial and ordinances of the English church--and in the Song
of Solomon. The latter were: Revelation, 18:4: “And I heard another
voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not
partakers of her sins....”; Isaiah, 53:11: “Depart ye, depart ye, go ye
out from thence, touch not the unclean thing; go ye out in the midst of
her; be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord”; II Corinthians,
6:17: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith
the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.” On
these texts he based his argument with Cotton for the total separation
of the New England churches. (See _Narragansett Club Publications_,
Vol. I, p. 300.)
[52] For much of the material made use of here, I am indebted to _The
Political Theory of Roger Williams_, a dissertation by Dr. James E.
Ernst of the University of Washington.
[53] “Letter to the Town Clerk of Providence,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 401.
[54] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol.
III, p. 349.
[55] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. IV, p. 187.
[56] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol.
III, p. 398.
[57] See _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. III, pp. 214, 355, 366.
[58] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 487.
[59] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 248.
[60] _Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 248.
[61] “The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloody,” in _ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 222.
[62] “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 76.
[63] Preface to “The Bloudy Tenent,” in _ibid._, Vol. III, p. 3.
[64] _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 51.
[65] “Letter to the Town of Providence,” in _Narragansett Club
Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 263.
[66] Duguit, _Law in the Modern State_, p. 51.
[67] Gooch, _History of Democratic Ideas_, p. 80.
[68] _Narragansett Club Publications_, Vol. VI, p. 268.
[69] Masson, _Life of Milton_, Vol. II, p. 563.
Chapter V • Other Dreamers in Israel
I • Nathaniel Ward • Elizabethan Puritan
The most caustic pen of early New England was wielded by the
lawyer-minister and wit, Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, author of the
crotchety little book, _The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_, and chief
compiler of the celebrated _Body of Liberties_. He is a strange figure
to encounter in the raw little settlements. To come into his presence
is to feel oneself carried back to an earlier age, when the courtly
wits were weaving their silken terms into gorgeous tapestries. Born
about the year 1578, he was only five years younger than Ben Jonson.
Highly educated and intimate with the best society of England and the
continent, he was well advanced in middle life when he set foot in the
new world, and in his late sixties when he wrote _The Simple Cobler_.
Far more strikingly than any of his emigrant brethren he belonged in
taste and temperament to the later Elizabethan world, which lingered on
into the reigns of James and Charles, zealously cultivating its quaint
garden of letters, playing with inkhorn terms, and easing its cares
with clever conceits. Faithful disciple of Calvin though he was, he
was something of a courtier as well, with a rich sap of intelligence,
which, fermented by much thought and travel in many lands, made him the
raciest of wits, and doubtless the most delightful of companions over
a respectable Puritan bottle. “I have only Two comforts to Live upon,”
Increase Mather reported him as saying. “The one is in the Perfections
of Christ; The other is in The Imperfections of all Christians.”
_The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_ is certainly the brightest bit of
Renaissance English penned in America--an Elizabethan clipped garden
set down in a wilderness of theology. It deserves to be far better
known than it is, not only for its “convenient condiments” of speech
that will tickle the palate of an epicure, but for its quaint
exposition of the muddled state of England in the year 1645. Like a
belated Euphuist, Nathaniel Ward delighted in fantastic words.
If I affect termes [he confessed, by way of apology] it is my
feeblenesse; my friends that know me, thinke I doe not: I confesse,
I see I have here and there taken a few finish stitches, which may
haply please a few Velvet eares; but I cannot now well pull them
out, unlesse I should seame-rend all. It seems it is a fashion
with you to sugar your papers with Carnation phrases, and spangle
your speeches with new quodled words.... I honour them with my
heart, that can expresse more than ordinary matter in ordinary
words; it is a pleasing eloquence; them more, that study wisely
and soberly to inhance their native language.... Affected termes
are unaffecting things to solid hearers; yet I hold him prudent,
that in these fastidious times, will helpe disedged appetites
with convenient condiments, and bangled ears, with pretty quicke
pluckes.[70]
The casual reader is chiefly impressed by the quaint satire of the
book, with its caustic comment on women’s fashions--the “foole-fangles”
of “nugiperous Gentledames,” who “transclout” themselves into “gant
bar-geese, ill-shapen-shotten-shell-fish”; and it is such bits that
are commonly picked out for reprinting in the anthologies. But the
real significance of the work lies elsewhere. _The Simple Cobler_ is
an old man’s plea for accommodation of differences. It is bitter with
intolerance of toleration; it is torn between an old loyalty to King
Charles whom Ward knew and loved--“my long Idolatry towards you,” as
he confesses sadly--and a new loyalty to Parliament; and it is sobered
by a strong concern over the desperate condition of England, which
required looking to speedily, he believed, if the realm were not to be
torn past all mending. On both sides there was abundant “misprision
of Treason,” which properly considered, he held to be no other than
a “misprision of Reason”; and it was in the hope of summoning reason
back to the national councils that the Cobbler offered his humble
suggestions for the consideration of Englishmen.
Ward had been a lawyer before he turned to the ministry, and he seems
to have impressed himself upon his fellow emigrants chiefly as a
“subtile statesman.” In his own way he was a political philosopher,
little given like Roger Williams to exploring theory and examining
principles, but applying rather a shrewd common sense to the problems
of the times. He was convinced that old ways no longer sufficed; that
prerogative and liberty could not much longer strain and pull against
each other without rending the whole fabric of the commonwealth;
and the kernel of the book lies in a new theory of constitutional
government for England which he offers as a convenient way out of the
difficulties. Ward recognized that new interests were challenging the
long sway of King and Tories; and as the antagonisms of rival interests
strengthened, the insufficiency of the traditional use and wont to
maintain a due balance of power was daily becoming more apparent. Hence
had resulted confusion, and out of the confusion, civil war. From
these patent facts Ward had convinced himself that there must be an
overhauling of the fundamental law of England: the twilight zones must
be explored and charted; the several rights and privileges of King,
Lords, and Commons, must be sharply delimited; and thus every party in
the government be brought to understand the exact bounds of its sphere.
Neither King nor Commons would then encroach upon the other, and royal
prerogative and popular will no longer dwell at sword’s point with each
other. What was needed, in short, was a written constitution, carefully
arrived at by common consent, the terms of which should be just to all.
Hitherto God “hath taken order, that ill prerogatives, gotten by the
Sword, should in time be fetched home by the Dagger, if nothing else
will doe it: Yet I trust there is both day and means to intervent this
bargaine.”
To preserve a just balance between rival interests in the state, and
to hold all parties to their responsibility to God, were then the two
problems to which Nathaniel Ward addressed himself, and the manner
and terms of his argument are sufficiently revealed in the following
passages:
Authority must have power to make and keep people honest; People,
honesty to obey Authority; both a Joynt-Councell to keep both safe.
Morall Lawes, Royall Prerogatives, Popular Liberties, are not of
Mans making or giving, but Gods: Man is but to measure them out
by Gods Rule: which if mans wisdome cannot reach, Mans experience
must mend: And these Essentialls, must not be Ephorized or Tribuned
by one or a few Mens discretion, but lineally sanctioned by
Supreame Councels. In _pro-re-nascent_ occurrences, which cannot be
foreseen; Diets, Parliaments, Senates, or accountable Commissions,
must have power to consult and execute against intersilient dangers
and flagitious crimes prohibited by the light of Nature: yet it
were good if States would let People know so much beforehand, by
some safe woven _manifesto_, that grosse Delinquents may tell no
tales of Anchors and Buoyes, nor palliate their presumptions with
pretense of ignorance. I know no difference in these Essentialls,
between Monarchies, Aristocracies, or Democracies.... And in all,
the best Standard to measure Prerogatives, is the Ploughstaffe; to
measure Liberties, the Scepter: if the tearms were a little altered
into Loyall Prerogatives and Royall Liberties, then we should be
sure to have Royall Kings and Loyall Subjects....
He is a good King that undoes not his Subjects by any one of his
unlimited Prerogatives: and they are a good People, that undoe not
their Prince, by any one of their unbounded Liberties, be they the
very least. I am sure either may, and I am sure neither would be
trusted, how good soever. Stories tell us in effect, though not in
termes, that over-risen Kings, have been the next evills to the
world, unto fallen Angels; and that over-franchised people, are
devills with smooth snaffles in their mouthes. A King that lives
by Law, lives by love: and he that lives above Law, shall live
under hatred doe what he can. Slavery and knavery goe as seldome
asunder, as Tyranny and Cruelty. I have a long while thought it
very possible, in a time of Peace ... for disert Statesmen, to
cut an exquisite thred between Kings Prerogatives, and Subjects
Liberties of all sorts, so as _Caesar_ might have his due, and
People their share, without such sharpe disputes. Good Casuists
would case it, and case it, part it, and part it; now it, and then
it, punctually.[71]
Nathaniel Ward was no democrat like Hooker and therefore no
Congregationalist. “I am neither Presbyterian, nor plebsbyterian, but
an Interpendent,” he said of himself. But his “Interpendency” would
seem to have been only an individualistic form of Presbyterianism. For
the radical Sectaries who were rising out of the turmoil of revolution,
he had the contempt of a thoroughbred Jacobean gentleman; and for their
newfangled notion of religious toleration and their fetish of popular
liberties--founded and nourished he believed in sentimentalism--he
would substitute the solid reality of absolute truth, the faithful
friend and coadjutor of which he professed himself to be. “Justice and
Equity were before time, and will be after it”; and he regarded it as
folly to try to circumvent them. He would have no great altering of
the fundamental arrangements of society, such as Independents like
Roger Williams were seeking. The solidarity of church and state was an
anciently accepted principle, far safer to trust in, he believed, than
the vagaries of unhistorical sects.
Experience will teach Churches and Christians, that it is farre
better to live in a State united, though a little Corrupt, then
in a State, whereof some Part is incorrupt, and all the rest
divided.... The Scripture saith, there is nothing makes free but
Truth, and Truth saith, there is no Truth but One.... He that is
willing to tolerate any Religion, or discrepant way of Religion,
besides his own, unlesse it be in matters meerly indifferent,
either doubts of his own, or is not sincere in it.... He that is
willing to tolerate any unsound opinion, that his own may also be
tolerated, though never so sound, will for a need hang Gods Bible
at the Devils girdle.[72]
As an honest Christian and a loyal subject he would honor both the
divine and temporal authorities; nevertheless, in order that the
law of God and the law of the land might be known of all and march
together, he would have the exact terms of the constitution written
out by “disert statesmen” in time of peace, and published broadly, in
Massachusetts as well as in England. And so when he was commissioned to
draw up a body of liberties for the new commonwealth, he found the task
congenial. As a lawyer he seems to have been concerned at the non-legal
methods of the magistrates in dispensing judgment, so repugnant to the
spirit of the Common Law; and in the election sermon of 1641, that he
was invited to preach, he “advanced several things that savored more of
liberty, than some of the magistrates were prepared to approve.”[73]
But it was the lawyer protesting against court methods that spoke
out, not the liberal concerned with broader liberties. In a letter
to Winthrop, December 22, 1639, dealing with the body of laws, he
questioned, “Whether it will not be of ill consequence to send the
Court business to the common consideration of the Freemen,” adding:
I fear it will too much exauctorate the power of that Court to
prostrate matters in that manner, I suspect both Commonwealth and
Churches have discended to lowe already. I see the spirits of the
people runne high, and what they gett they hould. They may not be
denyed their proper and lawfull liberties, but a question whether
it be of God to interest the inferiour sort in that which should be
reserved _inter optimates penes quos est sancire leges_ [_i.e._ to
the aristocracy with whom rests the power to establish the law].[74]
The celebrated _Body of Liberties_ was presented three years after _The
Simple Cobler_ was written, and in spite of his frankly aristocratic
bias, Nathaniel Ward did a real service to Massachusetts by
incorporating into the law of the commonwealth many of the old English
safeguards of person and property, in some instances advancing beyond
current English practice. Yet true to his Hebraic leanings, and in
harmony with the spirit of the theocracy, he added certain brutalities
drawn from the Mosaic code that were soon to drop away.
There is something refreshing in the extraordinary frankness of this
old Puritan of the days of Elizabeth. He was no demagogue, but a stout
upholder of authority, who accepted the rule of caste and the law of an
eye for an eye. The militant severity of his judgments, and the caustic
wit of his comments, suggest somewhat startlingly how long and bitter
would be the struggle in New England before the spirit of liberalism
should find wide acceptance there. Gentlemen of the immigrant
generation were set in their ways, and none more inflexibly than
Nathaniel Ward. He was too old to adjust himself to new conditions, a
fact which he recognized by returning to England to die, leaving behind
as a warning certain pithy quatrains of which this is one:
The upper world shall Rule,
While Stars will run their race:
The nether world obey
While People keep their place.
II • John Eliot • A Theocratic Utopia
At the session of the General Court holden at Boston, May 22, 1661, it
was ordered:
This Court taking notice of a booke entituled Christian
Commonwealth, written ... by Mr. John Eliot of Roxbury in New
England, which ... is justly offensive and in speciall relating
to kingly Gouvernment in England, the which the said Mr. Eliot
hath also freely and fully acknowledged to this Court. It is
therefore ordered by this Court and the Authority thereof, that the
said Booke be totally suppressed and the Authors acknowledgement
recorded; and that all persons whatsoever in this jurisdiction
that have any of the said Bookes in theire Custody shall on theire
perrills within fowerteene dayes after publication hereof either
cancel or deface or deliver them unto the next Magistrate or to the
Secretary, whereby all farther divulment and improovement of the
said offensive Booke may be prevented.[75]
The little book over which such a pother was made by the New England
magistrates in the days when they were under the censorious eye of the
newly restored Stuart government was the single venture in the field
of political speculation by the excellent John Eliot, apostle to the
Indians. It was a slender volume, written about 1650, although not
printed till 1659; but within the narrow compass of twenty-one pages
this dreamer in Israel has sketched the outlines of an ideal Christian
commonwealth. It was a day and a world of idealists, and so John Eliot
paused in the midst of his missionary labors to fashion a brick for the
building of that temple which the Puritans of the Protectorate were
dreaming of. The idols had been broken by the hammer of Cromwell; the
malevolent powers of this world were brought low; it remained now only
for the people of God to enter into a solemn covenant to establish a
commonwealth after the true divine model. That no mistake should be
made in so important a matter, John Eliot was moved to send out of the
American wilderness the plan of a Christian Utopia, sanctioned by the
Mosaic example and buttressed at every point by chapter and verse,
which he offered to the godly Puritans of England as a suitable guide
to their feet.
Naked theocracy is nowhere else so uncompromisingly delineated as in
the pages of _The Christian Commonwealth_. At the basis of Eliot’s
political speculations were the two germinal conceptions which animated
his theocratic brethren generally: the conception that Christ is King
of Kings before whom all earthly authority must bow, and the conception
that the Scripture alone reveals the law of God. So long as the Stuarts
were ruling at St. James’s speculative theocrats found it expedient
to gloss their principles with nice distinctions between temporal and
spiritual overlords; but with monarchy overthrown, they came out boldly
and urged the English people to put away all profane institutions.
“_Scripturae plentitudinem adoro_,” John Cotton had exclaimed; and to
the same purpose John Eliot laid down the thesis:
There is undoubtedly a forme of civil Government instituted by God
himself in the holy Scriptures; whereby any Nation may enjoy all
the ends and effects of Government in the best manner, were they
but perswaded to make trial of it. We should derogate from the
sufficiency and perfection of the Scriptures, if we should deny it.
The prayers, the expectation, and faith of the Saints in the
Prophecies and Promises of holy Scripture, are daily sounding in
the ears of the Lord, for the downfall of Anti-christ, and with
him all humane Powers, Polities, Dominions, and Governments; and
in the room thereof, we wait for the coming of the Kingdom of the
Lord Jesus, who by his Divine Wisdom, Power, Government and Laws,
given us ... in the holy Scriptures, will reign over all the
Nations of the earth in his due time: I mean the Lord Jesus will
bring down all people, to be ruled by the Institutions, Laws, and
Directions of the Word of God, not only in Church-Government and
Administrations, but also in the Government and Administration of
all affairs in the Common wealth. And then Christ reigneth, when
all things among men, are done by the direction of the word of his
mouth: his Kingdom is then come amongst us, when his will is done
on earth, as it is done in heaven, where no Humane or Angelical
Policy or Wisdom doth guide anything, but all is done by Divine
direction (Ps. 103:20); and so it shall be on earth, when and where
Christ reigneth.
Much is spoken of the rightful Heir of the Crown of England, and
of the unjustice of casting out the right Heir; but Christ is the
onely right Heir of the Crown of England (Ps. 2:8) and of all other
Nations also (Rev. 11:15).
That which the Lord now calleth England to attend is not to search
humane Politics and Platformes of Government, contrived by the
wisdom of man; but as the Lord hath carried on their works for
them, so they ought to go unto the Lord, and enquire at the Word of
his mouth, what Platforme of Government he hath therein commanded
and prescribed.
From his Scriptural premises Eliot deduced a system of government that
is altogether remarkable, not only for its rejection of the Separatist
theory of natural rights, but for its naïve simplicity. Since the
law has been declared once for all, perfect and final, there is no
need for a legislative branch of government; and since Christ is sole
ruler and king, there is no place for a profane head of the state;
it remains only for the Christian theorist to provide a competent
magisterial system to hear causes and adjudicate differences. Society
is concerned wholly with duties and not at all with rights; government,
therefore, begins and ends with the magistrate. In order to secure a
suitable magistracy, Eliot proposed to divide society into groups of
tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands, each of which should choose its
rulers, who in turn should choose their representatives to the higher
councils; and so there was evolved an ascending series of magistrates
until the supreme council of the nation was reached, the decisions of
which should be final.
The duties of all the Rulers of the civil part of the Kingdom of
Christ, are as followeth: ... to govern the people in the orderly
and seasonable practice of all the Commanders of God, in actions
liable to Political observations whether of piety and love to God,
or of justice and love to man with peace.
Far removed as _The Christian Commonwealth_ was from the
democratic political theory of the Army radicals, or the practical
constitutionalism of Nathaniel Ward, it was the logical culmination
of all theocratic programs. The ideal of social unity, of relentless
conformity, according to which the rebel is a social outcast to be
silenced at any cost, dominates this godly Utopia as mercilessly as
it dominated the policy of Laud. In setting up King Jesus for King
Charles, there was to be no easing of the yoke upon rebellious spirits;
and in binding society upon the letter of the Scripture there was to
be no consideration for the aspirations of the unregenerate. It is not
pleasant to consider what the Saints would have made of New England if
their will had prevailed. Curious as this little work is--testifying
rather to the sincerity of Eliot’s Hebraism than to his political
intelligence or his knowledge of men--it is characteristic of the
idealist who consecrated his life to the Indian mission. How little
disturbed he was by the perversities and limitations of everyday fact,
is revealed in the policy which he laid down for his Indian converts:
And this Vow I did solemnly make unto the Lord concerning them;
that they being a people without any forme of Government and now
to chuse; I would endeavour with all my might, to bring them to
embrace such Government, both civil and Ecclesiastical, as the Lord
hath commanded in the holy Scriptures; and to deduce all their
Lawes from the holy Scriptures, that so they may be the Lord’s
people, ruled by him alone in all things.
Which vow, considering the state of the Indian tribes to whom it was to
apply, may serve to throw light upon the reason for the scant success
of the Saints in their dealings with the red-men.
Footnotes
[70] _The Simple Cobler_, edition of 1843, pp. 89-90.
[71] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[72] _Ibid._, pp. 8, 10.
[73] _Ibid._, Introduction.
[74] Dean, _Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward_, pp. 56-57.
[75] _Massachusetts Historical Society Publications_, Vol. IX, Third
Series, p. 128.
Part Two: the Twilight of the Oligarchy • 1660-1720
It is not pleasant to linger in the drab later years of a century that
in its prime had known able men and accomplished notable things. A
world that accepted Michael Wigglesworth for its poet, and accounted
Cotton Mather its most distinguished man of letters, had certainly
backslidden in the ways of culture. The final harvest of the theocracy
must be reckoned somewhat scanty. English Independency had been the
robust and rebellious child of a great age; New England Puritanism
was the stunted offspring of a petty environment. With the passing
of the emigrant generation, a narrow provincialism settled upon
the commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay. Not a single notable book
appeared; scarcely a single generous figure emerged from the primitive
background. A thin soil and the law of Moses created a capable but
ungainly race, prosaic and niggardly. Their very speech lost much of
the native English beauty that had come down from medieval times.
The clean and expressive idiom that Bunyan caught from the lips of
English villagers, with its echoes of a more spontaneous life before
the Puritan middle class had substituted asceticism for beauty, grew
thinner and more meager, its bright homespun dyes subdued to a dun
butternut. The town records which in the first years had been set
down in dignified and adequate phrase became increasingly crabbed and
illiterate, laboriously composed by plain men to whom spelling had
become a lost art. The horizons of life in New England were contracting
to a narrow round of chores and sermons. “When I first saw the Lieut.
Governor,” Sewall remarked of Stoughton, “He was Carting Ears of Corn
from the Uper Barn.” The picture suggests the pastoral note, but it
suggests much else as well.
Against this incursion of the provincial the church was the single
force to be counted on to do battle. The ministers did their best,
but it needed abler men than were available to counteract the growing
formalism of the times. They might lament that their admonitions fell
on unheeding ears, that they preached in vain to a “sermon-proof,
gospel-glutted generation”; but the blame must attach in part to the
formalism of their appeals. The straw was over-threshed. The common
provincialism infected the pulpit as well as the pew, and the creative
vigor of the ministry steadily declined. The ground was being prepared
for superstition and bigotry. As the belief spread through the New
England villages that the end of the world would fall on the end of the
century, men’s thoughts naturally ran much on the demonology that is a
logical consequence of the Hebraic dualism, and the most intelligent
saw no reason to doubt that “the Evening Wolves will be much abroad,
when we are near the Evening of the World.” The psychology was being
prepared for the witch-mania of Salem, and Cotton Mather was only
echoing the common belief when he cried, “An Army of Devils is horribly
broke in upon the place which is the _Centre_, and after a sort, the
First-born of our _English Settlements_.”[76] In this matter, as in so
many others, the ministers were no better than their congregations;
they were blind leaders of the blind, and they lent their sanction to
the intolerance of the mass judgment. In an environment so stifling,
with every unfamiliar idea likely to be seized upon as evidence of the
devil’s wiles, there was no room for free speculation. A generation
under the terror of witchcraft was given over to stark reaction.
The Salem outbreak was the logical outcome of the long policy of
repression, that had hanged Quakers and destroyed independent thought,
in its attempt to imprison the natural man in a strait-jacket of
Puritan righteousness. Emotions long repressed sometimes find sinister
outlets, and the witchcraft madness was only a dramatic aftermath of a
generation of repressions and inhibitions.[77]
It was during these unhappy years that power finally slipped from
the hands of the oligarchy. With the charter gone, a Royal Governor
presiding over the Council, and a property qualification instead of a
religious test for suffrage, the old order was broken past mending.
The members of the oligarchy still hoped against hope, and under the
governorship of Phips they made heroic attempts to bolster up the
cause; but the Quebec expedition was so badly muddled as to bring
the commonwealth to the verge of ruin, and the Governor and Council
wrote to England that God had “spit in our faces.”[78] Whether or
not that was a correct analysis of the divine reaction to the Quebec
fiasco is of no importance today; a good many New Englanders, it would
seem, doubted it, and under the pressure of high taxes, a depreciated
currency and a great debt, they made their dissatisfaction heard at the
royal court. When the English government at last “resolved to settle
the Countrey,” the end of the oligarchy was come. The cautious amongst
them were for throwing the whole responsibility on the Lord: “the
foundations being gone, what can the righteous do?” argued Judge Sewall
with shrewd worldly-wisdom. But the ministers would make no compromise
with Baal. The tongues of false prophets might seduce the people, but
they stood for the old order, fighting a losing fight with righteous
zeal. On June 1, 1702, Sewall noted in his diary that he had “much
adoe to persuade Mr. Willard to dine with me,” the pastor being in a
sulk because the civil representatives had taken precedence over the
ministers in the procession for proclaiming Queen Anne. But in the end
even “good Mr. Willard” was forced to acknowledge that his loyalty was
given to a lost cause.
Footnotes
[76] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 14.
[77] See Lucien Price, “Witchcraft, Then and Now,” in _The Nation_,
Vol. CXV, No. 2987.
[78] J. T. Adams, _The Founding of New England_, p. 442.
Chapter I • Samuel Sewall • Yankee
By good fortune an intimate record of daily life in old New England
has been preserved in abundant detail. The diary of Samuel Sewall
not only narrates the homely activities of Boston in the evening of
the theocracy, _antiquis moribus, prisca fide_, but it unconsciously
reveals the transformation of the English Puritan into the New England
Yankee. The sober Boston citizens who on the Sabbath droned Windsor and
York tunes, and took notes of long sermons, on week-days plied their
gospel of thrift with notable success. They loved the meetinghouse as
their fathers had loved it, but they were the sons and grandsons of
tradesmen, and true to their English instincts they set about erecting
a provincial mercantile society, dominated by the ideals of the little
capitalist. Of this rising world of mercantilism, Samuel Sewall was a
worthy representative. A Puritan magistrate and village capitalist, he
made full use of his opportunities to worship God, to thrive and to
rise. As the older ideal of theocratic stewardship is revealed in the
career of John Winthrop, the newer practice of incipient capitalism is
revealed in the life of Samuel Sewall.
The _Diary_ is a fascinating book, with its petty gossip interwoven
with matters of public concern, and its brisk activities set in a
black border of innumerable funerals: the one among all the books
of the time that is still quick with life after these two hundred
years and more. In its meager entries we can trace the change that
was coming to Massachusetts in the transition from a theocracy to a
royal colony; and we can feel the strong emotions which that change
aroused. The dry facts of history take on flesh and blood; forgotten
names become living men walking the streets of Boston or arguing in
the Council Chamber; Samuel Sewall himself becomes more real to us
than our own contemporaries. He was the veritable embodiment of his
serious, prudential Massachusetts, reflecting its changing fortunes
with painstaking fidelity. In that petty world of conventional piety
and shrewd self-interest, the kind-hearted Judge bustled about, a
sermon in one hand to soothe the doubts of the troubled, and a bit
of chocolate in the other to comfort the bedridden--as honest and
friendly and prosaic a soul as Massachusetts ever bred. If one wishes
to understand the first native New England generation, one cannot do
better than linger over the daily jottings of this lawyer-tradesman,
who knew his Calvin far better than his Coke, and who while busily
adding new acres to his holdings strove to keep the younger generation
uncontaminated by wigs and revels and other godless things, by the
sweet ravishment of the psalms, in the singing of which the voice of
the Judge was lifted up with pathetic earnestness.
For many years after his death fame dealt more than generously with
Samuel Sewall. The prosperity that came to him during his earthly
pilgrimage long provided for his memory, and made of him a greater
figure than either nature or good fortune created. Who does not know
Whittier’s tribute?
Stately and slow, with thoughtful air,
His black cap hiding his whitened hair,
Walks the Judge of the Great Assise,
Samuel Sewall, the good and wise.
His face with lines of firmness wrought,
He wears the look of a man unbought,
Who swears to his hurt and changes not;
Yet touched and softened nevertheless
With the grace of Christian gentleness;
The face that a child would climb to kiss;
True and tender and brave and just,
That man might honor and woman trust.
And a hundred and forty-eight years after the cold January day when
all that was mortal of him was “honorably Inter’d” in the Sewall tomb
whither so many of his family had gone before,[79] a brilliant student
of early American letters gave fresh currency to the stately Sewall of
tradition. “He was a man built, every way, after a large pattern. By
his great wealth, his great offices, his learning, his strong sense,
his wit, his warm human sympathy, his fearlessness, his magnanimity, he
was a visible potentate among men in those days.”[80]
That was before the diary was published and the lay figure of
tradition vanished in presence of the real man. We know Samuel Sewall
now and see him as he was. That he was a great man it is impossible to
make out; but that he was a small man by no means follows. Behind the
formal trappings of magistrate and councilor, we discover a capable,
middle-class soul, honest, simple-hearted, serving himself yet not
unmindful of his fellow townsmen, an excellent neighbor and citizen,
to whom the strongest appeal of life was the economic. Like those
kindred spirits, Defoe and Franklin, the dominant inspiration of his
life was prudential, as befitted the descendant of generations of
tradesmen. “Mr. Henry Sewall, my great Grandfather,” wrote the Judge in
old age, “was a Linen Draper in the City of Coventry in Great Britain.
He acquired a great Estate, was a prudent Man, and was more than once
chosen Mayor of the City.”[81] In turning Puritan the English burgess
did not change his nature, and Samuel Sewall was true to his breeding
in fashioning his life upon that of his great grandfather. To acquire
wealth and honors, to occupy a dignified position among his fellows,
was the dominant ambition of his life. With excellent thrift he fixed
his young affections upon the only child of a wealthy merchant, the
richest heiress in the colony; no penniless “waiting-woman,” for
Samuel Sewall, such as had contented the unworldly Thomas Hooker. He
understood how desirable it is to put money in one’s purse; so he made
a great alliance and proved himself a shrewd husbandman as well as a
kind husband.[82] From commerce and land speculation and money lending
and the perquisites of many offices, he accumulated steadily until his
wealth entitled him to be regarded as one of the first citizens of
Massachusetts. He did not forget his prudence even in his generosities,
but set down carefully in his diary what his benefactions cost, that
there might be no mistake when he came to make his reckoning with the
Lord. He knew his rights and upheld them stoutly; and in the petty
quarrels and litigations in which he found himself involved, he stuck
to the letter of the law and usually won his point. He did not misuse
his official position to feather his own nest, but what might be got
legally from public office he took care to get.
With abundant wealth the path of preferment was easy to him. From
his election to the privileges of a freeman in 1678, at the age of
twenty-six, to the end of a long life, he was continuously engaged
in public affairs. He sought office and was not backward in pushing
his claims upon a desirable post;[83] and by careful attention to
business rather than by exceptional parts, he rose to a place of
very great influence in the commonwealth. Like a competent man of
affairs, he was prompt in meeting engagements--“am, I think, the most
constant attender of Councils,” he remarked of himself approvingly.
He carried out to the letter the early advice given him: “Mr. Reyner
... Advised me not to keep overmuch within, but goe among men, and
that thereby I should advantage myself.”[84] Capable, industrious,
public-spirited, he led a busy and useful life that justified more than
commonly the responsibilities which came to him. His qualities might
be middle-class, but they were sterling and worthy of honor. It was a
fortunate star that led him out of Tory England, where he would never
have been more than a prosperous tradesman, to the new world where
kindred spirits were erecting a commonwealth after his own heart.[85]
Nevertheless with all his excellent qualities Samuel Sewall was not
a great or original nature. The evidence is convincing that he was a
capable executive and administrator rather than a creative thinker
or forceful leader; a Puritan embodiment of Defoe’s merchant ideal;
an example of the man who rises to civic honors by simple business
virtues. He was at home in the narrow round of routine, but for bold
speculation he reveals the incapacity of the practical soul. His
intellectual interests were few; his ready curiosity was that of the
uncreative mind, concerning itself with persons and happenings rather
than with ideas. To say that Sewall possessed either an economic
or political philosophy would be too generous an interpretation of
his opinions. The views which he upheld vigorously were little more
than prejudices. Of the several economic questions which engaged
the attention of the Council during his years of service, the most
insistent was the question of issuing bills of credit to supplement
the scanty currency. There was the usual class alignment, the wealthy
opposing the issues, and the poor generally favoring them. The
position of Sewall was clear. He vigorously opposed every issue, from
the conviction that the only honest money was hard money, even going
so far as to prefer barter to bills.[86] Nowhere does he reveal any
intelligent grasp of the economics of the problem, nor was he aware
that his judgment might have been influenced by his private interests
as a money lender.
In his political views he was equally unconcerned with broad
principles. He seems to have been wholly unread in political theory,
and like his fellow magistrates he never examined fundamentals. He
accepted without question the right of the godly to police society, and
he would have no meddling with affairs of state by tavern and fireside
politicians. As a member of the oligarchy he naturally approved
oligarchic rule. Although he would turn to the democracy for support
against the Lords of Trade, when the latter were moving to overturn
the theocracy, he put no trust in the political wisdom of the common
people. He was as magisterial as John Winthrop in his belief in the
principle of the stewardship of the elders. Stability of government
was the prime essential; there must be no criticism of government by
private individuals or by newspapers. On an occasion when Dudley’s
administration had been sharply attacked in a London paper, a copy of
which had been brought over and talked about, there was a great pother
in Council. Although Sewall was not willing to defend Dudley, he was
troubled.
At last the Council voted, it tended to the disturbance of
the Government. Lt. Govr. and Council order’d me to Reprimand
Mr. Dummer.... I told him how intolerable it was for privat
persons to print Reflections and Censures on the highest Acts of
Government.... Twas ill done of them who printed it in London, and
twas ill done by them that carried it on here.[87]
His characteristic attitude then comes out in the phrase: “I said
... I was for upholding Government whether in or out of it.” Samuel
Sewall was no rebel against authority. But if he was firm in support
of the _de facto_ government, he was insistent that it should be
honest. He protested to Governor Dudley against padding the muster
pay-rolls[88] and he dissented strongly against introducing the current
English practice of buying commissions in the army.[89] The scandalous
corruption of English politics must not be permitted to sully the
government of Massachusetts.
Sewall enjoyed in his lifetime the repute of a scholar. He was Latinist
enough to justify his Harvard degree of Master of Arts; he read a
good deal, and wrote and published books. But he seems to have cared
nothing for pure literature, and was unacquainted with the English
classics. His intellectual interest was in things either occult or
inconsequential. Biblical prophecy was his favorite study, and his
most ambitious work, _Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, essayed to
prove that America was to be the final “rendezvous of Gog and Magog.”
Although long a magistrate and judge of the highest court, he was not
a lawyer. He received no preliminary training in the law, and there
are few indications in the _Diary_ that he read the literature of
the profession. His indifference seems to have given concern to his
friends, for on January 13, 1696, four years after he had been chosen
judge, he noted:
When were there at first, Mr. Danforth bad me look on the
Cupboard’s head for a book; I told him I saw there a Law-book,
Wingate on the Common Law. He said he would lend it me, I should
speak to Amsden to call for it; and if he died, he would give it
me. Again when took leave after prayer, He said he lent me that
Book not to wrap up but to read, and if misliked it, should tell
him of it.[90]
Primitive New England did not take kindly to lawyers, and in
administering a patriarchal justice by rule of thumb, Sewall was like
other New England magistrates. Neither did it take kindly to the spirit
of free speculation, and in his potterings over occultisms he was
confessing the sterility of intellectual interests.
If the kind-hearted Judge lacked capacity for bold and liberal thought,
he lacked capacity as well for emotional fervor. He was quite without
imagination. Despite his honest concern for his soul, and his sincere
desire for the advancement of God’s kingdom in New England, Sewall did
not possess a deeply religious nature. In his religious life he was
the same prudent, plodding soul, that stowed away in his strong-box
deeds to ample possessions during his pilgrimage through this vale of
tears. The natural man was strong in his two hundred and odd pounds
of flesh, and the religious mysticism that lurked in the heart of
primitive Puritanism found no response in his phlegmatic soul. He was
no Seeker, like Roger Williams, to be driven by a passionate fervor
along untried paths; nor was he a philosopher, like John Wise, to
concern himself with broad ecclesiastical principles. Instead, there
is more than a hint of the tradesman’s conception of religion--one has
only to understand the profitableness of salvation to be led to invest
in it. His religion must be orthodox; no untried methods or gambler’s
chances; a good business man will scrutinize title-deeds with due care,
and the title-deeds to salvation are of the first importance. How
characteristic are the following entries in the diary:
Sabbath, March 2d. I Pray’d in the Family, that might have an
interest in God, Signed, Sealed and Delivered, and that all that
tended to make it sure, might be perfected.
Febr. 6. [1718] This morning ... I had a sweet and very affectionat
Meditation Concerning the Lord Jesus; Nothing was to be objected
against his Person, Parentage, Relations, Estate, House, Home!
Why did I not resolutely, presently close with Him! And I cry’d
mightily to God that He would help me so to doe!
23. 5. [1721] Mr. Prince preaches the Lecture, from Gen. 22. 18
... A very seasonable Discourse. One Fly was discovered in his
Ointment: He asserted that the 1000. years Rev. 20. stood for Three
Hundred and Sixty Thousand years; taking every day of the 1000.
years for a year: as 365. days i.e. years. _Apage has nugas!_
[“Away with this nonsense!”][91]
No higher criticism for Samuel Sewall. If we quibble over the plain
words of Scripture, how shall we be certain of the terms of the
contract?
A man so cautious by nature, and with so large a stake in the existing
order, could not fail to be a conservative, content with a world that
justified itself by the prosperity which it brought him, and which
it would bring to others, he doubted not, if they governed their
conduct with equal prudence. He desired no innovations in church or
state; established forms answered his needs and filled the measure of
his ideal. The existing system was approved by all the respectable
people of the community; there was everything to gain in upholding
it, and likelihood of loss in suffering power to pass into the hands
of a royal governor or of the ignorant poor. And so, determined by
complex motives, by habit, by class ties, by economic interest, and
by honest liking, Samuel Sewall went with the stream of conventional
orthodoxy, strong for the old theocratic principles, seeing no need
for readjustments to meet changing conditions. The true principles of
church and state had been laid down by the fathers, to which the common
acceptance by the best people gave final sanction.
It is characteristic of the prosperous bourgeoisie, and the old Judge
walked the streets of Boston, or sat in his pew, or took his place
on the bench, as stubborn and unimaginative a conservative as any of
his fellows. If his persistent opposition to change, whether in the
matter of wigs, or Christmas keeping, or creed, or politics, was due
in part to a phlegmatic love of use and wont, it was prompted also by
an instinctive fear of innovation. The world doubtless is imperfect,
but it answers to God’s will and we understand its ways and can draw
our contracts with open eyes. Whereas change, however desirable it may
seem theoretically, entails too many disturbing uncertainties. Very
likely it was this subconscious concern for his material interests
that so often made the simple-minded Judge an unintelligent opponent
of all popular movements looking to a freer and more liberal society.
When his native kindliness was touched he spoke out frankly. His
anti-slavery tract (_The Selling of Joseph_), slight in extent and
somewhat overpraised by historians, was not only much in advance of
his time, but it contains one sentence that should not be forgotten,
“There is no proportion between twenty pieces of silver and liberty.”
Equally significant was his stand against capital punishment for
counterfeiting.[92] Such acts as the following must also be set down to
his credit: “I essay’d June 22 [1716], to prevent Indians and Negros
being Rated with Horses and Hogs; but could not prevail.”[93] His
native sense of justice was as strong as his kindliness. Who does not
know of his confession in regard to the witchcraft persecutions--an
act that set all Boston tongues wagging. When he was convinced that he
had made a grievous and sorrowful mistake, he rose in the congregation
while the minister read his public acknowledgment of that mistake,
and his repentance for his share in the unhappy business. Thereafter
in commemoration he kept an annual day of prayer and fasting. We can
forgive him much for that honest and manly act.
To the end of his life Sewall refused to go forward with the changing
times, and his voluntary assumption of the office of _praefectura
morum_ laid him under a heavy responsibility to see that the primitive
ways were upheld. He was magisterial in rebuke and few transgressors
of the strict New England code escaped a censure. One would like to
have James Franklin’s private opinion of the sharp-eyed old Judge. To
Franklin and other members of the Hell-fire Club--young fellows keenly
interested in domesticating the new wit literature in homespun Boston,
openly skeptical, inclining to Arianism and even to deism--he must
have seemed a prosy old reactionary, upholding a decadent orthodoxy
and an obsolete social order. No doubt many a sharp jibe was aimed at
his back, for there were many to whom the older ways began to seem
preposterous. It may very well have been that those who committed a
certain prank which Sewall records may have had him in mind.
Aug. 3. [1717] ... ’Tis sad it should be so, but a virulent Libel
was starch’d on the Three Doors of the Meeting House, containing
the following Words:
TO ALL TRUE-HEARTED CHRISTIANS
Good people, within this House, this very day,
A Canting Crew will meet to fast, and pray.
Just as a miser fasts with greedy mind to spare;
So the glutton fasts, to eat a greater share.
But the sower-headed Presbyterians fast to seem more holy,
And their Canting Ministers to punish sinfull foley.[94]
Happily there is another and pleasanter side to the character of Samuel
Sewall, and one that looked forward to the future instead of backward
to the past. Despite the harshness of the Puritan creed and the bigotry
of Puritan rule, the fields and meadows of New England, that sent a
breath of the countryside through the crooked streets of Boston, were
a wholesome influence in the lives of men and women. Magistrate and
money-lender though he was, Samuel Sewall was a countryman and farmer
also, a judge of milch cows and fat porkers as well as criminals, a
lover of robins and flowers and fruitful orchards, one who sat his
horse well, and when on circuit often drew up at a rail-fence to
discuss the crops with some gossipy farmer. Above all, a lover of
men, the most neighborly soul in the world, mingling freely with all
classes, and although quite properly proud of a visit from the Governor
or other great person, never above chatting with the carpenter, or
doing a kindness to an old nurse. It was the friendly heart of the man
that prompted so many little errands of helpfulness; and if sermons and
tracts and good advice flowed from him like a spring freshet, if he was
magisterial in petty rebuke, such little oddities of the man and the
time did not detract from his sympathy or lessen his helpfulness. Men
stood in awe of Cotton Mather, and children must have run from him, but
neither awe nor fear threw their shadow across Sewall’s path. We can
make too much of the countless funerals that dot his pages, with their
thrifty reckoning of gloves and scarfs and rings that were the queer
perquisites of pallbearers. It was not an unwholesome world despite the
smell of mortality that exudes from the old records, or the terrors of
little children smitten with the fear of hell; and the homely round of
Samuel Sewall’s activities was very far from unwholesome.
It was his neighborliness that made him so representative of the
leveling tendencies of a provincial village life--an easy comradeship
with men of all conditions, unknown to the rigid class divisions
of the old world. Going one day to visit the Jews’ burial place at
Mile-End, while on a visit to London, he invited the sexton to a pot
of beer and a quiet chat, remarking in friendly fashion, “wisht might
meet in Heaven: He answered, and drink a Glass of Beer together,
which we were then doing.”[95] His English friends would scarcely
have understood that homely little scene, so natural to the colonial.
Sewall is the first Yankee who reveals the native kindliness of the New
England village. He was zealous to do good and to deal generously with
others, because he had been generously dealt by. Growing more human
with the ripening years, yet instinctively conservative, stubbornly
intent on managing his own affairs in his own way and by his own
agents, provincial to the core and strong in local pride, he reveals
the special bent of the New England character, as it unconsciously
differentiated itself from its English original. Not American as yet
like Franklin, and no longer wholly English like Winthrop, far from
democratic and yet no Tory, he was the progenitor of a practical race
that was to spread the gospel of economic individualism across the
continent.
Footnotes
[79] Two of his three wives and eleven of his fourteen children he had
buried.
[80] Tyler, _History of American Literature during the Colonial
Period_, Chapter XIII, Part IV.
[81] _Diary_, in _Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, Fifth
Series, Vol. I, p. xi.
[82] Compare his haggling over the terms of settlement upon a later
proposed marriage; see _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 205.
[83] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 168.
[84] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 32.
[85] The following is part of an obituary notice by his son:
In 1684, He was chosen a Magistrate of the _Massachusetts_ Colony....
In 1692, He was appointed by King William and Queen Mary in their
Royal Charter, one of the first Council for their Majesties in this
Province, into which He was annually chosen and sat till 1725, when
He resign’d his Election, having outlived all the others nominated in
that Fundamental Constitution. In 1692 He was made one of the Judges,
and in 1718, Chief Justice of our Superior Courts of Judicature thro’
the Province, in which He sat till 1728, when his Infirmities growing
on Him, He resign’d that Place also. In 1715, He was made Judge of
Probates for this County of _Suffolk_, and continued in that Office
till 1728, when He laid it down; it being the last Publick Post wherein
He served and honoured his Country. _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 409-410.
In addition to the above, he was at times an overseer of Harvard
College, censor of the press, and captain of the Ancient and Honourable
Artillery Company; a frequent moderator of Boston town meeting, member
of innumerable committees on church, parish and commonwealth matters,
and adviser at large to whoever was in difficulties.
[86] See _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 366; Vol. III, pp. 87 and 345.
[87] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 84-85.
[88] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 228.
[89] _Ibid._, p. 214.
[90] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 419.
[91] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 312; Vol. III, p. 165; Vol. III, pp. 281-282.
[92] See _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 277.
[93] _Ibid._, p. 87.
[94] _Diary_, Vol. III, pp. 116-117. Note the use of the word
Presbyterian in these lines.
[95] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 301.
Chapter II • The Mather Dynasty
I
For one who is not a loving student of the unamiable bickerings that
clutter the records of early New England, and who does not read them
by the gentle light of filial loyalty, it would seem presumptuous to
venture into the thorny fields tilled by the Mathers. He is certain to
get well scratched, and not at all certain to return with any fruit
gathered. The rancors of dead partisanships beset him on every side,
and the gossip of old wives’ tales fills his ears. He will encounter
many a slanderous hearsay, and the authentic documents to which he
would naturally turn are often inaccessible, and always inhospitable.
The countless tracts, for the most part inconsequential, that issued
in an unbroken stream from the tireless Mather pens, consuming all the
italics in the printer’s case, constitute a veritable _cheval-de-frise_
to protect their authors’ literary reputations from any Philistine
attack; and behind that bristling barricade they have long bidden
defiance to casual invasion. Only a siege can reduce their stronghold
and bring them forth into the clear light of day.
Two generations of Harvard scholarship have essayed the undertaking,
but there is still wanting the detached critic who will set the
Mathers against an adequate historical background, and appraise them
objectively in relation to their times. The Harvard contributions are
excellent in their way, but a consciousness of dealing with Harvard
worthies would seem to have laid the writers under certain inhibitions.
Exposition too easily slides into apologetics. The latest study[96] is
a somewhat meticulous defense. It is an extraordinarily painstaking
document, that has added to our knowledge of Increase Mather’s life and
work, but it was unhappily conceived in the dark of the moon, a season
congenial to strange quirks of fancy. Some tangle it has cleared away,
but fresh obstacles have been added by the intrusion of a thesis to be
defended. In consequence, the interpretation of motives is colored by
special pleading, and the very necessary inquiry into the sources of
those virulent antagonisms that sprang up full-armed in the minister’s
every footprint is put aside as ungermane to a biography. It is an
unfortunate assumption for it puts aside much that is crucial. The
rehabilitation becomes too easy and complete. It proves too much. It
would have us believe that in spite of all the smoke that gathered
about Increase Mather’s militant pilgrimage through life, there was
never any fire of his kindling; that in spite of all the puddles
through which the priestly politician splashed to reach his ends, no
spot or stain ever smutched his gown. The contention may be sound, but
it puts credulity to the strain, and unless one has something of a
Mather stomach for marvels, one is likely to indulge in the luxury of
doubt.
II
The Mathers were a singularly provocative family, capable, ambitious,
certain to have a finger in every pie baking in the theocratic oven.
From the emigrant Richard with the great voice, chief architect of the
Cambridge Platform, to the provincial Cotton, the family combativeness
and love of publicity put their marks on New England history. Of the
three generations, certainly Increase Mather was the most generously
endowed with capacity for leadership; an able man, practical and
assertive, liking to be in the forefront of affairs, not wanting his
light hidden under a bushel. An arch-conservative, he justified his
ways to his conscience by the excellence of the heritage he strove
to conserve. A formalist, he satisfied his intellectual curiosity by
extolling the sufficiency of the creed of the fathers. He closed the
windows of his mind against the winds of new doctrine, and bounded
the fields of speculative inquiry by orthodox fences. He was of the
succession of John Cotton rather than Thomas Hooker, a priestly
theocrat, though never a shuffler like Cotton, less troubled by free
inquiry, less by the intellectual. All his life he was inhibited
from bold speculation by his personal loyalties and interests. As
a beneficiary of things as they were, certain to lose in prestige
and power with any relaxing of the theocracy, it would be asking
too much of human nature to expect him to question the sufficiency
of the established system of which he was the most distinguished
representative. Not to have approved it would have been to repudiate
his habitual way of thinking, his deepest prejudices, his strongest
convictions. He had been molded and shaped by the theocracy; it was
the very marrow of his bones; as well demand that pig iron turn molten
again after it comes from the matrix. The ore of which he was fashioned
was excellent, but once molded it was rigid; there would be no return
to fluidity. And so determined by every impact of environment, by every
appeal of loyalty, and by a very natural ambition, Increase Mather
became a stout upholder of the traditional order, a staunch old Puritan
Tory of the theocratic line. How could any promptings of liberalism
find nourishment in such a mind?[97] Why should one expect to find in
the works of such a man the seeds of new systems of thought or more
generous institutions? He was the outstanding figure of the theocracy
in the days of its overthrow, but intellectually he was not worthy to
unloose the shoe-strings of Roger Williams.
In his professional capacity, Increase Mather was the priest rather
than the theologian, a pastor of the flock, an expounder of the
creed, rather than a seeker after new light. As a minister his mind
was circumscribed by the thinking of John Calvin. He learned nothing
from Luther, and was bitterly hostile to those phases of Independency
that embodied the more generous Lutheran principles. No man was by
temperament better fitted to embrace the coercive spirit of the Genevan
discipline. Strong-willed and ascetic, he discovered in discipline
the chief end for which the children of Adam are created. A profound
admirer of the close-knit Genevan system, he was a Presbyterian in
spirit, a man after Calvin’s own heart, who clung to the old coercions
in an age that was seeking to throw them off. If he counseled
innovation it was in the way of strengthening ministerial authority,
never in the way of liberalizing either creed or practice. It was the
Congregationalism of the Cambridge Platform, and not that of early
Plymouth, that he upheld; and to strengthen that order he turned
earnestly to the practical work of Presbyterianizing. He was the prime
mover in summoning the synod of 1679-80, requested by the Court to
consider amongst other things what “may appeare necessary for the
preventing schismes, haeresies, prophaneness, & the establishment of
the churches in one faith & order of the gospell,”[98] and the chief
suggestions of the body, of which he was the conspicuous leader, were
a return to a stricter discipline, and a strengthening of the passage
in the Savoy Confession of faith--adopted by the synod--by borrowings
from the Westminster Confession, which “more positively set forth the
authority of the state in doctrinal questions.”[99]
In 1691, while in London, Mather had been active in the work of uniting
the Presbyterian and Congregational churches of England, under articles
that would seem to have been more Presbyterian than Congregational;
and in 1705, following the curiously spiteful controversy over the
Brattle Street Church he joined vigorously in the proposed work of
rejuvenating the New England system by engrafting further shoots
from the Presbyterian stock. One of these grafts from the London,
agreement--the principle of licensing ministerial candidates by the
association of ministers, thereby effectively preventing the intrusion
of undesired members--established itself on the Congregational system;
but another--the principle of associational control of the several
churches--was blighted by the attack of John Wise.[100] What this
desired consolidation of power in the hands of the ministers implied,
is suggested by the terms of the Cambridge Platform, which asserted
that “the work & duty of the people is expressed in the phrase of
obeying their Elders,” and that they may not “speak in church, before
they have leave from the elders: nor continue so doing, when they
require silence, nor may they oppose nor contradict the judgment or
sentence of the Elders, without sufficient & weighty cause.”[101]
Recalling that the elders of a church had been reduced in number to the
single minister, one may perhaps venture to suggest that a man ardently
working to strengthen the hands of the ministerial oligarchy by further
Presbyterianizing was no friend to Separatist-Congregationalism, nor
one in whom the spirit of humility would work any lessening of the
authority of the Lord’s stewards.[102]
In his conception of toleration Mather followed naturally in the
footsteps of John Cotton. He would tolerate all views that were not
in error, but his criteria of truth were so far from catholic as to
lead him into constant and vehement attack upon other sects. As a
responsible leader he was careful to clothe his attacks with generous
professions; but he never stepped forward to uphold the right of
free thought, or to dissuade his brethren from heresy-baiting. His
biographer is greatly impressed by the minister’s professions, and
takes them at somewhat more than face value, forgetting the ancient
saying that by the fruits of men’s lives they shall be known. Casuistry
is useful for purposes of defense, and a skillful apologist can explain
away much; but the spirit of toleration revealed in the following
passages was certainly no child of liberalism:
The “Anabaptists” had given trouble in New England. They had
installed as minister a man excommunicated from the Congregational
church, and, when their meeting-house was closed to them, they
persisted in assembling publicly before its barred doors rather
than worship unmolested in a private house. To Mather these were
attacks upon the true faith, and manifest disturbances of the
civil peace. Naturally there is some acidity in his strictures
on the “blasted Error” of “Antipedobaptism.”... He denounces
Baptists roundly enough, points to their kinship with the turbulent
Anabaptists in Europe, and writes: “Are they not generally of a bad
Spirit? Bitter enemies to the Lords most eminent Servants? yea,
to the faithfull Ambassadors, spitting the cruel venome of Asps
against them.”
He then concludes: “Nor is the modern reader likely to disagree”
with the apology by President Oakes, who wrote in an introduction to
Mather’s screed:
It is sufficiently known to those that know the Author, that he is
none of the Ishmaels of the times, that have their hand against
every man and love to be taking a Dog by the Ears ... or to be
dabling in the waters of strife.... They that know his Doctrine
and manner of life, cannot but know that the life of his Spirit
is in the things of practical Divinity, and the great Design of
his ministry is to promote the power and practice of piety in the
greatest instances.... I dare undertake ... his design ... is not
to traduce ... those that are otherwise minded, or expose them to
severities & sufferings on the bare account of their opinion.[103]
From these curious passages the unsympathetic realist is likely to draw
the conclusions that the spirit of mutual admiration came to early
birth in New England, and that it makes a vast difference whose ox
is gored. Something of the same casuistry is employed to explain away
Increase Mather’s unhappy part in the witchcraft mess.[104] The whole
matter is involved and rendered difficult by guilty consciences and the
need to save reputations, and perhaps the facts are not to be got at;
yet it is only another instance to show how quickly candor flies out
at the window when a Mather comes in at the door. One may make much or
little of the son’s statement that Increase grew more tolerant in his
later years; it would seem at best to have been only the difference
between black and dark gray. A dominating man does not take kindly to
differences of counsel. Increase Mather was a stout upholder of the law
and order in the shaping of which he had a hand, but he looked with no
friendly eye on the architects of a different order; and the bitterness
of his later years was the natural consequence of a strong, proud,
ambitious man, thwarted in his dearest projects.
If he contributed nothing to a more liberal theology or church
organization, it is idle to expect him to have contributed to political
speculation. As a leader of the theocracy he meddled much in practical
politics, but it would seem that he was quite unread in the political
philosophers and wholly ignorant of major principles. The great English
liberals of Commonwealth times and later left him untouched. He bought
and read many books, but almost none of a political nature.[105]
Hobbes, Harrington, Sidney, Milton, Filmer, Locke, were as much out
of his intellectual ken as were the speculations of Roger Williams.
Interest in political theory had ceased in Massachusetts with the
banishment of the great Independent, and the principles of liberal
thinkers like Harrington and Milton would have awakened little sympathy
in so stalwart a theocrat as Increase Mather. He was a practical
man, an administrator and mentor, a stern _castigator morum_ to the
commonwealth, and as a college president he had been trained in a
school little notable for its sympathetic consideration of the views
of subordinates. He got on ill with his Harvard tutors, and one of the
unseemliest squabbles of his later years grew out of the bitterness
sowed between a “strong” administrator and his teaching staff.[106] A
man accounted less pious, concerned with ends more patently worldly,
might well be reckoned dictatorial and domineering; but Puritan
righteousness, perhaps, is not to be judged by profane standards, nor
the same severity of judgment applied to politicians laboring in the
theocratic vineyard, that is applied to the common breed.
Perhaps the happiest years of Increase Mather’s arduous life were those
spent in London as agent of the theocratic party to secure such terms
as he could for the settlement of New England. It was a congenial task
and a congenial field. His love of diplomacy and his fondness for
England were both gratified. He mingled there on terms of equality with
the intellectual leaders of English Nonconformity, and matched his wit
with men high in station. He proved himself a skillful manager, but
the threads were too tangled for any Puritan diplomat to smoothe out,
and he fell short of his hopes. The terms of the charter as finally
drafted satisfied few of the Boston theocrats, and his nomination of
Sir William Phipps for Governor was certainly ill-judged. Sir William
had been converted to the true faith by Increase himself and was
reckoned by him a chosen vessel of the Lord; but he turned out to be no
better than a cracked pot, and with the coming of Dudley the political
influence of Increase Mather was finally broken. He was maneuvered
out of his position as president of Harvard and later suffered the
mortification of seeing the post fall into the hands of Leverett, the
old tutor now become an influential politician, with whom he had been
bitterly at outs. “Doubtless there is not any government in the world,”
he wrote, “that has been laid under greater obligations by a greater
man than this government has been by me. Nevertheless I have received
more discouragement in the work of the Lord, by those in government,
than by all the men in the world besides. Let not my children put too
much confidence in men.”[107] It is not pleasant to be ousted from
one’s position by politicians, and if one is certain that the slight
intended for the servant falls on the Master, it is scarcely to be
borne. If waves of black pessimism swept over him in those unhappy
later years when his ambitions were hopelessly frustrated, there was
provocation enough. He had outlived his age and the ablest of the
native-born theocrats had become a byword and a mocking amongst the
profane of Boston.
Not a great man, as the world reckons greatness, Increase Mather
may scarcely be accounted a great Puritan. As a theologian he was
wanting in speculative vigor, and as a pastor he was wanting in
self-denying love. It is not necessary to set him over against Roger
Williams or Jonathan Edwards or William Ellery Channing, to reveal his
intellectual and spiritual shortcomings. One has only to place him
beside so rugged and honest a Puritan as Samuel Hopkins, who in true
Christian humility, utterly regardless of his own fame, gave his life
to theology and the care of the poor and the outcast, to realize how
conventional a soul was Increase Mather, how incurious intellectually,
how ambitious and self-seeking. Men loved Samuel Hopkins even though
they might vigorously reject his doctrine, as they loved Roger Williams
and Ellery Channing; but few seem to have loved Increase Mather. One
might respect his abilities, but he was too austerely forbidding to
like, too overbearing to awaken the spirit of good will. Ideas in
the abstract held no interest for him. His biographer has happily
recalled Mather’s forgotten interest in scientific inquiry, and for
this slight relief from the intolerable drab of his life-story one
may be grateful. Yet one must not build too high on an insubstantial
foundation. In the England that Mather loved, and toward which
he was strongly drawn--hoping that opportunity would offer for a
pulpit there--pottering over natural philosophy had become a mark
of distinction, and a man so envious of repute would have wished to
approve himself to those whom he admired. Though he lived in Boston he
would not have it thought that he was provincial.
Of the miscellaneous literary output that flowed from his pen in
an abundant stream, little need be said. It is of concern only to
minute historians of the local. That he was master of an excellent
prose style, clear and straightforward, is sufficiently evident; if
his matter had been so good, his legitimate fame would have been far
greater. The work on which his reputation largely rests is _An Essay
for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_, printed at Boston and
London in 1684, and twice reissued in the nineteenth century under the
title _Remarkable Providences_. It is an amusing book of old wives’
tales, not singular at all for the times, but characteristic rather;
an expression of the naïveté that crops out in Winthrop’s _History
of New England_, and other writings of the emigrant generation, but
now become a fashion amongst the lesser lights of the Royal Academy
and English Nonconformists. It suited to a nicety the Mather love
of marvels, and Increase constituted himself a generous repository
of all the chimney-corner tales of the countryside. To call such a
book “a scientific and historical recording of phenomena observed
in New England,” as his biographer has done, is to gall the back
of a thesis with hard riding.[108] In one chapter only does Mather
suggest the spirit of scientific inquiry; four out of the twelve deal
with witchcraft and kindred topics; and the rest are made up of such
instances of divine providence as great fish jumping out of the sea
into the boats of starving sailors adrift, of the freaks played by
lightning and tornadoes, and of God’s punishments on wicked Quakers.
At the time it was a harmless enough book, but in the light of after
developments it was scarcely so harmless. The emphasis laid upon
witchcraft was an unfortunate, if unconsidered, influence in preparing
the psychology of New England for the Salem outbreak, and the minister
later reaped a bitter harvest from it.
“Not many years ago,” he wrote in the preface to _Illustrious
Providences_, “I _lost_ (and that’s an afflictive _loss_ indeed!)
several moneths from study by sickness. Let every God-fearing reader
joyn with me in prayer, that I may be enabled to redeem the time,
and (in all ways wherein I am capable) to serve my generation.” That
Increase Mather sincerely desired to serve his generation according to
his lights, none may deny. His labors were appalling, his reputation
was great, and when he died the light of the old churches went out.
The spirit of Presbyterianism went to its grave in New England, and
not till a hundred years later did the new light--which was no other
than primitive English Independency--shine out in the life and work of
William Ellery Channing. After two centuries Unitarianism recovered
for the Massachusetts churches the spirit of early Separatism that had
been lost since the days of the Cambridge Platform. Channing finally
uprooted the vine that Increase Mather had so laboriously tended.
III
Of the unpopularity that gathered about the name of Mather after the
fall of the theocracy, the larger portion fell to the lot of the son,
the eccentricities of whose character made him peculiarly vulnerable to
attack. In his youth the spoiled child of Boston, in middle life he was
petulant and irritable, inclined to sulk when his will was crossed.
In the career of no other New England Puritan is the inquisitorial
pettiness of the Genevan system of theology and discipline revealed
so disagreeably. The heroic qualities of an earlier age had atrophied
in an atmosphere of formalism, and Boston Calvinism of the year 1690
had become a grotesque caricature of a system that in its vigor had
defied the power of Rome and laid kingdoms at its feet. Embodied in
Cotton Mather it was garrulous, meddlesome, scolding, an echo of dead
voices, a shadow of forgotten realities. The common provincialism had
laid its blight upon it. The horizons of the New England imagination
grew narrow, and Puritan anthropomorphism unconsciously reduced the
God of the Hebrew prophets to the compass of a village priest, clothed
in stock and gown, and endowed with the intellect of a parish beadle.
In the egocentric universe wherein Cotton Mather lived and labored
the cosmos had shrunk to the narrow bounds of a Puritan commonwealth,
whereof Boston was the capital and the prosperity of the North Church
the special and particular object of divine concern. The mind of
Increase Mather had been enlarged by contact with English life; the
mind of the son was dwarfed by a village world.
Cotton Mather is an attractive subject for the psychoanalyst. Intensely
emotional, high-strung and nervous, he was oversexed and overwrought,
subject to ecstatic exaltations and, especially during his celibate
years, given to seeing visions. In the carefully edited _Diary_ which
he left for the edification of his natural and spiritual children, at
the beginning of his twenty-third year, is an apologetic entry--“_Cum
Relego, Scripsisse Pudet!_”--that Professor Wendell has put into
English thus:
A strange and memorable thing. After outpourings of prayer, with
the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face
shone like the noonday sun. His features were as those of a man,
and beardless; his head was encircled by a splendid tiara; on his
shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe
reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike
the girdles of the peoples of the East. And this Angel said that he
was sent by the Lord Jesus to bear a clear answer to the prayers of
a certain youth, and to bear back his words in reply. Many things
this Angel said which it is not fit should be set down here. But
among other things not to be forgotten he declared that the fate of
this youth should be to find full expression for what in him was
best; ... And in particular this Angel spoke of the influence his
branches should have, and of the books this youth should write and
publish, not only in America but in Europe. And he added certain
special prophecies of the great works this youth should do for
the Church of Christ in the revolutions that are now at hand.
Lord Jesus! What is the meaning of this marvel? From the wiles of
the Devil, I beseech thee, deliver and defend Thy most unworthy
servant.[109]
The passage throws a good deal of light on the psychology of Cotton
Mather. Such visions were clearly the result of abnormal stimuli,
acting on a neurotic temperament. From both sides of his family he
inherited a tense nervous system that was aggravated by precocity and
an unnatural regimen. The inevitable result was a hothouse plant of
Puritan forcing. His religious exaltation flowered from the root of
egoism. His vanity was cosmic. He esteemed himself a beacon set on
a hill, a divine torch which the very hand of God had lighted. The
success or failure of God’s plan for New England, he believed, rested
on his shoulders; and with such heavy responsibilities devolved upon
him he was driven, hot-haste, by the prick of urgency. The king’s
business requireth haste. The work of the Lord cannot wait upon
sluggards. “O then _To work_ as fast as you can,” he wrote in _The
Magnalia_, “and of soul-work and church-work as much as ever you can.
Say to all _Hindrances_ ... ‘You’ll excuse me if I ask you to be short
with me, for my work is great and my time is but little.’” And so with
an amazing activity that was little short of neurosis, he gave himself
over to the great business of managing the affairs of New England in
accordance with God’s will.
In undertaking so difficult a job, he frequently came into conflict
with other interpreters of God’s plan for New England, and partisan
venom gathered about him wherever he passed. Tact was never a Mather
virtue, and Cotton made two enemies to his father’s one. His quarrels
trod on each other’s heels, and a downright vindictiveness breathes
through his private records of them. He railed at whoever disagreed
with him, and imputed silly or malignant motives. The pages of his
diary are filled with epithets that he flung privately at his enemies;
one marvels that so many in the little town of Boston could be singled
out as “strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil.” Robert Calef,
whose _More Wonders of the Invisible World_ was an inconvenient reply
to his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, was set down as “a very
wicked sort of a Sadducee in this Town, raking together a crue of
Libels ... an abominable Bundle of Lies, written on purpose, with a
Quil under a special Energy and Management of Satan, to damnify my
precious Opportunities of Glorifying my Lord Jesus Christ.”[110] When
an anti-Mather group of Cambridge men set up the Brattle Street Church,
and invited Benjamin Colman, who had received Presbyterian ordination
in England, by way of reply to the Mather group, to become their
pastor, Cotton wrote in his diary:
A Company of Head-strong Men in the Town, the cheef of whom, are
full of malignity to the Holy Waye of our Churches, have built in
this Town, another Meeting-house. To delude many better-meaning Men
in their own Company, and the Churches in the Neighbourhood, they
past a Vote ... that they would not vary from the Practice of these
Churches, except in one little Particular.... But a young Man, born
and bred here, and hence gone for England, is now returned hither,
at their Invitation, equip’d with an _Ordination_, to qualify him,
for all that is intended.
On his “returning and arriving here, these fallacious People” gave
themselves over, in short, to “Their violent and impetuous Lusts,
to carry on the Apostasy,” and Cotton Mather prayed God to make
him an instrument to defeat the “Designs that Satan may have in
the Enterprise.”[111] Similar passages of extravagant abuse of men
so wicked as to disagree with him flowed from his pen in copious
abundance. Although he constantly prayed that his daily life might
be “a trembling walk with God,” he was clearly a difficult fellow to
get on with; and in the opinion of many he was justly described by a
contemporary, as a “malecontent priest,” consumed with an “Hereditary
rancour” that made him “everlastingly opposite” to every will but his
own.
The diary of Cotton Mather is a treasure-trove to the abnormal
psychologist. The thing would be inconceivable if the record were not
in print. What a crooked and diseased mind lay back of those eyes that
were forever spying out occasions to magnify self! He grovels in proud
self-abasement. He distorts the most obvious reality. His mind is
clogged with the strangest miscellany of truth and marvel. He labors
to acquire the possessions of a scholar, but he listens to old wives’
tales with greedy avidity. In all his mental processes the solidest
fact falls into fantastic perspective. He was earnest to do good, he
labored to put into effect hundreds of “Good devices,” but he walked
always in his own shadow. His egoism blots out charity and even the
divine mercy. Consider his account of an “execution sermon” preached
to a nameless girl condemned for killing her natural child, and the
light it throws on both minister and congregation:
The Execution of the miserable Malefactor, was ordered for to have
been the last Week, upon the Lecture of another. I wondred then
what would become of my _Particular_ Faith, of her condition being
so ordered in the Providence of God, that it should furnish me,
with a _special Opportunity_ to glorify Him. While I was entirely
resigning to the wisdome of Heaven all such Matters, the Judges,
wholly without my seeking, altered and allow’d her Execution to
fall on the Day of _my Lecture_. The _General Court_ then sitting,
ordered the Lecture to bee held in a larger and a stronger House,
than that _old_ one, where ’tis usually kept. For my own part, I
was weak, and faint, and spent; but I humbly gave myself up to the
_Spirit_ of my Heavenly Lord and Hee assured mee, that Hee would
send His good Angel to strengthen mee. The greatest Assembly, ever
in this Countrey preach’d unto, was now come together; It may bee
four or five thousand Souls. I could not gett unto the _Pulpit_,
but by climbing over _Pues_ and _Heads_: and there the Spirit of my
dearest Lord came upon mee. I preached with a more than ordinary
Assistance, and enlarged, and uttered the most awakening Things,
for near two hours together. My Strength and Voice failed not; but
when it was near failing, a silent Look to Heaven strangely renew’d
it. In the whole I found Prayer answered and Hope exceeded, and
Faith encouraged, and the Lord using _mee_, the vilest in all that
great Assembly, to glorify Him. Oh! what shall I render to the
Lord![112]
Straightway thereafter, he rendered the Lord another characteristic
service. No sooner was the girl hanged--for whose safekeeping no good
angel seems to have been available after the minister had bespoken
his--than he hastened to the printer to arrange for printing the
sermon, and “annexed thereunto, an History of Criminals executed in
this Land, and effectually, an Account of their dying Speeches, and
of my own Discourses with them in their last Hours.... I entitled the
Book, +PILLARS OF SALT+.” Clearly this was the time to peddle his
wares, when all Boston was talking of the great event; and with a
nose for publicity as keen as Defoe’s, he flung together a jumble of
material, and trusted to its timeliness to sell. Some such origin, no
doubt, accounts for a good many of the small library of titles that
bore his name, an output that seems to have justified the angelic
prophecy of “the books this youth should write and publish.” With a
very lust for printer’s ink, he padded his bibliography like a college
professor seeking promotion; but in spite of all the prayers poured
out in behalf of them, they would seem for the most part to have been
little more than tuppenny tracts, stuffed with a sodden morality, that
not even an angel could make literature of.
Holding so strong a conviction of apostleship, Cotton Mather would
certainly play the politician, and quite as certainly blunder and go
wrong. Far more than his father he was a bookman, who believed that
all knowledge was shut up between pigskin covers. He was as lacking in
worldly wisdom as a child, and in his ecstatic contemplation of the
marvels wrought by God in primitive New England he never discovered
that that older world had passed away. Another age was rising, with
other ideals than ecclesiastical, which the three thousand books in his
library told him nothing about. He was an anachronism in his own day.
Living in an earlier age, when the hierarchy was in its prime, he would
have been carried far on the tide of theocratic prestige; a generation
later, when lay-power had definitely superseded clerical, he would have
taken his place as a stout defender of Tory ways. But at the moment
when a critical realignment of parties was under way in Massachusetts;
when the villagers were becoming democratized and the gentry toryized;
when even the clergy were dividing--Cotton Mather was a general without
an army. He was a primitive Puritan in a Boston that was fast becoming
Yankee, and his love for the theocracy grew stronger with every defeat.
The judgment of after times finds little in his political activities
to approve and much to condemn. After all allowances are made the fact
remains that he was a leader of reaction; and no protestations can
obscure the motive of personal ambition. His own prestige was involved
with that of the theocracy. It was due to the traditional authority
of the ministry that he enjoyed the distinction of being a “Person,
whom the Eye and the Talk of the People is very much upon,” and any
lessening of that authority would hurt him cruelly in his vanity. This
remains the sufficient explanation of his varied political activities
in the course of which he trimmed his sails to different winds. He
first essayed a frontal attack on the secular power, but suffering a
personal slight, he shifted and struck in the dark at an exposed flank;
and finally, receiving only further mortification, he made overtures of
peace and found his way back to the tables of the great. It was against
the administration of the wily and unscrupulous Dudley that he waged
his bitterest warfare. Failing to make headway by open hostility, he
seized upon a current trade scandal, poured out his grievances in an
anonymous pamphlet sent to London to be published, and awaited the
result. It was a slashing attack, done in the tone of a lover of the
ancient rights and privileges of New England, and it must have cut
Dudley to the quick. A quotation or two will suffice to reveal the
nature of the charges:
But, when the President [Dudley] was pleased, out of an Active
and Passive Principle, to tell our Countreymen, in open Council,
_That the People in_ New-England _were all Slaves; and that the_
only _Difference between Them and Slaves, was their not being_
Bought _and Sold: And that they must not think the Privileges_ of
Englishmen _would follow them to the end of the World_. I say,
when the People heard this, they lookt upon themselves in a manner
Lost....
All the People here are Bought and Sold, betwixt the Governour and
his son Paul....
This is the _Third Time_ that he has been Trusted with Power from
the _Crown_ in _America_, and he has constantly Abus’d it, to the
Dishonour of the Government, and almost Ruin of the People he was
sent to Govern.[113]
There was enough truth in the charges to make them serious, but the
spleen was quite too evident. The author was at once discovered and
Cotton Mather suffered a vigorous counter-attack that damaged a
reputation already undermined. Perhaps even worse was the social slight
put upon him by those in government. What it cost him to be left out of
the invitations of the great he reveals in the _Diary_:
2 _d._ 7m. [September] Friday. [1709] The other Ministers of the
Neighbourhood, are this Day feasting with our wicked Governour;
I have, by my provoking Plainness and Freedom, in telling this
_Ahab_ of his wickedness, procured myself to be left out of his
Invitations. I rejoiced in my Liberty from the Temptations, with
which they were encumbred, while they were _eating of his Dainties_
and durst not reprove him. And, considering the Power and Malice of
my Enemies, I thought it proper of me, to be this day Fasting, in
Secret, before the Lord.
Ten years later there is a different story to tell. The minister has
left the opposition bench and gone over to the government. A note in
Sewall’s diary tells the tale:
March, 12. [1718/19] Dr. Cotton Mather prays again [in Council],
Preaches the Lecture from Prov. 29: 18. no Vision. [_Where there is
no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is
he._] The Govr., Lt. Govr., Mr. Dudley, Mr. Belcher press’d hard
that there might be an order of the Govr. and Council to print it.
Col. Tailor, Clark, Davenport, Sewall and others opposed it. For
my part, the Dr. spake so much of his visions of Convulsion and
Mutiny, mentioning our being a dependent Government, and the Danger
of Parliamentary Resentments: that I was afraid the printing of it
might be an Invitation to the Parliament to take away our Charter.
Govr. would have it put to the vote: but when he saw how hardly it
went, caused the Secretary to break off in the midst.[114]
Here is a party alignment that tells its own story, and it needs
no very lively imagination to fill out the meager note and reënact
the little drama. The minister, eager to make overtures of peace,
falls into the Tory note, talks about mob-rule and the sinfulness
of popular unrest, calls upon authority to maintain law and order,
and hints at the expediency of preserving due colonial subservience
in view of possible resentments on the part of certain great men in
England. Sewall, as a “true New-England man,” squirms somewhat under
the implications, but the little group of Tories are loud in praise.
Such a sermon, from so eminent a servant of God, would aid wonderfully
in strengthening the spirit of loyalty to the crown, and it must be
printed and circulated amongst the people. But the opposition proved
too spirited, and the manuscript was not dispatched to the printer, no
doubt to Cotton Mather’s chagrin.
It was easy for so reactionary a nature to slide over into the Tory.
There was not a grain of liberalism in his make-up. His antipathy to
all popular movements was deep-rooted, for he knew no other political
philosophy than that of the obsolete theocracy in which he had grown
up. He was a bourgeois soul who loved respectability and was jealous
of his social position; no fraternizing with the poor and outcast for
him, no profitless excursions into the realms of Utopian justice.
Though he might play to popular prejudices to serve his political ends,
he had scant regard for popular rights. The highest privilege of the
New England people, he believed, was the privilege of being ruled by
the godly. His real attitude towards the plain people is revealed in a
note by his son, that refers to the days following the overturn of the
Andros government:
Upon Discoursing with him of the Affairs he has told me that he
always pressed _Peace_ and _Love_ and _Submission_ unto a legal
Government, tho’ he suffered from some tumultuous People, by doing
so; and upon the whole, has asserted unto me his _Innocency_ and
freedom from all known Iniquity in that time, but declared his
Resolution, from the View he had of the fickle Humors of the
Populace, that he would chuse to be concern’d with them as little
as possible for the future.[115]
As he grew older and the shadow of failure fell across his life,
his bitterness towards a people that had rejected his admonitions
is revealed on many a page of his diary. It was a “silly people,” a
“foolish people,” “insignificant lice”--“The cursed clamour of a people
strangely and fiercely possessed of the Devil”--“My aged father laies
to heart the withdrawal of a vain, proud, foolish people from him in
his age”--“It is the Hour of ... Darkness on this Despicable Town.”
He could not easily forgive those who had wounded his love of power
and lust of adulation, and he was too aloof from the daily life of
men to understand the political and social movements of the times,
too self-centered to understand his fellow villagers. He possessed
none of the sympathetic friendliness that made Samuel Sewall a natural
confidant to every one in trouble. He loved the people when they
honored and obeyed him, but when they hearkened to other counsels he
would fall to scolding like a fishwife. Doubtless he was sincere in
thinking he would gladly die to save his people from their sins, but he
had no mind to neighbor with them or humor their wicked love of power.
He immured himself so closely within the walls of the old theocratic
temple that he never took the trouble to examine the groundsills, and
when the rotten timbers gave way and the structure came tumbling about
his ears, he was caught unprepared and went down in its ruins.
Happily most of the printed output of Cotton Mather has fallen
into the oblivion it deserved. It is barren of ideas, and marred
by pedantic mannerisms that submerge the frequent felicities of
phrase--old-fashioned on the day it came from the press. “In his
_Style_, indeed,” wrote his friend Thomas Prince, “he was something
singular, and not so agreeable to the Gust of the Age. But like his
_manner of speaking_, it was very _emphatical_.” Yet he possessed
very considerable gifts and under happier circumstances he might have
had a notable literary career; but he was the victim of a provincial
environment. He was the most widely read man of his generation in
America, and one of the few who followed sympathetically the current
scientific movement in England. Like old Increase he dabbled in
science; he was proud of his membership in the Royal Society, to which
he forwarded his characteristic _Curiosa Americana_--a hodgepodge of
those marvels in which his generation delighted. It was from an English
source that he got the idea of inoculation for smallpox, which he urged
upon Boston so insistently that a war of scurrilous pamphlets broke
out. He made use of the method in his own family, incurring thereby
much stupid abuse and at least one attack of violence. It was an
intelligent and courageous experiment, that is not to be forgotten in
casting up the accounts of Cotton Mather.
Of his major works two only call for brief consideration: the
celebrated _Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History
of New England_; and the less known _Wonders of the Invisible World_.
The latter is suggestive for the light it throws on the psychology of
the witchcraft mania. The fantastic devil-fear, which bit so deeply
into the imagination of Puritan New England, has already been commented
on. In that common seventeenth-century delusion, Cotton Mather not only
ran with the mob, but he came near to outdistancing the most credulous.
His speech and writings dripped with devil-talk. The grotesqueries that
marked the current marvel-tales crop out nakedly in his writings. “I
have set myself,” he wrote in the _Diary_, “to countermine the whole
_Plot_ of the Devil, against New-England, in every branch of it, as far
as one of my _darkness_ can comprehend such a _Work_ of Darkness.” His
conviction of the malignant activities of Satan was so vivid, that in
delivering a carefully prepared sermon on the _Wiles of the Divil_, he
was fain, he tells us, to pause and lift up his eyes and cry “unto the
Lord Jesus Christ, that he would rate off Satan,” who “all the Time of
my Prayer before the Lecture” had “horribly buffeted me”--by indicting
on the fasting priest certain qualms of the stomach. How tremendous he
conceived to be the battle over a human soul, he describes thus:
The _Wilderness_ through which we are passing to the Promised Land
is all over fill’d with Fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be
God, none of them have hitherto so fastned upon us as to confound
us utterly! All our way to Heaven lies by _Dens of Lions_ and the
_Mounts of Leopards_; there are incredible Droves of Devils in
our way.... We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the
Devil’s Field, as the Devil’s _Gaol_; a world in which every Nook
whereof, the Devil is encamped with _Bands of Robbers_ to pester
all that have their Faces looking Zionward.[116]
In the light of Mather’s logic, “That there is a _Devil_, is a thing
Doubted by none but such as are under the influence of the Devil,” and
“God indeed has the _Devil_ in a _Chain_, but has horribly lengthened
out the Chain,” his private comment on the work--“that reviled
book”--becomes comprehensible.
The _Magnalia_ is a far more important work, the repository of a vast
miscellany of information concerning early New England that his pious
zeal saved from oblivion. It is the _magnum opus_ of the Massachusetts
theocracy, the best and sincerest work that Cotton Mather did. The
theme with which it deals, and about which he accumulates marvels and
special providences together with historical facts, was the thing
which next to his own fame lay nearest his heart--the glory of that
theocracy which men whom he accounted foolish and wicked were seeking
to destroy. The purpose of the book has nowhere been better stated than
by Professor Wendell:
Its true motive was to excite so enthusiastic a sympathy with the
ideals of the Puritan fathers that, whatever fate might befall
the civil government, their ancestral seminary of learning should
remain true to its colours.... The time was come, Cotton Mather
thought, when the history of these three generations might be
critically examined; if this examination should result in showing
that there had lived in New England an unprecedented proportion
of men and women and children whose earthly existence had given
signs that they were among the elect, then his book might go far to
prove that the pristine policy of New England had been especially
favoured of the Lord. For surely the Lord would choose His elect
most eagerly in places where life was conducted most according to
His will.[117]
When old Increase was near the end of his many years, a friend wrote
to ask if he were still in the land of the living. “No, Tell him I
am going to it,” he said to his son; “this Poor World is the land of
the Dying.” The bitter words were sober truth. The New England of the
dreams of Increase and Cotton Mather was sick to death from morbid
introspection and ascetic inhibitions; no lancet or purge known to
the Puritan pharmacopeia could save it. Though father and son walked
the streets of Boston at noonday, they were only twilight figures,
communing with ghosts, building with shadows. They were not unlike
a certain mad woman that Sewall tells of, who went crying about the
town, “My child is dead within me.” The child of Cotton Mather’s hopes
had long been dead within him, only he could not bring himself to
acknowledge it. The fruit of the vine planted by the fathers was still
sweet to him, and when other men complained of its bitterness, and fell
to gathering from other vines, he could only rail at their perversity.
He would not believe that the grapes were indeed bitter and the vine
blighted; that the old vineyard must be re-plowed and planted to fresh
stock. All his life he had set marvels above realities and in the end
his wonder-working providence failed him. Prayers could not bring back
a dead past; passionate conjurations could not strike the living waters
from the cold granite of Puritan formalism. A New England flagellant,
a Puritan Brother of the Cross, he sought comfort in fasts and vigils
and spiritual castigations, and--it is pleasant to learn--in ways far
more natural and wholesome. Incredible as it may seem, the following
record is authentic, and it falls like a shaft of warm sunshine across
the path of the morbid priest: “Augt, 15. [1716].... Now about Dr.
C. Mather Fishing in Spy-pond, falls into the Water, the boat being
ticklish, but receives no hurt.”[118] The restless minister who had
fished overmuch in troubled waters, sometimes, it would appear,
ventured for perch in Spy Pond.
Footnotes
[96] Kenneth B. Murdock, _Increase Mather_, 1925.
[97] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 394-395.
[98] Quoted in W. Walker, _A History of Congregational Churches, etc._,
p. 187.
[99] _Ibid._, p. 190. His biographer has overlooked the significance of
this. See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, p. 151.
[100] His biographer has somewhat slurred his account of the
“Proposals.” See p. 282. But his justification is worth noting: “If the
original brand of Puritan piety was worth saving, and Mather believed
it was, an oligarchic church government was the only means of securing
it in an age when men were inclined to change their religious ideas as
they changed their thought on other affairs.”
[101] W. Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches, etc._, p.
205.
[102] Compare Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 361-363.
[103] Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 138-139.
[104] See pp. 294-295, where he seeks unsuccessfully to refute the
position taken by J. T. Adams.
[105] See Murdock, _Increase Mather_, pp. 125-127.
[106] “The Brattle-Street Church Controversy,” for which see _ibid._,
pp. 258 ff.
[107] _Ibid._, pp. 373-4, note.
[108] _Ibid._, p. 170.
[109] _Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_, p. 64.
[110] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 271.
[111] _Ibid._, pp. 325-326.
[112] _Diary_, Vol. I, p. 279.
[113] _A Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New-England ...
by the Male-Administration of their Present Governour, Joseph Dudley,
Esq., and his Son Paul_, London, 1707, in _Massachusetts Historical
Society Collections_, Fifth Series, Vol. VI.
[114] Vol. II, p. 214.
[115] Wendell, _Cotton Mather, etc._, p. 82.
[116] _Wonders of the Invisible World_, p. 63.
[117] _Literary History of America_, pp. 48-49.
[118] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. III, p. 98.
Chapter III • Stirrings of Liberalism
I • John Wise • Village Democrat
In the days when Sir Edmund Andros was seeking to fasten upon
Massachusetts Bay the principles and practice of Stuart prerogative,
an event occurred that greatly stirred New England. Taxes having
been arbitrarily assessed in Council, the several towns were bidden
appoint commissioners to collect them. When the order reached Ipswich,
John Wise, minister of the second church, gathered the chief members
of his flock together, and it was agreed by them to choose no such
commissioner at the town meeting--“We have a good God, and a good
king, and shall do well to stand for our privileges,” the minister
is reported to have argued. Soon thereafter John Wise was summoned
before a star-chamber court on the charge of sedition. Upon his plea of
colonial privilege, the president of the court, Dudley, is said to have
retorted, “You shall have no more privileges left you than not to be
sold for slaves.” “Do you believe,” demanded Andros, “Joe and Tom may
tell the King what money he may have?” “Do not think,” put in another
judge, “the laws of England follow you to the ends of the earth.”
Thereupon with five others, John Wise was thrown into Boston jail,
where he lay one and twenty days, and whence he was released only after
payment of fifty pounds, giving bond in a thousand pounds for good
behavior, and suffering suspension from the ministry. “The evidence in
the case,” he remarked afterward, “as to the substance of it, was that
we too boldly endeavored to persuade ourselves we were Englishmen, and
under privileges.”[119] The year following, Andros having been driven
out, John Wise brought suit against Dudley for having denied him a writ
of _habeas corpus_.[120]
Two years later Wise served as chaplain in the ill-managed Quebec
expedition under Sir William Phipps. He bore himself well both in
council and on the field; went ashore with the storming party; and if
he had succeeded in his efforts to instil some of his own force into
the leaders, the grand exploit might not have dwindled to such an
unhappy ending. In a long account which he sent to Increase Mather,
then in London, he did not mince matters, or attempt to throw on
the Lord’s shoulders blame that belonged elsewhere, but charged the
fiasco to the cowardice of Major Walley, in command of the assaulting
troops.[121] Clearly the Ipswich minister was a fighting as well as a
praying parson, whom Cromwell would have delighted in.
Posterity has been too negligent of John Wise hitherto. Although
possessed of the keenest mind and most trenchant pen of his generation
of New Englanders, he was uninfected by the itch of publicity that
attacked so many of his fellow ministers, and so failed to challenge
the attention of later times. Called to serve in an outlying portion
of the Master’s vineyard he discovered little opportunity there and
less inclination to magnify his own importance. He was too honest to
persuade himself that God’s fame was bound up with his own, and he
was never forward to push his claims to priority in righteousness.
Nevertheless what little we know of him is to his credit. An
independent man, powerful of body, vigorous of intellect, direct and
outspoken in debate, he seems to have understood the plain people whom
he served, and he sympathized heartily with the democratic ideals then
taking form in the New England villages. Such liberalism as emerged
from the simplicity of village life found intelligent response in
his sympathies, and he dedicated his keen mind and wide reading to
the business of providing it with a philosophical justification.
Some explanation of his democratic leanings may be discovered in
his antecedents. His father was a self-made man who had come over
to Roxbury as an indented servant--most menial of stations in that
aristocratic old Boston world. He must have been of sound and rugged
stock, for in addition to a magnificent physique he endowed his son
with manly independence and democratic self-respect, which stood the
latter in good stead when, after having made his way through Harvard
College, he came to speak for the people against the tax program of
Andros, the reactionary ambitions of the Presbyterians, and the schemes
of the hard-money men. In John Wise, Cotton Mather was to encounter an
antagonist who was more than a match for him.
With the final overthrow of the theocracy and the lessening of the
political power of the clergy, a critical period in the development
of the church was reached, and with it a renewal of the old conflict
between the Presbyterian and Congregational principles. In the year
1705, under the leadership of the Mathers, the Presbyterian party,
which numbered among its adherents most of the ministers of the
larger churches, put forth a series of “Proposals,” looking to a
closer union of the churches, and greater control of the separate
congregations by the ministerial association. This was a challenge to
the Congregationalists which John Wise could not overlook. The question
touched the fundamentals of church organization, and when by way of
preparation he turned to examine critically the work of the fathers, he
found in it quite another meaning than Cotton Mather found. It was as a
liberal that he went back to the past, seeking to recover the original
Congregational principle, which, since the conservative triumph in
the Cambridge Platform of 1648, had been obscured. When he was quite
ready, he published in 1710, his _Churches Quarrel Espoused_, reissued
five years later; and in 1717, his _Vindication of the Government of
the New England Churches_, reissued together with the earlier work in
1772, and again in 1860. The two works were a democratic counterblast
to the Presbyterian propaganda, and they stirred the mind of New
England profoundly. What Edwards did later for the doctrinal side of
Congregationalism, John Wise did for the institutional. His exposition
of the Congregational principle was so luminous and convincing
that it soon came to be regarded as authoritative, and more than a
hundred years after the _Vindication_ appeared the Chief Justice of
Massachusetts cited it in support of a judicial decision.
The significance of John Wise in the history of democratic America
lies in the fact that he followed “an unbeaten path,” justifying the
principle of Congregationalism by analogy from civil polity. Seemingly
alone amongst the New England clergy of his day, he had grounded
himself in political theory; and the doctrine upon which he erected
his argument was the theory of natural rights, derived from a study of
Pufendorf’s _De Jure Naturae et Gentium_, published in 1672. Locke and
the other writers of the English natural-rights school he seems not to
have been acquainted with; but Pufendorf he had read closely, and he
discharged the new theory against his opponents with telling effect.
This was the first effective reply in America to the old theocratic
sneer that if the democratic form of government were indeed divinely
sanctioned, was it not strange that God had overlooked it in providing
a government for his chosen people? Wise was the first New England
minister to break with the literal Hebraism of the old school; like
Roger Williams he was willing to make use of profane philosophies,
basing his argument upon an appeal to history, a method which baffled
the narrow Hebraists, putting them in a quandary.
After examining the three regular forms of civil government, and
showing how each is related to “the many ennobling immunities” of the
subject, Wise turned to the real business in hand, which was to inquire
“whether any of the aforesaid species of regular, unmixed governments,
can with any good show of reason be predicable of the church of Christ
on earth”; whether the monarchical form as exhibited in papacy and
episcopacy, the aristocratic form as exhibited in Presbyterianism, or
the democratic form as exhibited in Congregationalism, is nearest the
divine model as revealed in Scripture and the law of nature?
The gross inadequacy of the monarchical principle appears to him so
certain that he concludes his argument with the comment “that God and
wise nature were never propitious to the birth of this monster.” The
inadequacy of the aristocratic principle seems to him equally clear.
The principle of stewardship, ideal though it may appear in theory, did
not seem to work in practice, and he put his finger shrewdly upon the
weakness of oligarchical rule in Massachusetts. Government by a “select
company of choice persons” might be justified, if--
we could be assured they would make the Scripture, and not their
private will the rule of their personal and ministerial actions;
... but considering how great an interest is embarked, and how
frail a bottom we trust, though we should rely upon the best of
men, especially if we remember what is in the hearts of good
men (namely, much ignorance, abundance of small ends, many times
cloaked with a high pretense in religion; pride skulking and often
breeding revenge upon a small affront, and blown up by a pretended
zeal, yet really and truly by nothing more divine than interest
or ill nature), and also considering how very uncertain we are
of the real goodness of those we esteem good men ... and ... how
Christianity, by the aforesaid principle, had been peeled, robbed
and spoiled already, it cannot consist with the light of nature to
venture again upon such perils, especially if we can find a safer
way home.... In a word an aristocracy is a dangerous constitution
in the church of Christ.[122]
This “safer way home,” as he then proceeded to point out, lay in
following the broad path of democracy:
But to abbreviate, it seems most agreeable with the light of
nature, that if there be any of the regular forms of government
settled in the church of God, it must needs be ... a democracy.
This is the form of government which the light of nature does
highly value, and often directs to as most agreeable to the just
and natural prerogatives of human beings.... It is certainly a
great truth, namely, that man’s original liberty after it is
resigned ... ought to be cherished in all wise governments; or
otherwise a man in making himself a subject, he alters himself
from a freeman into a slave, which to do is repugnant to the law
of nature. Also the natural equality of men amongst men must be
duly favoured; in that government was never established by God or
nature, to give one man a prerogative to insult over another....
Honor all men. The end of all good government is to cultivate
humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every
man in his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc., without
injury or abuse to any.[123]
From which he concludes that--
... a democracy in church or state, is a very honorable and
regular government according to the dictates of right reason, And,
therefore ... That these churches of New England, in their ancient
constitution of church order, it being a democracy, are manifestly
justified and defended by the law and light of nature.[124]
A vigorous thinker was John Wise, with a shrewd knowledge of men and
their selfishness. He would rule himself, well or ill, and would have
others do likewise. Stewards in church and state, he would have none
of. “Brethren,” he exclaimed, “ye have been called unto liberty,
therefore Hold your hold brethren!... pull up well upon the oars, you
have a rich cargo, and I hope we shall escape shipwreck ... daylight
and good piloting will secure all.”[125] “There is strong and sharp
reasoning” in his pages, more solid meat in his two volumes than in
all Cotton Mather’s muddled effusions. Like a good Englishman and a
good Yankee he hated arbitrary power as he hated the devil. “The very
name of an arbitrary government is ready to put an Englishman’s blood
into a fermentation; but when it comes and shakes its whip over their
ears, and tells them it is their master, it makes them stark mad.”[126]
Naturally so vigorous an advocate of democracy in the church was
disliked by the gentlemen whose ambitions he thwarted. Such plebeian
views were incomprehensible to Cotton Mather. When _The Churches
Quarrel Espoused_ was reprinted in 1713, prefaced with a commendatory
letter signed by two well-known clergymen, the latter wrote to a friend:
... A furious Man, called John Wise,[127] of whom, I could wish
he had, _Cor bonum_, while we are all sensible, he wants, _Caput
bene regulatum_, has lately published a foolish Libel, against
some of us, for presbyterianizing too much in our Care to repair
some Deficiencies in our Churches. And some of our People, who are
not only tenacious of their Liberties, but also more suspicious
than they have cause to be of a Design in their pastors to make
abridgments of them; they are too much led into Temptation, by
such Invectives. But the Impression is not so great as our grand
Adversary doubtless hoped for.[128]
Two years later, when the _Vindication_ was published, the sulky
theocrat noted in his diary:
25 [May. 1717] G[ood] D[evice]. Should not I take into
Consideration what may be done for the Service of the Ministry and
Religion and the Churches, throughout the Land, that the Poison of
Wise’s cursed Libel may have an Antidote?[129]
Cotton Mather was unable to discover an antidote, and the poison of
Wise’s democratic philosophy was to prove of surprising vitality. As
late as 1772, when his two works were reprinted on subscription, no
fewer than 1133 copies were taken. That the argument of Wise was not
without influence in the struggle then developing seems reasonable; but
that it greatly influenced the thinking of the revolutionary leaders,
as Professor Tyler supposes, is scarcely probable. The argument from
natural rights was well known in 1772, and it was to Locke and not
to Wise that men like Samuel Adams turned for help. Nevertheless, in
denying to him wide influence in the later period we are neither
detracting from the honor that is rightly his as the first colonial to
justify village democracy by an appeal to political philosophy, nor
lessening the repute in which he should be held by Americans as the
early defender of local self-rule.
The instinctive sympathy of John Wise with the plain people among whom
he lived led him to stand with them in another matter that touched the
interests of the farming class. The currency question had thrust its
provocative demands into political councils, and sharply divided the
electorate. City men like Samuel Sewall were jealous to maintain the
English metallic currency, partly through custom and partly because its
scarcity augmented its value; whereas the plain people of Ipswich, like
so many country people, no doubt were impressed with the desirability
of a land-script currency. Into this mighty controversy entered John
Wise, who in the year 1721, under the pen name of _Amicus Patriae_,
is reputed to have been the author of a book entitled, _A Word of
Comfort to a Melancholy Country. Or the Bank of Credit ... fairly
defended by a Discovery of the Great Benefit, accruing by it to the
whole Province, etc. Humbly dedicated to the Merchants in Boston._ It
was “a well-managed and witty plea for paper money and ‘inflation.’”
With the economics of the problem that he was delving into, we are not
concerned; many heads have wrestled with it since; we are concerned
rather to point out that the democratic John Wise was on the same side
with the democratic Franklin, in espousing paper currency.
After all, the significant thing that emerges from the life and work
of John Wise, is the unerring directness with which he seized upon the
core of primitive Congregationalism, and the breadth and vigor with
which he defended it. After a spirited contest lasting three-quarters
of a century, theocratic Puritanism yielded to ecclesiastical
democracy. For two generations it had remained doubtful which way the
church would incline. Dominated by gentlemen, it was warped towards
Presbyterianism; but interpreted by commoners, it leaned towards
Congregationalism. The son of a plebeian. Wise inclined to sympathize
with the spirit of radical Separatism, bred of the democratic
aspirations of Jacobean underlings; and this radical Separatism he
found justified by the new political philosophy, as well as by facts
of the New England village world. The struggle for ecclesiastical
democracy was a forerunner of the struggle for political democracy
which was to be the business of the next century; and in founding his
ecclesiasticism upon the doctrine of natural rights, John Wise was an
early witness to the new order of thought.
II • Social Drifts
Great changes, whether liberal or otherwise as the future might
determine, were to come to Massachusetts from the new order with its
Charter provision establishing a property qualification for suffrage.
The venture in idealism was over and economic determinism reasserted
its sway. New England was to swing back into the broad current of
English political development. Following the Revolution of 1688 a new
theory of the political state was rising in England--the theory that
the state originated in private property and exists primarily for the
protection of property; and this conception, thrust upon New England,
was to cut sharply across the cleavages of the old order and create
new ones. It substituted the dominance of wealth for the stewardship
of righteousness; the stake-in-society principle for the Mosaic code.
It set a premium upon acquisitiveness and subordinated the Puritan to
the Yankee. It prepared the way for class alignments which must grow
sharper with the increase of wealth, and would eventually produce a
Tory group with natural longings for titles and a colonial aristocracy.
How powerful this mercantile-Tory element was to become would depend
upon the counter strength of the rising democratic group, with its
freehold tenure of land, its town meeting, its Congregational church,
and its distrust of aristocratic orders.
For the present, the world of John Wise was the real New England,
thrifty, parsimonious, intensely local, driving straight towards a
homespun democracy. The older fashioned New Englander, whatever his
social position, did not take kindly to Toryism; and when it made its
appearance in the train of the royal officials, swaggering somewhat
and a bit insolent, it seemed to the colonial both alien and wicked.
English Tory and Puritan Yankee frankly disliked each other; their
ideals were incompatible, their manners unlike. A cloud of suspicion
surrounded the English official as he walked the streets of Boston:
suspicion of the hated church which he promptly set up, though not much
given to worship; suspicion of his political motives and the overseas
authority which he represented. In a vague way the New Englanders
were convinced that he constituted a menace to their most cherished
rights and privileges; that he was secretly bent on undermining the
traditional liberties. And the English gentleman, with his casual
old-world arrogance, unwittingly aggravated the common suspicion.
How great was the chasm that separated the two worlds is sharply
revealed by an episode in the career of Joseph Dudley, son of the
emigrant, who was made royal governor in 1702. Dudley had lived much in
England, had sat in Parliament, and had imbibed prerogative notions of
government. He little relished the homely ways of New England and he
bore himself somewhat haughtily. One December day in 1705, as he was
driving along a country road with high snowdrifts on each side, he met
with two loads of wood. The chariot coming to a stop, Dudley thrust
his head out of the window and bade the carters turn aside and make
way for him; but they were inclined to argue the matter in view of the
drifts. Words were multiplied, and one of the carters cried--to quote
Sewall--“I am as good flesh and blood as you ... you may goe out of the
way.” In a rage the governor drew his sword and struck at the fellow,
who snatched the sword away and broke it. “You lie, you dog; you lie,
you devill!” cried Dudley, beside himself. “Such words don’t become a
Christian,” retorted the carter. “A Christian, you dog!” cried Dudley;
“a Christian, you devill! I was a Christian before you were born!”
and he snatched the carter’s whip and lashed him roundly. “Being in a
great passion: threatn’d to send those that affronted him to England.”
He arrested both carters and threw them into jail, whence they were
released by the help of Sewall, who took their side though connected
with Dudley through marriage. They were of good yeoman families, yet
the matter hung on for nearly a year before they were discharged from
their bonds.[130]
Village New England was becoming surprisingly independent in
spirit when plain countrymen stood upon their rights against the
Governor--“nor did they once in the Govrs ... sight pull of their
hatts,” as Dudley took pains to inform the Queen’s justices. Three
generations in America were having their effect in the creation of a
homespun democracy. “Mr. Dudley’s principles, in government, were too
high for the Massachusetts people,” commented a later Tory, whose own
principles were high:
He found it difficult to maintain what appeared to him to be the
just prerogative of the crown, and at the same time to recover
and preserve the esteem of the country. The government had been
so popular [_i.e._ democratic] under the old charter, that the
exercise of the powers reserved to the crown by the new charter was
submitted to with reluctance.[131]
If “the prejudices against him were great,” some explanation is found
in a letter written by his son, Attorney-General Paul Dudley, to an
English friend, which came to the hands of Cotton Mather and was
published by him:
I refer you to Mr. -- for an Account of everything, especially
about the Government, and the Colledge; both which, are Discoursed
of here, in Chimney Corners, and Private Meetings, as confidently
as can be.... This Country will never be worth Living in, for
Lawyers and Gentlemen, till the _Charter_ is _Taken Away_. My
Father and I sometimes Talk of the Queen’s Establishing a _Court of
Chancery_ in this Country; I have Writ about it, to Mr. Blathwayt:
If the Matter should Succeed, you might get some Place worth your
Return; of which I should be very Glad.[132]
If New England had grown restive under the theocratic oligarchy, it had
no intention of being toryized by English placemen.
It was during these troubled years that a new force made its appearance
in Massachusetts which Sewall noted: “Sept. 25 [1690]. A printed
sheet entituled publick Occurrences comes out, which gives much
distaste because not Licensed....” A week later he added: “Print of
the Governour and Council comes out shewing their disallowance of
the Public Occurrences”; and the next day, “Mr. Mather writes a very
sharp letter about it.” This was Increase Mather, who would tolerate
no such lawlessness of the press, which must be kept as a private
preserve for the orthodox party. Against the Mather conservatism it
was impossible to make headway, and the little sheet did not come to
a second issue. Not till fourteen years later did Sewall set down a
similar note: “April 24 [1704]. I went to Cambridge.... I gave Mr.
Willard the first News-Letter that ever was carried over the River. He
shew’d it to the Fellows.” So began in America, at first unlawfully,
and then with due propriety, the work of making and publishing
newspapers. For seventy-two years thereafter, the _News-Letter_
was published continuously, justifying in all its utterances the
confidence of Boston conservatism, espousing naturally the Tory side
in the pre-Revolutionary quarrels, and coming to a sudden end on the
evacuation of Boston by General Gage.
On December 14, 1719, the _Boston Gazette_ entered the field as a
competitor for conservative readers, and two years later, August 17,
1721, the _New England Courant_ appeared, the first organ of the
opposition. It was edited by James Franklin, who possessed much of the
Franklin independence, untempered by the prudence of Benjamin; and he
set himself incautiously to the business of assailing the strait-laced
authorities of Boston. He got together a group of brisk young men,
known as the Hell-fire Club, who flung their vivacious satires at the
Mathers with such effect as to lead Cotton Mather to undertake the
following “Good Device”:
Warnings are to be given unto the wicked Printer, and his
Accomplices, who every week publish a vile Paper to lessen and
blacken the Ministers of the Town, and render their Ministry
ineffectual. A Wickedness never parall’d any where upon the Face of
the Earth.[133]
Although his prayers could not convert the wicked journalists, his
warnings availed with the magistrates, who took means to put a stop
to such disrespect. Twice Franklin was arraigned for contempt, and
once he spent four weeks in the common jail. By way of counterblast
to so disreputable a sheet, the _New England Weekly Journal_ appeared
on March 20, 1727, an eminently respectable sheet, edited by Mather
Byles and with such notable contributors as the Reverend Thomas Prince.
But with the coming of the _Journal_ with its staff of writers who
modeled their style upon the Augustan wits, we are in the mid-current
of the eighteenth century, that was to enlarge the influence of the
public press far beyond what could have been foreseen from its small
beginnings. It was to penetrate the inland villages and slowly wear
away their insularity of temper and outlook, bringing fresh ideas to
minds that had long stagnated. On the whole it was not a liberal press,
but its final effect was profoundly liberalizing.
Footnotes
[119] A similar plea had failed Dr. Church when he offended the
oligarchy twenty years before, who quite as arbitrarily had fined him
six hundred pounds.
[120] See the account in Palfrey, _History of Massachusetts_, Vol. II,
Book XII, p. 327; and in Wise, _Vindication of the Government of the
New England Churches, Introduction_. The current Tory interpretation of
the common law of sedition was severe. “In 1679, at the trial of Henry
Carr [Care], indicted for some passages in a weekly paper, the Lord
Chief Justice Scroggs declared it criminal at Common Law to ‘write on
the subject of government, whether in terms of praise or censure, it is
not material; for no man has a right to say anything of government’”
(_State Trials_, VII, 929; quoted in Schuyler, _The Liberty of the
Press in the American Colonies, etc._)
[121] See _Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings_, Second
Series, Vol. XV, pp. 283-296.
[122] _Vindication_, edition of 1860, pp. 50-53.
[123] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[124] _Ibid._, p. 60.
[125] _The Churches Quarrel Espoused_, p. 116.
[126] _Ibid._, p. 209.
[127] A gratuitous insult, as Wise was well known.
[128] “Letter to Robert Wodrow, September 17, 1715:” _Diary_, in
_Massachusetts Historical Collections_, Seventh Series, Vol. VIII, p.
327.
[129] _Ibid._, p. 450.
[130] The account with affidavits is given in Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II,
pp. 144-147.
[131] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, Vol. II, p.
148.
[132] Sewall, _Diary_, Vol. II, Introduction, p. 109.
[133] _Diary_, Vol. II, p. 663.
Book Two • The Colonial Mind
The undistinguished years of the early and middle eighteenth century,
rude and drab in their insularity, were the creative springtime of
democratic America--plebeian years that sowed what after times were
to reap. The forgotten men and women of those silent decades wrote
little, debated little, very likely thought little; they were plain
workmen with whom ideas counted for less than the day’s work. The stir
of achievement filled the land, daily penetrating farther into the
backwoods and bringing new farmlands under the plow. The stern demands
of necessity held men in their grip, narrowing the horizon of their
minds, and obscuring the vision of their larger accomplishment. Along
the Appalachian watershed a vast drama, magnificent in the breadth and
sweep of its movement, was being enacted by players unconscious of
their parts. Not until long after they had gone to their graves were
the broad lines of that drama revealed. Today it is plain that those
unremembered years were engaged in clearing away encumbrances more
significant than the great oaks and maples of the virgin wilderness:
they were uprooting ancient habits of thought, destroying social
customs that had grown old and dignified in class-ridden Europe. A
new psychology was being created by the wide spaces that was to be
enormously significant when it came to self-consciousness. If this
middle eighteenth century wrote little literature, it created and
spread among a vigorous people something of far greater importance to
America, the psychology of democratic individualism.
From this determining influence--too little recognized by later
generations--the creative outlines of our history have taken shape.
American ideals and institutions emerged in large part from the silent
revolution which during the middle eighteenth century differentiated
the American from the transplanted colonial; a change that resulted
from an amalgam of the older English stock with other races, and the
subjection of this new product on a great scale to the influence of
diffused landholding. From these two major facts of a new race and
a free environment came the social and political philosophy of older
America, to which we have traditionally applied the term democratic,
and which unconsciously wove itself into our daily intercourse and ways
of thinking.
Part One: The Mind in the Making • 1720-1763
Chapter I • Colonial Backgrounds
I • New Stock
Immigration in the eighteenth century was almost wholly economic in
motive. The reports of free land and free opportunity in America
penetrated to remote hamlets of Great Britain, and more slowly to
the continent, and drew hither a rude influx of the dispossessed and
disinherited of Europe. From the hopeless poverty of great masses
of old-world laborers, increasing numbers sought escape through
emigration, accepting the hardships and uncertainties of the migration
in the hope of bettering themselves ultimately. A host of English
nondescripts--broken men, bond servants, “gaol birds,” the lees and
settlings of the old world--came overseas, voluntarily or under
duress, in numbers running into the hundred thousands, and shared with
German peasants from the Palatine, or Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the
back-breaking labor of subduing the wilderness. About these unfortunate
men and women no romance has gathered; tradition and history have not
remembered their names or glorified their deeds; yet their blood runs
in the veins of most Americans today of the older stock, and their
contribution to our common heritage was great and lasting.
Of the different racial strains that mingled their blood with the
earlier English--Irish, Huguenot-French, German, Scotch-Irish--the last
was by far the most important. Not since 1630, when the _Lady Arbella_
and her companion vessels brought the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay,
had there been an event so momentous to America as the arrival in 1718
of some four thousand Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the vanguard of an
army which by the time of the Revolution had risen to approximately
two hundred thousand, or more than twelve times the number of English
who settled Massachusetts. They were desperately poor; the available
lands near the coast were already preëmpted; so armed with axes, their
seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the
backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through
a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements
of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic,
thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the
material out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned,
the creators of that “western type which in politics and industry
became ultimately the American type.”[134]
Next to the Scotch-Irish, who for the most part were free peasants,
the most important addition to eighteenth-century America were the
indented servants. Mostly from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany,
they represented all trades and some of the professions. The white
slavers of the times were well organized and plied a brisk trade with
satisfactory profits; and in consequence, a steady stream of indented
servants poured into America to turn the wheels of colonial industry.
In his history of the German redemptioners, Diffenderfer has printed a
number of newspaper advertisements which throw a curious light upon the
traffic: here are two:
From the _American Weekly Mercury_, February 18, 1729:
Lately arrived from London, a parcel of very likely English
servants, men and women, several of the men Tradesmen; to be
sold reasonable and Time allowed for payment. By Charles Read of
Philadelphia, or Capt. John Ball, on board his ship, at _Anthony
Millkinson’s Wharf_.
From the same for May 22, 1729, announcements of two ships:
There is just arrived from Scotland, a parcel of choice _Scotch
Servants_; Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers and ploughmen, some for
five and others for seven years; Imported by James Coults, etc.
Just arrived from London in the ship _Providence_, Capt. Jonathan
Clarke, a parcel of very likely _servants_, most Tradesmen, to be
sold on reasonable Terms.
The several nationalities were appraised and rated by careful merchants
and the fittest import seasons considered.[135] The “best time for
Servants is about the month of May,” one merchant wrote to his agent in
Ireland; and another warned, “Irish servants will be very dull, such
numbers have already arrived from Different parts & many more expected,
that I believe it will be overdone, especially as several Dutch vessels
are expected here, which will always command the Market.”[136]
In the middle colonies, particularly Pennsylvania, the greater number
of servants came from the Rhine country. Deceived by swindling agents,
thousands of German peasants, eager to get away from their war-harried
and plundered homes, sold themselves into servitude to pay their
passage to America. For the better part of a century these German
redemptioners thronged the ports of Philadelphia and Baltimore, as the
following news items testify:
From _Der Hoch Deutsche Pennsylvanische Bericht_, August 16, 1750:
Six ships with Irish servants have arrived at Philadelphia, and two
ships with German Newcomers. Some say 18 more on their way here;
others say 24 and still others 10,000 persons.
From the same, December 16, 1750:
Capt. Hasselwood has arrived from Holland with the latest ship that
brought Germans. It is the fourteenth that has come laden with
Germans this year. 4,317 have registered in the Court House....
Besides these, 1,000 servants and passengers arrived from Ireland
and England.[137]
Of the human side of this widespread traffic some little idea may
be got from the diary of a certain John Harrower, a man of modest
education who became an articled schoolmaster to a Virginia family in
the year 1774. Following are some entries:
Wednesday, 26th. [January, 1774.] This day I being reduced to
the last shilling was obliged to engage to go to Virginia for
four years, as a schoolmaster for Bedd, Board, washing and five
pounds during the whole time. I have also wrote my wife this day a
particular Acct of everything that has happened to me since I left
her until this date....
Munday 31st ... It is surprising to see the No. of good tradesmen
of all kinds, th’t come on b’d every day ... while the Clerk was
filling up the Indentures the doctor search’d every serv’t to see
that they were sound ... seventy-five were Intend [indented] to
Capt Bowres for four Years....
Munday 7th ... at 4 pm put a servant ashore extreamly bade in a
fever, and then got under saile for Virginia with seventy Servants
on board all indented to serve four yeares there at their different
Occupations....
Munday, May 2nd.... At 2 pm the Capt carried five servts ashore to
Hampton in order to sell their Indentures, But returned again at
Midnight with[out] selling any more but one Boat Builder....
Freiday, 6th ... at Hobshole there was five Glasgow ships and an
English Brigantine lying, at 2 pm we passed by Leedstown on our
Star board hand where there was a ship from London lying with
convicts....
Wednesday, 11th.... At 10 A M Both Coopers and the Barber from our
Mace [mess] went ashore upon tryall. At night one Daniel Turner a
servt returned onb’d from Liberty so Drunk that he abused the Capt
and Chief Mate and Boatswan to a verry high degree, which made
him to be horse whipt, put in Irons and thumb screwed, on houre
afterward he was unthumbscrewed, taken out of the Irons, but then
he was hand cuffed, and gagged all night....
Munday, 16th. This day severalls came on b’d to purchase servts
Indentures and among them there was two soul drivers, they are
Men who made it their business to go on b’d all ships who have
in either Servants or Convicts and buy sometimes the whole and
sometimes a parcell of them as they can agree, and then they drive
them through the Country like a parcell of Sheep until they can
sell them to advantage, but all went away without buying any....
Munday, 23rd [May] ... at same time all the rest of the servants
were ordered ashore to a tent at Fredericksbg and several of their
indentures were then sold, about 4 pm I was brought to Colonel
Daingerfield, when we immediately agreed and my Indenture for four
years was then delivered him and he was to send for me the next
day.[138]
In some such fashion, year after year, thousands of immigrants were
transported to America, there to mingle their blood with that of the
earlier comers. They came as social derelicts, were greeted by the
awaiting “soul-drivers,” found masters, worked and got on, or lost
heart and slipped away into the tempting backcountry whither so many
broken men went in search of refuge. They were a plebeian lot, and they
endured the common fate of the underling. Very likely they transmitted
to their children a bitter hostility to the ways of an aristocratic
society, the residuum of old grievances, and this slowly accumulating
animus was eventually to count heavily with lower-class colonials in
favor of a more democratic order in the new world.
II • The Frontier • Lubberland
The frontier, which exercised so creative an influence in shaping
American character and institutions, was regarded in very different
lights by the gentleman and the commoner. To the former it was no other
than lubberland, the abode of rude leveling, the temptation to gross
social laxity. It drew away servants who were needed, and kept the
price of real estate low; and such very different persons as Cotton
Mather and John Dickinson agreed in desiring to stop the constant
drain into the backcountry, and keep settlers in the older portions.
Descriptions of the frontier indited by aristocratic pens convey an
idea very different from later democratic conceptions, and paint the
ancestors of later Jacksonians in unlovely colors.
Among the earliest of these records is _The Private Journal kept by
Madam Knight on a Journey from Boston to New York in the Year 1704_.
Madam Knight was a sprightly and intelligent woman, keeper of a dame’s
school in Boston, who set down in the journal some of the odd things
that came under her sharp eyes on her venturesome trip on horseback.
As she drew away from the older settlements, signs of relaxing social
convention multiplied with the worsening of the road. Connecticut,
which had always been too democratic to suit the Boston taste, she
found “a little too much Independant in their principalls.” It was not
careful to uphold proper social distinctions, but inclined to a free
and easy leveling altogether offensive:
... They Generally lived very well and comfortable in their
famelies. But too Indulgent (especially ye farmers) to their
slaves: suffering too great familiarity from them, permitting ym
to sit at Table and eat with them (as they say to save time), and
into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand. They
told me that there was a farmer lived nere the Town where I lodged
who had some difference with his slave, concerning something the
master had promised him and did not punctually perform; wch caused
some hard words between them; But at length they put the matter to
Arbitration and Bound themselves to stand to the award of such as
they named--wch done, the Arbitrators Having heard the Allegations
of both parties, Order the master to pay 40s to black face, and
acknowledge his fault. And so the matter ended; the poor master
very honestly standing to the award.[139]
In the unsettled country strange figures with rude decivilized ways
made their appearance. Here is a description of one such product of the
wilderness:
I had scarce done thinking, when an Indian-like Animal come to the
door, on a creature very much like himselfe, in mien and feature,
as well as Ragged cloathing; and having ’litt, makes an Awkerd
Scratch with his Indian shoo, and a Nodd, sitts on ye block,
fumbles out his black Junk [salt meat?], dipps it in ye ashes, and
presents it piping hott to his muscheeto’s (?), and fell to sucking
like a calf, without speaking, for near a quarter of an hower. At
length the old man said how do’s Sarah do? who I understood was the
wretches wife, and Daughter to ye old man.[140]
She thus describes a squatter’s hut in the backwoods:
This little Hutt was one of the wretchedest I ever saw a habitation
for human creatures. It was suported with shores enclosed with
Clapboards, laid on Lengthways, and so much asunder, that the
Light come throu’ everywhere; the doore tyed on with a cord in ye
place of hinges; The floor the bear earth; no windows but such
as the thin covering afforded, nor any furniture but a Bedd with
a glass Bottle hanging at ye head on’t; an earthan cupp, a small
pewter bason, A Bord with sticks to stand on, instead of a table,
and a block or two in ye corner instead of chairs. The family were
the old man, his wife and two children; all and every part being
the picture of poverty. Notwithstanding both the Hutt and its
Inhabitance were very clean and tydee.[141]
As Madam Knight meditated upon the causes of such poverty, she came to
a characteristic Boston conclusion:
We may Observe here the great necessity and benefitt both of
Education and Conversation: for these people have as Large a
portion of mother witt, and sometimes Larger, than those who have
bin brought up in Citties; but for want of emprovements, Render
themselves almost Ridiculos, as above.[142]
It is in the chatty narrative of Colonel William Byrd of Virginia,[143]
that we find the earliest detailed description of the fringe of
squatter settlements. Colonel Byrd was the first gentleman of Virginia,
a man of old-world education and some literary taste,[144] polished
manners, and a vast number of acres of choice land which he had
acquired and held largely tax-free, by means well understood among
Virginia gentlemen.[145] Among the several capacities in which he
served the commonwealth in return for his many acres, was to act as
a member of a joint commission which in the year 1728 ran a boundary
line between Virginia and North Carolina. As he sat his horse in the
capacity of overseer, he observed many amusing things which he jotted
down in his journal.
The backcountry, it would seem, had already developed the free and
easy ways of a squatter world, shiftless, lubberly, independent, but
animated by hostility towards the aristocratic Old Dominion, from which
many of the settlers had come. North Carolina had long been a place of
refuge for debtors, criminals, and runaway servants, who used their
legs to even the score with a caste system; and Colonel Byrd regarded
the lazy crew with amused contempt:
Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live
with less Labour than in N Carolina. It approaches nearer to the
Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity
of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the
Slothfulness of the People. Indian corn is of so great increase,
that a little Pains will Subsist a very large Family with Bread,
and then they may have meat without any Pains at all, by the Help
of the Low Grounds, and the great Variety of Mast that grows on
the High-land. The Men, for their parts, just like the Indians,
impose all the Work upon the poor Women. They make their Wives
rise out of their Beds early in the Morning, at the same time that
they lye and Snore, till the Sun has run one third of his course,
and disperst all the unwholesome Damps. Then, after Stretching and
Yawning for half an Hour, they light their Pipes, and, under the
Protection of a cloud of Smoak, venture out into the open Air;
tho’ if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return
Shivering into the Chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they
stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and
gravely consider whether they had best go and take a Small Heat at
the Hough; but generally find reasons to put off till another time.
Thus they loiter away their Lives, like Solomon’s Sluggard, with
their Arms across, and at the Winding up of the Year Scarcely have
Bread to Eat. To speak the Truth, tis a thorough Aversion to Labor
that makes People file off to N Carolina, where Plenty and a Warm
Sun confirm them in their Disposition to Laziness for their whole
Lives.[146]
One thing Colonel Byrd noted everywhere: the lazy lubbers wanted
chiefly to be let alone; they dreaded the possibility of falling within
the Virginia line; they were content in their Eden, and had no wish to
exchange their freedom for the stricter rule of the Old Dominion:
Wherever we passed we constantly found the Borderers laid it to
Heart if their Land was taken into Virginia; they chose rather
belong to Carolina, where they pay no Tribute, either to God or
to Caesar.... Another reason was, that the Government there is
so Loose, and the Laws so feebly executed, that, like those in
the Neighbourhood of Sydon formerly, every one does just what
seems good in his own Eyes.... Besides, there might have been
some Danger, perhaps, in venturing to be so rigorous, for fear of
undergoing the Fate of an honest Justice in Corotuck Precinct. This
bold Magistrate, it seems, taking upon to order a fellow to the
Stocks, for being disorderly in his Drink, was, for his intemperate
zeal, carry’d thither himself, and narrowly escap’d being whipp’t
by the Rabble into the Bargain.[147]
They are rarely guilty of Flattering or making any Court to their
governours, but treat them with all the Excesses of Freedom and
Familiarity. They are of Opinion their rulers woul’d be apt to grow
insolent, if they grew Rich, and for that reason they take care to
keep them poorer, and more dependent, if possible, than the Saints
of New England used to do their Governours.[148]
To the student of colonial politics such glimpses are suggestive.
They reveal how early was the popular distrust of magistrates and
government; and they serve to explain the most striking characteristic
of Revolutionary political practice--the movement to minimize the
power of the judiciary and the executive, and magnify the power of
the legislature; to keep authority within the control of the local
democracies. “Every one does just what seems good in his own Eyes”--in
this attitude of social _laissez faire_ that throve on a diet of corn
pone and salt pork was the origin of the coonskin democracy of Old
Hickory that was to bring eventual disaster to the plans of gentlemen.
III • The Frontier • Land of Promise
Quite another picture of the frontier was likely to be painted by
the eighteenth-century democrat. In the well-known _Letters_ of
Crèvecœur, and in the recently published _More Letters from an American
Farmer_,[149] is an analysis of frontier life and its creative
influence upon the emerging American character, far more sympathetic
and thoughtful than the casual narratives of Madam Knight and Colonel
Byrd. The author was a cultivated Norman-French gentleman, who about
the year 1759 or 1760 entered the English colonies from Canada, was
a surveyor for a time near Albany, a resident of Pennsylvania and of
Ulster County in the province of New York, eventually acquired a farm
of 120 acres in Orange County which he named “Pine Hill,” married
Mehetabel Tippet of Yonkers, and became a competent tiller of the soil
as well as a lover of country life. In disposition he was active and
energetic, curious concerning the ways of nature and society. In Canada
he had joined the army as lieutenant under Montcalm and was sent on a
map-making expedition to the wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, and
traveled from Detroit as far south as the Ohio River. After quitting
Canada following the fall of Quebec, he traveled from Nova Scotia
through the English colonies to the extreme south, and perhaps visited
Bermuda and Jamaica, noting keenly the country and the manners of the
people. Perhaps no other man before the Revolution was so intimately
acquainted with the French and English colonies as a whole, with their
near background of frontier and the great wilderness beyond, as this
French American; and it was from long and intimate contact with the
realities of colonial life that he wrote those comments that have
preserved his name to the present.
The Revolution broke in upon his peaceful life with disastrous
consequences. He took no part in the preliminary disputes, and was
under grave suspicion by his neighbors in Orange County and by the
British. He was thrown into prison in New York by his Majesty’s
officers, where his health was undermined and he was reduced to extreme
straits. Finally permitted to sail for Europe without his family, he
was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland, but reached London where
he disposed of his manuscripts, and eventually got over to France
in August, 1781. After the peace he returned to America to find his
wife dead, his children scattered, and his farmhouse burnt. For a
time he was French consul at New York, where he interested himself
in establishing a packet service between France and America, and
in the improvement of agricultural methods, amongst other ways by
the establishment of botanical gardens. He was a scientific farmer,
introducing the system of cover crops into America and endeavoring to
introduce potato culture into France. He was a corresponding member of
the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Agricultural Society of Paris,
and a member of the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, et Arts de Meaux,
and of the Société d’Agriculture de Caen. In 1790 he returned to France
where he died in 1813.
Underneath the discursive chat of his letters is the firm fabric of
economic fact. In the background of his thinking Crèvecœur was quite
definitely Physiocratic, in his warm humanitarianism as well as in his
agrarian bias. As the kindly Frenchman studied the ways of colonial
society and contemplated the future, he asked himself the question,
what was the American as he was perceptibly differentiating from his
European ancestors? That a new race was emerging in this new country,
he was convinced; and that it was not in consequence chiefly of a new
mixture of blood--although that was not without its influence--he
likewise believed. A more potent influence was at work and that
influence was environment. Crèvecœur was something of an economic
determinist who sought to explain laws, customs, institutions--the
pattern of the social web--by an inquiry into economic factors. _Mann
ist was er isst._ “Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the
fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they
grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the
climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we
profess, and the mode of our employment.”[150] Transplanted from the
meager opportunities of the old world to the rich soil and ample spaces
of America, the European undergoes a subtle transformation.
The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor that
emigrate. In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have
by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes;
to what purpose should they ask one another, what countrymen they
are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who
wanders about, who works and starves ... can that man call England
or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for
him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met nothing but
the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and
punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface
of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.
Every thing tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of
living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe
they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetable mould, and
refreshing showers; they withered and were mowed down by want,
hunger, and war: but now by the power of transplantation, like all
other plants, they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they
were not numbered in any civil list of their country, except in
those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible
power has this surprizing metamorphosis been performed? By that
of the laws of their industry ... his country is now that which
gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: _Ubi panis ibi
patria_, is a motto of all emigrants.... Here the rewards of his
industry follow with equal steps in the progress of his labor; his
labor is founded on the basis of nature, _self-interest_; can it
want a stronger allurement?[151]
From economic individualism in presence of unexploited natural
resources, he deduces the natural emergence of a new American
psychology that differentiates the colonial from the European peasant.
If “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless
labor,” the emigrant “has passed to toils of a very different nature,
rewarded by ample subsistence”; if he has left off being a peasant and
become a free-holder and citizen; will not this man “entertain new
ideas, and form new opinions”? He possesses a stake in society; his
horizons broaden, his ambitions quicken; this is his country.
An European, when he first arrives, seems limited in his
intentions, as well as in his views; but he very suddenly alters
his scale ... he no sooner breathes our air than he forms new
schemes, and embarks in designs he never would have thought of
in his own country. There the plenitude of society confines many
useful ideas, and often extinguishes the most laudable schemes
which here ripen into maturity.[152]
He begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto
he had not lived, but simply vegetated; he now feels himself a
man, because he is treated as such; the laws of his own country
had overlooked him in his insignificancy; the laws of this cover
him with their mantle. Judge what an alteration there must arise
in the mind and thoughts of this man; he begins to forget his
former servitude and dependence, his heart involuntarily swells and
glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which
constitute an American.... From nothing to start into being, to
become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal
blessing is annexed! What a change indeed! It is in consequence of
that change that he becomes an American.[153]
_He_ is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient
prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the mode of life
he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of
our great _Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day
cause great changes in the world.[154]
Having convinced himself that economic relaxation was the creative
force in determining American institutions and psychology, he was
led to examine the working of that force in diverse portions of
America. It is neither in the older seacoast world, nor along the
extreme frontier that he discovers his representative America; but
in the broad stretches of clearings, the vigorous backcountry or
“middle-settlements,” where agriculture was followed soberly and
effectively. “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the soil,”
he pointed out; and it is the farmer of the middle region of New York
and Pennsylvania, with his broad acres in prosperous cultivation, his
economic independence, and his manly vigor, that he most delights to
dwell upon:
Europe has no such class of men; the early knowledge they acquire,
the early bargains they make, give them a great degree of sagacity.
As freemen, they will be litigious; pride and obstinacy are often
the cause of lawsuits; the nature of our laws and governments
may be another. As citizens it is easy to imagine, that they
will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political
disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others. As
farmers, they will be careful and anxious to get as much as they
can, because what they get is theirs.... As Christians, religion
curbs them not in their opinions; the laws inspect our actions;
our thoughts are left to God. Industry, good living, selfishness,
litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen, religious
indifference, are their characteristics.[155]
The thinly settled backwoods with their restless squatter population,
Crèvecœur regards as the rough vanguard of the westward-moving
settlements. It is here, he points out, that the forces of leveling
are strongest, that the last remnants of old-world distinctions and
privileges are stript away, that the idea of individual freedom carries
furthest, sometimes to social disaster. “He who would wish to see
America in its proper light,” he says, “and have a true idea of its
feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments, must visit our extended line
of frontiers where the last settlers dwell.”
Now we arrive near the great woods, near the last inhabited
districts; there men seem to be placed ... beyond the reach of
government, which in some measure leaves them to themselves ...
as they were driven there by misfortune, necessity of beginnings,
desire of acquiring large tracts of land, idleness, frequent want
of economy, ancient debts; the reunion of such people does not
afford a very pleasing spectacle.... The few magistrates they have,
are in general little better than the rest; they are often in a
perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by
blows, sometimes by means of law ... men are wholly left dependent
upon their native tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry,
which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few
moral rules. There, remote from the power of example, and check of
shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.
They are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years
the more respectable army of veterans which come after them. In
that space, prosperity will polish some, vice and law will drive
off the rest, who uniting with others like themselves will recede
still farther; making room for more industrious people, who will
finish their improvements, convert the loghouse into a convenient
habitation, and rejoicing that the first heavy labors are finished,
will change in a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a
fine, fertile, well regulated district. Such is our progress, such
is the march of the Europeans toward the interior parts of this
continent. In all society there are off-casts; this impure part
serves as our precursors or pioneers.[156]
Crèvecœur’s chattiness and bucolic love of nature may easily obscure
for the casual reader, the solid economic core of the _Letters_. The
story of Andrew, the Hebridean, with its note of idyllic simplicity,
reads like a tale out of the French romantics; yet in its broad outline
it is the story of many an immigrant who penetrated to the hospitable
backcountry, took land, and prospered. The strong coloring of the
description is only partly French; in part it is a reflection of the
spontaneous optimism that was working like leaven in colonial society.
It is the old-fashioned phrasing rather than the matter that makes the
_Letters_ seem obsolete to modern readers. Change the wording, soften
the bucolic enthusiasm, and the sober American of earlier generations,
as he observed the arrival of the strong-armed peasant from the north
of Europe, would have discovered nothing strange in such a sentiment as
this:
After a foreigner from any part of Europe is arrived, and become
a citizen; let him devoutly listen to the voice of our great
parent, which says to him, “Welcome to my shores, distressed
European; bless the hour in which thou didst see my verdant fields,
my fair navigable rivers, and my green mountains!--If thou wilt
work, I have bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober, and
industrious, I have greater rewards to bestow on thee--ease and
independence. I will give thee fields to feed and clothe thee; a
comfortable fire-side to sit by.... I shall endow thee besides
with the immunities of a freeman.... Go thou, and work and
till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and
industrious.”[157]
Andrew the Hebridean is a portrait painted by a Physiocratic
humanitarian, but the idealism that would build peace and content
on honest foundations, and would deny them to none, not even the
poorest if they proved worthy, found frequent justification in the
prosaic experience of colonial America. If many an immigrant found
“soul-drivers” awaiting them, many others like Andrew found a more
hospitable reception.
Across the peaceful scenes depicted in the _Letters_ soon fell the dark
shadow of civil war, and Crèvecœur’s content was rudely broken in upon.
As a French humanitarian he loathed war and all its works, and every
instinct and argument counseled him to stand apart from the strife
that seemed to him so meaningless. He liked peace and orderly ways and
he could not work himself into a passion over the supposed wrongs of
a people who seemed to him blessed above all others on this troubled
earth. As a philosophical farmer he held the politician in contempt and
refused to take seriously abstract theories of statecraft. The citizen
who stuck to his plow was happier, he believed, than the citizen who
talked noisily of his wrongs, and was eager to overset things. The
rough leveling of the frontier he had found distasteful, and as he
watched the development of the Revolutionary disputes, he seems to have
discovered in the Whig program an irruption of the tumultuous frontier
leveling that threatened to sweep away the common peace and well-being.
The source of the unrest he traced to New England, the feculent
wellspring of all the hypocrisies; it was inspired, he was convinced,
by a selfish demagoguery and led by unprincipled mobsters. In so far
as he held partisan sympathies, they inclined to the Loyalist side.
His education in England and his breeding as a gentleman, drew him
towards the Loyalist gentry with whom he associated in Orange County,
and repelled him from the noisy ardor of the plebeian patriots. Yet in
spirit he stood resolutely aloof, although his sympathies were cruelly
hurt by the sufferings that fell under his observation. In certain
letters only recently published (_Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_), he narrates the misfortunes that befell innocent men and
women from the bitterness of civil strife,[158] and draws a picture of
the lawlessness and greed of patriot committeemen, and the intolerance
of the mob spirit, that is not pleasant to contemplate.[159]
Bitterness rarely exudes from his pen, but when he considers the ways
of Whig politicians he now and then indulges in a passage that reveals
his loathing of the mercenary spirit that he discovers in the new
patriotism. In the conclusion of “The American Belisarius” he gives
vent to his anger against those who outrage common morality; if it were
not for the fact that this is a moral universe, he says ironically:
I’d worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break
every duty, neglect every bond, overlook every obligation to which
no punishment was annexed. I’d set myself calumniating my rich
neighbors. I’d call all passive, inoffensive men by the name of
inimical. I’d plunder or detain the entrusted deposits. I’d trade
on public moneys, though contrary to my oath. Oath! Chaff for good
Whigs, and only fit to bind a few conscientious Royalists! I’d
build my new fortune on the depreciation of the money. I’d inform
against every man who would make any difference betwixt it and
silver, whilst I, secure from any discovery or suspicion by my good
name, would privately exchange ten for one. I’d pocket the fines
of poor militiamen extracted from their heart’s blood. I’d become
obdurate, merciless, and unjust. I’d grow rich, “fas vel nefas.”
I’d send others a-fighting, whilst I stayed at home to trade and
to rule. I’d become a clamorous American, a modern Whig, and offer
every night incense to the god Arimanes.[160]
A lover of peace and good will, a humanitarian concerned only with
justice and the common well-being, seeking new ways to enlarge the
returns of agriculture, devoid of petty ambition and local prejudice,
a friend of man, Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was an embodiment of the
generous spirit of French revolutionary thought, a man whom Jefferson
would have liked for a neighbor. His sketchy and discursive writings
may not be notable literature, but we could ill spare them from the
library of eighteenth-century America.
Footnotes
[134] See Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_, p. 37.
[135] Sometimes the profits were unexpectedly great, as is illustrated
by the case of a certain George Martin, who contracted with a
shipmaster to transport himself, his wife, and five children to America
for fifty-four pounds. He paid down $16, but died on the passage.
On the arrival of the vessel in port, the captain foreclosed on the
contract, sold the widow for twenty-two pounds, the three eldest sons
at thirty pounds each, and the two youngest, who were under five years
of age, he sold for ten pounds, realizing one hundred and twenty-two
pounds on a debt under fifty-one pounds. (Diffenderfer, _The German
Immigrants into Pennsylvania_, p. 268).
[136] _Ibid._, p. 229.
[137] _Ibid._, Part II, “The Redemptioners,” p. 209.
[138] For the entire diary, see _American Historical Review_, Vol. VI,
pp. 65-107.
[139] _The Private Journal, etc._, p. 40.
[140] _Ibid._, pp. 29-30.
[141] _Ibid._, p. 28.
[142] _Ibid._, p. 45.
[143] “The History of the Dividing Line,” in _The Writings of Colonel
William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esquire_, New York, 1901.
[144] At his death his library contained some four thousand volumes,
“the largest private library in the English-speaking colonies,”
according to his biographer.
[145] His father died possessed of 26,231 acres. He himself owned at
his death “no less than 179,440 acres of the best land in Virginia.”
[146] _Op. cit._, pp. 75-76.
[147] _Ibid._, p. 87.
[148] _Ibid._, p. 81.
[149] Published under the title of _Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_ by the Yale University Press, 1925.
[150] _Letters ..._, in edition of 1904, p. 56.
[151] _Ibid._, pp. 52-55.
[152] _Ibid._, p. 76.
[153] _Ibid._, pp. 77, 79.
[154] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.
[155] _Ibid._, pp. 57-58.
[156] _Ibid._, pp. 58-60.
[157] _Ibid._, pp. 90-91.
[158] See, e. g., “The Man of Sorrows,” “The Wyoming Massacre,” “The
History of Mrs. B.,” “The Frontier Woman.”
[159] See, e. g., “The American Belisarius” and “Landscapes.”
[160] _Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_, p. 249.
Chapter II • The Anachronism of Jonathan Edwards
I
Before an adequate democratic philosophy could arise in this world of
pragmatic individualism, the traditional system of New England theology
must be put away, and a new conception of man and of his duty and
destiny in the world must take its place. For the moment Calvinism was
strengthened by the coming of the Scotch-Irish who spread the familiar
dogmas along the frontier, remote from attack by old-world rationalism;
nevertheless those dogmas carried within them the seeds of slow decay.
The world that had created them lay in a forgotten past. The five
points of Calvinism, postulated on a God of wrath, were no longer
living principles answering to common experience; they were become no
other than ghosts that walked on the Sabbath to terrify the timid. An
intellectual _Aufklärung_ was a necessary preliminary to the creation
of a fruitful social philosophy. Theology must be made to square with
actuality, or yield control of men’s minds to more stimulating things.
But unfortunately there was no vigorous attack but only a tedious
decay. The old was too deeply entrenched to be routed, and stricken
with palsy it lingered out a morose old age. For years New England
stewed in its petty provincialism, untouched by the brisk debates that
stirred the old world. No vigorous disputant challenged its orthodoxy.
In the year 1726 Cotton Mather wrote, “I cannot learn, That among
all the Pastors of Two Hundred Churches, there is one Arminian; much
less an Arian, or a Gentilist.”[161] Nevertheless rationalism was
in the air, and although it might be excluded from the minister’s
study, it spread its subtle infection through the mass of the people.
The backwash of English deism reached the shores of New England, and
by the decade of the forties a movement of liberalism seems to have
got under way. The word Arminian sprinkles more freely the pages of
controversial literature, indicating the nature of the attack being
directed against Calvinism. Dogma was face to face with rationalism.
A critical movement had long been developing in England, undermining
there the foundations of Calvinism; and in this work members of the
Anglican clergy had aided. Hooker had been a rationalist and the
influence of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ was thrown in favor of an
appeal to reason and to history. He rejected a literal Hebraism for
a more philosophical interpretation of the Scripture. “The Light of
naturall understanding, wit and reason, is from God,” he argued; “he
it is which thereby doth illuminate every man entring into the World.
He is the Author of all that we think or do by vertue of that light
which himselfe hath given.”[162] Because of this rationalizing tendency
the Anglican clergy, before the middle of the seventeenth century, had
passed from the Calvinistic to the Arminian position. The fundamental
dogma of Arminianism was the doctrine of the freedom of the will--that
the elect of God are not pre-chosen, but a righteous life and good
works will bring men into the way of salvation. Destructive of the
whole Calvinistic system as such doctrine was--striking at the taproot
of determinism--Arminianism carried a social significance greater than
its theological import: it was an expression of the ideal of individual
responsibility that emerged from the decay of the feudal system. The
first reformers had asserted the right to individual interpretation
of the Scriptures; the Arminians threw upon the individual the whole
responsibility, bidding him assert his will and achieve his own
salvation.
English rationalism was carried further by a notable group of thinkers,
including Milton and Locke, who rapidly passed from Arminianism to
Arianism, and thence to Deism. By the beginning of the eighteenth
century English Presbyterianism, which had clung to Calvinism long
after the defection of the Anglicans, was undermined by the growing
rationalism and finally passed over into Unitarianism. Calvinism had
lost the battle in the old world and ceased to play an important part
in the intellectual life of England. In the face of this steady drift
away from the conception of a divine Will that dwarfed the human will
and held it fixed in the mesh of the divine purpose, towards the
conception of the responsibility of the individual and the significance
of the moral code in the work of salvation, the New England Calvinists
found their work cut out for them. A critical spirit was stirring, an
incipient rationalism was beginning to ask questions; orthodoxy for
the first time was on the defensive, and ill equipped for the pending
battle.
But Calvinism had fallen into the clutch of forces greater and more
revolutionary than either minister or congregation realized. To preach
with convincing force one must appeal to the common experience; dogma
must seem to square with the evident facts of life; it must appear
to be the inevitable and sufficient explanation of the mysteries and
perplexities that beset men in the world of reality. When it ceases to
be a reasonable working hypothesis in the light of common experience,
it is no longer a controlling influence in men’s lives. And this was
the unhappy predicament in which Calvinism now found itself. Take, for
example, the doctrine of total depravity. In the corrupt worlds of
Augustine and John Calvin such a doctrine must have seemed a reasonable
explanation of the common brutality; an evil society must spring from
the evil heart of man. But in the village world of New England the
doctrine had lost its social sanction. When in moments of calm sense
these provincial Calvinists asked themselves if the human heart were
in truth utterly depraved, if they themselves and their neighbors were
such vipers and worms as they professed to be, the conviction must have
grown upon them that such professions were untrue. The everyday life of
the New England village was animated by rugged virtues--by kindliness
toward neighbors and faithfulness to a strict ethical code, rather than
by hatred to God and man, or brutal wallowing in sin. In short, these
villagers knew that they were very far from a bad lot; and when they
pondered on this fact they must have discovered increasing difficulty
in reconciling Sunday dogma and week-day experience. Although they
repeated the familiar creed, the sanction for that creed was gone; it
was the voice of dogma that spoke, and not the voice of reason and
experience.[163]
Such is the explanation, as well, of the decay of another of the
cardinal points of Calvinism--the dogma of special election. In an
aristocratic society it is natural to believe that God has set men
apart in classes; but as the leveling process tended to strip away
social distinctions, the new individualism undermined the older class
psychology. When the common man has freed himself from political
absolutism, he will become dissatisfied with theological absolutism.
The right to achieve salvation is a natural corollary to the right to
win social distinction; that one’s future status lay wholly beyond the
reach of one’s will, that it rested in the hands of an arbitrary God
who gave or withheld salvation at pleasure, was a conception that ill
accorded with the nascent ideal of democracy. When that ideal should
be sufficiently clarified, the dogma of the elect of God, like the
aristocratic conception of the king’s favorite, would be quietly put
away in the potter’s field.
As the century advanced, the growing dissatisfaction with Calvinism
received fresh impetus from the new social philosophy of France. The
teaching of Rousseau that in a state of nature men were good, that
they are still sound at heart, and that the evils of civilization
have resulted from a perversion of the social contract, would appeal
to men whose experience was daily teaching them the falseness of the
traditional dogmas; and the ideal of equality would come home with
special meaning to men bred up in villages and on the frontier. Such
doctrines were fundamentally hostile to the spirit of Calvinism: not
only did Rousseau set the doctrine of human perfectibility over against
the dogma of total depravity, but he quickened the passion of revolt
against every form of arbitrary authority, theological as well as
political and social. Although the provincial colonial might not come
in immediate contact with such speculative philosophy, in the long
run he could not escape being influenced by it, and that influence
would count against a decadent theology that held men’s minds in its
tenacious _rigor mortis_.
The crux of the question, it came finally to be seen by the apologists
of the old order, lay in the fundamental problem of determinism. Was
the will of man effectively free, or was it held in strict subjection
to the stable will of God? According as the decision went touching
this question, would stand or fall the entire metaphysical structure
of Calvinism. To this problem, therefore, the best minds among the
ministers directed their thought; and the historical position of
Jonathan Edwards, greatest of the defenders of Calvinism, is revealed
in its true perspective when his labors are studied in the light of
this vital question.
II
Never had the traditional theology been so sorely in need of a champion
as at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century;
and such a champion God raised up--many devout Calvinists believed--in
the person of Jonathan Edwards. Armed at all points--a theologian
equipped with the keenest dialectics, a metaphysician endowed with a
brilliantly speculative mind, a psychologist competent to deal with
the subtlest phenomena of the sick soul--here was a man who might be
counted on to justify the ancient dogmas to the troubled churches of
New England.
The offspring of four generations of religious enthusiasts, by every
right of heredity and training the child of Puritanism, Jonathan
Edwards was the last and greatest of the royal line of Puritan mystics.
As a young man he felt himself to be living in the very presence of
God; he was conscious of the divine life flowing through and around
him, making him one with the Godhood; and he was filled with yearning
for personal union with the divine love in Christ. His intellectual and
spiritual life was molded by a God-consciousness as passionate as that
of Spinoza; and it is this fact of a lifelong devotion to the God-idea
that furnishes the clue to an understanding of his later development.
Not content that God had marked him for His own, he must build a
philosophical universe about the Godhood, justifying his mysticism by
a metaphysical idealism. He must examine critically the foundations of
his creed and establish his theology upon philosophy. No obscurity must
remain unprobed, no link in the chain of reasoning escape challenge:
he must base the five points of Calvinism upon a metaphysics that
should relate them to a universal system of thought, giving them a
cosmic as well as a Biblical sanction. It was a great ambition, likely
to prove too difficult even for the remarkable powers of Edwards; and
if in pursuit of new arguments for old doctrines, he found himself
inclosed in a mesh of subtleties, if his theology and metaphysics were
never quite reconciled, blame must be laid upon the difficulty of
the undertaking rather than on the incapacity of the thinker. To one
cardinal principle Edwards was faithful--the conception of the majesty
and sufficiency of God; and this polar idea provides the clue to both
his philosophical and theological systems.
Yet with this as a guide there is much that remains perplexing. There
are inconsistencies in his thought as there were in his pastoral
life; and we shall understand his position only when we recognize the
contrary tendencies which confused him, as the inevitable consequences
of a system of thought that was at once reactionary and progressive,
the outcome of certain latent inconsistencies too antagonistic for any
thinker to reconcile. As the defender of the traditional theology,
setting his face against the developing experience of his generation,
and as a rigid disciplinarian, reverting to the older Separatist
conception of a church of the elect, and rejecting the “whole way
covenant” of his grandfather Stoddard, he may perhaps appear in the
light of a reactionary. But as the expounder of philosophic idealism
he was looking forward to Emerson; and as the advocate of the new
revivalistic methods, exalting the experience of conversion as the
central fact of the Christian life, and assisting the forces that were
drawing church and state apart, he was a pronounced revolutionist,
the schismatic leader of the New Lights and the father of later
Congregationalism. That Edwards was aware of certain inconsistencies is
fairly evident; that he was puzzled, hesitated, and stopped halfway in
his labors, is evident too, unless we believe, with Mrs. Stowe, that
certain of his speculations were too daring to put into print. The
chains that bound him were too strong to be broken; the contradictions
that lay at the root of the Calvinistic system could be eradicated only
by grubbing up the whole, and for that the time had not yet come.
In his early years, before his conversion turned him aside from
his true path, setting the apologetics of the theologian above the
speculations of the philosopher, Edwards gave promise of becoming a
strikingly creative thinker. Following the native bent of his genius,
he plunged into the study of metaphysics with such fruitful results
that it seemed likely that New England Puritanism was at last to
come to flower; that the mystical perception of the divine love,
which had steeped the early Puritan thought in emotion and quickened
it to poetry, was now to create a system of philosophy which, like
transcendentalism in the next century, should adequately express the
aspirations of the New England mind. There is no more interesting phase
in the early history of Edwards than the transition from religious
mysticism to philosophical idealism. The yearning for the knitting of
the soul to Christ, as expressed in the imagery of the Song of Songs,
burgeoned into a larger idealism that translated the Rose of Sharon and
the Lily of the Valley into an all-pervasive spirit of divine life. In
certain moods it is the mystic who cries, “My soul breaketh for the
longing it hath; my soul waiteth for the Lord, more than they who watch
for the morning.”
He was reading one day the words of Scripture [says Allen,
paraphrasing Edwards’ diary], “Now unto the King eternal, immortal,
invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever, Amen,”
when there came to him for the first time a sort of inward, sweet
delight in God and divine things. A sense of the divine glory was,
as it were, diffused through him. He thought how happy he should
be if he might be rapt up to God in Heaven, swallowed up in him
forever. He began to have an inward, sweet sense of Christ and the
work of redemption. The Book of Canticles attracted him as a fit
expression for his mood. It seemed to him as if he were in a kind
of vision, alone in the mountains or some solitary wilderness,
conversing sweetly with Christ and wrapt and swallowed up in
God.... God’s Excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed
to appear in everything--in the sun, moon, and stars; in clouds
and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all
nature, which used greatly to fix my mind.[164]
In other moods the intellect gains ascendency over the emotions, and it
is the idealistic metaphysician who speaks. With a searching curiosity
that impelled him to ask what lies behind the outward semblance of
things, binding them into a coherent whole and imparting to the world
of experience a compelling unity, he came early to an interpretation
distinctly Berkeleyan. From what source he derived it has been much
debated and remains unanswered; nevertheless it is clear that it is
closely related to his religious mysticism. When he inquired what lies
back of the outward semblance, what is the thing in itself behind
attributes and qualities, the existence of which is implicit in our
perception of time and space, but which cannot be resolved into the
things perceived, it was natural that he should have interpreted this
_Ding an sich_ in terms of God. “Men are wont to content themselves
by saying merely that it is something; but that something is _He_ in
whom all things consist.”[165] The world of sensation thus translates
itself into a world of ideas; and this world of ideas, the expression
of the divine mind, is the only reality. The more important of his
early generalizations are given by Allen in some extracts from his
notes on the “Mind”: “Bodies have no existence of their own.” “All
existence is mental; the existence of all things is ideal.” “The brain
exists only mentally, or in idea.” “Instead of matter being the only
proper substance, and more substantial than anything else because it is
hard and solid, yet it is truly nothing at all, strictly and in itself
considered.” “The universe exists nowhere but in the divine mind.”
“Space is necessary, eternal, infinite, and omnipresent. But I had as
good speak plain. I have already said as much as that space is God.”
“And indeed the secret lies here,--that which truly is the substance
of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable
Idea in God’s mind, together with His stable will that the same shall
gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to
certain fixed and exact established methods and laws; or, in somewhat
different language, the infinitely exact, precise, Divine Idea,
together with the answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable
will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and
effects on their minds.”[166]
Edwards had come to such conclusions before the normal unfolding
of his mind was interrupted by his conversion. From the first a
strong bias toward theology had tended to warp his interest in the
purely metaphysical, and with the quickening of an active religious
experience, he turned to examine the dogmas which expressed his faith.
The call of the churches in distress came to him, and he made ready
his logic to do battle with the enemy. Against the twin tendencies
that were undermining the foundations of Calvinism--Arminianism with
its humanistic emphasis and deism with its mechanistic--the deepest
instincts of Edwards protested. The profound God-consciousness that
filled him was stirred by what seemed an infidel attack upon the
divine glory and sufficiency; the mystic and idealist was aroused to
protest against a theology that conceived of religion as consisting
of benevolence toward men rather than in union with God; and
against a philosophy that in constructing a mechanical system was
de-personalizing God into a vague First Cause, and bowing him politely
out of the universe. In so great a crisis his duty seemed clear--to
vindicate, not the ways of God, but God himself to men; to assert the
glory and sufficiency of God even to the extent of minifying the
capacities and potentialities of man.
The basis of his defense was already provided in his metaphysics, the
conception of the divine idea existent in God’s mind and expressed
in His stable will. The needs of his polemics, however, thrust into
relief the secondary rather than the primary element in his philosophy,
exalting the doctrine of the divine will to the obscuring of the divine
idea. How this came about is sufficiently clear in the light of the
fact that in explaining the existence of evil, Calvinism fell back on
determinism: the dogma of election could be fitted to the conception of
a precise and stable will of God. The long feud between Arminianism and
Calvinism resulted from emphasis laid upon different attributes of the
Godhood. Shall God be interpreted in terms of will or love? If He is
the sovereign ruler of the universe, He is also the common father; and
that which broadly divides later theological systems from earlier is
the shift from the former interpretation to the latter. The strategic
weakness of Edwards’s position lay in his assumption of the divine
sovereignty as a cardinal postulate.
But in adhering to the doctrine of predetermined election by the
sovereign will of God, Edwards did unconscious violence to the
instincts of the mystic, that throughout his earlier speculations--and
in much of his later, as well--impelled him to glorify the love of God
the Father, and the sweetness of spiritual communion with Him. The
practical necessities of the preacher, called upon to uphold the dogma
of election in face of growing disbelief, seem to have forced him to
such a position; but once having entered upon the train of speculation
opened by the question of divine polity involved in “His having mercy
on whom He will have mercy, while whom He will. He hardeneth,” he came
somewhat reluctantly to accept the doctrine of God’s sovereignty as
the cardinal principle of his theology, the creative source of his
thinking. Thereafter he followed a path that led back to an absolutist
past, rather than forward to a more liberal future. He had broken
wholly with the social tendencies of his age and world.[167]
The philosophical conception of divine sovereignty was too abstract
to concern the New England laity; it was rather against the dependent
dogmas of election and total depravity that the revolt was rising.
And in defense of these threatened dogmas Edwards put forth his best
strength. The crux of the matter, obviously, lay in the difficult
question of the power of will. The entire structure of Calvinistic
theology had been erected upon the assumption of determinism; and
it must stand or fall according as the argument should justify or
fail to justify that hypothesis. If the human will is effectively
free to choose between good and evil, the dogma of the elect must
go down with the dogma of predestination; and the teachings of the
Arminians--tending, as they seemed to the Calvinist, to abase the
creator in exalting the creature, and minifying the sovereignty of God
in magnifying the excellence of man--would be in a way to prevail.
Around this crucial point the battle had long raged, and it was with
full realization of the critical nature of the problem that Edwards
resolved to penetrate to the root of the matter, and by subjecting
the question of determinism to exact analysis, rout the enemies of
Calvinism from the inmost keep of their stronghold. His celebrated work
_On the Freedom of the Will_, written in 1754, not only was his most
important contribution to theology, but it was the last great defense
of the conservatism that was stifling the intellectual life of New
England.
The argument of this knotty book rests on a psychological rather than
a metaphysical basis. Compressed into the briefest terms it runs thus:
will is subject to desire, and desire follows what seems to us good;
hence the determining impulse is to be sought in the impulse to seek
the apparent good. The ethical import of such an argument will turn,
of course, upon the character of the good which the natural man may
be expected to desire. To Rousseau with his benevolent interpretation
of human nature nothing is to be feared from the subjection of will
to desire. Nor to the younger Edwards, feeling his way along the path
of transcendentalism, rediscovering the doctrine of the inner light,
was such subjection to be feared. In a remarkable sermon published
in 1734, he had expounded the thesis, “That there is such a thing
as a Spiritual and Divine Light, immediately imparted to the Soul
by God, of a different nature from any that is obtained by natural
means.”[168] The divine splendor which the idealist had seen diffused
through the material world the theologian was now merging with the
regenerative life of the Holy Spirit which “acts in the mind of a
saint as an in-dwelling vital principle.” It is “a kind of emanation
of God’s beauty, and is related to God as the light is to the sun”;
it is a new vision by means of which one may “see the beauty and
loveliness of spiritual things.” In such a reinterpretation of the
Quaker doctrine--so harshly condemned by the earlier Puritans--Edwards
entered upon a train of thought that threatened to disrupt the entire
Calvinistic system. He was at the dividing of the ways; he must abandon
transcendentalism or the dogma of total depravity.
Instead he sought refuge in compromise, endeavoring to reconcile what
was incompatible. Herein lay the tragedy of Edwards’s intellectual
life; the theologian triumphed over the philosopher, circumscribing
his powers to ignoble ends. The field of efficiency allotted by the
later theologian to this “in-dwelling vital principle,” was no longer
coextensive with the universe, but was narrowed to the little world
of the elect. In the primal state of man, Edwards argued, before the
sin of Adam had destroyed the harmony between creature and creator,
the light which flowed from God as from a sun shone freely upon His
universe, filling its remotest parts with the divine plenitude; but
with the fall the harmony was destroyed, the sun was hidden, and only
stray beams broke through the rifts to shine upon those whom God willed
them to shine upon; all else in creation was given over to eternal
darkness. And if the natural man, thus cast into sudden darkness “as
light ceases in a room when the candle is withdrawn,” is a being whose
will is impotent to his salvation, it follows that he will now be
impelled as inevitably towards evil as before he was impelled towards
good. Every instinct of a nature corrupt and compact of sin, and with
no wish to exchange darkness for light--having no eyes for the divine
glory--drives him to a blind and consuming hatred of God. He is become
as a loathsome “viper, hissing and spitting poison at God,” the
outcast and pariah of the universe. There is no drawing back from the
conclusion involved in the argument; the Edwardean logic moves forward
by regular steps. The punishment meted out to sin is to be measured
by the excellence of which the sin is a denial. God is of infinite
excellence, and denial of His excellence is therefore infinitely sinful
and merits infinite punishment. As a perfectly just judge God could not
decree otherwise; because of the infinite heinousness of his sin, the
natural man must receive the doom of eternal damnation.[169]
Under the rod of such logic--grotesque, abortive, unseasoned by any
saving knowledge of human nature--Edwards preached that remarkable
series of imprecatory sermons that sank deep into the memory of New
England, and for which it has never forgiven him.[170] Unfortunate
as those sermons were in darkening the fame of an acute thinker,
disastrous as they were in providing a sanction for other men to
terrify the imaginations of ill-balanced persons, we cannot regret that
Edwards devoted his logic to an assiduous stoking of the fires of hell.
The theology of Calvin lay like a heavy weight upon the soul of New
England, and there could be no surer way to bring it into disrepute,
than to thrust into naked relief the brutal grotesqueries of those
dogmas that professed thus to explain the dark mysteries which lie upon
the horizons of life. For a long while yet they were to harass the
imagination of New England, but the end already could be foreseen. Once
the horrors that lay in the background of Calvinism were disclosed to
common view, the system was doomed. It might still wear the semblance
of life; it might still remain as an evil genius to darken the
conscience of men and women; but its authoritative appeal was gone. In
this necessary work of freeing the spirit of New England, no other
thinker played so large or so unconscious a part as Jonathan Edwards;
and it was the notorious minatory sermons--the translation into vivid
images of the generalized dogmas--that awakened the popular mind to an
understanding of the conclusions involved in the premises.
While Edwards was thus hastening the decay of Calvinism with his lurid
painting of “the landscape of hell,” in another phase of his work he
was engaged in awakening an interest in religion among the slothful
churches. He had long been interested in the phenomena of conversion,
and as the great revival of the forties, led by Whitefield, spread from
England to the colonies, he joined eagerly in the work. In consequence
of an earlier revival in his parish of Northampton, his attention had
been drawn to the little understood psychology of the awakening soul,
and with the detachment of the scientist he set himself to study the
problem. The terrors aroused by his minatory sermons provided his
clinical laboratory with numerous cases of abnormal emotionalism. Day
after day he probed and analyzed and compared, until as a result of
his close studies in vivisection, he became a specialist in the theory
of conversion, commanding the eager attention of a generation that had
come to look upon this as the central fact of Christian experience.
It is not easy today to be sympathetic with this phase of Edwards’s
work; it belongs equally with his dogmas to a world of thought that
is no longer ours. The repulsive records as they are set down in his
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, marked by evidence of
pathological states of mind not far removed from insanity, no longer
seem a testimony to God’s beneficent presence; the spiritual writhings
which this gentle-natured student watched with such fascination,
appear rather to be cases for the alienist to prescribe for. But to
Edwards the terrors of a five-year-old girl were not pathological;
they were the soul-labors of the spiritual rebirth, the visible signs
of the supreme miracle of the universe, filling him with wonder and
awe at God’s infinite mercy; and like a modern psychologist he was
at enormous pains to chart the successive steps in the miraculous
transformation.[171]
Other and greater consequences were to flow from the new revivalism.
The Great Awakening was the single movement that stirred the colonial
heart deeply during three generations. It reveals, among other things,
that America was still living in the world of the seventeenth century:
that the upper class was not yet rationalized, nor the middle class
commercialized. Theology was still of greater popular interest than
politics. In its chief phenomena the Great Awakening was a return to an
earlier age--to those unbalanced enthusiasms of the Puritan upheaval.
It was essentially a mass movement. Its use of hypnotic suggestion, its
lurid terrorism, its outcries and hysterical possessions, reveal like
the Ranters of a hundred years before the phenomena of mob psychology,
and it made appeal to the ill-educated, the isolated, the neurotic, to
the many natural victims of hypnotic excitation bred by the monotony
and austerity of village life. Its after effects were revolutionary,
for the quickening of religious emotionalism marked the beginning of
the end of Puritan formalism.
The bitter quarrel among the churches which followed as an aftermath
was more than a theological dispute; it was a sign of the breaking
up of the traditional parish system. The hierarchy had long before
lost its authority, but in their several parishes the ministers still
enjoyed patriarchal power. The tragic dismissal of Edwards from his
parish was an unprecedented revolt against that authority. But greater
changes were to follow. After the Great Awakening itinerant preachers
made their appearance, who presumed to enter any parish without the
consent of the minister, and preach such doctrines as they would. They
were non-conforming free lances, hostile to the established church,
whose stock-in-trade was the new emotionalism. Under their leadership,
Separatist congregations were gathered that were not only an offense to
the regular establishment but a challenge to its authority. Hundreds
left the old congregations and flocked to the Baptists and Methodists,
and naturally they would make trouble over paying taxes to support a
church they had repudiated. In short, a little revolution was under way
that was to end in the complete disintegration of the parish system.
By a curious irony of fate, Jonathan Edwards, reactionary Calvinist
and philosophical recluse, became the intellectual leader of the
revolutionaries. His insistence upon conversion as the sole ground
of admission to communion was the final blow that destroyed the old
theocratic system which the Mathers had labored to uphold. Church
and state were effectively cut asunder by such a test. There is no
evidence that Edwards was concerned about the political or social
consequences that must result from the abandonment of the traditional
“Half-way Covenant.” It was a question of doctrine with him, involving
only matters of church discipline. Although he was accused of being a
Separatist, and of seeking to disintegrate the parish system, he had no
thought of attacking a parochial order that he held in high esteem. He
was unconcerned that his teachings led straight to the old Separatist
conclusion that it is the church mystical which Christ established,
and not the church visible. Nevertheless he became the creator of the
new Congregationalism, which in accepting the democratic principles
elaborated by John Wise and establishing the local church as an
autonomous unit, effectively nullified the Presbyterian tendencies of
the old order.
As one follows the laborious career of this great thinker, a sense of
the tragic failure of his life deepens. The burdens that he assumed
were beyond the strength of any man. Beginning as a mystic, brooding
on the all-pervasive spirit of sweetness and light diffused through
the universe, with its promise of spiritual emancipation; then turning
to an archaic theology and giving over his middle years to the work
of minifying the excellence of man in order to exalt the sovereignty
of God; and finally settling back upon the mystical doctrine of
conversion--such a life leaves one with a feeling of futility, a sense
of great powers baffled and wasted, a spiritual tragedy enacted within
the narrow walls of a minister’s study. There was both pathos and irony
in the fate of Jonathan Edwards, removed from the familiar places
where for twenty years he had labored, the tie with his congregation
broken, and sent to the frontier mission at Stockbridge to preach to a
band of Indians and to speculate on the unfreedom of the human will.
The greatest mind of New England had become an anachronism in a world
that bred Benjamin Franklin. If he had been an Anglican like Bishop
Berkeley, if he had mingled with the leaders of thought in London
instead of remaining isolated in Massachusetts, he must have made a
name for himself not unworthy to be matched with that of the great
bishop whom he so much resembled. The intellectual powers were his,
but the inspiration was lacking; like Cotton Mather before him, he was
the unconscious victim of a decadent ideal and a petty environment.
Cut off from fruitful intercourse with other thinkers, drawn away from
the stimulating field of philosophy into the arid realm of theology,
it was his fate to devote his noble gifts to the thankless task of
re-imprisoning the mind of New England within a system from which his
nature and his powers summoned him to unshackle it. He was called to be
a transcendental emancipator, but he remained a Calvinist.
Footnotes
[161] Quoted in Walker, _History of the Congregational Churches in the
United States_, p. 216.
[162] _Ecclesiasticall Politie_, sixth edition, Book III, p. 10.
[163] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 89.
[164] _Jonathan Edwards_, p. 25.
[165] _Ibid._, p. 13.
[166] For an examination of the philosophy of Edwards, see Adam
Leroy Jones, “Early American Philosophers,” in _Columbia University
Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology and Education_, Vol. II, No. 4,
Chapter 4.
[167] For a statement of the doctrine, see Sermon XXXIV, “God’s
Sovereignty,” in _Works_, New York, 1847, Vol. IV, p. 548.
Edwards unconsciously admits that the doctrine of sovereignty was
reactionary. “From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections
against the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, in choosing whom He would to
eternal life, and rejecting whom He pleased, leaving them eternally to
perish and be everlastingly tormented in hell.” Later he came to regard
such repugnance as the sinful expression of the natural man. As he saw
further, his mind “apprehended the justice and reasonableness of ...
God’s absolute sovereignty and justice with respect to salvation ...
as much as of anything that I see with my eyes; at least it is so at
times. But I have often, since that first conviction, had quite another
sense of God’s sovereignty than I had then. I have often hid not only
a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often
appeared exceedingly pleasant, bright, and sweet.... But my first
conviction was not so.” Quoted in Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, pp. 37-38.
[168] Sermon XXVII, in _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 438.
[169] See Sermon IX, in _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 226. The argument is
unfolded in the following propositions: “Every crime or fault deserves
a greater or less punishment, according as the crime is greater or
less.” “A crime is more or less heinous, according as we are under
greater or less obligations to the contrary.” “Our obligations to
love, honor, and obey any being, is in proportion to its loveliness,
honorableness, and authority.” “But God is a being infinitely lovely,
because he hath infinite excellence and beauty.” “So that sin against
God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime
infinitely heinous, and so deserving of infinite punishment.”
[170] See in particular Sermon XI. “The Eternity of Hell Torments”;
Sermon XII, “When the Wicked shall have filled up the measure of their
Sin, wrath will come upon them to the uttermost”; Sermon XIII, “The End
of the Wicked contemplated by the Righteous; or, The Torments of the
Wicked in Hell, no occasion of grief to the Saints in Heaven”; Sermon
XV, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in _Works_, Vol. IV.
[171] According to Edwards there were four regular stages: (1) the
first stirrings, when the sinner is brought under conviction that he is
lost; (2) the realization of God’s justice, that he merits damnation;
(3) the breaking in of the light, the first “gracious discoveries”
of God’s mercies; (4) peace after the storm, the joy of assurance of
salvation. For a fuller statement, see Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_, pp.
133-160.
Chapter III • Benjamin Franklin • Our First Ambassador
There was a singularly dramatic fitness in the life and career of
Benjamin Franklin. America has never been more worthily represented
at old-world capitals than by this unpretentious commoner, drawn from
the stock of the plain people. A plebeian in an aristocratic age, he
was nevertheless, by common consent, first among colonial Americans in
qualities of mind and heart. A wit and philosopher, rich in learning,
charming in manners, ripe in the wisdom of this world, resourceful
in dealing with men and events, he was one of the most delightful as
he was one of the greatest men produced by the English race in the
eighteenth century.
“Figure to yourself,” he wrote in his seventy-second year, “an old man,
with gray hair appearing under a marten fur cap, among the powdered
heads of Paris. It is this odd figure that salutes you, with handfuls
of blessings.” An odd figure indeed in such a setting, but a figure
that captured the imagination of Paris, as it has since captured the
imagination of America; so novel as to seem romantic--a charming rustic
philosopher who might have stepped out of the pages of Rousseau. And
so the French aristocracy patronized _le bon homme_, and laughed with
him at the affectations of this preposterous world, and made much of
him for the zest that it discovered in a novel sensation. It was the
same odd figure that had stood at the bar of the House of Commons and
matched his intelligence against that of celebrated English lawyers;
the same figure that had been called in council by the great Pitt--who
thought himself too great to learn anything even from Franklin; that
had been lashed by the scurrilous tongue of Wedderburn; that had seen a
thousand bribes dangled before him by Lord Howe and other gentlemen--a
figure that seems strangely out of place in that old-fashioned Tory
world, with its narrow sympathies and narrower intelligence. And yet
considered in the light of social revolutions, what other figure in
eighteenth-century Europe or America is so dramatically significant?
The figure of the self-made democrat, with some three millions of his
fellows at his back, and countless other millions to come, who was
entering on a world-wide struggle for political mastery, the end of
which no one can yet foresee? His presence in the councils of gentlemen
was a tacit denial of their hitherto unquestioned right of supremacy.
It was a rare personal triumph; but it was far more significant than
that, it was the triumph of a rising class and a new social ideal.
Although Franklin’s origins, whether Boston or Philadelphia, were
narrowly provincial, his mind from early youth to extreme old age was
curiously open and free, and to such a mind the intellectual wealth
of the world lies open and free. From that wealth he helped himself
generously, to such good effect that he early became an intellectual
cosmopolitan, at ease with the best intellects and at home among the
diverse speculative interests of the eighteenth century: the sane and
witty embodiment of its rationalism, its emancipation from authority,
its growing concern for social justice, its hopeful pursuit of new
political and economic philosophies, its tempered optimism that trusted
intelligence to set the world right. No other man in America and few in
Europe had so completely freed themselves from the prejudice of custom.
The Calvinism in which he was bred left not the slightest trace upon
him; and the middle-class world from which he emerged did not narrow
his mind to its petty horizons. He was a free man who went his own
way with imperturbable good will and unbiased intelligence; our first
social philosopher, the first ambassador of American democracy to the
courts of Europe.
Fortune was kind to Franklin in many ways: kind in that it did not
visit upon him the fate that befell his elder brother Ebenezer, of whom
Sewall noted, “Ebenezer Franklin of the South Church, a male-infant
of 16 months old, was drowned in a Tub of Suds, Febr. 5, 1702/3”;
kind also in that it set him in a land where opportunity waited upon
enterprise, and where thousands of kindred spirits were erecting a
society that honored such qualities as he possessed. In England he must
have remained middle-class, shut in by a wall of prejudice; but in
colonial America he found a congenial environment. Like Samuel Sewall,
he swam easily in the main current of colonial life, won increasing
honors, until--as he naïvely remarked--he came more than once to stand
before kings. How fortunate he was is revealed by contrast with the
career of his great English counterpart and fellow spirit, Daniel
Defoe, whose _Essay on Projects_--a classic document of the rising
middle class--might well have been Franklin’s first textbook.
The earliest literary representative of the English middle class, Defoe
preached the same gospel of social betterment. With his head full of
projects for the advancement of trade and the material well-being of
his fellows, he preached the new gospel of practical efficiency to a
generation of wits, going so far as to assert that the ideal statesman
should be sought, not among gentlemen but among merchants, whose
training in business affairs had made them shrewd judges of men and
capable in dealing with practical matters. But the London of Queen
Anne was not a place in which to rise by preaching efficiency. Defoe’s
day had not yet come in England, and in spite of great abilities and
arduous labors he remained a Grub Street hack, the servant and not
the counselor of aristocratic politicians. Instead of coming to stand
before kings--like the more fortunate Franklin--he stood often before
constables; instead of cracking his joke and his bottle at Will’s
Coffee House, he was forced to study the ways of the unprosperous at
Bridewell. But if he failed in his ambition to get on, he found a
certain solace in the vicarious realization of his ideal. Robinson
Crusoe, the practically efficient man making himself master of his
environment, was the dream of Daniel Defoe; Franklin was the visible,
new-world embodiment of that dream.
It was Franklin’s supreme capacity for doing well the things which
his fellow Americans held in esteem, that enabled him to rise out of
obscurity to a position of leadership. Before he should be intrusted
with the confidence of his fellow citizens, he must prove himself
worthy of such confidence, and even in colonial America the task was
far from easy. In the wealthier communities society was exclusive and
select--nowhere more so than in Philadelphia--and it could not be
expected to view with approval the advancement of a printer-tradesman,
especially if he were a member of the plebeian anti-Proprietary
party. It was an evidence of Franklin’s discretion that he removed
from Boston, where neither his father’s chandlery shop, nor his
brother’s baiting of the ruling gentry, would serve his purpose. In
Philadelphia, free from family entanglements, he bent himself to the
task of securing a competence, understanding how easily the wheel
turns on a well-greased axle; and by the time he had come to his
early forties he had kept his shop so well that henceforth it would
keep him. He was ready to do his real work in the world; and in the
choice of that work he revealed the curious _flair_ for the timely that
was so characteristic. His extraordinary successes in the field of
civic betterments gained him the good will of the commonalty, and his
experiments in natural philosophy won the approbation of the gentry.
Interest in scientific inquiry, particularly in physics, had spread
widely in England since the founding of the Royal Society, and to be an
authority on magnetism was as evident a mark of breeding in Georgian
England as discriminating judgment in the matter of manuscripts and
mistresses had been a sign of culture among Florentine cinquecentists.
In establishing a reputation as a natural philosopher, therefore,
Franklin not only was acquiring dignity at home, but he was providing
himself with a sure passport to European favor. And it was the seal
of European approval that finally won for Franklin the grudging
recognition of the first families of Philadelphia. A few held out
against him and to the day of his death regarded him with disapproval;
but in the end his personal charm prevailed with all but a handful of
elderly Tory ladies. So delightful a wit and so useful a citizen could
not be dismissed as a pushing tradesman.
Franklin first entered politics as a member of the popular party, then
engaged in a bitter struggle with the Proprietors over tax matters,
defense of the frontier, and other questions of acute popular concern.
There was the usual colonial alignment between the backcountry yeomanry
and the town gentry; between the agrarian and mercantile interests;
and the dispute had reached a point where the yeomanry determined to
appeal to the King to convert the commonwealth into a Crown Colony. As
one of the leaders of the popular party, Franklin was singled out for
attack. A bitter election went against him, and he lost his seat in the
Assembly, only to be chosen Colonial Agent to England, there to begin
his long diplomatic career. Probably no other attack which Franklin
suffered was so coarse or vindictive as this assault by the Proprietary
party, led by the first gentlemen of Philadelphia, John Dickinson
among them. Unpleasant as the experience was, it proved of service to
Franklin, for it taught him how quickly the hornets would be about the
ears of anyone who disturbed the nest of official perquisites; and this
was worth knowing to a colonial diplomat on his first mission to a
court and parliament where yellow jackets were uncommonly abundant.[172]
He was nearly threescore when he set out on his diplomatic mission,
which beginning modestly as temporary agent of the anti-Proprietary
party of Pennsylvania, was to broaden immensely as the American
difficulties increased, until he became in the eyes of all the
world the spokesman of the colonial cause; first at London to King,
Parliament, and people, and later at Paris to all Europe. It was
a mission of discussion and argument, curiously illuminating to
a colonial bred in a simple, decentralized world. Before he went
abroad Franklin had been a democrat by temperament and environment;
when he returned he was a democrat by conviction, confirmed in his
preference for government immediately responsible to the majority
will. Centralized Tory governments had taught him the excellence
of town-meeting ways. At London he discovered widespread political
corruption. It was a world flyblown with the vices of irresponsible
power. The letters of Franklin are full of the scandal of bribe-taking
and pension-mongering, of gross parliamentary jobbery. The elections
of 1768 were a debauch, the brisk bidding of Indian nabobs sending the
market price of parliamentary seats up to four thousand pounds. “It
is thought,” he wrote on March 13, “that near two millions will be
spent on this election; but those, who understand figures and act by
computation, say the crown has _two millions in places and pensions_ to
dispose of, and it is well worth while to engage in such a seven years
lottery, though all that have tickets should not get prizes.”[173]
To expect such a government to be swayed by appeals to justice or
abstract rights was plain folly, Franklin very quickly learned. The
colonial goose was there to be plucked, and gentlemen who gained their
livelihood by skillful plucking would not easily be denied. “To get
a larger field on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites, is
all that is regarded,” wrote the celebrated London physician, Dr.
Fothergill, to Franklin.[174] Even war with the colonies might not seem
undesirable to some, for “an auditor of the exchequer has sixpence in
the pound, or a fortieth part, of all the public money expended by the
nation, so that, when a war costs forty millions, one million is paid
to him.”[175]
It was a bitter experience for one who had grown up in respect for
England and veneration for English traditions. Franklin was not a
man of divided loyalties, and his love of the old home was deep and
sincere. He had many warm friends there, and the idea of American
separation from the empire was profoundly repugnant to him. It was not
till he was convinced beyond hope that America could expect from the
English government nothing but ignoble dependence that he accepted the
idea of independence. Again and again he complained bitterly of “the
extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this rotten
old state.”[176] “I wish all the friends of liberty and of man would
quit that sink of corruption, and leave it to its fate.” “I do not
expect that your new Parliament will be either wiser or honester than
the last. All projects to procure an honest one, by place bills, etc.,
appear to me vain and impracticable. The true cure, I imagine, is to
be found in rendering all places unprofitable, and the King too poor
to give bribes and pensions. Till this is done, which can only be by
a revolution (and I think you have not virtue enough left to procure
one), your nation will always be plundered, and obliged to pay by
taxes the plunderers for plundering and ruining. Liberty and virtue
therefore join in the call, +COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE+!”[177] “The
people of England ... are just and generous,” wrote his friend David
Hartley, member of Parliament, “and, if it were put to the sense of
the people of England, you would not be left in any doubt whether it
was _want of will_, or _want of power_, to do you justice. You know
the blot of our constitution, by which, to our disgrace, and to your
misfortune, a corrupt ministry, sheltered by Parliamentary influence,
are out of our immediate control. A day of account may come, when the
justice of the nation may prevail; and if it comes not too late, it
may prove a day of reconciliation and cordial reunion between us and
America.”[178] He is blind indeed who cannot see in such experience
the explanation of Franklin’s later efforts in Pennsylvania and in the
constitutional convention to keep government in America responsive to
the will of the people.
During the long years of his ambassadorship, so rich in intellectual
opportunity, Franklin was intimately concerned with economics and
politics, and he found in them subjects congenial to his talents. By
temperament he was what we should call today a sociologist. He cared
little for abstract reasoning, but much for social betterment; and this
led him to examine critically current economic theory in the light
of present fact. All his life economics was a major interest with
him, and his several contributions entitle him to be regarded as our
first important economist, the only one indeed before the nineteenth
century. His chief guides in this little explored field seem to have
been Sir William Petty, the statistician of the Restoration period, in
his younger days, and the French Physiocrats in later years. He was
the first American to abandon the traditional mercantile school--a
generation before other American thinkers had repudiated it; and he was
the first to ally himself with the rising school of _laissez faire_.
In the year 1729, when he was just turned twenty-three, Franklin
entered the field of economics with a pamphlet entitled _A Modest
Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency_. It is a
curiously suggestive work, not only for the light which it sheds on his
economic views, but on his social and political sympathies. It marks
his early alignment with the agrarian party, to which he adhered to
the end of his life. From the days when Samuel Sewall first confronted
the question of land-banks in the Massachusetts legislature till the
British government forbade all issues of bills of credit, the currency
question was bitterly debated in the several colonies. It was primarily
a class issue, in which the town merchants and money lenders found
themselves outvoted by the agrarian debtors and small men. Little light
had come from those debates on the nature of money and its social
functions; but much heat had been engendered over the supposed question
of honest versus dishonest money. With this cheap fallacy Franklin was
not concerned; but he was greatly concerned in this and in later papers
in expounding the quantitative theory of money, the nature of credit,
and the important fact, overlooked by the hard-money men, that gold and
silver are themselves commodities, fluctuating in value with supply and
demand. This first pamphlet, Franklin afterward remarked, “was well
received by the common people in general; but the rich men disliked it,
for it increased and strengthened the clamor for more money; and, they
happening to have no writers among them that were able to answer it,
their opposition slackened, and the point was carried by a majority in
the House.”[179]
By much the most interesting idea in the pamphlet, however, is the
elaboration of the labor theory of value. Commenting on this, McMaster
says in his _Life of Franklin_:
Bad as were his notions of political economy, his pamphlet
contained one great truth,--the truth that labor is the measure of
value. Whether he discovered, or, as is not unlikely, borrowed it,
he was the first openly to assert it; and his it remained till,
forty-seven years later, Adam Smith adopted it and reaffirmed it in
“The Wealth of Nations.”[180]
Unfortunately the biographer’s knowledge of the history of economic
thought was as faulty as, in his judgment, were Franklin’s economic
principles. In his _Treatise of Taxes_, written in 1662, Sir William
Petty--whom Franklin in many ways greatly resembled--clearly elaborated
the principle of labor-value;[181] it was restated by Vauban in 1707,
in his _Projet d’une disme Royale_, by Hume in 1752, and later by the
Physiocrats; and when Adam Smith wrote it was pretty widely known.
There can be little doubt where Franklin got it. The similarity between
his work and that of Sir William Petty is too evident to escape
comment. But that does not lessen the significance of the fact that a
self-trained provincial of three and twenty should have read Petty’s
work, seized upon the salient idea and turned it to effective use,
years before economic students generally were acquainted with it. All
his life Franklin took up ideas like a sponge, and what he took he
incorporated with the solid results of his own observations.
During his stay in England Franklin came in close contact with the
body of Physiocratic writings, which seem to have greatly stimulated
his interest in economic thought. The school was at the height of
its influence between the years 1763 and 1772, and had pretty well
undermined the position of the mercantilists. They were the founders
of modern social science and their teachings contained in germ the
liberal doctrine of economics in its entirety. In their emphasis upon
free trade and _laissez-faire_ competition, on the police theory of
the state, on property, security, liberty, on the natural laws of
association and self-interest, and especially in their emphasis on land
as the sole source of wealth, they presented a system of economics that
fitted American conditions as Franklin understood those conditions. In
one important point--their acceptance of an absolute prince--Franklin
broke with them wholly; but their preference for agriculture over
manufacturing and commerce accorded with his deepest convictions.
America was notably happy and contented in comparison with Europe, and
America would remain happy and contented, he believed, so long as land
was abundant and her farmers remained freeholders. The new middle-class
gospel of industrialism he profoundly distrusted. He shared Goldsmith’s
concern over the destruction of the English peasantry and the creation
of a degraded proletariat. Manufacture and trade developed only
where free land was inadequate or the peasants were dispossessed;
industrialism sprang from the national poverty and was nourished by it.
Writing in 1760 he said:
Unprejudiced men well know, that all the penal and prohibitory
laws that were ever thought on will not be sufficient to prevent
manufactures in a country, whose inhabitants surpass the number
that can subsist by the husbandry of it.... Manufactures are
founded in poverty. It is the number of poor without land in a
country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that
enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and afford it cheap
enough to prevent the importation of the same kind from abroad, and
to bear the expense of its own exportation. But no man, who can
have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist
his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer, and work
for a master. Hence while there is land enough in America for our
people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.[182]
Nine years later, in his _Positions to be Examined, concerning National
Wealth_, he stated the Physiocratic theory thus:
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The
first is by _war_, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered
neighbors. This is _robbery_. The second by _commerce_, which is
generally _cheating_. The third by _agriculture_, the only _honest
way_, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into
the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of
God in his favor.[183]
Franklin’s prejudice against trade somewhat lessened in after years,
as he considered the economic need of free exchange of commodities.
In 1774, two years before the publication of _The Wealth of Nations_,
he collaborated with George Whately in writing a pamphlet entitled
_Principles of Trade_, that suggests Adam Smith. Franklin was
acquainted with Smith, had visited him, and doubtless had discussed
with him the theory of _laissez faire_, division of labor, use of
machinery, and other principles of the new school, but no mention of
him is made.[184] The central doctrine is thus elaborated:
Perhaps, in general, it would be better if government meddled no
farther with trade, than to protect it, and let it take its course.
Most of the statutes, or acts, edicts, _arrêts_, and placarts
of parliaments, princes, and states, for regulating, directing,
or restraining of trade, have, we think, been either political
blunders, or jobs obtained by artful men for private advantage,
under pretense of public good. When Colbert assembled some wise
old merchants of France, and desired their advice and opinion,
how he could best serve and promote commerce, their answer, after
consultation, was, in three words only, _Laissez-nous faire_: “Let
us alone.” It is said by a very solid writer of the same nation,
that he is well advanced in the science of politics, who knows the
full force of that maxim, _Pas trop gouverner_: “Not to govern too
much.” Which, perhaps, would be of more use when applied to trade,
than in any other public concern. It were therefore to be wished,
that commerce was as free between all the nations of the world, as
it is between the several counties of England; so would all, by
mutual communication, obtain more enjoyments. Those counties do not
ruin one another by trade; neither would the nations. No nation was
ever ruined by trade, even seemingly the most disadvantageous.[185]
As a colonial, long familiar with the injustice of Navigation Laws,
Boards of Trade, and other restrictions in favor of British tradesmen,
Franklin agreed with Adam Smith on the principle of free trade; but
with later developments of the _laissez-faire_ school--its fetish of
the economic man and its iron law of wages--he would not have agreed.
Plugson of Undershot was no hero of his, and the social system which
Plugson was creating would have seemed to him as vicious as the old
system with its “bad, wasteful, plundering governments, and their mad
destructive wars.” In his later speculations he was rather the social
philosopher than the economist, puzzled at the irrationality of society
that chooses to make a pigsty of the world, instead of the garden
that it might be if men would but use the sense that God has given
them. “The happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of
political society,”[186] he believed, and a starvation wage-system was
the surest way of destroying that happiness.[187] In one of the most
delightful letters that he ever wrote, Franklin commented on the ways
of men thus:
It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of this world are
managed. Naturally one would imagine, that the interests of a few
individuals should give way to general interest; but individuals
manage their affairs with so much more application, industry, and
address, than the public do theirs, that general interest most
commonly gives way to particular. We assemble parliaments and
councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we
necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their
collected passions, prejudices, and private interests. By the
help of these, artful men overpower their wisdom and dupe its
possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, _arrêts_, and edicts,
all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of great
men is the greatest fool upon earth?...
What occasions then so much want and misery? It is the employment
of men and women in works, that produce neither the necessaries
nor conveniences of life, who, with those who do nothing, consume
necessaries raised by the laborious.... Look round the world, and
see the millions employed in doing nothing, or in something that
amounts to nothing, when the necessaries and conveniences of life
are in question. What is the bulk of commerce, for which we fight
and destroy each other, but the toil of millions for superfluities,
to the great hazard and loss of many lives?... It has been computed
by some political arithmetician, that, if every man and woman would
work for four hours each day on something useful, that labor would
produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of
life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the
rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.[188]
But the immediate problem of Franklin as representative of the colonies
at St. James’s, was political--how to reconcile the antagonistic
ambitions of the sundered bodies of Englishmen; and the solution which
he set forth with admirable clearness, bears the impress of a mind
intent upon the reality behind parchment pretense. While lawyers were
befogging the issue with legal quibble, and politicians were proving
the unconstitutionality of the forces stirring in eighteenth-century
America, Franklin was more concerned with adjusting imperial policy to
existing fact. On one side were the colonies, in which the practice of
local self-government had taken deep root; whether the practice was
sanctioned by their charters or the British constitution was beside the
question. On the other side was the British parliament, serving as a
legislative body for its proper constituency, the people of the British
Isles. Over both colonies and parliament, providing an effective but
ungalling tie to bind the parts together, was the King, to whom both
paid willing allegiance. So long as England was content to maintain the
_status quo_, the colonies, Franklin believed, would remain loyal to
the empire; but if the ministry persisted in its program of extending
parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, the outcome must be one of
two things, federation or separation.
To the principle of federation Franklin was an early and faithful
friend. The conception of a federal union of the several colonies was
slowly spreading in America, and no other colonial had done so much
to further it; in his well-known Plan of Union he had sketched the
outlines of a federal constitution; what was more natural, therefore,
than for him to think in terms of a Federated British Empire, as a
statesmanlike solution of the present perplexities. The plan involved
two problems: first, an inquiry into the nature and constitution
of an imperial parliament, and second, provision for an equitable
representation of the several divisions of the empire. The present
difficulties had arisen out of the ambition of the British parliament
to assume sovereignty over the colonial legislatures, thereby reducing
them to a dependent status; those difficulties would be settled only
by constitutional recognition of local rights and local sovereignties.
“The British state,” he argued, “is only the Island of Great Britain,”
and if by reason of familiarity with local needs, “the British
legislature” is “the only proper judge of what concerns the welfare of
that state,” why does the principle not hold for the several colonial
legislatures?
Here appears the excellency of the invention of colony government,
by separate, independent legislatures. By this means, the remotest
parts of a great empire may be as well governed as the centre;
misrule, oppressions of proconsuls, and discontents and rebellions
thence arising, prevented. By this means, the power of a king
may be extended without inconvenience over territories of any
dimensions, how great soever. America was thus happily governed in
all its different and remote settlements, by the crown and their
own Assemblies, till the new politics took place, of governing it
by one Parliament, which have not succeeded and never will.[189]
In this dream of a British Empire Franklin was far in advance of
his time. On both sides of the ocean selfish and unimaginative men
stood ready to thwart all such proposals; little Englanders and
little colonials in vast numbers were concerned with more immediate
and personal interests than those of the English race. Nevertheless
Franklin was convinced that the gods, if not the Tories, were on the
side of the colonies. The enormous increase in material strength that
the years were swiftly bringing to America was an augury of good hope;
the legitimate demands of America would be granted when America had
grown too strong to be denied, which must be shortly. In the meantime
it was the duty of Englishmen, British and colonial alike, to endeavor
“with unfeigned and unwearying zeal to preserve from breaking that
fine and noble China vase, the British empire.” It was the traditional
policy of “protract and grow strong”--a wise and sane policy--and
Franklin clung to it until he was convinced of its utter futility.
One other choice remained--separation; and he made that choice sadly,
understanding better than most what it involved.
The years which followed were filled to the brim for Franklin as well
as for America. Ideals changed and principles clarified swiftly;
but his social philosophy was founded on too wide and sobering an
experience with men and governments, to sway with every gusty passion
of the times. He had been a democrat from his youth up and in those
critical first days of independence, when the forces of agrarianism
were taking possession of state governments, he threw in his lot
with them, and joined heartily in the stimulating work of providing
a democratic constitution for Pennsylvania. During the later years
of reaction following the peace, when so many Revolutionary leaders
endeavored to stay the agrarian movement and undo its work, he saw
no cause to lose faith in government immediately responsive to the
majority will. He was a forerunner of Jefferson, like him firm in the
conviction that government was good in the measure that it remained
close to the people. He sat in the Constitutional Convention as one of
the few democrats, and although he was unable to make headway against
the aristocratic majority, he was quite unconvinced by their rhetoric.
For years he had been an advocate of unrestricted manhood suffrage,
annual parliaments,[190] and a single-chamber legislature; and when he
heard eloquent young lawyers argue that a single-chamber legislature,
responsive to a democratic electorate, must lead to mob legislation,
and that good government required a carefully calculated system of
checks and balances, he remarked:
It appears to me ... like putting one horse before a cart and the
other behind it, and whipping them both. If the horses are of equal
strength, the wheels of the cart, like the wheels of government,
will stand still; and if the horses are strong enough the cart will
be torn to pieces.[191]
When in 1790 it was proposed to substitute a bicameral system for the
single-chamber in Pennsylvania, Franklin came to the defense of the
simpler, more democratic form, with a vivacity little staled by years:
Has not the famous political fable of the snake, with two heads and
one body, some useful instruction contained in it? She was going
to a brook to drink, and in her way was to pass through a hedge, a
twig of which opposed her direct course; one head chose to go on
the right side of the twig, the other on the left; so that time was
spent in the contest, and before the decision was completed, the
poor snake died with thirst.[192]
Both his economic principles and his views on government have been
condemned by Federalistic critics as tainted with populism. They both
sprang from the same root of agrarian democracy. Whether Franklin
or his critics more adequately represented the larger interests of
eighteenth-century America is beside the present question; it is enough
to note that all such criticism is leveled primarily at Franklin’s
democratic philosophy as a thing in itself undesirable, if not
dangerous.
Franklin may often have been wrong, but he was never arrogant, never
dogmatic. He was too wise and too generous for that. In the midst
of prosperity he never forgot the unprosperous. All his life his
sympathy went out to whoever suffered in person or fortune from the
injustice of society: to the debtor who found himself pinched by the
shrinking supply of currency; to the black slave who suffered the most
elementary of wrongs; to impressed seamen; to the weak and wretched
of earth. He was a part of that emerging humanitarian movement which,
during the last half of the eighteenth century, was creating a new
sense of social responsibility. True to his Physiocratic convictions,
Franklin was social-minded. He was concerned not with property or class
interests, but with the common welfare; and in his quick sympathy for
all sorts and conditions of men, in his conviction that he must use
his talents to make this world better and not exploit it, he reveals
the breadth and generosity of his nature. Reason and work, in his
pragmatic philosophy, are the faithful handmaids of progress, of which
war, whether public or private, is the utter negation. After long
years of thought he rendered a judgment which later experience has not
reversed,--“there is no good war and no bad peace.”
It is to little purpose that certain shortcomings of Franklin are dwelt
upon. “There is a flower of religion, a flower of honor, a flower of
chivalry, that you must not require of Franklin,” said Sainte-Beuve;
a judgment that is quite true and quite obvious. A man who is less
concerned with the golden pavements of the City of God than that the
cobblestones on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia should be well and
evenly laid, who troubles less to save his soul from burning hereafter
than to protect his neighbors’ houses by organizing an efficient
fire-company, who is less regardful of the light that never was on
sea or land than of a new-model street lamp to light the steps of the
belated wayfarer--such a man, obviously, does not reveal the full
measure of human aspiration. Franklin ended as he began, the child
of a century marked by sharp spiritual limitations. What was best
in that century he made his own. In his modesty, his willingness to
compromise, his openmindedness, his clear and luminous understanding,
his charity--above all, in his desire to subdue the ugly facts of
society to some more rational scheme of things--he proved himself a
great and useful man, one of the greatest and most useful whom America
has produced.
Footnotes
[172] “You know,” wrote Franklin to his wife on the eve of his
departure, “that I have many enemies ... and very bitter ones; and
you must expect their enmity will extend in some degree to you.” He
was forced to slip away and get secretly on board the vessel. His
activities were reproved thus by a certain Tory lady:
Oh! had he been wise to pursue
The track for his talents designed,
What a tribute of praise had been due
To the teacher and friend of mankind.
But to covet political fame
Was in him a degrading ambition,
The spark that from Lucifer came,
And kindled the blaze of sedition.
(In _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 267.)
In Sargent’s _Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan
Odell_, these verses are attributed to a less likely source.
[173] _Works_, Vol. VII, p. 398.
[174] _Ibid._, Vol. V, p. 81.
[175] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 428. A good deal of light is thrown upon the
ways of the ministry in Franklin’s account, _Negotiations in London_.
See in particular pp. 37, 68, 76 of Vol. V, where Lord Hyde and Lord
Howe exhibit special solicitude for his advancement. His letters tell
of successive attempts to approach him, and among his works is a
little skit in which he speaks of himself thus: “Your correspondent
_Brittannicus_ inveighs violently against Dr. Franklin, for his
ingratitude to the ministry of this nation, who have conferred upon
him so many favors. They gave him the post-office of America: they
made his son a governor; and they offered him a post of five hundred a
year in the salt-office, if he would relinquish the interests of his
country; but he has had the wickedness to continue true to it, and is
as much an American as ever. As it is a settled point in government
here, that every man has his price, it is plain they are bunglers in
their business, and have not given him enough.” (_Works_, Vol. IV, pp.
534-535.)
[176] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 146.
[177] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, pp. 215, 505.
[178] _Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 177.
[179] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 254.
[180] P. 64.
[181] See _Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty_, Cambridge Press, Vol. I,
pp. 43-51.
[182] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 19.
[183] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 376.
[184] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 438.
[185] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 401.
[186] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 323.
[187] See “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, etc.,” in _Ibid._,
Vol. II, p. 436.
[188] “On Luxury, Idleness, and Industry,” in _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp.
448-451.
[189] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 282. For Franklin’s views on American
representation in Parliament, see Vol. VII, pp. 315, 329.
[190] See the pamphlet indorsed _Some Good Whig Principles_, of the
probable date of 1768-69, in _Works_, Vol. II.
[191] _Works of Thomas Paine_, edited by Moncure D. Conway, Vol. IV, p.
465.
[192] In “Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the
Constitution of Pennsylvania,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 167.
Part Two: The Awakening of the American Mind • 1763-1783
Chapter I • Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule
I • Background Facts
The American Revolution remains after a hundred and fifty years
somewhat of a puzzle to historians. Much careful investigation has
been done in the last two decades, but we still know too little to
speak confidently or with a sense of finality. The appeal to arms would
seem to have been brought about by a minority of the American people,
directed by a small group of skillful leaders, who like Indian scouts,
covered their tracks so cleverly that only the keenest trailers can
now follow their course and understand their strategy. On the other
hand, the philosophy of revolution is familiar to us. Revolutions
are born of an abnormal state of mind, sensitized by an accumulated
body of experience. They are psychological explosions, resulting from
irritations commonly economic in origin, and they are conditioned in
their programs by the stock of knowledge and aspiration peculiar to
their time and place. Two determining facts, then, would seem to lie
at the root of the American Revolution: the American psychology which
shaped the colonial outlook, and the peculiar situation of the British
Empire at the close of the French and Indian war.[193]
In old age John Adams “hazarded an opinion, that the true history of
the American revolution could not be recovered,” for “the revolution
was effected before the war commenced. The revolution was in the
minds and hearts of the people.”[194] Accepting Adams’s thesis of a
change in American psychology, we may hazard a further opinion that
the revolution resulted from the emergence in the two countries of
divergent interpretations of the theory and practice of sovereignty,
which may be sufficiently distinguished by the terms local home rule
and imperial centralization. In the beginning it was a clash of
jurisdiction between colonial self-government and absentee paternalism;
but later it developed into an open challenge of the monarchical
principle. A popular will to self-rule had long been developing in
America, and when the outbreak of hostilities clarified its latent
objective, it speedily asserted a conscious republican purpose. To
many of the early supporters of the colonial protest, this republican
outcome was unforeseen and deeply regretted; but it was implicit in
the whole history of colonial development, and must ultimately stand
sharply revealed, once its aspirations were balked.
If the crisis was precipitated almost casually by the program of
parliamentary regulation, the long drift towards alienation was far
from casual. An American mind had been created by the silent pressure
of environment. A large measure of economic freedom had developed
an American liberalism, frankly and vigorously individualistic. It
was not consciously democratic, or even republican. There were few
avowed democrats in the stolid mass of colonial provincialism; a busy
and commonplace routine offered little opportunity for revolutionary
appeal to a people grown lethargic from economic abundance. Of social
unrest, the common fuel of revolutionary fires, there was practically
none; and but for a blundering ministerial imperialism that challenged
this nascent liberalism, throwing over it the mantle of patriotism,
the colonies would have written a very different history. Once the
crisis was precipitated, however, and it became clear that imperial
centralization was encroaching upon local rights, the liberal impulses
in the background of the American mind assumed a militant form and
purpose.
The existence of this native liberalism had been stupidly overlooked
and ignored by responsible statesmen. With the exception of Franklin,
colonial spokesmen were commonly members of the aristocratic group,
among whom the Tory philosophy was spreading fast. Gentlemen in Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston fashioned their manners upon
the polite world of St. James’s and caught the Tory ways in politics
as naturally as the London style in wigs. They associated with the
royal officials, traveled in England, corresponded with members of
Parliament. advised in all matters of colonial policy, and proved
themselves the most shortsighted of counselors. Upon their heads rest
in part the blunders of the ministry. In failing to understand the
native liberalism of America, they not only shared responsibility for
an unwise policy, but they hastened their own destruction. Samuel Adams
could not have played so effectively upon the popular prejudices if
the Hutchinsons and Olivers had not brought the Tory ways into wide
disrepute by their arrogance.
Colonial liberalism, on the other hand, was not so simple and
homogeneous as we long believed. It was rather a somewhat vague
composite of the aspirations of three diverse geographical areas, with
different economic interests, social ways, and political ideals. The
middle and northern coast region, with its mercantile cities, was a
distinct area; the tidewater region from Maryland to Georgia, with its
plantation economy, constituted another; and the indefinite backcountry
beyond the older settlements, stretching from Maine southward along
the Alleghany watershed, constituted a third. The first was dominated
by a merchant group--wholesale importers and exporters--wealthy and
conservative, but with a great majority of the population--small
tradesmen, mechanics and yeomen--far more democratic than the
leaders. The second was controlled by the aristocratic planters,
whose leadership during the crises of the dispute with England was
rejected by an economically strong but socially inferior body of
factors or alien middlemen. The third was composed of thousands of
small freeholders, largely Scotch-Irish and German, who acknowledged
no leadership, were unconsciously democratic in their ways, suspicious
of the seacoast aristocracy, wedded to an agrarian philosophy. The
merchant group was liberal only to the extent that liberalism meant
profit: their commercial relations with England constituted them
the closest tie between the two countries, and their timid love
of established ways made them naturally conservative rather than
revolutionary. The planter group possessed the traditional independence
of English gentlemen: they would tolerate no outside dictation in
matters concerning their own parishes, and their burdensome debts to
English merchants cooled the ardor of their loyalty to Great Britain.
The frontier agrarians, on the other hand, were pronounced liberals by
environment and training to whom English ties were at the strongest
only sentimental. They were republican in temper, and becoming class
conscious during the ten years of debate, they grew rapidly in power
and finally turned America against England. A recent historian has thus
characterized the change of temper which brought these agrarians to the
front as the fighting strength of the republicans:
A new class, formed within a decade, growing rapidly in numbers,
was rising to power. In Pennsylvania, as in a number of other
colonies, it consisted of small farmers in the back country,
Scotch-Irish and German immigrants, reënforced by the voteless
laborers and artisans of Philadelphia or other seaboard cities....
For over a decade this rising democracy had struggled for power
against the little seaboard aristocracy of wealth and accepted
social leadership.... The colonial masses could no longer be
controlled by reverence for the high-born. The Quaker merchants of
Philadelphia, the holders of manors on the Hudson, the tobacco and
rice planters of Virginia and South Carolina, and even the great
merchants, clergy, and professional men of New England, could no
longer rule without question their social inferiors.... Thus, in
1774, came the climax in the struggle between rich and poor, East
and West, those with a vote and those who were voteless, between
privilege and the welfare of the common man. The two classes might
work in harmony or might clash on the question of resistance to
Great Britain, but they were pretty sure to be in opposition on
the issue of individual rights. A merchant ... might welcome the
support of the mechanics and small shopkeepers against a grievous
tax by the British Government, but the price, a right to vote and
to hold office, he was sure to resent, and he grew more and more
alarmed as the pressure became more insistent.[195]
From the imperial point of view there were the soundest reasons why,
following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, Parliament should have desired
to set about reorganizing the far-spread British Empire. Within a
few years vast territories had been added to the crown, and if the
scattered parts were to be gathered into a cohesive and powerful whole
there was need of a definite policy of coördination and integration.
The American colonies were only a small part of the total empire, and
it was generally agreed among English statesmen that the old policy of
“salutary neglect” could no longer serve imperial interests. If the
Whig imperialists under the leadership of Pitt had been put in charge
of imperial reconstruction, the outcome very likely would have been
peaceful. But unfortunately for the empire the colonial problem became
embroiled with English domestic politics. The purpose of the King was
to set up a personal autocracy with Tory help, overthrow the rule of
the Whig families, eliminate from the ministry the more intelligent
Old Whig leaders--Pitt, Camden, Barré, Burke, Shelburne--and bring in
a narrow-minded group who held to the obsolete mercantilist theory
of colonial dependency. The immediate outcome was the inauguration
of a policy that ran counter to the economic interests of the three
major colonial regions and aroused the hostility of important colonial
groups. Every successive enactment was a greater blunder, until the
crowning stupidity of the tea monopoly--which used colonial interests
as a pawn in a game of the East India Company--threw the colonial fat
into the fire.
The grievances of the merchants resulting from the regulatory trade
acts were real and serious. However the ministry might justify those
acts before Parliament, their effects were disastrous to substantial
colonial interests, and to American eyes seemed designed to bring
colonial trade into further subjection to English merchants. The
attempt to suppress the widespread practice of smuggling was ill
advised even though logical, for it aroused the consuming public as
well as the middlemen, and gave popular backing to the protests of the
merchants. The total political result was to align against Parliament
the most influential groups in the trading towns--the wealthy importers
and the professional classes--and provided opportunity to the radicals
to spread their propaganda under cover of respectable leadership.
The movement of resistance thus set on foot by the class-conscious
merchants eventually slipped from their control and passed into the
hands of the Sons of Liberty, who drove faster and farther than
conservative business men would willingly follow; yet these latter
soon found themselves coerced by tumultuous forces which they had
unwittingly loosed. In consequence there came a time of divided
counsels, and when independence was finally declared large numbers of
the wealthiest and most dignified merchants turned Loyalist and threw
in their lot with the King. More than two hundred quitted Boston on its
evacuation by General Gage. Others stood apart as neutrals till the
war was over, and then drew together in a compact organization to stem
the tide of post-war agrarianism and assist in setting up a federal
government after their liking.[196]
The grievances of the plantation group were less obvious but none the
less real. Probably more critical than taxation or the debts owed to
English merchants, was the question of the western lands. The Quebec
Act stirred the South as the tea monopoly stirred Boston and New York
and Philadelphia. Involved in that act were certain long accepted
colonial rights of domain, on the strength of which vast speculation
in backcountry lands had been engaged in by English and colonial land
companies and individuals.[197] The question was extraordinarily
complicated, involving the rights of the Indians, the ambition of
the Hudson Bay Company to retain the western wilderness as a vast
fur preserve, the rights of Catholics in the French settlements,
the rights of the imperial treasury to income from the sale of the
lands, the rights of soldiers of the French wars to lands granted by
colonial legislatures, the rights of frontiersmen to free settlement
and exploitation, as well as specific grants to several colonies, in
particular Massachusetts, Connecticut and Virginia. From this mass
of conflicting interests, all eager to exploit an incalculably rich
domain, little hope of satisfactory solution offered, and a wiser
ministry would have kept hands off. But an ill-considered Parliamentary
enactment cut the knot in a way to arouse the quick and keen resentment
of America. Whatever may be said for the solution, one thing is clear;
it set aside by arbitrary statute cherished rights which Virginian
gentlemen, with their eyes on rich plantations to the West, deeply
resented. It was a matter of vital concern to colonies like Virginia
that they should control their wilderness frontier. The Quebec Act not
only alienated thousands of western colonials, but it provided them
with influential leaders like Washington and Robert Morris. It was more
fuel to the radical bonfire.
In the end the fortunes of the revolutionary movement rested with the
yeomanry, and this yeomanry with its agrarian outlook and republican
sympathies, was in a mood to respond to radical appeal. That the farmer
was induced to take down his squirrel rifle and fight King George was
made possible by a number of irritations--his deep-rooted prejudice
against aristocracy, his instinctive dislike of crown officials, his
inveterate localism that resented alien interference--as well as by
substantial class interests. In every colony the party of incipient
populism had been checked and thwarted by royal officials; and it was
this mass of populistic discontent, seeing itself in danger of being
totally crushed, and its interests ignored, that provided the rank and
file of armed opposition to the King. Already Parliament had brought
acute financial distress to the colonies by forbidding the emission
of bills of credit; and other attacks on popular policies followed.
The strength of the popular opposition to royal programs had lain
heretofore in the legislative control of the purse; by threatening to
withhold salaries, the democratic legislatures had been able to coerce
the royal governor and the judges, and keep them somewhat responsive
to the popular will. To the Tories such coercion was proof that the
democratic claws needed cutting, and one of the purposes of the Stamp
Act was the providing of a fund to pay the royal officials out of the
royal chest. It was a skillful plan, but it overreached itself. Party
alignment had become too sharp, agrarian suspicions had grown too
sensitive, for the plan to succeed. The immediate, fatal result was the
accession of a numerous body of fighting men to the other malcontents.
The American Revolution was one of the first fruits of a shortsighted
imperialism. A generous policy of imperial federation would have
returned incredible revenues to Great Britain; but the Tory ministry
was not intelligent enough to let sleeping dogs lie. A sentimental
attachment had kept America loyal. So long as his customary and
traditional rights remained undisturbed, the colonial would throw
up his cap for King George; but if he were driven to choose between
loyalty and self-interest, between sentiment and profit, the choice
was certain. If the heavy debts which the foolish wars of Pitt had
bequeathed to the Empire had not seemed to offer a justification,
the Tory blunderers would not have forced the issue; but once it was
joined, vast numbers of Americans came to believe that the development
of their country had reached a point where it would be hampered by
further overseas regulation; that America must be free to exploit her
resources to her exclusive advantage; and that such economic freedom
would be possible only with political independence. It was the ill
luck of the ministry to present the question so concretely that the
colonial radicals were given an opportunity to awaken the latent forces
of American liberalism and turn them against English sovereignty.
A militant nationalistic psychology resulted from a widespread
propaganda, and the last ties with England were broken.
II • Argument and Propaganda
We understand the ways of propaganda today better than our fathers
understood them, and the official pronouncements of diplomats and
statesmen we have grown somewhat skeptical of. Historians of the
American Revolution have paid rather too exclusive attention to formal
speeches and state papers, forgetting that those speeches and papers
too often served the purpose of obscuring and evading the real issues.
The ten years of dreary debate preceding the clash of arms, during
which theory and precedent were examined by partisan lawyers, did
little more than serve party purposes on both sides of the Atlantic,
investing immediate interests with nationalistic or imperialistic
idealism. Honest men talked themselves into a passion, but they took
good care that their cause should appear dressed to advantage.
On the American side the argument fell into two broad divisions: an
attempt to justify the colonial position by appeal to the British
constitution, and when that failed by an appeal to the extra-legal
doctrine of natural right. To understand the obscure constitutional
wrangle, it must be recalled that important changes in English
constitutional practice had taken place since the colonies were
founded. Parliamentary sovereignty had superseded royal sovereignty,
or in other words, the sovereignty of property had superseded divine
right autocracy; and this in turn was undergoing change in the second
half of the eighteenth century--the sovereignty of landed property
was challenged by the rising capitalism. The Revolution of 1688 had
established the general principle that the state can take no property
in the form of taxes or levies without the consent of the owner, given
by himself or by his representative sitting in Parliament. But in
current practice the system of representation had become so misshapen
that a new theory had arisen to give constitutional sanction to
existing methods. Refusal to reapportion representation had resulted in
the notorious rotten-borough system, control of which boroughs was too
valuable an asset to the ruling oligarchy to be surrendered. To justify
the scandal a new theory of virtual representation was developed--a
theory upon which turned much of the early revolutionary debate. In
brief the theory asserted that as Parliament speaks for the total body
of Englishmen, it makes no practical difference who elects them, where
they live, who they are, or what interests they represent. Within the
halls of Parliament they can be trusted to think and legislate for the
nation as a whole. The essential constitutional principle requires
only that there shall be a respectable body chosen from among the
commons of England, in whose hands shall rest the custody of the purse,
and who shall serve as a check upon the royal prerogative. Such was
the parliamentary situation in 1763, and when appeal was made by the
colonials to the principle of no taxation without representation, it
was answered by appeal to the theory of virtual representation.
American constitutional practice, on the other hand, had developed in
a contrary direction. Quite as consciously as Parliament, the several
colonial legislatures rested on the principle of property rights, but
a different system of representation had developed. By easy logic a
geographical theory had emerged, by the terms of which a legislator
must be a freeman of the district rather than of the realm, that he
should hold power for a short period and frequently submit his conduct
to the scrutiny of the electors, and that a district should bear a just
per capita relation to the total population. The doctrine of virtual
representation was alien to colonial theory, although in fact it might
be applied to the large body of disfranchised non-property-holders.
The broad difference, then, in the legislative practice of the two
countries lay in the important distinction between local, numerical
representation, and a grotesque system of borough jobbing. Both systems
rested on a narrow suffrage, although the colonial basis was very
much broader. The difference was without significance so long as the
traditional relations between America and England continued; but when
Parliament proposed to extend the theory of virtual representation
to the colonies, and treat Massachusetts and Virginia as on a
constitutional footing with Birmingham and Manchester, the difference
became acute. No American colony was willing to become the pawn of
parliamentary placemen, at the mercy of parliamentary jobbery.
The debate over this vital question was involved in obscurities by
reason of the vagueness of the British constitution. If an unwritten
constitution be no other than established practice--and it is true of
the English constitution in spite of the body of principles existing in
such pronouncements as Magna Charta, the settlement of 1689, and the
Common Law--then the current practice of Parliament must be accepted as
constitutional. This was the fatal weakness of the colonial argument,
as it was the weakness of Pitt and other defenders of America in
Parliament. When Pitt exclaimed with characteristic grandiloquence,
“I come not here armed at all points with law cases and acts of
Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog-ears, to defend
the cause of liberty,” he abandoned the legal ground to appeal to the
sense of justice and right of Englishmen. But the question could not
so easily be transferred from the domain of constitutional law. For
upwards of a hundred years Parliament had been sovereign, and for the
colonials now to deny its sovereignty meant one of two things: either
to go back to the obsolete principle of divine right, or to postulate
an extra-parliamentary body of constitutional law, unknown to English
practice. A sovereignty inhering neither in King nor Parliament,
but in a super-constitution, was a conception that had been played
with by Coke in an endeavor to exalt the Common Law, and hinted at
by later Whig statesmen, but which had never established itself in
practice. The colonials recognized the dilemma and made half-hearted
attempts to evade it. John Adams and Franklin endeavored to argue
that as the colonial charters were from the crown, and antedated the
rise of Parliament, Americans owed allegiance to the King and not to
Parliament, and hence parliamentary pretentions to sovereignty over
America were only a new form of unconstitutional prerogative. But
the argument was taken seriously by neither side, and was soon put
away.[198]
It finally became clear to American leaders that if their cause were
to make headway, appeal must be made to broader principles. Their
case must rest on philosophical rather than on legal grounds. This
suffices to explain the shift from constitutionalism to abstract
rights, which marked the middle period of the debate. By 1773 it had
become evident to thoughtful observers that the cause of American
liberalism must fail, or become revolutionary in purpose and intent,
and to become such it must seek justification in extra-constitutional
principles. And this justification it discovered in the writings of
English liberals of the seventeenth century--in Sidney and Milton, and
above all in Locke. The influence of Locke had long been paramount in
English political speculation. He had been the apologist and defender
of the settlement of 1689; the principles which he expounded lay at the
base of the dynastic rights of the reigning house, and were nominally
accepted by all the parliamentary leaders. The relations between
natural rights and parliamentary sovereignty had not wholly clarified,
and in the background of English constitutional thought still lingered
a vague notion of certain natural rights above the constitution, and
limiting parliamentary statutes. Thinkers as different as Blackstone
and Camden subscribed to such doctrine, but it daily became more
tenuous in the face of a growing acceptance of unlimited parliamentary
sovereignty.[199]
In turning to Locke, therefore, the colonial debaters went back a
century and picked up the argument of liberalism as it existed before
it had been nullified by later English practice. They occupied a
position similar to that defended by him a hundred years before;
they were combating the same arbitrary rule that had brought on the
Revolution of 1688. He had laid down the basic principle of revolution
in the doctrine of certain natural rights of the subject which no state
may subvert without peril to the original compact; he had asserted
that taxation without representation constituted such subversive
tyranny; and he gave high sanction to the right and duty of resistance
to an encroaching sovereignty. The noble words, “Chains are but an
ill wearing how much soever we gild or polish them,” uttered a note
of defiance to arbitrary power which struck a responsive chord in the
breast of the colonial liberal. In short, Locke’s two _Treatises on
Civil Government_, aimed at Sir Robert Filmer’s absurd _Patriarcha_,
were turned against Parliament and became the textbook of the American
Revolution.
The ground had been well prepared. The argument of Locke went home
with such convincing force to the colonial liberal because it embodied
conclusions towards which America had long been moving. It was an
eloquent confirmation of native experience, a sober justification
of the psychology of individualism. The self-governing state had so
long been an established fact in colonial life as to have assumed the
complexion of a natural right. The political compact had taken form in
American political thought, a generation before Locke gave currency to
the theory, and Jefferson was expressing native conclusions drawn from
American experience when he argued that “governments derive their just
powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.” It is not true to assert that Jefferson was only reciting
Locke, with modifications derived from the French humanitarians. It is
nearer the truth to say that he made use of old-world philosophy to
express and justify certain native tendencies then seeking adequate
statement.
To such an experience, armed with such a philosophy, there must
come eventually the conviction that both monarchy and aristocracy
were irrational; that the ambitions of a coercive alien sovereignty
were fraught with danger to the rights of the American citizen.
The resurgent absolutism of Stuart times, with its doctrine of
the omnicompetent state, which the King was reviving through the
instrumentality of Parliament, was broken by the stubborn colonial
resistance. Absolutism under whatever form was doomed in America,
however slowly it might linger out its life. Jonathan Boucher might
seek to revive Sir Robert Filmer, and preach to Americans the dogma of
divine right through royal primogeniture from Adam, and other colonial
Tories might applaud; but they were fast becoming anachronisms.
The Revolution was to overthrow for Americans the principle of the
absolutist state, and substitute a modified sovereignty, circumscribed
by the utilitarian test of its relation to the common well-being of its
citizens. For the first time in modern history it was discovered that
“the true meaning of sovereignty,” as a recent student has put it, is
to be sought “not in the coercive power possessed by its instrument
[the state,] but in the fused good-will for which it stands.”[200]
III • Certain Social Consequences
The swift crystallization of colonial sentiment in favor of
republicanism, as the crisis developed, produced the American
revolution of which John Adams wrote. The long leveling process of
a hundred and forty years, with its psychology of decentralization,
fruited naturally in a new political philosophy fitted to new-world
conditions. Monarchy, with its social appanage of aristocracy, was
a caste institution wholly unsuited to an unregimented America. The
war brought this revolutionary fact home to the consciousness of
thousands of colonials; and the liberalism that before had been vaguely
instinctive quickly became eager and militant. The old order was
passing; the day of the Tory in America was over for the present; the
republican was henceforth to be master of the new world. Out of this
primary revolution were to come other revolutions, social and economic,
made possible by the new republican freedom.
The swift rise of a political philosophy traditionally regarded as
mean and traitorous was inexplicable to Tory gentlemen, and aroused a
fierce retaliatory opposition. A social war of the classes, bitter,
vindictive, followed upon hostilities against England. The arrogance of
the gentry during those brisk days when the new spirit was rising is
scarcely comprehensible to later Americans unused to such frankness.
The republicans were scorned by the superior classes as unprincipled
sedition-mongers, plotting treason against the King and society. If
commoners flocked to town-meetings and outvoted the gentlemen, the
latter were outraged at the presumption of the “mobsters” in flouting
their betters. For the plain people to take things into their own hands
was no other than anarchy. The familiar records of the day are filled
with such aristocratic jests as this:
Down at night a bricklayer or carpenter lies,
Next sun a Lycurgus, a Solon doth rise.[201]
“The dirty mob was all about me as I drove into town,” said Mistress
Peggy Hutchinson, as she looked out on turbulent Boston from her
father’s chariot; and her feminine contempt for the common people was
an echo of the universal Tory contempt for republican mechanics and
farmers. It was the duty of the vulgar, as loyal subjects, to pay taxes
and not lay them; to obey the law and not make it. By far the most
important consequence of the Revolution was the striking down of this
mounting aristocratic spirit that was making rapid headway with the
increase of wealth. It sifted the American people as the migrations
of the seventeenth century had sifted the English people, keeping
the republicans at home and sending forth the Tories, weakening the
influence of the conservatives and increasing the influence of the
liberals. Few experiences in our history have proved so momentous in
results as this shift of power and change in personnel that resulted
from the great schism. A middle-class America was to rise on the ruins
of the colonial aristocracy.
The unfortunate Loyalists were victims of their own blindness. They did
not rightly estimate the driving power of the liberal forces released
by the struggle, and failing to understand, they staked everything on
the issue, and lost, and were driven rudely out of the land by the
plebeian republicans whom they despised. The disruption of colonial
society resulting from the expulsion of the Loyalists was far graver
than we commonly assume. Shiploads of excellent gentlemen, and among
them the most cultivated minds in America, were driven from their
firesides and sent forth to seek new homes, whether in “Hell, Hull
or Halifax” mattered little to the victors. Upward of forty thousand
sought refuge in Canada; thousands more went to the Bahamas; and still
other thousands returned to the old home. “There will scarcely be a
village in England without some American dust in it, I believe, by
the time we are all at rest,” wrote the Loyalist Dutchman, Peter Van
Schaak. Much suffering was endured and much bitterness engendered, and
if for years the dominant temper in Canada was fiercely hostile to
the United States, the mood is traceable to the expatriated gentlemen
who transmitted to their children a grudge against the victorious
republicans. It was an unhappy business, but it was scarcely avoidable
once appeal was made to the sword. There was no longer place in America
for the foolish dream of a colonial aristocracy.
The change of temper that came over American society with the loss of
the Loyalists, was immense and far-reaching. For the first time the
middle class was free to create a civilization after its own ideals.
In rising to leadership it brought another spirit into every phase
of life. Dignity and culture henceforth were to count for less and
assertiveness for more. Ways became less leisurely, the social temper
less urbane. The charm of the older aristocracy disappeared along
with its indisputable evils. Although a few of the older wits like
Mather Byles lingered on bitterly, and others like Gouverneur Morris
accepted the situation philosophically, they belonged to the past. A
franker evaluation of success in terms of money began to obscure the
older personal and family distinction. New men brought new ways and a
vulgar clamor of politics went hand in hand with business expansion.
The demagogue and the speculator discovered a fruitful field for
their activities. The new capitalism lay on the horizon of republican
America, and the middle class was eager to hasten its development.
But a new economic order required a new political state, and as a
necessary preliminary, the spirit of nationalism began that slow
encroachment upon local frontiers which was to modify profoundly the
common psychology. Americanism superseded colonialism, and with the new
loyalty there developed a conception of federal sovereignty, overriding
all local authorities, checking the movement of particularism, binding
the separate commonwealths in a consolidating union. This marked
the turning point in American development; the checking of the long
movement of decentralization and the beginning of a counter movement of
centralization--the most revolutionary change in three hundred years of
American experience. The history of the rise of the coercive state in
America, with the ultimate arrest of all centrifugal tendencies, was
implicit in that momentous counter movement.
Footnotes
[193] An excellent short statement of the causes of the American
Revolution is given by A. M. Schlesinger in _New Viewpoints in American
History_, Chapter VII. Compare C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the War
of Independence_.
[194] Letter to Mr. Niles, January 14, 1818.
[195] Van Tyne, _Causes of the War of Independence_, pp. 424-426.
[196] For an admirable study, see A. M. Schlesinger, _The Colonial
Merchants and the American Revolution: 1763-1776_.
[197] This important subject has been examined by C. W. Alvord, _The
Mississippi Valley in British Policies_: C. A. Beard, _An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution_; C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the
War of Independence_.
[198] For an excellent discussion of the constitutional questions
involved, see C. H. Van Tyne, _The Causes of the War of Independence_,
Chapters VIII and IX.
[199] For this see Van Tyne, _ibid._, pp. 234-238.
[200] H. J. Laski, _The Problem of Sovereignty_, p. 12; see also
Appendices A and B.
[201] Moore, _Diary of the Revolution_, Vol. II, p. 22.
Chapter II • The Mind of the American Tory
So nearly forgotten by later generations is the American Tory of
Revolutionary times that it will be well to examine the genus with some
care; for only by understanding the great authority inhering in his
traditional leadership can we measure his power to thwart the ambitions
of the republicans. In numbers the Tories were a very small minority;
unendowed with wealth and position they would have been negligible; but
as members of the local gentry they enjoyed great prestige which was
highly serviceable to the royal cause. Although native born they aped
the English aristocracy, and reproduced on a less magnificent scale
the manners of the English landed families. Less arrogant than their
old-world models, certainly much less corrupt in their politics, they
exuded the same aristocratic prejudices and the same narrow sympathies.
Their most cherished dream was the institution of an American nobility,
with the seal of royal favor set upon their social pretensions. They
were the embodiment of the aristocratic eighteenth century, in a world
instinctively hostile to all aristocracies. Out of a numerous company
of distinguished Tories, three will serve for consideration--Thomas
Hutchinson, Royal Governor, Daniel Leonard, lawyer, and Jonathan
Boucher, minister.
I • Thomas Hutchinson • Royal Governor
The career of the last royal governor of Massachusetts affords a
suggestive study in the relation of material prosperity to political
principles. Descended in the fourth generation from the Antinomian
enthusiast, Mistress Anne Hutchinson, whom all the authorities of
Boston could neither terrify nor silence, but who suffered contumely
and exile rather than submit her will to official censors, Thomas
Hutchinson reveals in his stiff conservatism the common change that
follows upon economic well-being. The House of Hutchinson had long
since abandoned all unprofitable radicalisms and had taken to the safer
business of acquiring property and respectability; in which work it
had by God’s blessing greatly prospered, until it came to be reckoned
the first house in the province. With growing wealth political honors
multiplied. The grandfather of the governor had been the first Chief
Justice of the Common Pleas, Commander of the Forces, Assistant,
and Councilor; and at his death in 1717 he was as eminent a citizen
as Chief Justice Sewall, the diarist. The governor’s father, Thomas
Hutchinson, Sr., devoted more attention to his calling of merchant than
to politics, nevertheless he sat in the Council for twenty-five years,
and was a colonel in the provincial militia. With the advent of Thomas
Hutchinson upon the scene, the respectability of the house was assured,
abundant wealth had been accumulated, and the path of political
preferment was open. The little colony was eager to confer honors on
so promising a son. He was ambitious and thrifty, and he coveted the
distinction and the material rewards which officeholding brought. No
Boston gentleman of his day had a sharper eye for the main chance. He
added office to office, and at one and the same time he was Member of
the Council, Judge of Probate, Chief Justice, and Lieutenant Governor;
and such other offices as he could not himself possess he maneuvered to
get into the hands of his sons, and brothers-in-law, and dependents.
One of those brothers-in-law, Samuel Mather, son of Cotton Mather,
who refused to follow his kinsman into the Tory camp, called him “an
avaritious man”; and avaricious of power, even more than of money, he
certainly was.
With his abundant offices and honors, there was every temptation
to conservatism. Unless there was hidden in him some lingering
idealism, some seed of the ancestral radicalism to sprout and grow
into discontent, Thomas Hutchinson was marked for a reactionary.
And unhappily in his conventional soul there was not the faintest
spark of idealism. The enthusiasm of Mistress Anne was washed clean
out of the Hutchinson blood, leaving only the native stubbornness;
which stubbornness, dominating a character cold, formal, arrogant,
dogmatic, unimaginative, self-righteous, was finally to play havoc
with Thomas Hutchinson’s good fortune. The son of a merchant, he was
a careful, methodical soul, who studied how to save and invest; in a
later generation he would have been a great banker, but in his own he
preferred to invest in politics. How suggestive of Yankee thrift is
such an entry as this:
All the time he was at College he carried on a little trade by
sending ventures in his father’s vessels, & kept a little paper
Journal & leger, & enterd in it every dinner, supper, breakfast,
& every article of expense, even of a shilling; which practice
soon became pleasant; & he found it of great use all his life....
Before he came of age, he had, by adventuring to sea from two or
three quintalls [hundredweight] of fish, given him by his father,
when about 12 years old, acquired four or five hundred pounds
sterling.[202]
After a number of years in his father’s countinghouse, learning
the ways of eighteenth-century trade, he abandoned the mercantile
career and entered politics at the age of six-and-twenty. From May
31, 1737, when he first took his place in the House of Deputies
as one of the “Boston Seat,” to June 1, 1774, when he quitted his
country home at Milton to take ship for London and exile, he was a
power in the political life of Massachusetts, reaching eventually
the highest station. During that long period of thirty-seven years
he was a spokesman of the New England gentry, always on the side of
government, never in the opposition. That he ever critically examined
the foundations of his political creed, there is nothing in the printed
record to indicate. He had some of the tastes of the book-lover and
scholar. He was deeply interested in the Puritan past, and his _History
of Massachusetts Bay_ was based on a wide knowledge of manuscript
sources which he had been at great pains to collect. But in spite of a
praiseworthy care for accuracy and impartiality, he lacked the creative
imagination to reconstruct the past. He had pretty much freed his
mind from religious bigotry, but he could not rid himself of a narrow
partisanship, and his treatment of the agrarian movement was grossly
unfair. His shortcomings as a political thinker were more striking. His
knowledge of the political classics was of the slightest. When Samuel
Adams made use of the natural-rights theory, Hutchinson’s comment
would indicate that he had no acquaintance with the theory and had not
even read Locke.[203] He was little given to intellectual interests,
and ill at ease in dealing with general principles. He possessed the
mental qualities of a lawyer rather than a speculative thinker, and his
long immersion in office contracted a mind naturally sterile to the
routine habits of an administrator. He hardened early, and thereafter
he was incapable of changing his views or liberalizing his sympathies.
Consistency he erected into a fetish and once he had taken a position
he would not budge from it. He did not understand the liberal America
that was rising about him--neither the economic forces that were
creating it nor the spokesmen who represented it; and he saw no reason
for change. The House of Hutchinson had prospered under existing
conditions, and other houses would prosper likewise, he believed,
if they were equally honest and diligent. So he went his tactless,
unintelligent way, barking his shins on every liberal tendency of the
times, and hating the men who gave him trouble.
Hutchinson, in short, was a complete Tory, and if we would understand
him and his class, we must first take into account the current Tory
philosophy. Compressed into a sentence it was the expression of the
will-to-power of the wealthy. Its motive was economic class interest,
and its object the exploitation of society through the instrumentality
of the state. Stated thus, the philosophy does not appear to advantage;
it lays itself open to unpleasant criticism by those who are not
its beneficiaries. In consequence, much ingenuity in tailoring
was necessary to provide it with garments to cover its nakedness.
Embroidered with patriotism, loyalty, law and order, it made a very
respectable appearance; and when it put on the stately robe of the
British Constitution, it was enormously impressive. The Tory theory
of the British Constitution may well be regarded as a masterpiece of
the gentle art of tailoring. Government by king, lords, and commons it
asserted, approximated the ideal of a “mixt government,” embracing the
total wisdom of the realm, ruling in the interests of all, avoiding
the evils of class domination, and chastising the refractory only for
the common good. Gentlemen might well praise the “glorious British
Constitution.” It was their little jest at the expense of the English
people, who were content to be exploited by them.
In this game of political pretense Hutchinson willingly shared. He
knew that Parliament did not represent the English people; that it was
controlled by a group of landed gentlemen with mercenaries in their
pay; and yet in reply to repeated charges he revealed no hint of the
truth, but reiterated the familiar Tory interpretation in the face of
shrewd enemies who knew that he was insincere. In private among other
gentlemen, Hutchinson was frank enough. He knew what was at stake
in America--whether political control should remain in the hands of
“gentlemen of principle and property,” with the assistance of English
Tories, or whether it should pass into the hands of the majority. And
so while declaiming against mobs, and preaching loyalty to the best of
kings, he secretly busied himself with influential persons in devising
methods to frustrate the Whig ambitions. Moreover in dealing with his
enemies he was a thorough realist. In his comment on American Whigs and
their political methods, he set down many a shrewd and just estimate
of their actions and motives. But in defense of the English ministry
he refused to face reality. He quibbled and misrepresented and denied,
stooping to dirty politics to hold his party together and strengthen it.
At the moment when Hutchinson assumed the duties of governor the
situation was tense. Bernard had muddled things sadly, and “the
rage against him became, at length, so violent, that it was judged
necessary to recall him,”[204] and he slipped off to England to receive
a baronetcy and a pension. But he had brought the commonwealth to
the parting of the ways, and Hutchinson found himself in a difficult
position. The roots of the trouble are laid bare in the following
affidavit of Bernard:
In the Province of Massachusetts Bay, when civil authority
was reduced so low as to have nothing left but the form of a
government, and scarce even that, an enquiry into the causes of so
great a weakness in the governing power was unavoidable; and there
was no entering upon such an enquiry, without observing upon the
ill effects of that part of the constitution of that government,
whereby the appointment of the Council is left to the people, to be
made by annual election; and yet the Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative, is subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council. This solecism in policy has been as hurtful in practice
as it is absurd in theory, and it is the true cause of the extreme
imbecility of the power of the crown in this government, at times
when the exertion of it is most wanted. This is not an observation
of a new date; it is of many years standing; ... ever since he has
felt the effects which the popular constitution of the Council
has had upon the Royalty of the government, which is above three
years ago; within which time, he has seen the King deprived of
the service of every man at the Council Board, who has resolution
enough to disapprove the opposition to the authority of the King
and the Parliament, and their supremacy over the _American_
Colonies. This, and this only, is the foundation of the charge
of their endeavouring to overthrow the charter; whereas his real
desire has been, that the charter should have a more durable
stability, by means of a necessary alteration, without which, he
is persuaded it cannot have a much longer duration; as the abuse
of the appointment of the Council now prevailing, must oblige the
Parliament to interfere sooner or later.[205]
The more thoughtfully one considers this frank statement the more
clearly it appears what grounds for party dissension lay in the
“solecism” of a constitution whereby the “Royal Governor, in all Acts
of prerogative,” was “subject to the controul of the Democraticall
Council.” It would not be easy to patch up a working compromise between
an absentee prerogative and the local democratic will; one or the
other must be sovereign; and because the terms of the charter enabled
the democracy to nullify the prerogative, Bernard concluded that the
charter must be revised and the abuse corrected. In this Hutchinson
agreed, and from the imperial point of view not without reason. “By
an unfortunate mistake,” he wrote in apology to Gage, “soon after
the charter, a law passed which made every town in the Province a
corporation perfectly democratic.” With every passing year the mistake
was becoming more unfortunate, and the vital problem before government,
in the opinion of Hutchinson, was how to correct this unfortunate
mistake, together with other like mistakes, with such happy skill as
to check the democratic branch without arousing popular resentment. On
this reef Hutchinson foundered.
As early as 1764 the meddlesome Bernard had proposed to the home
government a complete remodeling of colonial governments on the English
Tory plan; and by way of suggestion he forwarded some proposals looking
to the eventual consolidation of the several colonies under a single
royal government, the erection of a house of lords as a balance to the
popular party and a comprehensive tax policy. It was one of numerous
suggestions then being made for incorporating America into the British
Empire, and extending the imperial power over the continent. Bernard’s
bias is sufficiently revealed in the following:
86. There is no government in America at present, whose powers
are properly balanced; there not being in any of them, a real
and distinct third legislative power mediating between the king
and the people, which is the peculiar excellence of the British
constitution.
87. The want of such a third legislative power, adds weight to the
popular, and lightens the royal scale; so as to destroy the balance
between the royal and popular powers.
88. Although America is not now ... ripe enough for an hereditary
nobility; yet it is now capable of a nobility for life.
89. A nobility appointed by the king for life, and made
independent, would probably give strength and stability to the
American governments, as effectually as an hereditary nobility does
to that of Great Britain.[206]
It is not known to what extent Hutchinson indorsed so ambitious and
comprehensive a plan. For years he had been Bernard’s understudy, and
supported him in all his policies; but being cautious by nature and
attached to local custom, he probably would have rejected the plan
of continental consolidation unless his personal ambition had been
enlisted. Hosmer’s attempt to clear his skirts[207] is not convincing.
Recalling that Hutchinson yielded invariably to royal or ministerial
suggestions, no matter how contrary to local custom, there is no reason
to believe that he would have objected to any coercive program, which
provided adequately for the colonial Tories.
In another matter that touched the political life of Massachusetts
to the quick, Hutchinson was deeply engaged. The source of the power
of the popular party lay in the democratic town meeting. In earlier
days the Tories had made no objection to it, for it was amenable to
control by the “better sort of people.” But under the skillful politics
of Samuel Adams and his fellows, it had become the chief instrument
of opposition, and Hutchinson was determined to cut its claws. On so
delicate a matter, however, it was only to the ministry that he could
speak frankly; he must not appear to be laying a plot against an
institution so long established as a part of the political machinery
of the commonwealth. Under date of March 26, 1770, he wrote to the
secretary of Lord Hillsboro:
There is a Town Meeting, no sort of regard being had to any
qualification of voters, but all the inferior people meet together;
and at a late meeting the inhabitants of other towns who happened
to be in town, mixed with them.... It is in other words being under
the government of the mob. This has given the lower part of the
people such a sense of their importance that a gentleman does not
meet with what used to be common civility, and we are sinking into
perfect barbarism.... If this town could be separated from the rest
of the Province, the infection has not taken such strong hold of
the parts remote from it. The spirit of anarchy which prevails in
Boston is more than I am able to cope with.[208]
Writing to Hillsboro on April 19, 1771, he complained:
In these votes and in most of the public proceedings of the town of
Boston, persons of the best character and estate have little or no
concern. They decline attending Town Meetings where they are sure
to be outvoted by men of the lowest order.[209]
A month later, writing to his old crony, ex-Governor Bernard, he
suggested a remedy which in one form or another he was constantly
holding before the ministry, as an inducement to act:
The town of Boston is the source from whence all the other parts
of the Province derive more or less troubled water. When you
consider what is called its constitution, your good sense will
determine immediately that it never can be otherwise for a long
time together, whilst the majority which conducts all affairs, if
met together upon another occasion, would be properly called a mob,
and are persons of such rank and circumstance as in all communities
constitute a mob, there being no sort of regulation of voters
in practice; and as these will always be most in number, men of
weight and value, although they wish to suppress them, cannot be
induced to attempt to do it for fear not only of being outvoted,
but affronted and insulted. Call such an assembly what you will,
it is really no sort of government, not even a democracy, at best
a corruption of it. There is no hope of a cure by any legislative
but among ourselves [_i.e._, ministerial supporters] to compel the
town to be a corporation.[210] The people will not seek it, because
every one is sensible his importance will be lessened. If ever a
remedy is found, it must be by compelling them to swallow it, and
that by an exterior power,--the Parliament.[211]
In such advice--the destruction of the democratic machinery by an
“exterior power” in order that control of government should lie
beyond the reach of the popular will--we may discover ample grounds
for democratic dissatisfaction with the governor. Hutchinson believed
that when matters of state were settled by gentlemen over their wine,
good government resulted; but when discussed by common people over
their cider, the door was thrown wide open to anarchy. His particular
_bête noire_ was the mob, by which name he designated any gathering
that had not received his gracious permission to assemble. It was his
shortsighted willingness to arm himself with external authority against
his fellow countrymen, that filled the years of his administration
with so much bitterness. The more he lost ground, the more anxiously
he pleaded for help from the ministry. When certain of his private
letters came to the hands of Franklin and were sent home, Hutchinson
was put in a rage. He had long been fearful of such a diplomatic
leak and urged secrecy, for if his private correspondence should
become public, he explained, “I have no security against the rage
of the people.”[212] Much ink was used by his friends in declaiming
against the infamy of making public a gentleman’s private letters,
and Hutchinson characterized it as an “affrontery” such as “was
never known before.” That such private correspondence was in effect
official correspondence, in that it aimed at shaping parliamentary
policy towards Massachusetts, was ignored by these outraged gentlemen.
Diplomats who plan privately rarely like to be read publicly,
especially when the public reads how it is being bought and sold.
Very likely the Assembly overstated the case in declaring that “there
has been, for many years past, measures contemplated, and a plan
formed, by a set of men, born and educated among us, to raise their own
fortunes, and advance themselves to posts of honor and profit, not only
to the destruction of the charter and constitution of this province,
but at the expense of the rights and liberties of the American
colonies.”[213] Hutchinson was too cautious and too conservative to
seek any revolutionary end; at the same time he was too yielding to
make a stand against any encroachment that had legal sanction. From
his narrow mind no help could be expected touching the great matter of
imperial federation. In seeking a way out of the difficulties in which
the British Empire was daily becoming entangled, the royal governor
could discover no wiser plan than the abridgment of fundamental
privileges which a hundred and fifty years of slow growth had made the
peculiar possession of the colonies. The unhappy conclusion towards
which the American Tories were drifting he set forth in words which
were to become the most notorious he ever penned.
I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good
order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgment of
what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering
that in a remove from a state of nature to the most perfect state
of government, there must be a great restraint of natural liberty.
I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in
which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy
all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never
yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish
to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion
with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach
must prove the ruin of the colony.[214]
Later writers, forgetful of Hutchinson’s self-seeking record-and of
his Tory philosophy, have inclined to leniency in judging him for
his stand on this crucial point. But in spite of his wig and scarlet
broadcloth robes he was only an unintelligent politician, who served
the hand that fed him. No better commentary could be asked than is
found in the caustic remark of the keenest Englishman of his day on
the ministerial policy. In a letter of April, 1777, Horace Walpole
asked, “What politicians are those who have preferred the empty name
of _sovereignty_ to that of _alliance_, and forced subsidies to the
golden ocean of commerce?” Hutchinson was stubborn rather than wise.
He would make no compromise in the matter of sovereignty; there could
be no lawful will but the will of Parliament. “I know of no line that
can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total
independence of the colonies,” he replied to the Assembly, when it was
struggling with the idea of federation.[215] When the Council and House
were outlining a plan of imperial union, and seeking to demonstrate
that the “subordinate authorities” of the colonies were sovereign
within their fields, and “that, in fact, two such powers do subsist
together, and are not incompatible”; the governor with patient finality
explained to them the true “nature of supreme power,”
... and urged, as an undeniable principle, that such a power is
essential in all governments, and that another power, with the
name of subordinate, and with a right to withstand or control the
supreme in particulars, is an absurdity--for it so far ceases
to be subordinate, and becomes itself supreme; that no sensible
writer upon government ever denied what he asserted; and whilst the
council continued to hold, that two supreme powers were compatible,
it would be to no purpose to reason upon the other parts of their
message to him, or to deny what they adduced from a principle so
contrary to reason.[216]
Hutchinson’s position as the King’s representative soon became so
difficult that a wiser man would have resigned. He was constrained
to be the executive of a policy of government by ministerial
instructions. Again and again he vetoed a measure, or dissolved the
legislature, or took action contrary to the spirit of the charter;
and the sole justification which he pleaded was a secret letter of
instructions, the terms of which he refused to make public, and the
object of which must be judged by his acts. “So long as he continued
commander-in-chief,” he replied to the House in one of their perennial
wranglings, “he should think himself bound to conform to every
signification of his majesty’s pleasure.” To the denunciations of the
popular party he remained outwardly indifferent, strong in the supposed
integrity of his official purpose. In time, he believed, the evil
spoken of him by ambitious men would be forgotten, and his course would
find vindication. The words of Bernard might well have been his:
He denies, that the opinion of the whole people of that Province
can now be taken and ascertained, labouring as it does at present,
under the baneful influence of a desperate faction, who by raising
groundless fears and jealousies, by deluding one part of the
people, and by intimidating the other part, has destroyed all real
freedom, not only of action, but even of sentiment and opinion.
But the Respondent doubts not but that his Administration has been
approved by the generally of the best and most respectable men of
the Province.[217]
In spite of Hutchinson’s endeavors to build up a prerogative party
the drift of public opinion went steadily against him until he was
convinced that he stood almost alone. “He was not sure of support from
any one person in authority,” he commented stoically, in telling of
the tea troubles. The Council, the Assembly, the very constables were
against him. Yet he went his way obstinately; he would fulfill to
the last word the instructions of his superiors. The ministry might
be unwise, but better the legal folly of Parliament than the madness
of the democracy. To encroach upon the royal prerogative, Hutchinson
believed was to endanger the nice balance of the constitution. He was
convinced that “the present easy, happy model of government” was as
near perfect as the ingenuity of Englishmen could devise; that the
welfare of America was dependent upon a proper subordination of the
colonies to the mother country; and that the popular party was plotting
treason against their country and their king. The third volume of
his history is a long argument to demonstrate the wisdom of his own
and Bernard’s administrations. The liberal governor, Thomas Pownall,
Hutchinson disliked, partly because of his easy familiar ways, but
chiefly because he was not a prerogative man.[218] But if Pownall
had been in Hutchinson’s place, the history of the relations of
Massachusetts and England would have run very differently.
It was his ingrained snobbery which, more than anything else, brought
about his undoing. The aristocratic governor never differed with a
lord, and rarely agreed with a commoner. It was intolerable to him that
common fellows should dispute his reasoning or sit in judgment upon
his official acts. It was their duty as loyal subjects to obey without
question the mandates of the King’s appointed spokesmen; and when
town-meeting resolutions, put through by mechanics and petty tradesmen,
criticised his conduct, or refused to accept the decision of the
supreme court that the “Boston massacre” was not legally a “massacre,”
he saw in such acts only the madness of the mobocracy. That the people
should suspect the probity of his majesty’s judges was painful to him.
As partisan bitterness increased, he became acutely suspicious of all
who disagreed with him, and shut his mind against every argument. The
debates and resolves in House and Council “abounded with duplicity
and inconclusive reasonings.” “The disingenuity and low craft, which
appeared in so many of the messages, resolves, and other publick
instruments,” he commented, descended “to the level and vulgarity of a
common newspaper essay.”[219] To the leaders of the popular party, the
group of keen debaters and parliamentarians who kept him constantly on
the defense, he attributed an artful malignancy. The fathers of the
Revolution do not appear to advantage in the pages of his history. The
Otises had gone over to the opposition because the father had been
disappointed on the occasion of Hutchinson’s elevation to the coveted
chief-justiceship. John Hancock’s “ruling passion was a fondness for
popular applause.... His natural powers were moderate, and had been
very little improved by study.” John Adams was a man whose “ambition
was without bounds.... He could not look with complacency upon any man
who was in possession of more wealth, more honours, or more knowledge
than himself,” and he went over to the opposition because of a slight
upon him by refusal of a place on the bench. For Samuel Adams, his
most relentless enemy, Hutchinson’s hatred was boundless. He had
defaulted as collector of taxes and for equivalent of his arrears of
public money he had set up as defender of the public liberties, and he
“made more converts by calumniating governors, and other servants of
the crown, than by strength of reasoning.” His main business in life
was “robbing men of their characters.”
It is unlikely that time will bring any vindication of the later career
of Thomas Hutchinson. He was a stiff-necked official of scrupulous
principle, whose principles were grossly reactionary. He was sincerely
attached to the great ideal of imperial unity, but he conceived of
that unity as embodied in the coercive sovereignty of the crown and
parliament, with Tory gentlemen as exclusive administrators. Samuel
Adams was not unjust in declaring, “It has been his principle from a
boy that mankind are to be governed by the discerning few; and it has
ever since been his ambition to be the hero of the few.” Courteous
and conscientious, with very considerable administrative ability, it
was his misfortune to defend a social philosophy alien to the rough
individualism of his fellow countrymen. He would think only in terms
of imperial centralization, and they would think only in terms of
local home rule. He conceived of the political state as a private
preserve for gentlemen to hunt over, and they conceived of it as a free
hunting-ground for all. He never understood the assertive, capitalistic
America that was rising about him, and in joining issue with it he
destroyed himself. “If we were not mad,” he lamented, “I have no doubt
we might enjoy all that liberty which can subsist with a state of
government.” It was the complaint of the Tory upon a democracy that
preferred self-rule to the blessings of a trusteeship, which, like a
lawyers’ squabble, consumed the estate in fees. Quite evidently the
“mobility,” in the days of Thomas Hutchinson, was running into madness,
for it demanded greater liberty than was compatible with a “state of
government” sanctioned by crown officials--a fact which the royal
governor grieved over but was helpless to restrain.
II • Daniel Leonard • Tory Lawyer
Probably the most finished prose writer, certainly one of the most
cultivated minds, among the notable group of American Loyalists, was a
young man of excellent family, who if events had turned out otherwise
would have made a much greater name for himself. Daniel Leonard was a
Harvard graduate and a member of the Boston bar, an effective speaker,
of some weight in commonwealth politics, and aligned with Hutchinson,
Sewall, and the crown party. In temperament and taste he seems to have
been conspicuously aristocratic. He delighted in fine clothes and
set up his coach and pair to drive from his countryseat to Boston--a
gesture of opulence that excited the laughter of sober people, and led
Mercy Warren to introduce him into her comedy, _The Group_, under the
name of Beau Trumps. According to John Adams, who was a decided gossip,
it was this cavalier love of display that led to his political undoing,
overcoming his native sympathy with the party of revolution.
He wore a broad gold lace round the rim of his hat, he made his
cloak glitter with laces still broader, he had set up his chariot
and pair and constantly traveled in it from Taunton to Boston. This
made the world stare--it was a novelty. Not another lawyer in the
province, attorney or barrister, of whatever age, reputation, rank,
or station, presumed to ride in a coach or chariot. The discerning
ones soon perceived that wealth and power must have charms to
a heart that delighted in so much finery, and indulged in such
unusual expense. Such marks could not escape the vigilant eyes of
the two arch-tempters, Hutchinson and Sewall, who had more art,
insinuation, and address, than all the rest of their party.[220]
Under the pen name of “Massachusettensis,” Leonard published a series
of weekly letters addressed to “the Inhabitants of the Province of
Massachusetts Bay,” running from December 12, 1774, to April 3, 1775,
a fortnight before the affair at Lexington. They were begun soon after
the adjournment of the Continental Congress, and may be taken as the
final statement of the Tory argument. They were exceedingly skillful
partisan pamphlets, adapted with great adroitness to current prejudices
and old loyalties. Their main appeal was to the psychology of the
colonial, and if the springs of that psychology had not been sapped
by the rising liberalism, the appeal would have been extraordinarily
persuasive. Probably the King’s cause was never presented more
convincingly, and the American Tories were delighted with the
letters. “On my return from Congress,” said John Adams, “I found
the Massachusetts Gazette teeming with political speculations, and
Massachusettensis shining like the moon among the lesser stars.”[221]
He at once replied to them under the pen name “Novanglus,” beginning
with a slashing attack in which the seventeenth-century republicans
are called in to refute Leonard, and then reciting some plain facts
about the British government and its American spokesman, which somewhat
tarnished the latter’s eulogies. But he soon strayed off into abstract
disquisition, and the controversy was brought to an abrupt end with the
news from Lexington.
As in most Loyalist pamphlets, Leonard’s appeal was primarily to
the law and the constitution, and it is tagged with references to
statutes like a proper lawyer’s brief. But underlying the argument is a
political philosophy which fairly represents the current Tory theory.
The immediate purpose of the Letters was to make the rebellious spirit
of the colonial Whigs toward their lawful sovereign appear both wicked
and groundless, dangerous to the peace and well-being of society and
inspired by the personal ambitions of demagogues. This major purpose
involved him in two main arguments: first, on the heinousness of
rebellion in general; and second, on the special heinousness of the
Whig leaders. Leonard’s political philosophy is implied rather than
elaborated. With other American Loyalists he evaded broad principles;
nevertheless his total argument rests on a philosophical foundation too
well known to be glossed over. He derived immediately from Hobbes, and
he follows the _Leviathan_ in his exaltation of the sovereign state.
Men in a state of nature, he argued, live in a condition of anarchy,
with the hand of all against all. Amid such chaos civilization is
impossible, and the common need of security for person and property
impelled men to erect the coercive state as an instrument of social
protection. It first arose and has since been maintained from the
necessity of holding in check the spirit of anarchy which continually
threatens from the ambitions of designing men. This is the great danger
that lies always in wait, ready to destroy society. Government is a
guarantee of the protection of the weak against the strong, and every
friend of law and order must enlist his loyalty on the side of the
lawful prince against all who would foment rebellion; for rebellion is
the mischief-maker that unlooses all the evils of Pandora’s box.
This was no more than the familiar stock-in-trade of the Tory,
nevertheless Leonard becomes quite terrifying in describing the evils
of sedition:
Rebellion is the most atrocious offence, that can be perpetrated
by man, save those which are committed more immediately against
the supreme Governor of the Universe who is the avenger of his
own cause. It dissolves the social band, annihilates the security
resulting from law and government; introduces fraud, violence,
rapine, murder, sacrilege, and the long train of evils, that riot,
uncontrouled, in a state of nature. Allegiance and protection are
reciprocal. The subject is bound by the compact to yield obedience
to government, and in return, is entitled to protection from it;
thus the poor are protected against the rich; the weak against
the strong; the individual against the many; and this protection
is guaranteed to each member, by the whole community. But when
government is laid prostrate, a state of war, of all against all,
commences; might overcomes right; innocence itself has no security,
unless the individual sequesters himself from his fellowmen,
inhabits his own cave, and seeks his own prey. This is what is
called a state of nature.[222]
The “seeds of sedition” having been sown, they spring up and bring
forth fruits of death; the “people are led to sacrifice real liberty to
licentiousness, which gradually ripens into rebellion and civil war.”
And what is still more to be lamented, the generality of the
people, who are thus made the dupes of artifice, and the mere
stilts of ambition, are sure to be losers in the end. The best
they can expect, is to be thrown neglected by, when they are no
longer wanted; but they are seldom so happy; if they are subdued,
confiscation of estate and ignominious death are their portion;
if they conquer, their own army is often turned upon them, to
subjugate them to a more tyrannical government than that they
rebelled against.[223]
Leonard then proceeds to supplement the Hobbesian argument by an
elaborate appeal to the history of English law, and discovers ample
sanction in a recital of a long list of statutory enactments and
court decisions against the evil of sedition. As treason is the
gravest social crime, so it has always been visited with the severest
punishments. He states the history of legislation against treason, and
points out how the statutes have been construed to reach so far as to
embrace the gathering of private men in a warlike manner, with a design
to redress public grievances or to better their economic condition. He
makes a parade of the brutal laws of feudal times, and the decisions
of Tudor and Stuart judges, justifying those pronouncements as a
necessary defense of society against sedition-mongers and their
subversive ambitions. By a natural transition he brings the argument
home to his American readers. The aims and methods of the Whigs, he
contends, constitute a clear violation of the law of treason. They are
playing with the gallows, with their Committees of Correspondence--“the
foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent that ever issued from the
eggs of sedition,” and the imperative need of the hour was to put a
stop to all treasonable thought and action.
I saw the small seed of sedition, when it was implanted; it was, as
a grain of mustard. I have watched the plant until it has become
a great tree; the vilest reptiles that crawl upon the earth, are
concealed at the root; the foulest birds of the air rest upon its
branches. I now would induce you to go to work immediately with
axes and hatchets, and cut it down, for a twofold reason; because
it is a pest to society, and lest it be felled suddenly by a
stronger arm and crush thousands in the fall.[224]
From the first major proposition, that all sedition is heinous, Leonard
passed to his second, that the sedition of the American Whigs was
peculiarly wicked, for it was grounded in no injustice on the part of
England. If loyalty is the highest social virtue, that loyalty might
justly be claimed by Great Britain as her due. “Has she not been a
nursing mother to us, from the days of our infancy to this time? Has
she not been indulgent almost to a fault?” The Whigs, he asserted
broadly, have been patching together their supposed grievances out of
cloth that never came from an English loom. It is the shoddiest of
homespun, mean, and shameful.
We had always considered ourselves, as a part of the British
empire, and the parliament, as the supreme legislature of the
whole. Acts of parliament for regulating our internal policy were
familiar. We had paid postage agreeable to act of parliament, ...
duties imposed for regulating trade, and even for raising a revenue
to the crown without questioning the right, though we closely
adverted to the rate or quantum. We knew that in all those acts of
government, the good of the whole had been consulted, and whenever
through want of information any thing grievous had been ordained,
we were sure of obtaining redress by a proper representation of
it. We were happy in our subordination; but in an evil hour, under
the influence of a malignant planet, the design was formed of
opposing the stamp-act, by a denial of the right of parliament to
make it.[225]
Our patriots exclaim, “that humble and reasonable petitions from
the representatives of the people have been frequently treated
with contempt.” This is as virulent a libel upon his majesty’s
government, as falsehood and ingenuity combined could fabricate.
Our humble and reasonable petitions have not only been ever
graciously received, when the established mode of exhibiting
them has been observed, but generally granted. Applications of
a different kind, have been treated with neglect, though not
always with the contempt they deserved. These either originated in
illegal assemblies, and could not be received without implicitly
countenancing such enormities, or contained such matter, and
were conceived in such terms, as to be at once an insult to his
majesty, and a libel on his government. Instead of being decent
remonstrances against real grievances, or prayers for their
removal, they were insidious attempts to wrest from the crown, or
the supreme legislature, their inherent, unalienable prerogatives
or rights.[226]
The prerogative might not be argued, according to Leonard, nor the
sovereignty of parliament discussed, for any such comment was “an
insult to his majesty, and a libel on his government.” The illegal
Continental Congress had done both and thereby proved itself seditious.
The prince, or sovereign, as some writers call the supreme
authority of a state, is sufficiently ample and extensive to
provide a remedy for every wrong, in all possible emergencies and
contingencies; and consequently a power, that is not derived from
such authority, springing up in a state, must encroach upon it,
and in proportion as the usurpation enlarges itself, the rightful
prince must be diminished; indeed, they cannot long subsist
together, but must continually militate, till one or the other be
destroyed.[227]
The true animus of the Whig attack upon the nice balance of the British
constitution Leonard professed to discover in a dangerous republican
ambition. From the beginning there had been an excess of the democratic
element in the charters and practice of many of the colonies; and this
overbalance must in the end be rectified.
Our council boards are as destitute of the constitutional authority
of the house of lords, as their several members are of the noble
independence, and splendid appendages of peerage. The house of
peers is the bulwark of the British constitution, and through
successive ages, has withstood the shocks of monarchy, and the
sappings of democracy, and the constitution gained strength by the
conflict.[228]
Lacking a peerage, which Leonard regrets, but which will come with
time, American political practice is less stable than the English,
more exposed to “the sappings of democracy”; but necessary steps have
already been taken to stabilize it. The hands of the royal governor and
judges have been strengthened against the democratic House, and “town
meetings are restrained to prevent their passing traitorous resolves.”
The ideal towards which America must travel as fast as circumstance and
the colonial temper will permit, is the wise balance of the English
government, with local powers vested in colonial lords and commons,
supervised by the King and the Imperial Parliament. In the midst of
these present agitations, wickedly fomented by Whig smugglers--“a
smuggler and a whig are cousin germans, the offspring of two sisters,
avarice and ambition”--it should be remembered that “the terms whig
and tory have been adopted according to the arbitrary use of them in
this province, but they rather ought to be reversed; an American tory
is a supporter of our excellent constitution, and an American whig a
subverter of it.” To bring these American subverters of the glorious
British constitution to a sense of their obligations, Leonard refers
them to the words of James Otis written ten years before:
It is a maxim, that the king can do no wrong; and every good
subject is bound to believe his king is not inclined to do any. We
are blessed with a prince who has given abundant demonstrations,
that in all his actions, he studies the good of his people, and
the true glory of his crown, which are inseparable. It would
therefore be the highest degree of impudence and disloyalty, to
imagine that the king, at the head of his parliament, could have
any but the most pure and perfect intentions of justice, goodness
and truth, that human nature is capable of. All this I say and
believe of the king and parliament, in all their acts; even in that
which so nearly affects the interests of the colonists; and that a
most perfect and ready obedience is to be yielded to it while it
remains in force. The power of parliament is uncontroulable but
by themselves, and we must obey. They can only repeal their own
acts. There would be an end of all government, if one or a number
of subjects, or subordinate provinces should take upon them so
far to judge of the justice of an act of parliament, as to refuse
obedience to it. If there was nothing else to restrain such a step,
prudence ought to do it, for forcibly resisting the parliament and
the king’s laws is high treason. Therefore let the parliament lay
what burdens they please on us, we must, it is our duty to submit
and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve
us.[229]
The argument comes back finally to a threat; sovereignty rests not on
good will but on coercion. The insincerity and unreality of the Tory
appeal are only too patent. Those old pleaders were true to their
breeding and their interests, for they regarded fact as little as
a modern diplomat. They ignored or denied open and plain evidence.
Nowhere, perhaps, does the weakness of Leonard’s argument become
more evident than in his refusal to admit the theoretical right of
revolution. He professed allegiance to a king whose claim to the crown
rested on revolution, and was justified by the apostle of Whiggery,
Locke. But nowhere does he refer to Locke, and not until he was
prodded by John Adams, who insisted that the Whig principles were “the
principles of Aristotle and Plato, of Livy and Cicero, and Sydney,
Harrington and Locke,” did he concede that any other interpretation of
revolution than the Hobbesian, was justifiable. In his last paper, of
April 3, 1775, he replied to Adams thus:
I hold the rights of the people as sacred, and revere the
principles, that have established the succession to the imperial
crown of Great Britain, in the line of the illustrious house of
Brunswick; but that the difficulty lies in applying them to the
cause of the whigs ... for admitting that the collective body
of the people, that are subject to the British empire, have an
inherent right to change their form of government, or race of
kings, it does not follow, that the inhabitants of a single
province, or of a number of provinces, or any given part under a
majority of the whole empire, have such a right. By admitting that
the less may rule or sequester themselves from the greater, we
unhinge all government.[230]
By such logic does he whittle away the doctrine of the right of
revolution. As a lawyer Daniel Leonard discovered a distinction between
the Continental Congress of 1774 and the Revolutionary Convention
of 1689, which rendered the former treasonable and the latter
glorious. But the rising liberalism of America could see no such nice
distinction, and a year later the brilliant young lawyer was forced to
withdraw to Halifax. He was rewarded by a grateful King with the post
of chief justice of Bermuda, lived to be nearly ninety, and died in
London in 1829, one of the last of the exiled Loyalists.
III • Jonathan Boucher • Tory Priest
The extremest expression of American Toryism came not unfittingly from
an Anglican priest. The English church has always been the mother
of loyalty, and Jonathan Boucher of Virginia and Maryland was the
spiritual son of a notable line of bishops and priests who upheld the
royal prerogative through evil times and good, throwing the august
sanction of religion about the monarchical state. A fearless, capable,
outspoken man was this English-born southerner, taking counsel of
his own thought, not over-tolerant of those who differed with him,
holding himself _in loco parentis_ to his parishioners, and exacting
obedience from them. He was another Increase Mather, with the same love
of domination, the same directness of purpose and strength of will. A
man of conspicuous parts and equally conspicuous position: not only a
clergyman, but a gentleman of affairs, owner of a large plantation and
many slaves, concerned with public business and a volunteer statesman:
a sort of unofficial adviser and secretary to draft provincial laws.
Above all of independent mind. He would truckle to no man, and he
subjected the opinions of his neighbors to the same scrutiny that he
gave his own. For the popular orator and the demagogue he had frank
contempt, and mass prejudices and mob power held no terrors for him.
There was both courage and futility in his free, outspoken career.
He refused to be intimidated or turned aside by popular disfavor.
“For more than six months I preached, when I did preach, with a pair
of loaded pistols lying on the cushions; having given notice that if
any one attempted, what had long been threatened, to drag me out of
the pulpit, I should think myself justified in repelling violence by
violence.” One day he promptly knocked down a burly blacksmith who
had been set on him, but there came a time when his church was filled
with armed men, and his friends, fearing for his life, held him back
forcibly from mounting the pulpit. That episode marked the end of his
career in America. He had plainly become obsolete, and he was driven
home to his native England. There as an old man, he published in 1797
thirteen sermons, preached in America between 1763 and 1775, with
an historical preface, under the title, _A View of the Causes and
Consequences of the American Revolution_, and dedicated to his old
neighbor and friend, General Washington.
The political philosophy of Jonathan Boucher, as elaborated in
these discourses, is frank and unequivocal. It is the voice of
seventeenth-century Cavalier England, speaking to an alien people, bred
up in another philosophy of government. Church and state, the Bible and
the British constitution, the divine authority of God and the divine
authority of the _status quo_, have got themselves curiously fused--and
confused--in the mind of this disciple of Laud. It was the result
not of ignorance but of conviction. When the revolutionary movement
began to make a stir about him, the parish priest took the situation
seriously and set about preparing himself to cope with it. Before then
he had been no student of political theory, but now he turned to his
books. “With sincerity in my heart, and my Bible in my hand,” he said,
“I sat down to explore the truth ... to read and study what had been
collected and laid down on the subject of government by writers ...
who got their materials ... from the only pure sources of information,
the law of God, and the law of the land.”[231] The restriction in his
choice of writers is suggestive of his bias; it eliminated at one
stroke the main body of political speculation, not only the English
thinkers of the preceding century, but the continental followers of the
natural-rights school. Actually, however, Boucher did not limit himself
so narrowly, for he refers frequently to Locke, and he was fairly
familiar with the main doctrines of the revolutionary philosophy. But
his most cherished discovery was Sir Robert Filmer’s _Patriarcha_,
and having digested Filmer’s quaint theory, thenceforth he remained a
confirmed patriarchist. The absurd jumble of Hebraic precedent and Tory
prejudice which Filmer had laboriously put together and which Locke had
knocked to pieces, was wholly convincing to this belated advocate of
divine right, who proceeded to wipe the dust off the precious volume
and expound its doctrines to an amazed congregation.
The single and sacred duty of the subject, Jonathan Boucher was
convinced, is faithful obedience to the powers that are set over him.
Those powers derive from God and are instituted for the subject’s good.
It follows, therefore, that the unpardonable sin is rebellion against
lawfully constituted authority. “The doctrine of _obedience for
conscience sake_,” he asserted, “is ... the great _cornerstone_ of all
good government.”[232] With Daniel Leonard he makes much of it, but he
appeals rather to the sanctions of religion than to the law.
Obedience to Government is every man’s duty, because it is every
man’s interest; but it is particularly incumbent on Christians,
because ... it is enjoined by the positive commands of God....
If the form of government under which the good providence of God
has been pleased to place us be mild and free, it is our duty to
enjoy it with gratitude and with thankfulness.... If it be less
indulgent and less liberal than in reason it ought to be, still it
is our duty not to disturb the peace of the community, by becoming
refractory and rebellious subjects, and _resisting the ordinances
of God_.[233]
Those great and good men, who, _like wise master-builders_,
have from time to time so _fitly framed together_ our glorious
Constitution, well knew that _other sure foundation no man could
lay_ than ... obedience, not only _for wrath_, but _for conscience
sake_.[234]
Because this spirit of obedience was openly flouted in America, where
every influence made for rough individual liberty, Jonathan Boucher
feared for the future. Loose principles were abroad, notions of popular
sovereignty under the majority will, that must give “rise to a low and
unworthy opinion of government,” unless the people were recalled to
their duty. Particularly dangerous, he thought, was “that loose notion
respecting government, which has long been disseminated among the
people at large with incredible industry, namely, that all government
is the mere creature of the people, and may therefore be tampered with,
altered, new-modelled, set up or pulled down, just as tumultuous crowds
of the most disorderly persons in the community (who on such occasions
are always so forward to call themselves _the people_) may happen in
some giddy moments of overheated ardour to determine.”[235]
The unhappy results of such evil principles Boucher saw spread
through America. With the insidious undermining of respect for
law and government, the vicious conception of republicanism made
its appearance. “Everything in America had a republican aspect,”
he commented in after years; and he agreed with Bernard that “the
splitting America into many small governments weakened the governing
power, and strengthened that of the people.”[236] If Parliament had
been wise enough to consolidate government in America, drawing it to a
single head, and investing it with dignity and authority, the country
would not have become, like revolutionary France, “a mean and odious
republic.” As a minister and a loyal British subject, Jonathan Boucher
would not seduce the American people “by any flowery panegyrics on
liberty. Such panegyrics are the productions of ancient heathens and
modern patriots: nothing of the kind is to be met with in the Bible,
nor in the Statute Book. The word _liberty_, as meaning civil liberty,
does not, I believe, occur in all the Scriptures.”[237]
To respect the laws, is to respect liberty in the only rational
sense in which the term can be used; for liberty consists in
subserviency to law. “Where there is no law,” says Mr. Locke,
“there is no freedom.”... True liberty, then, is a liberty to do
everything that is right, and the being restrained from doing
anything that is wrong.[238]
The evils which flow from disrespect for authority carry much further
than the unsettling of the political _status quo_; they end by
overturning the entire social order. If any group or class rejects
the divine plan according to which God has set each in its due place,
society as a whole is involved in strife that may lapse into anarchy.
It was an unhappy scene, prophesying an unhappier future, that the
minister beheld in contemporary America.
There never was a time when a whole people were so little governed
by settled good principles.... Both employers and the employed,
much to their mutual shame and inconvenience, no longer live
together with anything like attachment and cordiality on either
side; and the laboring classes, instead of regarding the rich as
their guardians, patrons, and benefactors, now look on them as so
many overgrown colossuses whom it is no demerit in them to wrong.
A still more general ... topic of complaint is, that the lower
classes, instead of being industrious, frugal, and orderly (virtues
so peculiarly becoming their station in life) are become idle,
improvident, and dissolute.[239]
With social morality thus dangerously undermined, the Americans were
a natural prey to demagogues, who filled the land with their clamor
of patriotism and liberty. The situation in Virginia was peculiarly
dangerous by reason of long-standing debts to English merchants which
the planters were unable to pay; they found themselves in consequence,
impaled on the horns of an unhappy dilemma, “to be loyal and be ruined,
or to rebel and be damned.”[240]
Instructed by the colonial troubles, Jonathan Boucher elaborated a
theory of the true origin and purpose of government, a theory taken
straight out of Filmer, which he expands thus:
As soon as there were some to be governed, there were also some to
govern.... The first father was the first king: and ... it was thus
that all government originated, and monarchy is the most ancient
form.[241]
The glory of God is much concerned, that there should be good
government in the world: it is, therefore, the uniform doctrine
of the Scriptures, that it is under the deputation and authority
of God alone that _kings reign and princes decree justice_. Kings
and princes (which are only other words for supreme magistrates)
were doubtless created and appointed, not so much for their own
sakes, as for the sake of the people committed to their charge: yet
they are not, therefore, the creatures of the people. So far from
deriving their authority from any supposed consent or suffrage of
men, they receive their commission from Heaven; they receive it
from God, the source and original of all power.[242]
Instituted by God and functioning under divine sanction, government
becomes, therefore, a divine instrument, for the security of which He
is greatly concerned: “Everything our blessed Lord either said or did,
pointedly tended to discourage the disturbing a settled government.”
“Unless we are good subjects, we cannot be good Christians.” Jesus
“thought it would be better, both for Judea in particular, and for
the world in general, that ... the people should not be distracted
by a revolution, and ... that there should be no precedent to which
revolutionists might appeal.” “The only very intolerable grievance in
government is, when men allow themselves to disturb and destroy the
peace of the world, by vain attempts to render that perfect, which
the laws of our nature have ordained to be imperfect.” “To suffer
nobly indicates more greatness of mind than can be shown by acting
valiantly.”[243] Jonathan Boucher was the high Tory of the Tory cause
in America. He refused to strike his flag to the pirate craft of
republicanism; he would not truckle to newfangled notions; but stood up
stoutly to be counted for God and the King. In laying bare the heart
of Toryism, he unwittingly gave aid and comfort to the detested cause
of liberalism. It is reasonable to assume that such militant loyalty
to the outworn doctrine of passive submission was a real disservice to
the ministry, for it revealed the prerogative in a light peculiarly
offensive to American prejudices. What a godsend to the liberals was
such doctrine on the lips of so eminent a divine!
Footnotes
[202] _Diary and Letters_, Vol. I, pp. 46-48.
[203] See Hosmer, _Life of Samuel Adams_, p. 259.
[204] Hutchinson, _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 255.
[205] “Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives to the King,” in _Works of Samuel Adams_, Vol. I, pp.
365-367.
[206] Quoted in John Adams, _Novanglus_, Second Letter.
[207] See his _Life of Thomas Hutchinson_.
[208] Quoted in _ibid._, p. 189.
[209] _Ibid._, p. 206.
[210] Hutchinson assumes the act of incorporation will lay restrictions
upon the right of suffrage and the powers of the town meeting.
[211] _Ibid._, pp. 206-207.
[212] _Ibid._, p. 199.
[213] _Resolves of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay_,
June 16, 1773.
[214] _Ibid._, p. 436. Compare the view of Van Tyne, _The Causes of the
War of Independence_, p. 85.
[215] Speech of January 6, 1773.
[216] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, pp. 381-382.
[217] _Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of
Representatives._
[218] For Hutchinson’s statement of the Tory case, see Vol. III, pp.
352-355.
[219] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 399.
[220] _Works_, Vol. X, pp. 194-195; quoted in Tyler, _Literary History
of the American Revolution_, Vol. I, Chapter XVI.
[221] Preface to _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_, 1819.
[222] Letter of February 6, 1775, in _Novanglus and Massachusettensis_,
pp. 187-188.
[223] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.
[224] Letter of January 2, in _ibid._, p. 159.
[225] Letter of December 19, in _ibid._, p. 147.
[226] Letter of March 27, in _ibid._, pp. 217-218.
[227] _Ibid._, p. 219.
[228] Letter of January 9, in _ibid._, p. 171.
[229] Letter of January 23, in _ibid._, p. 181.
[230] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[231] _A View of the Causes, etc._, p. 591.
[232] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[233] _Ibid._, pp. 507-508.
[234] _Ibid._, p. 306.
[235] _Ibid._, p. 313.
[236] _Ibid._, p. xliv.
[237] _Ibid._, p. 504.
[238] _Ibid._, pp. 509 and 511.
[239] _Ibid._, p. 309.
[240] _Ibid._, Preface, p. xlii.
[241] _Ibid._, p. 525.
[242] _Ibid._, p. 534.
[243] _Ibid._, pp. 535, 538, 542, 543.
Chapter III • John Dickinson • The Mind of the American Whig
For many colonials it was a hard and bitter choice that was thrust
upon them by the political situation. They had no wish to choose
between loyalty to the British Empire and love for their native land.
So long as the quarrel remained a legal dispute over parliamentary
encroachments, colonial sentiment was fairly united in opposition to
the ministerial policy; differences of opinion arose over methods of
defense, rather than the need of it. The threatened loss of home rule
drew together radical and conservative. Although Governor Hutchinson
asserted that the feeling against England was the work of a small
populistic element--“in Massachusetts Bay the exception to the
constitutional authority of Parliament was first taken, and principally
supported, by men who were before discontented”[244]--it is clear
that the active Tory party numbered at first few more than the royal
officials and their beneficiaries. But when it came to the point of
severing colonial relations with the mother country, comparatively few
among the upper classes in the northern and middle colonies went with
the party of independence. The moderate men, the conciliationists,
were crushed between the two extremes, and the Tory party was greatly
increased in numbers and influence.
Of this moderate party of conciliationists, the outstanding figure
during the years of tedious debate was John Dickinson, of Philadelphia.
His _Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_, published between December 2,
1767, and February 15, 1768, created considerable stir both in America
and England, and if Hutchinson may be trusted, they “formed a temporary
political creed for the colonies.” Later he was chief draftsman of a
notable series of state papers: the Declaration of Rights of the Stamp
Act Congress; the two Petitions to the King and the Address to the
Inhabitants of Quebec of the first Continental Congress; and finally
the Articles of Confederation. Professor Tyler has fastened upon
him the title of “penman of the Revolution”; but a juster title, and
more in accord with the facts, would be “spokesman of the Colonial
Whigs.” From his first entrance into public life to the adoption of
the Constitution, Dickinson was a consistent advocate of the political
philosophy of which John Pym was the early representative, Locke
the philosophical defender, and Pitt the parliamentary advocate--a
philosophy which he accepted as the final embodiment of the long
struggle for English freedom.
English Whiggery has been fortunate in its advocates. It has been
expounded with great fervor and glossed with much eloquence. Its ends
have been so persistently proclaimed as at one with the cause of human
liberty, that in the mind of English-speaking people it early became
synonymous with English liberalism. In so far as it represented a
protest against divine right, such an interpretation was historically
just. It was the expression of a rising class, and every rising class
in its ostensible program professes to be liberal. But in the outcome
Whiggery proved to be very different from generic liberalism. Examined
critically the program of Whiggery is seen to have been compounded
of substantial economic interests. Although the Whig party created
the modern House of Commons and ministerial government, and wrote
into the British constitution the principle of no taxation without
representation, back of such revolutionary changes was a middle-class,
property theory of society. It laid down as the first principle of
political science the dogma that government is instituted for the
protection of property; and it advanced by inevitable stages to the
position that government should use its powers to extend the field of
profitable operations and safeguard exploitation, the natural outcome
of which was a policy of imperialism. On the pretense of furthering
human liberty it carried the British flag and British goods to the ends
of the earth. The great Pitt, grandson of the unscrupulous exploiter of
India, completed the work begun by John Pym more than a century before;
the American Revolution was the natural sequence of an imperialistic
policy begun by Cromwell’s Navigation Act, which, aimed immediately
at the Dutch carriers, put the power of the government behind British
shipping to the disadvantage of American competitors.
The philosophy of Whiggery had spread widely in America before the
Revolution and numbered among its advocates probably the great
majority of thoughtful Americans. Of these John Dickinson became
the best known, although he was certainly not the ablest--less
able, indeed, than his fellow Marylander, Daniel Dulany. Of Quaker
extraction, Dickinson was a country gentleman who inherited broad
acres, an honorable name, and high social position. His dignified
standing was further assured by his marriage with the only surviving
child of Isaac Norris, long Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and
the most influential amongst a little group of wealthy merchants who
had long ruled the commonwealth in patriarchal fashion. By his wife he
came into possession of Fairhill, a country place of several hundred
acres on the outskirts of Philadelphia, one of the show places of the
city, of which the mansion with its stately façade, its waxed floors
and red-cedar wainscoting, its books and paintings and statuary,
its setting of gardens and fishponds and conservatories, was vastly
impressive to a world that loved dignified display.
With such advantages of wealth and position he could hardly fail to
get on in his profession, and within a short time after his return
from the Inns of Court at London, where he had his training in the
law, he became one of the leaders of the Philadelphia bar and was
soon deep in commonwealth politics. He was a gentleman in a society
of gentlemen and preferment came easily to him. His natural parts
were respectable, he had improved himself by considerable reading in
history and politics, he possessed a cultivated pen and some facility
in debate. He understood commercial problems, could talk trade, was
ready with statistics of imports and exports, and was an advocate of
the paper money which Philadelphia merchants had discovered to be a
stimulus to business. Among his intimate friends were Robert Morris,
Thomas Willing, and George Clymer, representatives of the younger
generation of Philadelphians, whose speculative enterprises were not
approved by their conservative elders. And so by consequence he became
the spokesman of the mercantile interests in their remonstrance against
the ministerial policies.
But Dickinson was more than a legal adviser to clients who were in
trade. As lawyer and statesman he was true to the best traditions of
the English law and the British constitution, faithful to what he
conceived to be the larger interests of the British Empire. In all his
public acts he was animated by a scrupulous sense of duty, swerving no
whit from the line of conduct marked out by his principles in spite
of the clamor of opposition. From first to last he seems to have been
guided by a fine sense of responsible stewardship that came to him
from his English heritage. Certainly the dignity of John Dickinson
and the integrity of his political career suffer little by contrast
with certain popular representatives who governed their conduct by
expediency rather than principle. The great ideal of imperial unity
possessed him completely, and he would do nothing to bring it into
jeopardy. He sacrificed his great influence with the radicals by his
refusal to go with the majority for independence; he would not assist
in disrupting the British Empire even though he could not preserve it.
The refusal was difficult and it destroyed his popularity in a moment.
He withdrew from active participation in political affairs, and for
years afterwards, to the eyes of former associates, his conduct seemed
to have been pusillanimous.
By temperament and breeding Dickinson was a conservative, and this
native bias was emphasized by his English training in the law. The
lawyers of the middle and southern colonies were far better trained
than those of New England. Many were from the Inns of Court, where
they had steeped themselves in the Common Law and had imbibed profound
respect for the orderly processes of English legal procedure.
They found intellectual satisfaction in tracing the evolution of
constitutional practice, and their methods of thought were too strictly
legal to suffer them to stray into the domain of extra-legal political
speculation. Their appeal was to the law and the constitution; never to
abstract principles. If, on the other hand, the revolutionary leaders
of New England--and Virginians like Jefferson and Patrick Henry--were
poorer lawyers they were better political scientists, for their legal
training had been too casual and too scanty to contract their minds to
statutes and precedents. Jefferson and John Adams were alike in this
respect; their interests were speculative rather than legal; and they
wrote more convincingly when defending the principles of Locke than in
expounding Coke.
But John Dickinson remained always the lawyer. The English political
thinkers of the seventeenth century scarcely touched the fringe of
his mind. In consequence his writings are a long constitutional
argument. He rarely refers to political authorities. The philosophy of
Locke--whom he had read--is largely ignored, and Hume--“this great man
whose political speculations are so much admired”--is quoted only in
support of a constitutional interpretation. “The constitutional modes
of relief are those I wish to see pursued on the present occasion,” he
insisted in reply to the natural-rights advocates, and the attitude
is eloquent of the man. This scrupulous legalism he carried to such
lengths that when the new constitution for Pennsylvania was adopted he
refused to take office under it because he doubted the legality of the
convention that framed it.
With such temperament and training Dickinson would seem to have had the
making of an excellent Tory in him. What cause had he to quarrel with
Great Britain, and why should he have risked his lot with the party
of protest? It was not because he denied the ministerial theory of
parliamentary sovereignty in America, for he acknowledged both the fact
and the necessity for such sovereignty:
He, who considers these provinces as states distinct from the
_British Empire_, has very slender notions of _justice_, or of
their _interests_. We are but parts of a _whole_ and therefore
there must exist a power somewhere to preside, and preserve the
connection in due order. This power is lodged in the parliament;
and we are as much dependent on _Great-Britain_ as a perfectly free
people can be on another.[245]
Nor was it because of old trade grievances--shipping restrictions, the
spying of customs officers, prohibitions laid on manufactures, and the
like. He accepted without challenge the English mercantile view of the
economic relations of colonies to the mother country, and he professed
to see in existing trade regulations only the incidental and necessary
burdens of a system both salutary and just; he had no protest to urge
against the principle of the Navigation Acts.
Colonies have been settled by the nations of _Europe_ for the
purposes of trade. These purposes were to be attained, by the
colonies raising for their mother country those things which she
did not produce herself; and by supplying themselves from her
with things they wanted. These were the _national objects_, in
the commencement of our colonies, and have been uniformly so in
their promotion.... The parent country, with undeviating prudence
and virtue, attentive to the first principles of colonization,
drew to herself the benefits she might reasonably expect, and
preserved to her children the blessings, on which those benefits
were founded. She made laws, obliging her colonies to carry to
her all those products which she wanted for her own use; and all
those raw materials which she chose herself to work up. Besides
this restriction, she forbad them to procure _manufactures_ from
any other part of the globe, or even the _products_ of _European_
countries, which alone could rival her, without first being brought
to her. In short, by a variety of laws, she regulated their trade
in such a manner as she thought most conducive to their mutual
advantage, and her own welfare.[246]
Not only did Dickinson concede to the mother country the right to
regulate the entire system of colonial trade and industry to the
primary advantage of British merchants, even going so far as to justify
it by a false historical explanation of the rise of the colonies; not
only did he profess to believe that such regulation had been exercised
in a spirit of unselfish concern for the well-being of the empire; but
he professed a faith in the King and the English people that suggests
Hutchinson and Bernard. Consider such naïve adulation as the following:
We have an excellent prince, in whose good dispositions towards us
we may confide. We have a generous, sensible and humane nation,
to whom we may apply. They may be deceived. They may, by artful
men, be provoked to anger against us. I cannot believe they will
be cruel or unjust; or that their anger will be implacable. Let us
behave like dutiful children, who have received unmerited blows
from a beloved parent. Let us complain to our parent; but let our
complaints speak at the same time the language of affliction and
veneration.[247]
With so much conceded, what ground of serious quarrel remained? What
was there to justify an American protest against the parliamentary
program? Nothing less than the vital principle of taxation. In this
matter the ministerial policy overrode the fundamental tenet of
Whiggery. The situation was critical, for if the Tories denied the
validity of the Whiggish principle in dealing with the colonies, they
might deny it at home and the old battle of 1688 must be fought over.
The right of control of the public purse by a chamber in which the
property owners were represented, and which they would dominate, was a
principle too vital to be yielded, and the English Whigs in Parliament,
led by Pitt and Camden, took vigorous issue with the ministerial tax
proposals. To American Whigs the proposed innovation was a calamity. To
suffer control of the American purse to pass out of their hands into
those of a group beyond their reach meant a return to a system of Tory
spoliation; it meant that property and the rule of property in America
were threatened. To the colonial Whig the constitutional representative
chamber could be no other than the assembly of the commonwealth of
which he was a taxpayer. The English Parliament was alien if not
hostile to his interests; and if the right of imposing taxes upon the
colonies were held to lie in this overseas body, the colonials would
find themselves in the identical position of their ancestors of the
days of King Charles. No longer masters of their property, they would
not be a free people.
All this John Dickinson understood perfectly, and as a large property
owner he hastened to the defense of the principle of self-taxation.
He proposed to show that the policy of the ministry, in advancing the
new tax program, was a usurpation of power and a violation of the
constitutional rights of American property owners; and that as such
it should be resisted on constitutional grounds. This is the burden
of the celebrated _Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_. In arguing
their case the American debaters were embarrassed by a long series of
precedents which seemed to prove that Parliament possessed sovereignty
over the colonies; that such sovereignty had in fact been repeatedly
acknowledged; and that a hundred years of fiscal legislation,
unchallenged heretofore, had clearly established the parliamentary
right of taxation. To this difficult point Dickinson directed his
argument. The real point at issue, he contended, lay in the fundamental
distinction between a tax and an imposition; Parliament possessed the
constitutional right to impose the latter, but not the former. An
imposition, he pointed out, is a fiscal arrangement made by the proper
representatives, primarily “for the regulation of trade,” and with a
view to the general interests of the whole; whereas a tax is a “gift
of the people to the crown, to be employed for public uses.” The one
is regulatory in intent, imposed in a paternal spirit; and though the
result may lessen or increase the opportunity of the individual or the
community to acquire property, it does not take away what has already
been got; whereas a tax reaches into the pocket of the individual
and takes from him what belongs to him alone. Unless the subject
“give and grant of his own free will,” such a tax had long been held
unconstitutional. Of necessity, every tax must be internal, and since
by their charter governments the colonies were granted the right to
impose “internal taxes,” Parliament has no right to impose them.
A “+TAX+” means an imposition to raise money. Such persons
therefore as speak of _internal_ and external “+TAXES+,” I pray
may pardon me, if I object to that expression, as applied to the
privileges and interests of these colonies. There may be _internal_
and _external_ +IMPOSITIONS+, founded on _different principles_,
and having _different tendencies_, every “tax” being an imposition,
tho’ every imposition is not a “tax.” But _all taxes_ are founded
on the same _principles_; and have the _same tendency_. External
impositions, for the regulation of our trade, do not “grant to
his Majesty _the property of the colonies_.” They only _prevent
the colonies acquiring property_, in things not necessary, in a
manner judged to be injurious to the welfare of the whole empire.
But the last statute respecting us, “grants to his Majesty _the
property of the colonies_,” by laying duties on the manufactures of
_Great-Britain_ which they +MUST+ take, and which she settled on
them, on purpose that they +SHOULD+ take. What _tax_ can be more
internal than this? Here is money drawn, _without their consent_,
from a society, who have constantly enjoyed a constitutional mode
of raising all money among themselves.[248]
This line of argument was not original with Dickinson. It had earlier
been elaborated by Daniel Dulany of Maryland, in an able pamphlet,[249]
which had provided argument to Pitt for his speech on the repeal of the
Stamp Act.[250] Dickinson in turn quoted from Pitt’s speech in support
of his position.[251] How intimate was the connection between English
and American Whigs, and how like was their reasoning, is made clear
from a passage of a later speech by Pitt which Dickinson quoted in the
preface to a collected edition of his works issued in 1801:
This universal opposition to your arbitrary system of taxation,
might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things,
and from the nature of man, and _above all_ ... from the spirit
of +WHIGGISM+ flourishing in _America_. The spirit which _now_
pervades _America_, is _the same_ which formerly opposed loans,
benevolences, and ship-money in this country; is _the same spirit_
which roused all _England_ to action at the revolution, and which
established at a remote era, your liberties, on the basis of that
grand fundamental maxim of the constitution, that no subject of
_England_ shall be taxed, but by his own consent. To maintain this
principle, is the _common cause_ of the +WHIGS+, on the other
side of the _Atlantic_, and on this. _It is liberty to liberty
engaged._ In this great cause they are immoveably allied. It is
the alliance of _God_ and _nature_, immutable, eternal, fixed as
the firmament of heaven. As an _Englishman_, I recognize to the
_Americans_, their supreme unalterable right of property. As an
_American_, I would equally recognize to _England_, her supreme
right of regulating commerce and navigation. This distinction is
involved in the abstract nature of things; property is private,
individual, absolute: the touch of another annihilates it. Trade
is an extended and complicated consideration; it reaches as far
as ships can sail, or winds can blow; it is a vast and various
machine. To regulate the numberless movements of its several
parts, and combine them into one harmonious effect, for the good
of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the
supreme power of the empire. On this grand practical distinction,
then, let us rest: taxation is theirs, commercial regulation is
ours. As to metaphysical refinements, attempting to shew, that
the _Americans_ are equally free from legislative controul, and
commercial restraint, as from taxation, for the purpose of revenue,
I pronounce them futile, frivolous, and groundless.[252]
How characteristic of Pitt is the shrewd purpose, covered over with
pretentious rhetoric, to seize the imperialistic substance of trade
control for the London merchants, and graciously yield in the name of
liberty, the shadow of taxation!
Discussion of abstract rights interested Dickinson no more than it did
Pitt; but he cared greatly for English liberty, by which he meant the
rights of propertied gentlemen recognized by the British constitution,
for which his ancestors had struggled. He had no wish to enlarge
those rights, for he believed they were adequate to the well-being
of Englishmen. No thought of a republican form of government crossed
his mind. He had no sympathy with democracy; he believed in a “mixed
government” as exemplified in the British system; and while he was not
an outspoken advocate of an American peerage, he would have approved of
its institution. Like so many upper-class Americans, he was English as
well as colonial; he could not conceive that the heritage of England
to her sons was circumscribed by geographical lines, and he habitually
thought and spoke in terms of the British Empire, and never in local
terms. What he most feared was a misunderstanding that would widen
into rupture. There is more than a hint of the doctrine of passive
resistance in his counsel of moderation:
The cause of _liberty_ is a cause of too much dignity to be sullied
by turbulence and tumult. It ought to be maintained in a manner
suitable to her nature. Those who engage in it, should breathe a
sedate, yet fervent spirit, animating them to actions of prudence,
justice, modesty, bravery, humanity, and magnanimity.... I hope,
my dear countrymen, that you will, in every colony, be on your
guard against those, who may at any time endeavour to stir you
up, under pretense of patriotism, to any measures disrespectful
to our Sovereign and our mother country. Hot, rash, disorderly
proceedings, injure the reputation of a people, as to wisdom,
valour, and virtue, without procuring them the least benefit. I
pray god, that he may be pleased to inspire you and your posterity,
to the latest ages, with a spirit of which I have an idea, that
I find a difficulty to express. To express it in the best manner
I can, I mean a spirit, that shall so guide you, that it will be
impossible to determine whether an _American’s_ character is most
distinguishable, for its loyalty to his Sovereign, his duty to
his mother country, his love of freedom, or his affection for his
native soil.[253]
In these earlier years of the controversy Dickinson seems to have
remained placidly unaware of the sordid realities of parliamentary
huckstering, the details of which Franklin was daily noting in his
letters. He seems honestly to have believed in the justice and good
intentions of the King and his ministers, and he felt little sympathy
for the New England malcontents. But as the debate dragged on, and the
English politicians in whose rectitude he had professed confidence,
clearly were playing into the hands of British trading interests, going
so far as to seek to bolster up the falling fortunes of the East India
Company at the expense of colonial merchants, he was impelled to speak
with plebeian warmth. His _Two Letters on the Tea Tax_, written in
November, 1773, are as vigorous in denunciation as Samuel Adams could
have penned.
_Five Ships_, loaded with +TEA+, on their Way to _America_, and
this with a View not only to _enforce_ the _Revenue Act_, but to
_establish_ a _Monopoly_ for the _East-India Company_, who have
espoused the Cause of the Ministry; and hope to repair their
broken Fortunes by the Ruin of _American_ freedom and Liberty! No
Wonder the Minds of the People are exasperated ... to a degree of
Madness.... Pray have you heard, whether _they_ and the _Ministers_
have not _made a Property_ of +US+, and whether +WE+, our +WIVES+
and +CHILDREN+, together, with the +HARD EARNED FRUITS OF OUR
LABOUR+, are not _made over_ to this almost _bankrupt Company_,
to augment their Stock, and to _repair_ their _ruined Fortunes?_
Justice seems to have forsaken the old World.... The Rights of
free States and Cities are swallowed up in Power. Subjects are
considered as Property.... Are we ... to be given up to the
Disposal of the _East-India Company?_.... Their conduct in Asia,
for some Years past, has given ample Proof, how little they regard
the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They
have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes,
and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain ... hackneyed as
they are in Murders, Rapine, and Cruelty, [they] would sacrifice
the Lives of Thousands to preserve their Trash, and enforce their
measures.[254]
The ideal of a beneficent British Empire, extending English freedom
through the world, appealed to the imagination of Dickinson; but the
reality of British imperialism, “hackneyed in murders, rapine and
cruelty,” seeking to extend its exploitation to America, striking at
the trade interests of Philadelphia and his merchant friends, was
enough to disturb his legal calm. What fate awaited American rights
and liberties if the London imperialists were permitted to prey upon
them, he began to comprehend. The bones would be picked clean, and
America would become another India. It was the deepening fear of such
a possibility that sapped Dickinson’s loyalty, and reconciled him to
independence after the thing was done.
The later years of Dickinson were happier than those of the middle
period. The conservative reaction that set in with the conclusion of
peace carried the emerging party of nationalism back to the position
of Whiggery, which Dickinson had tenaciously occupied. The leaders of
that party were coming to agree on the necessity for a closer alignment
in defense of property rule, and they gladly accepted Dickinson as
an ally and co-worker. He was chosen a member of the Constitutional
Convention, and there found a congenial audience for the exposition of
his political principles. In the debates he spoke as a high Federalist
who would like to go further toward the model of the British system
than the state of the public mind rendered expedient. A strong and
stable government, he believed, depended upon a just balance of king,
lords, and commons.
A limited monarchy he considered as _one_ of the best governments
in the world. He was not certain that the same blessings were
derivable from any other form. It was certain that equal blessings
had never yet been derived from any of the republican forms. A
limited monarchy, however, was out of the question. The spirit of
the times, the state of our affairs, forbade the experiment, if it
were desirable. Was it possible, moreover, in the nature of things,
to introduce it, even if these objects were less insuperable? A
house of nobles was essential to such a government. Could these
be created by a breath, or by a stroke of the pen? No. They were
the growth of ages, and could only arise under a complication of
circumstances none of which existed in this country. But, though a
form the most perfect, _perhaps_, in itself, be unattainable, we
must not despair.[255]
Granted the necessity of a republican form of government, the question
so vital to Whiggery remained, how could property secure and maintain
a commanding position in the government? The reply was obvious; it
must be through limitation of suffrage rights. If the vote could be
restricted to property holders, even though small freeholders were
included, the common rights of property would be secure.
Mr. Dickinson had a very different idea of the tendency of
vesting the rights of suffrage in the freeholders of the Country.
He considered them as the best guardians of liberty; And the
restriction of the right to them as a necessary defence agst. the
dangerous influence of those multitudes without property & without
principle, with which our country like all others, will in time
abound.[256]
A further safeguard offered in the proper constitution of the Senate.
As a representative of a small state, Dickinson was concerned that the
several states should enjoy a parity of power in the upper house, as he
was concerned that the Senate should provide a safeguard for property
interests. It must be rendered secure from factional unrest and
democratic aggression. He was very likely at one with his friend George
Clymer, in holding that “a representative of the people is appointed
to think _for_ and not _with_ his constituents”; and to the end that
the right persons should be chosen to do the national thinking, he
laid down the principle that, “In the formation of the Senate, we
ought to carry it through such a refining process as will assimilate
it as nearly as may be to the House of Lords in England.”[257]
Such expressions throw sufficient light upon Dickinson’s opinions
of democratic government, but they do not prepare us for a curious
inconsistency that marked his last years, namely, his friendship for
Jefferson and his sympathy with the Jeffersonian program. The reasons
for this strange shift are not clear, but it is generally attributed
to his fear of consolidation that might end in subordinating the small
states to the greater ones. It certainly was not due to any sympathy
with agrarianism.
Dickinson was in no sense a serious political thinker. He was a
cultivated lawyer who defended with skill and grace a ready-made
philosophy, unconcerned about the social significance of that
philosophy. Scarcely anywhere else in his writings does he show to such
poor advantage as in the nine _Letters of Fabius_ written in defense
of the Constitution during the great debate. There is in them not
a single illuminating comment. His most anxious concern is shown in
his reply to George Mason’s direct charge, that the “government will
commence in a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to
foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a
corrupt oppressive aristocracy.”[258] After searching the records of
the past he concludes that “the uniform tenor of history ... holds up
the _licentiousness_ of the people, and _turbulent temper_ of some of
the states, as _the only causes_ to be dreaded, not the conspiracies
of federal officers.”[259] The argument had been somewhat staled by
Federalistic repetition, but Dickinson soberly accepted it as sound
historical interpretation. His cleverest defense he found in an
appeal to the analogy of the British constitution, which has only one
democratic branch, and that “diseased” by inadequate representation, to
withstand the power and influence of king and lords; if English liberty
has been thus safeguarded, what danger can threaten America with “a
constitution and government, every branch of which is so extremely
popular”?[260]
However greatly the writings of Dickinson, from the Farmer’s Letters
to the _Letters of Fabius_, may have appealed to Whiggish lawyers, it
is inconceivable that they should have appealed to the rank and file
of Americans. As an eighteenth-century gentleman he little understood
the spirit of liberalism that was stirring in many minds; he did not
sympathize with the turbulent forces that were driving towards a
different social order; and in consequence his technical arguments
seem today curiously old-fashioned. Franklin’s common sense kept him
a realist; but Dickinson’s loyalty made him an idealist, incapable of
understanding current economic forces either in England or America. The
colonial was so ingrained in his habits of thought that it was hard for
him to become an American. So long as it was politic to profess loyalty
to England while remonstrating against ministerial policies, John
Dickinson was the man for the business. But when it became necessary
to throw aside the mask of loyal professions, to stand up and fight,
he was thrust aside to make room for more vigorous spokesmen. No doubt
there were desirable things which the radicals overlooked; no doubt
the ideal of imperial unity, of a world-wide federation of the several
bodies of Englishmen, possessed a grandeur which ardent patriots held
too cheap. But that ideal did not prevail, despite Dickinson’s earnest
endeavors; and in the new order which arose he probably never felt
quite at home, or was free from a lingering regret. He belonged still
in that older world in which he was bred.
Footnotes
[244] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 257.
[245] “Farmer’s Letters,” in _Works_, Vol. I, p. 312.
[246] _Ibid._, p. 337.
[247] _Ibid._, p. 327.
[248] _Ibid._, pp. 332-333.
[249] _Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British
Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue by Act of Parliament._
[250] See Tyler, _Literary History of the American Revolution_, Vol. I,
p. 111.
[251] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 320.
[252] _Ibid._, pp. xv-xvii.
[253] “Farmer’s Letters,” in _Works_, Vol. I, pp. 324-325.
[254] _Works_, Vol. I, pp. 459-461.
[255] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. V, p. 148.
[256] _Ibid._
[257] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 163.
[258] Quoted in Ford, _Pamphlets on the Constitution_, p. 332.
[259] _Ibid._, p. 200.
[260] _Ibid._, p. 212.
Chapter IV • Samuel Adams • The Mind of the American Democrat
In the history of the rise of political democracy in America Samuel
Adams occupies a distinguished place. He was by no means the first
American to espouse the democratic cause, but he was the first to
conceive the party machinery to establish it in practice. The single
purpose of his life was the organization of the rank and file to
take over control of the political state. He was the instrument of a
changing world that was to transfer sovereignty from the aristocratic
minority to the democratic majority. Political sovereignty inheres
potentially in the mass will of the people; but if that will is
restrained from exercising its strength by an undemocratic psychology,
it remains powerless in presence of an organized minority. The America
in which Samuel Adams labored was ripe to throw off the inhibitions
of the popular will; and it was his perception of that fact, and the
tenacity and skill with which he cajoled the mass to “make a push for
perfect political liberty,” that made him an outstanding figure in our
history. In his hands the majority will became in reality the sovereign
will. But before he could wield it he must create it; and before he
could create it he must understand the mass mind. He must turn popular
prejudice to his own purpose; he must guide the popular resentment at
grievances into the way of revolution; he must urge the slow moving
mass forward until it stood on the threshold of independence, beyond
which lay the ultimate goal of his ambitions, the democratic state.
And so, in pursuit of his life purpose, Samuel Adams became a master
political strategist, the first of our great popular leaders.
The modern term, professional agitator, most adequately characterizes
him. He was an intriguing rebel against every ambition of the regnant
order. He hated every sort of aristocratic privilege, whether in
the form of overseas prerogative or in the later guise of native
Federalism; it must be swept away and a new, democratic order take its
place. In the pursuit of this great end he daily counseled treason
and made rebellion his business. Loyalty to the government _de facto_
was no virtue in his political ethics; he was not frightened into
conformity by the stigma attaching to the term rebel. America was
founded in rebellion, he well knew, and it should continue in rebellion
till every false loyalty was cast off and concern for the common
well-being accepted as the single loyalty worthy of respect. “What has
commonly been called rebellion in the people,” he commented wisely,
“has often been nothing else but a manly and glorious struggle in
opposition to the lawless power of rebellious Kings and Princes.”[261]
He was the outstanding example in his day of the militant idealist to
whom the dissemination of unrest was a matter of principle. No cause
goes forward without its leaders, and democratic America owes Samuel
Adams a debt which it has too grudgingly acknowledged.
He was born and grew up in an atmosphere of politics. His father
was a prosperous, well-read gentleman who found politics a pleasant
avocation; he established the Caucus Club for political discussion,
and became one of the leaders of the popular party that opposed the
Tory group, gathered about the royal officials. Its personnel can only
be guessed at, but it was probably composed of small merchants, with
a following of mechanics and other unimportant folk. It seems to have
been greatly interested in currency reform, and the elder Adams was
one of the principal organizers and stockholders of the Land Bank, a
project for increasing the money of the commonwealth. The institution
was roughly liquidated by government decree at the instigation of
commercial rivals interested in “tight money”; the father lost heavily
and the son was pretty much ruined by later attempts at arbitrary
collection on his stock. It seems to have been a petty and altogether
sordid move on the part of government, in which Hutchinson played an
important part. With the loss of his money Samuel Adams, Jr., settled
down to a meager, somewhat precarious existence, preferring politics
to profits, and began that long, arduous career which resulted so
momentously for America.
He had taken his two degrees at Harvard in the expectation of becoming
a minister; but while an undergraduate he was more interested in the
political classics than in theology, and he rejected the ministry for
the law. But a brief experience with Coke sufficed, and he turned
to more congenial fields. With a group of like-minded young men he
founded in 1748 _The Public Advertiser_, a weekly magazine of politics.
In the essays which as a young man of twenty-six he wrote for that
paper, he expounded a political creed frankly liberal. He began as he
ended, anti-Tory and pro-democratic. From then till the beginning of
the tax troubles he was a tireless contributor to the newspapers, and
except during the administration of the liberal Pownall, always in
the opposition. Hutchinson stated the exact truth when he said, “He
was for near twenty years a writer against government in the public
newspapers.” The need was urgent, for during those years the government
of Massachusetts was being subtly changed. With increasing prosperity,
ways of thinking, like styles of dress, were becoming more like those
of St. James’s. Ambitious young men were drawn into the circle of the
ruling group and caught with the bait of preferment. An aristocracy
was emerging that wanted only titles to make ready to set up a House
of Lords. Quite plainly it was time for the liberals to arouse the
rank and file of the people to the danger, and this became the daily
business of Samuel Adams.
The evidence available is insufficient to explain the motives which
impelled him to take up and carry forward so difficult and thankless
a work. The cost in personal ease and the good opinion of respectable
people was great, the peril certain, and the reward dubious.
Not lightly will a serious man compromise with treason; to talk
republicanism was not profitable in Tory New England; and Samuel Adams,
no more than another, was anxious to come to close acquaintance with
the hangman. What secret motives inspired the heart of this ascetic
Puritan--“he eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much,”
said the Loyalist Galloway, half sneeringly, half out of respect--we
can only guess at. Very likely there was an old grudge at a government
that had ruined him; very likely love of power stimulated his hatred
of the ruling clique; very likely his close association with tradesmen
colored his resentment at overseas regulation, for better than most,
he knew that the American goose was reserved for English plucking.
Nevertheless the more intimately one comes to know Samuel Adams the
more inadequate seem all cynical and sordid interpretations of his
strange career. He was no self-seeking politician, but a man of vision.
He believed ardently in the principle of local home rule. Love of
the New England town-meeting democracy was bred in his bones. More
clearly than others he saw the danger of erecting a governing class
irresponsive to the popular will. He was, in short, the embodiment
of the rising spirit of the eighteenth century that found expression
in individualism, that exalted liberty and hated tyranny--a spirit
that had for its ultimate purpose the reduction of the powers of the
political state.
His critical study of the methods of Tory politicians early stripped
from government the last vestige of glamor so appealing to the
ignorant. Adams understood too perfectly the secret springs and
backstairs intrigues that determined governmental policies, to be taken
in by appeal to his loyalty. English politics was a sordid business,
conducted by professional traders, to whom loyalty and patriotism were
no more than gestures to gull the simple. Quite as well as Franklin,
Adams understood its ways. He had watched the steady unfolding of the
ministerial program: how it was proposed to free the royal governor
and judges from popular restraint by the payment of salaries from the
royal chest; to change the charter in the interest of prerogative by
vesting the nomination of the councilors in the governor; to disarm the
democracy by destroying the town meeting as a political instrument;
in short to substitute government by ministerial instructions for
government by the people. As he watched the calculated encroachments
upon the historical rights of the commonwealth--rights that were
sanctioned by a hundred and forty years of exercise, and were now in
danger from carelessness--he would have been faithless to his duty
if he had not sought to arouse the people of Massachusetts to the
danger. There was no idle rhetoric in the words, “No time can better
be employed than in the preservation of the rights derived from the
British constitution.... No treasure can be better expended, than in
securing that true old English liberty, which gives a relish to every
other enjoyment.”[262]
In the fulfillment of this purpose to defend the democratic rights of
Massachusetts, Adams became no mean master of political theory. In the
works of no other writer is the total body of Revolutionary thought so
adequately revealed. He was deeply read in the political classics, and
all the great names--Hooker and Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel, Coke and
Blackstone, Locke and Milton and Sidney and Hume and Montesquieu--are
spread largely through his pages to buttress his argument. In spite
of the elusive “meanders and windings” of his thought, veering and
tacking as the winds blew, three broad lines of defense are clearly
discernible. He rested his case on an appeal to the natural rights of
man, to the particular rights and privileges of the British subject
under the constitution, and to the express terms of the compact between
the crown and its emigrant subjects laid down in the several colonial
charters. Inasmuch as the American cause was to be argued before an
old-world court, it was common prudence to seek to justify the seeming
innovations of American institutional development, by old-world
precedent and authority. If he could base the American grievance on
the Whig doctrine of representation, he might rally the English Whigs
to the American cause. This was sound constitutionalism, and Adams was
too shrewd not to profess the highest respect for the glorious British
constitution. “You know there is a charm in the word ‘constitutional,’”
he slyly suggested to a fellow colonial; and such respect, not to say
veneration, he trumpeted to the world, until it may well have seemed
that he did protest too much.
In his first line of defense Adams was on familiar ground, and he
was supported by the authority of Locke, whose opinions were sacred
in the eyes of English Whigs. What use he made of him is evident;
“the immortal Locke,” he calls him at one time, and at another, “one
of the greatest men that ever wrote.” He had been a disciple of
Locke since his first interest in political theory, and he thought
and spoke habitually in terms of the natural-rights school. It is
sometimes asserted that the appeal to natural rights was made only
after the breakdown of the colonial argument drawn from constitutional
practice.[263] But as early as 1765 Adams based his argument on Locke
in assuming the economic origin of government, and the inevitable
connection between property and parliamentary representation.[264]
How heavily he leaned on the natural-rights school appears again
and again; particularly in a brilliant series of articles, signed
“Candidus,” written in 1771, where he paraphrases the _Second Treatise
on Government_:
Mr. Locke has often been quoted in the present dispute ... and very
much to our purpose. His reasoning is so forcible, that no one has
ever attempted to confute it. He holds that “the preservation of
property is the end of government, and that for which men enter
into society. It therefore necessarily supposes and requires
that the people should have property, without which they must be
suppos’d to lose that by entering into society, which was the _end_
for which they enter’d into it; too gross an absurdity for any man
to own. Men therefore _in society having property_, they have such
right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs,
that no body hath the right to take _any part_ of their subsistence
from them without their consent: Without this, they could have no
property at all. For I truly can have no property in that which
another can by right take from me when he pleases, against my
consent. Hence, says he, it is a mistake to think that the supreme
power of any commonwealth can dispose of the estates of the subject
arbitrarily, or _take any part_ of them at pleasure. The prince or
senate can never have a power to take to themselves the whole or
any part of the subjects’ property without _their own_ consent;
for this would be in effect to have no property at all.”--This is
the reasoning of that great and good man. And is not our own case
exactly described by him?[265]
This was excellent doctrine in the eyes of the English Whigs, and
it explains in part the support which Pitt and Camden lent to the
colonial cause. But in his second line of defense, namely, that the
English constitution was a fundamental charter of the natural rights
of the subject, and that a statute which disregarded those natural
rights was null and void, Adams was on less tenable ground. Every
attempt to establish such a principle, whether that fundamental law
be conceived of as the “law of God and nature,” special compacts like
the Magna Charta, or the Common Law, has met with failure in English
constitutional practice. Nevertheless Adams made use of the argument,
derived, very likely, from Coke.
Magna Charta itself is in substance but a constrained Declaration
or proclamation, and promulgation in the name of King, Lords, and
Commons, of the sense the latter had of their original, inherent,
indefeazible natural Rights, as also those of free Citizens equally
perdurable with the other. That great author, that great jurist,
and even that Court writer Mr. Justice Blackstone holds that this
recognition was justly obtained of King John sword in hand: and
peradventure it must be one day sword in hand again rescued and
preserved from total destruction.[266]
[Magna Charta] is affirm’d by Lord Coke to be declaratory of
the principal grounds of the fundamental laws and liberties of
England. “It is called _Charta Libertatum Regni, the Charter
of the Liberties of the kingdom_, upon great reason ... because
_liberos facit, it makes and preserves the people free_.”... If
then according to Lord Coke, _Magna Charta_ is declaratory of
the principal grounds of the _fundamental_ laws and liberties of
the people, and Vatel is right in his opinion, that the supreme
legislature cannot change the constitution, I think it follows,
whether Lord Coke has expressly asserted it or not, that an act of
parliament made against Magna Charta in violation of its essential
parts, is void.[267]
Adams was probably fully aware of the weakness of the argument. The
well known attempt of Coke to establish a body of super-parliamentary
law that sanctioned the annulling of a statute had been a total
failure. Parliament had refused to yield sovereignty to the lawyers.
The Tories were on stronger ground in asserting Hume’s doctrine that
“the only rule of government is the established practice of the age,
upon maxims universally assented to”; and the established practice
was sufficient reply to the argument that “it is the glory of the
British constitution that it hath its foundations in the law of God and
nature.” Moreover the doctrine of virtual representation was at hand
to cover any discrepancy between natural rights and existing practice;
the argument from Locke was met by a legal refinement which held that
as the charter of Massachusetts was as of the manor of East Greenwich,
the freemen of Boston were personally represented by the parliamentary
member from that borough.
When Adams fell back upon his third line of defense, the appeal to
the colonial charter, he broke with the English Whigs completely. The
royal charters, by authority of which the colonies had been founded and
governed hitherto, were exalted by him into a secondary fundamental
law, subordinate to the English constitution, but with authority
beyond an act of parliament. This organic law of the charter was “the
only medium of their political connection with the Mother State,” he
argued, and as sacred to Americans “as Magna Charta is to the People of
Britain, as it contains a Declaration of all their Rights founded in
natural Justice.”[268]
Thus we see that Whatever Govermnt in general may be founded in,
Ours was manifestly founded in Compact.... By this Charter, we have
an exclusive Right to make Laws for our own internal Government &
Taxation: And indeed if the Inhabitants here are British Subjects
... it seems necessary that they should exercise this Power
themselves; for they are not represented in the British Parliamt &
their great Distance renders it impracticable: It is very probable
that all the subordinate legislative Powers in America, were
constituted upon the Apprehension of this Impracticability.[269]
After all, the futility of argument as a colonial defense against
Grenville or Townshend was evident to so shrewd a student of political
realism as Samuel Adams. If the colonies were to preserve their
traditional liberties, more effective means must be found than appeal
to justice or colonial use and wont. Force must be used, and that
force--short of armed rebellion--could be only an aroused public
opinion. It was like to prove a difficult business, this arousing of
an effective public opinion, and not wanting in danger; but neither
difficulty nor danger would deter a calculating enthusiast like Adams
from undertaking it. He was ready to devote his life to the work of
creating and guiding a popular interest in political measures.
The means which he made use of were as novel as they were repugnant
to the Tory statecraft. He was the first American to understand the
power of publicity, and not the least of his services to democracy was
his attack upon the principle of secret government. Affairs of state
had always been guarded jealously from public knowledge, on the theory
long before stated by Sir Robert Filmer that the subject must “have
nothing to do to meddle with mysteries of state, such _arcana imperii_,
or cabinet councils, the vulgar may not pry into.” Adams now proposed
to lay them open to common inspection. He insisted that questions of
governmental policy be taken out of the exclusive jurisdiction of
secret councils, and transferred to Faneuil Hall where the freemen
of Boston might examine them, and where the “Cause of Liberty” might
“be warmly espoused and ably vindicated.” Here was a revolutionary
proposal indeed, with its demand for public discussion and a popular
referendum; and naturally it gave offense to the crown officials. It
meant the vulgarization of government. It was a disturbing thought
to such men that government might come to be regarded as the common
concern of the tax-paying public; that the town meeting might fall
under the control of the plebeian mass and crowd in with its demands
upon the aristocratic Council. How could gentlemen deliberate freely
and determine wisely, with demagogues sitting in judgment on every word
and vote? So disturbing to gentlemen was any criticism that one of
Hutchinson’s followers went so far as to charge Adams with “Indecency
in ‘undertaking to answer a Governor’s Message,’” to which he replied:
I know very well that it has been handed as a political Creed of
late, that the Reasoning of the People without Doors is not to be
regarded--But every “transient Person” has a Right publickly to
animadvert upon whatever is publickly advanc’d by any Man, and I am
resolv’d to exercise that Right, when I please, without asking any
Man’s Leave.[270]
Effective organization of the rank and file of the people was the
business at hand. It was a new problem and there was need of new
methods. The Caucus Club, founded by his father, served as a training
school for the leaders; there the policies were determined upon for the
town meeting and the assembly, and there the plans for a continental
union were laid in Non-Importation Agreements, organization of
Committees of Correspondence, and the like. The program there agreed
upon Adams made it his business to put through the town meeting, as
the first step. When he faced his fellow Bostonians in Faneuil Hall
he relied upon the influence which long years of familiar intercourse
with all sorts and conditions of men had won for him, and many a Boston
freeman went to the meeting ready to vote for “whatever the old man
wanted.” Behind the imposing figure of John Hancock, or the eloquence
of John Adams, was certain to be the directing mind of the “master of
the puppets,” as Hutchinson sneeringly called Samuel Adams.
His hours of triumph in Boston town meeting or in the assembly were
preceded by an incredible amount of labor with the pen as well as with
the tongue, for this master politician was the journalist as well as
the organizer of the New England revolution. The public opinion on
which he depended was daily being made in chimney corners and tavern
talk, and he proposed to mold it through the agency of a party press.
No other pen in Boston was so busy as his. “There is Sam Adams writing
against the Tories,” his fellow townsmen are said to have remarked
when they saw his familiar candle burning long into the night. When he
was away in attendance on the Continental Congress he reproached his
friends at home for neglecting the work of publicity. “Your presses
have been too long silent. What were your Committees of Correspondence
about? I hear nothing of circular Letters--of joynt Committees &c.
Such Methods have in times past raised the Spirits of the people--drawn
off their Attention from picking up Pins, & directed their Views to
great objects.”[271]
With such neglect Samuel Adams could not be charged. As clerk of the
inevitable Committee of Grievances appointed by the Boston town meeting
in accordance with his prearranged plan, he wrote those plain-spoken
papers that stirred the wrath of Tory gentlemen; as clerk of the
assembly he was the chief author of successive state papers, which
under guise of replying to the prerogative principles of Bernard
and Hutchinson, set forth in masterly fashion the whole theory of
colonial rights; and as Chairman of the Committee of Correspondence
he appealed to his fellow Americans of every colony. Yet his official
writings constitute only a minor part of his total work. His letters
were innumerable and his newspaper articles crowded the desk of every
friendly editor. The labors undergone and the energy consumed were
enormous. It was no holiday task to create and guide a public opinion
that was so constantly falling into apathy.
Running through the third volume of Hutchinson’s _History of
Massachusetts Bay_ is a note of indignant protest at “the machinations
of selfish and designing men” who at the precise time when the feeling
between the two countries was friendliest, and an amicable settlement
of differences seemed likeliest, were assiduous to breed fresh discord
and frustrate the hopes of peace. That he had Adams chiefly in mind
there can be little doubt. During the “calm interval” of the summer
of ’71, when, according to Hutchinson, “the province was more free
from real evils” than for years, and when “to keep up a spirit of
discontent, recourse was had, either to evils merely imaginary, or to
such as were at a distance, and feared rather than felt,”[272] Adams
wrote the ablest of his many able newspaper articles.[273] In no other
phase of his work is the craft of the man so evident as in these
anonymous newspaper discussions. There was cunning as well as caution
in his method. Changing his style with every fresh quill and every
new pen name, putting forth an idea for the sake of denying it, then
examining its merits cautiously, and finally advocating it boldly, he
created like Falstaff a host of patriots out of a single Bostonian in
brown homespun, making it appear that many were troubled over evils
that were visible only to him. On occasion his style possesses the
light touch, the leisurely detail, the easy pleasantry of a Spectator
essay;[274] again, there is a note of biting irony and studied
insult;[275] and again, there is dignified discussion in which Adams
argues dispassionately with his countrymen, or pleads with them to
stand together in defense of the common welfare. But in whatever vein
or under whatever disguise he wrote, the conclusion of every argument
was the implied suggestion, how much better it would be if the American
people were to take into their own hands the management of their
affairs.
But before the colonial could be induced to strike for governmental
control, the old psychology of subserviency to the ruling class must
be uprooted; and an effective means to that end was to lay bare the
selfish motives of the aristocracy. To stimulate what we call today
class consciousness was a necessary preliminary to a democratic
psychology; and to this task Adams devoted every energy. The ways
of the iconoclast are rarely lovely, and the breaking of idols is
certain to wound sensitive souls. There was abundant justification
for the charge of Hutchinson that “robbing men of their characters”
was the “patriotic business” of Samuel Adams; but he missed the point
in attributing to him the motive, _Gubernatorum vituperatio populo
placet_. The respect that attached to Bernard and Hutchinson by
virtue of their official positions was a powerful ally of ministerial
authority; their words carried weight beyond the sanction of their
logic; for the good of America their power must be destroyed. Doubtless
Adams was ungenerous in attack; certainly he was vindictive in his
hates; but the cold record as we read it today justifies one in the
belief that the men whom he attacked were tools of the ministry,
and must be struck down if the rights of Massachusetts were to be
preserved. And it was due to the bitter denunciations of Adams that
Thomas Hutchinson was driven from his native land and forced to take
refuge in England, the best hated man in all the colonies.
But it was not enough to pull down the courtly Hutchinson, for behind
the governor was a group of lawyers and judges, equally subservient
to prerogative, adepts in the art of interpreting away rights by due
process of law. It became part of the day’s work, therefore, to lay
open the sacred precincts of the courts to common inspection; to create
a public opinion to review judicial decisions when those decisions
were political rather than legal. It was a startling innovation for a
private citizen to assert in the public press that “_state-lawyers_,
attorneys and sollicitors general, & persons advanced to the highest
stations in the courts of law, _prostitute_ the honor of the
profession, become _tools of ministers_, and employ their talents for
_explaining away_, if possible, the Rights of a kingdom.” Never before
had the integrity of the colonial courts been openly attacked and
the motives of the judiciary impugned. But it was far more startling
for Adams to lay down the thesis, that in matters which concern the
general welfare, the letter of the law is not to be considered final,
and “the opinions ... and determinations of the greatest Sages and
Judges of the law in the Exchequer Chamber, ought not to be considered
as decisive or binding ... any further, than they are consonant to
natural reason.”[276] If Franklin was concerned to create a new
economics in harmony with democratic needs, Samuel Adams was concerned
to democratize the New England law. He was dissatisfied with a legal
system created by a Tory past, and that had lately received a fresh
Tory impress at the hands of Blackstone. Such a body of law could not
answer the needs of a free people; it must be reshaped to conform to
new needs. And the conclusion towards which his thinking pointed was
the principle of a referendum of judicial decisions, for how otherwise
could it be determined whether a given decision were “consonant to
natural reason”?
Samuel Adams was little given to striking at the air, and he set
himself to the work of cutting the claws of the more obnoxious judges
with the same cool skill that marked his baiting of the governor.
Certain of them who held plural offices he maneuvered out of the
Council, on the ground that they ought not to exercise both legislative
and judicial functions; and when Bernard protested that they had been
members of the Council for years and by reason of “their knowledge of
the public business, were almost necessary to the body,” he replied
that they were to be released “from the cares and perplexities
of politics ... to make further advances in the knowledge of the
law”--which thrust, in view of the notorious fact that few of them had
been trained in the law, but had risen to the bench through political
influence, must be reckoned a palpable hit.[277] Others beyond his
immediate reach found their characters assailed and their motives
aspersed, until popular respect for them was destroyed; and the unlucky
judges who accepted payment from the royal chest found such a hue and
cry raised against them that they were driven to make choice between
the royal guineas or answering to the mob--a rude but effective way of
stimulating their loyalty to the commonwealth. In short, this “master
of the puppets,” measuring the power of the judges and fearing their
prerogative bias, did not scruple over ways and means of rendering them
more responsive to the popular will, which in the eyes of the best
people of Boston was no less than incendiary.
The work of Samuel Adams was largely done before the word democrat was
given vogue by the French Revolution, and he cautiously refrained from
using it; nevertheless he was probably the most thoroughgoing democrat
of his generation of Americans. He was wholly persuaded that the
sovereign people have a right to change their fundamental law, together
with the interpretation and administration of it, whenever they
desire; and that pending such change it was well to nullify an act of
prerogative subversive of their interests. “We contend, that the People
& their Representatives have a Right to withstand the abusive Exercise
of a legal & constitutional Prerogative of the Crown,” he argued in
reply to Hutchinson; “whenever instructions cannot be complyed with,
without injuring the people, they cease to be binding.”[278] From the
necessary corollary, that the people are competent to judge of their
own good and manage their own affairs, Adams did not shrink. Stated
thus in general terms, the theory possessed no novelty. The sovereignty
of the people had long been a staple of Whiggish theory; but Adams gave
to the doctrine democratic significance. The people, in his philosophy,
were something more than the wealthy and cultured minority to whom the
Whigs appealed; they were the mass of men--the yeoman, the tradesman,
the mechanic--all that multitude of homespun folk who had hitherto been
mere pawns in the political game. Such a passage as this, written four
years before Lexington, reads like Tom Paine and his doctrine of the
_res publica_:
The _multitude_ I am speaking of, is the _body of the people_--no
contemptible multitude--for whose sake government is instituted;
or rather, who have themselves erected it, solely for their own
good--to whom even kings and all in subordination to them, are
strictly speaking, servants and not masters.... Philanthrop
[Jonathan Sewall] I think, speaks somewhat unintelligently, when
he tells us that the well being and happiness of the whole depends
upon _subordination_; as if mankind submitted to government for the
sake of being subordinate.... Mankind have entered into political
societies, rather for the sake of restoring _equality_.... I am not
of levelling principles: But I am apt to think, that constitution
of civil government which admits equality in the most extensive
degree, consistent with the true design of government, is the
best.[279]
Accepting the sovereignty of the people, Adams was led to a pure
democracy, based on the town meeting. He rejected every form of “mixt
government,” whether in the form of king, lords and commons, or in
the form of constitutional checks and balances. That sober men should
profess to prefer the dominion of the few to the rule of all, he could
not understand. “I find everywhere some Men, who are afraid of a free
Government,” he said in 1776, “lest it be perverted, and made Use of
as a Cloke for Licenciousness. The fear of the Peoples abusing their
Liberty is made an Argument against their having the Enjoyment of it;
as if anything were so much to be dreaded by Mankind as Slavery.”[280]
Democracy he believed was inevitable, for “in these times of Light
and Liberty, every man chuses to see and judge for himself.”[281]
He was quite untroubled by any fear of the tyranny of the mass; he
was a good enough historian to know that it is always the minority
and not the mass that creates tyranny. Though Toryism might infect
the government circles, and aristocracy appeal to the wealthy and
ambitious, the great body of Massachusetts people were democratic, and
he looked forward hopefully to a new political order, created by the
popular mind. It came more quickly than he had expected, once the old
inhibitions were removed. “New Govts are now erecting in the several
American states under the Authority of the People,” he wrote soon after
Independence. “Monarchy seems to be generally exploded. And it is not
a little surprising to me that the Aristocratick Spirit, which appeard
to have taken deep Root in some of them, now gives place to that of
Democracy.”[282]
During the difficult after-years of reconstruction Adams remained
true to his democratic principles. As he had earlier resisted the
encroachments of monarchical centralization, he later fought against
Federalistic consolidation. He distrusted the Constitution as an
undemocratic instrument, fearing a centralized authority removed from
immediate control; and he joined heartily in the work of securing a
Bill of Rights. He welcomed the French Revolution and followed closely
the developing democratic philosophy which that great upheaval did so
much to clarify and disseminate. He remained an unrepentant Jacobin
during those acrimonious years when the Federalists were filling the
air with their anti-Jacobin fustian. He had heard gentlemen rant
before and was probably amused when, as Governor, he attended Harvard
Commencement and listened to young Robert Treat Paine fulminate against
the red atheism of France and its American spawn. Although a kinsman of
John Adams and warm friend, he welcomed the election of Jefferson as a
return to democratic principles after an unhappy period of “prejudice
and passion,” although he warned him, “you must depend upon being
hated ... because they hate your principles.” The last letter in the
collected edition of his works, addressed to his old friend Tom Paine,
November 30, 1802, is an appeal for democratic unity; and the words
with which it concludes--_felix qui cautus_--embody the principle of
his amazing political strategy. In playing for great stakes it is well
to be wary.
His anti-Federalism, aggravated by his frank advocacy of Jacobin
principles, cost him heavily in after days, and like Philip Freneau his
just fame was long obscured by partisan spleen. Although he retained
his hold on the affections of the Massachusetts electorate, and was
annually chosen Governor until the infirmities of age determined his
withdrawal from public affairs, he was silently dropped from the roll
of American patriots whose deeds were celebrated in current panegyrics.
His manuscripts were scattered after his death, and he was in the way
of being forgotten till Bancroft, in the next century, gave fresh
currency to his earlier reputation. Since then the figure of Samuel
Adams has grown steadily larger, although he still awaits a biographer
who will set him in his due place in the history of American liberalism.
Footnotes
[261] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 269.
[262] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 348.
[263] Hutchinson seems to justify such a view from a passage written in
1770: “The leaders here seem to acknowledge that their cause is not to
be defended on constitutional principles, and Adams now gives out that
there is no need of it; they are upon better ground; all men have a
natural right to change a bad constitution for a better, whenever they
have it in their power.” (Hosmer, _Life of Samuel Adams_, p. 259.)
[264] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 135.
[265] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 299.
[266] “The Rights of the Colonists,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 355-356.
[267] “Candidus,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 325-326.
[268] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 28.
[269] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 29.
[270] “A Chatterer,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 45-46.
[271] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 289.
[272] _History of Massachusetts Bay_, Vol. III, p. 349.
[273] See in particular the “Candidus” articles in _Works_, Vol. II, in
which he elaborated his views on government by ministerial instructions.
[274] See “Puritan” articles, in _Works_, Vol. I, p. 201 _et seq._
[275] See “Candidus,” in Vol. II, p. 246; “Chatterer,” in Vol. II, pp.
35, 39, 43; “Layman,” in Vol. I, p. 322.
[276] _Works_, Vol. II., p. 436.
[277] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 80.
[278] _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 22, 26.
[279] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 150.
[280] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 244.
[281] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 39.
[282] _Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 305.
Chapter V • Literary Echoes
The Revolutionary upheaval produced no polite literature in any
respects comparable to its utilitarian prose. The expiring wit
literature of England was an exotic that refused to be naturalized, and
the times were unpropitious for the creation of a native poetry. An
occasional dilettante like Mather Byles aspired to be a wit, but the
reputation of the clever Bostonian owed more to his tongue than to his
pen, and he is dimly remembered for the letter that he received from
the great Mr. Pope, rather than for notable verse. Nevertheless in the
early seventies pure literature was beginning to make a perceptible
stir in New England. Clever young men in the colleges were turning
moderns and making ready to wage a new battle of the books. They
preferred the refinements of verse to the didacticism of sermons; they
were discovering the charm of playful satire; and they found in the
currently fashionable tetrameter a brisk vehicle for their attacks on
academic dullness. They admired Churchill, then at the height of his
brief fame, but they were restrained by a decent modesty and dared
not go his length in brutal frankness. It was from these young men,
amateurs in verse writing and amateurs likewise in politics, that the
American cause mainly recruited its literary defenders. They might be
flaming Whigs but they were also well-bred young gentlemen who studied
the amenities and sought to unite patriotism with good form.
I • The Whig Satirists
1. John Trumbull
There was the best of Yankee blood in the veins of John Trumbull.
Among his kinsmen were the Reverend Benjamin Trumbull, historian
of Connecticut, Governor Jonathan Trumbull--Washington’s “Brother
Jonathan”--and John Trumbull the painter. On his mother’s side he was
descended from the vigorous Solomon Stoddard, grandfather of Jonathan
Edwards. His father was a scholarly minister, long a trustee of Yale
College, at which school the son spent seven years as undergraduate and
tutor. He was a precocious youth with a strong love of polite letters,
and a praiseworthy desire to achieve literary distinction. Greek and
Latin had been the toys of his childhood and when he was seven years of
age he passed the entrance examination to college. During the period
of his tutorship he joined with Timothy Dwight and Joseph Howe in
the work of overhauling the stale curriculum, supplementing Lilly’s
Grammar and Calvin’s Institutes with Pope and Churchill. Like other
aspiring youths of the day he dabbled in Spectator papers, practiced
his couplets, and eventually produced _The Progress of Dulness_, the
cleverest bit of academic verse till then produced in America. At heart
Trumbull was thoroughly academic, and nothing would have suited his
temperament better than the life of a Yale professor; but the prospects
proving unfavorable, he began to mingle Blackstone with the poets in
preparation for his future profession.
He was thus engaged during the middle years of the long dispute with
England, the bitter wranglings of which seem to have disturbed him
little in his quiet retreat. But in 1773 he resigned his tutorship
to prepare himself further in the law. Removing to Boston he entered
the office of John Adams, then rising to prominence as a spokesman
of the popular party; and he took lodgings in the house of Caleb
Cushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Placed thus at the
storm center of provincial politics, he was soon infected with the
Whig dissatisfactions and joined himself to the patriotic party. When
Adams went to Philadelphia to sit in the Continental Congress, Trumbull
withdrew to Hartford, where he established himself. Before quitting
Boston he had published an _Elegy on the Times_, a political tract that
seemed to Adams so useful to the cause that he marked the young poet
for future service, and the year following he encouraged the writing
of _M’Fingal_, the first part of which appeared in 1775. So great was
the prestige it met with that Trumbull tinkered with it for seven
years, publishing it finally in its completed form in 1782. The law
seems to have been a jealous mistress then as now, and his dreams of
further literary work were inadequately realized. He is believed to
have had a hand in _The Anarchiad_, and he wrote some minor poems; but
he soon drifted into politics, went on the bench, finally removed to
Detroit in 1825, and died there in 1831, at the age of eighty-one. He
had outlived his Revolutionary generation, long outlived his literary
ambitions, and was pretty much forgotten before he died. His collected
works, published in 1820, proved a losing venture for the printer.
America in 1820 was turning romantic, and few, it seems, cared to
invest in two volumes of echoes.
Trumbull’s reputation rests exclusively on _M’Fingal_. It was so
popular in its time that more than thirty pirated editions were
issued. It was broadcasted by “news-papers, hawkers, pedlars, and
petty chapmen,” and it served its partisan purpose. The author was
complimented by the Marquis de Chastellux on fulfilling all the
conditions of burlesque poetry as approved since the days of Homer;
but in spite of the indisputable cleverness of some of the lines,
it is not a great work. In its final form it is spun out to extreme
length, and pretty much swamped by the elaborate machinery on which the
poet visibly prided himself. Even in the thick of attack Trumbull did
not forget his academic reading, but he explains his allusions with
meticulous care. He seems, indeed, rather more concerned about the laws
of the mock epic than the threatened rights of America. The Scotch Tory
hero is a figure so unlike the real Tory--the Olivers and Leonards and
Hutchinsons, with their love of power and dignified display--that the
caricature loses much in historical veracity. Trumbull’s patriotism
was well bred and unmarked by fierce partisanship. His refined tastes
were an ill equipment for the turmoil of revolution. The ways of the
radical were not lovely in his eyes; the Sons of Liberty with their
tar-pots and feather-beds were too often rough fellows, and although
they provided him with comic material to set off the blunderings of
the Squire, they probably seemed to him little better than tools of
demagogues. Very often this tousle-headed democracy behaved like a mob,
and Trumbull in his tie-wig did not approve of mobs.
The more thoughtfully one reads _M’Fingal_, throwing upon it the light
of the total career of its author, the more clearly one perceives
that John Trumbull was not a rebellious soul. In the year 1773, while
projecting some fresh ventures in the Spectator vein, “he congratulated
himself on the fact ‘that the ferment of politics’ was, as he supposed,
‘pretty much subsided,’ and that at last the country was to enjoy a
‘mild interval from the struggles of patriotism and self-interest,
from noise and confusion, Wilkes and liberty.’” He had then no wish for
embroilment in civil war, no dreams of political independence. All his
life he seems to have suffered from ill health, which probably sapped
his militancy and lessened his pugnacity. From this temperamental
calmness came a certain detachment that allowed his partisanship to
remain cooler than the hot passions of the times commonly suffered. He
could permit himself the luxury of a laugh at the current absurdities;
and it is this light-heartedness that made _M’Fingal_ so immediately
effective. The rollicking burlesque of the Tory argument, the telling
_reductio ad absurdum_ of the Tory logic, must have tickled the ears of
every Whig and provoked many a laugh in obscure chimney-seats. Laughter
is a keen weapon, and Trumbull’s gayety laid open weak spots in the
Tory armor that were proof against Freneau’s invective. It was a rare
note in those acrimonious times, and one likes Trumbull the better for
minding his manners and engaging in the duel like a gentleman. After
all, this son of Yale had certain characteristics of the intellectual,
and if his environment had been favorable and the law had not claimed
him, very likely he would have given a better account of the talents
that were certainly his. He wrote with ease if not with finish, and he
possessed the requisite qualities of a man of letters. A lovable man he
seems to have been, but somewhat easy-going, too lightly turned away
from his purpose; and in consequence his later life failed to realize
the expectations of his early years.
That he was not a Loyalist was probably due in large measure to
environment and his family connections. Considering his temperament,
it is not easy to discover any logical reason why he should have
turned Whig. He had never suffered in his own fortune from existing
arrangements; he was not a political idealist to throw the glamor of
republicanism about the struggle; he had not subjected the colonial
question to critical analysis. He was an academic dilettante,
unconcerned with political principles, little more than an echo of the
Connecticut gentry in such matters; and if he espoused the Whig cause
it is a pretty good indication that Yale College was indoctrinated
in Whig principles. An echo he remained throughout his life. When
later he became a Federalist and enjoyed some of the emoluments of
party victory, and when later still democracy lifted up its head in
Connecticut, wearing the French cockade, and bringing down upon it
the wrath of all respectable people, he reflected faithfully the views
of his class. John Trumbull was a moderate liberal, but no leveler, no
democrat, no friend to Jeffersonian heresies. Democracy he detested
heartily, and he joined with the other Hartford Wits to draw its
portrait in unflattering terms. As a Connecticut gentleman he was
insistent on the supremacy of the tie-wig in government as well as in
society; he would scarcely have been a Connecticut gentleman had he
thought otherwise.
2. Francis Hopkinson, Esq.
If the career of Trumbull indicates that Whiggery existed among the
young collegians of Connecticut, the career of Francis Hopkinson
suggests that the culture of Philadelphia, the great center of
fashion and wit, was Whiggish also. That it should have been so is
the more noteworthy, for the Quaker spirit of Philadelphia was far
less militant than the Puritan spirit of Boston; more peaceful, if
not more conservative. The city had long been dominated by a group
of sober merchants who detested the leveling tendencies of New
England. But the domination of these older men was passing; a younger
generation, more aggressive in trade and speculation, was rising to
power; and that Philadelphia finally went with the Whigs was due to the
influence of these younger merchants. When it became clear that the
commercial interests of men like Robert Morris and George Clymer were
disadvantaged by the connection with England, the ardor of patriotism
grew stronger, and talk of independence became common. No sooner had
business come out for independence than culture swung over; the wit
which would gladly have remained loyal applauded the comments of the
countinghouse, and the newspaper essay reflected the new patriotic
sentiments.
Chief among the Philadelphia wits was Francis Hopkinson, Esq., a
charmingly versatile dilettante, who to the vocation of the law and the
bench of admiralty, joined the polite avocations of painting, music,
natural philosophy, and literature. He was indisputably clever, full of
innumerable sprightly enthusiasms, and master of cultivated speech and
manners. Of his skill in painting and music we cannot judge, but of his
literary accomplishments the record has been preserved. Life seems to
have been an agreeable experience to him, and if his dainty enthusiasms
were a marvel to John Adams,[283] it would indicate that society in
Philadelphia in 1775 was far more refined than in provincial Boston.
Hopkinson possessed ample means to gratify his polite tastes, and
had long moved in the most exclusive circles. The son of an eminent
lawyer, he had received the best education available in the colonies,
after which he went abroad to acquire old-world polish. Some fourteen
months were spent in England, where, as a near kinsman of the Bishop
of Worcester, he frequented the best English society, made the
acquaintance of eminent men, and even enjoyed the distinction of
dining with my Lord North. On his return he prudently fell in love
with an heiress of the Bordens, of Bordentown, and turned Jerseyman
the better to administer his wife’s estates. He entered the law, and
doubtless at the solicitation of his kinsman the Bishop, he became a
beneficiary of ministerial patronage: receiving appointment in 1772
to a sinecure post as collector of customs at Newcastle, and two
years later being made mandamus councilor for New Jersey--a somewhat
hazardous post, considering the nature of the office and the temper
of the people. Already in Massachusetts certain gentlemen had learned
that the compliment of royal recognition might cost too dear a price.
That Hopkinson should have been tendered such an appointment as late as
1774, shows that he was regarded by the ministry as good Tory material.
During the anxious months of 1774, when intelligent Americans were
trying to forecast the outcome of the growing radicalism of the
colonial temper, Hopkinson must have done some serious thinking; with
the result that when in September the Continental Congress assembled
in Philadelphia, he offered to the members as his contribution to the
discussion a clever little allegory wherein the whole question at issue
between England and the colonies was sketched with a light touch that
is an agreeable relief from the arguments of the official debaters. In
_A Pretty Story_ Hopkinson is frankly pro-colonial, and offers his wit
to the service of his country. It is not a great work, but it shows
that he had definitely put aside the ministerial temptation--probably
to the disgust of the good Bishop--and had gone over to the Whigs. Two
years later he took a seat in the Congress, and within a week voted
for the Declaration of Independence, aligning himself against the
conservative group led by his fellow townsman, John Dickinson.
What impelled Hopkinson to so momentous a shift in political
opinion can be explained by no records that have been preserved,
and must remain a matter of conjecture. Even less than Trumbull was
he revolutionary in temper. His Whiggery was probably commercial
in origin, a reflection of the economic interests of the merchant
class with which he mingled. That he went so far as to attack the
aristocratic spirit of the English government--its debauching of public
servants and its sordid motives--may have been due quite as much to a
refined integrity as to partisan advantage; but for an aristocrat to
attack the aristocratic principle of government was unusual as it was
dangerous for his class. But though he turned Whig he was no agrarian
to substitute the majority will for the royal prerogative; and when the
war was over and political re-alignment was under way, Hopkinson went
with his group, became a stout Federalist, defended the Constitution,
and enjoyed his share of the party emoluments. His wit was unembittered
by the acrimonious disputes of Jacobin days, and his partisanship
retained its note of casual sprightliness through the dogdays of the
nineties.
His chief contributions to the debate over the Constitution were _The
New Roof_ and _Objections to the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government
for the United States, on Genuine Principles_. They are delightfully
clever, but the cleverness cannot conceal a good-natured contempt for
the democratic underling and all his ways. The attitude of aristocratic
superiority is the more striking for its easy bearing. The first is
an implied eulogy of James Wilson, Scotch lawyer of Philadelphia, who
as master-architect finds his plans for erecting a splendid roof over
a “certain Mansion-house” violently opposed by Margery, a slattern
midwife, for no better reason than that “in the construction of the
new roof, her apartments would be considerably lessened.” Margery, of
course, is agrarian democracy, and to further her interests she incites
three worthless servants to testify that the old leaky roof is better
than the one proposed. Naturally their flimsy arguments are laughed out
of court, and the wisdom of the architect is apparent to all except a
“half-crazy fellow”[284] who filled the air with his “fustian,” making
himself a general nuisance to the disgust of all respectable people.
In the second of the two works, Hopkinson gives freer rein to his
polite fancy, figuring the opposition to the Constitution under the
form of a Wheelbarrow Society at the city gaol. Within those walled
precincts, he suggests, the most advanced advocates of natural liberty
may be found, and there the monstrous crime of the Constitution is
most eloquently exposed. How foolish is this America that persists in
believing what able lawyers and reputable gentlemen say of the merits
of the document, and refuses to intrust the making of a fundamental law
to such true liegemen of democracy as these knights of the chain-gang!
It is all very witty, and provokes its laugh, and serves its purpose
of heaping on the head of the opposition the class prejudice that was
indignant at the insolence of plebeians in holding contrary views on
a subject quite beyond their comprehension. But times change, and the
sprightliest wit may lose its savor. Those old Federalist skits are as
dead today as the marvelous pageant got up by Hopkinson to celebrate
the adoption of the Constitution, an affair which greatly pleased the
amiable little gentleman, a detailed account of which he prepared
for the definitive edition of his works, where it may be read by the
curious.
If Francis Hopkinson is no very important figure in our literary
history, he is not without significance as a representative of our
colonial culture that deliberately chose to be Whig rather than Tory.
He risked much and he was amply rewarded. For years he sat on the bench
of the Court of Admiralty, sparkled at dinners, and was a respected
and influential member of a genteel society. If the recompense for his
services during the perilous days was greater than fell to the lot of a
democrat like Philip Freneau, who will wonder? Like rewards like, and
the days of democratic rewards were not yet come in America.
II • The Tory Satirists
1. Jonathan Odell
Amongst the occasional writers who dedicated extemporized couplets
to the defense of Toryism in America, there can be no doubt to whom
belongs the primacy. Jonathan Odell was easily first as a purveyor of
virulent Loyalist rhyme. Of the sternest Puritan ancestry, Odell was
educated in medicine, and saw service in the West Indies as surgeon
to his Majesty’s forces. Turning Anglican he was ordained priest
in London, and came home to his native colonies as a missionary, to
further the cause of episcopacy. Busily engaged with parochial duties,
he chose to remain aloof from all political disputes, and during the
early months of the war he refrained from taking sides. Unfortunately,
however, he made acquaintances among some captive British officers,
for whom he wrote a song in honor of the King’s birthday, which was
sung with much drinking of wine on June 4, 1776, the news of which
getting abroad stirred the Whig partisans to anger. Soon thereafter
matters grew too warm for Odell to remain longer neutral; he suffered
certain humiliating personal experiences and was driven to seek refuge
within the British lines. Thenceforth none was more ardent in the royal
cause. He busied himself with innumerable intrigues to undermine the
Whig strength, amongst others serving as a go-between in the unlucky
André-Arnold affair. He remained implacable to the end, and not until
the last Redcoat was withdrawn from the independent states, did he
leave off urging reprisals. When it was all over he withdrew sullenly
to Nova Scotia, was amply rewarded by his King, and sat down to nourish
to the end of a long life the most virulent hatred of all Whigs and
republicans. “Toryissimus,” Professor Tyler calls him, borrowing Sir
Walter’s word; and the term hits to a nicety the bitter arrogant nature
which so closely resembled in its essentials the “proud prelate Laud,”
from whom his ancestors had fled a hundred and fifty years before.
A vigorous man was Jonathan Odell, strong, capable, uncompromising,
possessing a clear intellect and a heart little touched by Christian
charity--a stern Hebraist who would sweep away with the besom of wrath
all the enemies of his God and his King. He felt no hesitation in
making out the list of the proscribed: the enemies of the King were
_ipso facto_ the enemies of God--rebels who were daily signing their
own death warrants in overt acts of treason. Watching the seditious
crew of “Congress men” seducing the colonials into unnatural rebellion
against the best of kings and fathers, he took it to be his Christian
duty to lay the rod of correction upon their shoulders. If they would
not be warned they must be hanged. Not content with active intrigue, he
pressed his pen into service, and during the year 1779 he wrote four
pieces which for bitterness of satire outdid Freneau at his frankest.
Freneau was bitter and brutal in all conscience, but he was never
nasty; there were infamies of personal insult that he would not stoop
to, vulgarities of innuendo that he was not guilty of. If he studied
the art of Churchill, he stopped short of Churchill’s grossness. But
Odell the priest was unhampered by scruple; the meanest gossip found
a place in his “acrid rhyme.” No Christian charity spread its mantle
over the shortcomings of his enemies, no Christian forgiveness found
lodgment in his unforgiving heart. He was a son of the Old Testament
and he girded up his righteousness with prayer.
Ask I too much? then grant me for a time
Some deleterious pow’rs of acrid rhyme:
Some ars’nic verse, to poison with the pen
These rats, who nestle in the Lion’s den![285]
The four satires which embody his holy wrath and which were little
calculated to spread sweetness and light in a world sorely in need of
them, are _The Word of Congress_, _The Congratulation_, _The Feu de
Joie_, and _The American Times_--all written, probably, in the last
months of the year 1779. Of these the first and the last are the most
suggestive in their denunciation. The spirit which prompted him to turn
to satire is given in the preface to the 1780 edition of _The American
Times_.
The masters of Reason have decided, that when doctrines and
practices have been fairly examined, and proved to be contrary to
Truth, and injurious to Society, then and not before may Ridicule
be lawfully employed in the Service of Virtue. This is exactly
the case of the grand American Rebellion; it has been weighed in
the balance, and found wanting: able writers have exposed its
principles, its conduct, and its final aim. Reason has done her
part, and therefore this is the legitimate moment for Satire.
Accordingly the following Piece is offered to the Public. What it
is found to want of Genius, the Author cannot supply; what it may
want of Correction, he hopes the candor of the Public will excuse
on account of the fugitive nature of the subject: next year the
publication would be too late; for in all probability there will
then be no Congress existing.
When we examine the work of Odell to discover the deeper springs of his
thought, we come upon naked class prejudice, undiluted Toryism. His
social philosophy is erected upon that unstable foundation; the actions
of men are judged solely by that light. Of any valid or reasoned
philosophy, social or political, he was as wanting as a child. Of any
real understanding of his fellow Americans who had espoused the Whig
cause, he was as lacking as General Clinton, whose “warfare,” Odell
asserted, “was the war of God.” The colonial grievances which other
Tories acknowledged to have some foundation, Odell casually ignored.
There was no cause in heaven or earth for colonial disloyalty, he
was convinced, except Whiggish perversity, and for such perversity
there must be due punishment--the rope. In his mind’s eye he sees the
“impious crew,” one after another silenced by the halter. There must be
no ill-judged mercy; the best of the rebels must swing with the worst,
for they are all sedition-mongers, all attainted traitors. From his
vast ignorance Odell derived an equally vast confidence in the ultimate
triumph of truth. There is a note of finality in his judgments that
amazes, an infallibility that amuses. The Reverend Jonathan frankly
acknowledges himself to be the boon companion of Reason, the favored
suitor of Truth--from them only has he taken instruction and in their
name he professes to speak. Whereas the Whigs are poor fellows who have
held commerce with neither.
Odell is careful of his workmanship and organizes his materials with
an eye to climax. _The American Times_ is formally divided into three
parts. The poem opens with a summoning of the infernal crew of sedition
and the abuse of them severally, rising to a rhetorical conclusion in
an address to Washington; then the leering portrait of the mother of
all mischiefs. Democracy, is painted; finally comes a pure and lofty
strain which summons Reason to decide in the great cause. Taxation,
Independence, are haled before her august throne and there condemned,
and the whole concludes with a vision of Britannia’s guardian angel
bearing a two-edged sword and proclaiming:
At length the day of Vengeance is at hand:
The exterminating Angel takes his stand:
Hear the last summons, rebels, and relent:
Yet but a moment is there to repent.
Lo! the great Searcher ready at the door,
Who means decisively to purge the floor:
Yes, the wise Sifter now prepares the fan
To separate the meal from useless bran.
Down to the centre from his burning ire
Ye foes of goodness and of truth, retire:
And ye, who now lie humbled in the dust,
Shall raise your heads, ye loyal and ye just;
Th’ approving sentence of your Sovereign gain,
And shine refulgent as the starry train.
Then, when eternal justice is appeas’d;
When with due vengeance heav’n and earth are pleas’d;
America, from dire pollution clear’d,
Shall flourish yet again, belov’d, rever’d:
In duty’s lap her growing sons be nurs’d,
And her last days be happier than her first.[286]
Into this framework Odell has fitted a surprising number of personal
attacks. His ink blots out the good name of every Whig on whom it
drips. To the present generation it furnishes food for wonder to
see what a paltry appearance the fathers make in the verse of this
plain-speaking Tory. Jefferson, Paine, Morris, Adams, Washington, and
a host of others, are shallow creatures, in the judgment of Odell,
bereft of reason, void of honor, the very scum of the revolutionary
pot; whereas Clinton and Gage, Hutchinson and Galloway, are holy
instruments in the hand of God to cleanse the land of pollution. The
attack is rankly and grossly partisan, with no saving grace of humor or
humanity. The alpha and omega of Odell’s political faith was loyalty to
the crown, and the bankruptcy of such a creed in revolutionary America
is nowhere thrust into harsher relief than in the bitter verses of
this bitter heart. Empty Jonathan Odell of prejudice, class interest,
passion for the prerogative, with their corollary of praise for an
unmanly truckling to the King, and nothing remains, the empty sack
collapses. It was a hardship that he should have been driven out of his
native country upon the failure of the King’s cause, but what could
be done with a fellow who insisted that his empty sack was stuffed
with all the virtues? He was harshly intolerant in his Toryism, and he
encountered a victorious republican harshness.
2. Samuel Peters
It is amusing to turn from the implacable Odell to the mendacious
Peters, only to meet with another tale of abortive missionary zeal.
The Anglican clergy played a conspicuous part during the Revolutionary
troubles--a part that in many cases inspired small regard for the
establishment in the minds of a dissenting laity. Not in vain did
the church teach loyalty to authority, for while the British Empire
was breaking asunder, the Anglican ministers were visible pillars of
prerogative and with pen and voice lent effective aid to the royal
cause. Sometimes their ardor outran their intelligence, their devotion
betrayed their discretion; nevertheless their zeal contributed notably
to the number and quality of the Loyalist writings.
For some inconceivable reason Samuel Peters was seized with a desire
to plant the Anglican church in Congregational Connecticut--surely
the strangest of desires and the strangest of men to undertake such
a work. To uplift the banner of episcopacy in a commonwealth that
for over a hundred years had been militantly Separatist, that did
not want bishops and would not have them--here was missionary zeal
that a plain man understands with difficulty. To have made headway
at all there was need of apostolic fervor and an ingratiating tact;
and Samuel Peters possessed neither. He was a gentleman who preened
himself on his quality, exuding in speech and action a pride of caste
that led him to speak of the American farmers as peasants--the only
native Loyalist who thus aped the English. His abilities were far from
mean, but his better qualities were corroded by overweening conceit.
Possessed of all the arrogance of a lord and all the ostentation of a
brewer, he was scarcely the man to serve the Connecticut laity with
due Christian humility. He pointed out the truth authoritatively and
then took it as a personal affront if his hearers failed to agree with
him. And so, after explaining to the Congregationalists of Connecticut
the infallible truth of the Anglican way, and being ready to minister
to them according to that way, he fell into a pet when they refused to
turn churchmen. The more he argued the more he got himself disliked,
and when his tactless loyalism brought down the Sons of Liberty upon
him and he was driven to Boston--whence he sailed for England where he
survived for thirty-one years--he took a spirited revenge by writing
his _History of Connecticut_, a work that solaced the early years of
expatriation, and provided material for many an after argument.
It is an amazingly provocative book, over which the sons of Connecticut
have disputed acrimoniously for a hundred years without coming
to agreement. Fortunately those disputes are of far less concern
today than the political philosophy tucked away in the pages of the
_History_; the scandal is far less interesting than the shrewd comment
on the causes of the American Revolution. Samuel Peters was a high Tory
with the virtue of frankness, which defeat had made the more open. From
his secure refuge in England he looked back upon the revolutionary
upheaval, and his analysis of causes is the more suggestive from the
fact that he had nothing to gain from truckling to popular opinion. His
judgments are interesting even when he exaggerates. The colonial Tory
is no longer serving immediate partisan ends, but after the battle has
been fought and lost he takes a grim pleasure in pointing out to the
English government its costly blunders. Affairs went ill in America,
not because of too much Toryism on the part of government, but because
of too little and too late applied. The explanation of the origin
and spread of unrest in America, Peters regarded as very simple. The
tap-root of the disaffection was republicanism, which through the
criminal negligence of government was not severed in the days when the
plant was small, but which was suffered to grow till the tree could not
be pulled up or destroyed.
It appears to me, that the British government, in the last century,
did not expect New-England to remain under their authority; nor did
the New-Englanders consider themselves as subjects, but allies,
of Great Britain. It seems that England’s intent was to afford an
asylum to the republicans who had been a scourge to the British
constitution; and so, to encourage that restless party to emigrate,
republican charters were granted, and privileges and promises given
them far beyond what an Englishman in England is entitled to.
The emigrants were empowered to make laws, in church and state,
agreeable to their own will and pleasure, without the King’s
approbation.[287]
From the first they have uniformly declared, in church and state,
that America is a new world, subject to the people residing in it;
and that none but enemies to the country would appeal from their
courts to the King in Council. They never have prayed for any
earthly king by name. They always called themselves republicans
and enemies to kingly government.... They hate the idea of a
parliament.... They never have admitted one law of England to be
in force among them, till passed by their assemblies.... They hold
Jesus to be their only King, whom if they love and obey, they will
not submit, because they have not submitted to the laws of the King
of England.[288]
The natural fruits of this pernicious root of republicanism were the
colonial hostility to the monarchical and aristocratic elements of
the British constitution, together with all the domestic turbulence
and lawlessness which have marked the history of New England from the
first. If gentlemen wished an object lesson in republicanism, none
better than Connecticut could be had; there from the earliest days,
“republicanism, schisms, and persecutions,” have gone hand in hand;
and it was to make this clear to the world that Samuel Peters took the
trouble to write his _History_.
In the course of this work, my readers must necessarily have
observed, in some degree, the ill effects of the democratical
constitution of Connecticut. I would wish them to imagine, for
I feel myself unable adequately to describe, the confusion,
turbulence, and convulsion, arising in a province, where not only
every civil officer, from the Governor to the constable, but also
every minister, is appointed as well as paid by the people, and
faction and superstition are established. The clergy, lawyers, and
merchants or traders, are the three efficient parties which guide
the helm of government.... _En rabies vulgi_--I must beg leave to
refer my readers to their own reflections upon such a system of
government as I have here sketched out.[289]
That such a people would respect the King’s laws at a late day, when
those laws lessened their profits, was foolish to expect. There had
been much complaint from ministerial gentlemen in respect to colonial
smuggling; but how idle was it to complain of the natural consequences
of ministerial laxness chronic for a hundred years!
Smuggling is rivetted in the constitutions and practice of the
inhabitants of Connecticut ... and their province is a storehouse
for the smugglers of the neighboring colonies. They conscientiously
study to cheat the King of those duties, which, they say, God and
nature never intended should be paid. From the governor down to
the tithing-man, who are sworn to support the laws, they will aid
smugglers, resist collectors, and mob informers.[290]
In contemplating these open and notorious facts, which every member of
government must have known, Samuel Peters came very near anger at the
gross stupidity of the ministerial policy. The way to have met these
difficulties was plain--the itch of democracy should have been cured
with the salve of aristocracy. The natural leaders in the several
colonies should have been taken care of by a judicious distribution of
titles of nobility.
The people of New-England are rightly stiled republicans: but a
distinction should be made between the learned and unlearned, the
rich and poor. The latter form a great majority; the minority,
therefore, are obliged to wear the livery of the majority, in
order to secure their election into office. Those very republican
gentlemen are ambitious, fond of the power of governing, and grudge
no money nor pains to obtain an annual office. What would they not
give for a dignity depending not on the fickle will of a multitude,
but on the steady reason and generosity of a King?[291]
There was shrewd, unclerical wisdom in the comment of Samuel Peters.
If the gentlemen of England had founded their colonial policy on the
principle of sharing the emoluments of rank and power with ambitious
gentlemen in America, there might well have been quite another story
to tell. But because they begrudged the small rewards, because they
would have the shadow as well as the substance, they lost everything.
An outcome so untoward and so stupid hurt Samuel Peters to the quick;
but it was not his fault, and he doubtless found a crumb of malicious
satisfaction in pointing out the ministerial stupidity after the
mischief was done.
Footnotes
[283] See _Familiar Letters of John and Abigail Adams_, p. 217.
[284] “Philadelphiensis,” one of the anti-Federalist pamphleteers.
[285] _Loyalist Poetry_, p. 55.
[286] _Loyalist Poetry_, p. 36.
[287] _A General History of Connecticut_, Appendix, p. 374.
[288] _Ibid._, p. 290.
[289] _Ibid._, pp. 282-285.
[290] _Ibid._, p. 320.
[291] _Ibid._, p. 377.
Book Three: Liberalism and the Constitution • 1783-1800
Part One: The Agrarian Defeat • 1783-1787
Chapter I • Agrarianism and Capitalism
I • The Background of Ideas • English and French Contributions
With the close of the war the question of the times was the urgent
problem of the form and control of the new political state to be
erected: whether it should be the coercive sovereign of the whole, or
should share its sovereignty with the several states. Although the
problem was political, the forces that were driving to a solution were
economic, and were commonly recognized as such. Agrarian and mercantile
interests opposed each other openly and shaped their political programs
in accordance with their special needs. Not until French romanticism
popularized the doctrine of social equalitarianism was there any
serious questioning of the principle of the economic basis of politics.
The fact of property rule was challenged in America no more than in
England, and the laws of suffrage in the several states were founded
on that principle. The new state, therefore, took its shape from men
who were political realists, deeply read in the republican literature
of the seventeenth century, and inspired by the ideals of the rising
English middle class. The opponents of the new state, on the other
hand, were economic liberals who rejected English middle-class ideals,
and inclined increasingly to the humanitarian theory of the French
thinkers, though with an eye always upon American conditions. The
struggle between these two schools of thought determined the final
outcome of a long and acrimonious contest.
The English middle class had received its creative bent from
seventeenth-century Puritanism. That vast movement survived political
defeat and effected a silent revolution in English character that
projected its ideals far into the future. It permeated the rising
tradesman class, stimulated its ambition, and gave it an ethics
precisely fitted to its needs. In inculcating the doctrine of a sacred
calling to work, it substituted the modern attitude towards production
for the medieval. It rejected the older conception of work for the sake
of a livelihood, of production for consumption, and substituted the
ideal of work for its own sake, of production for the sake of profit.
It implicitly condemned the leisurely, play-loving and pleasure-taking
activities of medieval England, and substituted a drab ideal of
laborious gain, that measured life in terms of material prosperity
and exalted the business of acquisition as the rational end of life.
In the sanction of such an ethics, wealth became the first object of
social desire; and this ideal, that answered the ambitions of the
rising middle class, was preached under the authority of religion. To
labor diligently in the vocation to which one is called of God, it was
believed, was to labor under the great Taskmaster’s eye, and in the
confident hope of eternal reward.
No conceivable discipline was better calculated to breed a utilitarian
race and create a nation of tradesmen. The immediate result was the
emergence of a middle-class, unimaginative, laborious, prudential,
who devoutly believed that the right to rise in the world, to pursue
economic well-being in a competitive society, was the most sacred of
human rights; that those who were faithful in little things, God would
make rulers over great things. To scant one’s service, whether to God
or one’s master, was the cardinal sin; work, thrift, self-denial, were
the cardinal virtues. This amazing revolution in the ethics of work
laid the basis upon which modern England was to rise; it carried in its
loins the industrial revolution. The rise of the new ethics coincided
historically with the final disintegration of the craft guilds, and
the emergence of the great trading companies. It provided a desirable
sanction for the modern principle of exploitation, and the development
of the middleman system of distribution; and these conceptions the
Puritanized English commercial class seized upon eagerly, and in
capable fashion set about the work of creating the system of modern
capitalism.
Every rising group is jealous of its interests and active in asserting
them. It joins forces with whatever movements of current liberalism
promise to further its purpose, but it will see to it that the wider
movement shall serve its narrower ends. The commercial class gathered
strength swiftly during the early seventeenth century, and with the
gentry formed the backbone of discontent with the strong rule of
Strafford. London was growing fast, “the abode of smoke, disease and
democracy,” as a contemporary gentleman phrased it; and the London
burgesses supported Parliament heartily. The new money-economy wanted
to be free from governmental restrictions and exactions, and the
simplest way seemed to lie in asserting parliamentary sovereignty. That
hope was frustrated after 1660 when control of Parliament passed into
the hands of the landed gentry. The aristocracy was too strong for the
middle class, and the latter was forced to buy its privileges in the
open parliamentary market. Not until the intellectual liberalism of
the later eighteenth century clarified its conception of the minimized
state, did the money economy rise to fresh political consciousness, and
then it joined heartily with the new liberalism in an attack upon the
centralized powers of the political state.
The philosophy of this new liberalism was derived largely from two
notable thinkers of the preceding century, Harrington and Locke,
supplemented later by Adam Smith. The influence of the _Oceana_ upon
later thinkers was profound. In grasping and applying the principle of
the economic interpretation of history Harrington laid the foundation
of modern political theory. The true source of political power, he
asserted, is economic power--“empire follows the balance of property.”
The form of government in a given country, whether monarchical,
aristocratic, or democratic, according to the doctrine of economic
determinism, depends upon the ownership of land, whether vested
largely in one, in a minority, or in many. This primary economic power
is modified, however, by the presence in every society of a natural
aristocracy; the authority of character and ability imposes a natural
leadership on those less capable, and disturbs the simple economics
of the situation. Because of the resulting clash of interests,
political stability can be secured only by a judiciously calculated
system of checks; and the system which Harrington elaborated provided
for a bicameral legislature--the aristocratic branch proposing and
debating, and the democratic branch resolving--rotation in office,
and the ballot, to the end that there should be a government of laws
and not of men. His ideal was rulership by the best and wisest under
well-considered laws, circumscribed by a written constitution.
Locke followed Harrington in founding his political theory upon
economics, but he gave to it a characteristically middle-class
interpretation. Harrington had been primarily concerned with a land
economy; Locke was to become unconsciously a spokesman of a money
economy. The persistent problem of that economy was the security of
private property against sequestration, and the ultimate effect of
Locke’s teachings was to secure and strengthen the rights of property
in the state. In basing his doctrine of property ownership upon labor,
he prepared the way for a conception of economic power dissociated
from land. In the universal communism which marks the state of nature,
he argued, private property rights result from labor bestowed, and
are ethically and socially valid. But in such a state of nature, the
possession and enjoyment of property thus detached from the communal
whole are at constant hazards. “The great and chief end, therefore, of
men uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government,
is the preservation of their property.”[292] If such was the original
purpose for which government was instituted among men, it follows that
government must regard property rights with particular tenderness;
for if the state prove untrustworthy, the original compact upon
which it was erected is dissolved, and society returns to a state of
nature. Locke therefore went far in asserting the inviolable rights of
property, laying it down as a guiding principle that the sovereign in
time of war may lawfully enforce conscription upon the bodies and lives
of his subjects, but not upon their property. “The supreme power cannot
take from any man any part of his property without his own consent,”
for “to invade the fundamental law of property” is to subvert “the end
of government.”[293] In thus asserting the sacredness of property,
Locke laid the foundation of the new philosophy of capitalism.
As English capitalism grew stronger it began to envisage more
critically the fundamental problem of the powers and functions of the
political state. A state controlled by the landed interests, given to
imposing vexatious restrictions upon trade, could not answer its needs;
freedom rather than regulation was requisite to healthy development.
From the Physiocratic teachings had come the new conception that
economic well-being cannot be imposed from above by governmental
paternalism, but results from untrammeled individual enterprise. The
great concern of government should be to assist and not hamper industry
and trade; political policies should follow and serve commercial
interests. Thus was provided the background from which emerged
_The Wealth of Nations_, the declaration of independence of modern
capitalism. Adam Smith completed the work of Locke, and gave definite
form to the middle-class liberalism of eighteenth-century England, a
liberalism that in the pursuit of commercial freedom found it desirable
to limit the powers of the state. The Tory state had been centralized
and paternal, the capitalistic state was to be reduced to the position
of umpire between competitors. The net results, thus, of two hundred
years of English middle-class struggle to free its economic ambitions
from governmental restrictions was the conception of the social,
political, and economic sufficiency of _laissez faire_. “Let alone” had
been erected into a fetish.
In France, on the other hand, the economic interpretation of history
dominated political thinking far less than in England, and the liberal
movement owed more to a group of intellectuals than to the middle
class. The French leaders were a remarkable group, far removed in
temper from Harrington and Locke and Adam Smith. The Physiocrats were
agrarians and the romantics were humanitarians. They followed the path
of logic to broad principles. As leadership passed from Montesquieu to
Rousseau, French liberalism abandoned the cautious historical appeal,
and turned to generalization that carried far beyond liberalism. The
Rousseau school became advanced radicals, aiming at the regeneration
of society as a whole, seeking political justice by a universal appeal
to reason. This explains the breadth and suggestiveness of their
thinking, as well as the smallness of their immediate achievement. In
seeking much they overreached accomplishment, for they had behind them
no disciplined, class-conscious group, pursuing definite ends. But in
outrunning their own time, they became leaders of later times; and the
unfulfilled program of Rousseau carried over to become the inspiration
of later humanitarianism.
The creative impulse of French romantic philosophy was a passionate
social idealism. A disciple of Locke, Rousseau went further than
his master and translated politics and economics into sociology.
That a juster, more wholesome social order should take the place of
the existing obsolete system; that reason and not interests should
determine social institutions; that the ultimate ends to be sought were
universal liberty, equality, and fraternity--such in brief were the
main conceptions of his philosophy. “Regard for the general good” must
be accepted as the sole test of laws and institutions. He attacked the
problem by way of psychology, essaying a revaluation of human nature.
Incalculable harm had been done, and grave mistakes made, Rousseau
believed, by the old slanderous interpretation; to assume that every
man is a knave, governed solely by self-interest, was an assumption
contrary to fact. It was a generalization deduced from certain acquired
characteristics. If in a competitive society men prove to be selfish,
ambitious of power and distinction, brutal in seeking egoistic ends,
the blame attaches to a vicious social system that has debased them
from their natural state. In a state of nature men are kindly,
rational, sociable; but in society the great rewards fall to the
self-seeking. A ruthless social order is forever perverting the natural
man; whereas if social rewards were bestowed on the social-minded,
the innate sense of justice would speedily modify and control the
impulse to egoism. The solution of the vexing social problem, Rousseau
concluded, lay in a return to a state of nature, where under the
determining influence of wholesome environment the individual should
develop naturally, unperverted by false standards and unjust rewards.
French radicalism, then, was driving in the same direction with English
liberalism, but it went much further. Both desired a loosening of the
machinery of centralized power as represented by the political state;
but whereas English liberalism protested against a paternalism that
diminished its profits, French radicalism struck at the principle
of centralization. Political institutions it regarded as artificial
agencies for the purposes of exploitation--the state was little more
than a tax machine; whereas the living source and wellspring of every
true civilization is social custom, voluntary association, free
exchange. The root of French radicalism was anarchistic, and its ideal
was an agrarian society of free-holders. It would sweep away the long
accumulated mass of prescriptive rights, the dead hand of the past,
and encourage free men to create a new society that should have as
its sole end and justification, the common well-being. A pronounced
individualism characterized both movements, French and English; but
in the one case it was humanitarian, appealing to reason and seeking
social justice, in the other it was self-seeking, founded on the right
of exploitation, and looking toward capitalism.
During the period with which we are concerned, American thought, become
militantly self-conscious but still vague and inchoate touching any
ultimate program, drew inspiration from both sources; but the deeper,
controlling influence came finally to be English rather than French.
The common doctrine of decentralization fitted American conditions,
but to many Americans decentralization, whether social or political,
had proved undesirable. The common doctrine of liberty accorded with
the passions released by the Revolution, but the French humanitarian
conceptions of equality and fraternity found little response in a
middle-class, competitive world. On the contrary, the English doctrine
of economic individualism made universal appeal. In presence of vast,
unpreëmpted resources, the right of every man to preëmpt and exploit
what he would, was synonymous with individual liberty. Any government
which should endeavor to limit such exploitation would be bitterly
assailed; and if the small man were free to enjoy his petty privilege,
the greater interests might preëmpt unchallenged. The total influence
of old-world liberalism upon the America of post-war days was,
therefore, favorable to capitalistic development and hostile to social
democracy. Until the early years of the nineties the democratic spirit
of French radicalism was little understood in America, and the field
remained free to the English middle-class philosophy, which appealed
equally to the agrarian and the capitalistic groups.
II • The Political Situation
Against this background of ideas, the political tactics of the year
1787 are sufficiently comprehensible. Two major problems had been
settled by the war, namely, that henceforth the exploitation of America
was to remain the prerogative of Americans, and that in the new country
there was no place for a king or a titled aristocracy. But with these
preliminaries settled, the problem remained to determine the form and
powers of a national government. Should that government be entrusted
with coercive sovereignty, or should it remain the titular head of
confederated sovereign commonwealths? The latter solution had been
accepted during the period of war, and in proposing abolition of the
Articles of Confederation and the substitution of a new instrument, the
burden of proof fell upon the advocates of the new. How the problem
was met and the solution achieved by a skillful minority in face of
a hostile majority is a suggestive lesson in political strategy. It
is a classic example of the relation of economics to politics; of the
struggle between greater property and smaller property for control of
the state.
The strategic position of the large property interests in the year
1787 was favorable to a bold stroke. In the northern and middle
states the controlling influence was wielded by a powerful money
group that had been slowly rising during pre-Revolutionary days,
and had greatly increased its resources and augmented its prestige
as a result of war financing and speculation in currency and lands.
They at once assumed the leadership which before had belonged to
the gentry. Like all eighteenth-century realists they exhibited a
frank property-consciousness that determined all their moves. With
them affiliated such members of the older gentry as remained, the
professional classes, ambitious Revolutionary officers who had set up
the militant Order of the Cincinnati, together with a numerous body
of the disappointed and the disaffected; the net result of which was
a close working alliance of property and culture for the purpose of
erecting a centralized state with coercive powers. They were powerfully
aided by two outstanding characteristics of the eighteenth-century
mind: an aristocratic psychology which was deeply ingrained in the
colonial through the long unchallenged rule of the gentry; and the
universal belief in the stake-in-society theory of government,
evidenced by the general disfranchisement of non-property-holders.
Property had always ruled in America, openly and without apology,
and the money group could count on a spontaneous response to its
demand that property should reorganize the feeble central government
and set up one more to its liking. In the South this reorganization
was unnecessary, for the planter aristocracy, in siding with the
Revolution, remained masters of their society, and the money group
had not risen to challenge their supremacy. It remained only for the
northern interests to join forces with the planters to bring the great
property interests of the country under one banner.
The status of the small property holders, on the other hand, was much
less happy. They were in possession of many of the state governments,
and were strongly wedded to the Articles of Confederation; but they
were deep in populism and their agrarian measures offered rallying
points for a powerful opposition. They lacked disciplined cohesion and
were wanting in a broad program. The militant mood of Revolutionary
days had given place to suspicion and disillusion, and their fighting
strength was greatly weakened. They were suffering the fate of all
post-war governments. The widespread depression was attributed to
populist policies, and all the evils from which the country was
suffering were laid at the doors of agrarian legislatures. Under such
conditions the political strategy of the money group was predetermined.
The issue was ready-made. Astute politicians like Hamilton seized the
opportunity and crystallized the discontent by the ingenious argument
that the trouble was too much agrarianism, that agrarianism resulted
from too much democracy, and that the inevitable end of too much
democracy was universal anarchy. The root of all the troubles, it was
asserted, was the pernicious slackness of the Articles of Confederation
which prevented a vigorous administration. There could be no prosperity
until a competent national government was set up on a substantial basis.
The inevitable consequence was that the ideal of popular democratic
rule received a sharp setback. The aristocratic prejudices of the
colonial mind were given a more militant bias by skillful propaganda.
Democracy was pictured as no other than mob rule, and its ultimate
purpose the denial of all property rights. Populistic measures were
fiercely denounced as the natural fruit of democratic control; all
America was in danger of following the destructive example of New
Hampshire and Rhode Island. “Look at the Legislature of Rhode Island,”
exclaimed a speaker in the New York Constitutional Convention, “what
is it but the perfect picture of a mob!” The virus of democracy
was a poison that destroyed the character of the people as well as
government; was not the fate of Rhode Island a warning to the rest
of the country? Here is a picture of that commonwealth, drawn by an
English gentleman before agrarianism had done its worst.
The government of this province is entirely democratical, every
officer, except the collector of the customs, being appointed ...
either immediately by the people, or by the general assembly....
The character of the Rhode Islanders is by no means engaging,
or amiable, a circumstance principally owing to their form of
government. Their men in power, from the highest to the lowest, are
dependent upon the people, and frequently act without that strict
regard to probity and honour, which ought invariably to influence
and direct mankind. The private people are cunning, deceitful, and
selfish: they live almost entirely by unfair and illicit trading.
Their magistrates are partisan and corrupt: and it is folly to
expect justice in their courts of judicature; for he who has the
greatest purse is generally found to have the fairest cause.... It
is needless, after this, to observe that it is in a very declining
state.[294]
“Under the Articles of Confederation,” comments a recent student,
“populism had a free hand, for majorities in the state legislatures
were omnipotent. Any one who reads the economic history of the time
will see why the solid conservative interests of the country were
weary of the talk about the ‘rights of the people,’ and were bent upon
establishing firm guarantees for the rights of property.”[295] The
money-economy had made up its mind that such government as that of
Rhode Island could not longer be tolerated. An example must be made of
such hotbeds of anarchy; if reason would not be listened to, force must
be used. An ardent Federalist, Judge Dana of Massachusetts, offered a
possible solution:
This state [Rhode Island] will not choose delegates to the
convention, nor order on their delegates to Congress. I hope they
will not, as their neglect will give grounds to strike it out of
the union, and divide its territory between their neighbors....
According to my best observation, such a division of this state
would meet the best approbation of the commercial part of it,
though they are afraid to take any open measures in the present
state of things, to bring it about. Their interest must dictate
such a measure; they never can be secure under the present form
of government, but will always labor under the greatest mischief
any people can suffer, that of being ruled by the most ignorant
and unprincipled of their fellow citizens. This state is too
insignificant to have a place on an equal footing with any of
the others in the Union, unless it be Delaware. Therefore a
bold politician would seize upon the occasion their abominable
anti-federal conduct presents, for annihilating them as a separate
member of the Union.[296]
“It is fortunate,” wrote General Varnum to Washington, confirming Judge
Dana’s analysis of the economic divisions of Rhode Island, “that the
wealth and resources of this state are chiefly in possession of the
well affected, and they are entirely devoted to the public good.”
It was Shays’s Rebellion, that militant outbreak of populism that
set all western Massachusetts in uproar, and spread to the very
outskirts of Boston, which crystallized the anti-democratic sentiment,
and aroused the commercial group to decisive action. With its armed
attack upon lawyers and courts, its intimidation of legislators, its
appeal for the repudiation of debts, it provided the object lesson
in democratic anarchy which the “friends of law and order” greatly
needed. The revolt was put down, but the fear of democracy remained
and called aloud for stronger government. “We see the situation we are
in,” exclaimed a Boston member in the Massachusetts Constitutional
Convention. “We are verging toward destruction, and every one must be
sensible of it.” Shays had failed, but with political power in the
hands of agrarian legislatures, friendly to debtors, what dangers must
not the future hold in store? Was it not the patriotic duty of the
sober conservators of society to set up betimes a strong constitutional
defense, before the rights of property were swept away by the fierce
tide of democracy? Writing to Washington under date of October 23,
1786, General Knox argued:
On the very first impression of faction and licentiousness, the
fine theoretic government of Massachusetts has given way, and its
laws are trampled under foot.... Their creed is, that the property
of the United States has been protected from the confiscation of
Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be
the common property of all.... This dreadful situation, for which
our government have made no adequate provision, has alarmed every
man of principle and property in New England. They start as from a
dream, and ask what can have been the cause of this delusion? What
is to give us security against the violence of lawless men? Our
government must be braced, changed, or altered to secure our lives
and property. We imagined that the mildness of our government and
the wishes of the people were so correspondent that we were not as
other nations, requiring brutal force to support the laws. But we
find we are men--actual men, possessing all the turbulent passions
belonging to that animal, and that we must have a government
proper and adequate for him. The people of Massachusetts ... are
far advanced in this doctrine, and the men of property and the men
of station and principle there, are determined to establish and
protect them in their lawful pursuits.... Something is wanting and
something must be done.[297]
During these years of unrest the problem of a new fundamental law
was carefully studied by the anti-agrarian leaders and solutions
suggested. A remarkable change had come over their thinking. They
discarded the revolutionary doctrines that had served their need in the
debate with England. They were done with natural rights and romantic
interpretations of politics and were turned realists. They parted
company with English liberalism in its desire for a diminished state.
Their economic interests were suffering from the lack of a strong
centralized government, and they were in a mood to agree with earlier
realists who held that men are animals with turbulent passions, and
require a government “proper and adequate” for animals; and in view
of local agrarian majorities, a proper and adequate government could
not be had without a strong centralized state. The solution, they
were convinced, lay in a return to some form of seventeenth-century
republicanism, possibly modeled after Harrington, but with further
checks upon the power of the democratic branch of the legislature, and
a stronger executive. Hobbes with his leviathan monarchy had gone too
far, but he had, at least, understood the need of a strong state; and a
strong state, subservient to their interests, the business and landed
groups were determined to set up as a barrier against a threatening
agrarianism.
The great obstacle to such a program was the political power of the
farmers, bred up in the traditional practice of home rule, jealous of
local rights, and content with the Articles of Confederation. These
home rulers would not take kindly to any suggestion of a centralized
state, even though it should be republican in form. The thing must be
done skillfully, if it were to succeed. To nullify where they could not
override the political power of the agrarians, therefore, became the
practical problem of the money-economy. The fear aroused by Shays’s
Rebellion provided the strategic opportunity, and the best brains of
the country suggested the method. The struggle had begun which was to
provide a new fundamental law for the United States.
Footnotes
[292] _Second Treatise on Civil Government_, Chapter IX.
[293] _Ibid._, Chapter XI.
[294] Burnaby, _Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America
in the Years 1759 and 1760_.
[295] Beard, _The Supreme Court and the Constitution_.
[296] Austin, _Life of Elbridge Gerry_, Vol. II, pp. 66-67.
[297] Brooks, _Henry Knox_, pp. 194-195.
Chapter II • The Great Debate
When one considers the bulk of commentary that has grown up about
the Constitution, it is surprising how little abstract political
speculation accompanied its making and adoption. It was the first
response to the current liberal demand for written constitutions as a
safeguard against tyranny, but it was aimed at the encroachments of
agrarian majorities rather than at Tory minorities. It was the work
of able lawyers and men of affairs confronting a definite situation,
rather than of political philosophers; and it was accompanied
by none of that searching examination of fundamental rights and
principles which made the earlier Puritan and later French debate
over constitutional principles so rich in creative speculation. Not a
single political thinker comparable to the great English and French
philosophers emerged from the struggle. The debate drew freely upon the
materials supplied by those thinkers, but it added little that was new.
The Constitution was a venture in republicanism, on a scale and under
conditions without historical precedent. It was inevitable, therefore,
that the debate should concern itself greatly with the nature of
republicanism and its adaptability to American conditions. As the
argument developed, two major questions assumed critical importance:
the question of the powers of the Federal state, and the question of
the sovereign rights of the majority; and in dealing with both the
debaters were on ground inadequately surveyed. Of definite republican
theory little was available except the writings of a small group of
seventeenth-century republicans. Of democratic theory, on the other
hand, even less was available. American democratic aspiration had
far outrun old-world liberalism, and had produced no independent
speculation of its own. French democratic theory still awaited the rise
of Jacobinism to clarify its principles. The party of Commonwealth
Levelers, to be sure, with their doctrines of a “paramount law,”
manhood suffrage, and annual parliaments, offered much that might have
proved suggestive; but the literature of the Levelers was buried too
deep under Tory obloquy to be resurrected, and nowhere else was to be
found any considerable body of democratic theory. It was inevitable,
therefore, that the debaters should go back to the English liberals of
the preceding century.
Consider for a moment the authorities bandied to and fro in the great
debate. With such exceptions as Machiavelli, Vattel, Pufendorf,
Montesquieu, they were the well-known English theorists, Hobbes,
Harrington, Milton, Sidney, Halifax, Hume, and Blackstone. Unhappily
for the democrats every one of these great names counted against
their aspirations. Hobbes was a state absolutist whose _Leviathan_
provided sharp weapons for those who wished to tone the government
high; Hume was a Tory who accepted the traditional interpretation of
human nature in the light of which democracy was the open door to
anarchy; Blackstone was a Tory lawyer, who interpreted the British
constitution by a narrow legalism that was obsolete before the
_Commentaries_ came from the press. Harrington, Milton, and perhaps
Sidney, were republicans of strong aristocratic bias, and Halifax
and Locke--the latter by much the most influential of all--were
constitutional monarchists.[298] Every one of these great authorities
either distrusted or violently condemned democracy, yet they provided
the major body of theory made use of by the Federalists.
On the other hand, the slowly accumulating democratic theory was
unknown to the members of the convention. In 1761 Robert Wallace
had advanced an Owenite theory of property, attacking the principle
of economic individualism as responsible for the current evils of
government by landed property; but his book, _Various Prospects_, made
no ripple on the placid waters of English liberalism.[299] In 1768
Joseph Priestley, a thinker who later was to exercise great influence
in America, who lived here for a number of years and was intimate with
Jefferson, published his essay. _First Principles of Government_, a
work embodying the first English interpretation of the perfectibility
of man, the rule of reason, the theory of the diminished state, and the
Benthamite principle of utilitarianism or expediency in statecraft,
which struck at the principle of coercive sovereignty. But the ideas
of Priestley were probably little known in America in 1787, and his
influence was undermined further by a theological attack which sought
to fasten upon him the stigma of atheism. In short, in this war of
ideas the democrats were provided with little ammunition and fought at
a great disadvantage. If the debate had taken place five years later,
after the French Revolution had provided new democratic theory, the
disparity of intellectual equipment would have been far less marked.
One other fact must be kept in mind, namely, that the great debate was
in reality two debates, one carried on in the quiet of the convention
hall, the other in the open. Each interprets the other, and taken
together they reveal the conflict of forces and ideas that determined
the form of the Constitution. In the privacy of the convention the
speakers were free to express their views frankly, and in consequence a
loose rein was given to the play of ideas; fundamental principles were
examined critically and economic motives and class interests openly
acknowledged. But in arguing the case before the generality of voters
without doors a more cautious approach was necessary; arguments must
be tempered to well-known prejudices, and circumspection must take the
place of frankness. In the earlier debate, among innumerable lesser
problems, two main questions dominated the argument: the question of
the form of the centralized state--whether it should be aristocratic or
republican; and if republican--as was inevitable--the question of what
should be done about the majority will--how representation should be so
refined as to guarantee stability to the government and security to the
minority. In the second debate the appeal was to expediency rather than
to principles, and turned on three chief points: the need of adoption
in view of the desperate condition of the country; the adaptation
of the proposed republican form to the vast extent of territory and
diversity of interests; and the necessity of providing checks upon
political parties if anarchy were to be avoided.
In the convention the need of a strong state, with powers beyond
local legislatures, was not so much debated as assumed. By common
consent it was agreed that the present lack of a centralized, coercive
sovereignty, was the source of all current evils. How many members
preferred monarchy to republicanism, in principle, it is impossible to
determine; but they all realized the inexpediency of attempting to set
it up; even Hamilton yielded to the logic of Colonel Mason’s argument:
“Notwithstanding the oppression and injustice experienced among us
from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the
genius of the people must be consulted.” Accepting then the principle
of republicanism as a compromise between the extremes of monarchy
and democracy, the practical problem remained of erecting a system
that should secure the minority against the aggressions of political
faction. If the danger lay in an uncontrolled majority will, the way
of safety lay in imposing restraints upon that will. In elaborating
a system of checks and balances the members of the convention were
influenced by the practical considerations of economic determinism more
than by the theories of Montesquieu. They were realists who followed
the teachings of the greatest political thinkers from Aristotle to
Locke in asserting that the problem of government lay in arranging a
stable balance between the economic interests of the major classes. The
revolutionary conception of equalitarianism, that asserted the rights
of man apart from property and superior to property, did not enter into
their thinking as a workable hypothesis. The very conditions of the
unsettled times were an argument against it. Property, they argued,
is the stabilizing force in society; it is conservative and cautious;
having everything to lose by social upheavals, it is a restraining
force upon factional unrest. The propertyless, on the other hand,
having nothing to lose, easily become the victims of demagogues and
embroil society with foolish experiments. The republican experiment
might work in America because property was widely distributed, but in
the course of time a propertyless majority would arise, whose fickle
and subversive will must be held in check. The problem, therefore, was
to provide in time against such an eventuality. Certain members of the
convention did not go so far in their fear of the propertyless, but
relied upon the ability of property to protect itself by extra-legal
means. “Give the votes to people who have no property,” argued
Gouverneur Morris, “and they will sell them to the rich, who will be
able to buy them.”[300] But the more general view was expressed by
Madison:
The landed interest, at present, is prevalent, but in process of
time ... when the number of landholders shall be comparatively
small ... will not the landed interests be overbalanced in future
elections? and, unless wisely provided against, what will become of
our government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to
all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be
insecure. An agrarian law would take place. If these observations
be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of
the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share
in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to
balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.[301]
This conception of the natural sovereignty of the landed interest with
its stake-in-society theory of political rights, America inherited
from England; and although the new Constitution professed to rest
on the sovereignty of the people, the men who framed it refused to
interpret the term, sovereignty of the people, in an equalitarian
sense. They did not profess to be, in the words of John Quincy Adams,
“slavish adorers of our sovereign lords the people.” Every principle
of their social and political philosophy taught them the desirability
of limiting the majority will in order that the wiser minority will
might rule. Paul Leicester Ford has asserted that “the Federal compact
was the first deliberate attempt and assent of a majority to tie
its own hands; to give to the minority guarantees of fair and equal
treatment, without which democratic government is well-nigh impossible,
save when developed along the lines of socialism.”[302] Such partisan
misinterpretation of plain historical fact is characteristic of our
Federalist historians. If the hands of the disfranchised majority
were tied by the voting minority, it is a bit absurd to attribute the
resulting guarantees to an altruistic sense of justice, deliberately
expressed by the former. Very possibly in a world so aristocratic as
was America in 1787, no other course would have succeeded; but there is
not a single historical fact to justify so naïve an interpretation, and
the bitter partisan warfare which followed is sufficient to disprove it.
We are too prone to forget the wide popular disfavor with which the
new Constitution was received. No sooner did the second debate open
than it became evident that the majority opinion held quite a different
conception of the sovereignty of the people than was expressed by the
convention. It had no desire to tie its own hands; it did not take
kindly to the proposal to transfer power from the several states to the
Federal government. The villagers and small men were afraid of the new
instrument; they asserted that it had been prepared by aristocrats and
moneyed men, and they repudiated the stake-in-society principle. “The
Constitution,” said General Thompson in the Massachusetts Convention,
“and the reasons which induced gentlemen to frame it, ought to have
been sent to the several towns to be considered by them. My town
considered it seven hours, and after this there was not one in favor of
it.” In Rhode Island, where it was thus submitted, it was rejected “by
a very great majority.” The state of mind of the agrarian majority was
thus expressed by Amos Singletary, of Sutton, Massachusetts:
These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk
so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us, poor
illiterate people, swallow down the pill, expect to get into
Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this
Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their
own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like
the great leviathan.[303]
Among the host of pamphlets and newspaper articles that quickly
appeared, _The Federalist_ written by Hamilton and Madison with some
help from Jay, and _Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican_,
by Richard Henry Lee, fairly adequately present the opposing arguments.
By common consent _The Federalist_ was at once accepted by its party
as an unanswerable defense of the Constitution; and its fame has grown
greater with the passing years. No other work on political theory in
the American library has been rated so high, or been more frequently
cited. From the mass of contemporary pamphlets it emerges like a
colossus. It “has been seriously and reverently called the Bible of
Republicanism.” says a legal historian, which “for comprehensiveness
of design, strength, clearness, and simplicity ... has no parallel
among the writings of men, not even excepting or overlooking those of
Montesquieu and Aristotle,”[304]; and a literary historian pronounces
authoritatively, “it is so wisely thoughtful that one may almost
declare it the permanent basis of sound thinking concerning American
constitutional law.”[305]
_The Federalist_ was the work of able lawyers, with whom was joined a
notable political thinker. In very large part it is of interest only to
students of early constitutional theory and practice. It was designed
as a frankly partisan argument to appeal to an influential group in
New York, many members of which had followed George Clinton and Robert
Yates in opposition to the Constitution. On the political side it
develops four main theses: the necessity for taking effective action in
view of the self-confessed failure of the Articles of Confederation;
the urgent need of a sovereign, unitary state, to avoid the horrors
which must follow from “the political monster of an _imperium in
imperio_”; the necessity of providing that justice shall prevail over
the majority will; and the adaptability of the republican form to a
great extent of territory and divergent interests. Of these the second
and third lay bare the heart of Federalist political theory; and in the
treatment of them there is no shrinking from the conclusions of the
earlier debate, although the tone is conciliatory.
The argument for a unitary, sovereign state, developed by Hamilton,
and the argument for justice, developed by Madison, rest upon the same
basis and are regarded as the twin problems of government. The true
sanction of government is found, not in good will, as Bentham and later
democratic thinkers have urged, but in coercion;[306] and coercion
is accepted as necessary because of universal selfishness. “Why has
government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not
conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without restraint.”[307]
Granted coercive sovereignty, government must guarantee justice to
all; and justice demands that the majority shall suffer needful
restraint equally with the minority. The great and insidious danger
to good government has always been faction, the argument runs, and a
chief merit of the Constitution lay in its provisions to lessen the
disasters of factional ambition. “Complaints are everywhere heard
from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends
of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that
our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded
in the conflict of rival parties, and that measures are too often
decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the
minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing
majority.”[308]
No theory is more representative of the time than the theory of
faction. It was a first line of defense thrown up against the
advancing democratic movement. The term had long served conveniently
to stigmatize any popular unrest, the “factious multitude” having
been held synonymous in earlier usage with mob; but in the eighteenth
century the word was applied generally to political parties. In a
world moving inevitably towards manhood suffrage, a sharp alignment of
parties with definite platforms was greatly feared by the minority,
for the organization of the rank and file of voters must end in
majority control. An honest appeal to the people was the last thing
desired by the Federalists, and the democratic machinery of recalls
and referendums and rotation in office, which had developed during
the war, was stigmatized as factional devices which in the end must
destroy good government. “As every appeal to the people would carry an
implication of some defect in the government,” argued Madison,[309]
“frequent appeals would in a great measure deprive the government of
that veneration which time bestows on everything, and without which
the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite
stability.” “The danger of disturbing the public tranquillity by
interesting too strongly the public passions is a still more serious
objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to
the decisions of the whole society.”
In the remarkable tenth number, which compresses within a few pages
pretty much the whole Federalist theory of political science, Madison
has explained the Federalist objections to political parties and party
government.
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting
to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated
by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to
the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate
interests of the community.... If a faction consists of less than
a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which
enables the majority to defeat its sinister views, by regular
vote.... When a majority is included in a faction, the form of
popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to
its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights
of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights,
against the danger of such a faction, is then the great object
to which our inquiries are directed.... By what means is this
great object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the
existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same
time must be prevented; or the majority, having such coexistent
passion or interest, must be rendered by their number and local
situations, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of
oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to
coincide, we well know, that neither moral nor religious motives
can be relied on as an adequate control.
In full agreement with the greater political thinkers of the past,
Madison then traces political parties to economic sources. Since in
every society the diversity of economic groups creates diversity of
political programs, party divisions and party alignments are inevitable
in the ordinary course of events. The unequal distribution of property
is the realistic basis of all politics, and the “_sentiments_ and
_views_ which arise from the possession of different degrees and kinds
of property form the stuff of so-called ‘political psychology.’”[310]
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of
property originate, is ... an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity
of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first
object of government. From the protection of different and unequal
faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different
degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the
influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective
proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different
interests and parties.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of
man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees
of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil
society. A zeal for different opinions ... [has] divided mankind
into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered
them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to
co-operate for their common good.... But the most common and
durable source of factions has been the various and unequal
distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without
property have ever formed distinct interests of society. Those
who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like
discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest,
a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser
interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide
them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and
views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests,
forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves
the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary
operations of the government.
As a means of securing a necessary balance between rival interests,
Madison approved a republican rather than a democratic form of
government:
The two great points of difference, between a democracy and
a republic, are, first, the delegation of the government, in
the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest;
secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of
country, over which the latter may be extended. The effect of the
first difference is, on the one hand, to refine or enlarge the
public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body
of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests
of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice,
will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial
considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen, that
the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people,
will be more consonant to the public good, than if pronounced by
the people themselves, convened for the purpose.... The other point
of difference is, the greater number of citizens, and extent of
territory, which may be brought within the compass of republican,
than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance
principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded
in the former, than in the latter.... Extend the sphere, and you
take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it
less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common
motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common
motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to
discover their strength, and act in unison with each other.[311]
In such argument Madison was adapting to his purpose the views of
Milton and other seventeenth-century republicans, to whom in the
dangerous days when the Puritan Commonwealth was breaking up, the
“noise and shouting of the rude multitude,” the drunken ribaldry of the
London rabble, was prophetic of “new injunctions to manacle the native
libertie of mankinde.” But it has long since become a commonplace of
political observation that the minority and not the majority is the
more dangerous to the common well-being, for it is the minority that
most frequently uses government to its own ends.
The contrast in temper and argument between _The Federalist_ and
Richard Henry Lee’s _Letters from the Federal Farmer_,[312] is
striking. The calmness and fair-mindedness of the work persuade one
that it ill deserves the name partisan; it comes near to being a frank
and disinterested examination of the proposed instrument of government.
Its sharpest strictures are tempered by ready acknowledgment of
excellent features. The burden of Lee’s accusation is that the
instrument is undemocratic; that it must result in placing the majority
under control of the minority; and that it in no wise reflects the
sober judgment of the body of the people. He is more restrained than
Elbridge Gerry, who asserted that it was the outcome of a conspiracy
hatched in secret, a work of “such motley mixture, that its enemies
cannot trace a feature of Democratic or Republican extract.” But the
Farmer’s restraint adds weight to the serious charges which he brings
against the instrument, and the unseemly haste of its advocates in
urging its speedy adoption. It was not to destroy the work of the
Convention that he pleaded for delay; but that it should receive full
and fair consideration, and be disposed of as its merits or defects
should warrant.
His first concern is that the Constitution should not be adopted with
the inconsiderate haste for which _The Federalist_ was pressing.
“The first principal question that occurs, is, Whether, considering
our situation, we ought to precipitate the adoption of the proposed
Constitution?” Hamilton had made much of the desperate state of affairs
that admitted of no delay; Lee replied by denying, with Franklin and
other competent observers, that the present state was desperate.
Matters were improving daily, peace was restoring the ravages of war.
I know uneasy men, who with very much to precipitate, do not admit
all these facts; but they are facts well known to all men who
are thoroughly informed in the affairs of this country. It must,
however, be admitted, that our federal system is defective, and
that some of the state governments are not well administered;
but ... we impute to the defects in our governments many evils
and embarrassments which are most clearly the result of the late
war.... When we want a man to change his condition, we describe
it as wretched, miserable, and despised; and we draw a pleasing
picture of that which we would have him assume.... It is too often
the case in political concerns that men state facts not as they
are, but as they wish them to be.... Men who feel easy in their
circumstances, and such as are not sanguine in their expectations
relative to the consequences of the proposed change, will remain
quiet under the existing governments. Many commercial and monied
men, who are uneasy, not without just cause, ought to be respected;
and by no means, unreasonably disappointed in their expectations
and hopes.... It is natural for men, who wish to hasten the
adoption of a measure, to tell us, now is the crisis--now is the
critical moment which must be seized or all will be lost; and to
shut the door against free enquiry, whenever conscious the thing
presented has defects in it, which time and investigation will
probably discover.... If it is true, what has been so often said,
that the people of this country cannot change their constitution
for the worse, I presume it still behoves them to endeavor
deliberately to change it for the better.
Granted that experience has demonstrated the need of revising the
Articles of Confederation in certain essential points, Lee maintains
that the enemies of democracy have been making undue capital out of
the shortcomings of an emergency government, in the hope of subverting
the democratic state governments and substituting a more aristocratic
form.
The confederation was formed when great confidence was placed in
the voluntary exertions of individuals, and of the respective
states; and the framers of it, to guard against usurpation, so
limited, and checked the powers, that, in many respects, they
are inadequate to the exigencies of the union.... During the
war, the general confusion, and the introduction of paper money,
infused in the minds of people vague ideas respecting government
and credit. We expected too much from the return of peace, and of
course we have been disappointed. Our governments have been new and
unsettled; and several legislatures, by making tender, suspension,
and paper money laws, have given just cause of uneasiness to
creditors. By these and other causes, several orders of men in
the community have been prepared by degrees, for a change of
government; and this very abuse of power in the legislatures,
which in some cases has been charged upon the democratic part of
the community, has furnished aristocratical men with those very
weapons, and those very means, with which, in great measure, they
are rapidly effecting their favourite object.
The methods by which the convention was brought together at a time when
the “idea of destroying ultimately, the state government, and forming
one consolidated system, could not have been admitted,” is traced
briefly with penetrating comment, and the unfortunate decision of some
excellent republicans to take no part in the work is regretted:
Here the favorable moment for changing the government was
evidently discerned by a few men, who seized it with address....
Tho’ they chose men principally connected with commerce and the
judicial departments, yet they appointed many good republican
characters--had they all attended we should see, I am persuaded, a
better system presented. The non-attendance of eight or nine men,
who were appointed members of the convention, I shall ever consider
as a very unfortunate event to the United States.--Had they
attended, I am pretty clear that the results ... would not have
had that strong tendency to aristocracy now discernible in every
part of the plan ... the young visionary men, and the consolidating
aristocracy, would have been more restrained than they have been.
Lee frankly concedes that the instrument possesses many excellent
features, but he considers it greatly vitiated by the “want of that one
important factor in a free government, a representation of the people.”
“Because we have sometimes abused democracy, I am not among those who
think a democratic branch a nuisance.” “Every man of reflection must
see, that the change now proposed, is a transfer of power from the many
to the few.” The present agitation may be traced to its source in “two
very unprincipled parties,” between whom stand the great mass of honest
and substantial people:
One party is composed of little insurgents, men in debt, who want
no law, and who want a share of the property of others; these are
called levellers, Shaysites, &c. The other party is composed of a
few, but more dangerous men, with their servile dependents; these
avariciously grasp at all power and property; you may discover
in all the actions of these men, an evident dislike to free and
equal government, and they go systematically to work to change,
essentially, the forms of government in this country; these are
called aristocrats, m--ites, &c. Between these two parties is
the weight of the community: the men of middling property, men
not in debt on the one hand, and men, on the other, content with
republican governments, and not aiming at immense fortunes, offices
and power. In 1786, the little insurgents, the levellers, came
forth, invaded the rights of others, and attempted to establish
governments according to their wills. Their movements evidently
gave encouragement to the other party, which, in 1787, has taken
the political field, and with its fashionable dependents, and the
tongue and the pen, is endeavouring to establish in a great haste,
a politer kind of government. These two parties ... are really
insignificant, compared with the solid, free, and independent part
of the community.
Calm voices such as Lee’s were few in those strident days, and the
Federalists fairly overwhelmed the silent majority with clamorous
argument. Polite culture and professional learning joined forces to
write down the agrarians. The Hartford Wits dedicated smart couplets
to the cause; Francis Hopkinson made merry over their ways; Noah
Webster confuted them with his economic interpretation of politics;
lawyer-scholars like James Wilson and John Dickinson exposed their
heresies; solid business men like Peletiah Webster contributed after
the measure of their intelligence. In their ardor the Federalists
went further. “What can be the views of those gentlemen in Boston.”
asked Lee pertinently, “who countenanced the printers in shutting up
the press against a fair and free investigation?” From the strident
debate emerged not only the Constitution, but political parties, no
longer to be spoken of as factions, but eventually to be accepted as
necessary agencies in republican government; and to understand their
rival policies we must turn to examine the political philosophies of
the outstanding leaders.
Footnotes
[298] These English liberals have been often regarded as democrats.
Thus Merriam says of Locke, “He was the most famous of seventeenth
century democratic thinkers.” _American Political Theories_, p. 90.
[299] See Laski, _Political Thought from Locke to Bentham_, p. 188.
[300] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. I, p. 386.
[301] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 449-450.
[302] _The Federalist_, Introduction, p. viii.
[303] Quoted in Harding, _The Federal Constitution in Massachusetts_.
[304] Carson, _History of the Supreme Court_, quoted by Ford, _The
Federalist_, p. xxix.
[305] Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 118.
[306] Number 15.
[307] _Ibid._
[308] Number 10.
[309] Number 49.
[310] Beard, _The Economic Basis of Politics_, pp. 29-32.
[311] Number 10.
[312] The full title is: _Observations leading to a fair examination
of the system of government, proposed by the late Convention; and to
several essential and necessary alterations in it. In a number of
Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican._ Reprinted in Ford’s
pamphlets.
Chapter III • Political Thinkers • The English Group
Of this great age of American political thought, two important
characteristics emerge: it was overwhelmingly English in its
antecedents; and it was already differentiating its program from
that of contemporary English liberalism. Nearly all the outstanding
men--Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Wilson, Mason, Madison, Gouverneur
Morris--were of the older liberal tradition, and with some notable
exceptions, of the school of Pitt. Contemporary English liberals such
as Priestley, Bentham, and Godwin numbered few adherents among the
leaders of American thought. Economic conditions in America already
were imposing conclusions that pointed in a direction other than that
which English liberalism was traveling. The doctrine of the diminished
state, which was making persistent headway among English liberals,
could make no appeal to men who desired an augmented state; and
liberalism as a policy was in ill repute at a time when men believed
they were suffering from too much liberalism. American political
thought, therefore, followed an independent path, and in spite of its
English origin came to conclusions that differentiated it broadly from
the old-world theory.
I • Alexander Hamilton • The Leviathan State
Of the disciplined forces that put to rout the disorganized party
of agrarianism, the intellectual leader was Alexander Hamilton,
the brilliant Anglo-French West Indian, then just entered upon his
thirties. A man of quite remarkable ability, a lucid thinker, a great
lawyer, a skillful executive, a masterly organizer, a statesman of
broad comprehension and inflexible purpose, he originated and directed
the main policies of the Federalist group, and brought them to
successful issue. For this work he was singularly well equipped, for
in addition to great qualities of mind and persuasive ways he was free
to work unhampered by the narrow localisms and sectional prejudices
that hampered native Americans. He was rather English than American,
with a certain detachment that refused to permit his large plans to be
thwarted by minor, vexatious details, or the perversity of stupid men.
He was like the elder Pitt in the magnificence of his imperial outlook.
Such a man would think in terms of the nation rather than of the
state. He would agree with Paine that the continental belt must be
more securely buckled. The jealousies and rivalries that obstructed
the creation of a centralized Federal government found no sympathy
with him. He was annoyed beyond all patience with the dissensions of
local home rule. In his political philosophy there was no place for
“the political monster of an _imperium in imperio_”; he would destroy
all lesser sovereignties and reduce the several commonwealths to a
parish status. For town-meeting democracies and agrarian legislatures
he had frank contempt. The American villager and farmer he never knew
and never understood; his America was the America of landed gentlemen
and wealthy merchants and prosperous professional men, the classes
that were most bitterly anti-agrarian. And it was in association with
this group of conservative representatives of business and society
that he took his place as directing head in the work of reorganizing
the loose confederation into a strong and cohesive union. When
that work was accomplished his influence was commanding, and for a
dozen years he directed the major policies of the Federalist party.
His strategic position as Secretary of the Treasury enabled him to
stamp his principles so deeply upon the national economy that in all
the intervening years since he quitted his post they have not been
permanently altered. That we still follow the broad principles of
Hamilton in our financial policy is a remarkable testimony to the
perspicacity of his mind and his understanding of the economic forces
that control modern society. And hence, because the Hamiltonian
principles lie at the core of the problem which has proved so difficult
of solution by modern liberalism, the life and work of Hamilton are of
particular significance in our democratic development.
Hamilton was our first great master of modern finance, of that finespun
web of credit which holds together our industrial life; and because
his policies opened opportunities of profit to some and entailed
loss upon others, they have been debated with an acrimony such as few
programs have endured. About the figure of the brilliant federalist
the myth-makers have industriously woven their tales, distorting the
man into either a demigod or a monster. The individual has been merged
in the system which he created, and later interpretation has been shot
through with partisan feeling; political and economic prejudice has
proved too strong for disinterested estimate. Any rational judgment
of Hamilton is dependent upon an interpretation of the historical
background that determined his career, and in particular of the state
of post-Revolutionary economics; and over such vexing questions
partisans have wrangled interminably. Thus Sumner, in his life of
Hamilton, asserts dogmatically that Federalism was no other than the
forces of law and order at war with the turbulent, anarchistic forces
unloosed by the Revolution, and that the putting down of the scheme
of repudiation was the necessary preliminary to the establishment
of a great nation. In the light of such an interpretation, Hamilton
the far-seeing, courageous and honest master of finance, was the
savior of nationality, the one supreme figure rising above an envious
group of lesser men. But, as has been sufficiently pointed out in
preceding chapters, the historical facts are susceptible of quite other
interpretation; and as our knowledge of the economic struggle then
going on becomes more adequate, the falsity of such an explanation
becomes patent. If, on the other hand, we concede that the crux of the
political problem in 1787 was economic--the struggle waging between
farmer and business groups for control of government--then the position
of Hamilton becomes clear; he was the spokesman of the business
economy. He thought in terms of nationality and espoused the economics
of capitalism, because he discovered in them potentialities congenial
to his imperialistic mind.
The career of Hamilton followed logically from the determining facts
of temperament and experience. He came to New York an alien, without
position or influence, ambitious to make a name and stir in the
world; and in the America of his day there could be little doubt
what doors opened widest to preferment. He made friends easily, and
with his aristocratic tastes he preferred the rich and distinguished
to plebeians. Endowed with charming manners and brilliant parts, he
fascinated all whom he met; before he was of age he was intimate with
all the Whig leaders, civil and military, on Washington’s staff and
elsewhere, lending his brains to the solution of knotty problems,
prodding stupider minds with illuminating suggestions, proving himself
the clearest thinker in whatever group he found himself. It was by
sheer force of intellect that he gained distinction. Singularly
precocious, he matured early; before his twenty-fifth year he seems
to have developed every main principle of his political and economic
philosophy, and thereafter he never hesitated or swerved from his path.
He was tireless in propaganda, urging on the proposed Constitutional
convention, discussing with Robert Morris his favorite project of
a national bank, outlining various systems of funding, advocating
tariffs as an aid to domestic manufacture, and sketching the plan of a
political and economic system under which native commercialism could go
forward. His reputation as an acute and trustworthy financial adviser
was well established with influential men north and south, when the new
government was set up, and Washington turned to him naturally for the
Treasury post, to guide financial policies during the difficult days
immediately ahead. But so able a man could not be restricted within
a single portfolio, and during the larger part of Washington’s two
administrations Hamilton’s was the directing mind and chief influence.
He regarded himself as Prime Minister and rode roughshod over his
colleagues. Major policies such as that of no entangling alliances must
receive his careful scrutiny and approval before they were announced;
and in consequence more credit belongs to Hamilton for the success of
those first administrations than is commonly recognized.
But when we turn from the administrator and statesman to the
creative thinker, there is another story to tell. The quickness of
his perceptions, the largeness of his plans and efficacy of his
methods--his clear brilliancy of understanding and execution--are
enormously impressive; but they cannot conceal certain intellectual
shortcomings. There was a lack of subtlety in the swift working of his
mind, of shades and _nuances_ in the background of his thought, that
implied a lack of depth and richness in his intellectual accumulation.
Something hard, almost brutal lurks in his thought--a note of
intellectual arrogance, of cynical contempt. He was utterly devoid of
sentiment, and without a shred of idealism, unless a certain grandiose
quality in his conceptions be accounted idealism. His absorbing
interest in the rising system of credit and finance, his cool unconcern
for the social consequences of his policies, reveal his weakness. In
spite of his brilliancy Hamilton was circumscribed by the limitations
of the practical man.
In consequence of such limitations Hamilton was not a political
philosopher in the large meaning of the term. In knowledge of history
he does not compare with John Adams; and as an open-minded student of
politics he is immensely inferior to Jefferson. Outside the domain of
the law, his knowledge does not always keep pace with his argument. He
reasons adroitly from given premises, but he rarely pauses to examine
the validity of those premises. The fundamentals of political theory he
seems never to have questioned, and he lays down a major principle with
the easy finality of a dogmatist. Compare his views on any important
political principle with those of the greater thinkers of his time, and
they are likely to prove factional if not reactionary. The two tests
of eighteenth-century liberalism were the doctrine of individualism,
and the doctrine of the minimized state; and Hamilton rejected both:
the former in its larger social bearing, and the latter wholly. He
was not even abreast of seventeenth-century liberalism, for that was
strongly republican, and Hamilton detested republicanism only a little
less than democracy. Harrington and Locke were no masters of his;
much less were Bentham or Priestley or Godwin. He called the French
revolutionary writers “fanatics in political science”; to what extent
he read them does not appear. The thinkers to whom he owed most seem to
have been Hume, from whom he may have derived his cynical psychology,
and Hobbes whose absolute state was so congenial to his temperament.
But political theory he subordinated to economic theory. He was much
interested in economics. With the Physiocratic school and its agrarian
and sociological bias he could have no sympathy, but with the rising
English school that resulted from the development of the industrial
revolution, he found himself in hearty accord. Capitalism with its
credit system, its banks and debt-funding and money manipulation, was
wholly congenial to his masterful temperament. He read Adam Smith with
eagerness and _The Wealth of Nations_ was a source book for many of his
state papers. To create in America an English system of finance, and an
English system of industrialism, seemed to him the surest means to the
great end he had in view; a centralizing capitalism would be more than
a match for a decentralizing agrarianism, and the power of the state
would augment with the increase of liquid wealth.
But granted that he lacked the intellectual qualities of the
philosopher, it does not follow that his significance diminishes. On
the contrary his very independence of contemporary European theory
enlarged his serviceableness to party. He was free to employ his
intelligence on the practical difficulties of a new and unprecedented
situation. English liberalism did not answer the needs of Federalism,
if indeed it could answer the needs of the country at large. The time
had come to decide whether the long movement of decentralization should
go further, and confirm the future government as a loose confederacy
of powerful states, or whether an attempt should be made to check
that movement and establish a counter tendency towards centralized,
organized control. If the former, it meant surrendering the country
to a democratic _laissez faire_, and there was nothing in the history
of political _laissez faire_ as it had developed in America, that
justified the principle to Hamilton. It had culminated in agrarianism
with legislative majorities riding down all obstacles, denying the
validity of any check upon its will, constitutional, legal or ethical.
The property interests of the minority had been rendered insecure.
There had been altogether too much _laissez faire_; what was needed
was sharp control of legislative majorities; the will of the majority
must be held within due metes and bounds. Even in the economic world
the principle of _laissez faire_ no longer satisfied the needs of
the situation. Parliamentary enactments had aided British interests
in their exploitation of America before the war; it was only common
sense for an American government to assist American business. The new
capitalism that was rising stood in need of governmental subsidies.
Business was languishing; infant industries could not compete on
even terms with the powerful British manufacturing interests, long
established and with ample capital. From a realistic contemplation of
these facts Hamilton deduced the guiding principle that has since been
followed, namely, that governmental interference with economic laws is
desirable when it aids business, but intolerable and unsound when it
aims at business regulation or control, or when it assists agriculture
or labor.
Throughout his career Hamilton was surprisingly consistent. His mind
hardened early as it matured early, and he never saw cause to challenge
the principles which he first espoused. He was what a friendly critic
would call a political realist, and an enemy would pronounce a cynic.
With the practical man’s contempt for theorists and idealists, he took
his stand on current fact. He looked to the past for guidance, trusting
to the wisdom of experience; those principles which have worked
satisfactorily heretofore may be expected to work satisfactorily in the
future. Whoever aspires to become a sane political leader must remember
that his business is not to construct Utopias, but to govern men; and
if he would succeed in that difficult undertaking he must be wise in
the knowledge of human nature. At the basis of Hamilton’s political
philosophy was the traditional Tory psychology. Failure to understand
human nature, he believed, was the fatal weakness of all democratic
theorists; they put into men’s breeches altruistic beings fitted only
for a Utopian existence. But when we consider men as they are, we
discover that they are little other than beasts, who if unrestrained
will turn every garden into a pigsty. Everywhere men are impelled by
the primitive lust of aggression, and the political philosopher must
adjust his system to this unhappy fact. He must not suffer the charge
of cynicism to emasculate his philosophy; “the goodness of government
consists in a vigorous execution,” rather than in amiable intentions;
it is the business of the practical man and not of the theorist.
It needs no very extensive reading in Hamilton to discover ample
justification for such an interpretation of his political philosophy;
the evidence lies scattered broadly through his pages. At the
precocious age of seventeen he laid down the thesis, “A vast majority
of mankind is entirely biassed by motives of self-interest”; and as
political systems are determined by the raw material of the mass of
the people, they must be conditioned by such egoism. A year later he
discovered in Hume the central principle of his philosophy:
Political writers, says a celebrated author, have established it
as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and
fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, _every
man_ ought to be supposed a _knave_; and to have no other end,
in all his actions, but _private interest_. By this interest we
must govern him; and, by means of it, _make him co-operate to
public good_, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition.
Without this, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of _any
constitution_.[313]
At the age of twenty-seven he reiterated the doctrine, “The safest
reliance of every government, is on men’s interests. This is a
principle of human nature, on which all political speculation, to be
just, must be founded.”[314] Obviously this was not a pose of youthful
cynicism, but a sober judgment confirmed by observation and experience.
Accepting self-interest as the mainspring of human ambition, Hamilton
accepted equally the principle of class domination. From his reading
of history he discovered that the strong overcome the weak, and as
they grasp power they coalesce into a master group. This master group
will dominate, he believed, not only to further its interests, but to
prevent the spread of anarchy which threatens every society split into
factions and at the mercy of rival ambitions. In early days the master
group was a military order, later it became a landed aristocracy, in
modern times it is commercial; but always its power rests on property.
“That power which holds the purse-strings absolutely, must rule,” he
stated unequivocally. The economic masters of society of necessity
become the political masters. It is unthinkable that government should
not reflect the wishes of property, that it should be permanently
hostile to the greater economic interests; such hostility must destroy
it, for no man or group of men will be ruled by those whom they can
buy and sell. And in destroying itself it will give place to another
government, more wisely responsive to the master group; for even a
democratic people soon learns that any government is better than a
condition of anarchy, and a commercial people understands that a
government which serves the interests of men of property, serves the
interests of all, for if capital will not invest how shall labor
find employment? And if the economic masters do not organize society
efficiently, how shall the common people escape ruin?
Such are the fundamental principles which lie at the base of Hamilton’s
philosophy. He was in accord with John Adams and James Madison and
Noah Webster, in asserting the economic basis of government, with
its corollary of the class struggle. He not only accepted the rule
of property as inevitable, but as desirable. As an aristocrat he
deliberately allied himself with the wealthy. That men divide into
the rich and the poor, the wise and the foolish, he regarded as a
commonplace too evident to require argument. The explanation is
to be sought in human nature and human capacities. For the common
people, about whom Jefferson concerned himself with what seemed to
Hamilton sheer demagoguery, he felt only contempt. Their virtues and
capacities he had no faith in. “I am not much attached to the _majesty
of the multitude_,” he said during the debate over the Constitution,
“and waive all pretensions (founded on such conduct) to their
countenance.” His notorious comment--which the American democrat has
never forgiven him, “The people!--the people is a great beast!”--was
characteristically frank. Hamilton was no demagogue and nothing was
plainer to his logic than the proposition that if the people possessed
the capacity to rule, their weight of numbers would give them easy
mastery; whereas their yielding to the domination of the gifted few
proves their incapacity. A wise statesman, therefore, will consider
the people no further than to determine how government may be least
disturbed by their factional discontent, and kept free to pursue a
logical program. Under a republican form good government is difficult
to maintain, but not impossible. The people are easily deceived and
turned aside from their purpose; like children they are diverted by
toys; but if they become unruly they must be punished. Too much is at
stake in government for them to be permitted to muddle policies.
It is sufficiently clear that in tastes and convictions Hamilton
was a high Tory. The past to which he appealed was a Tory past, the
psychology which he accepted was a Tory psychology, the law and
order which he desired was a Tory law and order. His philosophy was
not liked by republican America, and he knew that it was not liked.
Practical business men accepted both his premises and conclusions, but
republicans under the spell of revolutionary idealism, and agrarians
suffering in their pocketbooks, would oppose them vigorously. He was
at pains, therefore, as a practical statesman, to dress his views in
a garb more seemly to plebeian prejudices, and like earlier Tories
he paraded an ethical justification for his Toryism. The current
Federalist dogma of the divine right of justice--_vox justiciae vox
dei_--was at hand to serve his purpose and he made free use of it.
But no ethical gilding could quite conceal a certain ruthlessness of
purpose; in practice justice became synonymous with expediency, and
expediency was curiously like sheer Tory will to power.
In certain of his principles Hamilton was a follower of Hobbes.
His philosophy conducted logically to the leviathan state, highly
centralized, coercive, efficient. But he was no idealist to exalt the
state as the divine repository of authority, an enduring entity apart
from the individual citizen and above him. He regarded the state as
a highly useful instrument, which in the name of law and order would
serve the interests of the powerful, and restrain the turbulence of
the disinherited. For in every government founded on coercion rather
than good will, the perennial unrest of those who are coerced is a
grave menace; in the end the exploited will turn fiercely upon the
exploiters. In such governments, therefore, self-interest requires
that social unrest shall be covered with opprobrium and put down by
the police power; and the sufficient test of a strong state lies in
its ability to protect the privileges of the minority against the
anarchy of the majority. In his eloquent declamation against anarchy
Hamilton was a conspicuous disciple of the law and order school. From
the grave difficulties of post-Revolutionary times with their agrarian
programs, he created a partisan argument for a leviathan state, which
fell upon willing ears; and in the Constitutional convention, which,
more than any other man, he was instrumental in assembling, he was the
outstanding advocate of the coercive state.
In his plan of government presented to the Convention, the principle
of centralized power was carried further than most would go, and his
supporting speeches expressed doctrines that startled certain of his
hearers. He was frankly a monarchist, and he urged the monarchical
principle with Hobbesian logic. “The principle chiefly intended to be
established is this--that there must be a permanent _will_.” “There
ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular
current.”
Gentlemen say we need to be rescued from the democracy. But
what [are] the means proposed? A democratic assembly is to be
checked by a democratic senate, and both these by a democratic
chief magistrate. The end will not be answered, the means will
not be equal to the object. It will, therefore, be feeble and
inefficient.[315]
The only effective way of keeping democratic factionalism within
bounds, Hamilton was convinced, lay in the erection of a powerful
chief magistrate, who “ought to be hereditary, and to have so much
power, that it will not be his interest to risk much to acquire more,”
and who would therefore stand “above corruption.” Failing to secure
the acceptance of the monarchical principle, he devoted himself to
the business of providing all possible checks upon the power of
the democracy. He “acknowledged himself not to think favorably of
republican government; but he addressed his remarks to those who did
think favorably of it, in order to prevail on them to tone their
government as high as possible.”[316] His argument was characteristic:
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The
first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.
The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and,
however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is
not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they
seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first
class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will
check the unsteadiness of the second; and as they cannot receive
any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good
government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the
mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?
Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
Their turbulent and uncontrollable disposition requires checks.[317]
The argument scarcely needs refuting today, although curiously enough,
it was rarely questioned by eighteenth-century gentlemen. It was the
stock in trade of the Federalists, nevertheless Hamilton was too acute
a thinker not to see its fallacy. It denied the fundamental premise
of his political philosophy. If men are actuated by self-interest,
how does it come about that this sovereign motive abdicates its rule
among the rich and well born? Is there a magic in property that
regenerates human nature? Do the wealthy betray no desire for greater
power? Do the strong and powerful care more for good government than
for class interests? Hamilton was fond of appealing to the teaching of
experience; but he had read history to little purpose if he believed
such notions. How mercilessly he would have exposed the fallacy in the
mouth of Jefferson! It was a class appeal, and he knew that it was a
class appeal, just as he knew that success knows no ethics. He was
confronted by a situation in practical politics, and in playing ignobly
upon selfish fears he was seeking to force the convention towards the
English model. He had no confidence in the Constitution as finally
adopted, and spoke in contemptuous terms of its weakness; whereas for
the British constitution he had only praise, going so far, according
to Jefferson, as to defend the notorious corruption of parliament on
the ground of expediency: “purge it of its corruption”--Jefferson
reports him as saying--“and give to its popular branch equality of
representation, and it would become an _impracticable_ government;
as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the
most perfect government which ever existed.”[318] The argument savors
of cynicism, but it is in keeping with his philosophy; the British
constitution owed its excellence to the fact that in the name of the
people it yielded control of the state to the landed aristocracy.
It was as a statesman that the brilliant qualities of Hamilton showed
to fullest advantage. In developing his policies as Secretary of
the Treasury he applied his favorite principle, that government and
property must join in a close working alliance. The new government
would remain weak and ineffective so long as it was hostile to
capital; but let it show itself friendly to capital, and capital
would make haste to uphold the hands of government. Confidence was
necessary to both, and it was a plant of slow growth, sensitive to
cold winds. The key to the problem lay in the public finance, and the
key to a strong system of finance lay in a great national bank. This,
Hamilton’s dearest project, was inspired by the example of the Bank of
England. No other institution would so surely link the great merchants
to government, he pointed out, for by being made partners in the
undertaking they would share both the responsibility and the profits.
It was notorious that during the Revolution men of wealth had forced
down the continental currency for speculative purposes; was it not as
certain that they would support an issue in which they were interested?
The private resources of wealthy citizens would thus become an asset
of government, for the bank would link “the interest of the State in
an intimate connection with those of the rich individuals belonging to
it.” “The men of property in America are enlightened about their own
interest, and would easily be brought to see the advantage of a good
plan.” Hence would arise stability and vigor of government.
Moreover, the bank would be of immense service in the pressing business
of the public debt. In regard to this difficult matter Hamilton was
early convinced that only one solution was possible: all outstanding
obligations, state and national, must be assumed by the Federal
government at face value, and funded. Anything short of that would
amount to repudiation of a lawful contract, entered into in good faith
by the purchaser; and such repudiation would destroy in the minds of
the wealthy the confidence in the integrity of the new government
that was vital to its success. It was true that speculators would reap
great and unearned profits; but the speculators for the most part were
the principal men of property whose support was so essential that any
terms were justifiable, and nothing would bind them so closely to the
government as the knowledge that it would deal generously with them.
It was true also that thousands of small men would lose by such a
transaction; but under any existing social economy the small man was
at a disadvantage, and the present state of affairs was not such as to
justify Utopian measures. To alienate the rich and powerful in order
to conciliate the poor and inconsequential seemed to him sheer folly.
The argument of expediency must prevail over abstract justice; the
government must make terms with those in whose hands lay the success or
failure of the venture.
His report on the public credit, of January 14, 1790, is one of the
significant documents in the history of American finance. It is the
first elaboration by an American statesman of the new system of
capitalization and credit developed in eighteenth-century England,
and it laid a broad foundation for later capitalistic development. To
less daring financiers of the time the public debt was no more than a
heavy obligation to be met; but to Hamilton it offered an opportunity
for revivifying the whole financial life of the nation. Let the debts
be consolidated and capitalized by a proper system of funding, and the
augmented credit would multiply capital, lower the rate of interest,
increase land values, and extend its benefits through all lines of
industry and commerce. It was a bold plan and it encountered bitter
opposition, which was not lessened by the heavy taxation that it called
for. In his tax proposals Hamilton revealed his political philosophy so
nakedly as almost to prove his undoing. His doctrine of the blessing of
a national debt smacked rather too strongly of English Toryism for the
American stomach.
A national debt, if it be not excessive, will be to us a national
blessing. It will be a powerful cement to our Union. It will also
create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree which,
without being oppressive, will be a spur to industry.... It were
otherwise to be feared our popular maxims would incline us to
too great parsimony and indulgence. We labor less now than any
civilized nation of Europe; and a habit of labor in the people, is
as essential to the health and vigor of their minds and bodies, as
it is conducive to the welfare of the State.[319]
A further struggle was encountered over the proposals of an internal
revenue and a tariff. In his advocacy of the former Hamilton
encountered the vigorous opposition of the backcountry. The total
lack of adequate means of transportation rendered the problem of a
grain market a chronic difficulty to the frontier farmers. The most
convenient solution lay in distilling, and so whisky had become the
chief commodity of the farmer that was transportable and brought
a cash price. In placing a tax upon distilled liquors, therefore,
Hamilton struck so directly at the economic interests of thousands of
backwoodsmen, as to bring a rebellion upon the new administration. He
knew what he was doing, but he calculated that it was safer to incur
the enmity of farmers than of financiers; nevertheless the fierceness
of the opposition surprised him, and aroused all the ruthlessness that
lay in the background of his nature. He called for the strong arm
of the military and when the rising was put down, he was angered at
Washington’s leniency in refusing to hang the convicted leaders. In
his advocacy of a tariff he was on safer ground, for he was proposing
a solution of the difficult situation confronting the manufacturers.
Something must be done to revive industry so long stagnant. The old
colonial machinery had been destroyed and new machinery must be
provided. Industrial independence must follow political independence;
and the easiest way lay in providing a tariff barrier behind which
the infant industries of America might grow and become sufficient for
domestic needs.
In his notable report on manufactures, submitted on December 5, 1791,
Hamilton showed his characteristic intelligence in his grasp of the
principles of the industrial revolution. Certainly no other man in
America saw so clearly the significance of the change that was taking
place in English industrialism, and what tremendous reservoirs of
wealth the new order laid open to the country that tapped them. The
productive possibilities that lay in the division of labor, factory
organization, the substitution of the machine for the tool, appealed to
his materialistic imagination, and he threw himself heart and soul into
the cause of industrial development in America. He accepted frankly the
principle of exploitation. He was convinced that the interests of the
manufacturers were one with the national interests, and he proposed to
put the paternal power of the government behind them. With the larger
social effects--the consequences to the working classes, congestion of
population, the certainty of a labor problem--he concerned himself no
more than did contemporary English statesmen. He was contemptuous of
Jefferson’s concern over such things. He had no Physiocratic leanings
towards agriculture; material greatness alone appealed to him; and he
contemplated with satisfaction the increase in national wealth that
would accrue from levying toll upon the weak and helpless.
Besides this advantage of occasional employment to classes having
different occupations, there is another, of a nature allied to
it, and of a similar tendency. This is the employment of persons
who would otherwise be idle, and in many cases, a burthen on the
community, either from bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body,
or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them for the
toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark, that,
in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the
latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than
they would otherwise be. Of the number of persons employed in
the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that
four-sevenths, nearly, are women and children; of whom the greatest
proportion are children, and many of them of a tender age.[320]
If the material power and splendor of the state be the great end of
statesmanship--as Hamilton believed--no just complaint can be lodged
against such a policy; but if the well-being of the individual citizen
be the chief end--as Jefferson maintained--a very different judgment
must be returned.
Although the fame of Hamilton has been most closely associated with
the principle of constitutional centralization, his truer significance
is to be found in his relation to the early developments of our modern
capitalistic order. In his understanding of credit finance and the
factory economy, he grasped the meaning of the economic revolution
which was to transform America from an agrarian to an industrial
country; and in urging the government to further such development, he
blazed the path that America has since followed. “A very great man,”
Woodrow Wilson has called him, “but not a great American.” In the
larger historical meaning of the term, in its democratic implications,
that judgment is true; but in the light of our industrial history,
with its corporate development and governmental subsidies, it does not
seem so true. As the creative organizer of a political state answering
the needs of a capitalistic order--a state destined to grow stronger
as imperialistic ambitions mount--he seems the most modern and the
most American of our eighteenth-century leaders, one to whom our
industrialism owes a very great debt, but from whom our democratic
liberalism has received nothing.
II • John Adams • Realist
Midway between Hamilton and Jefferson stands John Adams, the most
painstaking student of government and the most widely read in political
history, of his generation of Americans. The noble art of government
was a lifelong passion with him--the sublimest subject, in his opinion,
which a free citizen could study. Solid, pragmatic, unimaginative, he
was an admirable representative of the later eighteenth century with
its vigorous understanding, its distrust of idealisms, its contempt for
social theory. He was the political counterpart of Dr. Johnson. To a
generation sniveling over the sorrows of life and seeking panaceas in
Rousseau sentimentalisms, the English Tory proffered the consolation of
the realist. Things are bad enough, heaven knows; poverty, injustice,
disease, death, are evils which no optimism can shut its eyes to. But
what can be done? The malady of human nature is a disease beyond the
reach of romantic plasters. No quack remedies will cure ills that
lie too deep for laws or kings--they only aggravate the trouble.
Be sensible therefore. Endure like men what cannot be cured. Stop
sniveling and make the best of things as they are.
The analogy between these two vigorous exponents of common sense is
too obvious to miss. For years the chief business of John Adams was
to bring home to Americans the lesson in realism which Samuel Johnson
was urging upon his countrymen. The mischief of romantic idealisms was
spreading widely in America, disseminated by propagandists like Tom
Paine and theorists like Jefferson; there was high need that the people
be brought back to sober reality. This duty he took upon himself. He
was an uncompromising realist who refused to be duped by fine dreams or
humanitarian panaceas; he was much given to throwing cold water on the
hope of social regeneration through political agencies. And the reward
which he gained for his voluntary labors was a personal unpopularity
beyond that of any other statesman of the time. He was charged
with apostasy from his earlier democratic faith, and the charge had
sufficient foundation, unfortunately, to make it credible if one wished
to believe it.
During the revolutionary struggle he had been a member of the left
wing; during the early struggles under the Constitution he was a member
of the right wing. The young man had been a stalwart defender of human
rights, the old man was a stalwart defender of property rights; and
this shift of position was fatal to his reputation with the rising
democratic party. The French Revolution marked the critical turning
point in his intellectual development. As a politician he was well-nigh
ruined by it; but as a political thinker he owed it much. Before that
vast upheaval came to challenge his somewhat conventional mind, he
was a hard-working lawyer-politician, with a liking for legalistic
constitutional theory; but as the Revolution went forward, he was
forced into uncompromising reaction. While ardent young Americans
were becoming pro-French, he became pro-British; while they were
accepting the new leveling principles, he searched history to prove
how inevitable are social distinctions and economic classes; while
they looked hopefully forward to a democratic future, he gathered his
materials for an interpretation of political forces that revealed
aristocracy as the dominant factor in every society. Both Adams and his
critics were products of the French upheaval, but facing in different
directions; naturally, the antagonism between them became sharp and
bitter.
The severest critic cannot deny to John Adams excellent qualities
of mind and heart. A sound lawyer, a capable statesman, a vigorous
thinker and courageous debater, he fought his way from obscurity
to high position and many honors, and in every responsibility he
acquitted himself in a fashion altogether worthy of the notable
Adams posterity. A stubborn intellectual independence and a vigorous
assertiveness were his distinguishing characteristics. He revealed
to the full the Adams trait of going its own way and coming to its
own conclusions. He was never the victim of mob psychology, and he
was never careful of occasion or circumstance in speaking out his
convictions. America has had too few independent minds, and much of
Adams’s unpopularity was the result of his refusal to hunt with the
pack. Unfortunately his admirable qualities were offset by a blundering
tactlessness and a colossal vanity that brought many troubles upon
his head. He loved to be in the public eye and he studied the little
arts of self-advertising. In his youthful diary he set down these
characteristic words: “Reputation ought to be a perpetual subject of
my thoughts, and aim of my behavior. How shall I spread an opinion of
myself as a lawyer of distinguished genius, learning, and virtue?”
Self-confident, domineering, and jealously suspicious--always on the
lookout lest some honor due him should fall to another--he struggled
through a career strewn with animosities and heartburnings that a
nicer tact and a more generous nature would have avoided. He was his
own worst enemy. He did not spare himself in public service, but he
demanded strict payment and was inclined to haggle over the terms; in
consequence his later days were embittered and his fame was less than
he deserved.
Our present concern, however, is with the political scientist and not
with the politician; with the theories of government that occupied so
much of his thought, rather than with the policies of the statesman.
He wrote voluminously, heavily, with no grace of style or savor of
wit, and the long row of his collected writings may well appall the
reader who proposes to make his acquaintance. Ponderous treatises are
supplemented by lesser works and flanked by innumerable letters; his
industry was prodigious and no one will wonder at his exclamation, “My
hand is impatient of the pen and longs to throw it down.” His important
work divides broadly into two main divisions: his contribution to the
colonial debate with England, and his elaborate system of government
formulated during the years of French revolutionary debate. A brief
consideration will suffice for the first, but the second requires more
careful examination.
In his contributions to the colonial debate Adams concerned himself
mainly with questions of constitutional law. He placed little reliance
on the appeal to natural rights, and showed scant respect for “popular
talk and those democratical principles which have done so much mischief
in this country.”[321] The American cause, he believed, should be based
on constitutional principles, but those principles required restatement
in the light of existing fact. They must be rescued from the narrow
interpretation of little Englanders and adapted to meet the pressing
needs of imperial federation. The English people were not all residents
of the British Isles, and a constitutional practice suited to compact
groups in a common environment, was ill adapted to the needs of widely
sundered bodies of British subjects. Into this difficult and momentous
business of imperial federation, Adams plunged earnestly in an endeavor
to chart the unexplored field. That the problem was the gravest then
confronting Englishmen is abundantly evident today; that it received
grossly inadequate consideration on both sides of the Atlantic is
equally clear. In this field John Adams was a pioneer and his work
possesses still some historical interest. This fact, too frequently
overlooked, has been emphasized by a recent student, who has summarized
the final results of Adams’s thinking in the following theses: that the
empire was an association of equals, each with independent legislative
powers; that the British constitution was the fundamental law of the
empire, defining the relationship of the constituent parts; and that it
was the function of the judiciary to disallow a legislative act of any
of the several legislatures which did not comport with the fundamental
law, or which attempted to impose the will of one of the partners in
violation of the fundamental understanding and its guarantee.[322]
Such, in compressed form, was Adams’s elaboration and justification
of the dogma of Otis, that an act against the constitution was void.
In its relation to current English constitutional practice it was
at once revolutionary and reactionary. It implied a double attack
upon parliamentary sovereignty, first in limiting its powers by a
super-parliamentary constitution, and then in subjecting its acts to
judicial review. The final result would be the transfer of sovereignty
from the legislature to the judiciary. The idea had been toyed with
by English lawyers, but never seriously considered; it was alien to
the whole theory and history of parliamentary development. English
landed gentlemen have never been minded to grant the veto power to
the judiciary, but have persistently retained sovereignty in the
legislature. Nevertheless in such early speculation is found the germ
of our later practice, as it finally developed through the decisions of
Chief Justice Marshall.
In the works of his later period, such as _A Defence of the
Constitution of Government of the United States of America_ and
_Discourses on Davila_, Adams emerged from the narrow field of
constitutional law and elaborated a theory of government based on wide
reading and long observation. It was by way of reply to the French
thinkers, and it contributed in large measure to the partisan passions
of the time. Unfortunate circumstances attended the publication of
the works. The _Defence of the Constitution_ appeared at the moment
when newspaper accounts of the absurd dress in which he appeared at
the Court of St. James’s were provoking republican jests; and the
_Discourses on Davila_ came out in the _Gazette of the United States_,
when the country was buzzing about his childish fondness for titles and
ceremonies. It was impolitic for Adams to publish in the _Gazette_,
a virulently Federalistic sheet and anathema to all liberals. His
unpopular theories could not fail to arouse republican antagonism when
set over against such seeming commentary as this:
_Take away thrones and crowns from among men and there will
soon be an end of all dominion and justice._ There must be some
adventitious properties infused into the government to give it
energy and spirit, or the selfish, turbulent passions of men can
never be controlled. This has occasioned that artificial splendor
and dignity that are to be found in the courts of many nations. The
people of the United States may probably be induced to regard and
obey the laws without requiring the experiment of courts and titled
monarchs. In proportion as we become populous and wealthy must the
tone of the government be strengthened.[323]
The unfortunate effect of _Davila_ upon a highly wrought public opinion
Adams himself records: “the rage and fury of the Jacobinical journals
against these discourses, increased as they proceeded, intimidated the
printer, John Fenno, and convinced me, that to proceed would do more
hurt than good. I therefore broke off abruptly.”[324] But the mischief
to his reputation had been done; henceforth Adams was popularly
regarded as anti-republican. Debating the nature of aristocracy in the
New York Constitutional Convention, one of the speakers said, “I would
refer the gentleman for a definition of it to the Hon. John Adams, one
of our natural aristocrats.” Madison went so far as to charge that he
was secretly a monarchist. The charge was absurd, as any examination of
his political theory will convince. “It is a fixed principle with me,”
he wrote to Samuel Adams in 1790, “that all good government is and must
be republican.” But that he advocated a system of government hostile to
agrarianism, that he was bitterly antagonistic to French Jacobinism
and all its works, is apparent to the most casual reader. He was a
realist of the seventeenth-century school of English republicanism,
attacking what he regarded as the delirium of democracy, appealing to
experience in answer to abstract theory.
Adams erected his political system upon what he called “self-evident
truths.” He went to the root of the matter and directed his inquiry
into the validity of the humanitarian psychology which asserted that
men are good by nature, and may be trusted to deal justly with their
fellows. He appealed to the whole unhappy record of past misrule to
disprove the thesis. Instead of discovering in the average man a
kindly, rational being--as Jefferson professed to discover--Adams
found quite the contrary; and he summoned a host of historians and
philosophers to witness that Machiavelli was right in his contention
that “those who have written on civil government lay it down as a
first principle ... that whoever would found a state, and make proper
laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by
nature; that they will not fail to show that natural depravity of heart
whenever they have a fair opportunity.”[325] In further substantiation
of this fact he examined the history of governments past and present,
and he found everywhere testimony to the truth that the mass of men are
naturally indolent, selfish, given to luxury, shortsighted, jealous,
tending to faction and all mischievous intrigue. Never does he find
them given to virtue, choosing wisdom, seeking justice. They cannot
endure that others should be superior in virtue, or rank, or power;
but driven by ambition they strive to pull down their superiors in
order themselves to rise. The men in any society who possess sufficient
virtue to set justice above self-interest, are few and count for little
in the scale against the selfish many.[326]
This Calvinistic doctrine that “human nature is not fit to be
trusted,” and that “men are never good but through necessity,” being
accepted--and John Adams was as clearly satisfied of its truth as
“of any demonstration of Euclid”--he proceeded to translate it
into political terms, and examine the bearing of it upon systems
of government. At once a second fallacy of the humanitarian school
emerged--men are impelled not by ideals but by needs, not by reason,
as Godwin argued, but by the desire for goods. In a social state the
natural selfishness of human nature impels to economic aggression.
Underneath the turbulent unrest which threatens every government is
economic ambition. This is the rock on which all schemes of social
justice founder--a rock which every sound political thinker will chart
and recognize as a danger reef. Economics and biology provide the major
social drives. “That the first want of every man is his dinner and the
second want his girl were truths well known ... long before the great
philosopher Malthus arose to think he enlightened the world by his
discovery.”[327] The supposed liberty of a democratic state proves in
practice to be no other than anarchy, running swiftly into license and
ending in tyranny. All human societies are rooted in exploitation, the
bitter fruit of which is domestic warfare.
The universal social state is one of ruthless class struggle, wherein
the strong conquer the weak--this is the third deduction from the
premises which Adams laid down. It cannot be otherwise, he argued, from
the natural inequality of men. The rude mass being shiftless, ignorant,
spendthrift, they are at the mercy of the strong, ambitious, and
capable, who exploit them freely. Hence in every society emerges the
division between patricians and plebeians, developing into caste as the
social order grows complex. The self-interest of the patricians teaches
them the need of class solidarity, and with intelligent solidarity the
few easily seize control of the state and use it to their ends. Hence
arises an aristocracy or oligarchy, which maintains its power through
control of the economic resources of society. Control of property means
control of men; for sovereignty inheres in economics. In presence of
this historical fact it is foolish to declaim about natural rights;
there are no rights except such as are won either by property or the
sword.
That there should long exist a society without a property aristocracy
Adams regarded as inconceivable. The French democrats with their
talk of equality and fraternity were mischievous visionaries. “Every
democracy ... has an aristocracy in it as distinct as that of Rome,
France, England.” In older societies the aristocracy maintained
supremacy through possession of the land. In America the vast extent
of territory and the wide diffusion of landholding presented the most
favorable opportunity in history for democratic development if such
were possible; nevertheless the evidences of an aristocracy developing
here were too patent to miss. The abundance of economic resources,
Adams pointed out, was an invitation to gigantic exploitation, the
logical outcome of which must be the emergence of a master group,
richer and more powerful than the world has ever known. The power of
economic appeal was nullified in America by no special providence.
Paper wealth has been a source of aristocracy in this country,
as well as landed wealth, with a vengeance. Witness the immense
fortunes made _per saltum_ by aristocratical speculations, both in
land and paper.... But, sir, land and paper are not the only source
of aristocracy. There are master shipwrights, housewrights, masons,
&c. &c., who have each of them from twenty to a hundred families
in their employment, and can carry a posse to the polls when they
will. These are not only aristocrats, but a species of feudal
barons....
Should a planter in Virginia sell his _clarissimum et
illustrissimum et celeberricum locum_ with his thousand negroes,
to a merchant, would not the merchant gain the aristocratical
influence which the planter lost by his transfer? Run down, sir,
through all the ranks of society ... from the first planter and the
first merchant to the hog driver, the whiskey dram-seller, or the
Scottish peddler, and consider, whether the alienation of lands,
wharves, stores, pike stock, or even lottery tickets, does not
transfer the aristocracy as well as the property.[328]
Believe--as John Adams believed regarding the funding operations--that
“paper wealth is the madness of the many for the profit of the
few,”[329] it is nevertheless a modern illustration of the old truth
that the few do profit from the madness of the many, and by reason of
such profit set themselves up as masters. If then the historian cannot
escape the conclusion that political systems and social classes rest
upon economic foundations, this fundamental fact must preside over
the speculations of the political philosopher. Democracy is out of
the question, even if it were desirable. The great and sole object
of political science must be the preservation of liberty--the right
of every individual to life, freedom, property, in an aristocratic
society--and the frustration of the universal drive of self-interest
which leads on the one hand to tyranny, and on the other to anarchy.
Between these two poles of tyranny and anarchy, of oligarchy and
democracy, every society oscillates; to prevent such oscillation and
discover some mean between the extremes must be the business of the
political philosopher. The pregnant fallacy of the French school,
Adams insisted, lay in its doctrines of equality and fraternity. The
meanest underling does not desire equality; men kiss the feet above
them and trample on the fingers beneath. That the people love a lord
is a sign of their abundant folly. Should the democrats abolish the
principle of hereditary rank by law, it would still remain in fact; for
the property basis on which it rests is transmitted legally from father
to son, and each successive generation gains an adventitious advantage
from its substantial heritage as well as from the historical splendor
of the family name. On this rock every attempt at a democracy has
foundered.
If these words are true, no well ordered commonwealth ever existed;
for we read of none without a nobility, no, not one, that I can
recollect, without a hereditary nobility; ... It would be an
improvement in the affairs of society, probably, if the hereditary
legal descent could be avoided; and this experiment the Americans
have tried. But in this case a nobility must and will exist,
though without the name, as really as in countries where it is
hereditary.[330]
The mortal weakness of democracy, Adams agreed with Madison and the
Federalists generally, lay in faction, a disease which in the nature of
the case he regarded as incurable. The use of party power other than
justly was factional, and because the mass of men do not set justice
above present interest, the unbridled rule of the majority drives
straight towards mass tyranny. Despoiled by the superior ability of the
aristocracy, the exploited plebeians fight back blindly; and where the
constitution of government permits them to band together in a political
party, they override the rights of the minority as ruthlessly as the
latter before had denied the rights of the majority. Aristocratic
exploitation leads to democratic leveling; and the resultant anarchy is
but prelude to the rise of another aristocracy to repeat the unhappy
process.
The passions and desires of the majority of the representatives
being in their nature insatiable and unlimited by any thing within
their own breasts, and having nothing to control them without, will
crave more and more indulgence, and, as they have the power, they
will have the gratification.[331]
If you give more than a share in the sovereignty to the democrats,
that is, if you give them the command or preponderance in the
sovereignty, that is, the legislature, they will vote all property
out of the hands of you aristocrats, and if they let you escape
with your lives, it will be more humanity, consideration, and
generosity than any triumphant democracy ever displayed since the
creation. And what will follow? The aristocracy among the democrats
will take your places, and treat their fellows as severely and
sternly as you have treated them.[332]
The end of every democratic experiment, Adams pointed out, has been the
man on horseback. So inevitably does democracy culminate in despotism,
that “in reality, the word democracy signifies nothing more nor less
than a nation of people without any government at all, and before any
constitution is instituted.”[333] “Democracy never has been and never
can be so desirable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts,
is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It
soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy
that did not commit suicide.” “The proposition that the people are
the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the
worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge,
act, think, or will, as a political body. Individuals have conquered
themselves; nations and large bodies never.”[334]
Having thus examined the major doctrines of the French democratic
school, namely, that men are good by nature, that the social end
is liberty, equality, fraternity, and that social well-being will
result from an appeal to reason, Adams had cleared the problem of
what he regarded as misconceptions, and was ready to lay out a
system of government which should demonstrate his skill in political
architecture. The determining factor in laying down the main lines was
sufficiently clear. Since property lies at the root of the problem
of government, the business of devising a just and stable system of
government resolves itself into the question, What shall be done about
property? As an orthodox Whig Adams found part of his answer ready
to hand. With Locke he believed that property rights are sacred, and
that it is a chief business of government to protect private property
against unjust expropriation. The security of property may be taken as
the measure of the stability of government. “The moment the idea is
admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of
God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect
it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”[335] “The very name of a republic
implies, that the property of the people should be represented in
the legislature, and decide the rule of justice,” he argued, quoting
Cicero.[336] Moreover, the futility of any other arrangement was
axiomatic in his philosophy. If property is not granted representation,
it will usurp it; if attacked, it will know how to defend itself; and
the end will be the setting up of an oligarchy on the ruins of the
republic. But if Adams agreed with Hamilton that the state should
deal tenderly with the rights and interests of property, he refused
to go with the latter in his sole concern for the wealthy. Greater
property interests must be held in due balance with the smaller, for
if unchecked the strong will drive on to ruthless exploitation of the
weak, and society will be endangered from the top as in a democracy it
is endangered from the bottom. It was this desire for a mean between
oligarchy or monarchy on the one hand, and democracy on the other, that
determined his choice of a republican form of government.
The difficult problem of property-power in the state, Adams was
convinced, could be solved justly and permanently only by a judicious
system of balanced interests. Subjected, as every government must be,
to a persistent stress of rival interests, it must be constructed with
calculated nicety, or the structure would fall of its own weight;
and the sole principle, he believed, is that of the Gothic arch--the
principle of thrust and counter-thrust. Provide in such manner that the
selfishness of one group in society shall be neutralized by the counter
selfishness of other groups, let the buttress support the arch at its
weakest point, and upon such an equilibrium of counterforces great
vaults and noble towers may be erected. It is the apotheosis of the
system of checks and balances.
It is agreed that “the end of all government is the good and ease
of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights, without
oppression”; but it must be remembered, that the rich are _people_
as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others; that
they have as clear and as sacred a right to their large property
as others have to theirs which is smaller; that oppression to them
is as possible and as wicked as to others. The rich, therefore,
ought to have an effectual barrier in the constitution against
being robbed, plundered, and murdered, as well as the poor; and
this can never be without an independent senate. The poor should
have a bulwark against the same dangers and oppressions; and this
can never be without a house of representatives of the people. But
neither the rich nor the poor can be defended by their respective
guardians in the constitution, without an executive power, vested
with a negative, equal to either, to hold the balance even between
them, and decide when they cannot agree.[337]
Such in brief was the master principle of that system of mixed
government which John Adams advocated so persistently in the teeth
of the popular demand for a simpler, more responsive form. It based
itself frankly upon the dogma of the class struggle; it provided each
class--as he recognized them in his simple social analysis--with a
legislative arm with which to defend itself; and it set as arbiter
between them an executive, carefully selected, who was supposed to
represent that abstract _tertium quid_, the public. The keynote is
struck in a line from Pope set on the title-page of the _Defence_--“All
Nature’s difference keeps all Nature’s peace.” That Adams greatly
admired his handiwork is beyond doubt; that he was intellectually
honest with himself is very likely true; but that there is a note of
disingenuousness, a failure to take into account his pronounced bias
towards property interest, is certain. There was ample ground for the
popular dislike of his theory. This is not the place to enter upon an
examination of the system of checks and balances, nor to insist that
any such system becomes in practice an impossibility. It is more to
the point to remark upon certain fallacies in his theory which Adams
himself must have seen if his mind had been quite free from bias.
Adams’s intelligent analysis of social forces should have saved him
from the major fallacy of the doctrine of checks and balances. In
imposing the doctrine of a separation of powers upon the doctrine of
property power, he effectively denied the validity of the latter.
Assuming for the sake of the argument that the Senate will represent
property, what reason justified the assumption that the House would
represent the small men, or that the President would speak for the
whole? If property is sovereign, as Adams maintained--“Harrington
has shown that power always follows property. This I believe to be
as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and reaction are
equal, is in mechanics”[338]--will it not rule the House equally with
the Senate? above all, will it not control so important an officer as
the President? The theory that the President represents an abstract
public is a disingenuous political fiction; in the light of Adams’s
theory of economic determinism it is a gross absurdity. Moreover, Adams
invalidated his entire system by refusing to provide the necessary
machinery by which the House could represent the small man. In denying
manhood suffrage, he eliminated the proletarian and the renter from
the political equation, and left them without political power; in his
definition the small man was the freeholder, the representative of
the middle class. The House, therefore, equally with the Senate, was
the mouthpiece of property interests; the former more likely to be
representative of land, the latter of capital.
Where did Adams get the major ideas of his political philosophy?[339]
An omnivorous reader, he gathered from many sources, and his memory was
a well-stocked storehouse of fact and theory. As a young man he was
disciple of Locke and the natural-rights school, but as he grew older
he abandoned the natural-rights theory. His interpretation of human
nature he took over from Machiavelli, Hobbes and Hume, discovering in
their psychology of self-interest and emulation--often mean but many
times admirable--a conception in harmony with the Calvinism of his
early training. He owed much to Bolingbroke, whom he read five times,
but to James Harrington, the Commonwealth intellectual, he turned with
a zest of discovery so great that he may not unjustly be called one
of Harrington’s disciples. From the _Oceana_ he drew so abundantly
that the most casual student of political theory must remark his
indebtedness. Many of the major doctrines of Adams, which by dint of
iteration have become associated with his name, were taken straight
out of Harrington: such as the doctrine of a natural aristocracy; the
economic basis of sovereignty, discovered in the close relation of
property to power; the necessity of effecting a balance between rival
interests, with the ideal state rendered static by a nice balance of
governmental machinery; the conception of government by laws and not
by men; and finally, the historical method of approach, the cautious
appeal to past experience. Since Harrington’s time many of these
ideas had been restated: the defense of property rights by Locke; the
principle of the separation of powers and the historical method by
Montesquieu; the psychology of emulation by Hume and Robert Wallace,
the latter of whom is another Adams in his thesis, “Lust of power
sets man against his neighbor to the profit of the rich.” But in spite
of these later reinterpretations and his own additions, John Adams
remained essentially a seventeenth-century republican, preferring with
Milton the rule of the aristocracy to that of plebeians, and hating
all Jacobin radicalisms as the spawn of a dangerous romanticism that
disregarded the plain teachings of history and the admonitions of
common sense.
Though Adams was fiercely assailed as an advocate of class government,
he was far less hostile to agrarianism than was Hamilton. He was no
believer in unchecked government by wealth. His honest realism taught
him the sophistry of Hamilton’s assumption that gentlemen of property
are equally gentlemen of principle, and that wealth voluntarily
abdicates selfish interest. He feared the aggressions of the rich as
much as the turbulence of the poor. The bulk of his property was in
land, and his sympathies were enlisted on the side of a law-abiding
agrarianism, rather than on the side of a speculative capitalism.[340]
He would put down vigorously all such leveling as was implied in
Shays’s program, and the repudiations of Rhode Island; but he would not
permit the powerful to exploit the poor through the instrumentality
of government. This may explain in part his hostility to Hamilton and
his partial sympathy with Jefferson. He stood between the two rival
economies, arguing for a system of government that should be neither
agrarian nor capitalistic, but should maintain a static mean; and
in consequence he pleased nobody. His four years in the presidency
disrupted the Federalist party, and prepared the way for the triumph
of Jefferson. Though tactless and blundering in dealing with trimming
politicians, he was an honest and courageous man, and his many sterling
qualities merit a larger recognition than has been accorded them by a
grudging posterity. In spite of his dogmatisms and inconsistencies he
remains the most notable political thinker--with the possible exception
of John C. Calhoun--among American statesmen.
Footnotes
[313] _Works_, Vol. II, p. 51.
[314] _Ibid._, p. 298.
[315] Brief of speech submitting his plan of Constitution, in _Works_,
Vol. II, p. 415.
[316] _Elliot’s Debates_, Vol. V, p. 244.
[317] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 422.
[318] _Works of Jefferson_, Ford edition, Vol. I, p. 165.
[319] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 257.
[320] _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 207-208.
[321] “Autobiography,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 310.
[322] R. G. Adams, _Political Ideas of the American Revolution_,
Trinity College Press, 1922, pp. 92-93.
[323] _Gazette of the United States_, March, 1790; quoted in Forman,
“The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” in _Johns Hopkins Studies
in History and Political Science_, XX, Nos. 9-10.
[324] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 272, note.
[325] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 408.
[326] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.
9, 57, 97.
[327] Letter to John Taylor, in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.
[328] _Ibid._, pp. 508-509.
[329] _Ibid._, p. 508.
[330] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, pp.
124-125.
[331] _Ibid._, p. 64.
[332] “Letter to John Taylor,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 516.
[333] _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 211.
[334] See “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” and in particular Vol.
IV of _Works_.
[335] “Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 9.
[336] _Works_, Vol. IV, p. 295.
[337] “A Defence of the Constitution, etc.,” in _Works_, Vol. VI, p. 65.
[338] _Works_, Vol. IX, p. 376.
[339] For a detailed examination of the sources of his philosophy, see
the excellent discussion in C. M. Walsh, _The Political Science of John
Adams_, Chapters XV, XVI.
[340] See Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p.
317.
Part Two: Political Democracy Gets Under Way • 1787-1800
Chapter I • The Impact of the French Revolution
The dramatic impact of the French Revolution upon a situation which
for months had been overwrought entailed disturbing consequences.
Within a week after the setting up of the new government there began
that long series of events in France which carried far and gave birth
to extraordinary hopes and fears; and throughout the remaining years
of the century the French movement exercised a determining influence
upon American parties and issues. In the words of Colonel Higginson, it
“drew a red-hot ploughshare through the history of America as well as
through that of France. It not merely divided parties, but molded them;
gave them their demarcations, their watchwords and their bitterness.
The home issues were for a time subordinate, collateral; the real party
lines were established on the other side of the Atlantic.”[341] The
stirring of political passions afresh resulted in greatly clarifying
political philosophies, and in rendering more exact, political
alignments that before had been vague and inchoate.
The creative influence of the French Revolution upon the western world
resulted from the enormous impetus which it gave to the movement to
democratize American life and institutions. In no other country to
which the sparks of revolution drifted was there such quantity of
combustible material ready for the torch; and in setting afire this
native material the French upheaval put a stop to the aristocratic
reaction which had carried everything before it during the previous
decade. It spread widely the spirit of leveling, and destroyed the
last hope of the “monarchy men.” But it did more--it gave a wide
and popular currency to the ideal of democracy. Before the French
Revolution the American mind had been curiously sensitive over the term
democrat; even Samuel Adams had been driven by expediency to reject
the word, and, amongst the radicals, few had the boldness to avow
themselves democrats. By common consent the term had been covered with
opprobrium; democracy was no other than a _bellua multorum capitum_,
the hydra-headed monster of earlier Tories, licentious, irreligious,
the very spawn of anarchy. But now the old conceptions were rapidly
swept away, and democracy was accepted by liberals as the ultimate form
of political organization, to which the American experiment was to be
dedicated.
In thus imparting social idealism to political speculation, the
Revolution not only elevated the democratic ideal, but it provided a
body of philosophy, the lack of which had so seriously handicapped
the democrats during the great debate. And this new philosophy gained
extraordinarily wide currency in America under the stimulus of
revolutionary enthusiasm. It made direct appeal to the vast majority
who still remained among the political disinherited; it aroused
them to political consciousness and intensified the class alignment
that followed. The country divided sharply between left and right,
and political discussion became more intense as the French movement
developed. The English declaration of war upon France produced a crisis
in America, and sharpened the party cleavage. The Federalists went
with Great Britain and turned fiercely upon the democratic movement,
assailing it with increasing venom. The democrats, on the other
hand, became French partisans, and denounced all aristocrats with
true republican fervor, becoming more radical as French Jacobinism
developed. Never before had political passion risen to such heights in
America, not even during the early days of the American Revolution;
and never before had political ideas taken such hold upon the common
people. Out of this increasing ferment emerged certain consequences of
vast significance to the democratic movement: not only was an effective
barrier erected against the further spread of aristocratic Federalism,
but certain of its most characteristic doctrines disintegrated and
disappeared. The current dogma of faction gave way to a more democratic
interpretation of the majority will; the doctrine of the ethical
absolute--the _vox justiciae, vox dei_--quietly yielded to the more
practical conception of expediency; and the lately resurrected ideal of
an augmented state received a temporary check, the majority preferring
to intrust power to local bodies rather than to a central authority.
At the beginning the sympathy of America as a whole went heartily
with the revolutionary movement in France. The adherence of Lafayette
justified the cause to the most conservative. But with the advent of
the Girondists to power a division in American sentiment appeared:
Hamilton, John Adams, and other extreme Federalists drew back in
disapproval; and with the rise of the Jacobins, party cleavage
became sharp and bitter. All over America the liberals organized
democratic clubs, instituted committees of correspondence, and actively
forwarded the new leveling principles. The attack on ceremonial and
titles of address in Congress, of which Maclay has left record in
his _Journal_, was only a skirmish in the general war levied upon
social distinctions.[342] It was to these democratic societies that
Citizen Genêt made appeal; they rallied about him, toasted the French
principles, and assured him of the warm support of the American people.
The recall of Genêt was a blow to the American Jacobins, and they
retaliated by direct appeals to the people to repudiate the act of the
administration. Stung by their criticism of his policy of neutrality,
Washington denounced them as “certain self-created societies” that
offensively “assumed the tone of condemnation” of governmental
policies; and went so far as to imply that such criticism was
seditious. It was ill-advised for it was like a torch to dry leaves.
The Federalists fell upon the democrats with gusto. They denounced the
infidel French mobocracy and its American offspring. They declaimed
against “secret organizations,” imputing to them every evil known to
Satan: the democratic clubs were called “demoniacal clubs,” “nurseries
of sedition,” “hotbeds of atheism,” “spawn of faction”; and common
decency required that they be put down with a strong hand. In short the
most eminent Federalists joined heartily in the silly work of turning
the country into a bedlam.
A characteristic _odium theologicum_ quickly gathered about the
movement and extended to the whole democratic philosophy. Well-meaning
but ignorant gentlemen saw in Jacobinism only atheism and immorality.
John Adams professed not to know “what to make of a republic of
thirty million atheists,” and he attributed the unhappy result to the
“encyclopedists and economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire
and Rousseau,” with their mad doctrines of the “equality of persons
and property.” But the more violently such men protested, the more
insidiously “the infidel and irreligious spirit” spread through the
land. It found its way into such strongholds of orthodoxy as Harvard
College, to the scandal of the respectable; and as a counterblast to
Paine’s _Age of Reason_, a copy of Watson’s _Apology for the Bible_
was presented to every Harvard undergraduate, with what results in
godliness no record remains to tell. On both sides there was more
heat than light, more passion than reason, and in consequence such a
tremendous hue and cry was worked up that the noise carried to the
farthest outposts of settlement, and brought home to the most sluggish
some realization of the significance of the world-wide movement of
democracy then under way, and left few quite indifferent to the import
of the tricolor cockade. It was the first great popularization of
democratic ideals in America and when the hubbub finally subsided it
was apparent to all that democracy had made a definite and stable
advance, from which it must move forward to still other vantage points.
Only a few unregenerate aristocrats shared with Gouverneur Morris his
reasons for joy at the final overthrow of Napoleon: “’Tis done, the
long agony is over. The Bourbons are restored. France reposes in the
arms of her legitimate prince”; or who agreed with Robert Treat Paine
in calling the democratic movement of the nineties “the melancholy
record of our national degradation.” The Federalists still hated
Jefferson and his “revolution of 1800,” but a triumphant agrarianism
had broken them and their power for the time being.
So tremendous a movement naturally developed its literature of
propaganda in America as elsewhere. In the main this was little more
than an echo of the old-world debate, and, in particular, of the
controversy between Burke and Paine which deeply stirred the entire
English reading-public. Among the innumerable pamphlets, four works
may be regarded as representative: Paine’s _Rights of Man_, Barlow’s
_Advice to the Privileged Orders_, John Adams’s _Discourses on Davila_,
and John Quincy Adams’s _Publicola_; and of these we need here concern
ourselves only with _The Rights of Man_ and _Publicola_, which clearly
reveal the divergent political philosophies of the two parties. The
chief point of difference is the familiar issue, so acrimoniously dealt
with during the debate over the Constitution, the question of minority
rights as opposed to the majority will. Paine had made wide appeal
with his argument of social expediency against Burke’s doctrine of
pre-contract. His celebrated dictum, “That which a whole nation chuses
to do, it has a right to do,” if granted, must destroy the reasoning
not of Burke alone, but of American Federalism, for it rested on an
interpretation of sovereignty that was vital to the question. To Paine
sovereignty was necessarily inherent in the present majority will; to
assume that it rested elsewhere, whether in crown or judiciary or past
generations, was to deny the fundamental tenet of democracy. There can
be no trusteeship superior to the sovereign people, he asserted--no
constitution beyond their rightful power to alter or destroy.
It was against this doctrine of the present sovereignty of the
majority will that eleven articles signed _Publicola_, and appearing
in the _Columbian Centinel_ of Boston from June 8 to July 27, 1791,
were directed. They were from the pen of John Quincy Adams, then in
his early twenties and lately admitted to practice at the Boston
bar. Written with considerable skill, they were at once accepted as
the most effective reply offered to Paine’s argument; but they have
lost their appeal today and seem rather slight and tenuous essays in
Federalistic legalism. The outstanding note is concern for minority
rights. To permit the majority will to function unchecked seemed to
this young lawyer to open wide the door to tyranny. It is justified by
no political philosophy, he argued, certainly not by the doctrine of
natural rights. If all men are endowed by their creator with certain
inalienable rights, it follows that such rights must suffer abridgment
from no power, whether monarchical or democratic. Power may override
those rights temporarily, but power and rights are not synonymous
terms. The gist of Adams’s argument is thus set down:
This principle, that a whole nation has a right to do whatever it
pleases, cannot in any sense whatever be admitted as true. The
eternal and immutable laws of justice and of morality are paramount
to all human legislation. The violation of those laws is certainly
within the power, but it is not among the rights of nations. The
power of a nation is the collected power of all the individuals
which compose it.... If, therefore, a majority ... are bound by no
law human or divine, and have no other rule but their sovereign
will and pleasure to direct them, what possible security can any
citizen of the nation have for the protection of his unalienable
rights? The principles of liberty must still be the sport of
arbitrary power, and the hideous form of despotism must lay aside
the diadem and the scepter, only to assume the party-colored
garments of democracy.[343]
Concerning the repository of the “eternal and immutable laws of justice
and morality,” which are paramount to all human legislation, Adams
is as vague as other Federalists; but he seems to imply that it is
the body of English Common law, and that abstract justice is somehow
interwoven with the British constitution. In other words, his argument
conducts straight to the familiar doctrine of _vox justiciae, vox
dei_, with its implied sovereignty of the judiciary. In this, with
other thinkers of the abstract justice school, Adams was upholding
the principle of judicial trusteeship in opposition to the democratic
principle of the majority will. The distinction reveals exactly the
different positions of the two parties: the democrats accepted the
principle of utilitarian expediency; the Federalists espoused the
doctrine of the ethical absolute as the final law. To a generation
still strict in religious professions, the doctrine of the ethical
absolute made strong appeal; but the democrats attacked it so sharply
that it survived only by skillfully metamorphosing itself into judicial
sanctions.
The final outcome of the long acrimonious discussion of fundamental
principles was a curious reversal of positions: whereas the democrats
were charged with being political and social romantics, appealing to
a false psychology and following abstract theory, they were in fact
idealists who pointed to the sordid facts of economic and social
reality, in justification of new programs. No change could make
things worse. The Federalists, on the other hand, finding the appeal
to realism making against them, and fearful of the majority that was
discontented with the _status quo_, took their stand upon abstract
principle that was cousin german to a rigid legalism. It was a
significant impasse to which they were brought by the exigencies of the
political struggle.
Footnotes
[341] Quoted in Hazen, “Contemporary American Opinion of the French
Revolution,” in _Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and
Political Science_, Extra Vol. XVI. The material in this excellent
study has been used freely in the present chapter.
[342] For an amusing account see Hazen, _ibid._, pp. 209-219.
[343] _The Writings of John Quincy Adams_, edited by W. C. Ford, Vol.
I, pp. 70-71.
Chapter II • Political Thinkers • The French Group
The change which came over political thought in America in consequence
of the rise of French Jacobin philosophy is not inadequately revealed
in the writings of two men, quite dissimilar in antecedents and
training, but alike in fundamental purpose--Thomas Paine and Thomas
Jefferson. Both were speculative thinkers, profoundly in sympathy with
French revolutionary ideals: but the former was detached from local
patriotisms and national interests, a delegate at large in the cause
of human rights, concerned with spreading the gospel of freedom in
all lands; the latter remained wholly American, and while a keenly
interested spectator of the French upheaval, he was primarily concerned
to discover principles that would apply to native conditions and
further the cause of American democracy. Paine therefore became the
popular disseminator of the philosophy of republicanism, and Jefferson,
the practical statesman embodying it in political programs. Warm
friends, their influence became closely interwoven during the years
when agrarian democracy was gathering its strength to strike down the
rule of Federalism.
I • Tom Paine • Republican Pamphleteer
No more striking figure emerges from the times than the figure of the
Thetford Quaker. English in birth and rearing, in middle life Paine
came to embody the republican spirit of the American revolution;
and that spirit he made it his after business to carry overseas and
spread among the discontented of all lands. He was the first modern
internationalist, at home wherever rights were to be won or wrongs
corrected. “My country is the world,” he asserted proudly, “to do good,
my religion.” Throughout his later life he was a fearless skirmisher on
the outposts of democracy--another “Free born John” Lilburne, seeking
to complete the great work begun and thwarted in an earlier century;
and his career remains a stirring record of a time when revolution
threatened to sweep away the power and privilege of all kings and
aristocracies. Naturally his zeal cost him dear in reputation. The
passions of all who feared the loss of sinecures gathered about his
head, and he became the victim of an _odium theologicum et politicum_,
without parallel in our history. The Tories hunted him in packs,
and their execration and vituperation outran all decency. In London
clubs it became the fashion for gentlemen to wear TP nails in their
boot-heels to witness how they trampled on his base principles. He
was proscribed and banished, and his books burnt by the hangman. He
was regarded as worse than a common felon and outlaw, because more
dangerous. In America gentlemen echoed the common detestation--to be a
Paine-hater was a badge of respectability. “The filthy Tom Paine,” John
Adams called him, and the phrase stuck like a burr to his reputation.
But “reason, like time,” as Paine remarked “will make its own way,” and
the years are bringing a larger measure of justice to him.
Like Hamilton, Paine was an alien, but endowed with a heritage quite
unlike that of the brilliant boy from the West Indies. When he landed
in Philadelphia in the second week in December, 1774,[344] he was
in his thirty-seventh year, and had seemingly made shipwreck of his
life. He had been schooled in misfortune and was marked as a social
inefficient. A broken staymaker and tobacconist, he had twice been
removed from the office of petty exciseman for what today would be
called unionizing activity. He had separated from his wife, and his
mean and petty environment seemed to offer no hope of a decent living.
One stroke of good fortune had come to him, when as a delegate from
his union on some business with Parliament, he made the acquaintance
of Franklin, who was taken with “those wonderful eyes of his,” and
advised America as a likely place for getting on. So provided with
little more than Franklin’s letter of introduction, he set sail for new
worlds, cherishing the unmilitant plan of setting up in Philadelphia
a seminary of polite learning for young ladies. But the times proved
unpropitious for such a venture. He found himself in a world hesitating
fearfully on the brink of revolution, the electric atmosphere of which
he found strangely congenial. He at once threw himself whole-heartedly
into the colonial dispute, quickly seized the main points, mastered
the arguments, and thirteen months after his arrival published _Common
Sense_, a pamphlet that was to spread his name and fame throughout
America.
The amazing influence of _Common Sense_ on a public opinion long
befogged by legal quibble flowed from its direct and skillful appeal to
material interests. For the first time in a tedious, inconsequential
debate, it was openly asserted that governmental policies rest on
economic foundations; that the question of American independence was
only a question of expediency, and must be determined in the light of
economic advantage. Government is no more than a utility, and that
policy which was most likely to secure freedom and security “with the
least expense and greatest benefit,” must be preferred. The point at
issue before the American people, therefore, was whether a more useful
arrangement would result from continuing the old connection with
England, or from setting up for themselves; and it must be decided,
not in the court room or council chambers, but in the countinghouse
and market place, in the field and shop, wherever plain Americans
were making a living. Let the common people consult their own needs,
and determine the case without regard to legal or constitutional
precedents. It was a simple matter to be judged in the light of common
sense and their particular interests.
To further clear thinking on this fundamental matter Paine commented
on the economic consequences to America of the English connection.
Throughout colonial history, he asserted with some disregard to
fact, dependence had resulted in disadvantage to America; England
had systematically exploited the colonies and hampered development.
Whatever prosperity had been won heretofore, had been won in spite of
English hostility and interference; the peculiar economic position of
the colonies had proved their best reliance in the past, and would
prove still more advantageous in the future, if America were free
from jealous, paternal restrictions. What reason was there to expect
generous treatment from a power that had never shown generosity in past
dealings? How skillful was the appeal to colonial self-interest is
revealed in such passages as these:
We are already greater than the King wishes us to be, and will he
not hereafter endeavour to make us less? To bring the matter to one
point, Is the power who is jealous of our prosperity, a proper
power to govern us? Whoever says _No_, to this question, is an
Independent, for independency means no more than this, whether we
shall make our own laws, or, whether the King, the greatest enemy
this continent hath, or can have, shall tell us _there shall be no
laws but such as I like_.
America would have flourished as much, and probably much more,
had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by
which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and
will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.
As Europe is our market for trade we ought to form no partial
connection with any part of it. It is the true interest of America
to steer clear of European contentions, which she never can do
while by her dependence on Britain she is made the makeweight in
the scale of British politics.
Our corn will fetch its price in any market in Europe, and our
imported goods must be paid for buy them where we will.... ’Tis as
great folly to pay a Bunker-hill price for law as for land.
But Paine well knew that self-interest may be so clouded by prejudice
as not to see the way its nose is pointing. Though the colonial
talked of his grievances, he remained colonial in psychology, held
in unconscious subjection to English traditions. He was in the
clutch of outworn loyalties--loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the
British constitution; and to this difficult problem Paine addressed
himself with great skill. To a republican, as Paine seems to have
been from his landing in America, the odium which George III had
incurred was a heaven-sent opportunity. In order to strike at the
monarchical principle, it was only necessary to point out that the
folly of the King was the best commentary upon the foolishness of
hereditary monarchy. The boldness and audacity of Paine’s attack
on the king-principle must have added greatly to the popularity of
_Common Sense_ along the frontier. It was the first clear, far-carrying
appeal for republicanism addressed to American ears. How successful
it was, how ruthlessly it stripped away the divinity that doth hedge
a king, laying bare the stupidity of the king-cult, is suggested by
the remarkable change in the American attitude towards monarchy that
a few months brought about. After the appearance of _Common Sense_,
middle and lower class Americans shed their colonial loyalties like a
last year’s garment, and thenceforth they regarded the pretentions of
kings as little better than flummery. King George’s disgraced exciseman
had his revenge; he had thrust his royal master out of the colonial
affection and destroyed the monarchical principle in America.
A more difficult task remained, that of instituting “an inquiry into
the _constitutional errors_ of the English form of government,” in
order to prove what gains would result if America took herself out of
the English system. Here Paine faced, single-handed, a solid phalanx
of lawyers. He was the first pamphleteer to question the excellence of
a constitution that was proclaimed by American Tories as the wonder of
the world and the envy of other nations. In the acrimonious disputes
between 1765 and 1775, this was the single point on which all professed
to agree. A vast deal of laudation had been uttered; innumerable legal
pamphlets had been written; and no colonial had had the temerity to
question the adequacy of the British constitution to colonial needs.
And now came this republican, with penetrating comment on its origin
and working, to disturb the common complacency by pointing out how ill
fitted it was to answer the needs of America. It was a telling attack,
made with skill and shrewd insight; and it had a great part in arousing
a bitter antagonism to the English system in the minds of the American
yeomanry.
Paine was not a constitutional historian, but he had a keen eye for
realities. The fundamental fallacy of the English system, he asserted,
lay in the so-called “mixt aristocracy,” which was presumed to gather
the wisdom of the realm in council with the king, but which was no
more than a convenient arrangement for dividing the spoils. The House
of Commons had grown out of the struggles of feudal barons against
the king. It presumed to speak for the common people, but the rights
of the people were thus recognized only to be thwarted by the old
tyrannies. The “Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons,
on whose virtue depends the freedom of England,” were held in check by
the “remains of aristocratical tyranny in the person of the Peers,”
and further restrained by the “remains of Monarchical tyranny in the
person of the King.” From the play of these elements arose the system
of checks and balances which placed control in the hands of landed
property. It was based on the assumption that “the King is not to
be trusted without being looked after,” and that “the Commons, by
being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of
confidence than the Crown.” But in spite of the supposed balance “the
provision is unequal to the task,” for the Crown, as the dispenser of
places and pensions, is more than a match for Commons in the game of
politics.
The will of the king; is as much the law of the land in Britain
as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding
directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the
formidable shape of an act of parliament. For the fate of Charles
the First hath only made kings more subtle--not more just.
This was but the beginning of a long assault on the British
constitution which was to engage him much in after life. _Common Sense_
was a pronouncement of the new philosophy of republicanism that was
taking firm hold of the American mind, and which the French Revolution
was to spread so widely. It was a notable contribution, of which Paine
to the end of his life was justly proud.
As he came to America almost casually, with no conscious revolutionary
intent, so in the critical year 1787 he returned to Europe with the
peaceful intention of perfecting an iron bridge on which he was
engaged. True to his Quaker breeding he was more interested in the
arts of peace than of war, but again circumstance was too much for
him. Before he had completed his bridge, delegates from France came to
invite him to a seat in the National Assembly. A new day was rising
there; the constitution of a freer order was being constructed, and so
competent a workman could not be spared. In the thick of that eager
world of constitution-making, Paine finally clarified his political
philosophy and gave it wide currency. He became the pamphleteer of
revolution to the English-speaking world, to Philadelphia and New York
equally with London. Yet he was never an extremist; he was a Girondist
rather than a Jacobin, and when the Girondists were overthrown and a
dictatorship set up, he remained a constitutionalist. By the Jacobin
radicals he came to be regarded as a reactionary from his willingness
to retain monarchy in France; but Paine was a practical Englishman with
a shrewd judgment of what was politically possible, and he refused to
outrun reasonable expectations of accomplishment.
It was the simplicity and clarity of his political philosophy that
made its appeal so widely effective. His thinking turned on the two
fundamental questions, the source of government and the purpose for
which it is instituted among men; and the major premise on which
he reared his logic was the thesis that sovereignty inheres in the
majority will. At the basis of his philosophy was the natural-rights
theory, but given a fresh significance and vitality by the assertion
of the doctrine of continuous reaffirmation of the social compact.
Instead of deriving the sovereign state from a fictitious compact,
presumably entered into in a remote past, he derived it--as Roger
Williams had done a century and half before--from a continuous compact
reaffirmed by each generation. With the birth of each individual appear
fresh rights which no pre-contract can justly circumscribe or nullify;
ancestral arrangements are valid only to the extent that they are
acceptable to the living. Hence it follows, first, that the general
body of the people may at any time remake the fundamental law, and
bring it into accord with present desire; and second, that there can be
no law superior to this popular will expressed through the majority.
His most celebrated dictum--“That which a nation chuses to do it has a
right to do”--a dictum that aroused a bitterer hostility than any other
of his pronouncements--was the logical expression of his republicanism
that differentiated between the sovereign people and their agency, the
government; and this in turn he justified by a celebrated saying out
of Swift, “Government is a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of
many heads.” Like Jefferson, he would not have government kept from the
people, the agent domineer over the principal.
The purpose of government Paine discovered in the Benthamite principle
of expediency. If a diffused well-being results from the policies
of government, such government is justified; but if the tax-levies
are wasted in unsocial ways, if unjust impositions are levied, if
exploitation or tyranny results, such government is not justified.
The agent has cheated the principal, and must be called to account.
The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for
the “_res publica_, the public affairs, or the public good”; any
government that “does not make the _res publica_ its whole and sole
object, is not a good government.” In its most obvious phase, concern
for the _res publica_ means concern for the national economy, and this
in turn conditions the taxes that shall be levied and the ends for
which they shall be spent--whether upon the arts of peace or war. A
beneficent government has no need of standing armies and navies, or an
inquisitorial police; it is established in the hearts of the people
and rests securely on the common good will. It is the injustice of
government that creates armies to defend the earnings of injustice.
But every wise government will respect its limitations. As a child of
the eighteenth century, Paine hated the leviathan state as a monster
created by a minority to serve the ends of tyranny. The political
state he accepted as a present necessity, but he would not have its
prestige magnified and the temptation to tyranny increased by the cult
of nationalism. “Government is no farther necessary,” he believed,
“than to supply the few cases to which society and civilization are not
conveniently competent.” At best it is an artificial thing.
Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life; and
when even the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it
is a thing more in name and idea than in fact.... The more perfect
civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because
the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself....
All the great laws of society are laws of nature.[345]
The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is found in
_The Rights of Man_. This extraordinary work, the most influential
English contribution to the revolutionary movement, was an examination
of the English constitution in the light of what Paine held were the
true source and ends of government. It is a brilliant reply to Burke,
who rested his interpretation of the English constitution on the
legal ground of the common law of contract. Following the Revolution
of 1688, Burke had argued, the English people through their legal
representatives, entered into a solemn contract, binding “themselves,
their heirs, and posterities forever,” to certain express terms; and
neither in law nor in equity were they, of whatever generation, free
to change those terms except by the consent of both parties to the
contract. This was an elaboration of the theory of government tacitly
held by the Old Whigs, which derived government from a perpetual civil
contract as opposed to the radical doctrine of a revocable social
contract; and in attacking it Paine allied himself with such thinkers
as Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau.[346] He pointed out the
absurdity of carrying over the law of private property into the high
realm of political principle--to seek to impose the dead past upon the
living sovereignty. If sovereignty inhered in the English people in
1688, it must inhere in the English people in 1793, unless it had been
violently wrested from them; no parchment terms of another age can bind
that sovereignty other than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of
a single, static contract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation
of natural rights. Any generation--as the generation of 1688--is
competent to deal with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter
away the rights of those unborn; such a contract on the face of it is
null and void.
Every age and generation must be free to act for itself _in
all cases_ as the ages and generations which preceded it. The
vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most
ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.... Every generation is,
and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions
require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be
accommodated.[347]
Burke’s defense fares even worse when the argument is examined in the
light of expediency. Illogical as the English system must appear to the
political philosopher, can it plead the justification that it works;
that it does well the things it is paid to do; that it makes the _res
publica_ its main concern? The reply to such questions, Paine believed,
should be sought in the condition of the national economy; more
particularly by an examination of the account-books of the exchequer.
The English people paid annually seventeen millions sterling for the
maintenance of government, and what did they get in return? Nine
millions of the total went to pay interest on old wars, which in the
budget was known as the funded debt; of the remaining eight millions
the larger part was spent in new wars and sinecure pensions; whereas
the real needs of England--the true _res publica_--were shamelessly
neglected. The English people got little for their money except new
debts to justify new taxes. The poor were even taxed for the benefit
of the great. Thus my Lord Onslow, who was particularly zealous in
the business of proscribing Paine as “the common enemy of us all,”
drew four thousand pounds from the royal chest in sinecures, which
made him “the principal pauper of the neighbourhood, and occasioning a
greater expense than the poor, the aged, and the infirm, for ten miles
around.”[348] Government on the hereditary principle of Burke did not
appear to advantage in the light of such facts.
The injustice of aristocratic government, Paine believed, was fast
bringing it to its “rotting time” in England. “The opinions of men with
respect to government are changing fast in all countries; the enormous
expense of governments has provoked the people to think, by making
them feel.” Englishmen must soon throw aside the outworn monarchical
system and set up a republic. Economics was on the side of revolution.
The great work of revising fundamental laws was the pressing business
of the time. If this could be done peacefully, by means of a national
convention, it were well; if not, it would come by means of an uprising
of the people. It was no lawyer’s business to be determined by the
law of private property, but a practical matter of determining the
real will of the nation and putting it into execution. The judgment of
the people must be recorded, and the judgment of the people could be
had only through an adequate system of representation based on free
publicity. “I do not believe that the people of England have ever
been fairly and candidly dealt by,” Paine declared. Henceforth they
must be taken into full confidence. There must be no more _arcana
imperii_--“Nations can have no secrets; and the secrets of courts, like
those of individuals, are always their defects.”[349]
One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been,
that it has led to a discovery of the principles, and laid open the
imposition of governments. All the revolutions till then had worked
within the atmosphere of a court, and never on the grand floor of
a nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers.... In
all cases they took care to represent government as a thing made up
of mysteries, which only themselves understood; and they hid from
the understanding of the nation the only thing that was beneficial
to know, namely, _That government is nothing more than a national
association acting on the principles of a society._[350]
For the follies of government the people pay the bill--it was this
elementary lesson in public economics that Paine sought to impress upon
the popular mind; and they would still be cheated and plundered by
gentlemen who prospered in cozening, until they took matters into their
own hands. He had no fear of popular government. He believed in the
essential fairness of men and their capacity to deal wisely with the
problems of society if the necessary information were set before them.
“As far as my experience in public life extends, I have ever observed
that the great mass of people are always just, both in their intentions
and their object; but the true method of attaining such purpose does
not always appear at once,”[351] he argued before the French Assembly;
and the words express his settled conviction. Those who fear the
people usually have very good reasons. Heretofore politics had been
jealously guarded from free discussion; but now that the common people
were coming to understand that government is justified only by its
measure of service, the beginning of a new age was at hand.
The ripest product of Paine’s speculations on the relation of
government to the individual, is _Agrarian Justice_, a work too little
known to modern readers. It is a slender tract, written in the winter
of 1795-96, although not published till a year later; and it was an
answer to a sermon by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff,[352] entitled _The
Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_. In this
remarkable essay, Paine advanced from political to social theory,
pushing his thought into the unexplored realm of economic justice. The
prime impulse of his speculation is found in the contrast between the
augmenting poverty of Europe and the ideal of equality; a contrast
which in France had lately produced a proletarian revolt under Babeuf,
and which in England was harshly aggravated by the brutal inclosure
movement of the last forty years of the eighteenth century. The
question which he considers lies at the heart of our social problem,
namely, whether civilization is competent to cure the disease of
poverty which everywhere it disseminates?
The question emerged naturally from the development of Paine’s
thinking. It was implied in his major principle of the _res publica_,
and the solution must lie in the problem of the relation of government
to social well-being. But in prescribing means to end, he parted
company from Babeuf.[353] The latter was a Communist who approached
the problem from the point of view of the proletarian who had been
disappointed of the promised equality; whereas Paine, like Jefferson,
was essentially a Physiocratic agrarian. His long residence in America
had confirmed him in the belief that land monopoly was the root of
economic inequality; and his observations of the evictions then going
on in England, uprooting the peasants and sending them to industrial
centers to become wage-workers, strengthened his conviction. The land
problem must be solved if civilization were to be worth its cost, and
the technique of the solution, he believed, must be worked out by the
state. With his usual directness Paine went to the heart of the problem:
The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought
still to be, that the condition of every person born into the
world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be
worse than if he had been born before that period. But the fact
is, that the condition of millions, in every country in Europe, is
far worse than if they had been born before civilization began, or
had been born among the Indians of North-America at the present
day.[354]
It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am
pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as
it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should
be.[355]... The contrast of affluence and wretchedness ... is like
dead and living bodies chained together.[356]
It is the practice of what has unjustly obtained the name of
civilization ... to make some provision for persons becoming poor
and wretched only at the time they become so. Would it not, even as
a matter of economy, be far better to adopt means to prevent their
becoming poor?[357]
The crux of the problem, Paine proceeds to point out, lies in the
principle of private property; whether property rights are sacredly
individual--as Locke had asserted--or are limited by social needs.
In reply to this searching question Paine laid down the principle of
social values, a theory curiously modern and profoundly suggestive,
which makes _Agrarian Justice_ read like a chapter out of _Progress
and Poverty_. The principle is so broad, as Paine states it, that it
applies equally to a capitalistic and an agrarian order.
Personal property is the _effect of society_; and it is as
impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without
the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally....
All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a
man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society;
and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of
civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society
from whence the whole came ... if we examine the case minutely it
will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in
many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that
produced it; and the consequence of which is, that the working hand
perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence. It is,
perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the
profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for
the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages
daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better
for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard
it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason, that because he
might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take
it.[358]
It is the value of the improvement only, and not of the earth
itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore,
of cultivated land, owes to the community a _ground-rent_ ... for
the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the
fund proposed in this plan is to issue.[359]
Having thus pointed out an equitable source of social income--the
returning to society what society has created--Paine proposed to deal
with the problem of poverty by means of a ten per cent inheritance tax
to provide a fund for the endowment of the young and the pensioning
of the old. It was an early form of the state insurance idea. In his
own thinking Paine doubtless went much farther than this, but the
practical difficulty of separating the social moiety from the private
right inclined him to favor an inheritance tax as the simplest and best
plan; that it would lead to greater things as the social intelligence
quickened, he very likely believed. To bring men to realize that
society is responsible for poverty, and that its total eradication must
be regarded as the first object of civilization, was his prime purpose.
He was seeking to awaken the social conscience of his generation--a
generation sorely in need of idealism to offset its love of profits.
_Agrarian Justice_ was a contribution to the slowly developing
humanitarian sentiment, and it made appeal to minds already aroused by
the revolutionary movement. The republican clubs that were springing up
in England and America reflected the new social thought, and the most
radical became the most humanitarian. As early as 1791, in an address
signed by Horne Tooke, one of Paine’s English lieutenants, it was
declared:
We are oppressed with a heavy national debt, a burthen of taxes, an
expensive administration of government, beyond those of any people
in the world. We have also a very numerous poor; and we hold that
the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy,
and poverty, is far superior to that of supplying the invented
wants of courtly extravagance, ambition, and intrigue.[360]
The more critically one follows the thought of Paine the more evident
it becomes that the master passion of his later years was concern for
a new social economy. The well-being of society became an engrossing
interest with him; and his zeal for political revolution was predicated
on the belief that popular control of the political state was a
necessary preliminary to a juster social economy. Nothing was to be
expected from the old aristocratic order. His main attack, therefore,
was directed against the monarchical system, but now and then he paused
to level a thrust at the rising system of capitalism. If he hated King
George and the Tories, he hated the younger Pitt and the imperialists
even more. Over against _Agrarian Justice_ should be set his pamphlet
entitled _The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance_,
written in 1796, a skillful attack upon the new funding system. Paine
could not foresee, of course, the enormous expansion of credit that was
to accompany the industrial revolution, but in his commentary on the
quantitative theory of money, and the social consequences of inflation,
he unconsciously foretold later conditions. War he regarded as the
great waster, the fruitful mother of social misery. With his Quaker
training he was dedicated to pacifism, and he spent his life warring
against war, and disease, and poverty, and injustice, and ignorance,
and unreason; but no other war would he sanction. For those futile wars
bred of the ambitions of courts and monarchs, and which for all their
cost in blood and money served no social purpose, he would substitute
arbitration. “War is the Pharo-table of governments, and nations the
dupes of the game,” he declared[361]--whereas arbitration is an appeal
to reason which alone should adjudicate and determine between nations.
It would be idle to attempt to trace to their sources the major ideas
of his philosophy. Probably Paine did not know where he got them. He
was not a student like John Adams, familiar with all the political
philosophers; rather he was an epitome of a world in revolution. He
absorbed ideas like a sponge. He was so wholly a child of his age that
the intellectual processes of the age were no other than his own. But
he was very much more than an echo; he possessed that rarest of gifts,
an original mind. He looked at the world through no eyes than his
own. There is a curious remark in an early pamphlet which admirably
expresses his method: “When precedents fail to assist us, we must
return to the first principles of things for information, and _think_,
as if we were the _first men_ that thought.”[362] It was his remarkable
ability to think from first principles that gave such freshness and
vigor to his pen. He drew largely from French thought, but at bottom he
remained English. If he was Gallic in his psychology of human nature
and his passionate humanitarianism, he was English in his practical
political sense and insistence on the economic sources of political
action. In his political theory he was curiously like Roger Williams.
A thoroughgoing idealist in aim, generous and unsparing in service
to humanity, he was a confirmed realist in the handling of facts. He
refused to be duped by imposing appearances or great reputations, but
spoke out unpleasant truths which gentlemen wished to keep hidden.
Clear and direct in expression, he seasoned his writings with homely
figures and a frequent audacity of phrase that made wide appeal.
He was probably the greatest pamphleteer that the English race has
produced-and one of its great idealists.
During his residence abroad Paine habitually thought and spoke
of himself as an American. He conceived it to be his mission to
disseminate throughout Europe the beneficent principles of the
American Revolution; yet nowhere was he hated more virulently than
in America. To the animosity which his political principles excited
among Federalists was added the detestation of the orthodox for the
deism of the _Age of Reason_. The ministers outdid the politicians in
virulent attack upon his reputation, until the generous Quaker, the
friend of humanity and citizen of the world, was shrunk and distorted
into “the infidel Tom Paine.” It was a strange reward for a life spent
in the service of mankind. Like all idealists he made the mistake of
underestimating the defensive strength of vested interests, and their
skill in arousing the mob prejudice. His thousands of followers among
the disfranchised poor could not protect his reputation against the
attacks of the rich and powerful. Although reason may “make its own
way,” it makes its way with wearisome slowness and at unreasonable
cost. How tremendous were the obstacles that liberalism confronted in
post-revolutionary America is revealed with sufficient clearness in the
odium visited upon our great republican pamphleteer.
II • Thomas Jefferson • Agrarian Democrat
The years following the great defeat were disastrous to the party of
agrarian democracy. Under the brilliant leadership of Hamilton the
Federalists went forward confidently, gaining daily a firmer grip
on the machinery of government, and establishing their principles
in far-reaching legislative enactments. Their appeal to the wealthy
classes, to those who made themselves audible above the clamor, was
electrical. Hamilton was the hero of the hour, and the effusive
approval that augmented with every added profit to the money brokers,
seemed to indicate that the country was enthusiastically behind the
Federalist policy. To what despondency the democrats were reduced is
revealed in Maclay’s _Journal_, with its caustic comment on political
measures and motives. But the tide was already at the turn. The ideas
let loose by the French Revolution were running swiftly through
America, awakening a militant spirit in the democracy. Antagonism to
the aristocratic arrogance of Federalism, and disgust at its coercive
measures, were mounting fast. If that inchoate discontent were
organized and directed by a skillful leader, it might prove strong
enough to thrust the Hamiltonian party from power. To that work Thomas
Jefferson devoted himself with immense tact and untiring patience. A
master of political strategy, he spun his webs far and wide, quietly
awaiting the time when the bumbling Federalist bees should range too
carelessly in search of their honey. Accepted at once as the leader of
agrarian America, he was to prove in the course of a long life the most
original and native of the political leaders of the time.
Despite the mass of comment that has gathered about Jefferson, the full
reach and significance of his political philosophy remains too little
understood. Uncritical praise and censure have obscured or distorted
his purpose, and allied his principles with narrow and temporary ends.
Detraction will not let him alone. The hostility of his enemies, as a
recent biographer has remarked, has frequently taken “the peculiar form
of editing his works or writing his life.”[363] For this distortion
there is, perhaps, more than usual excuse. Certainly Jefferson is the
most elusive of our great political leaders. Apparently inconsistent,
changing his program with the changing times, he seemed to his enemies
devoid of principle, a shallow demagogue who incited the mob in order
to dupe the people. One of the most bitterly hated and greatly loved
men in the day when love and hate were intense, he was the spokesman
of the new order at a time of transition from a dependent monarchical
state, to an independent republican state. Back of the figure of
Jefferson, with his aristocratic head set on a plebeian frame, was
the philosophy of a new age and a new people--an age and a people not
yet come to the consistency of maturity, but feeling a way through
experiment to solid achievement. Far more completely than any other
American of his generation he embodied the idealisms of the great
revolution--its faith in human nature, its economic individualism,
its conviction that here in America, through the instrumentality of
political democracy, the lot of the common man should somehow be made
better.
From the distinguished group of contemporary political thinkers
Jefferson emerges as the preëminent intellectual, widely read, familiar
with ideas, at home in the field of speculation, a critical observer
of men and manners. All his life he was a student, and his devotion to
his books, running often to fifteen hours a day, recalls the heroic
zeal of Puritan scholars. He was trained in the law, but he was too
much the intellectual, too curious about all sorts of things, to
remain a lawyer. For such a man the appeal of political speculation
was irresistible, and early in life he began a wide reading in the
political classics that far outweighed Coke and Blackstone in creative
influence on his mind. He was equally at home with the English
liberals of the seventeenth century and the French liberals of the
eighteenth; and if he came eventually to set the French school above
the English, it was because he found in the back-to-nature philosophy,
with its corollary of an agrarian economics and its emphasis on social
well-being, a philosophy more consonant with Virginian experience
and his own temperament than Locke’s philosophy of property. But
he was very far from being a narrow French partisan, as has been
often charged; rather he judged old-world theory in the light of its
applicability to existing American conditions, and restrained his
love of speculation by immediate practical considerations. The man of
affairs kept a watchful eye on the philosopher in his study.
In the major doctrines of his political philosophy Jefferson was
an amalgam of English and French liberalisms, supplemented by the
conscious influence of the American frontier. That fusion early took
place in his mind. The first bill that he introduced into the Virginia
Assembly, at the age of twenty-six, was a bill to permit slave-owners
to manumit their slaves; and his first published pamphlet, issued
in 1774,[364] rejected the legal reasoning of John Dickinson and
Daniel Dulaney--supporting the parliamentary right to impose external
taxation--and took its stand on the doctrine of natural right to
local self-government and freedom of trade. When two years later he
drafted the Declaration of Independence the fusion was complete. The
strong influence of French humanitarianism is revealed in the passage
on slavery that was stricken out on the floor of Congress, and more
significantly in the change in the familiar phrasing of the several
natural rights. Samuel Adams and other followers of Locke had been
content with the classical enumeration of life, liberty, and property;
but in Jefferson’s hands the English doctrine was given a revolutionary
shift. The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for “property” marks
a complete break with the Whiggish doctrine of property rights that
Locke had bequeathed to the English middle class, and the substitution
of a broader sociological conception; and it was this substitution
that gave to the document the note of idealism which was to make its
appeal so perennially human and vital. The words were far more than
a political gesture to draw popular support; they were an embodiment
of Jefferson’s deepest convictions, and his total life thenceforward
was given over to the work of providing such political machinery for
America as should guarantee for all the enjoyment of those inalienable
rights. If the fact that he set the pursuit of happiness above
abstract property rights is to be taken as proof that Jefferson was an
impractical French theorist, the critic may take what comfort he can
from his deduction.
That Jefferson was an idealist was singularly fortunate for America;
there was need of idealism to leaven the materialistic realism of the
times. It was a critical period and he came at the turn of a long
running tide. He watched the beginnings of the political shift in
America from isolated colonial commonwealths to a unitary sovereign
state; and his wide reading and close observation had convinced him
that the impending change was fraught with momentous issues for the
common man. He had meditated much on the social results of the slow
oscillations in western civilization between social decentralization
and centralization, with their contrasting political and economic
structures; and he understood how the movement from simplicity to
complexity--from freedom to regimentation--creates a psychology and
an institutionalism that conducts straight to the leviathan state,
controlled by a ruling caste, serving the demands of exploitation,
heedless of the well-being of the regimented mass. This great lesson
in social drifts he brought home to America. There had been created
here the psychology and institutions of a decentralized society, with
a corresponding exaltation of the individual and the breakdown of
caste. In the broad spaces of America the old-world coercive state had
dwindled to a mere police arrangement for parochial duties; the free
citizen refused to be regimented; the several communities insisted
on managing their affairs by their own agents. Such was the natural
consequence of free economics; but with the turning of the tide would
not the drift towards centralization nullify the results of earlier
American experience and repeat here the unhappy history of European
peoples?
To the philosophic mind of Jefferson, such a question was not academic,
but urgent and vital. He had been bred in that older world, he believed
passionately in the excellence of its virtues, and his political and
social philosophy was determined by that experience. He sprang from a
society deep-rooted in an agrarian economy, and he wished to preserve
that society. Born on the Virginia frontier, he had never seen a hamlet
so large as twenty houses before his eighteenth year; his neighbors
and associates were capable and vigorous frontier democrats, who
managed the affairs of local government with the same homespun skill
that went to their farming. “It is not difficult,” remarks an acute
critic, “to see how the great principle of Jefferson’s life--absolute
faith in democracy--came to him. He was the product of the first West
in American history; he grew up with men who ruled their country well,
who fought the Indians valiantly.... Jefferson loved his backwoods
neighbors, and he, in turn, was loved by them.”[365] This early
conviction of the excellence of a freehold order was confirmed by later
experience; wide observation and much travel convinced him that no
other people was so favored by circumstance as the American, or so
vigorously self-reliant. That such well-being resulted from a plastic
economics, he regarded as self-evident; and from this economic freedom
came political freedom. In his European travels he saw everywhere
want and wretchedness dwelling in the shadow of the aristocratic
state, and he could not dissociate the two. Political tyranny was the
outward and visible sign of greater tyrannies that ran down to the very
roots of society; the leviathan state was the convenient instrument
through which those tyrannies took their heavy toll of the common
well-being. America was a land of free men; it was exploited neither
by an aristocracy nor a plutocracy. Surely there could be no greater
or nobler ambition for an American than to assist in preserving his
country from the misery that must attend a change from the present
happy condition of democratic industry, to the serfdom of the European
wage-taker and peasant.
To a mind imbued with such conceptions the appeal of the Physiocratic
theory of social economics would be irresistible. The ground was
prepared for the sowing of the seeds of the liberal French thought.
With its emphasis laid upon agriculture, its doctrine of the _produit
net_, its principle of _laissez faire_, and its social concern, the
Physiocratic theory accorded exactly with his familiar experience,
and it must have seemed to Jefferson that it was little other than a
deduction from the open facts of American life. He had read much in
the works of the Physiocratic group, and was intimately acquainted
with DuPont de Nemours; and the major principles of the school sank
deep into his mind and creatively determined his thinking, with the
result that Jeffersonian democracy as it spread through Virginia and
west along the frontier assumed a pronounced Physiocratic bias. The
sharp struggle between Jefferson and Hamilton must be reckoned, in
part at least, a conflict between the rival principles of Quesnay and
Adam Smith, between an agrarian and a capitalistic economy. Much as
Jefferson feared the ambitions of an aristocracy, he feared quite as
much the creation of a proletariat. As he looked into the future he saw
great cities rising to breed their Roman mobs, duped and exploited by
demagogues, the convenient tools of autocracy; and counting the cost
in social well-being, he set his face like flint against the rising
capitalism. A free yeomanry he regarded as the backbone of every great
people, the producers of the real wealth, the guardians of manly
independence; and the number of factory workers measured for him the
extent of social disease. It is this Physiocratic conception that
explains his bitter hostility to protective tariffs, national banks,
funding manipulations, the machinery of credit, and all the agencies of
capitalism which Hamilton was skillfully erecting in America. Not to
have hated such things Jefferson must first have emptied his mind of
the teachings of experience and the lessons of the social philosophers.
In the _Notes on Virginia_ there is a well-known passage that amplifies
his favorite thesis that a sound American economy was an agrarian
economy:
The political economists of Europe have established it as a
principle, that every State should endeavor to manufacture for
itself; and this principle, like many others, we transfer to
America.... But we have an immensity of land courting the industry
of the husbandman. Is it best then that all our citizens should
be employed in its improvement, or that one half should be called
off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft arts for
the other? 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. It is the
focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise
might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in
the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation
has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not
looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the
husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties
and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and
venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools
for the designs of ambition.... Generally speaking 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. While we have land to
labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a
work-bench, or twirling a distaff ... for the general operations
of manufacture, let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better
to carry provisions and materials to work-men there, than bring
them to the provisions and materials, and with them their manners
and principles.... The mobs of great cities add just so much to
the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the
human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve
a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon
eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.[366]
Such was his attitude in 1782, an attitude identical with Franklin’s.
Thirty-four years later he had modified his views of industrialism.
The bitter experience of the Napoleonic wars, with the hardships
and losses visited upon neutral shipping, had convinced him of the
need of domestic manufactures, and he was then deeply interested in
improved machinery, new methods, original ventures. “We must now place
the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturist,” he conceded, or
remain in economic dependence. But how much further the country should
be industrialized, whether it “shall be proposed to go beyond our own
supply” to compete in foreign markets, was not yet clear to him; the
problem remained still to be determined whether “the _surplus_ labor”
would be “most beneficially employed in the culture of the earth, or
in the fabrications of art.”[367] In such commentary Jefferson failed
to measure the thrust of economic determinism that drives every people
to go through with the industrial revolution, once it is begun; but
if we recall the primary principle of his political philosophy, that
the “care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction,
is the first and only legitimate object of good government,” we may
perhaps judge what would have been his attitude towards a centralized
industrialism. He would have judged its desirability, not by the
balance sheet of corporate business, but by the social ledger. As a
social economist he could not think in terms of the economic man, nor
simplify human beings to labor commodity, nor reduce the social tie
to the cash nexus. It is inconceivable that he should have shared
Hamilton’s satisfaction at the contemplation of women and children--and
many of the latter “of tender age”--wasting away in the mills; he was
too social-minded for that, too much an idealist, too human in short.
Though necessity might force him away from a simple agrarian economy,
it does not follow that he would become partisan to a centralizing
industrialism, with control vested in banking credit.
It is a common charge that Jefferson was consumed with suspicion, and
it is set down against him as the mark of a mean and ungenerous nature.
That in later years he was suspicious of fair-spoken advocates and
plausible programs was as true of Jefferson as of Sam Adams; he had
learned like the Boston democrat the virtue of the saying, _felix qui
cautus_, and with so much at stake he would practice caution. He feared
many things, for he was acutely aware of the incapacity of the heedless
majority to defend itself against an able and instructed minority. As
a child of an aristocratic age he fell into the mistake of visualizing
that minority in the guise of a landed gentry, rather than in the
guise of plutocracy; but in his quick fear of a minority he had all
history as counselor. When he took his seat in Washington’s cabinet
his suspicions of the Hamiltonian program were quickly aroused. He
believed that a monarchy was aimed at, and if that proved unattainable,
then a highly centralized state designed to hold in check the
democratic tendencies. His line of reasoning may be summarized thus:
In consequence of the republican enthusiasm of the early years of the
Revolution, democratic reorganization of the several state governments
had been successfully achieved. Very great progress towards democracy
had been made. Certain legislative acts of agrarian assemblies were now
being turned against democracy, to invalidate it as a working system of
government. But if agrarian majorities had used their power to enact
laws beneficial to their interests, they were only applying a lesson
learned from long experience with aristocratic legislatures. Such acts
were no serious indictment of the democratic principle, and to make
partisan use of them to justify curtailing the powers of the majority,
was a betrayal of popular rights. And this, Jefferson believed, was
the deliberate purpose of the Federalist leaders. Unable to stem the
popular tide in the several commonwealths, the wealthy minority had
devised a plan to superimpose upon the sovereign commonwealths a
centralized federal government, so hedged about as to lie beyond the
reach of local majorities, and hence able to override and nullify the
democratic will. Once safely established, this federal government would
gather fresh powers into its hands, until there emerged a rigorous
machine, modeled after the British system, and as little regardful of
the common interests. If this were not the Federalist purpose, why all
the praise of the British system as the ripe product of experience,
exactly adapted to the political genius of the English race?
In the matter of appeal to past experience, which provided the staple
of Federalist argument, Jefferson discovered fresh grounds of fear.
The past he looked upon as evil, and the record of experience was a
tale of injustice and bitter wrong. He would not have America follow
the trodden paths, for whither they led he knew too well. He would
countenance no entangling alliances with old-world upper-class systems
of statecraft, for such systems would reproduce in America the evils
it should be the chief business of America to prevent. There must be
erected here no counterpart of the European state; there must be no
king, no aristocracy, no plutocracy; but a new democratic organization
of government, in which the welfare of the whole people should be the
sole concern.
When I left Congress in ’76 [he wrote as an old man] it was in the
persuasion that our whole code must be revised, adapted to our
republican form of government, and now that we had no negatives of
Councils, Governors and Kings to restrain us from doing right, that
it should be corrected in all its parts with a single eye to reason
and the good of those for whose government it was planned.[368]
Not past experience but present need should instruct America in
drawing the plans of a new system of government and a new code of
law. In analyzing the evils of European systems Jefferson came to
certain conclusions that dominated all his later thinking, and
that may be phrased thus: The political state tends inevitably to
self-aggrandizement, the logical outcome of which is a political
leviathan, too big and too complex for popular control. With sovereign
powers vested in the hands of governmental agents, those agents lie
under a constant temptation to corruption and tyranny, and in the end
they align the powers of the state on the side of the most ambitious
and capable. The greater the power of government, the ampler its
revenues, the more energetic its administration, the more dangerous
it may become to the rights of men; for where the prize is greatest,
men struggle most ruthlessly, and what prize could be greater than the
privilege of exploiting society in the name of the state? History knows
no objective more tempting to the will to power, than the control of
the absolute state. A government adequately socialized, intent solely
upon furthering the common well-being, Jefferson would have been
unanxious about. But such governments existed only in the dreams of
Sir Thomas More and the Utopians; he could discover none such either
in the past or present. Everywhere strong governments were little more
than efficient tax-machines to support armies and provide subsidies and
places for the minority. Against such forces of corruption the people
struggle in vain.
If such was the common testimony of old-world experience--and no man
who knew the inner workings of government there would deny it--what
reason was there to expect that like causes would work unlike results
in America? To what purpose was the talk of strong government
encouraged amongst the holders of the public debt? To what end had
lobbyists for the funding bill invaded the floor of Congress? It was
idle to expect in America a nullification of the law, that where power
sits within, corruption waits without. The love of power is universal.
Most men are potential autocrats, the strong and capable may become
actual autocrats. No man is good enough, no group of men, to be trusted
with unrestrained powers--in America any more than in Europe. A
centralized government in control of the tax-machine, and secure from
popular restraint, would undo the results of the Revolutionary War. The
movement to consolidate power, Jefferson asserted, was “but Toryism in
disguise.” “The generalizing and concentrating all cares and powers
into one body ... has destroyed the liberty and the rights of men in
every government which has ever existed under the sun.”
Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a
single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from
under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance
of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details
necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the
same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their
constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder
and waste.[369]
The practice of local home rule had grown up in America in response to
native conditions; it had resulted from democratic needs; and Jefferson
was too thoroughly American, too instinctively democratic, to overlook
the significance of local sovereignties in a democratic philosophy.
From the sharp contrast between American and European practice he
deduced a cardinal principle, namely, that good government springs from
a common interest in public affairs, and that such common interest
is possible only when the field of activities is circumscribed. Set
government apart from the people, or above them, and public interest
is lost in a sense of futility. The danger of an encroaching tyranny
by a superimposed sovereignty, is made easy by the public lethargy
in respect to distant and unfamiliar things, and establishes itself
through the psychology of custom. Jefferson was never greatly concerned
about stable government; he was very much more concerned about
responsive government--that it should faithfully serve the majority
will. He made no god of the political state. He had no conventional
reverence for established law and order; he inquired rather what
sort of law and order he was asked to accept, was it just or unjust.
Changing conditions make ancient good uncouth, and established
institutions tend to fall into dry-rot, or to become tyrannical. Men
are more important than constitutions, and the public well-being is
more sacred than statutes. An occasional revolution, he commented
grimly apropos of the hue and cry over Shays’s Rebellion, is salutary;
if it does not come of itself it might well be brought about. Progress
in government results from experiment; and it is easier and safer to
experiment on a small scale than on a great. Inertia increases with
size, and the more consolidated the government, the more unyielding it
becomes. The longest delayed revolutions are the gravest.
In asserting the principle of the majority will, Jefferson like other
democratic thinkers of the time, found himself countered by the
argument of abstract justice. Vehement denunciation had greeted Paine’s
doctrine that what a nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. There
can be no rights, it was confidently asserted, superior to the right.
The people may legislate, but it remains to determine the validity of
statutes in the light of justice; that which is unjust is _ipso facto_
null and void. It was Coke’s doctrine of judicial review, set up in
America after its repudiation in England, and Jefferson’s hostility
to it was bitter. As an intellectual he had none of the lawyer’s
complacency with legal principles, or conceit of the law’s sufficiency;
and as a democrat he would not yield sovereignty into the hands of the
judiciary. He had no veneration for the Common Law of England: it had
grown up by slow accretions during centuries of absolutism; how should
it be expected to answer the needs of a freer age? It must be purged
of outworn elements, imbued with democratic sympathies. The Revolution
had been fought in defense of rights that are broader and more human
than legal principles; and to hand over those rights to be interpreted
away by lawyers, seemed to him moonstruck madness. It was the law of
Blackstone rather than of Coke that he feared most--that “elegant”
canonization of the malign influences of Tory reaction, and that was
so cried up by the smatterers and “ephemeral insects of the law” in
America; whereas Coke “was as good a Whig as ever wrote”:
Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are
making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of
independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a
Hume or a Blackstone. These two books, and especially the former
[Blackstone], have done more towards the suppression of the
liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte,
and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will
stand loaded before the judgment seat of his Maker.[370]
As Jefferson grew older his fear of judicial encroachment on the
popular will became acute, but it shifted from distrust of the Common
Law to concern over the Supreme Court. A strong and outspoken hatred
of the Federal judiciary runs through all his later writings, and he
lost no opportunity to popularize the thesis--“It is a misnomer to call
a government republican, in which a branch of the supreme power is
independent of the nation.”
The great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary. That body,
like gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, and unalarming
advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is
engulfing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that
which feeds them.[371]
It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider the judges as the
ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one
which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.... The
Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to
whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party,
its members would become despots.[372]
As Jefferson watched Chief Justice John Marshall gathering all
things within the purview of the Federal judiciary, preparing future
strongholds by the skillful use of _obiter dicta_, legislating by
means of judicial interpretation, nullifying the will of the majority,
and with the power of repeal made nugatory by the complexity of the
process, he saw clearly what the outcome would be. Surely that was
no democracy where judge-made laws were enforced by bench warrants,
and where the sovereign power lay beyond the immediate reach of the
popular will. The government that he desired would not rest on the
legal fiction of an abstract justice above statutes and constitutions,
whereof a group of judicial gentlemen were the repositories and
guardians. It would be like Paine’s, “a plain thing, and fitted to the
capacity of many heads”; for “where the law of the majority ceases to
be acknowledged, there government ends; the law of the strongest takes
its place.”
Granted the truth of Jefferson’s premises that power tends to contract
to the hands of a few, and that all government of the few is
vicious, then democracy is the only form of government under which an
approximation to justice can be realized. A class will serve class
interests. Government by an aristocracy is government in the interest
of the aristocracy. For the staple argument of the Federalists, that
gentlemen of principle and property alone may be intrusted with affairs
of state, Jefferson had a quiet contempt. “I have never observed men’s
honesty to increase with their riches,” he remarked. On the contrary,
he regarded the “better sort of people” as a chief hindrance to the
spread of social justice. The past had been evil because the past had
been exploited by gentlemen of principle and property. They had kept
government away from the people, and with their secret councils and
secret diplomacy they had plundered the taxpayers and drenched nations
in blood. Their selfish rivalries everywhere exacted a heavy toll of
society and left behind a trail of poverty and wretchedness. The future
would be better in the degree that mastery passed into common hands.
From the conclusions of his democratic premise he did not shrink. If
it were indeed true that the people were beasts, then the democratic
government of the future would be a bestial government--and even that
might be better than the old arrangement of masters and slaves. But the
American people whom Jefferson trusted were very far from beasts; he
was convinced that they were honest and well-meaning; and if government
were brought close to them, kept responsive to their will, a new and
beneficent chapter in human history would open. The populistic laws
passed by the legislatures of Rhode Island and New Hampshire, about
which such an uproar was raised by fearful creditors, and which were
urged as an argument against popular government, gave him no concern.
He understood the ways of propaganda, and he never accepted judgment of
the American people from the mouths of their enemies. The cure for the
evils of democracy, he believed, was more democracy. The whole are far
less likely to be unjust than the few; and if sovereignty does not rest
in the majority will, where shall it lodge?
Hume, the great apostle of toryism, says “the Commons established
a principle, which is noble in itself, and seems specious [_i.e._
pleasing], but is belied by all history and experience, _that the
people are the origin of all just power_.” And where else will
this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men,
find the origin of _just_ power, if not in the majority of the
society? Will it be in the minority? Or in the individual of that
minority?[373]
The America of Jefferson’s day was a simple world, with a simple
domestic economy. More than ninety per cent were plain country folk,
farmers and villagers, largely freeholders, managing their local
affairs in the traditional way. There were no great extremes of
poverty and wealth, no closely organized class groups. With its sharp
restrictions on suffrage and the prestige accorded the gentry, it was
still far from a political democracy; but it was hastening towards a
more democratic order. Remote from the cesspools of European diplomacy,
and not yet acquainted with imperialism, it had no need for a leviathan
state. Economic conditions sanctioned a _laissez-faire_ government,
simple and unambitious. In such a world the well-known words of
Jefferson’s first inaugural address, justified themselves to all who
did not seek to use the state for personal advantage.
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from
injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to
regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall
not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is
the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the
circle of our felicities.
In one significant direction he would extend the scope of
government--the encouragement of education. An intelligent people is
necessary to a democracy; free schools are a sign of a free society.
Tyranny thrives on ignorance and superstition, and every exploiting
group fears popular education. Free himself in thought and action,
believing in the unshackled commerce of ideas, hating all censorships,
Jefferson accounted the founding of the University of Virginia his
largest contribution to the well-being of his native commonwealth.
To all who profess faith in the democratic ideal Jefferson is a
perennial inspiration. A free soul, he loved freedom enough to deny it
to none; an idealist, he believed that the welfare of the whole, and
not the prosperity of any group, is the single end of government. He
was our first great leader to erect a political philosophy native to
the economics and experience of America, as he was the first to break
consciously with the past. His life was dedicated to the service of
freedom, and later generations may well recall his words, “I have sworn
upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.” Europe made Jefferson wholly American. From
his studies in France he came to see that where men enjoy free access
to the sources of subsistence, government is likely to be simple and
honest, and society free and content; but where a policy of preëmption
has run its course, the function of government is seduced from its
social purpose to perpetuate the inequalities which spring from the
progressive monopolization of natural resources, with augmenting
corruption and injustice. To preserve government in America from such
degradation, to keep the natural resources open to all, were the prime
desire and object of his life. That such an effort was foredoomed to
failure, in presence of imperious forces that shape society beyond the
capacity of political means to change or prevent, cannot detract from
the nobility of his ideal, or the inspiration of his life. Among the
greater thinkers of the constitutional period Jefferson remains by far
the most vital and suggestive, the one to whom later generations may
return most hopefully.
Footnotes
[344] For the date of his arrival, see _Massachusetts Historical
Society Proceedings_, Vol. XLIII, p. 246.
[345] _Rights of Man_, Part II, pp. 407, 408.
[346] For an excellent discussion of this, see C. M. Walsh, _The
Political Science of John Adams_, pp. 203-226.
[347] _The Rights of Man_, Part I, p. 278.
[348] “Letter to Lord Onslow,” in _Works_, Vol. III, p. 36.
[349] _Rights of Man_, Part II, p. 428.
[350] _Ibid._, pp. 410-411.
[351] Conway, _Life of Paine_, Vol. II, p. 4.
[352] Author of _An Apology for the Bible_ (a reply to Paine’s _Age
of Reason_), which was distributed among Harvard undergraduates. See
above, page 324.
[353] For the program of Babeuf, see R. W. Postgate, _Revolution from
1789 to 1906_, pp. 24, 54-60.
[354] _Works_, Vol. III, p. 329.
[355] This and the preceding sentence were expunged from all early
editions by the censor.
[356] _Ibid._, p. 337.
[357] _Ibid._, p. 338.
[358] _Ibid._, p. 340.
[359] _Ibid._, p. 329.
[360] _Address and Declaration of the Friends of Universal Peace and
Liberty_, quoted in Conway, _Life of Paine_, Vol. I, p. 316.
[361] _Rights of Man_, Part II, p. 413.
[362] _Works_, Vol. I, p. 155.
[363] Francis W. Hirst, _Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson_, p. 266.
[364] _A Summary View of the Rights of British America_, Williamsburg.
[365] Dodd, _Statesmen of the Old South_, p. 23.
[366] _Writings_, Vol. III, pp. 268-269.
[367] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 8.
[368] “Autobiography”, in _Writings_, Vol. I, p. 57.
[369] _Writings_, Vol. VII, p. 451.
[370] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, p. 335.
[371] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 189.
[372] _Ibid._, Vol. X, p. 160.
[373] _Ibid._, Vol. VII, p. 356.
Chapter III • The War of Belles Lettres
To turn from the field of political theory to the realm of polite
literature is not to quit the partisan battle-ground. The long struggle
between Federalist and Democrat was too bitter and absorbing, too
sharp in its alignment, not to conscript gentlemen of culture equally
with politicians. Every available quill was called to the colors, and
a civil war of _belles lettres_ broke out, that exceeded in animosity
any other known to our literary history. Attack and counter-attack were
slashing and acrimonious. Gentlemen forgot their manners and indulged
fiercely in tall language. Satire ran about the streets seeking new
victims to impale; slander lay in wait for every passer-by. The
crudest lies found willing listeners and sober ministers turned from
writing sermons to enshrine pothouse tales in heroic couplets. In this
virulent battle the Federalists, on the whole, had the better of it,
for they were greater masters of invective and flayed their victims
less clumsily; but the Democrats made up in ardor what they lacked in
skill, and the blows that fell on carefully tied wigs must have hurt
cruelly. As poetry those old satires may seem to us feeble enough,
but as historical documents they are eloquent. The passion of a world
in revolution, the hopes and fears of our forefathers as they watched
the great fires consuming the world in which they had grown up, still
survive in those stinging lines, as a reminder to later generations of
the rough and inhospitable way that democratic America has traveled in
its onward course.
I • The Federalist Group
1. The Hartford Wits
What Federalism was capable of in the way of polite letters is
sufficiently revealed in the work of a coterie of poetasters who
are known in our literary histories as the Hartford Wits. The title
of the group suggests their literary antecedents. They were the
representatives of a literary mode that had slowly percolated through
the crust of Puritan provincialism and imparted a certain sprightliness
to a dour temper. They were the literary old-guard of the expiring
eighteenth century, suspicious of all innovation, contemptuous of every
idealistic program. They stood stoutly by the customary and familiar.
The nineteenth century was knocking at their door, but they would
not open to it. And as they saw that new century coming in the guise
of revolution, exciting to unheard-of innovations in the fields of
politics and economics and religion and letters, giving rise to Jacobin
Clubs and Jeffersonian democracy, they set themselves seriously to
the work of barring its progress through their own little world. They
conveniently associated the economic unrest of post-war days, that
gave birth to a strange progeny in Rhode Island and New Hampshire and
Massachusetts, with the contamination of French atheism, charged all
unrest to the account of democracy, and hastened to put it down in the
name of law and righteousness. They hated new ways with the virtuous
hatred of the well-to-do, and dreamed of a future America as like the
past as one generation of oysters is like another.
There is a certain historical fitness in the fact that the Wits
should have arisen in Connecticut and been the intellectual children
of Yale. For generations the snug little commonwealth had been the
home of a tenacious conservatism, that clung to old ways and guarded
the institutions of the fathers with pious zeal. Nowhere else in New
England did the ruling hierarchy maintain so glacial a grip on society.
The Revolution of ’76 had only ruffled the surface on Connecticut life;
it left the social structure quite unchanged. The church retained its
unquestioned control of the machinery of the commonwealth; and the
church was dominated by a clerical aristocracy, hand in glove with a
mercantile aristocracy. Fresh currents of thought that were stirring
the pulpits of eastern Massachusetts--suggestions of an Arianism that
was to lead to the Unitarian schism--did not reach so far as New Haven,
and Yale was content to remain the bulwark of an obsolete Calvinism.
In such a soil Federalism would flourish like Jonah’s gourd; and it
exuded a special odor of sanctity from the Calvinism in which it was
rooted. To stout Federalists like Timothy Dwight, the current dogma of
total depravity sufficed to disprove the validity of all democratic
aspiration. It was a presumption little short of blasphemous to
assert that sinners are competent to manage the temporal affairs of
society. The doctrine of equalitarianism was a particular stench in the
nostrils of the aristocratic clergy, who disliked all leveling. The
Irish immigrants seem to have been the most offensive equalitarians.
A New England gentleman, traveling in Pennsylvania in the nineties,
wrote home: “I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a few
exceptions, they are ... the most God-provoking Democrats on this side
of Hell.” And in 1798 Harrison Gray Otis wrote: “If some means are not
adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and
others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty &
property.”[374] To prevent, if possible, such an unhappy outcome, the
upper classes of New England fell to organizing and drilling all the
elements of conservatism for a vigorous defense. They wrote and spoke
and preached, till the mind of respectable New England was saturated
with prejudice. The democratic principle was converted into a bogey to
frighten the simple. Such a hideous misshapen imp of darkness, such a
vile hag of anarchy had never before been painted for the imagination
of honest Yankees to shudder at; and if democracy seemed to them a
wild and fearsome thing making ready to destroy their venerated social
order, they only believed what the minister preached on the Sabbath and
the squire asserted on week days. The plebeian democrat, very likely
in debt, was quite overwhelmed by the organized forces of village
respectability.
In this great work of saving the commonwealth of Connecticut from the
pollutions of democracy the Hartford Wits were competent laborers. The
more important members of the group were John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight,
Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, and
Theodore Dwight. To these may be added the names of Dr. Elihu Hubbard
Smith and Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, who were friends and occasional
collaborators. Nearly all were Yale men with a pronounced Yale
predilection for Calvinism and Federalism, admirable representatives
of the oligarchical upper class of the provincial Connecticut society.
Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, was a minister and
president of Yale; Hopkins, Smith and Cogswell were physicians of high
professional standing; Trumbull and Theodore Dwight were lawyers;
Barlow and Humphreys found their way into the diplomatic field, and
Alsop was a merchant. They were all comfortably well off and several
were wealthy. Alsop was one of the few millionaires of the time; Barlow
acquired a fortune in France; and Humphreys late in life established
a textile industry incorporated for half a million. Hot Federalists,
they found in Washington, Governor Trumbull, and Fisher Ames, their
political mentors and guides. The most active of the group politically,
was Theodore Dwight, who with his cousin Timothy was a director of
the Eagle Bank, a Federalist institution, and bitterly opposed to the
chartering of Republican banks. When one of the latter applied to the
legislature for a charter he denounced it as a “child of intrigue and
the mother of Discord.” He was deep in the Hartford Convention, serving
as its secretary and later as its historian. He denounced Jeffersonian
republicanism as seeking to “discredit the ministry, decry religion,
and destroy public worship,” and as he saw it spreading through New
England he attributed to it the certain decay of morality and the
impending break-up of family ties, exclaiming with somewhat extreme
vivacity: “The outlaws of Europe, the fugitives from the pillory and
the gallows, have undertaken to assist our own abandoned citizens, in
the pleasing work of destroying Connecticut.... Can imagination paint
anything more dreadful on this side of hell!”
Later generations remember best the massive character of Timothy
Dwight, a man endowed with all the Connecticut virtues and walking
amongst his fellows with magnificent confidence in his powers.
A great preacher, an authoritative theologian, a distinguished
administrator--“every inch a college president”--a ready counselor on
any knotty point be it in law or politics or finance or agriculture or
_belles lettres_, a born leader of men, and by way of recreation an
inditer of Hebraic epics and huge didactic poems and ample Connecticut
pastorals, a confirmed traveler observing the manner of life in many
commonwealths and preserving his observations in solid volumes--he was
a man to compel the admiration of his fellows and put his stamp upon
his age. So vast was the contemporary reputation of Timothy Dwight, and
so many-sided, it may seem ironical that time should have shrunk him
to the narrow compass of a paragraph in our literary history. And yet
the more curiously one considers the work of the great president of
Yale, the more insistent become one’s doubts concerning the fineness
of this nugget of Connecticut gold. It shows very suspicious signs of
tarnish. His commanding presence and authoritative manner, his sonorous
eloquence, his forwardness in defense of what few doubted, his vehement
threshing of straw long since reduced to chaff, his prodigious labors,
his abundant printing, no longer seem so authentic a seal of greatness
as they seemed to his open-mouthed contemporaries; and one suspects
that he impressed his fellow citizens by the completeness with which
he measured up to every Connecticut ideal, rather than by the creative
vigor of his mind. The great Timothy, in short, seems to a later
generation to have been little more than a walking repository of the
venerable Connecticut _status quo_.
The intellectual inquisitiveness that gave birth to disintegrating
theory in the mind of his grandfather Jonathan Edwards, and made him a
profoundly revolutionary influence in his time, was wholly lacking in
the grandson. The latter refused to follow the questioning intellect
into unsurveyed fields. He would not meddle with change. His mind
was closed as tight as his study windows in January. He read widely
in the fields of rationalism, but he read only to refute. Now and
then to be sure, certain generous promptings visited him: he spoke
out against slavery; he encouraged the higher education of women.
But from such temptations to become a living voice he turned away to
follow the main-traveled road of Connecticut prejudice. His eyes were
fixed lovingly upon the past, and his fondest dreams for his native
commonwealth hovered about the ideal of a church-state which John
Cotton had labored to establish and Increase Mather to preserve. It
is with those capable theocrats of Massachusetts Bay, rather than
with Thomas Hooker of Hartford, that he is to be associated. Two
men could scarcely be more alike than Timothy Dwight and Increase
Mather; their careers ran in similar lines; each was the unmitered
pope of his generation, and each owed his extraordinary influence
to the same sterling qualities. As ecclesiastical politicians they
drew no line between religious and secular affairs, but were prompt
with a hand in every affair of the commonwealth. They spoke and
wrote with unquestioned authority. They regarded the minister as the
responsible leader of society who must not suffer his flock to be
led astray. The church was the guardian of morality, and the state
was its secular arm. The true faith must not be put in jeopardy by
unfaith. To Timothy Dwight infidelity and democracy went hand in
hand, and to suffer the commonwealth to fall under the control of
the godless meant the end of all morality and religion. To uphold the
established order--of which he was a distinguished member--was for him
the first of Christian duties. A stalwart Federalist, he was a good
hater of all Jacobins. His detestation of Jefferson was virulent and
he swallowed the nastiest tales about the great Virginian without a
qualm, never doubting their authenticity. It was sometimes hinted that
he was too much the aristocrat to feel the warmest sympathy for the
unprosperous, and there seems to have been ground for the suspicion.
The unprosperous were likely to be infected with Jeffersonian heresies,
and as he watched them being drawn off to the York-state frontier,
he rejoiced that their voting power was no longer to be feared. Such
restless spirits, he pointed out, “are impatient of the restraints of
law, religion, and morality; grumble about the taxes, by which Rulers,
Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported.... We have many troubles
even now; but we should have many more, if this body of foresters had
remained at home.”[375] If the disaffected did not like the way the
Congregational-Federalist party managed the good state of Connecticut,
it were a godsend if they should remove beyond its boundaries.
But it is with the literary work of Timothy Dwight that we are more
immediately concerned, and in all his abundant output, totaling
fourteen volumes and perhaps as much more in manuscript, the same
solid qualities are revealed. It is the occasional work of a man
wanting humor, playfulness, grace, lacking subtlety and creative
suggestiveness, but with a shrewd common sense, a great vigor, and a
certain grandiose imagination. A sonorous declaimer, he dearly loved
combat and the shock of marshaled argument. He went out of his way
to invite majestic effects. In _The Conquest of Canaan_ he described
so many thunderstorms that Trumbull suggested he ought to furnish a
lightning rod with the poem. Such a man could not move easily in narrow
spaces. An epic was none too slight to contain his exuberant rhetoric.
His ready versification, one often feels, runs like a water pipe with
the faucet off; the words flow in an unbroken stream with never a pause
to pick or choose. Yet even in his amazing copiousness there is vigor;
a well-stocked mind is pouring out the gatherings of years. When he
pauses to give advice--as he was fond of doing--his abundant sense
is worth listening to; the homely wisdom of his talk to the farmers
in the sixth part of _Greenfield Hill_ is not unlike Franklin. As a
satirist he belongs to the Churchill school; he is downright, abusive,
often violent, quite lacking the lightness of touch and the easy gayety
that runs so pleasantly through _M’Fingal_. His _Triumph of Infidelity_
is solid old-fashioned pulpit-thumping. The spirit of toleration was
withheld from him by his fairy godmother, and he knew no other way of
dealing with those who persisted in disagreement after their mistakes
had been pointed out, than the cudgel. In this tremendous poem he lays
about him vigorously. On Hume and Voltaire and Priestley, and all their
followers, his blows fall smartly. Bloody crowns ought to be plentiful,
but--though he does not seem to know it--the blows fall on straw men
and none proves mortal. On the whole one prefers him in the pastoral
mood when he lays aside his ministerial gown, and _Greenfield Hill_,
unless one excepts the _Travels in New England and New York_, remains
his most attractive work. Yet even that is sadly in need of winnowing.
A great college president Timothy Dwight may very well have been; he
was worshiped by his admirers only this side idolatry; but a great
thinker, a steadfast friend of truth in whatever garb it might appear,
a generous kindly soul loving even publicans and sinners, regardful of
others and forgetful of self, he assuredly was not.
2. “The Anarchiad”
Most of the political satire of the Wits was done in collaboration,
and consists of occasional sketches contributed to newspapers--with
explanatory comments and notes--dealing with matters of current
interest. Of the major works thus produced, _The Anarchiad_, _The
Echo_, and _The Political Greenhouse_, the first will suffice to reveal
the political sympathies of the Hartford group. _The Anarchiad_ is a
mock epic designed to counteract the populistic tendencies of post-war
times. It was published in _The New Haven Gazette_ between October 26,
1786, and September 13, 1787. In 1861 it was resurrected from a long
sleep by Luther G. Riggs, and reissued with an introduction and notes.
“This fearless satire,” according to the editor, “is supposed to have
exerted great and beneficial influence upon the public mind, and to
have tended in no small degree to check the leaders of insubordination
and infidel philosophy”; and it must be regarded as “a _national Poem_,
battling nobly for the right universal, for the majesty of law, and for
the Federal government.” The idea was got from a contemporary English
screed entitled _The Rolliad_, one of the numerous political satires
of which the late eighteenth century was so fond. Probably most of the
members of the group had a hand in it, but the acrid quality of its
comment owes more to Hopkins than to the others.
For such work the angular Connecticut physician was admirably fitted.
The son of a Waterbury farmer. Dr. Lemuel Hopkins was the most
picturesque member of the Hartford Wits, the most characteristically
Yankee. Brought up at the plow-tail, he received nevertheless an
excellent education, and because of a hereditary predisposition
to consumption turned to the medical profession. After serving
his apprenticeship at Wallingford he entered upon his practice at
Litchfield in 1776. During the Revolution he served for a short time
as a volunteer, but soon returned to his lancet and medicine case. In
1784 he removed to Hartford where he spent the remainder of his life.
In person he was tall, lean, stooping, rawboned, with coarse features
and large brilliant eyes. His uncouth appearance and eccentricity of
manner made him a striking figure, and his caustic wit rendered him
a redoubtable antagonist. As a physician he stood at the head of the
Connecticut profession. He was one of the founders of the Medical
Society of Connecticut, and as a frequent contributor to professional
literature he exerted a wide influence on the current practice.
The eccentric doctor seems to have been as honest as he was outspoken.
He was uncompromising in his warfare on all quacks, both medical and
political. For a time as a young man he was a disciple of French
infidel philosophy, but he cured his mental indisposition by a severe
Biblical regimen, and having restored himself to the robust health of
Calvinistic Christianity, he devoted himself to the work of curing
others. He became in consequence a specialist in the treatment of the
ravages caused by the _bacillus gallicus_. For every sort of humbug
he had a hearty contempt, and any political nostrum not listed in the
Federalistic materia medica he regarded as arrant quackery. He thought
no better of old wives’ remedies in government than in medicine,
and when the Rhode Island legislature passed its paper-money act in
1785, and six months later Shays’s Rebellion broke out, and mobs were
besieging the legislature of New Hampshire, he proposed to speak
plainly to the good people of Connecticut on the follies of popular
delusions. This would seem to have been the origin of _The Anarchiad_.
It sprang from the indignation of Dr. Hopkins, when, to quote from the
poem,
In visions fair, the scenes of fate unroll,
And Massachusetts opens on my soul.
There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway,
And mobs in myriads blacken all the way.
The sardonic temper of Dr. Hopkins fitted him for virulent satire,
and in this bitterest of the productions of the Wits, the reins were
on the neck of the muse. Scarcely another New England satire reflects
so sharply the class consciousness that underlay the bitter struggle
between agrarianism and capitalism. It is a slashing attack upon
agrarian economics and democratic liberalism, a versified echo of
the anger of creditors who were fighting the measures of populistic
legislatures. The staple of the satire is the wickedness of all
paper-money issues, with the State of Rhode Island as the chief of
agrarian sinners. About this main theme is gathered a miscellany
of Federalist shibboleths--the godlessness of Shays and his crew,
the seditious spirit of all who oppose the new Constitution, the
demagoguery of democratic politicians--and the satire rises to a
patriotic crescendo in declaiming against the folly of the democratic
ideal. So tremendous a work, however, cannot be adequately described;
the lines must speak for themselves. The following bits may serve in
lieu of the whole, the first of which is a comment on Rhode Island, the
pariah of States:
Hail! realm of rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile,
All hail! ye knav’ries of yon little isle.
There prowls the rascal, cloth’d with legal pow’r,
To snare the orphan, and the poor devour;
The crafty knave his creditor besets
And advertising paper pays his debts;
Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue,
No stop, no mercy from the debtor crew.
Arm’d with new tests, the licens’d villain bold,
Presents his bills, and robs them of their gold;
Their ears, though rogues and counterfeiters lose,
No legal robber fears the gallows noose.
Look through the State, the unhallow’d ground appears
A pen of dragons, and a cave of bears;
A nest of vipers, mix’d with adders foul;
The screeching night-bird, and the greater owl:
For now, unrighteousness, a deluge wide,
Pours round the land an overwhelming tide;
And dark injustice, wrapp’d in paper sheets,
Rolls a dread torrent through the wasted streets;
While net of law th’ unwary fry draws in
To damning deeds, and scarce they know they sin.
New paper struck, new tests, new tenders made,
Insult mankind, and help the thriving trade.
Each weekly print new lists of cheats proclaims,
Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names;
The wiser race, the snares of law to shun,
Like Lot from Sodom, from Rhode Island run....[376]
Nor less abhorr’d, the certain woe that waits
The giddy rage of democratic States,
Whose pop’lar breath, high-blown in restless tide,
No laws can temper, and no reason guide:
An equal sway, their mind indignant spurns;
To wanton sway, the bliss of freedom turns;
Led by wild demagogues, the factious crowd,
Mean, fierce, imperious, insolent and loud,
Nor fame, nor wealth, nor power, nor system draws--
They see no object, and perceive no cause;
But feel, by turns, in one disastrous hour,
Th’ extremes of license, and th’ extremes of power....
Will this vain scheme bid restless factions cease,
Check foreign wars, or fix internal peace?
Call public credit from her grave to rise,
Or gain in grandeur what they lose in size?...
But know, ye favor’d race, one potent head
Must rule your States, and strike your foes with dread.
The finance regulate, the trade control,
Live through the empire, and accord the whole.
Ere death invades, the night’s deep curtain falls,
Through ruin’d realms the voice of +UNION+ calls; ...
On you she calls! attend the warning cry;
+Ye live united, or divided die!+[377]
But chief the race allured by fleeting fame,
Who seek on earth the politicians name;
Auspicious race! whom folly joys to bless,
And wealth and honor crown with glad success;
Formed, like balloons, by emptiness to rise
On pop’lar gales, to waft them through the skies ...
See, from the shades, on tiny pinions swell
And rise, the young +DEMOCRACY+ of _hell!_
Before their face the _powers of Congress_ fade,
And _public credit_ sinks, an empty shade;
Wild severance rages, wars intestine spread,
Their boasted +UNION+ hides her dying head;
The forms of government in ruin hurl’d,
Reluctant empire quits the western world.[378]
Amid such democratic welter and mortal confusion the sole hope of
safety lies in Federalism, and the sapient leader who shall bring order
out of the wild misrule is thus greeted:
Ardent and bold, the smiling land to save,
In council sapient as in action brave,
I fear’d young Hamilton’s unshaken soul,
And saw his arm our wayward host control; ...
Fire in his eye, and thunder on his tongue.[379]
Other work the Hartford Wits did, but none which need detain us. Soon
changes and removals broke up the coterie, and they went diverse ways
to diverse rewards: Timothy Dwight to safeguard Yale undergraduates in
New Haven, Humphreys to the American legation at Paris, Trumbull to
the Michigan frontier, and Barlow to his notable career in Europe. But
happily not before they had contributed their portion of sweetness and
light to the great debate. The Wits were no skulkers in presence of
“insubordination and infidel philosophy,” when their economic interests
were touched.
II • The French Group
The Wits were not devoid of cleverness, but they were wanting in
ideas. They were partisans rather than intellectuals. In the rôle of
self-appointed custodians of Federalist moralities they were rather
tedious fellows, who substituted fustian for creative thought, and blew
up their verses with flatulent rhetoric. They sealed the windows of
their minds against the disturbing winds of doctrine that were blowing
briskly; they inspected the family tree of every new idea to determine
its respectability. An occasional fresh idea is necessary to keep one
from falling into staleness and mediocrity; but the Wits chose to
remain too ignorant to be interesting, and it is a relief to turn from
them to the more stimulating company of the French partisans. Here at
least there was intellectual sincerity: a genuine desire to understand
what was going on in the larger world of thought; to use what brains
God had given them to better the lot of the American people. Philip
Freneau, Joel Barlow, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge were not intellectual
giants, but they represent the best intelligence then being devoted to
literature in America, and their work retains a suggestiveness today
far beyond that of the Hartford Wits.
1. Philip Freneau • Poet of Two Revolutions
It is fitting that our first outstanding poet should have been a
liberal. The idealist has always seen deeper into the spirit of America
than the realist, and been less complacent with halfway achievement.
And it is equally fitting that his idealism should have got him into
trouble with the dominant group of his generation. Philip Freneau
was a volunteer in two revolutions, a color-sergeant carrying the
newly unfurled flag of democracy in the thick of civil strife. He
was a lifelong rebel, whose rebellions turned out to be patriotic or
seditious as they went with or against the purpose of the victorious
party. In the Revolution of ’76 he fought shoulder to shoulder with
John Adams and Hamilton and Washington, and his services were accorded
high praise. His poems inspired patriotic enthusiasm, greatly aided the
national cause, and won wide approval. But in the Revolution of ’93 he
parted company with Adams and Hamilton and Washington. When the old
leaders turned back in fear at the unloosing of democratic aspirations,
he went forward to new battles. He served the cause of ’93 with the
same ardor that had inspired his pen in ’76. It was not a new cause in
his eyes, but the old; not a different war, as Federalists asserted,
but other battles of the same war--the never ceasing struggle for human
freedom.
In thus breaking with the party of Federalism and casting his lot with
the democratic Jacobins, Freneau contracted a serious _mésalliance_
that destroyed his good name. Thereafter he was marked as a vulgar
democrat, a disseminator of insubordination and infidelity, an evil
influence among a respectable, God-fearing people. The further he went
in his new crusade, the lower he sank in decent opinion, until the
poet of the American Revolution came to be regarded as the hireling
mouthpiece of Jefferson, a writer of wretched and insolent doggerel,
an incendiary journalist--a mean and paltry figure beside the stately
forms of the Fathers of the Constitution. Gentlemen exhausted the
resources of ample vocabularies to express their detestation of his
leveling ways. To Timothy Dwight he was “A mere incendiary, or rather
... a despicable tool of bigger incendiaries, and his paper ... a
public nuisance.” To the gentle-natured Irving he was “A barking cur,”
and to Washington, whose words were accorded a quasi-royal respect,
he was “That rascal Freneau”: rather loose expressions, certainly,
for cultivated gentlemen to apply to another cultivated gentleman,
the friend of Madison and Brackenridge. It is evident that Freneau
and the great Federalist leaders disagreed somewhat violently in
their interpretations of the purpose and scope of the new venture in
republicanism.
The source of their disagreement lay in divergencies of social
philosophy too great to be bridged. In his republicanism Freneau
had gone far in advance of the Federalists. He was a democrat while
they remained aristocrats. He had rid himself of a host of outworn
prejudices, the heritage of an obsolete past, which held them in
bondage. He had read more clearly the meaning of the great movement
of decentralization that was shaping a new psychology, and must
lead eventually to democratic individualism. He had no wish to stay
or thwart that development; he accepted it wholly with all its
implications. He had freed his mind from the thralldom of caste; he
was impelled by no egoistic desire to impose his will upon others;
he was wholly free from the lust of economic aggression, either for
himself or for his class. He was an idealist who cared only for the
_res publica_, the common well-being, and he desired chiefly that the
new American government should serve the needs of a free people. There
was no envy in the soul of Freneau, and no self-seeking. He was the
friend of civilization rather than the advocate of particular forms
of government. He put his trust in local self-rule rather than in a
coercive state. Like Paine he distrusted all centralizing power. Like
Franklin he regarded the every-day world of business and politics as
a preposterous arrangement, unconcerned with justice; and he took it
on himself to do what he could to make it over. All his life he was an
unmuzzled advocate of whatever new movements gave promise of lessening
the old tyrannies. In championing the cause of democracy, he championed
a score of lesser causes: Unitarianism, deism, antislavery, Americanism
in education: thereby bringing down on his head the resentment of
all the conservatisms, religious, political, economic, social, then
prospering in America. Nevertheless he went his way through a sordid
world of politicians and speculators, feeding upon whatever shreds of
beauty he met with, a dreamer and an idealist sneered at by exploiters,
a spirit touched to finer issues than his generation cared for.
The chief desire of Freneau’s life was to be a poet, and if the country
had not been turmoiled by revolution, doubtless he would have been
content to “live unpromoted and write poems.” But revolution and not
poetry was the serious business of the age, and he chose to have a hand
in that business. Many later critics have lamented his choice. They
regret that he did not turn aside from the battle-ground to wander in
pastoral fields; that he was not content with the _noctes coenaeque
deum_ where the minstrel’s song is sufficient passport to hospitality.
It is a nice question of literary ethics. The raw material of poetry
was in Philip Freneau; there was need only of calm years to master
his art and clarify the vague romanticism of his nature. He had only
to stand apart from the turmoil, refusing to soil his hands with
politics, and cultivate his faculty for verse, to have made himself the
indisputable founder of American poetry. He was endowed with a romantic
imagination and love of natural beauty, a generation before the
romantic revival, and he might well have become a notable contributor
to that revival.
But he refused to stand apart. He would not hire a substitute to
defend the cause of freedom. There was rough work to be done, and
the democrats were too few to spare so competent a workman. So when
poetry proved unequal to the task he turned journalist, and set to
work in a field unclaimed by the muses. It was an immense sacrifice,
bringing disaster to all hope of contemporary fame, and tarnishing his
reputation in after years. His place in American letters was fixed by
a Federalist verdict, and he has since remained obscure and neglected
by all, save an occasional historian who dips into a few poems, regrets
that the smell of revolution is so rank, and dismisses him with the
comment that Campbell and Scott did him the honor to appropriate a
figure of speech without acknowledgment. Only within recent years
has a collected edition of his poems been accessible, and his prose
writings still remain buried in newspaper files. In consequence the
literary critics have echoed the political critics, and given new
life to the old partisanship. Thus Professor Wendell remarks that
“a considerable part of his poetry ... consists of rather reckless
satire, not conspicuously better or worse than much other satire of the
period.”[380] Even Professor Tyler, usually so generous in sympathy for
our early writers, dismisses Freneau with these words:
The poor old man, thus found dead on the lonely New Jersey moor,
had undoubtedly some sweetness in his heart; but he permitted
very little of it to work its way down to the tip of his pen.
With that pitiless pen of his he had fought many a fierce fight
in his day.... He was the poet of hatred, rather than of love....
Among all his verses, the reader finds scarcely one lyric of
patriotic enthusiasm, nor many lines to thrill the hearts of the
Revolutionists by any touch of loving devotion to their cause, but
everywhere lines hot and rank with sarcasm and invective against
the enemy.... Like Odell, Freneau was a good hater; his was the
wrathful muse; his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing, deadly. He
was the satirical gladiator on behalf of the Revolution, even as
Odell was the satirical gladiator in opposition to it.[381]
Such commentary is neither discriminating nor just. That the ways of
Freneau were often ruthless it needs only a casual reading of his
satire to perceive; that he was a good hater is quite as apparent;
but that the deeper springs of his nature were bitter is not true. He
was no satirist like Churchill to love filth and delight in venom.
It was an age of partisan ruthlessness, and if Freneau was a fierce
partisan it was because the new hope then whispering to liberals was
in danger of being stifled by selfish men who feared it. The vision of
a free republic arising on the ruins of colonial monarchy had taken
possession of his imagination; a republic admirable in justice and
righteous in all its ways. That vision, he believed, might be realized
if the republicans stood firm in its defense. A thousand perils beset
it. The lingering colonial traditions--the ties of old custom--were
powerful advocates of the old inequality; the greed of profit and
power--the ambitions of a monied aristocracy--were equally powerful
advocates of new tyrannies. Not only must George III and his Tory
supporters be driven from the land, but the work thus begun must be
carried through. An army of domestic enemies must be dealt with--a
formidable aristocracy of wealth and family. Naturally it would be no
holiday task. The King had no mind to be driven out of his American
dominions, and the Federalists had no mind to surrender control of the
new American state. And so no choice remained to the republicans but
to make the advocates of monarchy and aristocracy appear so hateful in
the eyes of the people that they would rise and destroy them.
In times of profound upheaval the demands of partisanship are stern
and exacting. The gray-goose quill may serve the cause of peace, but
the porcupine quill stings and rankles more; and if Freneau was given
to using the latter it was because he cared greatly for the ends to
be achieved. “How oft has rugged nature charged my pen with gall,”
he lamented late in life as he contemplated the enemies he had made.
Sensitive and proud, he had a Gallic impetuosity of onset. If he
plundered the broadsides of their store of abuse and ransacked the
dictionaries of their wealth of scurrility, it was not because he loved
abuse and scurrilities. If like Sam Adams, he was given to robbing men
of their characters, it was due to no personal or selfish motives;
those great ones whom he lampooned so fiercely, he believed were
enemies of the new order. If “his chosen warfare was grim, unsparing,
deadly,” as Professor Tyler asserts, it was because he was fighting for
a great ideal against men who were equally grim, unsparing, deadly.
Unembittered laughter had little opportunity to try its sanative
qualities in that long warfare of bushwhackers.
During the last quarter of the century the writings of Freneau in verse
and prose constitute an abstract and brief chronicle of the times. If
they seem old-fashioned to us today, they were quite new-fashioned
to the men who first read them. The early satires, printed in 1775
must have fallen upon American ears with almost startling effect.
A revolutionary change had come over Freneau; he had broken wholly
with the colonial temper and turned nationalist a year before the
Declaration of Independence. When he graduated from Princeton College
in the summer of 1771, he wrote in collaboration with Hugh Henry
Brackenridge a commencement poem entitled _The Rising Glory of
America_, in which the youthful collegians, bred up in a hotbed of
Whiggery, were as British as Pitt himself. The new English imperialism
fairly rioted in the swelling couplets. The poem is a prophecy of the
time when the British flag should wave from the Atlantic to the Pacific
over a contented people, who “warm in liberty and freedom’s cause,”
gloried in the name of Briton. Agriculture and commerce are duly
celebrated as the twin pillars of American prosperity, and the pages of
colonial history are combed for great names and heroic deeds. On the
roll of American heroes Braddock, Sir William Johnson, and Whitefield
are the most conspicuous. Oddly enough Washington’s valor at the time
of Braddock’s defeat was unknown to these collegians in 1771, but
was afterwards discovered and inserted in later editions. Following
independence Freneau revised the poem and the changed circumstances
played havoc with the colonial text. Braddock was silently expunged
together with “Britannia’s warlike troops, Choice spirits of her isle.”
“False Gallia’s sons” becomes “Gallia’s hostile sons.” A notable
tribute to English generosity seemed incongruous to Freneau after his
experience on the prison ship and was deleted. He no longer felt that
The British epithet is merciful,
And we the sons of Britain learn like them
To conquer and to spare.
What happened to Freneau during the years following his graduation is
uncertain, but in July, 1775, he appeared in New York City with his
pockets stuffed with another sort of verse, which he scattered among
the print-shops, the rebellious spirit of which may be judged from the
prayer,
_Libera Nos, Domine._--Deliver us, O Lord, not only from British
dependence, but
From the scoundrel, Lord North, who would bind us in chains,
From a royal king Log, with his tooth-full of brains,
Who dreams, and is certain (when taking a nap)
He has conquered our lands, as they lay on his map.
From a kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears,
We send up to heaven our wishes and prayers
That we, disunited, may freemen be still,
And Britain go on--to be damned if she will.[382]
The colonial slipped easily from Freneau and left him wholly American.
And with the colonial psychology there slipped from him also the
useless impedimenta of old-world social and political philosophies.
How far he advanced towards the democratic conception of society,
during those first rebellious years, is not clear; but he had set his
foot on a path that must conduct him far if he did not turn back.
And it is certain that he never turned back. His declaration of
independence from King George was the first of many such declarations
of independence--for himself and his fellow Americans. Thereafter
his serious business was the work of stripping from the colonial
every loyalty which still bound him to England. He supplemented the
work of Paine in teaching men whose fathers were English that they
were of another nation; that they could no longer remain both English
and American, but must make choice between the two allegiances. Year
after year he stirred the troubled waters, arousing the spirit of
nationalism by attacking everything pro-British. His attacks on the
English generals, the Tories, the royalist printers, were but means to
the great end of uprooting the traditional dependence on England and
quickening the new national psychology.
The second stimulus to Freneau’s revolutionary ardor came from the
French uprising. Later in the summer of 1775 he had quitted New York
and sailed for the West Indies. He spent two years on the Island of
Santa Cruz, then and later engaging in sea voyages about the islands
and along the American coast. They were creative years, when removed
equally from the distractions of war and the utilitarianism of America,
he was free to cultivate the romantic strain of poetry that was strong
in him. Then followed unhappier days. A period of stagnation had come
to him during the years of post-war reaction; and if fresh fuel had
not been brought from overseas to kindle anew his social enthusiasms,
it is likely that he would have drifted into a stale and unprofitable
old age. The spirit of romantic poetry was deadened by an unsympathetic
environment, but with the democratic hope rising in France came a fresh
call to arms. He discovered a larger and nobler interpretation of his
republican creed, that was to transform it into French Jacobinism
and arm it for a new leveling crusade. If he could not be a poet to
America he would enlist in the army of democracy. Not only must the
new government be made French-democratic instead of English-Whig,
but all distinctions of rank must be swept away, together with every
tyrannical dogma of church and state. In short there must be a social
house-cleaning, the limits of which were to be determined only by
reason and the common democratic good. So Freneau enthusiastically
joined with Paine and Jefferson in the partisan labor of spreading the
new faith.
His literary activity during this second period was remarkable. Songs
and odes and satires came from his ready pen in unending stream, eager,
cutting, vibrant with feeling. It requires an intimate knowledge of
the times to make out the identity of every figure at which he shoots
his arrows, but it needs no very intimate knowledge to measure the
intensity of his partisanship. The democratic hopes and fears of those
vibrant days find reflection in many an acrid verse. He was at one with
Jefferson in his concern at the monarchical reaction.
In ten short years, of freedom weary grown
The State, Republic, sickens for a throne.
The man who attached to the pen name of Peter Slender the letters O. S.
M.--One of the Swinish Multitude--would not fail to take the part of
the private soldier neglected by the state:
Sold are those arms which once on Britons blazed,
When, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came;
That power repelled, and Freedom’s fabrick raised,
She leaves her soldier--famine and a name![383]
Nor would he fail to capitalize the aristocratic contempt of the
Federalists for that same swinish multitude.
Lodge where you must, drink small-beer where you can,
But eat no roast pig, if no Federal man....
Your mouth was made for rye or barley bread;
What claims have you to halls of state,
Whose business is to stand and wait,
Subservient to command?
What right have you to white-bread, superfine,
Who were by nature destin’d for “_a swine_”--
As said good Edmund Burke,
The drudge of Britain’s dirty work,
Whose mighty pamphlets rous’d the royal band![384]
During the tumultuous year of ’93 Freneau issued a series of
_Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq._, which reflect sharply
the partisan passions aroused by the French Revolution. They were
lampoons directed at members of government who were in the democratic
black-book, chiefly John Adams, Knox, and Hamilton. The introductory
poem was addressed _To all the Great Folks in a Lump_; the second, _To
Atlas_, was an attack on Hamilton; the third, _To A Select Body of
Great Men_, was a lampoon of the Senate; and the fourth, _To a Would Be
Great Man_, was addressed to Freneau’s particular _bête noire_, John
Adams. This last, apropos of _Davila_, will serve to show the popular
reception which that unfortunate work received.
Daddy Vice, Daddy Vice,
One may see in a trice
The drift of your fine publication.
As sure as a gun
The thing was just done
To secure you a +PRETTY HIGH+ station.
When you tell us of _kings_
And such pretty things
Good mercy! how brilliant your page is!
So bright is each line
I vow you’ll shine
Like--a glow worm to all future ages.
On Davila’s page
Your discourses so sage
Democratical numskulls bepuzzle,
With arguments tough
As white leather or buff,
The republican Bull Dogs to muzzle.
’Tis labor in vain,
Your senses to strain,
Our brains any longer to muddle;
Like Colossus you stride
O’er our noddles so wide
We look up like frogs in a puddle.
If Freneau’s hatred of the men who opposed the democratic movement
was immeasurable, his enthusiasm for the new age of reason that he
believed was rising was as boundless. His pages during those years of
Jacobin radicalism are dotted thick with odes to liberty and addresses
to republicans; probably more fully than any other pages they reflect
the spirit that in England and America was forming Tom Paine clubs,
and projecting innumerable programs of social reform. A new social
conscience was stirring in Freneau, broadening immensely the horizon of
his thought; and if he counted rather too confidently on the appeal to
reason to bring the golden age, he proved himself thereby a true child
of his generation. In such lines as these one discovers the spirit that
moved Godwin to write _Political Justice_.
How can we call those systems just
Which bid the few, the proud, the first,
Possess all earthly good;
While millions robbed of all that’s dear
In silence shed the ceaseless tear,
And leaches suck their blood....
Let laws revive, by heaven designed,
To tame the tiger in the mind
And drive from human hearts
That love of wealth, that love of sway,
Which leads the world too much astray,
Which points envenomed darts:
And men will rise from what they are;
Sublimer, and superior, far,
Than Solon guessed, or Plato saw;
All will be just, all will be good--
That harmony, “not understood,”
Will reign the general law.
For, in our race, deranged, bereft,
The parting god some vestige left
Of worth before possessed;
Which full, which fair, which perfect shone,
When love and peace, in concord sown,
Ruled, and inspired each breast.[385]
In quite another vein, that reveals Freneau’s unusual mastery of
colloquial prose, is the following passage, impersonating Robert
Slender, the country philosopher.
Mr. Editor,
Having heard that there was a tavern at about the distance of a
mile or so from my favorite country spot, where now and then a few
neighbors meet to spit, smoke segars, drink apple whiskey, cider
or cider-royal, and read the news--a few evenings ago, I put on my
best coat, combed out my wig, put my spectacles in my pocket, and a
quarter dollar--This I thought was right; for although Mrs. Slender
told me eleven-pence was enough, says I, I’ll e’en take the quarter
dollar, for a man always feels himself of more consequence when he
has got good money in his pocket--so out I walks with a good stout
stick in my hand, which I always make a point to carry with me,
lest the dogs should make rather freer with my legs than I could
wish. But I had not gone more than half the way, when, by making a
false step, I splash’d my stocking from the knee to the ancle. Odds
my heart, said I, see what a hand I have made of my stocking; I’ll
be bail, added I, I’ll hear of this in both sides of my head--but
it can’t now be helped--this, and a thousand worse accidents,
which daily happen, are all occasioned by public neglect, and the
misapplication of the public’s money--Had I, said I, (talking to
myself all the while) the disposal of but half the income of the
United States, I could at least so order matters, that a man might
walk to his next neighbor’s without splashing his stockings or
being in danger of breaking his legs in ruts, holes, gutts, and
gullies. I do not know, says I to myself, as I moralized on my
splash’d stocking, but money might with more profit be laid out
in repairing the roads, than in marine establishments, supporting
a standing army, useless embassies, exorbitant salaries, given to
many flashy fellows that are no honor to us, or to themselves,
and chartering whole ships to carry a single man to another
nation--Odds my life, continued I, what a number of difficulties a
man labors under, who has never read further than Lilly’s grammar,
and has but a poor brain--had I been favored with a good education,
I could no doubt readily see the _great usefulness_ of all these
measures of government, that now appear to me so unaccountable--I
could then, said I, still talking to myself, see the reason why
the old patriots, whose blood flowed so freely in purchasing our
independence, are cast aside, like a broken pitcher, (as the
Scripture says) and why the old tories and active refugees are
advanced to places of power, honor and trust.[386]
In another writer so whimsical a note would have no other purpose than
to fill a Spectator paper. But the garrulous Robert Slender is Freneau
in quieter vein, pursuing his old purpose. As a social philosopher
his opinions are oddly like those of Tom Paine. In commenting on
the government’s use of the people’s money he was seeking to awaken
interest in the social possibilities of government: that government
would better serve the _res publica_ through internal improvements,
than by creating armies and navies and providing posts and pensions
for great men. This was a fashion of thought which Paine had done much
to spread, and in the midst of a pompous Federalism, when gentlemen
professed to believe that government could acquire reverence in the
people’s eyes only by being hedged about with ceremonial, Robert
Slender’s cogitations were very much to the point. If government were
truly democratized, if it concerned itself with realities, serving the
people in the homely affairs and common needs of everyday life, there
would be no need of aristocratic ceremonial. Like Paine, Freneau was an
idealist, with his head full of ideas which to practical men were only
silly French notions; and yet the idealist, in this matter of the _res
publica_, was the true realist.
For all his Jacobinism Freneau might have been spared some of the
odium that gathered about his head if he had not turned partisan
journalist and put himself in the thick of the fight. In the eighteenth
century the newspaper editor had not yet wholly risen from the rank
of mechanic; he was still a master-printer, with hands much too
ink-stained to pass himself off as a gentleman, and with financial
resources too limited to be intellectually independent. If his paper
were largely literary he made no powerful enemies, but let him enter
politics or seek to mold public opinion on important matters, and he
was likely to meet the fate of John Mein, outspoken editor of the
_Boston Chronicle_, who was destroyed for exposing the weakness of the
merchants’ non-importation policy.[387] Freneau had had considerable
experience in newspaper work at times when his sea life had grown
irksome, but he took no active part in politics until the fall of 1791,
when he set up the _National Gazette_ in Philadelphia, and began that
tumultuous career lasting two years which brought so much abuse upon
him.
The detailed story of his connection with the _Gazette_ is given in an
admirable study,[388] and need not be recounted further than to bring
into relief the bare essentials. Soon after the formation of the new
government Hamilton had provided himself with a newspaper, _The United
States Gazette_, that was an effective advocate of all Hamiltonian
policies. The editor, John Fenno, seems to have been a vigorous fellow,
into whose hands Hamilton threw much of the public printing, and whose
debts he paid when they became pressing. Alarmed at the influence
wielded by the newspaper, Jefferson and Madison approached Freneau,
who had been contemplating a new venture, with the suggestion that
he set up a rival democratic paper. To encourage him Jefferson gave
Freneau a small post as translator in the State Department, worth $250
a year. The _National Gazette_ was thereupon established, and for two
years a war between the hostile papers went on fiercely. If the _United
States Gazette_ lauded the virtues of the English government, extolled
the wisdom of Hamilton and abhorred all Jacobins, the _National
Gazette_ retorted in kind, attacking the Secretary of the Treasury
and applauding the growing Jacobite spirit that struck at every form
of aristocracy. It became the common clearing house for democratic
propaganda, and Freneau’s influence spread so widely that he may justly
be regarded as “the leading editor in America” during those critical
years.
It is quite evident today that “the chief business of the _Gazette_
was to destroy Hamilton.” Probably more largely than any other
writer, Freneau awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and
measures, which a few years later was to break the party. Jefferson’s
often-quoted remark, “His paper has saved our Constitution _which was
fast galloping into monarchy_, and has been checked by no one means so
powerfully as by that paper,” is somewhat extravagant; nevertheless the
universal detestation in which Freneau was held by all Federalists is
sufficient testimony to his influence. Washington was greatly ruffled
and wanted to remove him from his petty post in the State Department,
but Jefferson would not consent. It seems that Washington felt no
ill-will toward John Fenno, who drew six times the sum from the public
treasury that Freneau received. But Fenno was no democrat, “hostile to
garter, ribbon, crown, and star;” Fenno was no unsparing critic who
would attack even Washington if he lent himself to undemocratic ends;
whereas Freneau was plain-spoken, and no gentleman likes plain speaking
from subordinates.
All this was a hundred years ago and more. The inditers of those
partisan scurrilities, Democrat and Federalist alike, have long since
ceased their bickerings. Words which once stung like a whiplash
have become only echoes of dead passions. As the struggles of those
tumultuous years fall into truer perspective, the figure of Philip
Freneau takes on larger and nobler proportions. The cloud of calumny
that long obscured his virtues is dissipating, and we discover in him
an eager child of an age of democratic aspiration, the friend and
advocate of social justice. Like Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, he
was a notable American, who gave himself unselfishly to the work of
furthering the common well-being. “It was a long and stormy life,” says
Forman, “and it was lived for human rights and human freedom”--
Still on the people’s, still on Freedom’s side;
Still in the cause of man severely true.
After all, the poet in Freneau was deeper than the partisan. Despite
his conviction that a sordid America cared nothing for poetry--that “an
age employed in edging steel can no poetic raptures feel”--his love of
beauty was never killed nor the spring of poetic creation dried up.
In moments of release from cares he found solace in the poetry that
welled up from the unembittered depths of a rich and generous nature.
The portrait drawn by Professor Tyler depicts one side of Freneau; the
following lines, from a very late poem, reveal another:
The world has wrangled half an age,
And we again in war engage,
While this sweet, sequestr’d rill
Murmurs through the valley still....
But, with all your quiet flow,
Do you not some quarrels know!
Lately, angry, how you ran!
All at war--and much like man.
When the shower of waters fell,
How you raged, and what a swell!
All your banks you overflow’d,
Scarcely knew your own abode!
How you battled with the rock!
Gave my willows such a shock
As to menace, by its fall,
Underwood and bushes, all:
Now you are again at peace:
Time will come when that will cease;
Such the human passions are;
--You again will war declare.
Emblem, thou, of restless man;
What a sketch of nature’s plan!
Now at peace, and now at war,
Now you murmur, now you roar;
Muddy now, and limpid next,
Now with icy shackles vext--
What a likeness here we find!
What a picture of mankind![389]
This was the valedictory of Philip Freneau. His life was bitter and
turbulent, cast in a bitter and turbulent age; yet he found some grains
of comfort in the contemplation of nature and the exercise of the
poet’s craft. Through it all his heart remained clean and his hands
unstained. If he was not a great poet whom all the critics praise, he
loved beauty and served it in a careless world among an indifferent
people, and it ill becomes America to forget his contribution or deny
him some portion of the honor that has fallen generously to others no
more deserving.
2. Joel Barlow • Jacobin
That he should have long associated with the Hartford Wits and
collaborated with them in defense of Connecticut Federalism must have
seemed to Joel Barlow in after years the choicest bit of comedy in his
varied career. His subsequent adventures led him far from the strait
path of Yale orthodoxy. In those ripe later years life had pretty well
emptied him of all dogmatisms and taught him the virtue of catholic
sympathies. He had become acquainted with diverse philosophies and
had observed the ways of alien societies, and from such contacts the
horizons of his mind had broadened and his character mellowed. It was
a long road that he traveled from New Haven to his Washington salon.
Born a Connecticut Yankee, he accepted in his youth all the Connecticut
conventions, and graduated from Yale with as complete a stock of
respectable opinions as his classmate Noah Webster. An energetic
capable fellow, he wanted to get on in life. He wanted to be rich and
famous, and he tried many roads that promised to lead to that desirable
goal--law, politics, journalism, poetry, psalmody, speculation. Needing
a job he volunteered soon after graduation as chaplain in the army.
He had not prepared for the ministry and while preaching somewhat
indifferently to ragged soldiers he dreamed of poetic fame, and devoted
more time to his couplets than to pious meditation. His abilities
discovering no more profitable field for exercise than writing verse,
he was pretty much at a stand till chance sent him abroad as agent
for one of the speculative land-companies that were springing up like
mushrooms in post-war America. There he found his opportunity. In
France, where he established his headquarters, he entered a world of
thought vastly different from that of prim little Hartford. It was an
extraordinarily stimulating experience into which he threw himself with
zest. Seventeen years, from 1788 to 1805, he spent abroad on that first
visit, and those years changed the provincial Yankee into one of the
most cosmopolitan Americans of his generation. From a member of the
Hartford Wits, ardent in defense of the traditional Connecticut order,
he had become a citizen of the world, outspoken in defense of the
rights of man.
It was this later Barlow, completely new-outfitted by French romantic
tailors, that after years remember and that early friends could
not forgive. In adopting the Jacobin mode and setting himself to
the serious business of political thinking, he invited the caustic
criticism of his former associates; yet nothing in his life was more
creditable or marks him more definitely as an open-minded, intelligent
man. He was as receptive to new ideas as Timothy Dwight was impervious.
He plunged boldly into the maelstrom of speculation then boiling in
Europe. He moved in the society of the intellectuals, inquired into the
latest political and social theories, turned humanitarian, reëxamined
his Calvinistic theology in the light of current deism, and became one
of the free democratic thinkers swarming in every European capital.
He was equally at home in London and Paris, passing long periods of
time in both cities. An active member of the Constitutional Society of
London, he was intimate with Joseph Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Tom
Paine, sympathized with every liberal movement, and offered his pen to
the cause of a freer England. His _Advice to the Privileged Orders_ was
eulogized by Fox on the floor of Commons, and the Pitt ministry was
moved to suppress the work and proscribe the author. Thereupon Barlow
went into hiding. There seems to have been considerable provocation for
the government’s action. “It is safe to say,” remarks his biographer,
“that no political work of the day created so wide an interest or was
so extensively read.” With Paine and Barlow both loose in England there
was need of the government looking to its fences.
In 1793 he was made a citizen of France. His French career was not
unlike Paine’s, whom he resembled in many ways. He had much of the
latter’s genius for publicity and skill in propaganda, and his career
was a great stimulus to radicals at home. He was not too busy to
serve his country in a diplomatic way. He risked his life to aid
American prisoners in Africa and by his skill and address eventually
freed them--an achievement that few men could have gone through with
successfully. In the meantime he had not neglected his private affairs.
He made a fortune in the French funds, which he increased by able
merchandising. He had come to his goal by distant roads, and on his
return to America in 1805 he took up his abode at Washington, creating
a delightful countryseat on the outskirts of the raw little capital
where he maintained a salon for American liberals. He seems to have
felt no inclinations towards Connecticut; the old ties were broken
now for good, the French Jacobin could not fit into the rigid grooves
of Hartford Federalism. Six years later he was impressed a second time
into the diplomatic service, was sent to France on a difficult mission,
followed Napoleon, then on the Russian campaign, was caught in the
break-up of the grand army, suffered exposure, contracted pneumonia,
and died in a village near Cracow in Poland--a fate which many honest
Federalists regarded as amply merited by his vicious principles.
The later reputation of Barlow has been far less than his services
warranted or his solid merits deserved. His admirable prose writings
have been forgotten and the _Columbiad_ returns always to plague him.
The common detraction of all Jacobins and democrats fell heavily on so
conspicuous a head. “It is simply impossible,” says his biographer,
“for the historian of Federal proclivities and environment to do
justice to the great leaders of Republicanism in America.” Barlow
was forced to pay a heavy price for his intellectual independence.
Detraction was always lying in wait for him. John Adams, who had
suffered many a sharp thrust from him, wrote to Washington, “Tom Paine
is not a more worthless fellow.” Of the Yale dislike Barlow was well
aware, for he once confessed that he would have presented the school
with some needed chemical apparatus but he “supposed that, coming
from him, the college authorities would make a bonfire of them in the
college yard.”[390] Yet it is hard for a later generation to discover
wherein lay the viciousness of his life or principles. A warm-hearted
humanitarian, he was concerned always for the common well-being. The
two major passions of his life were freedom and education. During the
last years at Washington he was ardently promoting a plan for a great
national university at the seat of government, and had he lived ten
years longer his wide influence would probably have accomplished it.
His sins would seem to have been no other than an open break with the
Calvinism and Federalism of the Connecticut oligarchy--somewhat slender
grounds on which to pillory him as an infidel and a scalawag.
The social foundation of Barlow’s political philosophy is lucidly
presented in the _Advice to the Privileged Orders_, a work that
deserves a place beside Paine’s _Rights of Man_ as a great document
of the times. It does too much credit to American letters to be
suffered to lie buried with a dead partisanship. It is warm with the
humanitarian enthusiasm that had come down as a rich heritage from
the Physiocratic school of social thinkers. Two suggestive ideas lie
at the base of his speculations: the doctrine of the _res publica_,
and the doctrine of social responsibility for individual well-being.
The former, given wide currency by the _Rights of Man_, resulted from
the imposition of social conscience on abstract political theory, out
of which was derived a new conception of the duties and functions
of the political state--the conception that the state must be the
responsible agent of society as a whole rather than the tool of a
class, and that its true concern is the _public thing_, safeguarding
the social heritage as a common asset held in trust for succeeding
generations; the latter resulted from the inquiry into the relations of
the political state to the individual citizen--its responsibility as
the social agent, for the social waste of wrecked lives and thwarted
happiness, a waste that a rational social order would greatly lessen if
not eradicate. Barlow flatly denied that the primary function of the
state is the protection of property interests; its true end lies in
securing justice. But justice without equal opportunity is a mockery;
and equal opportunity is impossible unless the individual citizen
shall be equipped to live on equal terms with his fellows. Hence the
fine flower of political justice is discovered in education; in that
generous provision for the young and the weak that shall equip them
to become free members of the commonwealth. Like Paine’s _Agrarian
Justice_, the _Advice to the Privileged Orders_ is an extraordinarily
modern work, far more comprehensible today than when it was written.
That the “State has no right to punish a man, to whom it has given no
previous instruction,” and that “She ought not only to instruct him in
the artificial laws by which property is secured, but in the artificial
industry by which it is obtained,” are doctrines that seem far less
preposterous to us than they seemed to Timothy Dwight. The president of
Yale College was greatly troubled over Calvinistic sin; Joel Barlow was
greatly troubled over social injustice; in that difference is measured
the distance the latter had traveled in company with the French
Jacobins.
The root of his political thinking is the doctrine of equalitarianism.
“Only admit,” he says, “the original, unalterable truth, _that all men
are equal in their rights, and the foundation of everything is laid_.”
Accepting the romantic doctrine that human nature is excellent in its
plastic state, and capable of infinite development, he is untroubled
by the fact of human selfishness. He sees no bogey in democracy to
frighten timid souls, no specter of anarchy in the rule of the people.
They say mankind are wicked and rapacious, and “it must be that
offences will come.” This reason applies to individuals; but not to
nations deliberately speaking a national voice. I hope I shall not
be understood to mean, that the nature of man is totally changed by
living in a free republic. I allow that it is still _interested_
men and _passionate_ men, that direct the affairs of the world.
But in national assemblies, passion is lost in deliberation, and
interest balances interest; till the good of the whole community
combines the general will.
If government be founded on the vices of mankind, its business is
to restrain those vices in all, rather than to foster them in a
few.[391]
It was his sensitive social conscience that brought him to revolt
against all class government. He had seen the naked sordidness of such
governments in Europe, and he watched with concern the beginnings of
like government in America. The significance of the Hamiltonian program
could not escape so shrewd an observer as Barlow; he was too much a
realist to take political professions at face value. “I see,” he wrote,
“immense fortunes made by our funding legislators out of the public
funds which they funded for themselves.” Politics for profit was a
sorry spectacle to him, and he occupied his mind much with the problem
of erecting the machinery of an adequate democratic state that should
be faithful to its stewardship as agent of the whole.
It was this difficult problem with which he dealt in his _Letter
to the National Convention of France_. In this suggestive work two
ideas determined his thinking: the doctrine of the sovereignty of
the majority will, and the doctrine of government as a social agent.
In both he returned to the position of Roger Williams a hundred and
fifty years before. The sovereignty of the majority will he conceives
to be continuous and immediately effective; it cannot be held in
check by a rigid constitutionalism, for as Paine had pointed out,
such constitutionalism is no other than government from the grave.
He proposed therefore, that the fundamental law be amendable by
legislative enactment, one legislative body proposing and the next
determining, under full publicity. As a guarantee that such action
should express the popular will, that love of power on the part of the
agent should not defeat the purpose of society, he held that there must
be annual elections. Representatives should be periodically excluded
from candidacy, and other representatives fresh from the people sent
up, for “power always was and always must be a dangerous thing.” The
principle of recall he regarded as indispensable in a democratic
government, for it “will tend to maintain a proper relation between
the representatives and the people, and a due dependence of the former
upon the latter. Besides, when a man has lost the confidence of his
fellow citizens ... he is no longer their representative; and when he
ceases to be their’s, he cannot in any sense be the representative of
the nation.” The fundamental principle of state-craft Barlow states
thus: “Every individual ought to be rendered as independent of every
other individual as possible; and at the same time as dependent as
possible on the whole community.” The familiar romantic doctrine of
the diminished state is implicit in all his reasoning. Like Paine he
would do away utterly with the old mystery of government under which
ambitious men cloak their will to power; “for whatever there is in
the art of government, whether legislative or executive, above the
capacities of the ordinary class of what are called well-informed men,
is superfluous and destructive and ought to be laid aside.”
A thoroughgoing radical in economics and politics, Barlow was no
innovator in polite literature. He had pulled himself out of many a
Connecticut provincialism, but he stuck fast in the bog of provincial
poetry. It has long been the fashion to make merry over _The
Columbiad_, and there is only too patent a reason for it. To criticize
it is a work of supererogation. The appeal of “the grand style” seems
to have been too much for him. Some explanation doubtless is to be
found in the fact that he was working over an earlier poem done in the
days of an ebullient patriotism. It was a mistake to return to it,
for the heroic note in the vein of a political pamphleteer must play
havoc with it. What he now attempted, in the light of his long European
experience, was to embody in the narrative suitable political ideas,
transforming _The Vision of Columbus_ into an epic glorifying the great
republican experiment. His purpose is set forth in the preface.
[The] real object of the poem is to inculcate the love of national
liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence
and war; to show that on the basis of republican principle all good
morals, as well as good government and hopes of permanent peace,
must be founded; and to convince the student in political science,
that the theoretical question of the future advancement of human
society, till states as well as individuals arrive at universal
civilization, is held in dispute and still unsettled only because
we have had too little experience of organized liberty in the
government of nations, to have well considered its effects.
The humanitarian note is strong. War, slavery, monarchy, injustice,
the tyranny resulting from political inequality, and a host of other
evils, social and political, are assailed in vigorous declamation. It
may not be good poetry but the sentiments are those of an enlightened
and generous man. The conclusion rises to a vision of a golden age of
international commerce and universal peace, when “earth, garden’d all,
a tenfold burden brings,” and the sundered nations shall draw together,
and--
... cloth’d majestic in the robes of state,
Moved by one voice, in general congress meet
The legates of all empires.
In that future time science will have learned “with her own glance to
ken the total God,” and philosophy will “expand the selfish to the
social flame.” Of the political ideas incorporated in the massive work
some suggestion may be got from the following lines:
Ah, would you not be slaves, with lords and kings,
Then be not Masters; there the danger springs.
The whole crude system that torments this earth,
Of rank, privation, privilege of birth,
False honor, fraud, corruption, civil jars,
The rage of conquest and the curse of wars,
Pandora’s total shower, all ills combined
That erst o’erwhelmed and still distress mankind,
Boxt up secure in your deliberate hand,
Wait your behest to fix or fly this land.
Equality of right is nature’s plan;
And following nature is the march of man.
Whene’er he deviates in the least degree,
When, free himself, he would be more than free,
The baseless column, rear’d to bear his trust,
Falls as he mounts and whelms him in the dust....
Too much of Europe, here transplanted o’er,
Nursed feudal feelings on your tented shore,
Brought sable sires from Afric, call’d it gain,
And urged your sires to forge the fatal chain....
Restore their souls to men, give earth repose,
And save your sons from slavery, wars and woes.
Based on its rock of right your empire lies,
On walls of wisdom let the fabric rise;
Preserve your principles, their force unfold,
Let nations prove them and let kings behold.
+Equality+, your first firm-grounded stand;
Then +FREE ELECTION+; then your +FEDERAL BAND+:
This holy Triad should forever shine
The great compendium of all rights divine,
Creed of all schools, whence youths by millions draw
Their themes of right, their decalogues of law;
Till men shall wonder (in these codes inured)
How wars were made, how tyrants were endured.[392]
Diverse politics incline to diverse literary judgments, and the
critics are not yet done with Joel Barlow. If he was not a great poet
or a great political thinker, he was at least capable, open-minded,
generous, with a sensitive social conscience--certainly the most
stimulating and original of the literary group that foregathered
in Hartford. Injustice has long been done him by overlooking his
picturesque career, and his services to America, and restricting his
introduction to posterity to a few lines from _Hasty Pudding_. To
make a mush of so honest a thinker, to ignore his very considerable
contributions to the cause of democracy, is to impose too heavy a
penalty for his defection from Connecticut respectability. He suffered
quite enough in his lifetime. In the thick of his revolutionary
struggles abroad his wife begged him “to go home and be respectable”;
but it was not in the ardent nature of Joel Barlow to listen to such
counsel of timidity. He was in too deep to go back, and so while
Timothy Dwight was gathering laurels from every bush in Connecticut,
this apostle of humanitarianism, this apostate from Calvinistic
Federalism, was content to remain a byword and a shaking of the head
in the villages of his native commonwealth. For all which, perhaps,
the Washington salon and the intimate association with Jefferson may
have served as recompense. Better society could not be found even in
Hartford.
3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge • Free-Lance Democrat
In taking leave of this disturbant time when new social theories were
bringing confusion to weak understandings, one cannot do better than
to dip into the wittiest and most readable sketch produced by that
vigorous generation, as well as one of the sanest. _Modern Chivalry_
was the single noteworthy contribution to American letters by Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, a western Pennsylvanian of Scotch birth, and a
graduate of Princeton in the class with Freneau and Madison. With the
former he had practised his couplets, collaborating in writing the
commencement poem, _The Rising Glory of America_. After leaving college
he tried his hand at the usual things open to young graduates, was
tutor in the college, taught in an academy, studied divinity, served
as chaplain in the Revolutionary army, and later read law. He removed
eventually to the frontier town of Pittsburgh, was active in Republican
politics, became an ardent pro-French sympathizer, and finally went
upon the supreme bench of Pennsylvania. He wrote for his own amusement
and tried his hand at various kinds of polite literature, producing
a masque, a poetic drama on Bunker Hill, prose essays, some sermons,
and turned at last to satire. For this he was admirably equipped;
he possessed a keen, well-balanced mind, a prose style delightfully
colloquial and a wit pleasantly caustic.
Brackenridge is a refreshing person to come upon after one is satiated
with the heroic. A free-lance critic, independent in thought and act,
he was no vociferous party or class advocate given to enlisting God on
his side. Federalist and Republican alike might lose their heads and
indulge in unseemly clamor, but Brackenridge with good Scotch judgment
refused to howl with the pack. A stout and unrepentant democrat, he was
no visionary to shut his eyes to unpleasant facts lest they disturb
his faith. As he considered the turbulent confusions of an America
in rough process of democratization, he saw the evils as clearly as
the hope, and it amused him to satirize those evils after the manner
of Don Quixote. _Modern Chivalry_ has proved somewhat of a puzzle to
later critics who have not cleared their minds of the old cobwebs of
Federalist criticism. Thus a literary historian has suggested that it
is “a half-hidden satire on democracy”[393] and he inclines to number
it among the literary ram’s horns that were blown against the walls of
the democratic Jericho. But such an interpretation certainly misses
the point. Brackenridge had become a thorough Westerner with a fresh
point of view. Among the stump fields of his Pennsylvania circuit he
was equally removed from the cynicism of Hamilton and the romanticism
of Barlow. He saw all about him a rough and tumble democracy, living a
vigorous and capable if not lovely life. As a democrat he accepted the
fact of political equality and approved of it; the thing was there and
needed no justification or defense. Some of its ways were foolish, many
of its purposes were shortsighted; it amused him therefore to sharpen
his pen against certain of its absurdities and essay the remedial
effects of unembittered laughter. He was a realist concerned with
realities.
_Modern Chivalry_ is our first backcountry book. It is redolent
of stump-lands and their rude leveling ways, and for years it was
immensely popular along the western frontier. It is a satire aimed
primarily at backwoods shortcomings, but with an eye that kept turning
towards the older settlements to scrutinize their equal shortcomings.
Its main theme is concerned with certain weaknesses of popular
sovereignty already unpleasantly evident as a result of the extension
of suffrage; and in particular with the unseemly office-hunting zeal
of coonskin candidates. The preposterous spectacle of a pushing fellow
with no qualifications setting himself up for high office was to become
more frequent with the later rise of Jacksonian democracy; but already
there was abundant justification for the satire of Brackenridge. The
records of the time are loud in criticism of the demagoguery that
resulted from the sudden shift of leadership in consequence of the
social upheaval following the Revolutionary War. The old leaders of the
aristocratic tradition had fled or had fallen into disfavor, and new
men, too often of small capacity and less breeding, had pushed into
the seats of authority. With the triumph of Jefferson this transfer
of power went forward briskly to the scandal of all aristocrats. The
lust of office spread like the plague, and demagogues caught the
popular ear, none too nice to distinguish between sense and fustian.
Irving brushed against the democratic weakness in his brief venture
into politics, and vented his spleen in _Rip Van Winkle_. It is this
which Brackenridge deals with primarily in _Modern Chivalry_, the
first part of which was published in 1792 and the second in 1805. The
general leveling of offices, he pointed out, was not democracy, but the
abuse and ruin of democracy. America was engaged in a great and noble
experiment; the success of that experiment depended upon an honest and
intelligent electorate; it must not be brought to failure by demagogues
through the incapacity of the voter.
Brackenridge had come in later years to be a pacifist. He had had his
fill of revolutions and armed revolts. As a principal arbitrator during
the tumult of the Whisky Insurrection, he had come to fear popular
lawlessness; and as a friend of the French Revolution he was concerned
at the methods of the Jacobin leaders. Commenting on the Whisky
Insurrection he said in later years:
I saw before me anarchy, a shock to the government, a revolution
impregnated with the Jacobin principles of France.... Let no man
suppose I coveted a revolution; I had seen the evils of one already
in the American; and I had read the evils of another, the French.
My imagination presented the evils of the last strongly to my view,
and brought them so close to a possible experience at home, that
during the whole period of the insurrection, I could scarcely bear
to cast my eye on a paragraph of French news.[394]
A reasonable and intelligent democracy, holding steadily to the
purpose of the common good, was his cherished ideal. He was not a
political philosopher interested in general principles. His purpose
was to satirize manners, not to speculate on causes; and in the days
of triumphant republicanism the most conspicuous target was offered by
the tousled head of the demagogue, “the courtier of democracy.” In the
preface to the 1846 edition, the editor thus summarizes the political
views of Brackenridge:
An enlightened democracy was looked upon by him as the true
nobility. He considered the true democrat as the true gentleman,
who _ought_ to feel a stain on his fair reputation, “as a wound.”
He maintained “that democracy is not in its nature coarse, and
vulgar, or destitute of high integrity and honor.” The aim and
end of his writings was to raise the standard of democracy, and
to elevate “the noble of nature” to the same level with any
other noble, in those qualities which constitute true nobility.
The noble of nature, in his opinion, ought not to yield to the
noble of aristocracy or monarchy, in strict integrity, in liberal
and benevolent feelings, in propriety of manners and general
intelligence.
The work is a string of adventures, interspersed with miscellaneous
discussion, of Captain John Farrago--who is evidently Brackenridge
himself--and his bog-trotting servant Teague O’Regan. The Captain
is an intelligent person, well read in the literature of the times,
and “a good deal disposed to subscribe to the elementary principles”
of Paine’s _Rights of Man_. He can summarize neatly the arguments
on both sides of the political questions of the day, but he retains
the open mind and cautious judgment of the independent. He is
a free-lance critic, democratic in sympathies but unsparing in
exposure of absurdity. His hits fall right and left, on the country
yokel, the city speculator, members of Congress, the institution of
slavery. He is greatly concerned to preserve his servant from the
temptations of ambition which assail him in the backwoods as well as
in Philadelphia. The career of Teague O’Regan is a broad satire on
the mounting ambition of old-world peasants to push their way up.
That the underling should rise in a democratic country was well; but
that he should be in unseemly haste to scramble into positions beyond
his capacities, that in pushing his private fortunes he should bring
ridicule upon the democratic experiment, was not well. Teague O’Regan’s
desire to scramble discovered quite too fertile a field for his own
or the country’s good. He is nearly sent to Congress by a backwoods
constituency, listens to other seductive appeals, and in the end is
sent by President Washington to the West as a revenue officer, where
he falls into the untender hands of the whisky rioters, and finds his
Irish beauty marred by a coat of tar and feathers.
It is in his burlesque of electorate methods that Brackenridge hits
most sharply at the current tendencies of republicanism. The ways of
the backwoods he caricatures by describing a contest between an honest
deacon and an ignorant Scotch-Irishman, which he came upon in his
peregrinations.
When they looked upon the one, they felt an inclination to promote
him. But when, again, on the other hand, they saw two kegs which
they knew to be replenished with a very cheering liquor, they
seemed to be inclined in favor of the other. The candidates were
called upon to address the people, and the grave person mounted
the stump of a tree, many of them standing round, as the place was
a new clearing. His harangue was listened to by some of the older
and more sedate, and one man, hard of hearing, seemed to make great
effort to catch the sounds. As soon as the man of the two kegs took
a stump, he was surrounded by an eager crowd.--“Frinds,” said he,
in the native Scotch-Irish, “I’m a good dimicrat, and hates the
Brattish--I’m an elder of the meetin’, forby, and has been overseer
of the roads for three years:--An’ ye all know, that my mammy was
kilt o’ the Ingens--now all ye that’s in my favor, come forit an’
drenk.” Appetite, or rather thirst, prevailed, and the voters gave
their votes to the man with the two kegs.[395]
If whisky decided elections in the backcountry, business controlled
them in the city. The following is almost modern in its caricature:
The candidates were all remarkably pot-bellied; and waddled in
their gait. The captain inquiring what were the pretensions of
these men to be elected; he was told, that they had all stock
in the funds, and lived in brick buildings; and some of them
entertained fifty people at a time, and ate and drank abundantly;
and living an easy life, and pampering their appetites, they had
swollen to this size.
“It is a strange thing,” said the captain, “that in the
country, in my route, they would elect no one but a weaver or a
whisky-distiller; and here none but fat squabs, that guzzle wine,
and smoke segars.”... “No, faith” (said his friend), “there is na
danger of Teague here, unless he had his scores o’ shares in the
bank, and was in league with the brokers, and had a brick house at
his hurdies, or a ship or twa on the stocks ... all is now lost in
substantial interest, and the funds command everything.”[396]
That there might be no mistake as to the meaning of his satire
Brackenridge set down at the end an explicit statement of his purpose.
As already hinted by some things put into the mouth of the
captain, I could make it a principal matter to form the heart of
_a republican government_. And in order to this, keep out all
that nourishes _ambition_, the poison of public virtue.... In the
American republics, we retain yet a great deal of the spirit of
monarchy. The people are not aware of the phraseology itself, in
some instances.... The first lesson I would give to a son of mine
would be to have nothing to do with public business, but as a duty
to his country. To consider service in civil life, no more to be
desired than service in the military.... Those who say to them,
_vox populi vox dei_, offer up an incense to flattery, as impious
as the worshippers of the Caesars. They should be warned to beware
of flatterers, whose object is not to serve them, but themselves.
The demagogue in a democracy, and the courtier in a monarchy, are
identical. They are the same, plying the same arts in different
situations.... I shall have accomplished something by this book, if
it shall keep some honest man from lessening his respectability by
pushing himself into public trusts for which he is not qualified;
or when pushed into public station, if it shall contribute to keep
him honest by teaching him the folly of ambition, and farther
advancement.... This is in great part, the moral of this book; if
it should be at all necessary to give a hint of it.
One may do a worse service to democracy than to point out its faults.
Brackenridge was no truckler either to King George or to his neighbors.
Living in the midst of a coonskin democracy, he refused to believe
that there was any particular virtue in coonskin. It is not the cap
but what is under it that signifies. He was a vigorous individualist,
a confirmed democrat, a friend of all honest liberalisms, a man who
honored his own counsels and went his own way. We could better spare
more pretentious books from the library of our early literature than
these clever satires that preserve for us some of the homely ways of a
time when American institutions were still in the making.
Footnotes
[374] Quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in _Harrison Gray Otis_, Vol. I,
p. 107.
[375] _Travels_, Vol. II, p. 458.
[376] Number III.
[377] Number X.
[378] Number XI.
[379] Number IX.
[380] _Literary History of America_, p. 300.
[381] _Literary History of the American Revolution_, Vol. I, p. 172.
[382] _Poems_, Pattee edition, Vol. I, p. 141.
[383] _The American Soldier._
[384] _To Duncan Doolittle._
[385] _On False Systems of Government._
[386] _Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects, etc._,
by Robert Slender, 1799; quoted by Pattee, Introduction to _Poems of
Philip Freneau_.
[387] See A. M. Schlesinger, _The Colonial Merchants and the American
Revolution_, Chapter IV.
[388] Forman, “The Political Activities of Philip Freneau,” in _Johns
Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science_, Vol. XX.
[389] _The Brook of the Valley._
[390] Purcell, _Connecticut in Transition_, p. 27.
[391] _Advice to the Privileged Orders_, pp. 66, 70.
[392] _Book VIII._
[393] Cairns, _History of American Literature_, p. 147.
[394] _Modern Chivalry_, edition of 1846, p. 170.
[395] _Ibid._, p. 105.
[396] _Ibid._, pp. 127-128.
Conclusion
With the triumph of Jefferson in the great struggle of 1800, the first
democratic battle had been won at the polls, but victory remained still
in doubt. The new liberalism was in the saddle, but how long it would
keep its seat, or whither it would drive, no one could foresee. The
aristocratic eighteenth century was still in secure possession of all
the vantage points of polite culture. It still held the positions of
honor and emolument and dictated the ways of society. The tie-wig and
smallclothes had not yet been put to rout by homespun and coonskin, and
were laying plans to make good the first defeat. Polite letters were
still content with the old wit ideal, still enamored of the couplet,
still in love with caustic satire, still transfixing democracy with its
sharp quills. The nineteenth century with its cargo of romanticisms had
not yet crossed the Atlantic, and while Napoleon was strewing Europe
with the wrecks of old empires, America was still dwelling in the
twilight of a century that was loath to be gone.
The account in the American ledger was complex and not easily cast up,
yet Jefferson might well have regarded with satisfaction the results
of two hundred years of new-world experience. The drift was all in
the direction he was facing. The age of theology was gone, the age of
political speculation was passing, the age of constitution building
was over. Disintegration had come upon every system of caste brought
hither from the old world; the free economics of a decentralized
society had proved a sufficient solvent to destroy the principle
of monarchy and of aristocracy, and prepare the American mind for
a venture in republicanism. Overseas liberalisms had flourished in
the soil that proved inhospitable to overseas conservatisms; and it
was these European liberalisms that provided the mold into which ran
the fluid experience of America to assume substantial form. That
the venture in republicanism would inure to the benefit of agrarian
America--to the producers on their scattered farms--Jefferson seems
never to have doubted; and the ready naturalization of the philosophy
of equalitarianism in the backwoods settlements might well have seemed
to justify his hopes. Nevertheless new forces were preparing that
were to bring about momentous changes in nineteenth-century America.
Capitalism with its banks and credit and elastic currency and its
psychology of speculation, and industrialism with its technique of
factory production, were already at work preparing a different pattern
of life for America, a pattern wholly unlike that of the simpler
agrarianism with its domestic economy, which Jefferson represented. A
new romanticism of the middle class was eventually to shoulder aside
the aspirations of gentleman and farmer alike, and refashion America
after its own ideal. What was implied in that momentous change provides
the theme for another study, and cannot be entered upon here.
Bibliography
Only the more important titles dealt with in the present study are
listed hereunder, together with selected biographical and critical
material. The invaluable bibliographies in the _Cambridge History of
American Literature_, four vols., New York, 1917-22, cover most of the
writers considered, and the reader is referred to them for detailed
material.
Book I: Part I
I. English Backgrounds: For the broader European movements, see
Preserved Smith, _The Age of the Reformation_ (New York, 1920). For
English movements, see David Masson, _Life of Milton_ (6 vols.,
London, 1859-80). The important ideas of Luther will be found in _An
Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning
the Reform of the Christian State_ (1520); _The Babylonian Captivity
of the Church_ (1520); _A Treatise on Christian Liberty_ (1520). For
discussion, see L. H. Waring, _The Political Theories of Martin Luther_
(New York and London, 1910). For Calvin, see Williston Walker, _John
Calvin, The Organiser of Reformed Protestantism_ (New York and London,
1906; with bibliographical note).
II. The Transplanting of Ideas: For political history see James
Truslow Adams, _The Founding of New England_ (Boston, 1921). For
literary history consult the invaluable work of Moses Coit Tyler, _A
History of American Literature, 1607-1765_ (2 vols., New York, 1878).
Histories of Congregationalism will be found in Henry M. Dexter,
_The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years as Seen in
Its Literature_ (New York, 1880; with full bibliography); Williston
Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches in the United
States_ (New York, 1900); also W. Walker, _Creeds and Platforms of
Congregationalism_ (New York, 1893).
III. John Cotton: Little of Cotton’s work has been reprinted. _A Reply
to Mr. Williams His Examination_ was reissued in _Narragansett Club
Pub._, Vol. II, pp. 1-240. His most important work is _The Way of the
Congregational Churches Cleared_ (London, 1648).
No life has been written. See Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia_; W. Walker’s
_Ten New England Leaders_ (New York, 1901); A. Young, _John Cotton’s
Life and Letters. Chronicles of the First Planters, etc._ (Boston,
1846).
John Winthrop: _Journal ..._ (Hartford, 1790); as _The History of New
England ..._ edited by J. Savage (2 vols., Boston, 1825-26, 1853);
edited by J. K. Hosmer (2 vols., New York, 1908).
See R. C. Winthrop, _Life and Letters of John Winthrop_ (2 vols.,
Boston, 1863, 1866, 1869, 1895). J. Twitchell, _John Winthrop, First
Governor of Massachusetts_ (New York, 1892).
IV. Thomas Hooker: His works have not been reprinted. The _Survey of
the Summe of Church-Discipline ..._ was published in London in 1648.
Contemporary notes of his _Sermon before the General Court on May 31,
1638_, were printed with comment by J. Hammond Trumbull, in _Conn.
Hist. Soc. Col._, Vol. I, No. 19.
For his life, see G. L. Walker, _Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder,
Democrat_ (New York, 1891; with bibliography by J. H. Trumbull).
Roger Williams: _The Works of Roger Williams. Edited by members of the
Narragansett Club_ (6 vols., Providence, 1866-1874).
No satisfactory life has been written. The best is Oscar S. Straus,
_Roger Williams, the Pioneer of Religious Liberty_ (New York, 1894).
See also Edmund J. Carpenter, _Roger Williams: A Study of the Life,
Times and Character of a Political Pioneer_ (New York, 1909; Grafton
Hist. Series).
Book I: Part II
I. Samuel Sewall: _Diary_ (printed in _Mass. Hist. Soc. Col._, Series
5, Vols. 5-7). No life has been written.
II. Increase Mather: The extensive bibliography is confused, and a
definitive list is being prepared by T. J. Holmes and G. P. Winship.
Few works have been reprinted, and about the only available title is
_Illustrious Providences_ (Boston and London, 1684; London, 1687);
under title of _Remarkable Providences_ (London, 18561, 1890).
The authoritative life is by Kenneth B. Murdock, _Increase Mather,
The Foremost American Puritan_ (Harvard University Press. 1925; with
bibliography). See also Williston Walker, _Ten New England Leaders_
(New York, 1901).
Cotton Mather: The bibliography is enormous, but few titles are
available. _The Wonders of the Invisible World_ (Boston, 1693) has been
twice reprinted: with title, _Salem Witchcraft ..._ and notes by S. P.
Fowler (Cambridge, 1861); and with I. Mather’s _Account of the Tryals
of the New-England Witches_ (Library of Old Authors, London, 1862).
_The Bostonian Ebenezer_, Boston, 1698, was reprinted in Old South
Leaflets, Boston, 1896. The _Magnalia Christi Americana_, London, 1702,
was reissued (2 vols., Hartford and New Haven, 1820); and the same with
notes by T. Robbins, and translations of foreign quotations by L. F.
Robinson, and a life by S. G. Drake (Hartford, 1853). The _Essays to Do
Good_ has been reprinted ten times, the latest editions London, 1842,
and Boston, 1845. The most available text is _Selections from Cotton
Mather_, edited with introduction, by K. B. Murdock (New York, 1926;
American Authors Series).
The best life is by Barrett Wendell, _Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_
(New York, 1891; Harvard University Press, 1925). See also A. P.
Marvin, _The Life and Times of Cotton Mather_ (Boston, 1892).
III. John Wise: _The Churches Quarrel Espoused ..._ (Boston, 1710,
1715, 1745, 1772); reissued with the _Vindication_, with introduction
by J. S. Clark (Boston, 1860). _A Vindication of the Government of the
New-England Churches. Drawn from Antiquity; the Light of Nature; Holy
Scripture ..._ (Boston, 1717, 1772); reissued with the preceding title
(Boston, 1860).
No life of Wise has been written.
Book II: Part I
I. Colonial Backgrounds: See Herbert L. Osgood, _The American Colonies
in the Eighteenth Century_ (2 vols., New York, 1924).
New Stock: See John R. Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_ (New
York, 1902, 1920). F. R. Diffenderfer, _The German Immigrants into
Pennsylvania ..._ (New York, 1900). _The Diary of John Harrower (Amer.
Hist. Review_, Vol. VI, p. 65).
The Frontier--Lubberland: _The Journal of Sarah Kemble Knight_ (New
York, 1825; Albany, 1865; Norwich, Conn., 1901).
William Byrd: _Westover Manuscripts: containing the History of the
Dividing Line ... A Journey to the Land of Eden ..._ (Petersburg,
Va., 1841); reissued under title, _The History of the Dividing Line_
(edited by T. H. Wynne; 2 vols., Richmond, 1866). Also _The Writings of
“Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esq.”_ Edited by J. S.
Bassett (New York, 1901).
The Frontier--Land of Promise: _Letters from an American Farmer ..._
(London, 1782; with note by W. P. Trent and introduction by Ludwig
Lewisohn, New York, 1904). _More “Letters from an American Farmer,”_
edited with introductions by H. L. Bourdin, R. G. Gabriel, and S. T.
Williams, and issued under the title, _Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_ (New Haven, 1925).
For the life of Crèvecœur, see Julia Post Mitchell, _St. Jean de
Crèvecœur (Col. Univ. Studies in English and Comp. Lit._, New York,
1916).
II. Jonathan Edwards: _Works_ (8 vols., Leeds, 1806-11). _Works_,
edited by S. E. Dwight (10 vols., New York, 1829, 1830). _Works_ (10
vols., Edinburgh, 1847). Numerous other editions and many reprints.
The best life is by V. G. Allen, _Jonathan Edwards_ (Boston, 1889,
1890; with bibliography). See also Woodbridge Riley, _American Thought_
(New York, 1915).
III. Benjamin Franklin: The best edition of his works is that edited by
J. Bigelow (10 vols., New York, 1889). The _Autobiography_ was first
printed complete by J. Bigelow, New York, 1874. The latest reprint is
in the American Authors Series, edited with introduction by Percy H.
Boynton (New York, 1926).
Of the several lives, see James Parton, _Life and Times of Benjamin
Franklin_ (2 vols., New York, 1864); J. B. McMaster, _Benjamin Franklin
as a Man of Letters_ (Boston, 1887); J. T. Morse, _Benjamin Franklin_
(American Statesmen Series, Boston, 1889). See also W. A. Wetzel,
_Benjamin Franklin as an Economist_ (_Johns Hopkins Studies in Hist.
and Pol. Science_, Thirteenth Series, Vol. IX, pp. 421-476). A recent
life: Phillips Russell, _Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized
American_ (New York, 1926).
Book II: Part II
I. Imperial Sovereignty and Home Rule: For the literature of the
Revolutionary period, see the invaluable _Literary History of the
American Revolution_, by Moses Coit Tyler (2 vols., New York, 1897;
with annotated bibliography). For the political phases, see C. H. Van
Tyne, _The Causes of the War of Independence ..._ (Boston and New York,
1922); A. M. Schlesinger, _The Colonial Merchants and the American
Revolution, 1763-1776_ (New York, 1918); J. T. Adams, _Revolutionary
New England, 1691-1776_ (Boston, 1923).
II. Thomas Hutchinson: _The History of Massachusetts_ (3 vols., Boston
and London, 1764-1767-1828; Vols. I and II, Boston, 1795). _Diary and
Letters of Thomas Hutchinson ..._, edited by P. O. Hutchinson (2 vols.,
Boston, 1884-1886). J. K. Hosmer, _Life of Thomas Hutchinson_ (Boston,
1896).
Daniel Leonard: _Massachusettensis_ (London, 1776); reissued with
_Novanglus_ by John Adams, and ascribed on the title page to Jonathan
Sewall (Boston, 1819).
Jonathan Boucher: _A View of the Causes and Consequences of the
American Revolution_ (London, 1797).
III. John Dickinson: _Political Writings_ (2 vols., Wilmington, 1801).
_Writings_, edited by P. L. Ford (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1895).
See C. J. Stillé, _The Life and Times of John Dickinson_ (Philadelphia,
1891).
IV. Samuel Adams: _Writings_, edited by H. A. Cushing (4 vols., New
York, 1904-08).
See J. K. Hosmer, _Samuel Adams_ (Boston, 1884); revised edition (1898,
American Statesmen Series). W. V. Wells, _The Life and Public Services
of Samuel Adams_ (3 vols., Boston, 1865).
V. John Trumbull: _Poetical Works_ (2 vols., Hartford, 1820). _The
Progress of Dulness_ (New Haven, 1772-73). _An Elegy on the Times_
(Boston, 1774; New Haven, 1775). _M’Fingal_ (printed in parts from
1775 to 1782, and much revised; first published entire, Hartford,
1782; numerous contemporary editions). _The Progress of Dulness_
and _M’Fingal_ are reprinted in _The Connecticut Wits_, edited with
introduction and bibliography by Vernon L. Parrington (New York, 1926,
American Authors Series).
No life of Trumbull has been written.
Francis Hopkinson: _Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings_ (2
vols., Philadelphia, 1792). George Hastings, _Life and Works of Francis
Hopkinson_ (University of Chicago Press, 1926).
Jonathan Odell: _The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor
Jonathan Odell_, edited by Winthrop Sargent (Albany, 1860).
Samuel Peters: _A General History of Connecticut ... to which is added
an Appendix, wherein New and True Sources of the Present Rebellion are
pointed out ... By a Gentleman of the Province_ (London, 1781; New
Haven, 1829; New York, 1877).
Book III: Part I
I. Agrarianism and Capitalism: A vivid account of the party struggles
of the time is given in Claude G. Bowers, _Jefferson and Hamilton_
(Boston, 1925), with full bibliography. For political theory, see
Harold J. Laski, _Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham_
(New York, 1920). Charles E. Merriam, _A History of American Political
Theories_ (New York, 1903). A dramatic account of Shays’s Rebellion is
given in Edward Bellamy, _The Duke of Stockbridge_ (New York, 1901).
II. The Great Debate: The bibliography is extensive. See J. Elliot,
_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the
Federal Constitution ..._ (4 vols., Washington, 1827, 1836; 5 vols.,
Philadelphia, 1906). Max Farrand, _Records of the Federal Convention of
1787_ (3 vols., New Haven, 1911). S. B. Harding, _The Contest over the
Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts_
(New York, 1896). Charles A. Beard, _An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States_ (New York, 1913). _The Federalist_,
numerous editions; the best are those edited by H. C. Lodge (New
York, 1886) and by P. L. Ford (New York, 1898). Richard Henry Lee,
_Observations leading to a fair examination of the system of government
... In a number of Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican_
(reprinted in _Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States,
1787-1788_, edited by P. L. Ford, Brooklyn, 1888).
III. Alexander Hamilton: _Works, Comprising his Correspondence_, edited
by J. C. Hamilton (7 vols., New York, 1850-51). _Works_, edited by H.
C. Lodge (10 vols., New York, 1885).
There are numerous lives. See J. C. Hamilton, _The Life of Alexander
Hamilton_ (2 vols., New York, 1834). H. C. Lodge, _Alexander Hamilton_
(Boston, 1882, 1898). J. T. Morse, _The Life of Alexander Hamilton_
(2 vols., Boston, 1876). See also Gertrude Atherton, _The Conqueror_
(New York and London, 1902). A. H. Vanderberg, _The Greatest American,
Alexander Hamilton ... with a Symposium of Opinions by Distinguished
Americans_ (New York and London, 1922). F. S. Oliver, _Alexander
Hamilton: An Essay on the American Union_ (New York, 1907)--an English
view.
John Adams: _Works ... with a Life of the Author_, edited by C. F.
Adams (10 vols., Boston, 1850-56).
See J. Q. Adams and C. F. Adams, _The Life of John Adams_ (2 vols.,
Philadelphia, 1871). J. T. Morse, Jr., _John Adams_ (Boston, 1884,
1898). _Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams_, edited by C. F.
Adams (2 vols., Boston, 1840). C. M. Walsh, _The Political Science of
John Adams_ (New York, 1915).
Book III: Part II
I. The Impact of the French Revolution: Abundant material will be found
in Charles D. Hazen, _Contemporary American Opinion of the French
Revolution_ (Baltimore, 1897, _Johns Hopkins Studies in Hist. and Pol.
Science_, Extra Vol. 16). See also _The Journal of William Maclay_,
edited by E. S. Maclay (New York, 1890). For _Publicola_, see John Q.
Adams, _Writings ..._, edited by Worthington C. Ford (7 vols., New
York, 1913-17).
II. Tom Paine: _Writings ..._, edited by Moncure D. Conway (4 vols.,
New York, 1894-99). Moncure D. Conway, _Life of Thomas Paine ... To
which is added a Sketch of Paine by William Cobbett ..._ (2 vols., New
York and London, 1892).
Thomas Jefferson: _Writings_, edited by H. A. Washington (9 vols.,
Washington, 1853-54). _The Works of Thomas Jefferson_ (with _Anas_ and
_Autobiography_), edited by P. L. Ford (12 vols., New York, 1904-05).
Numerous lives, many of which are wholly unreliable. The official
biography was written by Henry S. Randall, _The Life of Thomas
Jefferson_ (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1858, 1871). Of later studies the
following are excellent: David S. Muzzey, _Thomas Jefferson_ (New York,
1919); Francis W. Hirst, _Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson_ (New
York, 1926)--an English view; and Albert Jay Nock, _Jefferson_ (New
York, 1926). See also Sarah N. Randolph, _The Domestic Life of Thomas
Jefferson_ (New York, 1871) and Thomas E. Watson, _The Life and Times
of Thomas Jefferson_ (New York, 1903).
III. The Federalist Group: For backgrounds of the Hartford wits, see
Richard J. Purcell, _Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818_ (Washington,
1918). William A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_
(New Haven, 1916). Samuel E. Morison, _Life and Letters of Harrison
Gray Otis_ (2 vols., Boston, 1913). For criticism, see F. Sheldon,
“Pleiades of Connecticut” (_Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. XV). Mrs. Annie
R. Marble, _Heralds of American Literature_ (Chicago, 1907). Moses
Coit Tyler, _Three Men of Letters_ (New York, 1895)--Dwight and
Barlow. The writings of the Wits have long been out of print. The most
available text is _The Connecticut Wits_, edited with introduction
and bibliographies, by Vernon L. Parrington (New York, 1926, American
Authors Series), which reprints large portions of Trumbull, Timothy
Dwight, Barlow, Humphreys, _The Anarchiad_, and portions of _The Echo_.
Timothy Dwight: The most important titles are _The Conquest of Canaan
..._ (Hartford, 1785). _The Triumph of Infidelity ..._ (1788).
_Greenfield Hill ..._ (1794). _Travels in New England and New York:
1796-1815_ (4 vols., New Haven, 1821-22; London, 1823).
See W. B. Sprague, _Life of Timothy Dwight_ (Sparks _Lib. Amer. Biog._,
Second Series, Vol. IV, Boston, 1845).
The French Group: Philip Freneau: _Poems_, edited for the Princeton
Hist. Assoc. by Fred L. Pattee (3 vols., Princeton, 1902-07). Victor
H. Paltsits, _A Bibliography of the Separate and Collected Works of
Philip Freneau, together with an Account of his Newspapers_ (New York,
1903). Mary S. Austin, _Philip Freneau, Poet of the Revolution_ (New
York, 1901). S. E. Forman, _The Political Activities of Philip Freneau_
(Baltimore, 1902, _Johns Hopkins Studies in Hist. and Pol. Science_,
Series XX, No. 9-10). Mrs. Annie R. Marble, _Heralds of American
Literature_ (Chicago, 1907).
Joel Barlow: His works are out of print, but portions will be found in
_The Connecticut Wits_ (New York, 1926). The important titles are: _The
Vision of Columbus ..._ (Hartford, 1787; London, 1787). _A Letter to
the National Convention of France ..._ (London, 1792). _Advice to the
Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe ..._ (London, 1792,
1796). _The Conspiracy of Kings ..._ (London, 1792). _The Hasty Pudding
..._ (New York, 1796; Salem, 1799; Stockbridge, 1799). _The Columbiad_
(Philadelphia, 1807; London, 1809).
Charles Burr Todd, _Life and Letters of Joel Barlow_ (New York, 1886).
See also Tyler, _Three Men of Letters_ (New York, 1895), and Marble,
_Heralds of American Literature_ (Chicago, 1907).
Hugh Henry Brackenridge: _Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of
Captain John Farrago, and Teague O’Regan, his servant ..._ (2 vols.,
Philadelphia, 1792; Vol. 3, Pittsburgh, 1793; Vol. 4, Philadelphia,
1797). These four volumes constitute Part I. Part II was issued in two
volumes, Philadelphia, 1804-05. Many revisions and changes of the text
followed. The complete work was issued in four volumes (Philadelphia,
1815), the fourth volume containing new material. Another complete
edition was issued in two volumes (Pittsburgh, 1819). For detailed
information see _Cambridge History of American Literature_ (Vol. I, p.
526).
An account of Brackenridge and in particular of his experience during
the Whiskey Rebellion, in a memoir by H. M. Brackenridge, prefaces the
edition of 1846 and later editions. No life of Brackenridge has been
written. His fugitive writings in verse, drama, and prose are numerous
but inaccessible. Some comment on Brackenridge is given in Henry Adams,
_Life of Albert Gallatin_ (Philadelphia, 1879).
Index [Volume One]
Adams, James Truslow, 20 n, 30 n, 36 n, 58 n, 87 n, 103 n
----, John, 179, 188, 190, 200 n, 205, 207, 208, 213, 222, 241, 247,
249, 253, 259, 292, 296, 299, 307-320, 323, 324, 328, 340, 368,
375, 384
----, John Quincy, 283, 324, 325-326
----, R. G., 310 n
----, Samuel, 123, 181, 196, 200, 206, 228, 233-247, 311, 322, 344,
348, 372
----, Samuel, Sr., 234
_Address and Declaration of the Friends of Universal Peace and
Liberty_, 339 n
_Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec_, 219
_Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe_,
324, 383, 384-386, 386 n
_Age of Reason, The_, 324, 341
_Agrarian Justice_, 337-339, 385
Allen, V. G., 154, 157 n, 160 n
Alsop, Richard, 359, 360
Alvord, C. W., 184 n
_American Belisarius, The_, 147, 147 n
_American Historical Review, The_, 136 n
_American Political Theories_, 280 n
_American Soldier, The_, 375 n
_American Times, The_, 257-259
_American Weekly Mercury, The_, 134
Ames, Fisher, 360
_Anarchiad, The_, 249, 363-367
André, Major John, 256
Andros, Sir Edmund, 118
Anne, Queen, 87, 166
_Answer of Bernard to the Petition of the House of Representatives to
the King_, 199 n, 204 n
_Apology for the Bible, An_, 324, 337 n
_Arbitrary Government Described: & the Government of the
Massachusetts Vindicated from that Aspersion_, 44
Aristotle, 213, 282, 284
Arnold, Benedict, 256
_Autobiography of John Adams_, 309 n
_Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson_, 350 n
Augustine, Saint, 68, 150
Austin, James Trecothick, 276 n
Babeuf, François Noel, 337
_Babylonian Captivity, The_, 12 n
Baillie, Joseph, 35
Ball, Captain John, 134
Bancroft, George, 247
Barlow, Joel, 324, 359, 360, 367, 368, 382-389, 391
Barré, Isaac, 183
Beard, Charles A., 184 n, 276 n, 287 n, 320 n
Belcher, Mr., 113
Bentham, Jeremy, 285, 292, 296
Berkeley, Bishop, 162
Bernard, Governor, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 216, 224, 242, 243,
244
Blackstone, Lord, 189, 236, 238, 244, 249, 280, 343, 352, 353
Blathwayt, Mr., 127
_Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, The_, 68 n, 70
n, 71 n, 72
_Bloudy Tenent Yet more Bloody, The_, 68 n, 69 n, 71 n
_Body of Liberties_, 21, 76, 80
Bolingbroke, Henry Saint John, Lord, 319
Borgeaud, Charles, 58 n
_Boston Chronicle, The_, 379
_Boston Gazette, The_, 128
Boucher, Rev. Jonathan, 190, 194, 214-218
Bowres, Captain, 135
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 368, 369, 372, 390-395
Braddock, General Edward, 373
_Brook of the Valley, The_, 381 n
Brooke, Lord, 34
Brooks, Noah, 277 n
Browne, Robert, 59
Bunyan, John, 40, 85
Burke, Edmund, 69, 183, 324, 325, 334, 335, 375
Burnaby, Rev. Andrew, 276 n
Byles, Rev. Mather, 128, 192, 248
Byrd, Colonel William, 138-140, 141
Cairns, William B., 391 n
Calef, Robert, 108
Calhoun, John C., 320
Calvin, John, 9, 11, 12-15, 20, 23, 27, 30, 42, 76, 89, 100, 150,
159, 249
Camden, Charles Pratt, Earl of, 183, 189, 224, 238
Campbell, Thomas, 370
_Candidus_, 237, 239 n, 242 n, 243 n
Canticles, 40, 65, 66 n, 154
Care, Henry, 119 n
Carson, Hampton Lawrence, 284 n
_Causes of the War of Independence, The_, 179 n, 182 n, 184 n, 188 n,
189 n, 203 n
Channing, William Ellery, 62, 65, 105, 106
Charles I, King, 16, 19, 55, 76, 77, 84, 225
Chastellux, Marquis de, 250
_Chatterer, A_, 241 n, 243 n
_Christian Commonwealth, The_, 81-84
Church, Dr., 118 n
Churchill, Charles, 248, 249, 257, 363, 371
_Churches Quarrel Espoused, The_, 120, 122 n, 123
Cicero, 213, 317
Clark, Mr., 113
Clarke, Captain Jonathan, 134
Clymer, George, 221, 230, 252
Clinton, George, 285
----, Sir Henry, 258, 259
Cogswell, Dr. Mason F., 359
Coke, Sir Edward, 44, 64, 89, 188, 222, 234, 236, 238, 239, 343, 352
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 173
Colman, Rev. Benjamin, 109
_Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, The_, 183 n, 379 n
_Columbia University Contributions to Philosophy, Psychology and
Education_, 155 n
_Columbiad, The_, 384, 387-389
_Columbian Centinel, The_, 325
_Commentaries_ (Blackstone), 280
_Common Sense_, 329-332
Commons, John R., 134 n
_Congratulation, The_, 257
_Connecticut in Transition: 1775-1818_, 384 n
_Conquest of Canaan, The_, 362
_Considerations for J. W._, 39
_Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British
Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising Revenue by an Act of
Parliament_, 226 n
_Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution_, 321 n, 323 n
Conway, Moncure D., 177 n, 336 n, 339 n
Corinthians, Second Epistle to the, 66 n
Cotton, Rev. John, vi, 19, 27-37, 38, 49, 51, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 63,
64, 72, 82, 99, 101, 361
_Cotton Mather, Puritan Priest_, 108 n, 114 n
Coults, James, 134
Crèvecœur, Hector St. John de, 140-147
Cromwell, Oliver, 10, 29, 66, 82, 220
Crusoe, Robinson, 166
_Curiosa Americana_, 115
Cushing, Caleb, 249
Daingerfield, Colonel, 136
D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 324
Dana, Judge, 276
Danforth, Mr., 93
Daniel, Book of, 66 n
Davenport, Rev. John, 60
----, Mr., 113
David, King, 31
Dean, John Ward, 80 n
_Declaration of Rights of the Stamp Act Congress_, 219
_Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The_, 340
_Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of
America, A_, 310, 311, 312 n, 315 n, 316 n, 317 n, 318 n
Defoe, Daniel, 90, 91, 110, 166
_De Jure Naturae et Gentium_, 121
_Diary of Jonathan Edwards_, 154
_Diary of John Harrower_, 135-136
_Diary of Cotton Mather_, 107, 109, 109 n, 110 n, 112, 123, 123 n,
128 n
_Diary of Samuel Sewall_, 88, 90 n, 91 n, 92 n, 93, 93 n, 94 n, 95 n,
96 n, 97 n, 113 n, 126 n, 127 n
_Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_, 196 n
_Diary of the Revolution_, 191 n
Dickinson, John, 137, 167, 219-232, 253, 291, 344
Diderot, Denis, 324
Diffenderfer, F. R., 134, 135 n
_Discourses on Davila_, 310, 311, 324, 376
Dodd, William Edward, 345 n
_Don Quixote_, 390
Duck, Chancellor, 56
Dudley, Joseph, 29
----, Governor Joseph, 92, 93, 104, 112, 113, 118, 126-127
----, Paul, 112, 127
Duguit, Léon, 73 n
Dulaney, Daniel, 221, 226, 344
Dummer, Mr., 92
Duns Scotus, 14
Dwight, Theodore, 359, 360
----, Rev. Timothy, 249, 358, 359, 360-363, 367, 369, 383, 385, 389
_Early American Philosophers_, 155 n
_Ecclesiasticall Politie_, 149, 149 n
_Echo, The_, 363
_Economic Basis of Politics, The_, 287 n
_Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An_, 184 n
_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, The_, 320 n
_Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, The_, 171 n
Edwards, Jonathan, vi, 105, 120, 151, 152-163, 249, 359, 361
_Elegy on the Times, An_, 249
Elizabeth, Queen, 7
Eliot, Rev. John, 30, 59, 81-84
----, Sir John, 38
_Elliot’s Debates_, 229 n, 230 n, 282 n, 283 n, 302 n
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 62, 153
_End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous, The; or, The
Torments of the Wicked in Hell, no Occasion of Grief to the
Saints in Heaven_, 159 n
Endicott, Roger, 23, 29, 50
Epistle to the Romans, 67
Ernst, Dr. James E., 67 n
_Essay of Projects, An_, 166
_Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, An_, 105, 106
_Eternity of Hell Torments, The_, 159 _n Every Man in his Humour_, 28
_False Systems of Government, On_, 377 n
_Familiar Letters of John and Abigail Adams_, 253 n
_Federal Constitution in Massachusetts, The_, 284 n
_Federalist, The_, 283 n, 284-288, 289
Fenno, John, 311, 379, 380
Ferne, Dr., 46
_Feu de Joie, The_, 257
Filmer, Sir Robert, 103, 189, 190, 215, 218, 240
_First Principles of Government_, 280
Ford, Paul Leicester, 231 n, 283, 284 n
----, Worthington C., 326 n
Forman, S. E., 311 n, 379 n, 380
Fothergill, Dr., 169
_Founding of New England, The_, 20 n, 30 n, 36 n, 58 n, 87 n
Fox, Charles James, 383
Franklin, Benjamin, vi, 90, 97, 124, 128, 162, 164-178, 180, 188,
202, 236, 244, 328, 334, 347, 363, 369, 380
----, Ebenezer, 165
----, James, 96, 128, 166
----, Josiah, 166
----, Mrs., 168 n
_Freedom of the Will, On the_, 157
Freneau, Philip, 247, 251, 255, 256, 368-381, 390
_Frontier Woman, The_, 146 n
Fuller, Dr., of Plymouth, 23
Gage, General Thomas, 128, 183, 199, 259
Galloway, Joseph, 235, 259
_Gazette of the United States, The_, 311, 311 n
_General History of Connecticut, A_, 260-262
Genesis, Book of, 94
Genêt, Citizen, 323
George III, King, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 228, 256, 259, 330, 340,
371, 373, 395
_German Immigrants into Pennsylvania, The_, 134, 134 n
Gerry, Elbridge, 288
_God’s Sovereignty_, 156 n
Godwin, William, 292, 296, 313, 376
Goldsmith, Oliver, 172
Gooch, George Peabody, 73 n
_Grace Abounding_, 40
_Greenfield Hill_, 363
Grenville, George, 240
Grotius, Hugo, 236
_Group, The_, 207
Halifax, Marquis of, 280
Hamilton, Alexander, vi, 275, 281, 284, 285, 289, 292-307, 317 n,
320, 323, 328, 342, 346, 347, 348, 367, 368, 375, 380, 391
Hancock, John, 205, 241
Harding, Samuel Bannister, 284 n
Harrington, James, 25, 26, 103, 213, 269, 270, 278, 280, 296, 318, 319
_Harrison Gray Otis_, 359 n
Harrower, John, 135-136
Hartford Wits, The, 291, 357-367, 368
Hartley, David, 170
Hasselwood, Captain, 135
_Hasty Pudding, The_, 389
Haynes, Governor, 57, 57 n
Hazen, Charles D., 321 n, 323 n
_Henry the Fourth_, 28
_Henry Knox_, 277 n
Henry, Patrick, 222
_Heresiography_, 64 n
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 321
Hirst, Francis W., 342 n
_History of American Literature, A_, 391 n
_History of American Literature during the Colonial Period, A_, 89 n
_History of the Congregational Churches in the United States, A_, 23
n, 25 n, 100 n, 101 n, 148 n
_History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, A_,
73 n
_History of the Dividing Line, The_, 138 n, 139-140
_History of Massachusetts Bay Colony_, 31 n, 33 n, 34 n, 50 n, 127 n,
196, 198 n, 203 n, 205 n, 219 n, 242, 242 n
_History of Mrs. B., The_, 146 n
_History of New England, A_, 118 n
_History of New England_ (Winthrop), 49 n, 105
_History of the Supreme Court_, 284 n
Hobbes, Thomas, 68, 69, 103, 208, 278, 280, 296, 300, 319
Hillsboro, Lord, 200, 201
_Hoch Deutsche Pennsylvanische Bericht, Der_, 135
Homer, 250
Hooker, Richard, 12, 67, 68, 149, 236
----, Thomas, 47, 53-62, 68, 79, 90, 99, 361
Hopkins, Dr. Lemuel, 359, 364-365
----, Rev. Samuel, 105
Hopkinson, Francis, 252-255, 291
Hosmer, J. K., 196 n, 200, 237 n
Howe, Joseph, 249
----, Sir William, 164
Hubbard, Rev. William, 57
Hume, David, 171, 222, 236, 239, 280, 296, 298, 319, 352, 353, 354,
363
Humphreys, David, 359, 360, 367
Hutchinson, Mistress Anne, 24, 28, 29, 49, 50, 194, 195
----, Mistress Peggy, 191
----, Colonel John, 38
----, Thomas, Sr., 195
----, Governor Thomas, 31 n, 33 n, 50 n, 127 n, 181, 194-206, 207,
219, 224, 234, 235, 237 n, 241, 242, 243, 245, 250, 259
_Hutchinson Papers_, 36 n
_Increase Mather, the Foremost American Puritan_, 98 n, 100 n, 101 n,
103 n, 104 n, 106 n
_Institutes of Calvin_, 20, 30, 31 n, 42 n, 249
Irving, Washington, 369, 391
Isaiah, 14, 66 n
James I, King, 55, 76
Jay, John, 284
Jefferson, Thomas, iii, vi, 72, 147, 176, 190, 222, 230, 247, 259,
280, 292, 296, 299, 302, 306, 307, 312, 320, 324, 327, 333,
337, 342-356, 362, 368, 374, 375, 379, 380, 389, 391, 397, 398
_Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science_, 311 n, 321
n, 379 n
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 307
----, Sir William, 373
_Jonathan Edwards_, 154 n, 157, 160 n
Jones, Adam Leroy, 155 n
Jonson, Ben, 28, 76
_Journal of William Maclay_, 323, 342
_Journal_ (Winthrop), 32, 45 n, 47 n
Knight, Madam Sarah, 137-138, 141
Knox, General Henry, 277, 375
Lafayette, Marquis de, 323
_Landscapes_, 147 n
Laski, Harold J., 190 n, 280 n
Latimer, Hugh, 55
Laud, Archbishop, 23, 27, 32, 55, 56, 84, 215, 256
_Law in the Modern State_, 73 n
_Layman_, 243 n
Lechford, Thomas, 23
Lee, Richard Henry, 284, 288-291
Leonard, Daniel, 194, 207-213, 216, 250
_Letter to Lord Onslow_, 335 n
_Letter of Lord Say and Sele_, 48 n
_Letter to Lord Say and Sele_, 31 n
_Letter to Major Mason_, 57 n
_Letter to the National Convention of France_, 386-387
_Letter to Mr. Niles_, 179 n
_Letter to John Taylor_, 313 n, 316 n
_Letter to Robert Wodrow_, 123 n
_Letter to the Town Clerk of Providence_, 67 n, 72 n
_Letters from an American Farmer_, 140, 142 n, 143 n, 144 n, 145, 145
n, 146
_Letters of Fabius_, 230, 231
_Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican_, 284, 288-291
_Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer_, 219, 223 n, 224 n, 225, 226 n,
228 n
_Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects_, 378 n
_Leviathan, The_, 209, 280
_Libera Nos, Domine_, 373
_Liberty of the Press in the American Colonies, The_, 119 n
_Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson_, 342 n
_Life and Letters of John Winthrop_, 39 n, 40 n, 41 n, 43 n, 44 n, 45
n, 46 n, 47 n
_Life of Samuel Adams_, 196 n, 237 n
_Life of Franklin_, 171
_Life of Elbridge Gerry_, 276 n
_Life of Thomas Hutchinson_, 200 n, 201 n, 202 n, 203 n
_Life of Milton_, 64 n, 75 n
_Life of Thomas Paine_, 336 n, 339 n
Lilburne, “Free-born” John, 328
_Lilly’s Grammar_, 249, 378
Lincoln, Earl of, 29
_Literary History of America, A_, 116 n, 150 n, 284 n, 371 n
_Literary History of the American Revolution, A_, 207 n, 226 n, 371 n
Livy, 213
Locke, John, iv, 66, 69, 103, 121, 123, 149, 189, 190, 196, 213, 215,
217, 220, 222, 236, 237, 238, 239, 269, 270, 271, 282, 296,
316, 319, 338, 343, 344
_Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Dr. Jonathan Odell, The_, 168
n, 257 n, 259 n
Luther, Martin, 6, 9, 11-12, 70, 72, 100
_Luxury, Idleness and Industry, On_, 174 n
Machiavelli, 280, 312, 319
Maclay, Senator William, 323, 342
_M’Fingal_, 249, 250-251, 363
McMaster, John Bach, 171
Madison, James, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 292, 299, 311, 315,
369, 379, 390
_Magnalia Christi Americana_, 33 n, 63, 63 n, 108, 115, 116
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 313
_Man of Sorrows, The_, 146 n
Marshall, Chief Justice John, 310, 353
Martin, George, 134 n
Mary, Queen, 91 n
Mason, George, 231, 281, 292
_Massachusettensis_, 207-213
_Massachusetts Historical Society Collections_, 81 n, 90 n, 112 n,
123 n
_Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings_, 119 n, 328 n
Masson, David, 64 n, 75 n
_Master John Cotton’s Answer to Master Roger Williams_, 37 n
Mather, Cotton, 14, 27, 28, 33, 56, 63, 75, 85, 86, 97, 99, 106-117,
120, 123, 127, 128, 137, 148, 162, 195
----, Increase, 76, 98, 99-106, 114, 119, 127, 214, 361
----, Richard, 60, 99
----, Samuel, 195
Mather Dynasty, The, 98-117
Mathers, The, 98, 120, 128, 162
Mein, John, 379
_Memoirs of Rev. Nathaniel Ward_, 80 n
_Memorial of the Present Deplorable State of New England ... by the
Male-Administration of their Present Governor, Joseph Dudley,
Esq. and his Son Paul, A_, 112 n
Merriam, Charles E., 280 n
Milton, John, 10, 12, 38, 59, 66, 72, 103, 149, 189, 236, 280, 288,
320
_Mississippi Valley in British Politics, The_, 184 n
_Model of Moses His Judicials_, 33
_Modell of Christian Charity_, 43
_Modern Chivalry_, 390-394
_Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,
A_, 170
Montcalm, Marquis de, 141
Montesquieu, Baron, 236, 271, 280, 282, 284, 319
Moore, Frank, 191 n
More, Sir Thomas, 350
_More Letters from an American Farmer_, 140
_More Wonders of the Invisible World_, 108
Morison, Samuel Eliot, 359 n
Morris, Gouverneur, 192, 282, 292, 324
----, Robert, 184, 221, 252, 259, 295
Murdock, Kenneth B., 98 n, 100 n, 101 n, 103 n, 104 n, 106 n
Napoleon, 324, 353, 384, 397
_Narragansett Club Publications_, 25 n, 35 n, 37 n, 57 n, 64 n, 66 n,
67 n, 68 n, 69 n, 71 n, 72 n, 74 n
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God, A_, 160
_Nation, The_, 86 n
_National Gazette, The_, 379
_Negotiations in London_, 169 n
Nemours, DuPont de, 346
_New England Courant, The_, 128
_England Weekly Journal, The_, 128
_New Haven Gazette, The_, 363
_New Roof, The_, 254
_New View Points in American History_, 179 n
_News-Letter_, 127-128
Norris, Isaac, 221
_Notes on Virginia_, 347
North, Frederick Lord, 253, 373
_Novanglus_, 200 n
_Novanglus and Massachusettensis_, 208 n
Oakes, President, 102
_Objections to the Proposed Plan of a Federal Government for the
United States on Genuine Principles_, 254-255
_Oceana_, 25, 269, 319
Odell, Rev. Jonathan, 255-259, 371
Olivers, The, 250
Onslow, Lord, 335
Otis, Harrison Gray, 359
----, James, 205, 212, 310
Paget (_also_ Pagit _or_ Pagitt), Rev. Ephraim, 64 n
Paine, Robert Treat, 247, 324
----, Tom, 62, 72, 245, 247, 259, 293, 307, 324, 325, 327-341, 352,
353, 369, 374, 376, 378, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 393
Palfrey, John Gorham, 118 n
_Pamphlets on the Constitution_, 231 n
_Patriarcha_, 189, 215
Pattee, Fred L., 373 n, 378 n
Paul, Saint, 8, 15, 67
Peters, Rev. Hugh, 75
----, Rev. Samuel, 58
----, Rev. Samuel (of Connecticut), 259-263
_Petition to the King_, 219
Petty, Sir William, 170, 171, 172
_Phaenomena Quaedam Apocalyptica_, 93
_Philadelphiensis_, 254 n
Philip, King, 29, 30
Phips, Governor William, 86, 104, 119
_Pillars of Salt_, 110
Pitt, William, 8, 164, 182, 183, 185, 188, 220, 224, 226, 227, 238,
292, 293, 372
----, William (the younger), 340, 385
Plato, 213
Plugson of Undershot, 174
_Poems of Philip Freneau_, 373 n, 378 n
_Poganuc People_, 13
_Political Activities of Philip Freneau, The_, 311 n, 379 n
_Political Greenhouse, The_, 363
_Political Ideas of the American Revolution, The_, 310 n
_Political Justice_, 376
_Political Science of John Adams, The_, 319 n, 334 n
_Political Theory of Roger Williams, The_, 67 n
_Political Thought from Locke to Bentham_, 280 n
Pope, Alexander, 248, 249, 318
_Positions to be Examined concerning National Wealth_, 173
Postgate, R. W., 337 n
Pownall, Governor Thomas, 205, 235
_Pretty Story, A_, 253
Price, Lucien, 86 n
Price, Richard, 334
Priestley, Joseph, 280, 292, 296, 334, 383
Prince, Rev. Thomas, 94, 114, 128
_Principles of Trade_, 173
_Private Journal Kept by Madam Knight on a Journey from Boston to New
York in the year 1704, The_, 137-138
_Probationary Odes by Jonathan Pindar, Esq._, 375
_Problem of Sovereignty, The_, 190 n
_Progress and Poverty_, 338
_Progress of Dulness, The_, 249
_Projet d’une Disme Royale_, 171
Proverbs, 113
Psalms, 83
Ptolemy, 13
_Public Advertiser, The_, 235
_Publick Occurrences_, 127
_Publicola_, 324, 325-326
Pufendorf, Baron, 121, 236, 280
Purcell, Richard J., 384 n
_Puritan_, 243 n
Pym, John, 220
_Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of
Pennsylvania_, 177 n
Quesnay, François, 346
_Races and Immigrants in America_, 134 n
Read, Charles, 134
_Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages_, 174 n
_Remarkable Providences_, 105
_Replye to the Answ: Made to the Discourse about the Neg: Vote, A_,
44, 46 n
_Resolves of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay_, 202 n
Revelation, Book of the, 66 n, 83, 94
_Revolution from 1789-1906_, 337 n
Reyner, Mr., 91
_Rhode Island Historical Society Publications_, 64 n
Riggs, Luther G., 363
_Rights of the Colonists, The_, 238 n
_Rights of Man, The_, 324, 334-337, 340 n, 384, 385, 393
_Rise of Modern Democracy, The_, 58 n
_Rising Glory of America, The_, 372, 390
_Rip Van Winkle_, 391
Robinson, Rev. John, 17
_Rolliad, The_, 364
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 154, 164, 271, 272, 324, 334
Sainte-Beuve, 178
Santayana, George, vi
Sargent, Winthrop, 168 n
Say and Sele, Lord, 29, 34
Schlesinger, A. M., 179 n, 183 n, 379 n
Schuyler, Livingston Rowe, 119 n
Scroggs, Lord Chief Justice, 119 n
Scott, Sir Walter, 256, 370
_Selling of Joseph, The_, 95
_Sermon IX_, 159 n
_Sermon XXVII_, 158 n
_Sermon XXXIV_, 156 n
Sewall, Henry, 90
----, Jonathan, 207, 246
----, Samuel, 85, 87, 88-97, 113, 114, 117 n, 124, 126, 127, 165,
170, 195
Shays, Daniel, 277, 278, 320, 352, 364, 365
Shakespeare, 28
Shelburne, Earl of, 183
Sidney, Algernon, 103, 189, 213, 236, 280
_Simple Cobler of Aggawam, The_, 76-80
Singletary, Amos, 284
_Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_, 159 n
_Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_, 140 n, 146, 147 n
Smith, Adam, 171, 173, 269, 271, 296, 346
----, Dr. Elihu Hubbard, 359
Solomon’s Song. See Canticles
_Some Good Whig Principles_, 177 n
Song of Songs. See Canticles
_Speech of January 6, 1773_ (Hutchinson), 203 n
Spinoza, 152
_State Trials_, 119 n
_Statesmen of the Old South_, 345 n
Stoddard, Rev. Solomon, 153, 249
Stone, Rev. Samuel, 57
Stoughton, Lieut. Governor, 85
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 13, 153
Strafford, Earl of, 269
_Summary View of the Rights of British America, A_, 244 n
Sumner, William Graham, 294
_Supreme Court and the Constitution, The_, 276 n
_Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, A_, 54, 60-62
Swift, Jonathan, 333
Tailor, Colonel, 113
_Thomas Hooker, Preacher, Founder, Democrat_, 55 n, 58 n, 59 n
Thompson, General, 284
Tippet, Mehetabel, 141
_To all the Great Folks in a Lump_, 375
_To all True-hearted Christians_, 96
_To Atlas_, 375
_To Duncan Doolittle_, 375 n
Tooke, Horne, 339, 383
_To a Select Body of Great Men_, 375
Townshend, Charles Viscount, 240
_To a Would Be Great Man_, 375
_Travels in New England and New York_, 362 n, 363
_Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America in the Years
1759 and 1760_, 276 n
_Treatise on Christian Liberty_, 12
_Treatise on Taxes_, 171
_Treatises on Civil Government, Two_, 189, 237, 270 n
_Two Letters on the Tea Tax_, 228
_Triumph of Infidelity, The_, 363
Trumbull, Rev. Benjamin, 248
----, John, 248-252, 254, 359, 362
----, John (the painter), 248
----, Governor Jonathan, 248, 360
Tyler, Moses Coit, 89 n, 123, 207 n, 220, 226 n, 256, 371, 372, 381
_United States Gazette, The_, 379
Vane, Sir Harry, 10, 12, 38, 59, 66, 72, 73-74
Van Schaak, Peter, 192
Van Tyne, C. H., 179 n, 182 n, 184 n, 188 n, 189 n, 203 n
_Various Prospects_, 280
Varnum, General, 276
Vattel, Emrich von, 236, 239, 280
Vauban, Sébastien de, 171
_View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, A_,
215-218
_Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches, A_, 119
n, 120, 122 n, 123
_Vision of Columbus, The_, 387
Voltaire, 324, 363
_Walker, G. L._, 55 n, 56 n, 58 n, 59 n
---- Williston, 23 n, 24, 100 n, 101 n, 148 n
Wallace, Robert, 280, 319
Walley, Major, 119
Walpole, Horace, 203
Walsh, C. M., 319 n, 334 n
Ward, Nathaniel, 21, 33, 55, 76-81, 84
Warren, Mrs. Mercy, 207
Warwick, Earl of, 29
Washington, George, 184, 258, 259, 276, 277, 292, 295, 305, 323, 349,
360, 368, 369, 380, 393
Watson, Bishop, of Llandaff, 324, 337
_Way of the Congregational Churches Cleared, The_, 35
_Wealth of Nations, The_, 171, 173, 271, 296
Webster, Daniel, 25
----, Noah, 291, 299, 382
----, Peletiah, 291
Wedderburn, Alexander, 164
Wendell, Barrett, 107, 114 n, 116, 150 n, 284 n, 370
Whately, George, 173
_When the Wicked shall have Filled up the Measure of their Sins,
Wrath will come upon them to the Uttermost_, 159 n
Whitfield, Rev. George, 160, 373
Whittier, John G., 89
Wigglesworth, Rev. Michael, 85
Wilkes, John, 251
Willard, Rev. Samuel, 87
William III, King, 91 n
Williams, Roger, iv, vi, 6, 10, 12, 24, 25, 28, 35-36, 37, 49, 50,
53, 54, 57 n, 59, 62-75, 77, 79, 94, 100, 103, 105, 121, 333,
341, 386
Willing, Thomas, 221
Wilson, James, 254, 291, 292
----, Rev. John, 59
----, Wood row, 306
_Wingate on the Common Law_, 93
Winthrop, Adam, 41
----, John, 17, 18, 19, 30, 32, 38-50, 51, 55, 57, 58, 71, 80, 88,
92, 97, 105
----, Margaret, 39
_Wisdom and Goodness of God, In having Made both Rich and Poor, The_,
337
Wise, Rev. John, 94, 101, 118-125, 162
_Witchcraft, Then and Now_, 86 n
_Wonders of the Invisible World, The_, 86 n, 108, 115-116, 116 n
Worcester, Bishop of, 253
_Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country, A; Or the Bank of Credit_,
124
_Word of Congress, The_, 257
_Works_ of John Adams, 207 n, 309 n, 311 n, 312 n, 313 n, 314 n, 315
n, 316 n, 317 n, 318 n
_Works_ of Samuel Adams, 199 n, 234 n, 236 n, 237 n, 238 n, 239 n,
240 n, 241 n, 242 n, 244 n, 245 n, 246 n
_Works_ of John Dickinson, 226 n, 227 n, 228 n
_Works_ of Jonathan Edwards, 156 n, 158 n, 159 n
_Works_ of Benjamin Franklin, 168 n, 169 n, 170 n, 171 n, 173 n, 174
n, 176 n, 177 n
_Works_ of Alexander Hamilton, 298 n, 301 n, 304 n, 306 n
_Works_ of Martin Luther, 12 n
_Works_ of Thomas Paine, 177 n, 335 n, 338 n, 339 n, 341 n
_Works_ of Daniel Webster, 26 n
_Writings_ of John Quincy Adams, 326 n
_Writings of Col. William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esq., The_,
138 n
_Writings_ of Thomas Jefferson, 303 n, 347 n, 348 n, 350 n, 351 n,
353 n, 355 n
_Wyoming Massacre, The_, 146 n
Yates, Robert, 285
The Romantic Revolution in America [Volume Two]
Foreword
In justification of the choice of writers and allotment of space in
the following pages, let it be said frankly that I have been guided
by what I conceived to be the historical significance of the several
documents. With aesthetic judgments I have not been greatly concerned.
I have not wished to evaluate reputations or weigh literary merits, but
rather to understand what our fathers thought, and why they wrote as
they did. This will serve to explain the considerable number of pages
devoted to southern letters, as well as to certain well-nigh forgotten
figures. For the purpose I had in view such a method was inevitable.
Lost causes have a way of shrinking in importance in the memory of
later generations, and the historian must go back to the days before
their overthrow, and view them in the light of their hopes. Time is
not always a just winnower; it is partial to success and its verdict
too often inclines to the side of the biggest cannon or the noisiest
_claque_. The exhuming of buried reputations and the revivifying of
dead causes is the familiar business of the historian, in whose eyes
forgotten men may assume as great significance as others with whom
posterity has dealt more generously. Communing with ghosts is not
unprofitable to one who listens to their tales. To our fathers John
Taylor and Beverley Tucker and Fisher Ames were living figures; they
spoke for their generation, and they may have something still to say to
a later generation. For dealing at length with such men as Hugh Legaré
and Gilmore Simms and John P. Kennedy and Herman Melville, no apologies
need be offered. They have too long been slighted. Walt Whitman I have
chosen to regard as the forerunner of a later school, and have reserved
the consideration of his work for another study. Certain other men I
have omitted regretfully out of regard to space--diverse figures such
as Orestes Brownson, Albert Brisbane, and John Esten Cooke, together
with a group of poets and essayists, who though they have long been
reckoned ghosts are nevertheless well worth knowing. Even echoes imply
substance somewhere.
V. L. P.
_Seattle, February 22, 1926._
Introduction
The present volume is the second in a proposed study of the main
tendencies of American thought as expressed in our literature. In
the preceding volume I have considered the incoming into America of
certain old-world ideals and institutions, and the subjection of
those ideals and institutions to the pressure of a new environment,
from which resulted the overthrow of the principles of monarchy and
aristocracy, and the setting up of the principle of republicanism.
In the present study I purpose considering certain new growths that
sprang up in the land thus cleared--what particular forms they assumed
and why they assumed such forms. The delimitations of the period
to be treated of are fixed by two wars that disturbed the normal
unfolding of national experience: the War of 1812 that hastened the
development of nineteenth-century ideals, and the Civil War that
uprooted certain of the crasser growths of those vigorous years. The
half century that lay between these dramatic episodes was a period of
extravagant youth, given over to a cult of romanticism that wrought as
many marvels as Aaron’s rod. In the South, in New England, and on the
western frontier, it laid hold of men’s minds, consuming the stubble
of eighteenth-century harvests, sweeping away the drab realisms of
a cautious past, and offering in their stead more alluring ideals.
Revolutions, greater and lesser, trod on each other’s heels; the common
adventure led into unexplored paths; and the final outcome for which it
was all preparing was the emergence of a new middle class that in the
succeeding half century was to subdue America to middle-class ends.
Such drastic overturnings of the customary and familiar, such swift
ruptures with the past, quite evidently do not come from trivial
causes. Men do not put off the old before the new is ready; and if in
those credulous years they turned romantic and refused to heed the
counsels of experience, it was because the soil had been new-plowed for
the growing of such crops as their fathers had not known. The grapes
from which the wine of romance is vinted, it must not be forgotten, are
rooted in the common earth. The loveliest romantic dreams spring from
a parentage that is humbly prosaic. There is no more fruitful source
of romantic hope than a fluid economics that overflows all narrow
preëmptions and sweeps away the restrictions that hamper free endeavor.
With fresh economic realms to conquer, the dullest plodder discovers
a stimulus in anticipation that sets him upon creating a Utopia. The
breaking up of the static, the bold adventuring upon new worlds, is the
fertile soil in which romance springs most luxuriantly. It needs no
uncommon eyes, surely, to discover in the swift changes that came to
America in the wake of the second English war, the seed-bed of those
ebullient romanticisms which in politics and economics, in theology
and literature, turned away so contemptuously from the homespun past.
Of a sudden America was becoming a new world with potentialities
before undreamed of; and this new America was no longer content with
the narrow ways of a more cautious generation. The older America of
colonial days had been static, rationalistic, inclined to pessimism,
fearful of innovation, tenacious of the customary. It conceived of
human nature as evil, and accounting men incurably wicked, it opened no
doors to Utopian dreams of a golden future. The round of daily life was
confined within a narrow domestic economy, with few and rare changes in
social status. Growth in population came mainly from natural increase.
Exploitation was laborious, and such wealth as was laid by was gained
in shop and field, in fisheries and shipping. With its expectations
cramped by a drab agrarianism, it was content to remain primitively
self-sufficient, not given to seeking riches by speculative short-cuts,
clinging to the habitual, distrustful of change.
During the thirty-odd years between the Peace of Paris and the end
of the War of 1812 that older America was dying. The America that
succeeded was a shifting, restless world, youthfully optimistic,
eager to better itself, bent on finding easier roads to wealth
than the plodding path of natural increase. It conceived of human
nature as acquisitive, and accounting acquisitiveness a cardinal
virtue, it set out to inquire what opportunities awaited it in the
unexploited resources of the continent. The cautious ways of earlier
generations were become as much out of date as last year’s almanac. New
commonwealths were rising in the wilderness; immigration from war-torn
Europe was pouring in; wild lands were daily coming on the market.
Money was to be made by the enterprising, and the multitude of the
enterprising was augmenting with the expansion of the settlements. The
ideal of a static society having been put away, progress was assumed
to be the first law of nature, and innovation was accepted as the sign
and seal of progress. It was our first great period of exploitation,
and from it emerged, as naturally as the cock from the mother egg, the
spirit of romance, gross and tawdry in vulgar minds, dainty and refined
in the more cultivated. But always romance. The days of realism were
past, and it was quietly laid away with the wig and smallclothes of an
outgrown generation.
Unfortunately economic romance is more imperious in its demands than
literary romance. Its dreams follow objective desires, and in America
of those days of new beginnings the desires of diverse economic groups
conducted straight to antagonistic imperialisms. The major interests
of the three great sections of the country differentiated more and
more sharply. The East was discovering its Utopia in an industrial
capitalistic order. With the flocking of immigrants to the factories
began the extraordinary expansion of the cities and the movement of
centralization that was eventually to transform America from a rural
to an urban society, supplanting the farmer by the business man and
disintegrating the traditional psychology. The new manufacturing and
the new finance were subjecting an agrarian people to the dislocations
and readjustments implied in the industrial revolution, the outcome of
which no man could foresee. The reaction of this new industrialism upon
the South was immediate. With the improvements in textile manufacturing
came greater demands upon the new southern staple, and an agriculture
that had long been static with its traditional crops of indigo, rice,
and tobacco, began to look forward confidently to a Utopia founded on
cotton, and conceived an imperialistic dream of expanding fields of
white bolls and black slaves, reaching into Mexico and embracing the
West Indies. The new South left off apologizing for slavery and hoping
for its ultimate extinction. Slavery had become enormously profitable
and it proposed to exploit the negro as frankly as New England was
exploiting the Irish immigrant, but more humanely if possible, in
something of the patriarchal spirit.
Meanwhile in the Inland Empire was arising an economics that looked
with little favor on the imperialisms of eastern capitalism or southern
slavery; an economics equalitarian in temper, decentralizing in
impulse; nourished on the idealism of the Declaration of Independence,
but interpreting it to mean the natural right of every free citizen to
satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the national resources
in the measure of his shrewdness. Democratic in professions, it was
middle-class in spirit and purpose. Discovering the inflowing tide of
immigration to be favorable to speculation, it sought its Utopia in
county-seat towns where land holdings mounted in value with every new
wave. No narrow horizons bounded a realm that stretched to the Pacific
and into the remote Northwest, and no stodgy ways of money-getting
could satisfy men whose imaginations ranged through such spaces. This
country was theirs to do with as they chose, and if eastern capitalism
or southern slavery interfered with their inalienable rights, their
Sharp’s rifles were at hand for defense. In the vast territory drained
by the Mississippi--the “Valley of Democracy,” a recent writer has
chosen to call it--was conceived what may be accounted the most
romantic dream that ever visited the native mind of America. It
impressed de Tocqueville, who discovered the poetry of America in this
romance of a moving frontier, in the vision that led the pioneer on his
conquering way westward, hewing at an interminable wilderness that was
matched only by his ambitions.
Such swift expansions, such mounting romanticisms of temper, must
inevitably provide themselves with correspondent philosophies to phrase
the new aspirations. The nineteenth century was not content to think in
the narrower terms of the eighteenth, but must refashion its thought to
suit the romantic style. The modes which it came to accept were for the
most part of European origin, adapted to new-world needs. From France
and England, and later from Germany, came variant schools of romantic
theory that at bottom were a common glorification of the ideal of
individualism; and this very diversity of interpretation made possible
in America an appeal to different classes and diverse interests, the
sum total of which was a many-sided contribution to social theory, but
a contribution which carried within it the seeds of later conflict.
The first stage in the romanticization of American thought resulted
from the naturalization of French revolutionary theory. Its devious
progress through the country can be traced fairly accurately. Landing
first in Virginia in the early seventeen-seventies, it met with a
hospitable reception from the generous planter society and spread
widely there the fashion of Physiocratic agrarianism. Traveling thence
westward into the Inland Empire it domesticated itself in frontier log
cabins under the guise of an assertive individualism, to issue later
as the coonskin democracy of the Jacksonian revolution. Eventually
reaching New England, the last haven and refuge of eighteenth-century
realism, it disarmed Yankee antagonism by assuming the dress of
Unitarianism and preached the doctrine of human perfectibility with
such conviction as to arouse the conscience of New England to an
extraordinary enthusiasm for reforming man and society. And coming
finally to New York it inoculated the mind of the emerging proletariat
with its doctrine of the rights of man, with Fourieristic and other
Utopias, and turmoiled contemporary politics with equalitarian Locofoco
programs. No other philosophy assumed so many and such attractive
disguises, or wrought such changes in American ideals, as this French
romanticism with its generous humanitarian impulses. The ground was
ready for the seed it was to sow, and if in the judgment of a hostile
philosophy the crop turned out to be tares, increasing thousands
believed it to be excellent wheat, to the growing of which America was
to be dedicated henceforth.
The rival philosophy, which came to view with increasing dislike the
doctrines of French romanticism, was of English middle class origin
and sprang from the long struggle of that class to loose the hands of
the landed gentry from control of the state. Phrased persuasively by
Adam Smith, it embodied the principle of liberalism as that principle
was understood by men of affairs. It conceived of a social Utopia that
must result if economic forces were given free play; if governmental
restrictions on trade were done away with and individual enterprise
were free to buy and sell in the open market. Springing from the
same root of individualism that brought forth French romanticism, it
flowered in an economics that denied the aspirations of the French
school. Assuming as its determining principle the common instinct of
acquisitiveness, it set up the economic man as the criterion of conduct
and proposed to reorder society to the single end of trade. Thus
sanctioned and given free rein, the principle of acquisitiveness set
forth on its triumphant march through western civilization. Accepted by
the English middle class as the ultimate social philosophy sufficient
to all needs, it presented to willing eyes the ideal of exploitation as
the goal of social progress.
But transported to America, the new philosophy soon discovered
unforeseen obstacles in its path. The acquisitive instinct was here
enormously strengthened by the vast unpreëmpted resources lying
all about, but unfortunately those resources were too great or too
speculative to be exploited by individual effort. Capital was wanting,
and unless collective funds were available, exploitation must be
slow and inadequate. There was need of the state to further the
opening up of western lands and to throw its guardianship about an
infant industrialism. Roads and canals could not wait on individual
enterprise; tariffs and subsidies could flow only from the government.
Hence arose a modification of _laissez faire_, from which resulted
the theory that a democratic state stands _in loco parentis_ to
the economic interests of its citizens, and should guarantee the
progressive well-being of strategic groups on whose prosperity
depended the common well-being. It was this modification of the
English philosophy that the Whig party came to embody in its platform,
and which by pooling the interests of western speculators, eastern
financiers and New England industrialists, sponsored the “American
Plan,” a curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow and divide the milk
among those who superintended the milking.
Meanwhile in the imperialistic South was arising a distinctive
philosophy, native to the special conditions imposed by slavery, that
was to set it apart from both eastern and western economics and draw it
inevitably into a narrowing isolation. Frankly defensive in purpose,
rejecting alike French equalitarianism and English individualism, it
sought to justify the institution of slavery by an appeal to realism
and square it to the theory of democracy by analogy with northern
industrialism. The conception of a Greek democracy, which was the
last citadel of the southern mind, was a skillful compromise between
the antagonistic principles of aristocracy and democracy, the most
romantic ideal brought forth by our golden age of romance. Assuming
the middle-class principle of exploitation as the creative source of
every civilization, it proposed to erect a free state on the basis of
a slave proletariat after the model of ancient Athens. A democracy,
it argued, is possible only among equals. In every society hitherto
the inevitable inequality between economic classes has nullified every
democratic program. Master and man, exploiter and exploited, are
necessarily opposed in vital economic interests; and this potential
clash, this fundamental antagonism of classes, has been intensified
by the rise of industrialism. Exploitation has been brutalized by the
impersonal wage-system, and the proletariat has been reduced to sodden
and embittered beasts. If now as honest realists we recognize frankly
that equality cannot exist between inferior and superior races, if
we accept the inevitable proletarian status of the negro, if finally
we concede the truism that the lifelong relations between master and
slave are more humane than the temporary relations between wage-giver
and wage-earner, we shall concern ourselves less with a romantic
equalitarianism and more with a rational conception of a democracy of
equals that may conceivably erect a civilization worthy of the name.
It was an ingenious theory, but unfortunately it left out of account
the ambitions of the middle class, and it was this class that in the
end destroyed it. Whether they will it or not, imperialisms have a
way of clashing with rival imperialisms. Reality persists though
romance may deny it, and in their several programs the three diverse
sections of America were driving blindly to a collision. In that bitter
collision the dream of the South was destroyed. With the overthrow of
the aristocratic principle in its final refuge the ground was cleared
of the last vestiges of the eighteenth century. Thenceforth America was
to become wholly middle class, and such romance as it might bring forth
was to be of another sort.
The literature of this extraordinarily vigorous period we are now
to deal with, not in the narrow field of _belles lettres_ alone but
in the outlying fields of social and political philosophies. The
difficulties in the way are many. To endeavor to penetrate critically
to the intellectual core of a period, to weigh this romance in
realistic scales, to take off the outer wrappings and lay bare the
inner truth, is no May-day undertaking. The critic finds himself at
every turn confronted by reputations distorted by contemporary praise
or censure. In the formal biographies written in that golden age of
myth-making, criticism too often gave way to eulogy. Our fathers wrote
like gentlemen, but unfortunately too often they believed that in
preparing a biography a gentleman was under obligation to speak well of
the dead. No blemishes were to be recognized, no disagreeable truths
to find a place in their immaculate pages. In consequence scarcely a
single commentary of the times is to be trusted, and the critic is
reduced to patching together his account out of scanty odds and ends,
or else settling down to do a series of full-length portraits, in which
work, quite evidently, he will not get far. The inadequacies of the
present study I am painfully conscious of: its omissions, its doubtful
interpretations, its hasty generalizations, its downright guesses;
but in the present lack of exact knowledge of the history of American
letters, I do not see how such inadequacies can be avoided.
Contents [Volume Two]
Introduction: Delimitations of period; romance and economic
change; differentiating imperialisms of East, South, West; romantic
philosophies: Physiocratic agrarianism, French equalitarianism,
English _laissez faire_; a counter-philosophy--slavery and a
Greek democracy iii
Book I: The Mind of the South
The mind of the South old-fashioned. Two germinal sources: Virginia,
from which derived Kentucky and Tennessee; South Carolina,
from which derived the Black Belt 3
Part I
The Virginia Renaissance
I. The Old Dominion: The mother of the agrarian West.
Transition from middle-class to plantation ideals.
Increasingly libertarian 5
II. The Heritage of Jeffersonianism
I. Jeffersonianism an expression of native conditions.
Interpreted in terms of Physiocratic agrarianism,
natural rights. Terminable nature of compact the
source of states-rights doctrine. Struggle between
capitalistic and agrarian economics. Virginia the
leader of the latter movement 10
II. John Taylor--Agrarian Economist: Leader of the
young Republicans. His works. Theory founded
in Physiocratic doctrine. Aristocratic origins of the
political state. Examination of the principles of John
Adams, Hamilton--social classes derive from exploitation.
Danger of a paper aristocracy. His philosophy
summarized 14
III. John Marshall--Last of the Virginia Federalists:
His strategic position. Middle-class sympathies;
intellectual qualities. A politician on the bench.
Two fixed ideas: sovereignty of the federal state;
sanctity of private property. His decisions Federalistic.
Two main groups: sovereignty of the judiciary;
irrevocable nature of contract. The Yazoo Fraud
case. An arch conservative 20
IV. The Older Plantation Mind
I. Plantation backgrounds: The literary renaissance
followed English romantic movement. Kennedy’s
_Swallow Barn_ and the rise of the plantation tradition 28
II. William Wirt: The man--embodiment of eighteenth-century
culture. _The British Spy_--characteristics.
_Life of Patrick Henry_--solution of the problem.
Later shift in political sympathies 30
III. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker--A Virginia Fire-eater.
His parochialism; his pessimism. _The Partisan
Leader_--a dramatization of Calhoun’s philosophy;
the note of romantic extravagance. Hatred of democracy--appeal
to South Carolina 35
V. Adventures in Romance
I. William Alexander Caruthers and the transition to
romance. _The Kentuckian in New York_, a contribution
to intersectional good will. An appreciation of
northern qualities; a criticism of slavery. _The Cavaliers
of Virginia_, the new spirit of romance. His slight
reputation 41
II. John Pendleton Kennedy--A southern Whig: The
man--Jeffersonian backgrounds; influence of Edward
Gray. Turned protectionist, accepted the doctrine
of progress. A romantic; an amateur. _Swallow
Barn_--an idyl of plantation life--slavery. _Horse-Shoe
Robinson; Rob of the Bowl_--cavalier romance. _Quodlibet_--a
Whig satire of Jacksonianism. His later
career 46
III. Edgar Allan Poe: Relations to southern environment--his
prejudices against New England. Aloofness from
Virginia ideals. A problem for abnormal psychology
and belletristic criticism. An artist and a critic 57
Part II
The Renaissance of Slavery
I. Southern Imperialism: Shift in attitude towards
slavery--consequences to Jeffersonian democracy. The Black
Belt--reasons why cotton became king. Reaction of
the South to imperialism. Jefferson Davis--his
character 61
II. Winds of Political Doctrine
I. Three streams of thought: Virginia humanitarianism,
western individualism, Carolina imperialism. Increasing
dominance of the third. Rise of a defensive
strategy; appeal to the Constitution 67
II. John C. Calhoun--Realist. His influence--destroyed
Jeffersonianism for the new South. A southern Puritan.
His early career--a nationalist. The year 1828
a turning-point--recognition of the danger of democracy
to slavery. Two lines of defense: states rights,
constitutional checks. Amplification of the second by
extension of the principle of the veto. Failure of
existing checks to protect minorities. Fallacy in the
conception of democratic majorities--an obscuring
of the economic basis of politics. Doctrine of the
concurrent majority. Conception of democracy--an
attack on theory of natural rights. His objective a
Greek democracy. Likeness to John Adams 69
III. Alexander H. Stephens--Constitutionalist: The man--passion
for freedom under law. His localism expressed
in states rights. A confirmed liberal--fear of extra-legal
powers. His _Constitutional View of the War
between the States_. Theory of the terminable nature of
compact--doctrine of good will. A political thinker,
rather than economic. Position on slavery 82
IV. Francis Lieber--A New-Modeled Federalism: A German
liberal influenced by English constitutional
practice and the common law. His doctrine of historical
evolution. Liberty founded in institutional self-government.
A _laissez-faire_ conception of the political state 93
III. The Dream of a Greek Democracy
I. Difficulty of the southern position. A reply to northern
industrialism--civilization and labor exploitation.
Contrast between wage-slavery and black slavery--certain
advantages of the latter. Southern replies to
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ 99
II. William J. Grayson: _The Hireling and the Slave_ as a
southern document. A contrast: the wretchedness
of the wage-slave in industrial centers; the contentment
of the black slave on the plantation. His attack
on Abolitionists 103
IV. Adventures in _Belles-Lettres_
I. Old Charleston: The capital of the planters--aristocratic,
Puritan, Victorian. Traditional home of Federalism.
Culture old-fashioned. A distinguished
society 109
II. William Crafts--Charleston Wit: A southern Robert
Treat Paine, seeking to domesticate Boston culture
in Charleston. His work 112
III. Hugh Swinton Legaré--Intellectual: A southern
Puritan. His career. A legal scholar, interpreting
politics in terms of the common law. A lexolater,
contemptuous of political philosophers. A juridical
romantic. Accepted the economics of _laissez faire_
and capitalism. Pessimistic in regard to the South.
Hostile to Nullification and Calhoun. The weakness
of slavery 114
IV. William Gilmore Simms: A plebeian snubbed by
Charleston, yet loyal to the Charleston parochialisms.
A realist hampered by the current romanticisms.
The most virile figure of the old South. A rich
and generous nature--likeness to Fielding. The
picaresque note in his work. Reasons for his exploitation
of “blood-pudding.” Lieutenant Porgy. His
two major themes: his special frontier compared with
Cooper’s; his revolutionary tales. His treatment of
the Indian. _The Yemassee_, compared with Cooper.
Later life 125
Part III
The Romance of the West
I. New Worlds
I. The Inland Empire and Jeffersonianism. Romance and
social change. Rise of the middle class, and clash of
philosophies. Economic origins of western Whiggery 137
II. Henry Clay: The embodiment of Whiggery. Reason
for his shift from Jeffersonianism. His theory of
paternalism 141
II. Two Spokesmen of the West
I. Andrew Jackson--Agrarian Liberal: The rise of western
equalitarianism. Federalist contempt for a Democrat.
Jackson our first great popular leader. Characteristics.
Early drift towards middle-class position;
reaction to agrarianism. Repudiation of Whiggery.
Hatred of aristocracy. His attitude toward the Bank
a return to the economics of John Taylor. His attitude
towards the state a modified Jeffersonianism. His
influence on American democracy. Effect on later
Whig strategy 145
II. Lincoln--Free-Soil Liberal: Liberalism and the Declaration
of Independence. A Jeffersonian who came to
the defense of natural rights. Equalitarianism and
_laissez faire_. The problem of free soil--a realist
seeking to reconcile them. His “divided house”
position an appeal to political realism. Good will
versus coercive sovereignty. The prose of his speeches.
Lincoln and the myth-makers 152
III. The Frontier in Letters: Romance and the Inland
Empire. Two main conceptions: Boone and the
Dark and Bloody Ground; Crockett and frontier
humor 161
I. The Romantic Frontier 162
II. The Realistic Frontier
(1) Augustus Longstreet and the Georgia Frontier:
The native realism of Georgia life. A frontier
plebeian who developed middle-class qualities.
A follower of Calhoun, but at bottom a Jeffersonian
agrarian. With the rise of Abolitionism abandoned
natural-rights philosophy. _Georgia Scenes_--the
note of realism 166
(2) The Davy Crockett Myth: The popular appeal of
the _Narrative_ and the rise of the Crockett myth.
Origin at Washington. Three stages: frontier
waggery; anti-Jackson spleen; the Alamo adventure.
A Whig attempt to catch the coonskin
vote--a by-product of Jacksonian methods. The
beginnings in _Sketches and Eccentricities_. Effect
on Davy. _The Tour_ and the _Life of Martin
Van Buren_. Conjectural authorship. How Davy
was made a Whig. The _Exploits and Adventures_.
_The Narrative_--the real Davy a wastrel 172
Book II: The Mind of the Middle East
A product of two centers: Philadelphia, New York. Lack of
intellectual backgrounds 183
I. The Old Capital
I. Philadelphia the capital of the older American culture.
Its contributions to the Revolutionary debates. Its
economic prospects curtailed by topography. Its
decline with the removal of the national capital 185
II. Brockden Brown and French liberalisms--influence
of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Explanation
of their appeal. _Alcuin; A Dialogue._ _Arthur Mervyn_,
a study in Godwinianism. _Wieland_ and the “blood-pudding”
school. Influence on later fiction in America 188
III. Robert Montgomery Bird: His contributions to the
romantic drama. _Nick of the Woods_--a realistic
treatment of the Indian. A contribution to the myth
of western humor 190
II. The New Capital
I. New York an economic rather than a cultural capital.
Reasons for its rise. The older Knickerbocker world
disintegrating. Stephen Van Rensselaer and John
Jacob Astor 193
II. Intellectual backgrounds: Lack of creativeness. Political
divisions. Emergence of the boss--Martin Van
Buren and Thurlow Weed 195
III. James Kent: The last of the old Federalist school.
His political theory--a disciple of Fisher Ames. His
_Commentaries on American Law_ 197
IV. Beginnings of the renaissance: _Salmagundi_; _The Croaker
Papers_. Fitz-Greene Halleck. His views--attitude
towards the proletariat. _Connecticut_; _Fanny_. The
last of the Wits 199
III. Two Knickerbocker Romantics
I. Washington Irving: His detachment. A _flâneur_. His
years abroad. Reaction to the Reform Bill. An
incipient liberal. Rediscovery of America. The
mission to Madrid. Contrast with Cooper. Political
principles--drift towards the middle class. _A Tour
of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, _Life of Washington_. His early
and late work contrasted 203
II. James Kirke Paulding: His origins--a son of the
people, distrustful of the middle class. Defense of
America against the English critics. His idealism.
_The Backwoodsman_; _The Puritan and his Daughter_.
His rejection of English “blood-pudding” romantic.
A Jeffersonian: _Letters from the South_ an echo of John
Taylor’s agrarianism; opposed Clay’s American Plan;
satirized Clay in _Koningsmarke_. _Westward Ho!; The
Dutchman’s Fireside._ An amateur in letters 212
IV. James Fenimore Cooper--Critic: The problem of
Cooper. A barometer of his generation. Troubled by
the transition from an aristocratic to a capitalistic
order--lingered between worlds. His Tory origins--Judge
William Cooper. Abandoned Federalism yet
ill content with Democracy. Effect of his European
travels. Likeness to John Adams--hated all cant.
Two phases of his criticism: the older Federalist
theories; the fallacies of capitalism. _The Monikins_--an
attack on the stake-in-society theory. _The Redskins_--an
attack on capitalistic exploitation. A
romanticized eighteenth century his refuge against
the vulgarities of Jacksonianism and capitalism.
_Home as Found_ and _The Redskins_ as studies in social
criticism. His love of the wilderness and hatred of
the frontier. The anti-rent trilogy. Picture of the
squatter. His growing realism--_Wyandotté_. His
later political philosophy--an ethical interpretation
of sovereignty. Failure of the critics to understand
Cooper 222
V. Some Contributions of New England
I. William Cullen Bryant--Puritan Liberal: Injustice
done him by neglect of his journalistic work. An
original mind. Transition from Federalist to Democrat.
Influence of the English economists--an
English liberal. Never a Jeffersonian, but anti-Whig.
Influence of William Leggett and Parke Godwin.
Attitude towards the labor movement. Defense of
free speech. A critic of the rising capitalism 238
II. Horace Greeley--Yankee Radical: A practical man
seeking a way out of the confusions of the times. His
early life; defense of protectionism. His working
back to Jeffersonianism. Interest in Fourierism.
Champion of the farmer and the wage-earner. His
“Vote Yourself a Farm” policy. Interest in the
proletariat--interpretation
of slavery. Coöperation. An idealist 247
III. Herman Melville--Pessimist: The source of his pessimism
in life itself--effect of frustrations. His ancestry:
the Gansevoort strain; the Melville strain. Contrast
between mother and son; effect of his marriage.
Stages toward pessimism marked by _Typee_, _Mardi_,
_Moby Dick_, _Pierre_. Transcendentalism and reality.
His democracy. A critic of America. Spiritual
dissatisfactions--_Clarel_ 258
Book III: The Mind of New England
The New England renaissance the last expression in America of
eighteenth-century revolutionary thought. Given a native ethical
bias. Twin tendencies of earlier New England. Static conditions
of life--the renaissance a movement of liberalism, shaped
by the Puritan strain 271
Part I
The Twilight of Federalism
I. The Passing of the Tie-Wig School
I. Old Boston: Conservatism of temper--a reaction from
the revolutionary enthusiasm of ’76. Emphasized by
refusal to entertain French romantic theories. The
renaissance delayed a generation. The home of the
stake-in-society principle; opposition to democracy 275
II. Fisher Ames and the Tie-Wig School: The spokesman
of Boston Federalism. A conservative, given to pessimism.
His political philosophy an adaptation of
English Whiggery to the Calvinistic conception of
stewardship; based on an absolute morality. Prosperity
and the Saints--the end of government to protect
property; hence it must be strong and coercive. Fear
of faction. A repository of aristocratic prejudice 279
III. Robert Treat Paine, Jr.--Wit: The last of the
eighteenth-century Wits. His verse. A Tory--attitude
towards the French Revolution. His prose. Contempt
for Jacobin doctrine 288
II. Winds of Political Doctrine
I. Changing economics after 1812--rise of industrialism.
A new spirit of nationalism. Danger of agrarianism,
particularism. Rise of the Whig party--middle-class
capitalistic. Menace of the new southern school of
states rights. Need of a new nationalistic theory of
the Constitution 296
II. Work begun by Joseph Story: A Massachusetts Republican.
Characteristics of New England Republicanism.
His shift to Whiggery. His _Commentaries
on the Constitution_: derived from the common law and
_The Federalist_. His view of the compact--interpretation
of “We the people” 299
III. Daniel Webster--Realist and Constitutionalist: Contrasted
with Emerson--English in temperament.
Two periods of intellectual development: an eighteenth-century
realist before 1825; a legalist afterwards.
A disciple of Harrington. Two early speeches:
_The Basis of the Senate, The First Settlement of New
England_--an elaboration of the economic basis of
politics. His economic theory--_laissez faire_. Shift
to protectionism due to changing economics of his constituents.
His reply to Hayne. His constitutional
theory in _The Constitution not a Compact_--his debt to
Story. His position on slavery--_The Seventh of
March Speech_. Effect on his reputation. Comment
of liberals. The Dartmouth College case. His failure 304
Part II
The Rise of Liberalism
I. The Renaissance: The movement of liberalism more
pronounced in New England because long restrained.
Ethical rather than economic; German rather than
French. Many-sided but rebellious 317
II. Liberalism and Calvinism
I. The stir in the church. French romanticism and
Unitarianism. The conservative reaction. The
dilemma of Calvinism--efforts to escape the horns of
dogma. The growth of rationalism. The philosophy
of Unitarianism--a recovery of the principle of primitive
Congregationalism. Elements of conservatism 321
II. William Ellery Channing: A spiritual nature, concerned
with two cardinal ideas: God’s love, man’s excellence.
Slow clarification of his thought. Major
tenets derived from Rousseau and the English Arians.
Attitude toward slavery. Theory of the political
state--approximation to the position of Jefferson. On
freedom of speech--the vital principle of Unitarianism 328
III. Liberalism and the Social Conscience
I. The Social Mind: The Puritan conscience individual
rather than social. Influence of Unitarianism in
awakening a sense of social responsibility. Beginnings
of reform 339
II. Perfectionism: An extreme expression of ethical
radicalism. John Humphrey Noyes, a Yankee Fifth
Monarchy man. His doctrines--expression in Conventions 342
III. Brook Farm: An attempt at an economic solution of
social maladjustments. Influence of transcendentalism.
Attitude of certain transcendentalists. Hostility
to Fourierism 346
IV. Abolitionism: The awakening of the New England
conscience to the evil of slavery. The Abolitionists a
remnant in Israel--their characteristics 350
IV. Certain Militants
I. William Lloyd Garrison: A flinty character. His early
life. _The Liberator._ A primitive Hebraist--his antagonisms.
His political theory founded on the Declaration
of Independence. A Perfectionist. Nullified the
Constitution. The strength and weakness of his
methods 352
II. John G. Whittier--Puritan-Quaker: The religion of
the Inner Light. A primitive Christian--a Come-outer.
Significance of _Leaves from Margaret Smith’s
Journal_. The politician amongst the Abolitionists.
Reasons for his break with Garrison. Not a political
thinker. His Abolitionist verse. His later verse. An
anachronism in industrial New England 361
III. Harriet Beecher Stowe--A Daughter of Puritanism:
Her Calvinist heredity. A sympathetic student of
New England psychology. Intellectual antecedents.
_Old-Town Folks_; _Poganuc People_. _The Minister’s
Wooing_ a defense of the Calvinist clergy. Her contact
with slavery--_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; _Dred_ 371
Part III
The Transcendental Mind
I. The Genesis of Transcendentalism: An expression
of metaphysical Utopianism. Idealism long starved in
New England. Derived from Unitarian doctrine of
the open mind. German idealism and native impulses.
A glorification of conscience and will--romantic.
The note of mysticism. The outcome a
movement of criticism 379
II. Ralph Waldo Emerson--Transcendental Critic: His
theory of transcendental criticism. The early Emerson--an
ascetic. Influence of first trip abroad--_Nature_.
The gist of Emersonianism. Reasons for the
contrast between the real and ideal. Estimate of
democracy; theory of the political state--the ethical
absolute--a transcendental Jeffersonianism. Theory
of economics--bias towards Physiocratic conception.
A critic of contemporary America--its materialisms.
Attitude towards reform 386
III. Henry Thoreau--Transcendental Economist: His life-business
to explore the meaning of wealth. His life an
experiment in values. A Concord man who “signed
off.” A Hellenist interpreting spiritual values. The
problem of economics stated. Significance of _Walden_--suggestions
of William Morris. The challenge of
slavery: _Civil Disobedience_. Compared with Godwin’s
_Political Justice_--doctrine of individual syndicalism.
Admiration for John Brown. The extremest expression
of eighteenth-century individualism 400
IV. Theodore Parker--Transcendental Minister: His characteristics:
a fighting man, a revolutionary. Sermon
on _The Transient and Permanent in Christianity_--marks
the second stage of Unitarianism. His studies
in higher criticism; his doctrine. His conception of
human perfectibility--evolutionary. A primitive
democrat; a political critic. Attack on current
materialisms--criticism of Webster. A modern 414
V. Margaret Fuller--Rebel: An embodiment of transcendental
rebellions. The contradictions in her
character as explained by Freudian psychology. Her
training--a victim of sex. Contemporary analysis of
her character. An intellectual child of eighteenth-century
romanticisms--influence of Goethe. Transcendentalism--Brook
Farm. _Woman in the Nineteenth
Century_ and feminism. Work as a critic.
Career in Europe. Influence of Jean Jacques. The
price of her rebellions 426
Part IV
Other Aspects of the New England Mind
I. The Reign of the Genteel
I. Brahminism and the genteel in letters--a refined
ethicism. Dislike of realistic methods. Lowell’s
position 435
II. Brahminism and history: The New England school:
Ticknor, Jared Sparks--methods of the latter. Bancroft’s
_History of the United States_--an attempt at a
democratic interpretation. Prescott, Motley, Parkman--followers
of the romantic school. Parkman
considered 437
III. Longfellow: Influence of Germany. A poet of the
library--his aloofness--his translations. The slavery
poems. Characteristics 439
II. Nathaniel Hawthorne--Skeptic: A temperament detached,
rationalistic, unhopeful, skeptical about
Utopias. Neither transcendental nor Unitarian in
philosophy, but curious concerning evil. Intellectually
unlocalized--his aloofness from romantic Salem. Like
Jonathan Edwards in probing the psychology of sin.
Tendency to symbolism and allegory. His intellectual
poverty--revealed in _American Notes_. Brook
Farm and _The Blithedale Romance_--reasons for his
interpretation of Hollingsworth and Margaret Fuller.
The sterility of his later years 442
III. The Authentic Brahmin
I. Oliver Wendell Holmes--Beacon Street Wit: Decline
of his reputation. Holmes and Paine as wits. A child
of the eighteenth century turned romantic. A
rationalist--hatred of Calvinism. Defense of Boston--a
Brahmin rebel defending free thought. Attack on
equalitarianism--dislike of the plutocracy--indifferent
to proletarian problems. His heroes respectable.
An amateur--a minor figure 451
II. James Russell Lowell--Cambridge Brahmin: Of
the true Brahmin line. His intellectual confusions.
Influence of his Tory heritage--the Lowells. His
course determined by environment and certain dominant
personalities. Three periods of his intellectual
life: the Maria White period and his immersion in current
radicalisms--reflections in his verse and prose;
the professorial period--immersion in scholarship--his
shortcomings as a critic--as a political writer; the
ambassadorial period--influence of Godkin--resurgence
of Brahmin conservatism--fear of democracy--of
agrarian and proletarian movements--concern at
political corruption--failure to understand its causes--faith
in civil service reform. His escape to London--the
final Lowell an English liberal 460
Conclusion: Effects of the Civil War on earlier
romanticisms--destruction of the slave economy; strengthening of
the rival agrarian and capitalistic economies. Certain
anachronisms--eighteenth-century liberalism--local home
rule--submerged by movement of consolidation. Romantic literary
schools became obsolete. The sovereignty of the middle class
and the emergence of realistic criticism 473
Bibliography 475
Index 483
Book One • The Mind of the South
To those who follow the main-traveled road of American experience, as
we know it today, the mind of the old South seems curiously remote.
It is so archaic, so wholly apart from all present-day ambitions, as
to appear singular. Yet the continental highways we now travel so
familiarly, it must be remembered, were not the highways of an earlier
America. It is the North that has changed, and not the South, and the
nationality that sits so easily upon us would have seemed ominous to
the simpler world that determined the ideals of the Old Dominion. The
southern mind has grown old-fashioned, but it is native and of long
and honorable descent. It derived its singularity from the eighteenth
century in which it took shape; and it retained the clear impress of
its origins long after the eighteenth century had become an anachronism
in America. It was primarily political, of the French rather than
the English school; but it was economic also, out of Quesnay and Du
Pont de Nemours rather than Adam Smith, with a frank bias towards the
Physiocratic agrarianism that was so congenial to the needs and temper
of a plantation society; and this political agrarianism, parochial in
its outlook rather than national, suffices to explain the singularity
of the southern mind in the eyes of a later industrialized America.
Simple and homogeneous in the early years of the nineteenth century,
it nevertheless carried the seeds of disruption within it. Beneath the
surface of this common political agrarianism disintegrating forces
were at work, that were to produce broad cleavages of thought and lead
to sharp differences of outlook and polity. An old South and a new
South dwelt side by side, and to the West lay a frontier that took
particular form as it came under the determining influence of one
or the other. Virginia and South Carolina were the germinal centers
of southern culture, from which issued the creative ideas that gave
special forms to the brood of frontier states. Kentucky and Tennessee
were the intellectual heirs of Virginia; Alabama and Mississippi were
the intellectual heirs of South Carolina. Of these two schools of
thought that looked in different directions and sought different ends,
Jefferson and Calhoun were the intellectual leaders; and the contrasts
in their philosophies--the rejection by the latter of equalitarian
idealism, and the substitution of economic realism--mark the diverse
tendencies which in the end disrupted the South. Jackson and Lincoln
were followers of the Jeffersonian school; Jefferson Davis finally
went with Calhoun; and Henry Clay, lacking an adequate philosophy,
wavered between them. The differences between these men were open
and patent, and any analysis of the mind of the South, any attempt
to understand the conflict of tendencies that marked the development
of southern thought between 1800 and 1860, must give due weight to
such differences. The problem, therefore, instead of being single is
threefold, and involves an examination of the mind of Virginia, the
mind of South Carolina, and the mind of the new West from the Ohio
River to the Gulf.
Part One: The Virginia Renaissance
Chapter I • The Old Dominion
The history of the Old Dominion is an easy chapter in the textbook of
economic determinism. It is a modern instance that exemplifies the
law of land distribution and political control as laid down by James
Harrington; it is another Oceana seated by the James River, that
would not suffer a king to rule because gentlemen held the land and
acknowledged no feudal dues or royal prerogatives. On the surface its
history seems little more than a bundle of paradoxes. From the raw
materials of English middle-class stock it created a distinguished
and capable aristocracy, that was restrained from feudal tyranny by
a vigorous yeomanry that held its land in fee simple and stoutly
maintained its rights. Established on a slave economy, it adopted an
agrarian economy, espoused a republic, and accepted the doctrine of
democratic equalitarianism. It was generous, humanitarian, independent;
parochial in its jealousies, yet farsighted in outlook; tenacious of
its authority and quick to defend it, yet never mean or grasping.
During the noonday of its power its influence was always on the side
of local democratic freedom and the common well-being. It opposed the
encroachments of the centralizing state and the spirit of capitalistic
exploitation; yet its domestic economy rested on the most primitive of
all exploitation.
But these paradoxes disappear when the history of Virginia is
interpreted in the light of its land economy. By force of circumstances
the Old Dominion became broadly American in its social philosophy, the
interpreter of America to herself. Native conditions created there a
native psychology, and this native psychology spread widely through
the frontier states where a like economics provided suitable breeding
places. Virginia was the mother of the agrarian West, as New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston were the progenitors of the mercantile and
industrial East; and in the frequent clashes between country and
town, between agrarianism and capitalism, the ideas of Virginia have
commonly opposed the ideas of the northern cities. Between the older
colonial America and later industrial America, stand the ideals of
the Old Dominion, more humane and generous than either, disseminating
the principles of French romantic philosophy, and instilling into the
provincial American mind, static and stagnant in the grip of English
colonialism, the ideal of democratic equalitarianism and the hope of
humane progress. The nineteenth century first entered America by way of
the James River.
The renaissance in Virginia began with the transition from middle-class
to plantation ideals that marked the last half of the eighteenth
century; and it was given intellectual stimulus by the libertarian
natural-rights philosophy that in England and France was undermining
the old order. There were no cities either mercantile or social, in
the Old Dominion, and no industrialism. Life everywhere centered in
the plantation. The navigable rivers of the tide-water region were
favorable to the development of a decentralized economics, and in
spite of royal commands to create adequate seaports, and heavy taxes
by the commonwealth, trading towns did not prosper. For two hundred
years Virginia refused to create a native middleman group to handle
its staples, but preferred to deal through British factors and ship
directly, preferably in Dutch bottoms. Each planter insisted on putting
his hogsheads of tobacco aboard ship at his own wharf, and receiving
his merchandise direct from London. The system was wasteful, and
Madison was active in an attempt to limit by law the ports of entry to
two, in order to build up a middleman machinery; but the plan broke on
the fixed prejudices of plantation masters who had come to share the
old English dislike of tradesmen. Virginia stubbornly refused to adopt
middle-class methods, even though refusal cost her dear. She preferred
to be exploited by British factors rather than create a domestic class
to devour her resources.
The system had grown up in earlier times when the merchant spirit was
strong in Virginia. It is often assumed that the Virginia aristocracy
was descended from emigrant Cavaliers who fled from England during the
commonwealth period; but the facts of history do not bear out such a
theory. It was descended largely from vigorous middle-class stock--from
men who had been merchants in England and in turning planters brought
to the business qualities that had been developed in mercantile
pursuits. In the seventeenth century Virginia society exhibited few of
the usual characteristics of the Cavalier. It was frankly _bourgeois_,
pushing, avaricious, keen in driving hard bargains, with no high sense
of honor, canny rather than impulsive, preferring the law to the duel,
hating war and only half-hearted in defense against the Indians--a
little world of London burgesses new seated on the banks of the James
and the Rappahannock. “Beyond doubt,” concludes a recent student,
“the most numerous section of the Virginia aristocracy was derived
from the English merchant class” (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, _Patrician
and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 28), pretty much the same class that
settled Boston and Philadelphia. For a hundred and fifty years these
merchant ideals characterized Virginia society. Speculation in land
was universal; exploitation was open and shameless; the highest
officials took advantage of their positions to loot the public domain,
resorting to divers sharp practices from tax dodging to outright theft.
One gentleman added a cipher to a grant for two thousand acres, and
although the fraud was commonly known, so great was his influence that
no one disputed his title to twenty thousand acres. While governor,
Alexander Spotswood issued patents for sixty thousand acres to
dummy holders, who deeded the land to him after he had retired from
office.[397]
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century such practices came
to an end. The merchant spirit died out among the Virginia planters,
and the Cavalier spirit took its place. A high sense of personal
and civic honor became the hall-mark of the landed aristocracy, and
for upwards of a hundred years this common code gave to Virginia an
enviable distinction. Both in national and commonwealth politics her
representatives were clean-handed and jealous to deserve the public
faith reposed in them. Among the planters were good business men, of
course, notably Washington, who under his stately manners concealed
a capable mind for speculative affairs. He engaged in various
enterprises; speculated heavily in western lands; was president of
the Potomac Company, organized to improve navigation and connect his
holdings with salt water; and at his death was one of the wealthiest
men in America. But such a career was very unusual in Virginia after
the Revolutionary War. Washington, indeed, may properly be regarded
as the last of the eighteenth-century gentlemen, who like Colonel
William Byrd was interested in accumulating vast holdings as well as
cultivating his plantation. Even more characteristic of an earlier day
was John Marshall, the last of the great Virginia Federalists, who was
nearer akin to Robert Morris, with whom he had business dealings, than
with Jefferson or John Randolph of Roanoke.
The opportunity for such careers in Virginia was passing. Population
was draining off into the West and few immigrants came to settle.
With no rapidly growing cities the incentive to speculate in unearned
increment was lacking and liquid capital was inadequate. The economics
of plantation life developed agrarian rather than capitalistic
interests. In the midst of a rapidly changing America, a world given
over to exploitation, increasingly middle class and contemptuous of
the older aristocratic order, the Old Dominion remained static and
unchanging. The plantation aristocracy was marooned by the rising tide.
It repudiated the ways of trade and industry and sharply criticised the
North for its plebeian spirit. “Commerce is certainly beneficial to
society in a secondary degree,” said Governor Tyler in 1810, addressing
the Virginia legislature, “but it produces also what is called citizens
of the world--the worst citizens in the world” (quoted in Wertenbaker,
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 102). Enterprising young
men who a generation before would have been strong Federalists and
supported the new capitalism, found such an atmosphere stifling and
migrated to the new South--to Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, or
farther West still, where greater opportunity awaited them. Virginia
produced no more Washingtons or Marshalls, but turned whole-heartedly
to the school of Jefferson, providing the leaders of states-rights
agrarianism. She broke off all intellectual alliances with the
mercantile and industrial North, and withdrew within her own plantation
world.
Purged thus of its Federalist remnant Virginia became increasingly
libertarian in its social and political philosophy. Its mind had
taken form at the time when French humanitarianism was in the air,
and it discovered much in the new philosophy that appealed to its
romantic spirit. A quick and jealous concern for personal liberty
and the rights of man was a common passion. The gentlemen of the Old
Dominion were bound together by caste solidarity, but they remained
strikingly individual, never amenable to group coercion, expressing
their convictions freely and ready to uphold their views by the code of
the duel. “No people ever lived,” said Alexander H. Stephens in 1867,
“more devoted to the principles of liberty, secured by free democratic
institutions, than the people of the South” (_Constitutional View_,
etc., Vol. I, p. 539). The right of dissent from majority opinion was
the imprescriptible right of every gentleman. In no other part of
America could the career of John Randolph be paralleled--a free-lance
critic of politicians and political measures, who turned his caustic
wit against whom he would, an arch individualist in opinions as other
Americans were in acquisitiveness. Politics was an absorbing game in
Virginia. Debarred from commercial pursuits, ambitious young Virginians
went in for law and politics, with an eye upon a congenial career at
Washington. This serves to explain the long predominance of southern
leadership in the national government. For two generations the South
provided a surprising number of first-class men whose influence was
commanding. Until the problem of slavery became acute, and leadership
passed from moderate Virginians to Fire Eaters from further south,
the influence of Virginia at Washington was thrown on the side of
republican simplicity, low taxes and the decentralization of power. The
armed clash over slavery very probably might have been averted if the
spirit of the Old Dominion had prevailed.
Footnotes
[397] For these and other facts, see Wertenbaker’s book (mentioned
above), pp. 95-99.
Chapter II • The Heritage of Jeffersonianism
I
To the young Virginia Republicans of the year 1800, Jeffersonianism
seemed to be a comprehensive social philosophy peculiarly adapted to
their needs. It offered a practical and humane program of national
development in harmony with existing fact and native genius. It had
not yet been distorted by the caprice of circumstance into a somewhat
nebulous idealism, nor confined within the narrower limits of political
equalitarianism and states-rights theory. By later generations
Jefferson has been interpreted too exclusively in terms of the
Declaration of Independence, the glowing idealism of which has proved
curiously elastic and has been stretched by later libertarian movements
to meet their special and particular ends: by the Jacksonian democracy
in their struggle for manhood suffrage; by the Abolitionists in their
attack upon a slave-sanctioning Constitution; by other idealists in
their various crusades. The great name of Jefferson, in consequence,
has come to be commonly associated with the conception of democracy and
the ideal of social justice. But to his young Virginia followers in the
morning of the Republican movement, the perennial suggestiveness of
their leader lay in the fact that he embodied for them the many-sided
liberalism of French revolutionary thought, its economic and social
idealisms equally with political. They interpreted him more adequately,
for they understood, as later interpreters frequently have not, how
deeply the roots of his natural-rights philosophy went down into
current economics. Of the different French writers who gave shape
and substance to his thinking, the strongest creative influence on
the mature Jefferson came from the Physiocratic group, from Quesnay,
Condorcet, Mirabeau, Du Pont de Nemours, the brilliant founders of an
economy that was primarily social rather than narrowly industrial or
financial. Historically the Physiocratic school is as sharply aligned
with idealistic agrarianism as the Manchester school is aligned with
capitalistic industrialism. The conception that agriculture is the
single productive form of labor, that from it alone comes the _produit
net_ or ultimate net labor increment, and that bankers, manufacturers
and middlemen belong to the class of sterile workers, profoundly
impressed the Virginia mind, bred up in a plantation economy and
concerned for the welfare and dignity of agriculture.
Franklin had first given currency to the Physiocratic theory in America
a generation earlier, but it was Jefferson who spread it widely among
the Virginia planters. He did more; he provided the new agrarianism
with a politics and a sociology. From the wealth of French writers
he formulated a complete libertarian philosophy. His receptive mind
was saturated with romantic idealism which assumed native, congenial
form in precipitation. From Rousseau, Godwin and Paine, as well as
from Quesnay and Condorcet, came the idea of political justice and the
conception of a minimized political state, assuming slightly different
forms from filtering through different minds. The early doctrine of
_laissez faire, laissez passer_--a phrase given currency by Gournay,
the godfather of the Physiocratic school--proved to be curiously
fruitful in the field of political speculation, as in economic. From
it issued a sanction for natural rights, the theory of progress, the
law of justice, and the principle of freedom. The right of coercion was
restricted by it to the narrowest limits, and the political state was
shorn of all arbitrary power. “Authority,” the Physiocratic thinkers
concluded, “should only employ the force of the community to compel
madmen and depraved men to make their conduct conform to the principles
of justice.”
So far Jefferson went gladly with the Physiocrats, but in their
acceptance of a benevolent despotism he discovered a denial of their
first principles, and turned to the more congenial democratic group.
With the political principles of Godwin and Paine he was in hearty
accord. With them he accepted as an historical fact the principle that
government is everywhere and always at war with natural freedom, and
from this he deduced the characteristic doctrine that the lover of
freedom will be jealous of delegated power, and will seek to hold the
political state to strict account. From this same principle, following
Paine, he deduced the doctrine of the terminable nature of compact,
which he set over against the legal doctrine of inviolability. In this
matter French liberalism and English legalism were at opposite poles.
Replying to Burke’s doctrine of irrevocable compact, Paine had written
_The Rights of Man_, which Jefferson did much to popularize in America,
and with the broad principles of which he was in complete accord.
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” Paine had argued, and
the dead possess no rights over it. Government from the grave is a
negation of the inalienable rights of the newborn; hence social justice
demands that a time limit should automatically revoke all compacts.
Since no generation can rightly deed away the heritage of the unborn,
the natural limit of every compact is the lifetime of the generation
ratifying it. “No society,” Jefferson said, “can make a perpetual
Constitution, or even a perpetual law.”
In this suggestive theory of the terminable nature of compact is to be
found the philosophical origin of the later doctrine of states rights.
However deeply it might be covered over by constitutional lawyers and
historians who defended the right of secession, the doctrine was there
implicitly, and the southern cause would have been more effectively
served if legal refinements had been subordinated to philosophical
justification of this fundamental doctrine. With a frank contempt for
all legalists Jefferson believed that social well-being was not to be
bounded by constitutional limitations or statutory enactments; that
political action should be governed by reason rather than by historical
precedent. He had discovered that the political state does not remain
static, but gathers power by the law of physical attraction; with
increasing power it becomes increasingly dangerous to natural freedom;
hence a long-established and venerable constitution may become, by
reason of its hold upon the popular affection, the most useful of
agencies to cloak aggressions on the rights of the people. The love
of profits is always seeking to overthrow the rule of justice. Human
selfishness persistently distorts civic conduct, warping it from ideal
ends. But the shortcomings of existing political states cannot abrogate
the law of justice or destroy the love of freedom. To safeguard freedom
from encroachment by the political state, and to establish the rule of
justice, were always the great and difficult ends that Jefferson aimed
at, and as a follower of the Physiocratic school and a Virginia planter
he turned naturally to a _laissez faire_ agrarianism in opposition to a
centralizing capitalism.
But he was much too sound a political thinker and too sagacious a
party leader to rest his case upon abstract theory. In all his later
writings and counsels he kept his mind close to economic fact, and
the Jeffersonian movement was a long and effective training school in
the economic basis of politics. It habituated the motley rank and file
of the electorate to think in economic terms and to regard political
parties as the instruments of economic groups. This was in keeping
with the soundest eighteenth-century tradition, before romantic dogma
had divorced politics and realism; and in so far Jefferson agreed
with his Federalist opponents, Hamilton and John Adams. A decade of
acrimonious debate had made it plain to the common voter that the real
struggle in America lay between the rival capitalist and agrarian
interests, of which the Federalist and Republican parties were the
political instruments. The Congressional enactments of the first twelve
years had further clarified the issue. The funding plan had visibly
increased the number and wealth of the rising capitalist group. The
first banks were being erected and the complex machinery of modern
credit--the hated “paper system” that had driven out the traditional
metallic currency--was being rapidly built up. A small financial group
in the northern cities was growing powerful from discounting and
money-brokerage. The truth was slowly coming home to the farmers and
small men that war is profitable to the few at the cost of the many;
that from the egg of war-financing was hatched a brood of middlemen
who exploited the post-war hardships and grew rich from the debts that
impoverished the producing farmers. This ambitious class, hitherto
negligible in America, was provided with the means to make a vigorous
fight; it invoked the political state as an ally, and under Hamilton’s
leadership used the administration to serve its financial interests.
It looked with open hostility upon every agrarian program, was cynical
towards French romantic theories, and was restrained by no scruples. To
loose the hands of this capable class from the helm of government, to
keep America agricultural, and the Federal state secondary in all but
necessary police powers to the several commonwealths, was the avowed
and logical purpose of the Jeffersonian Republicans.[398]
The leaders of the movement were men who in capacity and training were
worthy opponents of the capable Federalists. In surprising number
they were from the Old Dominion, gentlemen of the best Virginia
stock, who in the last decades of the eighteenth century engrafted
upon a generous plantation tradition the Physiocratic doctrines of
France. A finer race of gentlemen America has never produced, and it
was fortunate for the Jacksonian movement, which produced no notable
thinkers and contributed little to political and economic theory, that
the preceding generation had given adequate form to the philosophy of
agrarianism. That theory took definite shape between 1800 and 1820.
In the days of Hamilton’s control of the Treasury Department, the
agrarian opposition was weakened by the lack of such a theory; but the
necessities of the situation were a prod to the young Republicans,
and the philosophy of agrarianism rapidly crystallized. In its final
form it was an extraordinarily interesting and native expression of
two hundred years’ experience of a society founded on agriculture--a
reasoned defense of an older America against the ambitions of a younger
and more vigorous.
II • John Taylor • An Agrarian Economist
The intellectual leader of the young Republicans in the great attack
on the economics of Federalism was a thinker too little recognized by
later Americans. His just fame has been obscured with the cause for
which he labored, and his reputation lies buried with the old agrarian
_régime_. Nevertheless John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, “the
philosopher and statesman of agrarianism,” was the most penetrating
critic of Hamiltonian finance and the most original economist of his
generation. Unambitious, simple, honest, calm and dignified in bearing,
he embodied the heroic virtues of the great age of Virginia. In his
_Thirty Years’ View_, Thomas H. Benton describes him thus:
I can hardly figure to myself the ideal of a republican statesman
more perfect and complete than he was in reality:--plain and
solid, a wise counsellor, a ready and vigorous debater, acute and
comprehensive, ripe in all historical and political knowledge,
innately republican--modest, courteous, benevolent, hospitable,--a
skilful, practical farmer, giving his time to his farm and his
books, when not called by an emergency to the public service--and
returning to his books and his farm when the emergency was over....
He belonged to that constellation of great men which shone so
brightly in Virginia in his day, and the light of which was not
limited to Virginia, or our America, but spread through the bounds
of the civilized world. (Chapter XVIII.)
Taylor was a member of Congress at the time of the funding operations
and contributed two notable pamphlets to the public discussion: the
first, issued in 1793, entitled _An Examination of the Late Proceedings
in Congress Respecting the Official Conduct of the Secretary of the
Treasury_; the second, issued the following year, entitled _An Inquiry
into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures_. Twenty
years later, in 1814, he embodied his matured convictions in a stout
volume, printed at Fredericksburg, entitled _An Inquiry into the
Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States_. The
work is tediously prolix--dressed, according to Benton, “in a quaint
Sir Edward Coke style”--even more tediously moralistic; but in spite
of very evident stylistic shortcomings, it deserves, in the opinion
of Professor Beard, “to rank among the two or three really historic
contributions to political science which have been produced in the
United States” (_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 323).
It was the last of the eighteenth-century works, solidly reasoned,
keeping a main eye upon economics and refusing to wander off into
the bog of constitutionalism, concerned rather with the springs and
sources of political action and the objectives of political parties. It
summed up adequately the agrarian argument against capitalism, analyzed
the current tendencies, and provided a convenient handbook for the
Jacksonian movement, from which the latter drew freely in the dispute
over the Bank.
Like Jefferson’s, the agrarianism of Taylor was founded in the
Physiocratic economy. He was convinced that the tiller of the soil
was the only true economist, and that if republican America were to
retain its republican virtues it must guard against every system of
exploitation, for in exploitation lay the origin of social caste.
America had rid itself of the feudal principle of a landed aristocracy,
which in the past had provided the machinery of exploitation, by the
abolition of the law of primogeniture and entail, only to be confronted
by a graver danger, the new aristocracy of liquid wealth. His main
purpose, therefore, was an examination of the sources of power of the
capitalistic order, and the successive steps by which it had risen to
power. His analysis is acute and reveals a mind concerned with the
realities that lie beneath outward appearances. It is the economics
of history that concern him most, for as fully as John Adams he was
convinced that economics determine the form of the political state.
In his analysis of the origins of government, he discovers in every
society a master class that becomes the beneficiary of sovereign
power: the political state is first erected and thereafter used to
safeguard the past acquisitions and to further the present ambitions
of a dominant economic group which calls itself an aristocracy; and
such an aristocracy imposes its will upon the exploited mass, crudely
by the sword and purse, and subtly by the skillful use of psychology.
Once in control of the political state it intrenches itself behind
certain fictions which profess to carry moral sanction. This political
jugglery plays many tricks to catch the gullible; arrayed in the garb
of patriotism, loyalty, obedience to authority, law and order, divine
right, it carries a weighty appeal. When these moral fictions fail,
the fictions of the law step in, and such doctrines as the sacredness
of contract translate the stealings of the master class into vested
interests which the state is bound to protect. There is a fine irony
in Taylor’s implied references to Burke’s doctrine of a changeless
constitution based on a nonrevocable compact, and Hamilton’s doctrine
of the public faith, which, he argues, were clearly designed to
sacrifice the common good to the interests of a class:
Law enacted for the benefit of a nation, is repealable; but law
enacted for the benefit of individuals, though oppressive to
a nation, is a charter, and irrepealable.... Posterity, being
bound by the contracts of its ancestry, in every case which
diminishes its rights, man is daily growing less free by a
doctrine which never increases them. A government intrusted with
the administration of publick affairs for the good of a nation,
has a right to deed away that nation for the good of itself or
its partisans, by law charters for monopolies or sinecures; and
posterity is bound by these deeds. But although an existing
generation can never reassume the liberty or property held by its
ancestors, it may recompense itself by abridging, or abolishing the
right of its descendants. (Page 61.)
The two theories to which he devotes chief attention are the natural
aristocracy theory of John Adams, and the capitalistic aristocracy
theory of Hamilton. The first of these takes its bias from stressing
the inequality inherent in the nature of men; individuals are
biologically unequal; and from this fact Adams deduces that the thrifty
rise to opulence and the thriftless sink into poverty by reason of
individual qualities. Society can neither keep a strong man down nor
thrust a weak man up. Between the rich and the poor, the capable and
incapable, a state of war exists, held in check by the strong hand
in feudal and monarchical societies, but necessarily open and bitter
in a democracy. Hence the inevitable failure of democracy wherever it
is tried, and the necessity of nicely calculated checks in a republic
to prevent the equal tyranny of an aristocracy and a mob. The second
theory, the Hamiltonian, justifies itself by the same theory of
human nature. It accepts the fact of social inequality as inherent
in men, but it sees no reason to pursue Utopian dreams. Recognizing
the universal fact of economic control, it erects the state upon
exploitation as preferable to anarchy. This capitalistic state it
defends before a gullible public by eloquent appeals to the national
faith, the security of property, the fear of lawlessness.
Having thus analyzed the two theories Taylor seeks to cut the ground
from under both by arguing that social classes cannot be historically
explained by the fact of biological inequality amongst individuals, but
rather by accidental opportunity, unscrupulousness, and brute force.
All aristocracies, whether feudal, natural, or capitalistic, take their
origin and uphold their dominion, not from superior excellence or
capacity, but from exploitation, that beginning in a small way grows
by what it feeds on till it assumes the proportions of a colossus.
Exploitation breeds a continually augmenting exploitation that conducts
inevitably to caste regimentation. All aristocracies are founded in
social theft. They are not established in the morality of nature, but
exist as parasites on the social wealth; they levy upon the producer;
and the only preventive is to destroy the foundations on which they
rest by taking from them the means of exploitation.
In conjuring up phantom dangers of feudal aristocracies, Taylor pointed
out, John Adams was fighting dead issues. No feudal aristocracy could
arise in America; land was too plentiful and the quick jealousy of the
people would strike it down. The danger to republican institutions
was closer at hand; it was the poison of the new capitalism that was
spreading its virus through all the veins of the national life. And
in order that the American people might know something of the history
of this innovating force which they must reckon with, John Taylor
proceeded to open to them a page in the economics of capitalism. The
aristocracy of credit, founded on “monopoly and incorporation,” he
pointed out, had arisen first in England with the growing power of
the middle class; it had gone forward swiftly in consequence of the
Napoleonic wars, and through the agencies of the Bank of England and
the Consolidated Debt, it had secured control of the public credit. It
had arisen first in America in consequence of the financial disturbance
resulting from the Revolutionary War, and had further strengthened its
position by the War of 1812. Ambitious men had taken advantage of the
national necessities to create an artificial paper system identical
with that of England. They had profited immensely from the funding
operations and the National Bank; they were setting up their private
banks in every city and town, and through the manipulation of credit
were taking heavy toll of the national production. A money monopoly was
the most dangerous of all monopolies, and the master of all.
Taylor had grown up under the traditional domestic economy. He was
habituated to think of production in terms of consumption, and of
money as a stable measure of exchange. He could not adjust his mind
to the theory of production for profit, of middleman speculation, as
socially legitimate; and when that speculation extended to the national
currency, and exacted its profits from the medium of exchange, he took
alarm. Gold and silver are fairly stable commodities that allow of no
sudden increase or diminution, and in consequence a specie currency
does not readily lend itself to speculative juggling. But a paper
system has no natural limitations. Expanded and contracted at the
will of speculators, it subjects the business of the country to the
exploitation of money brokers. Vast sums had thus been taken from the
people by the funding operations. Gold and silver had been driven out
of circulation, and with their disappearance a riot of speculation
had begun by which only the brokers had profited. Such was the origin
of the new money aristocracy that had already taken possession of
the state and was using it for the sole end of exploitation. America
must make choice between agrarianism and capitalism; the two were
incompatible, John Taylor was convinced, and unless the ambitions of
the paper-money aristocracy were held in check, the American producer
would come under the heel of middle-class exploitation.
So suggestive was the reasoning of Taylor, so interesting for the light
it throws on the agrarian mind of the Virginia Republicans, that it
will be well to set down his theses in compact form. As summarized
admirably by Professor Beard, his argument runs thus:
1. The masses have always been exploited by ruling classes, royal,
ecclesiastical, or feudal, which have been genuine economic castes
sustaining their power by psychological devices such as “loyalty to
the throne and altar.”
2. Within recent times a new class, capitalistic in character,
has sprung up, based on exploitation through inflated public
paper, bank stock, and a protective tariff, likewise with its
psychological devices, “public faith, national integrity, and
sacred credit.”
3. In the United States, this class was built up by Hamilton’s
fiscal system, the bank, and protective tariff, all of which
are schemes designed to filch wealth from productive labor,
particularly labor upon the land.
4. Thus was created a fundamental conflict between the capitalistic
and agrarian interests which was the origin of parties in the
United States.
5. Having no political principles, capitalism could fraternize with
any party that promised protection, and in fact after the victory
of the Republicans successfully entrenched itself in power under
the new cover.
6. The only remedy is to follow the confiscatory examples of
other classes and destroy special privilege without compensation.
(_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 351.)
In the great battle of ideas that followed the conflict of interests,
the Virginia agrarians armed themselves with trenchant weapons.
In intellectual equipment they were a match for the ablest of
the Federalists; in social idealism, in generous concern for the
_res publica_, or common public business, in sober and practical
humanitarianism, they were far superior. Between John Taylor of
Virginia, spokesman of planter agrarianism, and Fisher Ames of
Massachusetts, spokesman of Boston Federalism, the contrast could
scarcely be greater. It is a contrast in social culture, in humane
ideals, in interpretations of the native genius of America; and in the
comparison it is not the Virginia Republican who suffers.
Footnotes
[398] See Charles A. Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian
Democracy_, Chapter XIII.
Chapter III • John Marshall • Last of the Virginia Federalists
Unlike John Taylor of Caroline, whose fame lies buried with his cause,
the reputation of John Marshall has taken on immense proportions with
the later triumph of his principles. There is abundant reason for the
veneration in which he has come to be held by present-day disciples of
Hamilton. More than any other man he saved the future for Federalism.
During the critical years of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian assaults
upon the outworks of nationalism, he held the inner keep of the law,
and prepared for the larger victories that came long after he was in
his grave. His strategic judicial decisions served as a causeway over
which passed the eighteenth-century doctrine of the sovereignty of the
law, to unite with the new philosophy of capitalistic exploitation. The
turbid waters of frontier leveling and states-rights democracy washed
fiercely about him, but he went on quietly with his self-appointed
work. He was one man who would not bow his neck to the majority yoke,
would not worship the democratic Baal. He profoundly distrusted the
principle of confederation. Convinced that the “continental belt”
must be buckled tightly, he gave unstinted service to the cause of
consolidation. The imperative need of a sovereign political state
to curb the disintegrating forces of America was axiomatic in his
thinking. Looking upon all democratic aspirations as calculated to
destroy federal sovereignty, and convinced that the principle of
equalitarianism was a bow strung to wield against society, he stoutly
upheld the principle of minority rule as the only practical agency of
stable and orderly government. Holding such views it was a matter of
high and patriotic duty with Marshall to use his official position
to prevent the majority will from endangering interests which were
far more sacred in his eyes than any natural rights propagated in the
hothouse of French philosophy. He was the last of the old school of
Federalists and the first of the new.
That John Marshall should have come out of Virginia is perhaps the
most ironical fact in the political history of the Old Dominion. Quite
unrepresentative of the dominant planter group that had gone over
to Jefferson, bitterly hostile to the agrarian interests that spoke
through John Taylor, he was the leader of a small remnant of Virginians
who followed Washington through the fierce extremes of party conflict.
He was the last and ablest representative of that older middle-class
Virginia, given to speculation and intent on money-making, that was
being superseded by a cavalier Virginia concerned about quite other
things than financial interests. He belonged rather to Boston than to
Richmond. His intense prejudices were primarily property prejudices.
He was the Fisher Ames of the South, embodying every principle of
the dogmatic tie-wig school of New England Federalists. Profoundly
influenced by Hamilton and Robert Morris, he seems to have found the
Boston group more congenial in temper and outlook. The explanation
of his strong property-consciousness is to be discovered both in
his material ambitions and his professional interests. He was a
business man rather than a planter. He was heavily involved in land
speculation and held stock in numerous corporations launched to exploit
the resources of the state. Robert Morris, whose daughter married
Marshall’s younger brother, was his financial adviser and advanced
money with which to purchase the Fairfax estate, an investment that
cost the buyers the very considerable sum of fourteen thousand pounds
and numerous lawsuits. He was a director in banks and a legal adviser
in important cases involving property rights. His financial interests
overran state boundaries and his political principles followed easily
in their train, washing away all local and sectional loyalties.
Like his kinsman Jefferson, Marshall was bred on the Virginia
frontier, and to the end of his life he retained the easy and careless
democracy of dress and manners that marked his early environment. In
his deportment he was far removed from the prim respectability of
the Boston Federalists. A friendly, likable man, fond of pitching
horseshoes and sitting in a game of cards, he was outwardly a genial
member of the crude little Richmond world where politics and law and
speculation engrossed the common attention. An easy-going nature, he
was wholly wanting in intellectual interests. Strangely ill-read in the
law, he was even more ignorant of history and economics and political
theory. His mind took an early set, and hardened into rigidity during
the reactionary years that lay between Shays’s Rebellion and the
rise of Napoleon. Of social and humanitarian interests he was utterly
devoid. One might as well look for the sap of idealism in a last year’s
stump as in John Marshall. French romantic philosophy he regarded as
the mother of all vicious leveling. There is no indication that he
had ever heard of the Physiocratic school of economics, or had looked
into the writings of Rousseau or Godwin or Paine. The blind sides of
his mind were many; his intellectual contacts were few; yet what he
saw and understood he grasped firmly. The narrowness of his outlook
intensified the rigidity with which he held to his fixed opinions; and
his extraordinary courage coupled with a dominant personality clothed
his strategic position as Chief Justice with fateful influence on the
later institutional development of America.
Although Marshall’s later fame is the fame of a lawyer, he was in
reality a politician whom fate in the person of John Adams placed on
the Supreme Court bench at a critical moment, where his political
opinions translated themselves into the organic law of the land, and
shaped the constitution to special and particular ends. Masterful,
tenacious, manipulating his fellow judges like putty, he was a judicial
sovereign who for thirty-five years molded the plastic constitution
to such form as pleased him, and when he died the work was so
thoroughly done that later generations have not been able to undo
it. His political opinions, therefore, become a matter of very great
importance to the historian, for they help to explain the peculiar
direction taken by our constitutional development. Materials for a
just estimate of his remarkable career were long wanting, but with the
appearance of Beveridge’s able and explicit _Life of John Marshall_
it is now possible to view him in exact historical perspective.
Carefully documented, the work is a genial and readable interpretation
that will go far to revivify the fame of the great Federalist. And
yet in spite of its abundant documentation--drawn perhaps somewhat
overmuch from Federalist sources--it is essentially a _biographie à
thèse_ that is careful to magnify the nationalism of its hero and to
minify the property consciousness. It provides a picturesque setting,
but it is a bit careless in its evaluation of the rival philosophies
then struggling for supremacy. Concerning the economics of the great
contest between Federalism and Republicanism it offers very inadequate
information, with the result that Jefferson is reduced to the status
of a master politician set over against the constructive statesman. The
intellectual limitations of the lawyer have reacted in these pages upon
his political enemy. Certain of the old Federalist prejudices have come
to life again in these entertaining pages.
The two fixed conceptions which dominated Marshall throughout his long
career on the bench were the sovereignty of the federal state and the
sanctity of private property; and these found their justification in
the virulence of his hatred of democracy. No man in America was less
democratic in his political convictions. Underneath the free and easy
exterior of the Chief Justice was as stalwart a reactionary as ever
sat on the Supreme Court bench. He was utterly indifferent to popular
views, and he calmly overturned the electoral verdicts of his fellow
Americans with the deliberateness of a born autocrat. Not only were
his important decisions political opinions, but they were Federalist
opinions. America had made definite choice between the Federalist
and Republican theories of government. It had repudiated the rule of
“gentlemen of principle and property” and set up a very different
rule. But to this mandate of the supposedly sovereign people Marshall
declined to yield. Defeated at the polls, no longer in control of the
executive and legislative branches of the government, Federalism found
itself reintrenched in the prejudices of John Marshall. He boldly
threw down the gage to the majority will, and when the long fierce
struggle was over, he had effectively written into the fundamental law
of the land the major tenets of the repudiated philosophy. “Judicial
statesmanship,” Mr. Beveridge calls these political decisions, and bids
us admire statesmanship on the bench; yet the phrase runs so far as to
merge the judge in the politician--an honest but somewhat indiscreet
admission that the law may be twisted to partisan ends. The frankly
political nature of Marshall’s decisions was universally recognized at
the time, and this explains the intense partisanship they evoked, the
fury of the Republicans and the extravagant praise of the Federalists.
The so-called Jeffersonian assault on the judiciary, of which so much
has been made by the orthodox historians, and which came near to
wrecking the system, was not primarily an attack upon the courts but
upon political judges who used their places to serve party ends. It is
a dangerous thing for the bench to twist the law to partisan or class
purposes, yet to this very thing John Marshall was notoriously given.
As a judicial statesman, then, rather than a lawyer, Marshall is to
be judged, and to such a business the political historian is more
competent than the legalist. His important decisions fall into two main
groups: those like Marbury _vs._ Madison that assert the supremacy of
the judiciary over the legislature--that is, the power of the Supreme
Court to nullify an act of Congress; and those like the Yazoo Fraud
case and the Dartmouth College case, that assert the irrevocable nature
of contracts. The first was an official pronouncement of the principle
that Hamilton had elaborated in _The Federalist_, namely, that the
constitution is a law and as such lies within the field of judicial
interpretation. This was sound Federalist doctrine, and Marshall
welcomed the opportunity to engraft it upon the fundamental law of
the land, going far out of his way to bring it within the judicial
purview.[399] It was a bold and skillful move, and as Beveridge
remarks, it announced a principle that “is wholly and exclusively
American. It is America’s contribution to the science of the law”
(Beveridge, _Life of John Marshall_, p. 142). A contribution, it should
be added, which with the multiplying of republican constitutions in the
later nineteenth century was pretty generally rejected.
Even more partisanly Federalist were the decisions touching the nature
of contract. These reached to the heart of the bitter opposition
of the commercial and financial interests to the legislative acts
of populistic majorities. Suffering heavily from the post-war
confusions, those majorities had struck blindly at the profiteers whose
well-feathered nests were securely protected by the law. The revolt
was natural and human; a rough sense of social justice lay behind it;
but because it struck at the most prosperous and capable members of
society, who held the professional classes in retainer and dominated
the agencies of publicity, it aroused an extraordinarily vindictive
opposition. Dip into the literature of the seventeen-eighties and
nineties anywhere, in the _Anarchiad_ and the _Echo_ of the Hartford
Wits, or the private letters of indignant gentlemen, and the animus
of the respectable classes is clamorously revealed. At bottom it was
no other than this, that the law of business must be made the law of
the land, and that any populistic tampering with such law was wicked
and anarchistic. How determining was this spirit in the matter of
the Constitutional Convention is sufficiently well known. In the
new constitution certain practices of populistic majorities were
estopped--the emission of bills of credit and paper money, and laws
impairing the obligation of contracts; but such provisions, strictly
interpreted, did not reach to all cases. There were still gaps in the
law of business through which populistic majorities might force their
bills. To stop those gaps and complete the great work of rendering
business secure was the problem to which Marshall addressed himself;
and in the Yazoo Fraud case and the Dartmouth College case, he brought
the long Federalistic struggle to a triumphant issue.
An examination of the first of these two celebrated cases will suffice
to reveal the spirit of his judicial statesmanship. The state of
Georgia, through its Legislature, had contracted to sell thirty-five
million acres of land--the great part of the territory now comprising
the states of Alabama and Mississippi--to certain speculative companies
“at less than one and one-half cents an acre.” The passage of the bill
was marked by more than the usual jobbery, so common with a generation
fond of looting the public domain. The fraud was so gross that the
state of Georgia was thrown into a fury that visited itself upon the
corrupt legislators. A new legislature repealed the law and rescinded
the contract; but some of the land had already been resold to investors
in Boston and Philadelphia, who brought their claims before the Supreme
Court. The state of mind in which the chief justice heard the argument
is thus suggested by Beveridge: “Marshall was profoundly interested in
the stability of contractual obligations. The repudiation of these by
the legislature of Virginia had powerfully and permanently influenced
his views upon this subject. Also Marshall’s own title to part of the
Fairfax estate had more than once been in jeopardy. At that very moment
a suit affecting the title of his brother’s to certain Fairfax lands
was pending in Virginia courts” (Vol. III, p. 584). To suggest that a
nicer judicial honor would have inhibited Marshall from sitting in the
case is perhaps going too far if one accepts the principle of judicial
statesmanship. Certainly Marshall discovered none of the scruples that
must have troubled George Wythe. In awarding claims for compensation
to the investors he held that the act of the Georgia legislature was a
contract and as such was inviolable. The crux of the decision, however,
lay in the pronouncement that the courts cannot examine the motives
that induce legislators to enact a law, that the people are bound
by their agents and must suffer the penalties of choosing unwise or
corrupt agents. The upshot of the verdict, in plain language, was that
a legislative contract is sacred no matter how corruptly got. A curious
decision, surely, for one who professed to venerate the common law. A
Virginian of the type of John Randolph would never have reasoned thus
to a conclusion that laid open the public domain to the deals of clever
lobbyists and encouraged the betrayal of official stewardship. He would
scarcely have sacrificed the public interests to the law of business.
The bitter hostility which Marshall’s decisions aroused in his native
commonwealth reveals how far the Virginia of Jefferson had traveled
from the Federalism of the commercial North. The states-rights
philosophy and the philosophy of consolidation were at swords’ points;
the agrarian and capitalistic economies were engaged in a mortal
duel; that it should have been a Virginian who saved the day for the
Hamiltonians, erecting the old Federalism into the law of the land,
and conducting by his decisions straight to an augmented, consolidated
state, under the shadow of whose power the development of corporate
finance might go forward without agrarian let or hindrance, was a
bitter brew for the Jeffersonian planters to drink. As Marshall grew
old he drew farther away from his fellow Virginians. In his last years
he was perhaps the most reactionary man in America. “Should Jackson
be elected,” he wrote in 1828, “I shall look upon the government as
virtually dissolved” (Beveridge, Vol. IV, p. 463). His last hatreds
he divided between Old Hickory and the rising democratic movement. He
bitterly resisted the spread of manhood suffrage; he would make no
change even in the antiquated judicial system of Virginia; he would
have no overturning of anything established. A stubborn autocrat he
remained to the end, and there was a certain ironic fitness in his last
encounter with the executive power. The autocratic lawyer met his match
in the autocratic soldier who grimly remarked, “John Marshall has made
his decision, now let him enforce it.”
Nearly a century has passed since these happenings [concludes
Beveridge] and Marshall’s attitude now appears to have been that
of cold reaction; but he was as honest as he was outspoken in his
resistance to democratic reforms. He wanted good government, safe
government. He was not in the least concerned in the rule of the
people as such. Indeed, he believed that the more they directly
controlled public affairs the worse the business of government
would be conducted. He feared that sheer majorities would be
unjust, intolerant, tyrannical, and he was certain that they would
be untrustworthy and freakishly changeable. (Vol. IV, p. 507.)
A strong, resourceful, honest, capable man was John Marshall. In so far
there is pretty common agreement. Beyond this, comes in the sundering
blade of political theory. Concerning the wisdom of his judicial
statesmanship it is idle to expect Federalist and Democrat to agree.
Footnotes
[399] For an excellent discussion see Beveridge, _Life of John
Marshall_, Vol. III, Chap. III.
Chapter IV • The Older Plantation Mind
I • Plantation Backgrounds
The literary renaissance of Virginia began in the late twenties when
the English romantic movement reached the quiet plantations. Till
then the Virginia mind had lingered pleasantly in the twilight of the
liberal eighteenth century, following ways of thought it had learned
of revolutionary France, and writing with a leisurely finish it had
learned of Augustan England. In that older Virginia dignified sentiment
was accepted as the hall-mark of breeding--a sentiment somewhat ornate
and consciously elegant, that recognized its obligations to a strict
morality, and laid its nosegay at the feet of the pure and beautiful
and good. When the Virginian essayed somewhat infrequently to commit
his thoughts to paper, he wrote as an old-fashioned gentleman,
conscious of his social responsibility, consulting classic standards
of taste, and embellishing his sentences with bits of choice Latin.
But after the year 1830 sentiment gave place to romance, and dignity
to exuberance of fancy. A new generation, trained in the school of Sir
Walter Scott, fell to the pleasant task of portraying the familiar
plantation life in glowing colors and investing it with romantic charm.
The plantation tradition, it will be remembered, first took shape in
the Old Dominion and assumed its salient features at the hands of
Virginia romantics. Its development was contemporary with the New
England transcendental movement, and in origin and spirit it was
as native to Virginia as the philosophy of idealism was native to
Massachusetts. Inspired by an over-seas romanticism, it accepted the
materials it found at hand and transmuted the easy-going plantation
life into enduring romance. The work was begun by Kennedy in his
idyllic _Swallow Barn_. The picture thus slightly sketched was given
stronger colors by Caruthers, and received completer form from John
Esten Cooke. From their hands Thomas Nelson Page took his materials
to refashion to suit the taste of a later day. No realism added its
sobering touches to the romantic picture thus early drawn, and none has
since been added. A golden light still lingers upon the old plantation.
Memories are still too dear to the Virginian to suffer any lessening
of the reputed splendors of _ante bellum_ days. The tragedy of a lost
cause has woven itself into the older romance and endowed the tradition
with an added sanction. It has long since spread beyond the confines of
Virginia and become a national possession. North as well as South is
so firmly convinced of its authenticity that realism has never had the
temerity to meddle with it.[400]
It was a romanticizing age, and in Virginia congenial materials were
ready to hand. The distinction of a plantation aristocracy set in the
midst of a bucolic republican society, with its genial hospitality,
its individuality, its sharp contrasts of whites and blacks, its
clutter of cabins for background to the pillared mansion, its wide
neighborhood interests, its outdoor life, its patriarchal spirit, was
a distinction that no romantic could overlook, the most individual and
native picturesque in all America. Life on the plantation was uncramped
by the drab routine and skimpy meanness of the New England farm; it was
unsoiled by the coarseness and vulgarity of the frontier; it had none
of the sordidness of the middle-class town. It might be wasteful, but
it was good material for literature; and hence the Virginia romantic
had no need to seek the picturesque in England and Spain, as Irving
had done. He had only to pick and choose from the familiar stuff lying
all about him, emphasizing the agreeable, overlooking the unpleasant,
fashioning his figures and action to suit the ideal of a golden age
of plantation society. Yet the result, it must be confessed, is not
wholly adequate. Virginia has suffered gravely from the want of a sober
realism. It is not so much that the worst did not get into the romantic
tradition--shortcomings in Virginia life which even Wirt hints at--as
that the best did not get in. The plantation master of the romantics
falls grossly short of the reality that Virginia provided. The simple
dignity of John Taylor, the ingrained Puritanism of Lee and Jackson,
the catholic culture and fine integrity of George Wythe, have been
left out of the tradition. The Virginian created by the romantics is
absurdly inferior to such men, who by any standard were as admirable a
group of gentlemen as America has ever bred. A little honest realism
would have corrected the picture, to the advantage of the Old Dominion.
At the time when the romantics were beginning their work of
constructing the plantation tradition the intellectual renaissance
of Virginia was passing. With the fading of the French influence
after 1820 came increasing isolation and a conscious sectionalism.
Intellectual discipline and catholic tastes became rarer. Virginia
had no share in the revolutionary enthusiasms of the Utopian thirties
and forties, when New England expected the Promised Land to appear at
the next turn in the road; it received no stimulus from the expansive
systems of thought that were setting all Europe in ferment. The new
Germany seems to have made no impression on the Virginia mind, neither
its philosophical idealism nor its provocative higher criticism.
The new interest in social speculation and experiment that arose in
Massachusetts with the beginnings of industrialism awakened no response
in Virginia. Plantation society was static, and social speculation was
unwelcome. The theories of Comte, of Fourier, of Owen were unknown;
Utopian experiments were untried. If Virginia escaped the curse of
industrialism it lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to New
England with the rise of the textile mills. Social unrest bred no
protests against the plantation order. The revolutionary mood was gone,
and after 1820 the stimulus to intellectual life grew weaker. English
romanticism as exemplified in the work of Scott and Tom Moore was the
single foreign influence that spread amongst the plantations, and the
new literature accepted the cult of the picturesque romantic. With the
passing of the great age of Virginia the tradition of her greatness
remained to be gathered up and preserved.
II • William Wirt
To Virginia gentlemen of the old school it must have seemed a bit
ironical that William Wirt should have come to be accepted as the
literary representative of the Old Dominion in the days of John
Randolph of Roanoke. Born in Maryland in 1772 of Swiss parentage,
Wirt belonged to Virginia only by adoption, and although on terms of
intimacy with the plantation gentry he embodied few of the traits that
went to the making of the plantation tradition. In temperament he was
far removed from the easy-going planter. A certain canny thrift marked
him, a pronounced desire to rise in the world and cut a distinguished
figure. He was careful to make a good investment of his talents,
attentive to profitable undertakings, whether in law or eloquence or
speculation. His mature life ran a singularly prosperous and dignified
course. He gathered property and reputation and office, and in every
position he acquitted himself honorably. To do less than well in any
undertaking he would have accounted a stain upon his reputation. In
every company he made himself liked. There was none of the aggressive
individualism of John Randolph, in wait for an opportunity to send
home a shaft of rankling wit, but always a studious concern to please.
He was troubled that anyone should think his criticism severe in _The
British Spy_, and he hesitated long before publishing his _Patrick
Henry_ for fear offense would be taken at the few blemishes he
discovered in his hero. An honest man and a capable, sterling after
his kind but not notably intellectual, not creative, he owed his
advancement to very practical qualities: an engaging personality and
genial wit, a knack at formal oratory, a graceful pen, a persevering
pursuit of his profession, the cultivation of desirable friendships.
An excellent lawyer, he never turned aside from the law to meddle with
politics; yet he was on good terms with the politicians, and he reached
the top of his ambition by appointment to the Attorney-Generalship of
the United States, a post which he held for upwards of twelve years.
In training and culture Wirt was of the sound eighteenth-century
tradition. He was bred in the classics, English literature, and the
common law. When he set up in his profession his library consisted
of Blackstone, _Don Quixote_, and _Tristram Shandy_. His literary
taste was formed by the later writers of the eighteenth century, by
Gray, Hervey, Young, Ossian, Burke, Sterne, rather than by Pope and
Dryden. In _The British Spy_ he praises Bacon highly and lavishes
commendation upon Addison, regretting that the _Spectator_ “should be
thrown by, and almost entirely forgotten, while the gilded blasphemies
of infidels, and the ‘noontide trances’ of pernicious theorists, are
hailed with rapture, and echoed around the world” (_Letter X_). Yet the
determining influence in his own writings, it is clear, came from the
sentimentalists and from Burke. From the former he caught the note of
polite emotion, and from the latter the strain of sonorous eloquence.
His well-bred sensibilities were constantly in the service of his pen
or tongue, to lend pathos to an affecting bit of description or to
transport his hearers by a melting appeal. A look, a gesture, a pose,
was nicely calculated to bring sympathetic tears to the eyes of his
auditors. To touch the emotions he considered the triumph of art,
and to conduct through the emotions to a sound morality, its sole
justification.
As a member of the Virginia bar Wirt took pride in the tradition
of sober culture that had grown up amongst its distinguished
practitioners. The members of that bar were gentlemen as well as
lawyers, who would rather go wrong in their legal authorities than in
their classical embellishments; they were orators as well, careful of
their diction and meticulous in rounding a period. In these excellent
qualities Wirt early distinguished himself. He had read more than
most, and apposite quotations from the classics came easily to his
pen to grace the pellucid flow of his English. One of the signal
triumphs of his life was when in an elaborate legal argument before
the Supreme Court at Washington, he retorted a passage of the _Aeneid_
upon his opponent, to provide a text for a burst of the exuberant
rhetoric that so delighted his generation (_The British Spy_, 1855, pp.
88-90). His love of ornate speech seems to us curiously old-fashioned,
yet it was the manner of the times, and he gave himself to it with
enthusiasm--_vivo gurgite exundans_, as he would have chosen to
say. The chief interest of his life was oratory, and how skillful a
practitioner he was adjudged by his own generation is revealed in the
comment of a contemporary who often admired “the blaze of his reasoning
and declamation”:
The march of his mind is direct to its object, the evolutions by
which he attains it, are so new and beautiful, and apparently
necessary to the occasion, that your admiration is kept alive, your
fancy delighted, and your judgment convinced, through every stage
of the process.... There is no weak point in his array, no chink
in the whole line of his extended works. Then the sweet melody
of voice, the beautiful decorations of fancy, the easy play of
a powerful reason, by which all this is accomplished, amaze and
delight. His pathos is natural and impressive; there is a pastoral
simplicity and tenderness in his pictures of distress, when he
describes female innocence, helplessness, and beauty, which the
husband on whom she smiled should have guarded from even the winds
of heaven which might visit it too roughly, “shivering at midnight
on the winter banks of the Ohio, and mingling her tears with the
torrent, which froze as they fell;” it is not a theatrical trick,
to move a fleeting pity, but a deep and impressive appeal to the
dignified charities of our nature. (_Ibid._, pp. 84-85.)
Wirt’s literary reputation rests chiefly upon _The British Spy_
and _Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry_, both of
which may be characterized in the admirable phrase above quoted,
as studies in “the dignified charities of our nature.” The former
was done hastily at the age of thirty, the latter was toiled over
for years and appeared when he was forty-five. They were received
with vast approval and set him quite in the front rank of American
literary fame. Yet the contemporary popularity of _The British Spy_
is inexplicable to us today. It is astonishing that so slight a thing
should have achieved so great a reputation, and it suggests the depths
of literary poverty in which the Virginia of 1803 was sunk. The work
is a miscellany--hodgepodge perhaps is a juster term--of character
sketches, geology, description, rhapsody, moralizing, with the faintest
suggestion of criticism. The sketch which achieved the greatest
celebrity, the description of the blind preacher (_Letter VII_,
pp. 195-202), is elaborately artificial and sentimental, done from
Sterne. The sketches of contemporary politicians, and in particular
that of Jefferson, contributed much to current appeal, and the casual
criticism aroused a mild remonstrance. There is a certain grace of
style after the late eighteenth-century manner, abundant sentiment and
little wit. Perhaps the happiest touch is the title; only a British
spy could discover material for criticism in the excellent life and
ideal institutions of Virginia, or insinuate that the commonwealth was
lacking in public spirit--that its roads were as bad as its schools,
and that the “one object throughout the state” was “to grow rich.” But
it was a very moral spy who was troubled that “the noxious weed of
infidelity had struck a deep, a fatal root, and spread its pestilential
branches far around”; and who lamented that “our eccentric and fanciful
countryman, Godwin, had contributed not a little to water and cherish
this pernicious exotic” (_Letter VII_, p. 203).
The demands made upon the dignified charities of our nature Wirt found
more insistent when he came to write the life of Patrick Henry. He was
troubled by his materials, as well as by the want of them. He complains
repeatedly in his letters of the difficulties of the task. There were
blemishes in the character of his god, spots that marred his divinity;
yet how to clean them away and not spoil the natural appearance was a
problem. He could not tell Virginians that Patrick Henry in his old
age was grasping and vain, that he changed his politics as he grew
rich. The idea was too repugnant to his own good nature, and to the
taste of the times. The age was sentimental and romantic even in its
eulogy. It took seriously the motto, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; it
was patriotically engaged in making a myth out of the figures and
events of the Revolution; and sober truth is not to be expected from
the stately biographies that emerged from this period of excessive
patriotism. The writers were too much in awe of their subjects, too
much concerned to present them in full dress with wig and cloak and
sword, and see to it that they acted a proper part. It was in this
attitude that Wirt first approached his theme, but failing to achieve
the desired result, he turned the work into eulogy of Henry’s oratory.
This was the most congenial of tasks to one so deeply interested in the
art of the orator. The fragmentary records that had come down were a
challenge to his inventiveness, and he set himself to recreate the lost
speeches, from scanty notes. How admirably he succeeded is shown in
the celebrated “give me liberty, or give me death” speech, that became
at once an American classic. One could forgive him much for such a
masterpiece.
The leaders of that older Virginia society were lawyers rather than
planters, and Wirt’s excursions into the field of _belles lettres_
were only pleasant outings from the court-room. His intellectual
interests were narrow. Though bred in an atmosphere of politics, he
cared nothing for political theory, was wholly unread in the political
classics, and untouched by the flood of social speculation that came
with the French Revolution. He drifted politically with the stream
of his generation, taking color from the changing waters. Brought
up a Jeffersonian Republican, he remained curiously ignorant of the
economic and political philosophy of agrarianism. He was little given
to abstract speculation on the rights of man, and was never partisan
to a cause. He was a genial embodiment of those colorless times when
the enthusiasms of eighteenth-century liberalism were dead and the
romanticisms of nineteenth-century exploitation were not yet risen,
known in the history books as the era of good feeling. Fundamentally
conservative and somewhat conventional, he would not look with approval
upon the new men and new ways that came in with the western democracy.
Upon the accession of Jackson he went over to the Whig party. He
supported Clay, yet for some reason, perhaps a harmless vanity, he
accepted a nomination for the presidency by the Anti-Masons in 1832
and went down before the hosts of the Jacksonians. Two years later his
blameless life was brought to a close. A kindly and honorable gentleman
of old-fashioned tastes, with a culture founded in Blackstone,
embellished by Addison and Sterne, and given a classic dignity by Livy,
he filled the measure of the excellencies as they were understood in
the Old Dominion in the days before romance had created the plantation
tradition.
III • Nathaniel Beverley Tucker • A Virginia Fire Eater
In striking contrast to the amiable Attorney-General was another
Virginia lawyer and judge who ventured into literature and whose one
important novel created a mighty stir in its day. Beverley Tucker
was twelve years younger than Wirt. Half brother of John Randolph of
Roanoke, for some years on the bench in Missouri, and long professor
of law at William and Mary College, he was a well-known figure in the
Old Dominion, and his vigorous speech was much applauded at conventions
where southern gentlemen met to talk over their grievances. In him
were richly embodied all the picturesque parochialisms that plantation
life encouraged. He was so completely and exclusively Virginian as
to deserve the epithet “Virginianissimus.” He never traveled, never
compared diverse civilizations, never questioned the excellence of
that in which he had been bred. His loyalty to his native commonwealth
was a consuming jealousy for its honor, and he tucked the horizons
of Virginia about him like a Hudson’s Bay blanket and defied the
cold winds of the North. Beyond Mason and Dixon’s line lay a foreign
country, and he judged all foreign countries by their size and color
on his wall map. He was the arch-romantic of his generation and his
_Partisan Leader_ is the repository of the curious political and
economic romanticisms of the ardent southern mind.
Over his after-dinner bottle of Madeira, Beverley Tucker may well
have been the raciest and most delightful of companions. Like Samuel
Johnson, he found his pleasure in a mind well stocked with robust
prejudices and a wit to phrase them tellingly. He never spared his
epithets nor hesitated to damn an opponent. Like Fisher Ames, he
coddled an aggravated case of political spleen and luxuriated in
a picturesque pessimism. The clouds hung low over his mind, and
the future of Virginia appeared as black to him as the future of
Massachusetts appeared desperate to the Boston Federalist. His
pessimism no doubt was a solace to his old age and provided a sauce
for his dinner. Temperamentally he was curiously like the New England
Jeremiah. He followed Calhoun with the unreasoning and passionate
conviction with which Fisher Ames followed Hamilton. He foresaw a
future laid waste by the ravenings of democracy, and like Ames he
took pleasure in sketching the dark picture. It would be no fault of
his if the easy-going planters remained indifferent to the political
monster that in the guise of Jacksonian democracy had made his den
at Washington and was preparing to devour the liberties of sovereign
commonwealths. He would make haste, while the shadows of those
liberties remained, to arouse Virginia to its peril before the jaws
closed upon it.
It was to this end that he wrote _The Partisan Leader_, an obvious
attempt to dramatize the political philosophy of Calhoun and breathe
into it a war psychology. Its single purpose was to popularize the
doctrine of secession and encourage Virginia to act upon it. The
book was printed at Washington by the notorious Duff Green, who had
quitted Jackson and gone over to Calhoun, and appeared under the pen
name of Edward William Sidney. Written in the last years of Jackson’s
second term, it prophesied Van Buren’s succession and his setting up a
dictatorship. The beginning of the action is projected thirteen years
into the future. Van Buren is assumed to be in his third term and is
seeking election a fourth time. He is in secure and insolent possession
of “the presidential throne.” He has surrounded himself with a horde
of democratic sycophants; his political machine is well oiled and the
army and navy are at his bidding. Virginia has been split asunder by
factions. Mercenaries in Van Buren’s pay occupy the public stations,
and supported by Federal bayonets they carry things with a high hand.
The lower South, under the leadership of South Carolina, has already
seceded, and freed from the exploitation of northern tariffs is
economically rejuvenated. The Virginia patriots are biding their time,
working under cover and making detailed plans to carry the commonwealth
over to the new Confederacy when the hour shall strike. The hand of
fate is no other than economic pressure. The free South has provided
an eloquent object lesson to Virginia planters. By reason of a trade
treaty with England, by the terms of which each country exports to
the other its natural wares unvexed by artificial restrictions--an
industrial economy and an agricultural mutually benefiting by the
exchange--the cotton and tobacco growers to the south of Virginia are
enjoying a prosperity unshared by the exploited planters of the Old
Dominion. When economic depression shall have finally opened the eyes
of Virginians to the folly of a federal union that sacrifices southern
interests to fatten northern manufacturers, the commonwealth must drop
into the lap of the Confederacy like a ripe persimmon. In the meantime
a mysterious Mr. B.--presumably Calhoun--moves adroitly behind the
scenes, shaping matters for the great event--a super-statesman, a man
of godlike sagacity and divine benevolence, a heroic embodiment of all
the magnanimous southern virtues, compared with whom Webster and Clay
are common political mercenaries and Jackson a paltry charlatan.
It is a romantically extravagant book, quite the absurdest in the
library of the old South. It possesses no savor of humor or pleasantry
of satire. Tucker was too deadly in earnest to play with his theme. He
had so long and bitterly brooded over the supposed wrongs of Virginia
that he had lost all sense of proportion. He lacks a cool skill in
dissection; he has not learned the gentlemanly art of flaying his
victim; he defends Virginia with a matchlock instead of a rapier.
Gilmore Simms credited him with one of the most finished prose styles
of the day, and a very recent critic remarks that “no other American
of the time wrote with such classical restraint and pride as Tucker”
(_Cambridge History of American Literature_, Vol. I, p. 312). But there
is little evidence of such mastery in _The Partisan Leader_. It is the
work of an unpracticed writer, with a command of rhetoric to furnish
forth a southern stump-speaker, but quite inadequate to the needs of
a competent novelist. Compared with Simms or Kennedy he is a mere
bungler. His characters are as wooden as Cooper’s females, and his plot
is grossly distorted by his polemics. The drama sags under the weight
of the sacred cause. There is inadvertent comedy in the picture of Van
Buren as the man on horseback--the sleek, well-groomed politician of
history rises somewhat inadequately to the rôle. In comparison with
Kennedy’s _Quodlibet_ his attack upon Jackson is only caricature.
Beverley Tucker was a patriotic Virginian whose craftsmanship proved
inadequate to the serious business in hand.
The backgrounds of his thought are clearly Jeffersonian. His prejudices
run strongly for eighteenth-century _laissez faire_. He is a confirmed
agrarian and his hatred of industrialism amounts to an obsession. He
will have nothing to do with protective tariffs that lay a tax upon
the planter to aid the manufacturer. In his advocacy of political
decentralization he is a disciple of Calhoun, but more pessimistic
than his master. Southern interests can be adequately protected, he
is convinced, only by a jealous insistence on the sovereign powers
of Virginia, and so long as Virginia remains within the centralizing
federal Union those sovereign powers will suffer a subtle diminution.
The simple-minded and magnanimous southern planter was no match in
the political game with unscrupulous and ambitious Northerners. But
in certain significant aspects of his political philosophy, Beverley
Tucker broke with the Jeffersonian tradition. Two current developments
had quite destroyed his faith in the democracy of Jefferson. The
rise of Jacksonianism had seated the rabble in power, and the spread
of Abolitionism was threatening to infect that triumphant rabble
with its poison. The very life of Virginia was at the mercy of a
hostile democracy, and to protect themselves and their slaves from
the encroachments of a democratized federal government seemed to him
the urgent business of the southern planters. Unless a move were made
speedily it would be too late, for the power of the northern democracy
was fast outstripping the confederate power of the South.
Tucker’s intense prejudices color every judgment, and in consequence
his misunderstanding of the North was colossal. He imagined a
profit-mongering clown whom he dubbed Yankee, and solemnly assured
himself that it was an authentic likeness. The Abolitionist was a
Yankee with an added Puritan malignancy. In his defense of slavery
Tucker has corrected the sentimental mistake of Jefferson in assuming
the extinction of slavery to be desirable, but he professes an equally
humanitarian spirit. His benevolence toward the negro is so warmly
generous that one is ready to weep at the sad fate of the faithful
slave who is in danger of being turned out into the cold world by the
wicked Abolitionists. The loyal attachment between master and servant,
he argues, is too finely generous to be understood by the mercenary
North. The Yankees “have not the qualities which would enable them to
comprehend the negro character. Their calculating selfishness can never
understand his disinterested devotion. Their artificial benevolence is
no interpreter of the unsophisticated heart.... They know no more of
the feelings of our slaves, than their fathers could comprehend of the
loyalty of the gallant cavaliers from whom we spring; and for the same
reason. The generous and self-renouncing must ever be a riddle to the
selfish” (p. 205, edition of 1861). Hence it is the clear duty of the
magnanimous planter to keep his generous and self-renouncing slaves out
of the clutches of the selfish Abolitionists.
Something of the ardency of Beverley Tucker’s convictions is revealed
in certain fragments of his letters to Gilmore Simms, to whom he
poured out his heart in uncensored words, and whose magazine, _The
Southern Quarterly Review_, he made use of to further the cause. In
those letters he writes himself down a frank and whole-hearted Tory.
There is an inveterate and ingrained aristocracy of temperament that
will not mince words when it comes to dealing with democracy. In his
comment on the growing democratic spirit he is virulent. He has lost
all hope for Virginia in the year of grace 1851. “She is sunk in the
slough of democracy, which has no sense of honor, no foresight, and is
never valiant but against its own instruments” (W. P. Trent, _William
Gilmore Simms_, p. 186). Georgia is in an even worse way. His spleen
at the commonwealth of Stephens and Toombs--“filled as that State is
with Yankee traders”--spits out venom: “She has been bought, and her
price is in the pockets of those she trusted.” He quotes sardonically
the comment of a Georgia senator: “The State of Georgia is a damned
rascal. I bought and sold her, and will buy her and sell her again
when I please” (_ibid._, p. 182). His only hope is in South Carolina,
and he pleads with Simms for decisive action. Calhoun’s kingdom is
singularly blessed, for no base democracy there sullies the purity of
manly councils. As early as 1820 Tucker had come to realize that the
Union was a curse to the South. “I vowed then, and I have repeated
the vow, _de die in diem_, that I will never give rest to my eyes nor
slumber to my eyelids until it is shattered into fragments.... Time
was when I might have been less desperate, because I could have sought
refuge under some emperor or king. But all such refuges are broken up,
and there is now no escape from the many-headed despotism of numbers,
but by a strong and bold stand on the banks of the Potomac.... If we
will not _have_ slaves, we must _be_ slaves.” He then makes his great
appeal:
And what are our democracies but mobs? South Carolina alone can
act, because she is the only State in which the gentleman retains
his place and influence, and in which the statesman has not been
degraded from his post. You are fast coming to that hopeless and
irreclaimable condition; and then all hope of action is gone. Work
now.... The twilight is already upon you, and hence I fear you will
not act even _now_. And if not now--never, never, never! (_Ibid._,
p. 187.)
It was not granted to Beverley Tucker to know what harvests were to be
gathered from his sowings. He did not live to see the fields of his
beloved commonwealth drenched in the blood that he had done more than
his share to let. In that bitter struggle it is certain that he would
have borne his part valiantly. He had sown to the wind, and he would
have welcomed the whirlwind. But the outcome must have broken his proud
heart, and it is well that he was not spared to see his hopes turn to
ashes in his mouth.
Footnotes
[400] For an excellent study, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_, 1925.
Chapter V • Adventures in Romance
I • William Alexander Caruthers • A Virginia Liberal
In the early thirties came the transition in Virginia from the
essay-sketch that had prevailed since the appearance of _The British
Spy_, to the full blown romance of love and adventure. The older
type had been a blend of nature description, social observation,
character sketches, with somewhat injudicious portions of sentiment
and moralizing, and with frequent resort to the old letter-form of
fiction that lingered out a surprising old age. Not only is the
transition revealed in the work of John P. Kennedy, whose _Swallow
Barn_, written in 1832, was followed in 1835 by _Horseshoe Robinson_,
but quite as strikingly in the work of Dr. William Alexander Caruthers,
whose _Kentuckian in New York, or, the Adventures of Three Southerns_,
published in 1834, was followed at once by _The Cavaliers of Virginia_,
1834-35.
Dr. Caruthers was a genial and cultivated Virginian from the Piedmont
region, with a ready wit and a clever pen, who had pretty well rid
himself of the intense and narrow parochialisms that restricted the
sympathies of Beverley Tucker. He was a Virginia liberal of the older
school, before the renaissance of the slave cause transferred southern
leadership to the South Carolina group, and he shared none of Tucker’s
partisanship for Calhoun. He had traveled widely both south and north,
and had discovered that human nature was much the same on both sides
of Mason and Dixon’s line. This experience qualified him to become a
shrewd and kindly interpreter of both sections of the country, and his
_Kentuckian in New York_ was an excellent contribution to the cause of
intersectional good-will. He sends two young South Carolinians just out
of college on a trip north, who fall in with a Kentuckian on the way,
and together they enjoy life in New York City, lose their hearts and
meet with divers romantic and amusing adventures. A fourth character,
a young Virginian, he sends to South Carolina, likewise to lose his
heart and encounter adventures; and the copious letters that travel
between them are filled with intelligent comment on unfamiliar ways.
The writers are generous-minded young liberals with keen eyes, and
their observations still make excellent reading after nearly a hundred
years.
The South Carolinian who falls romantically in love with a New York
girl is far from a Calhoun Fire Eater. He can see good even in the
Yankee, whom he defends against the common southern prejudice by
arguing that Yankee chicanery has resulted from a niggardly environment
and the competition that comes with overpopulation, a competition that
Virginia has been spared by the draining off of her population west;
and as for the Yankee “canting and sniveling,” “tell me,” he remarks,
“if you have not, in the very bosom of your great valley, as genuine
Presbyterians and Roundheads as ever graced the Rump Parliament, or
sung a psalm on horseback? And to give the devil his due, these same
Presbyterians are no bad citizens of a popular government” (Vol. I, p.
72). Virginia has judged the North out of her prejudices rather than
knowledge, and the advice Caruthers gives his Virginia neighbors, as an
antidote to the suspicions of Beverley Tucker, is to travel beyond the
boundaries of the Old Dominion.
Every southern should visit New-York. It would allay provincial
prejudices, and calm his excitement against his northern
countrymen. The people here are warm-hearted, generous,
and enthusiastic, in a degree scarcely inferior to our own
southerns.... Many of these Yorkers are above local prejudices, and
truly consider this as the commercial metropolis of the Union, and
all the people of the land as their customers, friends, patrons,
and countrymen. Nor is trade the only thing that flourishes.
The arts of polished and refined life, refined literature, and
the profounder studies of the schoolmen, all have here their
distinguished votaries,--I say distinguished, with reference to the
standard of science in our country. (Vol. I, p. 181.)
The material prosperity of the North contrasts painfully in his mind
with the condition of his native Carolina, and there is a note of
apprehension in his comment:
The more I see of these northern states, the more I am convinced
that some great revolution awaits our own cherished communities.
Revolutions, whether sudden or gradual, are fearful things; we
learn to feel attachments to those things which they tear up, as
a poor cripple feels attached to the mortified limb, that must be
amputated to save his life. A line of demarkation in such a case is
distinctly drawn between the diseased and the healthy flesh. Such a
line is now drawing between the slave and free states, I fear. God
send that the disease may be cured without amputation, and before
mortification takes place. I know that this latter is your own
belief. What think you now, since you have seen the greater extent
of the disease? (Vol. I, p. 165.)
The question is addressed to another young man on his travels, a young
Virginian who has gone south, and who is even more troubled at what he
finds. He cannot bring himself to think well of the sacred institution
as he sees it in South Carolina. There it is laid bare in all its naked
exploitation. The humaner relations between the races that he has known
in Virginia have been destroyed by the absentee system with its drivers
and overseers--“to these animals,” he says, “I have always had an utter
aversion.” The evils of the large-scale system have carried farther;
slavery in the Carolinas has destroyed the middle class of yeomen,
unduly exalted the aristocracy and utterly debased the poor white. The
single spot he heartily approves in the two commonwealths is Salem,
a Moravian settlement where no slavery exists, where all work, and
where education is thought so well of that the daughters of the first
southern families go there for their schooling. In Salem he found an
answer to the southern problem far more competent than Nullification.
_Here_, then, is a triumphant answer--an answer in deeds, instead
of words--in the happiness, and the substantial wealth of these
simple and primitive Moravians. Here ... is an industrious,
intelligent, and healthy community, in the very heart of all the
misery I have described. Let us then improve by the lesson, seek
out the sources of their prosperity, find the point where their
plans diverge from ours, and, my word for it ... we become a great,
a flourishing, and a happy people. (Vol. I, p. 80.)
To the problem of slavery he returns constantly, and his views may
perhaps be sufficiently understood from the following passages:
The poor of a slave-country are the most miserable and the most
wretched of all the human family. The grades of society in this
state are even farther apart than in Virginia. Here, there is one
immense chasm from the rich to the abject poor. In the valley
of Virginia, or in the country where you are, there are regular
gradations. The very happiest, most useful, and most industrious
class of a well-regulated community, is here wanting. Their place
is filled up by negroes; in consequence of which, your aristocrats
are more aristocratic, and your poor still poorer. The slaves
create an immeasurable distance between these two classes, which
can never be brought together until this separating cause be
removed. You know I am no _abolitionist_, in the incendiary meaning
of the term; yet I cannot deny from you and myself, that they
are an incubus upon our prosperity. This we would boldly deny,
if a Yankee uttered it in our hearing; but to ourselves, we must
e’en confess it. If I am, therefore, an abolitionist, it is not
for conscience-sake, but from policy and patriotism. (Vol. I, pp.
76-77.)
With us [in Virginia] slavery is tolerable, and has something
soothing about it to the heart of the philanthropist; the slaves
are more in the condition of tenants to their landlords--they are
viewed as rational creatures, and with more kindly feelings....
_Here_ slavery is intolerable; a single individual owning a hundred
or more, and often not knowing them when he sees them.... The
slaves here are plantation live-stock; not domestic and attached
family servants, who have served around the person of the master
from the childhood of both.... Here, besides your white overseers,
you have your black _drivers_;--an odious animal, almost peculiar
to the far south. It is horrible to see one slave following another
at his work, with a cow-skin dangling at his arm, and occasionally
tying him up and flogging him when he does not get through his two
tasks a day.... I do not observe much difference between the North
and South Carolinians, except in the case of those who inhabit the
most southern portions of the latter state. There your rich are
more princely and aristocratic, and your poor more wretched and
degraded; but to tell you the plain truth, many of your little
slaveholders are miserably poor and ignorant; and what must be the
condition of that negro who is a slave to one of these miserable
wretches? (Vol. II, pp. 115-119.)
To the solution of the difficult problem Caruthers offers no easy
plan. He cannot go with the northern “enthusiasts” who propose
immediate emancipation. They do not comprehend the complexity of the
problem. “We cannot set slaves free among us. Such a course would
dissolve the social compact. It would set at defiance all laws for the
protection of life, liberty, and property, either among them or the
whites.” He foresaw clearly what happened during the unhappy days of
reconstruction. “Would it be any reparation of an hereditary wrong, to
plunge the subjects of that wrong, with ourselves, into irretrievable
ruin, to attain nominal justice?” The free negroes would constitute a
menace more serious than the northern city mobs, which latter Caruthers
had no liking for. “These city mobocracies, composed as they are,
principally of wild Irish, are terrible things”; how much worse would
be a negro mobocracy? A confirmed agrarian, he finds his chief hope in
a vigorous yeomanry, and until the South shall develop that, matters
must go ill with it. In the midst of the Carolina system his thoughts
return fondly to his native state. He is under no illusion in regard
to the tide-water region of Virginia. It has lived a generous life,
but spendthrift and wasteful, and has come to evil days. But in the
West, beyond the mountains, a newer and more vigorous age is rising
that “will sweep away the melancholy vestiges of a former and more
chivalrous and generous age.”
Poor, exhausted eastern Virginia! she is in her dotage. Her
impassable roads protect her alike from the pity and contempt
of foreign travellers; but with all her weakness, with all the
imbecilities of premature age upon her, I love her still. (Vol. II,
p. 194.)
Of this more vigorous age the prototype is the title-hero of the
volume, the stalwart Kentuckian whose native intelligence and racy
speech delight the Carolinian. This free son of the untamed West is
portrayed with bold strokes, and if his talk leans somewhat heavily
on the current convention of frontier humor, if Montgomery Damon in
his picturesque exaggerations suggests Davy Crockett, the result is
none the less salty. Caruthers does not descend to caricature, but
writes with gusto, and the Kentuckian’s single letter is a little
masterpiece in the vein of the free frontier humor that was competing
with the cavalier romantic for popular approval. His whimsicalities,
Caruthers tells us, he hopes will encourage “a smile of good-humor”
so that this maiden product of the author’s pen may find its way into
the good graces of the reader--a course reckoned “the more necessary
by a southern aspirant, as there is evidently a current in American
literature, the fountainhead of which lies north of the Potomac, and in
which a southern is compelled to navigate up the stream if he jumps in
too far south” (Vol. II, p. 218.)
_The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown_, announced
in the postscript to the _Kentuckian in New York_, and published
soon afterwards, is a full-fledged historical romance, with Bacon’s
Rebellion for a background and a somewhat melodramatic figure of
a recluse warrior for its romantic hero. There is brisk action,
dramatic Indian fights, much ruffling of young cavaliers, and a fine
aristocratic swagger, but Caruthers’ sympathies seem to incline to the
more democratic elements and in the end his rebellious hero proves
himself a match for the brisk young blades. There is excellent reading
in it, as there is in his last work, _The Knights of the Horse-Shoe;
a Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion_,
published in 1845, and reissued as late as 1909; a genial story of
Governor Spotswood’s time. Caruthers deserved a better fate than fell
to his lot. In spite of his excellent work surprisingly little is known
about him; even the spelling of his name and the date of his death
are matters about which there is disagreement. From a slight sketch
contributed to _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ for July, 1838, _Climbing
the Natural Bridge_, it is known that he was a student at Washington
College, now Washington and Lee, at Lexington, Virginia, in the year
1818, and the signature affixed carries only one “r.” He seems to
have removed later to Savannah, Georgia, an enthusiastic description
of which he gives in the _Kentuckian in New York_. No doubt he there
practiced medicine and died in his prime, perhaps in the year 1846.
Virginia historians have inconsiderately neglected a cultivated and
open-minded writer who embodied the finer spirit of the Old Dominion
and whose stories have contributed their portion to the plantation
tradition.
II • John Pendleton Kennedy • A Southern Whig
A far more prosperous course was run by John P. Kennedy, whose
sympathies drew him north rather than south, and who early learned
that it is better to serve a rising than a decaying order. Very like
Caruthers in temperament and gifts, a liberal in all his sympathies, he
found the ties that bound him to the Old Dominion more fragile, and the
drift of circumstance carrying him with the stronger current. It was a
kindly fate that took him in charge, bringing him abundant prosperity
and contemporary fame.
One of the most attractive figures of his generation was this son
of a Maryland father and a Virginia mother. A gentleman of much
personal distinction, high-minded and of wide culture, endowed with
a pleasant wit, easy manners and generous nature, he is an agreeable
representative of the _ante bellum_ Southerns, an American Victorian of
the Cobden-Bright school, standing midway between the northern radical
and the southern Fire Eater. Like Henry Clay, he was a Whig engrafted
on a Jeffersonian root. Born and educated in Baltimore, he was a son of
the borderland, with strong ties of kinship and love that drew him to
the Old Dominion, and even stronger ties of intellectual, social and
financial interests that drew him towards Philadelphia and New York,
Saratoga and Newport. As a young man he found his inspiration in the
life of William Wirt, whose biography he afterwards wrote. Like Wirt,
he dreamed of combining law and letters and adopting the life of a
southern gentleman; but he discovered little that was congenial in the
exactions of the law, and in spite of considerable success as attorney
for certain Baltimore interests, he largely abandoned the profession.
He loved his Chaucer and Shakespeare more than his Coke and Blackstone:
he was more interested in Dickens and Thackeray and Carlyle and Irving
and Scott than in John Marshall’s decisions, and he followed the more
congenial path. He tried his hand likewise at politics. He was a member
of Congress for six years, was Secretary of the Navy during the last
months of President Fillmore’s administration, and was of service to
the Whig party as spokesman on dignified occasions. But he was never
a practical politician, and the rough and tumble of political life
he found utterly distasteful. As he grew older he unconsciously drew
further away from his southern antecedents. In his later years there
was little to distinguish him from Irving and Robert C. Winthrop and
other northern friends. He had left the world of Beverley Tucker far
behind him. He had severed all ties with Virginia and South Carolina,
and during the Civil War he was a militant Unionist, though it cost him
much grief and the loss of old friendships.
Kennedy’s life ran an usually placid and prosperous course, greatly
unlike that of Gilmore Simms. His father was a Scotch-Irish merchant
of Baltimore who married Nancy Pendleton, daughter of an excellent
Virginia family with many honorable connections. His early years
were not unlike Irving’s--a little Latin and Greek and much outdoor
life, with a desultory education got from vagrant books. The course
of study at the local college afforded far less intellectual stimulus
than _Tristram Shandy_, over which he pored of evenings, dissecting
the prose style to discover the secret of its charm, and filling his
notebooks with elaborately colloquial sentences, highly seasoned with
dashes and exclamation points. Graduating at eighteen, he enlisted in a
Baltimore regiment to fight the British, who were preparing their raid
on Washington. He went through the campaign as a summer lark, emerging
unscathed from the single skirmish. The field was lost, but whether the
honor of the crack Fifth was left on the battle ground may be judged
from Kennedy’s humorous comment. “Soon we had the famous ‘trial of
souls’--the battle of Bladensburg. The drafted militia ran away at the
first fire, and the Fifth Regiment was driven off the field with the
bayonet. We made a fine scamper of it. I lost my musket in the mêlée
while bearing off a comrade” (Tuckerman, _Life of Kennedy_, p. 79).
Throughout his twenties Kennedy was a studious dilettante in letters
and politics and law. He married but lost his wife and son within the
year; with his friend Peter Hoffman Cruse he published a series of
Baltimore sketches in two volumes entitled _The Red Book_; and at the
age of thirty-four married again. His second wife was the daughter
of Edward Gray, a wealthy Baltimore cotton-spinner who at the age of
eighteen had emigrated from northern Ireland to Philadelphia, became
a bank clerk and a Federalist simultaneously, adopted Washington and
Hamilton--whom he occasionally met in a professional way--as his
particular heroes, prospered greatly, purchased the Ellicott Mills a
few miles out of Baltimore, and set up a half feudal estate vastly
attractive to discriminating visitors like Irving.
Kennedy’s marriage to Elizabeth Gray in 1829 seems to have been the
turning-point of his life. Before this he had been a disinterested
liberal in his views, concerning himself in a political way with such
humanitarian issues as the repeal of the brutal debtor laws. He had
never been an avowed Jeffersonian like William Wirt and many of his
Virginia connections, but the Jeffersonian idealism must have appealed
to the generous sympathies of the young man. Immediately upon being
taken into the Gray family he adopted its ample scale of living, its
genial hospitality, its social and political philosophy. The influence
of the masterful Edward Gray was thenceforth a dominant creative factor
in Kennedy’s life, and he followed faithfully in the footsteps of his
father-in-law. The profits of the Ellicott Mills had been greatly
increased by the tariff act of 1824. Naturally Edward Gray was an
ardent protectionist, and Kennedy frankly espoused the same policy. He
accepted Henry Clay as his political leader, was sent to Congress on a
protectionist platform, lectured before Workingmen’s Institutes on the
advantages of industrial development, and gained a very considerable
reputation as an expounder of the American Plan. After the war he
became a Republican, voted for Grant, and adopted extreme nationalist
views. That the family income was dependent on tariff favors is a
detail which only a more realistic generation would suggest in
explanation of his political course; the fact remains, nevertheless,
that the youthful disciple of William Wirt adopted the new philosophy
of prosperity, became president of the board of directors of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railway, invested in West Virginia coal lands,
and was by way of becoming a captain of industry. The break with his
southern antecedents was complete and final; he went with his native
city in preferring the industrial to the plantation economy.
Baltimore in Kennedy’s day was a thriving port with a growing trade
to the West Indies and Europe. It had long been a convenient market
for the tobacco of Virginia, and with the development of the clipper
service its over-sea commerce expanded greatly. Unlike Charleston,
the mercantile interests predominated over the planter. Middle-class
ideals, to be sure, were still tempered by the dignified decorum that
lingered on from the eighteenth century. Merchants still emulated the
gentry and strove for personal distinction. They professed benevolent
ideals and their talk was much of public spirit and the progress of the
town. They adopted the romantic faith of their class in the beneficent
processes of trade and industry in furthering social well-being,
and they endowed Mechanics Institutes and founded public libraries
and museums with all the ardor of converts. In this agreeable work
of expounding the gospel of progress, Kennedy joined heartily. It
satisfied the latent idealism of his nature and recompensed him for
the loss of his Virginia heritage. Intellectually he was too honest to
pervert the gospel of progress to selfish class interest and seek to
hide the perversion behind sonorous platitudes, as his friend Robert C.
Winthrop of Boston was guilty of doing. He had too much love for the
English language to misuse it even in defense of the family income.
He could not contract his mind to the compass of a Whig politician’s.
His defense of industrialism, in consequence, embodies the spirit of
the best English liberalism as that liberalism was interpreted by
Victorian Englishmen. He seems to have been honestly convinced that the
future well-being of America was dependent upon the development of an
industrialism to provide an economic balance between manufactures and
agriculture.
Like his friend Irving, Kennedy was a devout romantic, with a love of
the old-time picturesque; but as a consistent Whig he would spin and
weave his romance out of domestic materials, refusing to import. He
was a child of the effervescent days following 1812, when the static
eighteenth century was breaking up and an ebullient romanticism was
permeating the land. Of this youthful period his thought reveals the
clear impress. Washington Irving from long pottering over the old-world
picturesque had become English romantic, with an inveterate dislike of
all innovation. The vulgar nineteenth century was destroying for him
the charm of the eighteenth; he would have had the world remain as it
was before the American and French revolutions had despoiled life of
picturesque feudal ways. Whereas Kennedy, sharing in a romanticism that
was economic and social--that was creating a wonderful America of the
future out of the raw materials of life--was content to remain native,
at home in the land of his birth. He might turn to the past for the
figures and scenes of his stories, but he discovered in the activities
of the present materials for romance quite as fascinating. He was
wholly Victorian in his genial optimism. He was receptive to new ideas
and promising ventures. He listened sympathetically to inventors and
scientists and promoters. He was instrumental in securing Congressional
aid to erect Morse’s telegraph line between Washington and his native
city. As Secretary of the Navy he provided for Commodore Perry’s
expedition to Japan, and the expedition to search for Dr. Kane in the
Arctic regions. But unfortunately his economic romanticism gradually
undermined his literary romanticism; he outgrew his earlier literary
ambitions, and the romances of his later life never got written. In the
end the gospel of progress was his undoing.
That the generous comfort in which he lived afforded him leisure, means
of travel, contact with distinguished people, goes without saying; but
that it was favorable to letters is far from clear. Divided interests
consumed his energies and kept him an amateur to the last. His literary
development was an evolution from a sketchy and humorous Addisonian,
with its echoes of the eighteenth century, to the full Victorian
romantic. The foreign elements from an earlier time slowly settled
to the bottom of the vat and left the pure wine of romance. But it
took time. Like other amateurs he was influenced by current literary
successes, and was much given to following the changing fashions. His
three best-known books, written between the ages of thirty-six and
forty-five, are unlike enough to have been written by different men.
_Swallow Barn_, like the youthful sketches of _The Red Book_, is
Irvingesque, and the Irving influence crops out again in a late book
_Quodlibet_; but _Horseshoe Robinson_ is substantial Revolutionary
romance, done in sober narrative with touches of realism; and _Rob of
the Bowl_ is light and whimsical cavalier romance, all atmosphere and
small talk, utterly unlike Irving. It is in this latter book, perhaps,
written in 1838 at the age of forty-two, that Kennedy really found
himself; he seems to move through the scenes more easily and with
greater delight than in any other of his pages.
That the leisurely sketches of _Swallow Barn_ belong to the school of
Irving is a fact as obvious as Kennedy’s love for the idling plantation
life. Quite too much, however, has been made of this imitativeness--it
is an imitativeness rather of method than of theme or style. If it was
not quite a pioneer work in the field of local description, it was
amongst the earliest. Paulding had dealt with Dutch colonial life,
and Timothy Flint and James Hall had begun the descriptive literature
of the West; but little else had been done at the time _Swallow Barn_
appeared. Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ came out two years later.
Intrinsically as well as historically the work is curiously suggestive.
Nowhere else does the plantation life of the Old Dominion in the days
before its decline appear so vividly as in these discursive pages: “the
mellow, bland, and sunny luxuriance of her old-time society--its good
fellowship, its hearty and constitutional _companionableness_, the
thriftless gaiety of the people, their dogged but amiable invincibility
of opinion, and that overflowing hospitality which knows no ebb.”
Like Irving, Kennedy went back to the old home, but that old home was
Virginia and not England; and there he found still lingering on the
great plantations charmingly romantic anachronisms that had disappeared
elsewhere--a spontaneous romanticism of temperament that gave color and
zest to the daily routine. The aloofness of plantation life had bred in
the Virginia gentry a piquant individuality, a distinction as of old
morocco or calfskin. Philly Wart, the shrewdly humorous fox-hunting
lawyer; old Mr. Tracy of The Brakes, “turning a little sour with age”
and resembling “that waterish, gravelly soil that you see sometimes
around a spring, where nothing grows but sheep-sorrel,” who cherishes a
hereditary boundary dispute, pursuing his hypothetical rights through
all the law courts and discovering, when the matter has been amicably
settled by arbitration, that much of the zest has gone out of his
life; the heroine Bel Tracy, a frank wholesome girl with a dash of Di
Vernon in her romantic affectations that lead her to play at hawking:
such figures fit as naturally into the background as the pampered house
servants, the horseback riding, the constant visiting, the abundant
dinners. Especially the dinners, when the neighborhood is invited in.
The table spread with opulent hospitality and careless profusion--the
baked ham at one end and the saddle of roast mutton at the other, with
fried chicken, oysters, crabs, sweet potatoes, jellies, custards--a
prodigal feast that only outdoor stomachs could manage, and all by way
of preliminary to the dusty wine-bottles and easy stories that hold the
men long after the ladies have withdrawn. Surely the romance of Old
Virginia, preserved in these light-hearted discursive pages, is worth
remembering by later generations who have forgotten how to live so
genially.
In 1832 when _Swallow Barn_ was written, the southern mind was just
at the turn in its attitude towards slavery, and Frank Meriwether, a
Virginian Sir Roger de Coverley, bred in the humanitarianism of the
older liberals, accepts the institution as a present evil that is in
a way of natural extinction. Slavery in _Swallow Barn_ is kept in the
background. There are slaves, of course, on the plantation, many of
them; but they are in the tobacco fields or the quarters, far from the
mansion; and not till near the end of the book does Kennedy’s curiosity
induce him to visit the cabins and draw out Frank Meriwether in talk
on slavery. The result is what one could have foreseen. The plantation
master was the victim of a benevolent romanticism that vaguely looks
for a solution to colonization schemes that will return the negro to
Africa; but like other southern gentlemen he is somewhat testy at the
suggestion of outside interference. Slavery he regards as an exclusive
southern problem, to be solved by those who understand its complex
domestic implications. It would be better for everybody if Abolition
busybodies would mind their own affairs and cease stirring up feelings
where no good can come of it. To prove that Virginia gentlemen are
aware of their responsibility, Meriwether offers a half humorous
suggestion that negro emancipation might well follow the example of
English villeinage, with a slow break-up of the system, the emancipated
negro to remain in a protective feudal relation to his master. It was
an amiable notion to play with, and it fitted the feudal psychology of
the plantation.
In these early sketches Kennedy revealed an easy knack at writing
that gave promise of excellent work later. He has lightness, grace,
refinement, an eye sensitive to picturesque effects, delight in line
and texture and color, an agreeable wit and playful sentiment, a relish
for English idiom and the literary colloquial. In _Horseshoe Robinson_,
written three years later, he abandoned the essay-sketch and turned
to the school of historical romance then in full swing. The story is
done in the orthodox manner of the thirties; it is compounded of equal
parts gentry and commoners, the former providing respectability and the
latter dramatic interest, the whole garnished with a few historical
figures. There is quite obvious concern for authentic reality. The
title-hero, a shrewd homespun scout, is carefully drawn from life; the
background of bushwhackings and forays and onsets, and the numerous
company of blackguards and honest folk, are painted in skillfully;
and the whole conducts to a dramatic finale in the battle of King’s
Mountain. It is an excellent tale, quite worth reading today, but
scarcely comparable in vividness and brisk action--in picaresque
realism which any true war story must embody--with _The Partisan_
of Gilmore Simms, written in the same year of 1835. Realism was not
Kennedy’s forte and after _Horseshoe Robinson_ he abandoned the field
of the Revolution which offered so rich an opportunity for the robuster
genius of the Charleston romancer.
In _Rob of the Bowl_ Kennedy opened a promising vein that he never
adequately explored--the vein of the cavalier romantic. Temperamentally
he was ill fitted to deal with rollicking action or picaresque
adventure; he preferred the leisurely, discursive romantic, subdued
to gentle raillery or humorous tenderness. One trembles to think what
Simms would have made of the materials that Kennedy brought together
in this tale of old St. Mary’s in the days of Charles II. Here is the
raw stuff of a true bloody-bones thriller: a gentlemanly blackguard
with the stumps of his legs bound in a huge rocking trencher and moving
about with the help of crutches, who is deep in the contraband trade;
a swaggering young pirate, a Brother of the Bloody Coast, who falls
in love with the daughter of the Collector of the Port and kidnaps
her from her father’s house; a romantic lover, slender and clerkly,
but skillful with the rapier, who turns out to be the son of Rob; a
haunted house that covers the smuggling operations of Rob and Captain
Cocklescraft; and all this set against a background of partisan
struggle between Roundhead and Cavalier, Protestant and Catholic, in
the early days of the Maryland settlement.
But in the handling the story is far removed from a bloody-bones tale.
The action is deliberately subdued to the humoresque; atmosphere is
studiously created; adventure is held in strict subjection to the
whimsical; and a mellow old-time flavor is imprisoned in the leisurely
pages. Kennedy had an appreciative eye for picturesque characters, and
in _Rob of the Bowl_ he has gathered a choice group, limned--as he
would choose to say--with a partial hand. Garret Weasel, the garrulous
pot-valiant innkeeper, and Dorothy his termagant spouse; Captain Jasper
Dauntless, the cogging, wheedling swordsman who twists Dame Dorothy
about his fingers and inveigles his host into undue commerce with
his cups--these to be sure are stock characters, but they are done
with excellent vivacity. Their abundant talk is well seasoned, and
if the action sometimes drags, the company is good and the drinking
is a sufficient end in itself. All the while he is writing Kennedy
keeps half an eye on Elizabethan literature to assure himself of the
exact turn of phrase. His vocabulary is saturated with the homely old
speech, and his characters talk as if they had culled all the simples
of English cottage gardens to garnish the staple of their wit. He has a
keener delight than Simms in the picturesque archaic. He far surpasses
Irving in easy mastery of the old-fashioned colloquial, as indeed he
surpasses all our early novelists. He delights in the courtly wit of
the Cavalier equally with the humors of Dogberry and Falstaff and
Captain Bobadil, and he quite evidently is seeking to cross the sparkle
of Congreve with the robustness of the Elizabethans. The result may
sometimes appear a bit self-conscious; his phrases too often seem to
be on dress parade; but he can plead his precedents in justification.
In its fondness for the literary colloquial his prose style almost
suggests Thackeray, and it is this suggestion, perhaps, that gave rise
to the tradition that Kennedy wrote for the former a certain chapter
of _The Virginians_. That he supplied Thackeray with materials for his
Virginia backgrounds may be accepted as true, but the indebtedness
probably went no further.
_Rob of the Bowl_ is certainly Kennedy’s best work, as it is one of
the most finished and delightful of our earlier romances. Although it
ran to six editions, the latest in 1907, it has scarcely received the
recognition its lightness of touch deserves. But instead of opening
the vein further he turned away to venture in new fields. _Quodlibet_,
written in 1840,[401] is a surprising successor to _Rob_--a satire on
Jacksonian democracy, done with a light touch and great good humor.
In those acrimonious days when Old Hickory’s attack on the Bank so
embittered its Whig partisans, Kennedy kept his temper, tipped his
shafts with laughter and sent them neatly between the joints of the
Democratic armor. Against such amusing satire fustian is helpless.
The book is keen, vivacious, sparkling. The supposed follies of
Jacksonianism--its deification of the majority vote, its cant of the
sovereign people, its hatred of all aristocrats, its demagoguery and
bluster and sheer buncombe--are hit off with exuberant raillery. The
story professes to be an account of the rise to prosperity of the
Borough of Quodlibet, under the beneficent smile of Democratic finance.
Mean and insignificant before the coming of Jackson, with the removal
of the “Deposites,” “like Jeshurun, it waxed fat,” with its rows
of brick shops built on speculation and its Patriotic Copper-Plate
Bank that issued an unlimited supply of beautifully engraved notes
as a stimulus to enterprise. To be sure the bank broke and the
cashier absconded with his family to Europe, but its untoward end was
attributed by all Jacksonian New Lights to the vile machinations of the
Whigs. It was certainly Nick Biddle and the Barings, with their hatred
of Old Bullion Benton’s democratic gold coinage, that were the devil in
the pot to spill the people’s porridge.
Yet even in its laughter Kennedy’s political bias is sharply and
narrowly partisan. The satire is a capitalistic counter to the agrarian
attack on the rising money power, and it is colored by the chagrin of
gentlemen who find themselves displaced by plebeians. Something of the
old aristocratic contempt for the plain man functioning as a political
animal lingers in its pages, which the bubbling humor does not wholly
conceal. In Jackson’s onslaught on the Bank, Kennedy discovers only an
impudent demagoguery; it is selfish and stupid, turmoiling the country
for partisan ends and seeking to cover its petty spite with the mantle
of patriotism. The Old Hero cuts a sorry figure in these brisk pages,
and Van Buren a still sorrier one. The satire sparkles amusingly, but
it is drawn from the old Federalist vintage and it preserves the flavor
of a time when gentlemen frankly resented the rule of the unwashed
majority. For that very reason _Quodlibet_ is an unusually interesting
document. It is the most vivacious criticism of Jacksonianism in our
political library, one of our few distinguished political satires, and
it deserves a better fate than to gather dust on old shelves.
After _Quodlibet_ Kennedy did little else. The last twenty years of his
life were largely wasted. His dignified life of William Wirt, published
in 1849, seems to have met with approval, for it ran to six editions.
Our grandfathers liked stately narrative that portrayed their subjects
in full dress; and Kennedy gave them an impeccably respectable work in
which all the rugosities of character were ironed out neatly and a fine
starchy effect achieved. It is hard to understand how a writer so keen
to detect the whimsical should have drawn so lifeless a picture of the
genial Attorney-General. Perhaps the memory of Wirt’s reputed greatness
rested too heavily upon him; or it may have been that a lawyer in
old Virginia lived as colorless a life as the narrative suggests; at
any rate the novelist who never had failed to breathe life into the
characters of his fiction, somehow failed in depicting this excellent
gentleman of the old school. During the Civil War Kennedy contributed
to the northern cause his _Letters of Mr. Paul Ambrose on the Great
Rebellion in the United States_, in which he again showed that he
could keep his temper and argue calmly. It was a difficult theme for
which he was inadequately equipped. His constitutional argument is not
impressive and it makes an ill showing when set over against Alexander
H. Stephens’ _Constitutional View of the War between the States_. He
was a man of letters rather than a lawyer, and if he had eschewed
politics and law and stuck to his pen our literature would have been
greatly in his debt. Few Americans of his day were so generously
gifted; none possessed a lighter touch. He has been somewhat carelessly
forgotten even by our literary historians who can plead no excuse for
so grave a blunder.
III • Edgar Allan Poe • Romantic
It is from this slovenly background of aristocratic Virginia, with
its liberalisms and conservatisms running at cross purposes, that the
enigmatical figure of Poe emerged to vex the northern critics. In so
far as any particular environment determined his highly individual and
creative nature, it was the indolent life of the planter gentry, shot
through with a pugnacious pride of locality, with a strong dislike of
alien ways, with haughtiness, dissipation, wastefulness, chivalry.
In his proud, irascible individualism that went out of its way to
pick a quarrel, there is something of the spirit of John Randolph of
Roanoke, but pied and streaked with unfortunate qualities that to
many observers seemed the marks of the mere charlatan. As a southern
gentleman he imbibed the common dislike of New England, and this
dislike was aggravated by its diverse conception of the functions of
art, and by the misfortunes that attended his literary career. An
aesthete and a craftsman, the first American writer to be concerned
with beauty alone, his ideals ran counter to every major interest
of the New England renaissance: the mystical, optimistic element in
transcendentalism; the social conscience that would make the world
over in accordance with French idealism, and that meddled with its
neighbor’s affairs in applying its equalitarianism to the negro; the
pervasive moralism that would accept no other criteria by which to
judge life and letters--these things could not fail to irritate a
nature too easily ruffled. The Yankee parochialisms rubbed across his
Virginia parochialisms; and when to these was added a Yankee preëmption
of the field of literary criticism, when a little clique engaged in the
business of mutual admiration puffed New England mediocrities at his
expense, the provocation was enough to arouse in a sensitive southern
mind an antagonism that rivaled Beverley Tucker’s. In his unhappy
pilgrimage through life Poe was his own worst enemy, but he took
comfort in charging his ill fortune upon the malignancy of others.
Southern though he was in the deep prejudices of a suspicious nature,
his aloofness from his own Virginia world was complete. Aside from his
art he had no philosophy and no programs and no causes. He got from
Virginia what was bad rather than good, and his alienation from the
more generous southern ideals did him harm. It was perhaps harder to be
an artist in that slack southern society than in New England--harder
to be a romantic concerned only with twilight melancholy. It would
have been hard enough anywhere in Jacksonian America. His romanticisms
were of quite another kind than those his countrymen were pursuing;
and the planter sympathized with them no more than did the New York
literati, or the western men of letters. In a world given over to
bumptious middle-class enthusiasms, there would be scant sympathy for
the craftsman and dreamer. There was no unearned increment to be got
from investments in “the misty mid-region of Weir,” which Poe threw
on the market. The technician concerned with the values of long and
short syllables would find few congenial spirits in a world of more
substantial things; and the purveyors of shoddy tales would not take
it kindly if their shortcomings were pointed out and a more competent
craftsmanship insisted upon. And so, like Herman Melville, Poe came to
shipwreck on the reef of American materialisms. The day of the artist
had not dawned in America.
So much only need be said. The problem of Poe, fascinating as it is,
lies quite outside the main current of American thought, and it may be
left with the psychologist and the belletrist with whom it belongs.
It is for abnormal psychology to explain his “neural instability
amounting almost to a dissociated or split personality,” his irritable
pride, his quarrelsomeness, his unhappy persecution complex, his
absurd pretentions to a learning he did not possess, his deliberate
fabrications about his life and methods of work, his oscillations
between abstinence and dissipation, between the morbidly grotesque and
the lucidly rational, his haunting fear of insanity that drove him to
demonstrate his sanity by pursuing complex problems of ratiocination.
Such problems are personal to Poe and do not concern us here. And it is
for the belletrist to evaluate his theory and practice of art: his debt
to Coleridge and Schlegel; the influence of the contemporary magazine
on his conception of the length of a work of the imagination; the
value of his theory of the tyrannizing unity of mood in the poem and
short story; the provocation to the craftsman of the pretentiousness
of contemporary American literature, joined to a flabby and crude
technique; the grossness of the popular taste and the validity of his
critical judgments. Whatever may be the final verdict it is clear that
as an aesthete and a craftsman he made a stir in the world that has
not lessened in the years since his death, but has steadily widened.
Others of greater repute in his day have fared less prosperously in
later reputation. He was the first of our artists and the first of our
critics; and the surprising thing is that such a man should have made
his appearance in an America given over to hostile ideals. He suffered
much from his aloofness, but he gained much also. In the midst of gross
and tawdry romanticisms he refused to be swallowed up, but went his own
way, a rebel in the cause of beauty, discovering in consequence a finer
romanticism than was before known in America.
Footnotes
[401] The characteristic title is _Quodlibet: Containing some Annals
thereof, with an Authentic Account of the Origin and Growth of the
Borough and the Sayings and Doings of Sundry Townspeople: Interspersed
with Sketches of the Most Remarkable and Distinguished Characters
of that Place and its Vicinity. Edited by Solomon Secondthoughts,
Schoolmaster, from original MSS. Indited by him, and now made Public at
the Request and under the Patronage of the Great New Light Democratic
Central Committee of Quodlibet._
Part Two: The Renaissance of Slavery
Chapter I • Southern Imperialism
I
By the year 1824 a change was becoming evident in the South that was
to affect profoundly the course of southern thought in regard to
her peculiar institution. The passing of the long Virginia hegemony
was a sign that southern opinion was undergoing a revolutionary
overturn, and that leadership henceforth would rest with men of a
different philosophy. The humanitarian spirit that marked the thought
of the preceding generation was dying out, to be replaced by a frank
recognition of local economic interests. Expectation that slavery was
on the way to natural extinction was yielding to the conviction that
the system was too profitable to the South to permit its extinction,
and this in turn bred an imperious desire to spread it westward to
the Pacific. With this significant shift from apology to imperialism,
it became clear to ardent pro-slavery men that lukewarm Virginians of
the old tradition were not the spokesmen to entrust with the fortunes
of the South, and leadership passed to the South Carolina school. In
that momentous shift much was implied. It was more than a shift from
Jefferson to Calhoun, from humanitarian idealism to economic realism.
It marked the complete ascendancy of a small minority of gentleman
planters over the inarticulate mass of southern yeomanry, and the
assertion of the aristocratic ideal as the goal of southern society.
It denied the principle of democracy as that principle was understood
in the North and West, and it rejected the new humanitarian spirit of
western civilization. It abandoned the Jeffersonian equalitarianism
that was so deeply rooted in the southern mind from Kentucky to
Georgia; it cast aside the agrarianism of John Taylor and the older
Virginians; and it set up in place of these congenial conceptions the
alien ideal of a Greek democracy. More momentous still, it threw down
the gauntlet to the ideals of the middle class, then in the first
flush of a triumphant career, and in the armed clash that eventually
resulted, it was destroyed by that class.
The intellectual capital of southern imperialism was Charleston, but
its numerical strength lay in the Black Belt, with South Carolina to
the east and Texas to the west, a compact territory the heart of which
was Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In this new South that
was rapidly passing through its frontier development, the patriarchal
system of Virginia gave way to a system of negro exploitation, more
naked as it passed further westward. It was here that the proportion
of slaves to whites was greatest; it was here that slave labor was
most profitable; and it was here in consequence that the slave economy
was most militant. The Black Belt became the native habitat of the
southern Fire Eater. In the late twenties and early thirties South
Carolina provided the outstanding leaders of the new school; but the
philosophy of imperialism spread rapidly and western men came more and
more to the front. George McDuffie and Bob Toombs, perhaps the boldest
of the loquacious tribe of Fire Eaters, came from Georgia; Alexander
H. Stephens was bred in the same turbulent state; L. Q. C. Lamar and
Jefferson Davis were from Mississippi. For the most part self-made,
products of a frontier environment, these western extremists had got
from Jefferson little more than an assertive individualism that easily
espoused the states-rights philosophy and prompted them to defend their
immediate interests. It was this vigorous group that largely created
the new southern psychology and prodded the southern mind along the
path marked out for it to travel. Democratic in their attitude towards
the white voter, middle class in their love of exploitation, they
retained little of the spirit of the Virginia school.
The expansion of the South to the Gulf region came a generation later
than the settlement of the Ohio valley. The Creek Indians who clung
tenaciously to the rich lands of Mississippi were long an obstacle to
the white advance, and the settlers filtered in slowly. Moreover the
slave economy was ill fitted to the business of pioneering. It was
difficult to transport negroes and establish great plantations in a
wilderness; there was too little security in a region that offered
every temptation to the slave to run away. The plantation system could
prosper only after a considerable degree of development had been
effected and sufficient negroes provided. On the other hand, the rich
soil, virgin and productive, offered every inducement for large-scale
production of cotton, tobacco and sugar. Here the economics of slavery
could be fairly tested, and if the system were found to be profitable
it would spread of its own impulse beyond the Mississippi, becoming
more imperialistic with every extension, ambitious to seize Texas with
its filibusters, looking as far as California and the Oregon territory
for future expansion. But while planning for such expansion it must
secure its strategic front at Washington, making certain that no rival
economy should control the central government to its disadvantage. It
was an ambitious program, but it was all implicit in the evident fact
that slavery in the Black Belt proved to be profitable.
The explanation of this sudden prosperity of the Black Belt is a
matter of familiar knowledge. Coincident with the first westward
expansion of slavery came a revolution in the technique of the English
cotton industry that brought about corresponding changes in southern
agriculture. The production of cotton textiles in England had long
been held back by the difficulty of spinning a fine and even thread.
When this problem was solved at the beginning of the century by the
invention of new machines, the cotton industry at once developed
amazingly, making heavy demands upon the supply of American raw
materials. This supply in turn was greatly increased by the invention
of the cotton gin, and the combined result of these inventions was
an upheaval in southern agriculture. In the eighteenth century the
southern staples were tobacco, rice and indigo; by 1825 the staples
had become cotton, tobacco and sugar. Almost in a decade cotton had
become king. In 1791, three years after Andrew Jackson settled in
Nashville, the total export of cotton was only 200,000 pounds. In 1803
it had risen to 40,000,000 pounds, and by 1860 the export for the
year was of the value of nearly two hundred millions of dollars. Such
figures provide a sufficient explanation of the militant spirit of the
slave economy after 1820. Here was an enormous vested interest, the
economic life of the South, that could not suffer its present or future
profits to be put in jeopardy by any political party on any pretext.
Its well-being and its prestige were both at stake. The peculiar
institution, which a generation before was commonly believed to be in
the way of natural extinction, had the South by the throat.
It was the strategic weakness of the South that the spirit of
exploitation, which following the peace of 1783 had spread through
America like the itch, should there have assumed its most hateful
form, far more revolting to the humanitarian sense and far less
justifiable to uneasy consciences than wage slavery. With every
extension the system became necessarily more brutal in exploitation.
As new plantations were opened the natural increase of negroes was
inadequate to meet the pressing demands for slaves. Since the abolition
of the traffic with Africa the occasional smuggling by venturesome
runners--many of whom were respectable New England church members--had
provided a totally inadequate supply of raw material; the price of
slaves rose steadily, and this in turn led to increasing speculation
in negroes. Buying and selling by middlemen went on briskly, to the
horror of northern humanitarians and the concern of southern. So
brutal and open was the exploitation that Alexander H. Stephens--the
kindest-hearted of men--went so far as to advocate the reopening of the
slave trade with Africa, as the lesser of the two evils. The better
South hated what it could not help. Although the slave trader remained
a social pariah with whom no gentleman would associate, his business
was a necessary evil of the system and could not be eradicated.
The reaction of the slave system upon the southern people, both
plantation masters and poor whites, was wholly evil. The generous
culture of Virginia failed to take root in the Black Belt. The
development of the plantation system under hired overseers infected
the masters, few in numbers and absolute in power, with an exaggerated
sense of their own greatness. The aristocratic spirit of the Old
Dominion had been tempered by a feeling of patriarchal responsibility
that humanized the relations between master and slave, and more
generous social contacts had created an admirable republican
squirearchy. But in the frontier Gulf states the rapid expansion of
the plantation system created an aristocracy given to swaggering,
_bourgeois_ in spirit, arrogant in manners. Republican simplicity was
losing vogue and there was much loose talk about the superiority of
the classes. It is said that when Alexander H. Stephens was appointed
a delegate to the Confederate Convention at Montgomery, he refused
to attend till he was assured that the jingoes would make no attempt
to set up a monarchy. Gideon Welles is authority for the story that
when news came to Washington of the secession of South Carolina,
Mrs. Jefferson Davis was all aflutter: “She said she wanted to get
rid of the old government; that they would have a monarchy South, and
gentlemen to fill official positions” (_Diary_, Vol. II, p. 256). Such
stories were probably the result of war hysteria; nevertheless they
suggest a bias in the southern temper that reveals how far the new
South had drifted from its Jeffersonian moorings.
Of this new South with its grandiose dreams of slave imperialism, fate
selected Jefferson Davis to be the political leader and spokesman. The
choice may have proved unfortunate, but it was logical. Much calumny
has been heaped upon his name, but that is the common fate of partisans
of lost causes. The real Jefferson Davis is to be sought in some mean
between the extravagant adulation of his friends and the slanders of
his enemies. Not a great man certainly; in no sense comparable to Lee
or Stonewall Jackson or Alexander H. Stephens; he was very far from a
petty or time-serving nature. As time softens the old animosities it
reveals the features of a high-minded southern gentleman who possessed
the virtues and the weaknesses of his race. Simple and austere in
tastes, he was the product of a crossing of the southern Puritan with
the aristocratic tradition of the Old Dominion. If he was not of
the old cavalier stock he was a gentleman by instinct and training.
His father was half Welsh, half English; his mother Scotch-Irish.
He came of Revolutionary stock. After the war his father settled in
Georgia and later removed to Kentucky, where the son was born in Todd
County in 1808. While still a small child he was taken to Wilkinson
County, Mississippi, where he was brought up on a plantation. Educated
at Lexington, Kentucky, and at West Point, he proved a serious,
capable student, who loved reading but possessed little intellectual
curiosity. His ideas were few, but those he embraced he clung to with
the tenacity of a strong nature. Resigning from the army after a few
years of honorable service, he settled down as a plantation master.
He was summoned from his isolation by the call for troops to serve
in the Mexican campaign, went through several battles with unusual
distinction, and proved himself an extremely able officer. With
his military fame the path to political preferment was open and he
demonstrated his ability in Congress. At the outbreak of the secession
movement he was eager to receive the appointment as commander of
the southern armies, but fate called him to the presidency of the
Confederacy and he devoted his best strength unselfishly to the cause,
only to find the accumulated bitterness of the North heaped upon his
single head. It was an unhappy lot, but there was iron in him, and he
bore it like a man.
Jefferson Davis was cut out of the same tough oak that fashioned John
C. Calhoun. Hard and unyielding, tenacious of opinion, dictatorial,
somewhat inclined to arrogance, he might break, but he would not
bend. The Scotch-Irish stock was rarely genial or tolerant, and Davis
possessed none of the seeming pliability of Lincoln that yielded the
non-essentials to secure the essentials. Utterly lacking in humor and
easy-going good nature, he offended by his very virtues. Profoundly
Puritan, he was narrow and rigid, a legalist in temperament, proud and
jealous of authority. Meticulously honest, he could not get on well
with men; he quarreled with his generals and wore himself out trying
to do everything himself. Politically he was a strict constructionist
of the most rigid views. He refused to follow Calhoun into the camp
of Nullification. His patriotism was extreme, and only a greater
loyalty to his state made him an advocate of secession. At bottom he
was a Jeffersonian and to the end of his life he was faithful to the
principles of his party. Kindly and humane, he treated his dependents
with singular consideration. He set up a curious little democracy
amongst the slaves of his plantation, and his negroes were devoted to
him with rare loyalty. There was in his nature not the slightest trace
of the exploiter; he was a patriarchal master after the old Virginia
ideal, with no hint of the speculator or middleman. The background of
his thought was agrarian and he shared with Jefferson a dislike for
capitalistic industrialism. The President of the Confederacy may have
been an unfortunate civil leader, but the slanders that so long clung
to his name are only worthy of the gutter. The sin that he was led into
was not counted a sin in his southern decalogue; it was the sin, not
of secession, but of imperialism--a sin common to all America in those
drunken times when the great West invited exploitation.
Chapter II • Winds of Political Doctrine
I
An economic revolution so widespread and profound could not fail to
impress its ideals on current political thought. In the year 1825 three
streams of tendency were flowing through the southern mind, rising from
different sources, incompatible in spirit and purpose, strong in their
diverse appeals; and in the end the major current was certain to engulf
the lesser. The humanitarianism of Virginia, the individualism of the
new West, and the imperialism of the Black Belt might seem to mingle
their waters for a time, but there would be confusions of thought and
diversity of counsels until one or another had worn a deeper channel
through which the dominant opinion might run. There could be no more
fascinating study in the economics of political theory than the
changing mind of the South during the critical decades from 1820 to
1850, as it followed the course determined by its peculiar institution.
Political thought passed under the jurisdiction of slavery, and
every southern writer took his daily bearings from that polar fact.
It is unintelligent to charge upon southern politicians a lack of
consistency--to point out that after 1820 Calhoun reversed himself on
every major political principle. It was true of Calhoun, as it was
true of Webster and true of Clay. In a rapidly changing America, with
economics in a state of flux, men were no longer free political agents,
guiding themselves by the fixed stars of accepted theory; they were
borne like corks on the current of the times, and their inconsistency
is the surest evidence that they spoke for their constituents. The
North and the South were at the parting of the ways, and if southern
imperialism created for its needs a philosophy of particularism, it
was met by a counter philosophy of nationalism created for its needs
by northern capitalism, which likewise was following the path of its
manifest destiny. The charge of innovation, indeed, lies more justly
against northern theory than southern; it was Webster rather than
Calhoun who ignored the teachings of the fathers.
Of these three streams of tendency it was the new imperialism of the
Black Belt that wore the deepest channel, gathering its tributaries
till it was swollen to an overwhelming flood that drew in every lesser
current. Every other interest was eventually sacrificed to slavery,
every ambition was laid upon that consuming altar. Southern political
thought, in consequence, came to be an ingenious study in the strategy
of defense. From the somewhat vague doctrine of states rights as struck
off by the Virginia school was elaborated a complete philosophy of
particularism with its principle of a protective state veto. Tremendous
as was the stir created by the doctrine of Nullification, that doctrine
was little more than a warning gesture, a militant expression of the
southern temper. The time was not ripe for the critical issue, the
philosophy of the new South was not yet clarified; the objective was
clearly seen, but the defenses were incomplete, the line of campaign
not yet laid down. That great work was in the skillful hands of
Calhoun, and much was yet to be done. The deeper purpose that lay
behind the gesture of Nullification was the purpose of erecting in the
slave states a civilization founded on a landed aristocracy that should
serve as a sufficient counterweight to the mercantile and industrial
civilization of the North; and in the event that the institution of
slavery were not assured of peaceful extension through the new West,
to secede and establish a southern Confederacy wherein a generous
civilization might develop, modeled after the Greek democracy. Such at
least was the dream of the noblest minds of the South.
Thrown early upon the defensive, southern political thought found too
little time to examine fundamental principles. The necessities of the
situation entailed a meticulous constitutional debate, in which the
terms of the Constitution were examined with microscopic care, and
interpreted in the light of their historical origin. Something of the
sterility of the lawyer’s mind marked the long debate; and little
of the suggestiveness of the philosopher’s. Acute as was Calhoun’s
reasoning, it reveals the weakness of contemporary political thought,
northern as well as southern. It concerned itself too exclusively
with government under the Constitution--its origin, the just
interpretation of the terms of the fundamental law, the potentialities
of consolidation inherent in the principle of loose construction. To
the broader problems of the nature and functions of the political
state--questions that had so deeply interested the speculative minds of
the French school--quite inadequate consideration was given. The drift
of circumstance was in the way of creating a leviathan state. Southern
orators railed at consolidation in abundant and florid language,
but they concerned themselves little with the deeper problem of the
relation of the political state to the well-being of the citizen.
This common weakness is strikingly evident in the work of Calhoun’s
successor, Alexander H. Stephens, whose interest was so exclusively
historical and constitutional as almost to exclude him from a place
among political philosophers.
II • John C. Calhoun • Realist
The greatest figure in that long controversy was certainly John C.
Calhoun, a man who set his face like flint against every northern
middle-class ambition, and with his dream of a Greek democracy steered
his beloved South upon the rocks. A truly notable figure was this
ascetic Carolinian. In the passionate debates over slavery he daily
matched powers with Webster and Clay and proved himself intellectually
the greatest of the three. He is the one outstanding political thinker
in a period singularly barren and uncreative. His influence was
commanding. Tall, lean, eager, with no humor, no playfulness, lacking
the magnetic personality of Clay and the ornate rhetoric of Webster,
speaking plainly and following his logic tenaciously, this gaunt
Scotch-Irishman became by virtue of intellect and character, driven by
an apostolic zeal, the master political mind of the South, an uncrowned
king who carried his native Carolina in his pocket like a rotten
borough. Long before his death he had expanded a political philosophy
into a school of thought. What he planned a hundred disciples hastened
to execute. Like Jefferson he was a pervasive influence in shaping
men’s opinions. It was impossible to ignore him or to escape the
admonitory finger that pointed at every weak and shuffling compromiser.
Whatever road one travels one comes at last upon the austere figure of
Calhoun, commanding every highway of the southern mind. He subjected
the philosophy of the fathers to critical analysis; pointed out
wherein he conceived it to be faulty; cast aside some of its most
sacred doctrines; provided another foundation for the democratic
faith which he professed. And when he had finished the great work of
reconstruction, the old Jeffersonianism that had satisfied the mind of
Virginia was reduced to a thing of shreds and patches, acknowledged
by his followers to have been a mistaken philosophy, blinded by
romantic idealism and led astray by French humanitarianism. To
substitute realism for idealism, to set class economics above abstract
humanitarianism, was the mission to which Calhoun devoted himself. He
undid for the plantation South the work of his old master. Speaking
in the name of democracy, he attacked the foundations on which the
democratic movement in America had rested, substituting for its
libertarian and equalitarian doctrines conceptions wholly alien and
antagonistic to western democracy, wholly Greek in their underlying
spirit.
Calhoun’s career was linked indissolubly with slavery. He was the
advocate and philosopher of southern imperialism, and in defense of
that imperialism he elaborated those particularist theories which
prepared the way for the movement of secession. Born and bred in
South Carolina, he was enveloped from infancy in the mesh of southern
provincialisms. Except for two years at Yale, where he graduated in the
class of 1804, and eighteen months reading law in Connecticut, his life
was spent between Washington and his plantation. He was in temperament
a Puritan, of that Scotch-Irish strain which, scattered along the
wide American frontier, greatly modified the American character and
gave to the South such different leaders as Stonewall Jackson and
Jefferson Davis. It was a hard, stern race--that Scotch-Irish--little
responsive to humanitarian appeal; and Calhoun was harder and sterner
than most. He held his emotions in strict subjection to his reason.
Intent on thinking every problem through from premise to conclusion,
concerned always with fundamental principles, he would have become,
in an environment congenial to humanistic thought, a distinguished
intellectual. His mind would have lost its rigidity and become pliable
from contact with diverse streams of theory, and his speculations would
have found new horizons from more generous intellectual acquisitions.
But unhappily there was nothing either at Washington or in South
Carolina that tended to liberalize his thinking. He had not gone to
school, as Jefferson had done, to the great thinkers of Europe; he
had not found an intellectual stimulus in revolutionary systems of
philosophy. He dwelt all his life in the arid world of politicians.
His two years at Yale may even be accounted a calamity. Timothy Dwight
and Calhoun were cut out of the same cloth. The South Carolina Puritan
would only be confirmed in his dogmatisms by the most dogmatic of
Yankee Puritans; and in consequence his career, like Jonathan Edwards’,
suffered from a narrow, ingrowing intellectualism. He was a potential
intellectual whose mind was unfertilized by contact with a generous
social culture.
Calhoun’s public life covered the forty years from 1810 to 1850,
from the first administration of Madison to that of Zachary Taylor.
For nearly half of the total period, up to the year 1828, he was a
politician of ability but without distinction. He entered Congress at a
time when the young men from the South and West were becoming impatient
with the cautious policy of the old Republicans led by Jefferson and
Madison. The war psychology was mounting under British pin-pricks,
and the young nationalists, forgetful that bayonets and cannon and
ships are not easily defeated by rhetoric, were eager to teach the
Mistress of the Seas some much-needed international manners. In those
early years Calhoun joined with Clay in driving through Congress a war
policy. In this he seems to have represented his constituents, whose
patriotism was always somewhat bellicose. During the shameful war
experience, the cool analytical Calhoun came near to exhibiting the
tawdry marks of the jingo; and thereafter for years there was little to
distinguish him from a Hamiltonian Federalist. He was a throughgoing
nationalist of the school of loose construction. He advocated a
protective tariff on the ground that “it would form a new and most
powerful cement, far outweighing any political objections that might be
urged against the system” (Gaillard Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 29). As
yet he had discovered no constitutional scruples against the exercise
of this or other implied powers. He was, he said, “no advocate for
refined arguments on the Constitution. The instrument is not intended
as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to
be construed with plain, good sense; and what can be more express than
the Constitution on this point?” (_ibid._, p. 30). As Secretary for War
in Monroe’s cabinet he was an advocate of internal improvements, and he
submitted to Congress an elaborate report on a proposed system of roads
and canals. Until the critical year 1828 there was little in Calhoun’s
career to distinguish him from Clay. The tide of national expansion was
running strong; the growth of exploitation was creating a middle-class
psychology; and Calhoun in these earlier years was as unconsciously
middle class as afterwards he became consciously aristocratic. He
sprang from an acquisitive race, and to the end of his life some
remnants of the old instincts clung to him despite his repudiation of
the middle-class political philosophy.
The year 1828, marked by a fierce discussion in South Carolina of
the Tariff of Abominations, proved the turning-point of his career.
As Vice President he had been little more than a spectator of the
growing discontent in his native state at the contrast between the
industrial prosperity of New England and the agricultural depression of
the South. But he could no longer remain an idle spectator. Pamphlets
and newspaper articles were appearing that sharply challenged his
position. Capitalistic Federalism and democratic equalitarianism were
equally under fire. The celebrated Dr. Cooper, an Englishman long
resident in South Carolina, who had suffered under the Alien and
Sedition law, had vigorously attacked the natural-rights dogma, and was
active in arousing the public mind against Calhoun’s consolidationist
tendencies.[402] The publication in 1821 of Yates’s _Minutes of Debates
of the Constitutional Convention_ had awakened widespread interest in
an historical interpretation of the Constitution, and the time was
ripe for a new period of constitutional debate. The tariff act of 1828
provided the immediate occasion. It opened the flood gates, and the
waters of states-rights doctrine that had long been gathering rushed
forth in a torrent. Calhoun hesitated no longer. The problem and the
solution had both clarified themselves in his mind, and he at once took
the lead in directing the unrest to achieve a definite end.
Calhoun’s contribution to political theory--a contribution that
elevates him to a distinguished place among American political
thinkers--was the child of necessity, and received its particularist
bias from the exigencies of sectional partisanship. With the rapid
expansion of the nation westward, and the consequent augmenting of a
potentially hostile free-soil power, the South was doomed to become
increasingly a minority voice in the councils of government; and if it
were to preserve its peculiar institution it must find more adequate
means of self-protection than it had enjoyed hitherto. The tendencies
most to be feared, in his judgment, were the spontaneous drift towards
consolidation, and an uncritical faith in numerical majorities.
He was convinced that America had too thoughtlessly accepted the
principle of political democracy as a sufficient safeguard against
the danger of arbitrary government. Soon or late it must discover,
what the South already was discovering, that numerical democracy,
unrestrained by constitutional limitations on its will, is no friend
to political justice. The critical test of every government is the
measure of protection afforded its weakest citizen; and judged by this
test a democratic state, when power has come to be centralized in few
hands, may prove to be no other than a tyrant. Irresponsible in its
unrestraint, the majority vote may easily outdo an Oriental despot
in arbitrary rule, and the more power it wields the more ruthless
will be its disregard of minority opinion. The political philosopher
who proposes to formulate an ideal democratic system of government,
therefore, must deal critically with this fundamental problem of
political justice, for upon the solution will turn the excellence and
permanence of every democracy. It was to this baffling problem that
Calhoun addressed himself.
In seeking a constitutional defense for the threatened southern
interests, he drew from the two great reservoirs of American
constitutional theory. From the Jeffersonian Republicans he derived his
familiar doctrine of states rights in opposition to the consolidating
principle; from the Federalists of the Montesquieu school he drew his
theory of static government, resulting from exactly balanced powers;
and from the amalgamation of these diverse theories he formulated a new
principle. Both schools of earlier thought, he had come to believe, had
been sound in their major premises, but both had gone astray in certain
important deductions. The experience of forty years, with the democracy
constantly augmenting its powers, had demonstrated to Calhoun’s
satisfaction both the grave danger that lay in the principle of
consolidation, and the insufficiency of existing checks on the Federal
government. The prime mistake of the Jeffersonians, he conceived, was
their belief that the democratic majority will necessarily serve the
cause of political justice; and the miscalculation of the Federalists
resulted from the belief that the division of powers provided in the
Constitution was adequate to prevent arbitrary government. He now
proposed to correct these two mistakes by providing an additional
check through the simple expedient--as logical as it was efficacious,
granted his premises--of recognizing the veto power of the individual
commonwealth upon an act of the Federal government. Stripped of its
states-rights limitation, this was in germ the principle of the
referendum, modified, however, by certain suggestive provisions.
The veto-power as a protective principle Calhoun regarded as the
hallmark of constitutional government. Granted that sovereignty
under the Constitution inheres in the people, and that all authority
is delegated, it follows that government is no more than an agent
with strictly defined fiduciary powers, all the acts of which are
subject to review by the principal. Whether such review shall be
immediate and plenary, or at more or less remove and limited,
becomes therefore a fundamental question of constitutional polity.
Unfortunately much confusion has resulted from an intentional
vagueness, contributed by interested groups to further particular ends,
in the common understanding of the terms, the people and government.
The former is rarely, as is usually assumed, a homogeneous body
with common interests, but a congeries of individuals and groups
and classes with diverse and often antagonistic interests; and the
latter--in a republic--is never a sacred entity, the residuary
legatee of sovereignty, to criticize which is to commit the crime
of _lèse-majesté_, but a group of officials invested with temporary
authority and actuated by motives common to all men. A necessary
preliminary, therefore, to an intelligent understanding of the
principle of veto is a critical analysis of these much misunderstood
terms.
Calhoun was far too honest a realist to be under any hallucinations in
regard to political government. He estimated at its full significance
“the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” Power he knew to be the
most insidious of poisons; every government is liable to the disease of
auto-intoxication. Seated securely in office the agent assumes all the
prerogatives of the principal and clothes his acts with the sanctity
of sovereignty. Armed with the taxing power, he distributes penalties
and benefits with partial hand, and unless an adequate defense
protects the weaker interests they will suffer a legal exploitation.
Every government justly rests under suspicion, and only the most
critical scrutiny of its conduct can keep it decently honest. Popular
government, from which the Republicans hoped too much, changes only
the outward form of the selfish struggle for power by substituting
party rule for class rule. With its disciplined party machine the
lure of political spoil encourages the most shameless exploitation of
the weaker groups, who have no recourse.[403] Hence, the more popular
the government, the more ruthless becomes the majority rule; and any
system of checks and balances that does not adequately restrain this
inherent tendency of party rule must prove a failure. However carefully
the political philosopher may provide for a division of powers among
executive, legislature and judiciary, he must fail of his object, for
a regnant majority will control all three branches of government, and
thus intrenched will defy the protests of the minority. The Montesquieu
theory had proved a failure in practice.
An even greater danger, in Calhoun’s judgment, lay in the current
misinterpretation of the term “the people,” the result of which was
the obscuring of the economic basis of society and the befuddling
of the whole problem of government. To this disastrous result, he
believed, both schools of political thought had contributed. The early
Republicans had oversimplified the political problem by assuming a
clear division between ruler and subject. The conception was a heritage
from European experience, where it had taken form as a strategic
move to align the unthinking mass against a despotic monarchy. The
Jeffersonians had used it to like purpose in their struggle against
consolidation, appealing to a common democracy against the aristocracy.
The early Federalists were even more blameworthy, for, understanding
clearly the economic origins of political power and the economic
ends served by the political state, they made their knowledge serve
their interests and concealed their designs by deceptive appeals to
patriotism. Every realist knows that “the people” is a political
fiction. Society is made up of individuals, each with his particular
interest. The total interests of the subject-citizens are necessarily
complex. Group and classify them as he may, the political philosopher
can never merge the parts in a coalescing whole, but must recognize
that the problem remains one of adjustments and compromises. It follows
therefore that any facile assumption that government represents the
people or rests on the will of the people is a disastrous fallacy.
Popular government rests on the will of the majority; aristocratic
government rests on the will of the aristocracy; and despotic
government rests on the will of the despot. It is an axiom that the
political state is partisan to those who administer it. The stakes of
rulership are high; the game of politics never lacks its devotees; the
business of deceiving the people in order to pluck the goose has long
been one of the respectable professions.
The perennial problem of constitutional government, then, in Calhoun’s
philosophy, remains what it was seen to be by the Federalist followers
of Montesquieu--the problem of restraining government by constitutional
checks to the end that it be kept just. Existing machinery having
demonstrated its inadequacy, it remained to provide more effective.
Freedom Calhoun regarded as the crown jewel of civilization, hardly
won, easily lost. But freedom was not to be measured by _habeas corpus_
acts and similar legal restraints on tyranny; it was freedom from legal
exploitation and statutory dictatorship. “The abuse of delegated power,
and the tyranny of the stronger over the weaker interests, are the two
dangers, and the only two to be guarded against; and if this be done
effectually, liberty must be eternal. Of the two, the latter is the
greater and most difficult to resist” (_Works_, Vol. VI, p. 32). In
more definite terms the problem is thus stated:
Two powers are necessary to the existence and preservation of
free States: a power on the part of the ruled to prevent rulers
from abusing their authority, by compelling them to be faithful
to their constituents, and which is effected through the right of
suffrage; and a power to compel the parts of society to be just to
one another, by compelling them to consult the interest of each
other--which can only be effected ... by requiring the concurring
assent of all the great and distinct interests of the community to
the measures of the Government. This result is the sum-total of all
the contrivances adopted by free States to preserve their liberty,
by preventing the conflicts between the several classes or parts of
the community. (_Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 189-190.)
In elaboration of the second phase of the problem Calhoun contributed
the principle on which his reputation as a political thinker must
rest--the doctrine of a concurrent majority. He found his solution
in an expansion of the principle of democracy--recovering the
true principle, he was fond of insisting--by superimposing upon
the consolidated, indiscriminate numerical majority the will of
a geographical majority; or in other words, by a special form of
sectional referendum.
It results, from what has been said, that there are two different
modes in which the sense of the community may be taken: one,
simply, by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the
right through a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the
majority. But one regards numbers only, and considers the whole
community one unit, having but one common interest throughout; and
collects the sense of the greater number of the whole, as that
of the community. The other, on the contrary, regards interests
as well as numbers;--considering the community as made up of
different and conflicting interests as far as the action of the
government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through its
majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as
the sense of the entire community. The former of these I call the
numerical, or absolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent,
or constitutional majority. (“A Disquisition on Government,” in
_Works_, Vol. I, p. 28.)
In such speculation on the possibility of achieving political justice
by the machinery of representation, Calhoun was face to face with a
revolutionary conception--the conception of proportional economic
representation. The idea was implicit in his assumption of an
existing economic sectionalism that must find adequate expression
through political agencies. He had come to understand the futility
of a miscellaneous numerical majority; he had only to go back to
eighteenth-century philosophy and substitute economic classes for
economic sectionalism, finding his social cleavages in economic
groups instead of geographical divisions, to have recast the whole
theory of representation. Clearly, he had made enormous strides in
his thinking. He had long since put behind him the philosophy of
Jefferson. He had subjected the principle of democracy to critical
scrutiny. But instead of rejecting it as an unworkable hypothesis, as
the Hamiltonian Federalists had done, he proposed to establish it on a
sound and permanent basis. The ideal of democracy he conceived to be
the noblest in the whole field of political thought, but misunderstood
and misapplied as it had been in America, it had become the mother of
every mischief. This betrayal of democracy he laid at the door of the
Jeffersonians. They had accepted too carelessly the romantic dogmas
of the French school, and had come to believe that democracy was
synonymous with political equalitarianism.
It was this false notion that had debased the noble ideal, and
delivered it over to the hands of the mob. To assert that men are
created free and equal is to fly in the face of every biological and
social fact. The first business of the true democrat, therefore,
was to reëxamine the nature of democracy and strip away the false
assumptions and vicious conclusions that had done it incalculable
injury. The Greeks, he pointed out, understood its essential nature
better than the moderns. Democracy assumes a co-partnership among
equals. Its only rational foundation is good will, and it can function
only through compromise. From this it follows that in a society
composed of high and low, capable and weak, worthy and unworthy--as
every historical society has been composed--a universal democracy is
impractical. The numerous body of social incompetents will suffer one
of two fates: they will be exploited by the capable minority under the
guise of free labor, or they will be accepted as the wards of society
and protected by the free citizens--they must inevitably become either
wage slaves or bond slaves, in either case incapable of maintaining
the rights of free members of the commonwealth. Democracy is possible
only in a society that recognizes inequality as a law of nature, but in
which the virtuous and capable enter into a voluntary co-partnership
for the common good, accepting wardship of the incompetent in the
interests of society. This was the Greek ideal and this ideal had
created Greek civilization.
Calhoun was thus brought face to face with the natural-rights theory,
which the glowing rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence had
disseminated throughout America, and which lay as a virus at the heart
of Jacksonianism. To destroy that theory, he believed, was a necessary
preliminary to any rational theory of democracy, and he turned to the
business with characteristic frankness. Upon the venerable dogmas he
threw the light of his realism, subjecting them to critical analysis.
The origin of government in compact was only a myth. The amiable being
known as man in a state of nature, whose portrait had been drawn by
the French romantics, he discovered in neither social nor biological
history. The true origin of government, he asserted in common with John
Adams, is to be found in practical necessity; government arises, as
Hobbes had pointed out, from the universal fact of human selfishness.
It has always been found necessary to lodge coercive powers in certain
hands as a social protection against individual aggression; and since
all men are impelled by self-interest, political systems are determined
in form and scope by this universal instinct. Without government there
is anarchy; with government there is potential tyranny. The crucial
problem to be solved by the political philosopher, hence, is to
determine the just delimitation between sovereign power and individual
liberty; the one protecting the rights of the whole, the other keeping
open fresh opportunity to advance.
Having thus established government on the firm basis of social
necessity, he proceeded to examine the romantic dogmas of liberty and
equality.
It follows, from what has been stated, that it is a great and
dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled
to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be
gratuitously lavished on all alike;--a reward reserved for the
intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving;--and not
a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and
vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying
it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is, and
ought to be the case. On the contrary its greatest praise,--its
proudest distinction is, that an all-wise Providence has reserved
it, as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our
faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than
liberty could not be conferred on the deserving;--nor a punishment
inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to
lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result
of some fixed law;--and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by
attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the
point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive,
and end in disappointment....
There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually
associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer
to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately
united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality.
That they are united to a certain extent,--and that equality of
citizens, in the eyes of the law, is essential to liberty in a
popular government, is conceded. But to go further, and make
equality of _condition_ essential to liberty, would be to destroy
both liberty and progress. The reason is, that inequality of
condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at
the same time, indispensable to progress.... It is, indeed, this
inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the
march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former
to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward
into their files. This gives to progress its greatest impulse. To
force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward
the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the
government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest
the march of progress. (“A Disquisition on Government,” in _Works_,
Vol. I, pp. 55-56.)
It was the persuasive ideal of a Greek democracy in the plantation
states that lay back of Calhoun’s defense of slavery--a defense that
thrusts into sharp relief the change of southern attitude in the
decade of the thirties. The earlier Jeffersonian attitude had been
fairly expressed by a Georgia representative in the debate on the
Missouri question:
Believe me, sir, I am not a panegyrist of slavery. It is an
unnatural state; a dark cloud which obscures half the lustre of our
free institutions!... Would it be fair; would it be manly; would
it be generous; would it be just, to offer contumely and contempt
to the unfortunate man who wears a cancer in his bosom, because he
will not submit to cautery at the hazard of his existence? (Quoted
in Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 53.)
But with slavery put upon its defense, the southern spokesmen passed
from apology to praise. From the first, Calhoun accepted the system
implicitly, but now he subjected it to critical analysis in the light
of his theory of a Greek democracy. Over against it he set the northern
system of wage labor, and he came to the conclusion that the latter
was more brutal and inhumane than the former. He was convinced that
heretofore the South had made a serious mistake in apologizing for its
peculiar institution, and in expecting its eventual extinction. In
this matter the fathers had been wrong. No serious-minded Southerner
any longer believed that slavery was on the way to natural extinction.
It was spreading daily and must be permitted to spread. The hopes of
southern civilization were bound up with it. The North must be brought
to recognize it as a beneficent institution, necessary to a free,
cultivated democracy, the only alternative to those fierce conflicts
between wage labor and capital which already in the manufacturing
states were threatening the permanence of American institutions. In
a speech delivered in 1838, Calhoun thus sketched the new southern
conception:
Many in the South once believed that it [slavery] was a moral and
political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in
its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis
for free institutions in the world. It is impossible with us that
the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes
it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in
all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions
as ours do not exist. The Southern States are an aggregate, in
fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a
little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates
in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he
is the common representative. These small communities aggregated
make the State in all, whose action, labor, and capital is equally
represented and perfectly harmonized. Hence the harmony, the union,
the stability of that section, which is rarely disturbed, except
through the action of this Government. The blessing of this state
of things extends beyond the limits of the South. It makes that
section the balance of the system; the great conservative power,
which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted,
from rushing into conflict.... Such are the institutions which
these deluded madmen are stirring heaven and earth to destroy,
and which we are called on to defend by the highest and most
solemn obligations that can be imposed on us as men and patriots.
(“Remarks on the State Rights Resolutions in Regard to Abolition.
January 12, 1838,” in _Works_, Vol. III, p. 180.)
Thus in the end the political philosopher turns partisan to a cause.
His fruitful speculations on the theory of representation, his
inquiry into the economic basis of politics, remained incomplete, the
larger reaches only half explored. Espousing the ideal of democracy,
he yielded to the seductions of a Greek republic. Beginning as a
Jeffersonian, he ended as the philosopher of a slave aristocracy, from
whose principles men like Governor McDuffie of South Carolina deduced
the dictum that “the laboring population of no nation on earth are
entitled to liberty, or capable of enjoying it.” It was a curious
dream, yet no more curious than his faith in an obsolete article in
the Constitution to withstand the advance of a hostile economy. There
is something almost tragic in the self-deception of this clear-minded
realist in his appeal to a paper defense against economic forces.
“The Constitution--no interference--no discrimination,” he cried
passionately in repudiating the right of Abolition petition. “These are
the grounds on which the battle may be safely fought.... You must tell
these deluded fanatics, you have no right to intermeddle in any form or
shape.... Expediency, justice, plighted faith, and the Constitution:
these, and these only, can be relied on to avert conflict” (_Works_,
Vol. III, p. 190).
Lost faiths and repudiated prophets go down to a common grave. The
living have little inclination to learn from the dead. The political
principles of Calhoun have had scant justice done them by later
generations who incline to accept the easy opinion that the cause which
triumphs is altogether the better cause. What Calhoun so greatly feared
has since come about. He erected a last barrier against the progress of
middle-class ideals--consolidation in politics and standardization in
society; against a universal cash-register evaluation of life: and the
barrier was blown to pieces by the guns of the Civil War. Historically
he was the last spokesman of the great school of the eighteenth
century, the intellectual descendant of John Adams. The two men were
much alike in the broad principles of their political philosophy, and
identical necessities brought them to identical conclusions. They
agreed in the fundamental principle that property will rule by reason
of its inherent power, and that political justice is attainable only by
a nicely calculated system of checks and balances, which provides each
important group with a defensive veto. But in the social experience on
which Adams founded his doctrine, political antagonism was potential
in rival classes, and justified a division of powers on the model
of the British constitution. In the intervening years, however, the
economic alignment had become sectional, the rise of party government
had created a new problem, and the earlier division of powers seemed
to demand a supplementary veto if the nice balance contemplated in
the Constitution were to be maintained. This was the kernel of the
states-rights doctrine which Calhoun elaborated with such skill. That
he should have associated the principle with a cause that was doomed
was disastrous to the just fame of Calhoun. More, it was disastrous to
the vital democratic principle of decentralized powers. In championing
a Greek democracy Calhoun affronted the latent idealism of America, and
the harm he did to agrarian democracy was incalculable.
III • Alexander H. Stephens • Constitutionalist
Southern scholars are pretty well agreed that the ablest defender
of the doctrine of secession was Alexander H. Stephens, the Georgia
commoner. He was sprung from the plain people. Brought up in severe
poverty, self-taught, the friend of the poor, he was no child of an
exclusive planter aristocracy, and was never quite trusted by them.
The victim of a slight, ramshackly physique, never weighing a hundred
pounds, never knowing a well day, fearfully handicapped in the everyday
matter of living, it is amazing that soul and body held together for
seventy-one years and more amazing that he accomplished what he did.
“Throughout life,” says one of his biographers, “he was practically
a brain without a body.” Temperamentally despondent, he was driven
into restless activity to forget self. His will was fine-tempered
steel and ill health never broke his courage even when it laid him on
his back. He feared nothing, but took a position and argued a cause
without regard to personal consequences. He never flinched from the
personal encounters which the lawless code of Georgia politics invited.
A morbid consciousness of his feeble physique sometimes drove him
into truculence, and on one occasion he was stabbed eighteen times by
a certain ornament of the Georgia bench, and saved his life only by
grasping the blade that was driven at his throat. But such encounters
can be explained on the ground of overcorrection; the real Stephens was
gentle, peace-loving, hating all swaggerers military or civilian, “a
man of generous sympathies, of broad humanity, a democrat of democrats,
a friend of all the world” (Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_,
p. 253). The words _Non sibi sed aliis_, cut in his tombstone at
Crawfordville, come nearer the truth than epitaphs usually do. He was
never selfishly ambitious and he could justly say after the fall of the
Confederacy, “I am old and weak in bodily infirmity, but I have done
my duty to God and my country, and I am ready for whatever fate may be
assigned me” (_ibid._, p. 393).
Stephens was a lifelong student of politics, regarding it as “one
of the most intricate, as well as interesting subjects that can
engage the attention of reflecting minds.” He was not a political
philosopher like Calhoun, concerned with principle and theory, but a
constitutional historian concerned to trace the genesis and development
of the fundamental law of the land. He was probably more widely read
in the early literature of the Constitution than any other man of his
generation. He had thumbed and dog-eared Elliot’s _Debates_, and could
cite dates and explain circumstances for the elucidation of doubtful
points or the correcting of an unhistorical interpretation. He knew the
genesis of every article, of almost every word in the Constitution, and
the reasons which determined the special form which each assumed; and
this exact knowledge equipped him for the task of critical commentator
on earlier commentators. Unfortunate was the theorizer who fell into
his hands. Federalist expositors like Story and Motley, given to rash
generalization from inadequate data, suffered disaster under his
critical inspection. With his fund of historical knowledge he was amply
prepared for the labor of love to which he turned after the war, and in
his _Constitutional View of the War between the States_ he produced
one of the most notable studies in the origin of the Constitution that
we have.
Certain deep personal needs, taking form in passionate conviction,
determined the bias of Stephens’ political philosophy, which was
quite simple, consistent and inflexible, from his first entry into
public life until his death. There was no subtlety in his intellectual
processes, no balancing uncertainly between diverse appeals, but
a clear faith which he expounded to the common voter in confident
expectation that it would awaken sympathetic response. His extensive
reading was not so much a disinterested search for light on the
ideal relations of men in society, as for confirmation of certain
prepossessions. That those prepossessions were shared by his fellow
Georgians, that they were the natural product of existing social
conditions, gave to them an added sanction. The creative source of
his philosophy was a passionate love of freedom; and his meditations
convinced him that the only freedom worth a tuppence is civil liberty
under civil law--that the test of any civilization is the concern it
manifests for the safeguarding of such liberty by exact and adequate
constitutional provisions. His reverence for law was a religion with
him, and his love of the Constitution as the fostering mother of the
law was only this side idolatry. “No stronger or more ardent Union man
ever lived than I was,” he asserted late in life. Intense loyalty was
almost commonplace amongst the people from whom he sprang. Love of the
Union, and of the Constitution as a guarantee of that Union, was far
stronger in the South before the Civil War than in the North. But it
was the Constitution of the fathers, not a newfangled consolidating
instrument that drew all power to Washington, that they loved. Pride
of locality--naïve though it might be and provincial--the spontaneous
pride of a simple untraveled people--was rooted in the southern
heart. It was nourished by a deep love of homestead and neighborhood,
natural to an agrarian society; and it came to political expression
in the doctrine that the commonwealth must be free to manage its own
affairs in its own way. The theory of states rights, amongst such
a people, was not an abstract principle but an expression of the
psychology of localism created by everyday habit. This explains the
intensity of conviction which colors the thought of Stephens. The
principle of local sovereignty was inbred. He rarely deigns to argue
the question. He never concerned himself with abstract argument--as
Jefferson had done--to prove the superior excellence of local home
rule. This failure, indeed, may perhaps be accounted his greatest
weakness as a political thinker. Rather he was concerned to prove that
state sovereignty existed prior to the Union, that it was jealously
guarded at the making of the Constitution, that it had never been
surrendered, and hence was the constitutional order until destroyed by
the Civil War. But if he refrained from abstract argument touching the
desirability of localizing political power, he exhibited a Jeffersonian
fear of unregulated power which consolidation makes possible.
This passionate love of freedom he exemplified in his own career. He
followed his convictions and spoke his own mind, regardless of occasion
or circumstance. He was no man’s tool. He hated a demagogue and never
curried favor with his constituents or calculated popular response. In
his public life he considered himself a representative of the people
of Georgia, and the one object of his labors was the preservation of
that constitutional liberty in which they had grown up. In furtherance
of this policy he found himself not infrequently at odds with other
southern leaders. He vigorously opposed his party in its Mexican war
policy, looking upon it as no other than imperialistic vandalism aimed
at a weaker neighbor for the purpose of extending slave territory.
There was no glamor for him in military victories; he would not concede
that a republic might plead manifest destiny in extenuation of armed
aggression, or that the ends of civilization may be furthered by war.
In a speech opposing the policy of his fellow Whigs, he thus expressed
his conception of national progress:
I am no enemy to the extension of our domain, or the enlargement
of the boundaries of the republic. I trust the day is coming,
and not far distant, when the whole continent will be ours; when
our institutions shall be diffused and cherished, and republican
government enjoyed, throughout the length and breadth of this
land.... That this is our ultimate destiny, if wise counsels
prevail, I confidently believe. But it is not to be accomplished
by the sword.... Republics never spread by arms. We can properly
enlarge only by voluntary accessions....
There is much said in this country of the party of progress. I
profess to be of that party; but I am far from advocating that kind
of progress which many of those who seem anxious to appropriate
the term exclusively to themselves are using their exertions to
push forward. Theirs, in my opinion, is a downward progress. It
is a progress of party, of excitement, of lust of power; a spirit
of war, aggression, violence and licentiousness. It is a progress
which, if indulged in, would soon sweep over all law, all order,
and the Constitution itself.... It is to progress in _these_
essential attributes of national greatness that I would look: the
improvement of mind, the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among
men,” the erection of schools, colleges and temples of learning;
the progress of intellect over matter; the triumph of mind over the
animal propensities; the advancement of kind feeling and good will
among the nations of the earth; the cultivation of virtue and the
pursuits of industry; the bringing into subjection and subservience
to the use of man of all the elements of nature around us; in a
word, the progress of civilization, and everything that elevates
and ennobles man. This ... is not to be done by wars, whether
foreign or domestic. Fields of blood and carnage may make men brave
and heroic, but seldom tend to make nations either virtuous or
great. (Quoted in Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, pp. 79-80.)
A man of peace, Stephens was greatly agitated over the movement of
secession. He fought the Fire Eaters to the bitter end in his native
state, but like other high-minded Southerners he went out with his
commonwealth. Loyalty to Georgia was stronger than loyalty to the
nation. But in the new order he preserved his old principles. The
Jeffersonian democrat could not forget his teachings. When the
Confederacy was discussing its proposed Constitution, he took alarm
at some loose talk about the desirability of setting up a monarchy.
His old friend Bob Toombs, one of the ablest of the southern leaders,
quite frankly preferred the English system to the American.[404] There
seems to have been considerable comment to like effect amongst the Tory
hot-heads; but the wind was not blowing in that direction and such
straws were only the stirrings of vagrant eddies. The Constitution as
adopted was more democratic than the older instrument--an outcome to
which Stephens contributed greatly.
As Vice President of the Confederacy he constituted himself the special
guardian of constitutional liberty, and his jealous concern at what
he regarded as administrative usurpations of power brought on grave
differences with President Davis. Even in the urgent crises of war he
would not sanction the use of extra-constitutional powers. He knew
better than most that power grows by what it feeds on, that too often
war destroys the liberty it professes to be serving. To win the war
and lose the peace, to secede in defense of constitutional rights and
then tamely yield them up, seemed to him a pitiful ending, and when
President Davis suspended the right of _habeas corpus_ and his generals
proclaimed martial law, he took alarm. “All such orders,” he said,
“are palpable and dangerous usurpations, and if permitted to continue
will end in military despotism.... Better in my judgment that Richmond
should fall, and that the enemy’s armies should sweep our whole country
from the Potomac to the Gulf than that our people should submissively
yield obedience to one of these edicts of our own generals” (Pendleton,
_Alexander H. Stephens_, p. 292). Freedom of speech he would not have
interfered with under any excuse. The suspension of civil law he
considered a threat aimed at every citizen of the South. He had heard,
he said, that one purpose of the act was “to control certain elections
and certain expected assemblages in North Carolina”--where there was a
good deal of disaffection--“to put a muzzle upon certain presses, and
a bit in the mouth of certain speakers of that State. If this be so, I
regard it as the more dangerous to public liberty” (_ibid._, p. 313).
To the question, “Can you not trust the President?” he replied in words
that deserve to be remembered:
To the question of whether I would not or cannot trust him with
these high powers not conferred by the Constitution, my answer is:
I am utterly opposed to everything looking to or tending toward
dictatorship in this country. There is no man living and not one of
the illustrious dead, whom, if now living, I would so trust.... I
would not turn on my heel to choose between masters. I was not born
to acknowledge a master from either the North or the South. I shall
never choose between candidates for that office. I have no wish
or desire to live after the degradation of my country, and have
no intention to survive its liberties, if life be the necessary
sacrifice of their maintenance to the utmost of my abilities.
(_Ibid._, pp. 313-314.)
No argument of expediency, no appeal to military necessity ever moved
him from the belief that the sole justification of government is the
maintenance of liberty, and that the sole guarantee of such liberty is
the orderly process of civil law. He was harassed by the encroachment
upon individual freedom demanded by war, north as well as south. “The
North to-day,” he said, “presents the spectacle of a free people having
gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet
attained is to make slaves of themselves” (_ibid._, p. 293). Perhaps no
other public man in America kept his head amidst the passions of the
time so completely as Stephens. He was utterly beyond reach of jingo
appeal, and he suffered what the individual must expect to suffer who
pits his single conscience against the mass will. He was branded as a
traitor, and only his extraordinary hold on the affections of the plain
people of Georgia saved him from the bitterest experience.
During the black period following the southern collapse, when he
was disfranchised, broken in health past mending, and hated by the
followers of President Davis, Stephens sought distraction in writing
American history. Three and a half years, from 1867 to 1870, he devoted
to his _Constitutional View of the Late War between the States_. The
case for states rights has never been more convincingly put than in
this monumental study. The first volume in particular, which deals
with the history of the Constitution, is an acute and able work. The
thesis on which it rests is the doctrine which Paine and Jefferson
derived from the French school, namely, that a constitutional compact
is terminable. Elaborated by Stephens and applied to the case in
question, the doctrine becomes this: that the right of secession is
a civil as well as a revolutionary right; that it is implied in the
compact originally entered into by the several states; that any state
may rightfully take back what it had peacefully granted, when such
action shall seem to it desirable. The sovereign commonwealth has
never abrogated its sovereignty; the Constitution is a Federal compact
amongst equals; the United States is a federated Union, not an organic
nation. To conceive of the organic law as a consolidating instrument
binding the individual citizen immediately to the central government,
as Webster and Judge Story had done, was not only unhistorical but
contrary to every fact and every tradition. To arrive at the principle
of consolidation, and hold that the right of secession is only a
revolutionary right, one must deliberately shut one’s eyes to the early
history of the Constitution.
Not content to prove the original compact nature of the
Constitution--an argument that runs through fourteen hundred pages,
buttressed by a mass of citations from all sources and wholly
convincing in its evidence--Stephens undertakes to prove the wisdom of
the fathers in establishing the federal union in compact. In respecting
existing loyalties to the several commonwealths, they not only
preserved the local democracies--which, as a Jeffersonian, Stephens
believed were the foundation of good government--but they established
the federal state on a strong and enduring foundation. The Hamiltonian
consolidationists had asserted that a strong state must rest on the
principle of coercive sovereignty, that it can he held together only
through the exercise of authority. Stephens replied by laying down the
counter principle that the secret of a strong and enduring state is to
be discovered in the spontaneous loyalty of its citizens, and that in
consequence a democracy which rests on the good will of the people as a
whole is the most enduring of all forms.
A Government, to be worth anything, ... must be strong. Its parts
and members must be held together by force of some sort. This I
cordially admit. We do not differ as to the force or its extent; we
differ only as to its nature and character. Should it be a physical
or moral force? In my judgment, the strongest force that can hold
the parts or constituent elements of any Government together is the
affection of the people towards it. (_Constitutional View, etc._,
Vol. I, p. 526.)
Affection, he reasoned, cannot be coerced. It must spring spontaneously
from the recognition that government is useful, that it is just, that
it treats all its parts and members equally, that it is an agency
erected by a free people to serve the ends of freedom. Allegiance is
an individual compact between the citizen and government. Destroy the
principle of voluntary allegiance, seek to coerce the citizen, impose
upon minorities the ruthless will of majorities, subjugate individual
commonwealths, and the federal Union which Jefferson believed to be
“the strongest Government on Earth,” would indeed become what Hamilton
in his blindness to the secret of power believed that it was--“a frail
and worthless fabric.” “But the indissoluble union between the several
states of this Confederated Nation is, after all, not in the _right_,
but in the _heart_” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 527). So long as the rights of
all are respected, the common interest and common loyalty will preserve
the union. Injustice alone is to be feared, for no political bonds can
long resist the action of this most potent of social dissolvents.
Modern as Stephens was in the assertion of the principle of good will
as the source of sovereignty in democratic government, he belonged to
his own generation in his blindness to economic motives. He thought
exclusively in legal and constitutional terms; he remained wholly a
lawyer. It is hard to understand how one so profoundly read in our
political history should have failed to discover the workings of
economic forces beneath the surface of politics. Calhoun, bred in
the same Jeffersonian school, had found his way through the mist of
equalitarianism to the solid realism of an earlier day; but to the last
of his fourteen hundred pages of exposition Stephens retained the
illusion that the political state is something apart from economics and
superior to it. He conceived of government as an end in itself, and
this lends an air of unreality to his thinking. An ardent Jeffersonian,
he reduced the philosophy of his master to the compact theory of
government. The economic basis of Jefferson’s philosophy, his love of
an agrarian order and hatred of capitalistic exploitation--motives
which serve to explain and justify his theory of local self
government--Stephens wholly ignores. The result is a grotesque
perversion of a philosophy which John Taylor had elaborated clearly.
Jefferson was a much greater political thinker than Stephens conceived,
although he called him the “greatest philosophical statesman” America
has produced. In his estimate of Andrew Jackson he falls into the same
mistake. He attempts to reduce the confused career of Jackson--half
middle-class in his earlier years and later returning to agrarian
principles--to the same narrow compass of the compact theory. Even
Webster, for whom he entertained “the highest esteem and admiration,”
and in praise of whose moral qualities he is almost fulsome,[405] he
quite failed to understand. Webster’s theory of the Constitution, he
clearly demonstrated, was utterly unhistorical; but Webster’s economic
alliances he ignored. What havoc was wrought in current politics by
suffering political theory to obscure economic reality is suggested by
the fact that Stephens, a Jeffersonian in every instinct, turned Whig
and voted for Webster in 1852--after the latter’s death. Politics makes
strange bedfellows, yet it must have been an ample bed that could sleep
the spokesman of an agrarian economy and the spokesman of capitalism
side by side.
In his attitude towards slavery Stephens was a product of his Georgia
environment. His views were ready-made, out of the common southern
storehouse. The economic determinism which he ignored in politics had
its revenge, and the man who often differed with his constituents on
political issues fell victim to the subtle power of economics. As the
South Carolina philosophy took form, issuing finally in the romantic
conception of a Greek democracy, it imposed itself imperiously on the
southern mind, on the commoner equally with the aristocrat. It was
impossible to escape, unless, like Moncure Conway, one were of an
idealistic temper far different from the common run. For Stephens it
proved impossible. In this matter of slavery he had no individual
opinion; his mind was molded by the common psychology and became a
repository of the common prejudice. He followed his fire-eating friend
Bob Toombs into the camp of Calhoun, and talked about a Greek democracy
in true Charleston style. In a speech delivered on March 21, 1861,
shortly after he was chosen Vice President of the Confederacy, he gave
expression to the new philosophy in these words:
The prevailing ideas entertained by ... most of the leading
statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution
were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the
laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally,
and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal
with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that,
somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution
would be evanescent and pass away.... Those ideas, however,
were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of
the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is
founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid,
its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not
equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior
race--is his natural and normal condition ... in conformity with
the ordinance of the Creator.... Our Confederacy is founded upon
principles in strict conformity with these [Divine] laws. This
stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the
chief of the corner”--the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice.
(Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, pp. 251-254.)
To the end of his life Stephens saw no reason to change his opinion
on negro slavery. He regarded it as more humane than wage slavery
because of the patriarchal responsibility devolving upon the master.
The institution was not founded, he said, on “the erroneous dogma of
the greatest good to the greatest number,” but on the broader principle
of securing “the greatest good possible, morally, intellectually, and
politically, to all classes of persons ... without necessary wrong or
detriment to any” (_Constitutional View, etc._, Vol. I, pp. 539-542).
In his relations with his own slaves he followed the best traditions
of the South. His kindness won their loyalty and affection. “Ef he
ain’t in heaven,” said a house servant after his death, “’tain’t no
use for anybody else to try to git dere” (Pendleton, _Alexander H.
Stephens_, p. 100). To the argument of Hinton Helper that the system
was economically ruinous to the poor white, he seems to have given no
consideration; but to the argument of the Abolitionist that it was
immoral, he replied with deep conviction. On that point he would not
yield an inch. After quoting a miscellany of Biblical texts from the
earliest Hebraic times down to Paul, he comments naïvely:
To maintain that Slavery is _in itself sinful_, in the face of all
that is said and written in the Bible upon the subject, with so
many sanctions of the relation by the Deity himself, does seem to
me to be little short of blasphemous! It is a direct imputation
upon the wisdom and justice, as well as the declared ordinances of
God, as they are written in the inspired oracles, to say nothing of
their manifestation in the universe around us. (_Ibid._, Vol. II,
p. 83.)
It is doubtful wisdom for the layman to meddle with Scripture. Stephens
was a sounder interpreter of the writings of the constitutional fathers
than of the will of God.
A careful historian devoted to a single idea rather than a creative
political thinker; a thorough democrat of the Jeffersonian school,
humanitarian, liberty-loving, courageous; a man who devoted his life
to the preservation of constitutional liberty as it had taken shape
before the industrial revolution unsettled the basis of modern life,
Alexander H. Stephens was an honest gentleman who bravely defended
the traditions of the South in the face of a new order. He was of
an earlier generation, instinctively hostile to all consolidation,
which, under the impulse of economic evolution, was obliterating state
lines, gathering financial power in great reservoirs, and creating a
new alignment between labor and capital. With such evolution it was
axiomatic that political practice should follow economic fact; that
a consolidating wealth should create a consolidated political state.
Great enterprises with ramifications in every section would not long
tolerate a multitude of state sovereignties; sovereignty must be
centralized at Washington where it could be guided and controlled.
The war only hastened what in the nature of things was inevitable.
Stephens rightly insisted that slavery was only the immediate _casus
belli_. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory
and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic
economic systems. That the principle of local self-government should
have been committed to the cause of slavery, that it was loaded with
an incubus certain to alienate the liberalism of the North, may be
accounted one of the tragedies of American history. It was disastrous
to American democracy, for it removed the last brake on the movement
of consolidation, submerging the democratic individualism of the
South in an unwieldy mass will, and surrendering the country to the
principle of capitalistic exploitation. Stephens never seems to have
realized this grave mistake in strategy. He never realized that the
principle of democracy, in the cause of which he believed that he was
faithful to the end, received a staggering blow from the enlistment of
northern liberalism under the banners of a consolidating nationalism.
He remained to the last an unreconstructed Jeffersonian, convinced that
the lost cause was the cause of liberal democracy.
IV • Francis Lieber • A New-Modeled Federalism
To turn from Calhoun and Stephens to Francis Lieber is to pass from the
South to the North, from an obsolescent political theory to a prophetic
conception, from the doctrine of states rights to the principle of an
evolving state that draws all lesser sovereignties into its orbit by
the law of attraction. Joseph Story had educed the legal conception
of the organic nature of the federal union from the terms of the
Constitution; Francis Lieber provided a philosophical background
that justified the same conclusion; and under the combined legal
and philosophical attack the compact theory found its philosophical
breastworks leveled, its natural-rights theory undermined, and its
commanding position effectively turned.
The figure of our first academic political philosopher appears oddly
out of place in the midst of South Carolina politicians, yet fate
set the studious German in the thick of the Fire Eaters, to cogitate
a philosophy of freedom in the land of slavery, and to justify the
spirit of nationalism amongst the advocates of particularism. For
twenty-one years he lived quietly in his southern classroom and study,
disregarding the passions that buzzed about him, elaborating ideas
that in later years came to exercise a determining influence upon
our academic political thinkers, and publishing ponderous volumes
that marked the beginning of the swing away from the natural-rights
philosophy and towards the conception of an engrossing political
state. Applying German liberalism to American constitutionalism, he
succeeded in new-modeling the Federalism of Hamilton and sending it
forth to meet the needs of an imperializing generation. He agreed
with Calhoun in the latter’s attack on French romantic theories; he
agreed with Webster in the conception of the organic nature of the
federal compact; but he went further and elaborated a theory of the
state as an historical development that receives its form and spirit
from the impress of social needs. Building on a foundation provided by
Montesquieu and Burke, guided by Hamilton and Marshall, he set about
erecting a structure that in the hands of Theodore Woolsey and John W.
Burgess came to overtop all local and state sovereignties--an imperial
authority that, in the words of Burgess, must become “the organ of
interpretation in last instance of the order of life for its subjects”
(Merriam, _American Political Theories_, p. 299). In that subtle shift
of vocabulary from citizen to subject appears the final result of the
speculations begun by Lieber, which in rejecting the natural-rights
philosophy overthrew the defenses erected by the eighteenth century
against an engrossing political state, and set the individual citizen
at the mercy of a new divine-right sovereignty. “Really the state
cannot be conceived,” according to Burgess, “without sovereignty,
_i.e._ without unlimited power over its subjects; that is its very
essence” (Merriam, _American Political Ideas: 1865-1917_, p. 380).
Between the democratic Stephens and the imperializing Burgess stands
the work of Francis Lieber. Born in Germany in the year 1800, son of
a well-to-do Berlin family, Lieber’s youth and young manhood fell in
stirring times. When only fifteen he served in the Waterloo campaign
under Blücher, was wounded, stricken with typhus, and nearly lost his
life. From those perilous experiences he emerged a pronounced liberal.
During the Metternich reaction he fell under suspicion, served a
prison term for his political opinions, graduated from the University
of Jena, and in 1822 went to Greece with a group of young German
idealists to serve the cause of revolution. Disgusted with the Greek
character he made his way to Italy, fell in with the historian Niebuhr,
became tutor to the latter’s son for a year, continued his university
studies, was a second time imprisoned, and finally in 1826 quitted
a hopelessly reactionary Germany, spent a year in England, and then
emigrated to America, following the example of Prof. Charles Follen.
In Boston he taught gymnastics for a time, edited the _Encyclopedia
Americana_, and in 1835 was appointed to the professorship of history
and political economy in South Carolina College. Here he remained
till 1856, teaching, writing, and acquiring academic fame. In 1855
he aspired to the presidency of the college, a post then vacant, but
his political theories were in disrepute with the legislature, and his
views on slavery were under general suspicion. Becoming embroiled with
the politicians, he lost the post, resigned his professorship, and went
to New York City, and in 1857 he was called to the new chair of history
and political science at Columbia, where he remained till his death in
1872.
The two books on which rests his reputation, _Political Ethics_
(1838-1839) and _Civil Liberty and Self-Government_ (1853), are
substantial volumes quite lacking the genial note that marks his
_Stranger in America_ (1834), a series of sketchy letters that
among other things contains an extraordinarily vivid account of his
experiences at Waterloo (_Letters VI, VII_). To a casual reader these
excursions into the philosophy of politics are as soberly respectable
as a judge’s wig, as studiously conventional as a professor’s gown.
He went about the business of blowing up the accepted Jeffersonian
philosophy decently, in the name of the law and under the high sanction
of liberty. There can be no doubt that this German liberal was a
passionate lover of liberty, and no doubt of his conviction that
freedom is possible only in a society under the reign of law. Like
Hamilton, he had no local ties or state loyalties to circumscribe his
political allegiance. It was natural for him to think in terms of
nationality. His bitter experience in Germany had laid open to him the
fatal weakness of petty states, and he was loath to see repeated in
America the history of warring antagonisms that disrupted the German
people. He was a profound admirer of the British constitution, more
English than German in his conception of liberty.
The nationalism of Lieber was identical with that of John Adams. It
was, in a phrase, government by law. But this government by law was
both political and legal. The former, he believed, was admirably
provided for by the federal Constitution; the latter was equally
provided for by the body of the Common Law; with these twin safeguards,
he was convinced, the liberty of the citizen was assured. In his
interpretation of the Constitution Lieber added little that was new.
He followed the older Federalists back to Montesquieu, and accepted
the existing system of constitutional checks as the final word of
political wisdom. In _Civil Liberty and Self-Government_ he glorifies
the federal system as the apotheosis of representative republicanism,
quite unconcerned at its undemocratic features. The sufficiency of
the Common Law to all social needs and the implicit sovereignty of
the judiciary, he regards as equally axiomatic. “The law,” he says,
“must be the lord and our ‘earthly god,’ and not a man, a set of men,
or the multitude” (_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_, p. 208). Yet
with the common blindness of the legalist, he proceeds to erect a
profession above society, and exalts a group of judges, appointive and
not elective, preferably holding office for life, as the embodiment of
impartial justice. That it is a presumption contrary to fact seems not
to have entered his mind. That judicial interpretation implies judicial
legislation, and that judicial legislation implies the sovereignty
of lawyers, are logical deductions of which his philosophy made no
account. Unfriendly to a democracy, he was content to yield authority
into the hands of the judiciary.
But if in his exaltation of the Common Law he was as extreme a legalist
as Hugh Legaré, in his doctrine of historical evolution he discovered
the seeds of freedom in what he calls institutions. By these he means
the organic expressions of daily life, or the customs of society which
take spontaneous form from its needs. It is no other than the social
fabric that Tom Paine was fond of contrasting, in its pervasive and
beneficent coöperation, with the repressive tyrannies of the political
state. Where liberty reposes thus in the social fabric, Lieber argues,
the sovereign power is held in check; and where institutional freedom
has not taken root, the political state will run into absolutism.
“Liberty,” he argues, “is a thing that grows, and institutions are its
very garden beds. There is no liberty which as a national blessing has
leaped into existence in full armor like Minerva from the head of Jove.
Liberty is crescive in its nature. It takes time, and is difficult,
like all noble things.... It must be defended, developed, conquered,
and bled for. It can never be added, like a mere capital on a column;
it must pervade the whole body” (_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_,
pp. 334-335, third edition). “Liberty stands in need of character,” and
this character is received from social institutions. He then proceeds:
... An institution is a system or body of usages, laws, or
regulations of extensive and recurring operation, containing within
itself an organism by which it effects its own independent action,
continuance, and generally its own farther development. Its object
is to generate, effect, regulate, or sanction a succession of
acts, transactions, or productions of a peculiar class or kind.
The idea of an institution implies a degree of self-government.
Laws act through human agents, and these are, in the case of
institutions, their officers or members. (_Ibid._, p. 300.)
It was the deep-rooted _civisme anglais_, he believed, that had
developed the orderly liberty of the English race; and it is this same
institutional spirit that provides the surest check upon the augmenting
power of the political state. There can be no tyranny where society is
trained and disciplined in liberty.
The creative source and origin of this excellent _civisme anglais_
Lieber discovered in the principle of local self-government; in
the exercise of local control of local interests; the enjoyment of
innumerable lesser sovereignties within the larger national organism.
These lesser sovereignties are both civil and social, and the amount
of liberty enjoyed in a given society is measured by the independent
vigor with which they function. The exercise of definite rights by the
several states is clearly one of the important institutional functions
of self-government, but it is only one. The New England town-meeting,
county and city governments, are even more important, while outside
these civil organisms are innumerable social organisms, exercising
their common right of establishing by-laws for their own governance,
and spreading the spirit of liberty through all the practices of
society.
According to the Anglican view, institutional self-government
consists in the fact that all the elementary parts of the
government, as well as the highest and most powerful branches,
consist in real institutions ... [but it] consists, farther,
in the unstinted freedom and fair protection which are granted
to institutions of all sorts, commercial, religious, cultural,
scientific, charitable, and industrial, to germinate and to
grow--provided they are moral and do not invade the equal rights
of others. It receives its aliment from a pervading spirit of
self-reliance and self-respect--the real afflatus of liberty.
(_Ibid._, p. 320.)
This, quite evidently, is the spirit of _laissez faire_ applied
to political philosophy. A people thus used to order their social
affairs, as the English people have long done, will prove competent
to manage their political affairs; and the widespread spirit of
individual independence will prevent the drift towards unregulated
centralism with its corollary of tyrannical power. The conception of
institutional liberty embodies much of the spirit of Jeffersonianism,
and it goes back in its origins as far as Roger Williams. The
states-rights advocates, Lieber implies, were mistaken in seeking
the principle of liberty through particularism. In magnifying the
individual commonwealth they overlooked the more vital units of
self-government. To erect the state above the nation was no lasting
solution of the most difficult problem in political philosophy, namely,
the coördination of sovereign power with individual liberty; it was
only to substitute one sovereignty for another, whereas to encourage
the spread of self-governing bodies through society was to provide the
necessary countercheck to centralizing power and coördinate liberty and
sovereignty under the reign of law.
A stimulating thinker was this German liberal with his historical
method and his conception of an evolutionary freedom rooted in the
institutions of the English people. He gave a new turn to speculation
on the origin and nature of the political state, the immediate
consequence of which was the repudiation of the compact theory and
natural-rights philosophy by our academic political scientists. The
organic conception of the political state fell in with the centralizing
movement that followed the Civil War, a movement which the forces of
institutional self-government have been powerless to prevent. On the
whole the influence of Lieber has been rather against than for that
liberty which was so dear to him, and the explanation is to be found
in the tragic divorce, in his thinking, of politics and economics. His
inveterate legalism and his failure to investigate the economics of
politics proved in the end the undoing of his liberalism.
Footnotes
[402] See Merriam, _American Political Theories_, p. 231; Gaillard
Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 64.
[403] See “A Disquisition on Government” in Calhoun’s _Works_, Vol. I,
pp. 41-42.
[404] See Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, p. 231, note.
[405] See _A Constitutional View, etc._, Vol. I, pp. 406-408.
Chapter III • The Dream of a Greek Democracy
I
The pronounced drift of southern thought, in the years immediately
preceding the Civil War, towards the ideal of the Greek democracy, has
been too carelessly forgotten by later times. It was no vagrant eddy
but a broadening current of tendency. In its blend of romanticism and
realism it fitted exactly the temper of the plantation mind, imparting
a fine idealism to shiftless realities and setting a generous goal to
be achieved by somewhat inadequate agencies. A humane and cultivated
democracy, set free from the narrow exactions of economics to engage
in the higher work of civilization, was a conception worthy of the
generous southern mind, a conception that does not suffer by contrast
with the northern dream of an exploitative industrialism. That it was
an impossible dream does not lessen its significance as an expression
of the best southern aspiration in the days when slavery was on the
defensive.
It is plain enough now that this drift of thought resulted from the
need of clarifying the logic of the situation, by bringing into harmony
two seemingly irreconcilable facts, the system of negro slavery and the
rising spirit of white democracy. The feudal principle, which lurks in
the background of all slave systems and which was peculiarly congenial
to the plantation temper, was confronted on every side by the stubborn
democracy of the yeomanry. A hundred miles beyond Charleston the feudal
spirit encountered the leveling individualism of the frontier; and this
passion for equality, that grew fiercer with every remove westward,
was a stumbling-block in the way of the planter aristocracy. Caught
thus between the two forces of a Jeffersonian democracy and a slave
economy, southern thought found in the Greek ideal the most natural
compromise. Since manual labor was black, a white skin was a guarantee
against serfdom, and the common race prejudice was accounted sufficient
to draw even the poor whites to the support of slavery. The sharp
cleavage between the races provided the basis for the conception of
a common white democracy of the master class, every member of which
shared in the supremacy of the race and was free to enjoy the profits
of negro exploitation. The enterprising small farmer might rise to
be a gentlemanly planter, providing his children with leisure to fit
themselves for citizenship in the commonwealth and assist in the great
work of creating a southern civilization. The Greek ideal, in short,
met the double need of southern economics and southern prejudices, and
made its appeal even to the frontier spirit of equalitarianism.
A native growth and rooted deep in southern realities, the new
conception emerged in response to the changing times. It may be
considered the plantation counterpart of northern industrialism,
marking the reaction of the southern mind to the economic revolution
in western civilization. With their diverse economics, North and South
were facing in different directions, and the Greek ideal was as natural
in Charleston as industrial feudalism was natural in Lowell. Created
in part as an ingenious measure of defense, it provided an excellent
counter offensive against alien critics by turning the light of
inquiry upon the bases of capitalism and thrusting upon the attention
of godly Puritans the dependence of culture upon exploitation. The
new industrialism was creating a new philosophy of labor, and this
philosophy the southern apologists seized upon and turned to their
special ends. They accepted certain of the capitalistic premises,
but they interpreted those premises in a spirit of drastic realism,
deducing conclusions disconcerting to the apologists of industrialism.
In defending the plantation system they attacked the factory system; in
upholding black slavery they attacked wage slavery; and in this game
of the pot and the kettle the exploitative root of both systems was
nakedly exposed.
The major premise of the new southern philosophy was identical with
that of northern capitalism, namely, that every civilization rests
on labor exploitation. However quaintly they might embroider this
fact with romantic patterns, they saw it clearly and deduced from
it the conclusion that the North was indulging in a vicious fallacy
in confusing wage labor with free labor. In every industrialized
society, they pointed out, free labor is an anachronism; where it
exists it is a hold-over from a simpler social order. The development
of industrialism tends to draw all labor into its capacious maw, and
the labor surplus that results from evicting the peasant from the
land creates a competitive labor market that speedily reduces the
laborer to the status of a wage-slave. Since slavery, then, in some
form is the inevitable counterpart of modern civilization, the question
that presses on the conscience of every enlightened and generous
observer is the question of the relative well-being of the slave under
the different systems. Upon this question the southern apologists
turned their shrewdest analysis. They examined the condition of the
proletariat in the English mill towns; they commented on the callous
exploitation of the textile workers in Massachusetts; they assessed the
waste in the labor turnover under the factory system; they considered
the seeds of class war sown by industrialism and pointed out the
insecurity of society under a system of capitalistic irresponsibility.
In their estimate of the social evils of industrialism they concurred
in the findings of Carlyle and antedated much of the criticism of
Ruskin. The huge mass of unpalatable fact which they uncovered was the
same mass that inspired George Ripley and Albert Brisbane and Horace
Greeley to seek a way out by the path of coöperative commonwealths.
But in the hands of these apologists the argument was turned to the
narrower end of proving that the southern field-hand fared better than
the northern mill-hand. They recognized both systems as capitalistic,
established in labor exploitation; but they proved to their own
satisfaction that the southern was far humaner, more truly social. In
the South, they pointed out, there was no waste in the labor turnover,
no ugly labor scrap-heap, no ruthless efficiency in using up the human
material. The master was responsible to society for the treatment and
conduct of his slaves, and the southern conscience was far tenderer
in the matter than the northern. The workers were never troubled by
uncertain means of subsistence. The young were free from care, the
old and infirm were adequately provided for. Living conditions were
commonly pleasant, and the personal relations between master and
slave kindly and loyal. When every argument against slavery had been
urged it still remained true that the patriarchal tie that existed
on the plantation was more humane than the cash-nexus of capitalism.
In this fundamental matter Carlyle was right; and right also in his
insistence on the need of capable masters. The South was fortunate in
its system. On the self-sufficient plantations there was many an Abbot
Sampson directing his little world wisely and humanely; collectively
these Abbot Sampsons formed a capable and socially responsible ruling
class worthy of their trust. The economic returns of a wage-slave
industrialism might be greater, but the returns in civilization were
far less.[406]
Such, in brief, was the reaction of the southern mind in the early
fifties to the challenge of an industrializing generation. It was not
till the publication of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ in 1851 that southern
apologists were fully aroused to the need of counter propaganda. They
had been moving slowly towards the conception of a Greek democracy
under the leadership of Calhoun, but now under the sharp prod of
Abolitionism they turned militant. Facts were collected and arguments
clarified, and the war was carried home to New England. In three
years following _Uncle Tom_, according to a recent student, fourteen
pro-slavery novels appeared together with other matter.[407] Much of
the material made use of in these stories was conveniently assembled
in a work entitled _Pro-Slavery Argument_, published in 1852, a
collaboration by Professor Dew of William and Mary College, Chancellor
Harper of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, Governor Hammond of
South Carolina, and Gilmore Simms. The first reviewed the Scriptural
authority for slavery; Chancellor Harper drew from Hobbes the familiar
argument that “a state of nature is a state of war”; Simms elaborated
the patriarchal theory; but Governor Hammond developed the more
significant argument of the degradation of the wage-slave, an argument
elaborated at considerable length in another work entitled _Letters
on Slavery_, in which he presented the results of his investigation
of English factory conditions. The novels that Miss Tandy comments
upon have been pretty much forgotten, but the titles of some of them
sufficiently reveal the lines of attack. L. B. Chase’s _English Serfdom
and American Slavery_ (1854), J. W. Page’s _Uncle Robin in His Cabin
in Virginia and Tom without One in Boston_ (1855), and S. H. Elliott’s
_New England Chattels_ (1858) quite evidently reflect the new southern
philosophy. If the South were attacked, it was not without weapons to
defend itself.
II • William J. Grayson
Of this very considerable literature of defense, _The Hireling and
the Slave_ presents in convenient compass the most telling southern
arguments, and reveals in its sharp contrast of realism and romanticism
the common southern temper. Its author, William J. Grayson, was a
cultivated South Carolinian who had served two terms in Congress and
for years was collector of the Port of Charleston. He was widely
read, was familiar with contemporary English writers on economics,
and possessed a fluent pen. He had published “an elaborate heroic
poem entitled _The Country_,” in which he had sung “the praises of
rural life and agricultural pursuits” (Introduction to Grayson’s
_Life of James L. Petigru_), and a volume entitled _Chicora and other
Poems_, the title work of which was a romantic poem celebrating the
primitive virtues of the Indian. Politically he was affiliated with
the anti-Calhoun party of Unionists. His closest friend was James L.
Petigru, a sketch of whose life he wrote as a last labor of love,
during the unhappy days of the Charleston siege. He did not go so far
as Petigru in refusing to have any part in a war that he opposed, but
the tragedy of it cut him to the quick. He was no Fire Eater, but a
southern moderate--a gentleman of old-fashioned tastes whose views
may be taken as those of the cultivated Charleston group to which he
belonged, of Petigru, of Legaré, of Alfred Huger.
_The Hireling and the Slave_, published in 1856 when Grayson was
sixty-eight and dedicated to Petigru, is a poem in heroic couplets of
approximately 1600 lines, divided into two parts. The first part draws
a realistic picture of the life of the wage-slave, the second paints an
idyllic picture of the life of the bond-slave. In this second part the
spirit of romance holds high carnival; the descriptions are done with
gusto and the rural pleasures that fall to the lot of the negro provide
a striking contrast to the mean environment of the factory worker.
About this contrast are grouped the lesser arguments: the hypocrisy of
the Yankee Abolitionist, the sentimentalism of English humanitarians,
the wisdom of providence in providing masters to protect the negro from
destruction by a superior race and train him through apprenticeship
in slavery to carry the blessings of civilization to Africa. The
heroic couplet was deliberately adopted to offer “some variety to
the poetic forms that are almost universally prevalent.” “The poetry
of the day is, for the most part,” Grayson remarked, “subtile and
transcendental in its character”; yet “the school of Dryden and Pope is
not entirely forgotten,” and “the most fastidious appetite may tolerate
an occasional change of diet, and exchange dainties now and then for
plainer fare” (_The Hireling and the Slave_, Preface, pp. xiv-xv). The
poem seems to have been popular in the South, and a southern reviewer
declared that “it ought to be on every man’s mantel” (_Life of James L.
Petigru_, p. vii).
In the preface Grayson discusses the subject of slavery with a
candor somewhat unusual, acknowledging its evils, yet discovering
compensations. As an expression of intelligent southern opinion on a
question in which the passions of the country were becoming deeply
engaged, his views deserve quotation. Slavery, he says,
... is that system of labor which exchanges subsistence for work,
which secures a life-maintenance from the master to the slave, and
gives a life-labor from the slave to the master. The slave is an
apprentice for life, and owes his labor to his master; the master
owes support, during life, to the slave. Slavery is the Negro
system of work. He is lazy and improvident. Slavery makes all work,
and it insures homes, food, and clothing for all. It permits no
idleness, and it provides for sickness, infancy, and old age. It
allows no tramping or skulking, and it knows no pauperism.
This is the whole system substantially. All cruelty is an abuse;
does not belong to the institution; is now punished, and may be in
time prevented. The abuses of slavery are as open to all reforming
influences as those of any civil, social, or political condition.
The improvement in the treatment of the slave is as marked as in
that of any other laboring class in the world.... If slavery is
subject to abuses, it has its advantages also. It establishes
more permanent, and, therefore, kinder relations between capital
and labor. It removes what Stuart Mill calls ‘the widening and
imbittering feud between the class of labor and the class of
capital.’ It draws the relation closer between master and servant.
It is not an engagement for days or weeks, but for life. There
is no such thing with slavery as a laborer for whom nobody cares
or provides. The most wretched feature in hireling labor is the
isolated, miserable creature who has no home, no food, and in whom
no one is particularly interested. _This is seen among hirelings
only._ (_Ibid._, Preface, pp. vii-viii.)
The principle on which Grayson bases his argument is the principle that
civilization rests on labor exploitation, but as a good churchman he
attributes the evil to God and discovers the children of Adam to be
suffering from the primeval curse--“Slave, hireling, help--the curse
pursues him still.” More specifically the thesis which he defends
is this, “The state of the hireling and the slave [is] the same
substantially--the condition hard labor, the reward subsistence;” and
the conclusion which he draws is that the slave obtains a larger return
for his labor than the factory hand. The picture he paints of the
condition of the wage slave of England is Hogarthian in its details:
There, unconcerned, the philanthropic eye
Beholds each phase of human misery;
Sees the worn child compelled in mines to slave
Through narrow seams of coal, a living grave,
Driven from the breezy hill, the sunny glade,
By ruthless hearts, the drudge of labor made,
Unknown the boyish sport, the hours of play,
Stripped of the common boon, the light of day,
Harnessed like brutes, like brutes to tug, and strain,
And drag, on hands and knees, the loaded wain:
There crammed in huts, in reeking masses thrown,
All moral sense and decency unknown,
With no restraint but what the felon knows,
With the sole joy that beer or gin bestows,
To gross excess and brutalizing strife,
The drunken hireling dedicates his life:
Starved else, by infamy’s sad wages fed,
There women prostitute themselves for bread,
And mothers, rioting with savage glee,
For murder’d infants spend the funeral fee;
Childhood bestows no childish sports or toys,
Age neither reverence nor repose enjoys,
Labor with hunger wages ceaseless strife,
And want and suffering only end with life;
In crowded huts contagious ills prevail,
Dull typhus lurks, and deadlier plagues assail,
Gaunt Famine prowls around his pauper prey,
And daily sweeps his ghastly hosts away;
Unburied corses taint the summer air,
And crime and outrage revel with despair.
(_Ibid._, pp. 24-25.)
Grayson does not stint his facts but traces the wretchedness of the
wage-slave through all the phases of his misery to provide a background
for the happier lot of the bond-slave. It is an unlovely picture, done
with considerable vigor, from which one turns gladly to contemplate
life on the southern plantation.
And yet the life, so unassailed by care,
So blessed with moderate work, with ample fare,
With all the good the starving pauper needs,
The happier slave on each plantation leads;
Safe from harassing doubts and annual fears,
He dreads no famine in unfruitful years;
If harvests fail from inauspicious skies,
The master’s providence his food supplies;
No paupers perish here for want of bread,
Or lingering live, by foreign bounty fed;
No exiled trains of homeless peasants go,
In distant climes, to tell their tales of woe:
Far other fortune, free from care and strife,
For work, or bread, attends the Negro’s life,
And Christian slaves may challenge as their own,
The blessings claimed in fabled states alone--
The cabin home, not comfortless, though rude,
Light daily labor, and abundant food,
The sturdy health that temperate habits yield,
The cheerful song that rings in every field,
The long, loud laugh, that freemen seldom share,
Heaven’s boon to bosoms unapproached by care,
And boisterous jest and humor unrefined,
That leave, though rough, no painful sting behind;
While, nestling near, to bless their humble lot,
Warm social joys surround the Negro’s cot,
The evening dance its merriment imparts,
Love, with its rapture, fills their youthful hearts,
And placid age, the task of labor done,
Enjoys the summer shade, the winter sun,
And, as through life no pauper want he knows,
Laments no poor-house penance at its close.
(_Ibid._, pp. 50-51.)
Convinced of the righteousness and humanity of slavery Grayson turns
with scorn upon the Abolitionists and their meddlesome interference
with the beneficent ways of Providence. With a few dexterous turns
of the spit he browns each one nicely like a roasted goose. His
descriptions strip off the gay plumage and reveal the naked fowl. He
makes a good job of it, as witness these bits:
There supple Sumner, with the Negro cause,
Plays the sly game for office and applause;
What boots it if the Negro sink or swim?
He wins the Senate--’tis enough for him....
He heeds nor court’s decree nor Gospel light,
What Sumner thinks is right alone is right....
There Greeley, grieving at a brother’s woe,
Spits with impartial spite on friend and foe....
To each fanatical delusion prone,
He damns all creeds and parties but his own,
Brawls, with hot zeal, for every fool and knave,
The foreign felon and the skulking slave; ...
And faction’s fiercest rabble always find
A kindred nature in the Tribune’s mind;
Ready each furious impulse to obey,
He raves and ravens like a beast of prey....
There Seward smiles the sweet perennial smile,
Skilled in the tricks of subtlety and guile;
The slyest schemer that the world e’er saw;
Peddler of sentiment and patent law;
Ready for fee or faction to display
His skill in either, if the practice pay....
(_Ibid._, pp. 38-40.)
As he contemplates Mrs. Stowe his full wrath is stirred. He does not
spare her sex. Southern chivalry serves the pure and good in lovely
woman, not the malignant and selfish. An unsexed woman is hateful to
it, and after extolling the true womanliness of Florence Nightingale,
angel of mercy, Grayson pays his compliments to the Yankee propagandist
thus:
Not such with Stowe, the wish or power to please,
She finds no joy in gentle deeds like these;
A moral scavenger, with greedy eye,
In social ills her coarser labors lie;
On fields where vice eludes the light of day,
She hunts up crimes as beagles hunt their prey;
Gleans every dirty nook--the felon’s jail,
And hangman’s mem’ry, for detraction’s tale,
Snuffs up pollution with a pious air,
Collects a rumor here, a slander there;
With hatred’s ardor gathers Newgate spoils,
And trades for gold the garbage of her toils.
In sink and sewer thus, with searching eye,
Through mud and slime unhappy wretches pry;
In fetid puddles dabble with delight,
Search every filthy gathering of the night;
Fish from its depths, and to the spacious bag
Convey with care the black, polluted rag;
With reeking waifs secure the nightly bed,
And turn their noisome stores to daily bread.
(_Ibid._, pp. 42-43.)
_The Hireling and the Slave_, is vigorous propaganda, carefully
documented and pointed with modern instances, the work of an
intelligent and humane writer who might be blind to certain evils in
slavery but whose eyes were open to the social ills that grew rankly
in the muck of industrialism. Outside of the South few in America had
as yet come to understand so much--a handful of New England idealists,
Parker and William Henry Channing and Emerson and Wendell Phillips,
and Orestes Brownson, and a handful of Utopians, Albert Brisbane and
George Ripley and Horace Greeley. The inadequacy of southern thought
was identical with that of northern: blinded by sectional economic
interests, they saw only half the truth. They beheld the mote in a
brother’s eye, but considered not the beam that was in their own.
Footnotes
[406] The same argument was made use of by northern supporters of
slavery. Gordon Bennett’s _New York Herald_, for example, “printed a
description of slum life in Liverpool, remarking that compared with the
English laborer, ‘the slave lived like a prince.’ He had his cabin,
neat, clean, and weather-proof: he had his own garden patch, over which
he was lord paramount; he was well fed, well lodged, well clothed, and
rarely over-worked; sleek, happy, contented, enjoying his many holidays
with gusto, he lived to a great age” (quoted in Allan Nevins, _The
Evening Post: A Century of Journalism_, p. 271).
[407] See Jeannette Reid Tandy, “Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American
Fiction in the Fifties,” _South Atlantic Quarterly_, January-March,
1922. See also Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The Southern Plantation_,
Chapter III.
Chapter IV • Adventures in Belles Lettres
I • Old Charleston
In the year 1825 the little city of Charleston, with its fourteen
thousand whites and more than fourteen thousand blacks, was perhaps the
most delightful spot in America. The Mecca of plantation fashion and
the capital of plantation politics, it prided itself on its genial and
distinguished society. It was the last stronghold in America of the
older pride of aristocracy. The tone of society still remained pretty
much what it had been before the schism of ’76. Social lines were rigid
and an old-fashioned conservatism of temper marked the upper class.
Despite the large admixture of French Huguenot blood the manners and
prejudices of the aristocracy retained the pronounced British cast
that came down from pre-Revolutionary times, and if Dr. Johnson could
have stepped from the Fleet Street of 1780 to the Charleston of 1825
he would have felt almost at home. “We are decidedly more English than
any other city of the United States,” said Hugh Legaré, whose love of
the English character was second only to his love of Charleston. It was
a gay world with its country squires and their horses and racing, its
Madeira drinking, its promenades and dancing and assemblies; one to win
the affection of all who liked lighthearted ways.
But underneath this gay life was a more serious Charleston, which in
certain of its aspects was not unlike Boston. From both the Huguenot
and Scotch-Irish strains came a sobering Puritanism that gave a serious
cast to thoughtful natures and disciplined them in a strict morality.
Calhoun was far more Puritan than Fisher Ames, and Hugh Legaré than
Edward Everett. Life was likely to be a serious business to these
southern Puritans, filled with weighty responsibilities, to be lived,
like Milton’s, as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye. Aristocrat though
he was, young Hugh Legaré was no gay cavalier treading the primrose
path, but as serious-minded as any Roundhead. Victorian in manners, he
would have found the bluff speech of the old revolutionary, General
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney--“more pregnant with meaning than prudish
in dress”--somewhat too “salt” for refined ears. It was this note of
Puritanism that marked the finest characters in Charleston and gave its
tone to society; but it was a Puritanism of conduct rather than dogma.
Charleston gentlemen were of the English church, and their Puritanism,
unwarped by Calvinism, assumed a moral rather than a theological cast.
The lawyer came to assume the position of intellectual leadership
taken by the minister in New England. A profound respect for law
dominated the Charleston mind. Blackstone was the Charleston Bible,
and the lawyer who was master of dignified oratory was looked upon
with high regard. The aristocracy opened its doors to young James
Louis Petigru, an Irish-Huguenot lawyer with his own way to make, but
it closed them tightly against young Gilmore Simms, apprentice to an
apothecary and unread in the classics. Ambitious youths therefore
turned to the law as a congenial career, for there reputations lay,
and political influence. A pronounced cult of the law, and regard for
orderly procedure, went hand in hand with the old English respect for
individual rights. Charleston gentlemen could not be coerced, even by
their own politicians, and Legaré was bitter against the Nullifiers
because the spirit of dictation was “alien to our old habitudes, to the
gentle courage, the courteous hostility, the mild and merciful justice,
the proud submission to _law_ and respect for right, which once
distinguished our low country society from and above all other American
society” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 211).
Politically Charleston was of the old Federalist tradition, as that
Federalism was embodied in the picturesque figure of General Pinckney.
Outside the narrow circle of the aristocracy, Federalism had long since
given way to a democratic faith with its background of states-rights
Jeffersonianism; but it lingered amongst the gentry and provided the
nucleus of the later Union party. Grayson tells a story of Petigru
that suggests the bitterness of the back-country democracy towards the
old Federalism. The latter one day was being abused by a swamp-sucker
“who lavished on him all the foul epithets and appellations he could
remember or invent, of which rogue and scoundrel were among the most
moderate.” At last he hit upon a term of reproach “which at that day
comprised everything hateful--he called him a ‘damned Federal,’” and
was promptly knocked down for the insult (William J. Grayson, _James
Louis Petigru_, pp. 83-84). But the Charleston vintage of Federalism
was little more than a stout conservatism that idealized the Union
and preached the sufficiency and sacredness of the law. It was social
rather than political or economic--the assertion of the prescriptive
right of gentlemen to govern the state. Jeffersonianism never took
possession of the first circles of Charleston as it did in Virginia,
and French revolutionary philosophy found there an uncongenial soil.
The profound conservatism of the aristocracy is sufficiently expressed
in a comment of Hugh Legaré--“The politics of the immortal Jefferson!
Pish!” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 207.) Physiocratic agrarianism found
few advocates amongst Carolina gentlemen. The Charleston mind was
political and legal rather than economic in its interests, and as a
commercial port Charleston was more sympathetic with capitalism than
with agrarianism. Its politics, in which it found much diversion, it
preferred highly seasoned, and when Nullification divided the state
into hostile camps, the Nullifiers and Unionists brought Charleston
to the verge of civil war. Respect for law and the amenities vanished
before the hot demands of partisanship.
The culture of Charleston was as conservatively old-fashioned as
its politics. Such a renaissance as it enjoyed before the Civil War
wrought its destruction was delayed by its rejection of French romantic
thought until the beginning of the thirties, and synchronized with the
renaissance of New England. When the romantic spirit appeared about
1825, it was primarily English, of the school of Tom Moore. There had
never been any literature in Charleston worthy of the name, except
such as had come from London, bound in calfskin and tooled morocco.
Those who affected a love of letters were still enamored of the heroic
couplet and the Addisonian essay. Not until he went to Brussels in
1832 did Legaré, the most brilliant southern linguist, take up the
study of German. The classics still dominated education, and literary
taste inclined to a mingling of wit and sentiment. Young and Ossian
and Mrs. Radcliffe held honored places on Charleston bookshelves. The
young poets were deep in Byron, and Sir Walter was in high repute.
But Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats were scarcely mentioned, and
Carlyle could not hope to gain a hearing. Nevertheless by the year
1828 the example of the _North American Review_ proved so stimulating
an incentive that the scholarship of Charleston collaborated to
establish the _Southern Review_, which ran a sober course for four
years, providing a medium for learned articles on law, letters and
politics. It was a serious venture that concerned itself little with
_belles lettres_, but the intellectual resources were inadequate, and
on Legaré’s departure for Europe _The Review_ came to an end. Later,
Gilmore Simms labored to the same purpose, but even his enormous
energy was insufficient to sustain a magazine esteemed worthy of
southern genius, and the work languished. Facile writers were fewer in
Charleston than in Boston.
But despite any shortcomings in the way of letters, to members of its
polite circles Charleston was the most delightful of American cities,
and its society the most distinguished. “I have never, since I could
form an opinion on such matters,” wrote Legaré from Brussels, where
he mingled with the most cultivated society, “doubted of the immense
superiority of Carolina society over all others on that continent, and
now feel it more than ever” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 218). It was a
common opinion of southern gentlemen, who, with their English notions
of a landed aristocracy, believed that “fixed landed property is of
the essence of civil society, properly so called.” It embodied the
planter ideal of a social capital, uncorrupted by a vulgar plutocracy.
Its highways ran out to the plantations; the free citizen of the Greek
democracy drew his wealth from the soil; the slave labored while the
master rode to and fro from the city. Law and politics were regarded
as respectable vocations for sons of gentlemen, but the ideal life was
acknowledged to be that of the planter, with his three thousand acres,
his three hundred negroes, his ricks of rice and bales of tobacco and
cotton. The profits that came from the law were certain to be invested
in land, and the young attorney dreamed of retiring in middle life to a
well-stocked plantation. To become a member of the ruling squirearchy
was an ambition that filled and satisfied the Charleston imagination.
II • William Crafts • Charleston Wit
The slightness of literary achievement in the Charleston of 1825 is
sufficiently attested by the considerable local fame that rewarded the
efforts of the volatile William Crafts. Born in Charleston in 1789,
the son of a well-to-do Yankee father and a southern mother, he was
sent to Harvard to complete his education, distinguished himself in the
classics and in declamation, achieved a gownsman’s fame for the brisk
informality of a Latin oration, and carried back to Charleston a great
reputation as a wit and scholar. He went into the law but burnt too few
candles at the shrine of Blackstone; was seized with political ambition
and proposed to make a great name for himself as a statesman, but his
politics were not agreeable to his constituents and his career failed
to arrive. He was a graceful orator in the florid southern style, an
agreeable fellow with a pleasant wit, who loved society, dabbled in
prose and verse, but proved to be unstable. He spread too much canvas
to the uncertain winds and his unballasted bark came to grief. He died
at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his writings to be gathered up and
published by his family--a miscellany that brought down upon it the
severe judgment of Hugh Legaré.
William Crafts was a transplanted Bostonian who essayed to domesticate
Harvard culture among the polite circles of Charleston. As an
undergraduate he admired the graceful preaching of Buckminster and the
acrid eloquence of Fisher Ames. The latter he seems to have adopted as
his political godfather, and from him he accepted a decadent Federalism
that got him into trouble when later he entered politics. But the chief
model on whom he shaped his life seems to have been Robert Treat Paine,
in the declining sun of whose fame the young Harvard undergraduate
warmed himself. With a less pregnant wit, a less trenchant prose style,
a less masculine oratory, he succeeded in becoming a smaller edition of
a petty master. The parallelism in the lives of the two apostles of wit
is striking. They were both dabblers, but Crafts possessed less skill
and dabbled less felicitously. They both broke with the rigid decorum
of their circles, but Paine achieved a more tragic shipwreck. They both
marked the last ebbing of the eighteenth century before the wit ideal
was submerged by the incoming tide of romanticism, and the reputations
of both have been forgotten.
In Crafts’ case, certainly, no injustice has been done. Such literary
wealth as he displayed would seem notable only in an indigent society.
His prose is vapid and feeble in the essay, and stilted and artificial
in the oration. His verse is insignificant in quantity--two formal
poems and a handful of occasional pieces--and wanting in distinction
of phrase or imagery. It is the work of a graceful imitator of doubtful
models. He wrote at the moment when the long supremacy of Pope was
yielding to the popularity of Moore, and his verse wavered between
the old loyalty and the new love. _Sullivan’s Island_, a carefully
elaborated descriptive poem, applies the structure and method of
_Windsor Forest_ to a local theme, following the original so closely as
to imitate the detail. His skill in the grand manner may be judged by a
single passage that phrases feebly what Pope had done vigorously:
When cooler gales foretell departing day,
The plaintive curlew homeward wings his way--
Now stoops, then soars, and fearing danger nigh,
To guardian heaven pours forth its piteous cry.
Alas! in vain. The fowler’s fond reply,
Still deemed its own, but tells it where to die.
_The Raciad_ is less crudely imitative. It is a brisk and rather
amusing account of the outpouring of Charleston society to the races,
the great event of the year in the gay southern capital. It is done
with some sprightliness, it is an amiable historical document, but it
is not important. When Crafts died in 1826 Charleston had done little
in the way of creative literature, but the stirring of the waters was
beginning. The following year a young apothecary just admitted to the
bar published a volume entitled _Lyrical and Other Poems_, first fruits
of the colossal labors of Gilmore Simms. In 1828 Hugh Legaré got _The
Southern Review_ on its feet, a substantial magazine that aspired to be
the mouthpiece of southern culture. With the beginning of the thirties
the Charleston renaissance was under way.
III • Hugh Swinton Legaré • Charleston Intellectual
A far solider nature than the ebullient Crafts was Hugh Swinton Legaré.
Of distinguished social position, the most cultivated mind in the South
before the Civil War, and one of the most cultivated in America, he was
an embodiment of the serious Charleston that served as counterweight
to the gayer. In Legaré the moral earnestness of the South came to its
most attractive expression. The repository of two streams of ethical
idealism, he was as Puritan as Calhoun. Natively aristocratic,
with a high sense of personal integrity and civic responsibility, a
profound student of law and letters, with the Charleston parochialism
brushed away by wide travel and intimate acquaintance with old-world
civilizations and classical cultures, he represented the excellent
seriousness that came to flower on the Carolina plantation as well as
in the New England meetinghouse. Southern Puritanism might be less
ungainly than that of Massachusetts, but it was equally introspective,
given to melancholy; and Hugh Legaré found his life as serious an
affair, and as laborious, as any New England Calvinist discovered his
to be. It is no holiday business to serve righteousness; wisdom does
not flower in the primrose path of dalliance; and this Charleston
gentleman emerged from a prolonged and arduous self-discipline as
complete a Puritan as Theodore Parker.
Descended in the fifth generation from a Huguenot ancestor who settled
in Charleston about 1695, he was French in name and by cherished family
tradition, but in little else. Through successive intermarriages,
the original French strain was pretty much diluted by the Scotch and
English, and few Gallic traits came down to him. In temperament and
sympathies he was the child of his mother, Mary Swinton, of Scotch
Covenanter blood. The native seriousness that came to him by right
of inheritance was intensified by fate. Inoculated for the smallpox
in his fourth year, the poison lingered in his system, keeping him
sickly for years and permanently stunting the lower half of his body.
Thus set apart from active life, he turned to books and entered upon
the career of a scholar. At the time of his death in 1842, at the
age of forty-five, he was perhaps the best linguist and the most
widely read man in America. A mature student of the classics, he
was intimately acquainted with French, Spanish, Italian and German,
and had added Romaic as a help to his Greek. This may seem a meager
list in comparison with Theodore Parker’s nineteen languages, but
the substantial acquisitions he gathered from the several bodies of
literature were far from meager.
Yet immense as were those acquisitions they were only supplementary to
his professional studies. The Charleston Puritan gave to the study of
law the same intensity that the Boston Puritan gave to theology. Not
content with a three years’ reading course in a law office, he went to
Europe to pursue his studies more comprehensively. At the University
of Edinburgh he plunged into an investigation of the Roman and Civil
Law, which henceforth was to be his major intellectual interest.
He found in the continental systems, he believed, a body of legal
principles more comprehensive and philosophical than the English Common
Law, and the ambition grew upon him to ingraft certain features of the
Civil Law upon American practice. After two years’ intense study he
came home, engaged in active practice of his profession, and ten years
later, at the age of thirty-five, was appointed _chargé d’affaires_ at
Brussels, where he spent four rich years. His diplomatic and social
life was subordinated to his studies, into which he threw himself
with the keenest zest, enlarging his knowledge of modern letters and
adding to his encyclopedic knowledge of legal systems. In 1841 he was
appointed Attorney-General of the United States in the cabinet of
President Tyler, and upon Webster’s retirement was given the additional
portfolio of Secretary of State _ad interim_. While on a visit to
Boston with President Tyler to assist in the Bunker Hill Monument
celebration, he was taken suddenly ill and died at the home of his
friend Professor Ticknor.
The man thus prematurely cut down was a nature of vast solidity.
Profoundly serious, inclined to the blackest melancholy, as pessimistic
as Fisher Ames, with no leaven of humor, no romance, no careless
idling, he was a hard taskmaster to his days. He toiled prodigiously at
his self-appointed tasks. His standards were severe, whether in letters
or law or politics or morals. As a critic he dealt with substantial
subjects: _The Constitutional History of Greece_; _The Origin,
History and Influence of Roman Legislation_; _Early Spanish Ballads_;
_Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians_; _Lord Byron’s Character and
Writings_--solid dissertations done with German thoroughness--reviews
of huge compass that provided opportunity for independent treatises.
As a lawyer he was rather a philosophical historian than a special
pleader. He was far more given to exploring the labyrinths of ancient
codes than to arguing cases. His legal erudition appalls the layman.
He had sat at the feet of black-letter philosophers; he had been
instructed by sages long since forgotten. His mind was an ample
storehouse of archaic legal maxims. He delighted in the crabbed law
Latin--its sententious phrases worn to the quick, the residuum and
repository of the wisdom bequeathed by past generations. Richer in
poetry than any verses of Byron were the Latin words _habeas corpus_
to one who, like this scholar, understood how packed they were with
English history, how rich in suggestion to all who love English
freedom. From this immense erudition came his love for old books and
venerable authorities. Blackstone he looked upon as a modern--“a
gentleman’s law book, clear, but not deep”; and the wisdom of my Lord
Coke seemed to him not so mellow as that drawn from the more capacious
vats of earlier days. He quoted Grotius and Vattel and Pufendorf and
Bourlamaqui more readily than the South Carolina Digest, and the names
of Papinian and Ulpian and Modestinus and Voet and Cujacius, of the
_Corpus Alaricianum_, of the Justinian, Gregorian, Hermogenian, and
Theodosian codes, slipped familiarly from his pen. How many outlandish
authorities were contained in the huge inkwell on his desk it is
idle to conjecture. Probably not three men in America comprehended
the significance of half the references that he offered for the
consideration of his fellow lawyers, or were competent to question his
deductions. Even the learned Judge Story and Chancellor Kent seem mere
dabblers in comparison with this philosophical historian.
Such learning must inevitably mold one’s thinking in kindred fields,
and he came naturally to espouse what for want of an exacter term
may be called the Common Law theory of politics. It is a conception
of law as an organic growth, the result of man’s laborious search
for a rational freedom in the social body, the single and avowed
end of which is justice. It has taken form not by the decrees of
legislatures, but by decisions of the judiciary, tested and reëxamined
and reargued generation after generation; built up code by code through
slow evolution, the wisdom of the past serving as counselor to the
present; continuously expanding its jurisdiction from the community
to the nation, and from the nation to a world society; the one
guarantee of a sober and rational progress. Theorists and philosophers
come and go; revolutions succeed and fail; foolish statutes and
temporary constitutions have their day; but the organic body of the
law survives all surface change, building into the fabric of society
what experience proves to be good, sloughing off what experience has
outgrown--the tempered rule of social justice; the exact measure of
every civilization compared with which the majority will is a crude and
inadequate makeshift.
From such a conception it follows that government is little more than
ancillary to the law, and political principles are sound in the measure
that they are founded on legal principles. Thus by following the musty
path of jurisprudence Legaré arrived at the same goal that John Cotton
had reached two hundred years before--the apotheosis of magistracy.
With the older Puritan he could assert, _Scripturae plenitudinem
adoro_. The sufficiency of the law to social justice was axiomatic in
his thinking. But the scriptures which he adored were the words of
the judges, whose decisions were above the authority of legislator
or governor and little concerned with a transient majority will. The
old theocrat had set up his theocracy; the modern lexolater would set
up his lexocracy; but the end was pretty much the same. Very likely
Legaré, like the present-day lexolater, would deny the conclusion, yet
it was implicit in his premises, and his scorn of political theory was
sufficient proof. Practical politics he regarded as rather a trumpery
business that achieves no solid results.[408] The political philosopher
he was profoundly suspicious of. The flood of speculation let loose
upon the world by the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries seemed to him to have invited disaster, and the political
classics of those revolutions he cared little for. He distrusted the
“era of illumination” that sacrificed use and wont to abstract theory.
“We have not too much faith in the ‘march of intellect,’” he remarked
dryly, “and would not ... pitch our anticipations in too high a key”
(_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 264). But his greatest contempt he reserved for
the intellectual revolutionaries--“hair-brained metaphysicians and
empirical demagogues” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 216), who would upset the
nice balance of the law. To this matter he returned again and again,
with the scorn of the legal mind for ambitious political systems.
“Innovators or Revolutionists, who go only for an imaginary abstract
rectitude and symmetry of government,” he said, “are always dangerous,
and sometimes the greatest curse with which heaven in its wrath can
visit an offending people” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 286).
I have no faith at all in speculative politics. A theorist in
government is as dangerous as a theorist in medicine, or in
agriculture, and for precisely the same reasons--the subjects
are too complicated and too obscure for simple and decisive
experiments. I go for undisputed results in the long run. (_Ibid._,
Vol. I, p. 303.)
Man begins a revolution, but its issues are with God alone. The
voluntary revolutions of man have always been abrupt, violent and
for the worse: so that the wisdom of antiquity laid it down, as a
maxim, that every fundamental change in the State must needs be
bloody and deadly. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 297.)
This inherent conservatism of the legal mind explains Legaré’s
intellectual sympathy with Federalism and his contempt for Jefferson.
The latter to him was the prince of demagogues, and his ink was vitriol
when he wrote of him, as thus in one of his letters: “The immortal
sayings and doings of the holy father in democracy--the servant of the
servants of Demos (whose nose of wax he knew better than anybody how to
shape to his own convenience,)--the infallible, though ever-changing,
St. Thomas of _Canting_-bury. And here, you may be sure, I _cross_
myself devoutly and cry out, with an all-fervent benediction to that
canonized worthy, _pax tecum_ (pronounced, you know, _Scottice, pox
tacum_)” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 208). Modern political theories seemed
to him mere upstart doctrines compared with the venerable principles of
the law, and he came to look with suspicion on all political liberalism
not sponsored by lawyers and supported by briefs. A passionate lover
of liberty, he was as distrustful of democracy as John Adams, and
his condemnation was as frank--“that scene of wild impulse, and
tyrannical misrule--a pure democracy” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 271). No
state, Beverley Tucker pointed out, was so little democratic as South
Carolina, and Legaré shared the common Charleston distrust of it. As he
watched England and France during the tumultuous thirties, and saw the
struggle over Nullification at home, his concern for the future became
acute and his pessimism as black as Fisher Ames’. In a letter from
Brussels, in the year 1833, shortly after the passage of the English
Reform Bill, he wrote:
Mankind have too little sense to maintain, for any length of time,
a well-tempered democracy, and a great deal too much to bear an
unlimited one--the most dreadful form of “State sovereignty,”
beyond all doubt, in which the descendants of the father of the
first murderer have ever given loose to their ruffian instinct
of violence and oppression. If they have a moderate policy of
the kind, which happens (as all complicated machines will) to be
occasionally a little out of order, their only idea of a remedy
is to pull it down, and along with it every thing that makes a
civil society worthy of its name. Who could ever have dreamed
that the law of brute force which now crushes Europe ... should
be deliberately adopted in America, instead of the really sublime
institutions of a federal jurisdiction, (fallible, of course, but
generally right) and that this relapse into downright barbarism
should be vaunted, by the most enlightened men in the Southern
States, as a _grand_ improvement and the only thing wanting to
make our government as perfect as we have been swearing it was all
along. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 210.)
Back of this ingrained conservatism was a tender Puritan conscience
that must twist his legal studies to ideal ends. After all it was no
other than a juridical romanticism that Hugh Legaré discovered in the
bottom of his scholar’s cup. As medieval as Sir Walter, he sought his
romance in old law-courts rather than in feudal castles, in black-robed
advocates rather than in knights and ladies; and he persuaded himself
that those old litigations, preserved in scraps of Latin and law
French, were dramatic episodes in the ceaseless battle for human
rights, whereof the single objective was justice. Slowly, stone upon
stone, the lawyers were erecting an impregnable citadel, within which
justice kept her inviolable court. It is a pleasant fiction still
believed in by lawyers of the old school, and to Legaré in his study
it bore the very semblance of truth. He had read too many law books;
he had speculated too little on politics; immersed in his codes, he
had forgotten to inquire into the hidden springs of sovereignty.
In his contempt for practical politics he had neglected to study
even the primer of economic determinism. To the economic historian,
Legaré’s boundless faith in the sufficiency of legal processes is
incomprehensible. A few lessons from the wiser Jefferson would have
taught him much that he needed to know concerning the economic sources
of power. In his attitude towards the law Jefferson was a suspicious
realist. He had no faith in legal codes that had grown up under
monarchical and aristocratic systems, and he put no trust in government
by lawyers. He could not understand how the Common Law, interpreted
by the Tory Blackstone, and applied by Federalist lawyers, should
serve the needs of a democracy. Democratic America, he was convinced,
must create a new democratic law, and hold its judiciary in strict
subjection to its will; to surrender sovereignty to an aristocracy of
the bench would mean the abdication of democracy. But Legaré refused
to go to school to Jefferson. He clung to his romantic conception of
the law with the same passionate conviction that Calhoun clung to
his romantic dream of a Greek democracy; and with the ebbing of the
romantic tide they were both left stranded.
But if Legaré was unsympathetic towards the new political theory
that came from the French intellectuals, and frankly hostile to the
new political practice that came in with the Jacksonians, he warmly
approved the new economics that came with the Industrial Revolution. In
his whole-hearted acceptance of Adam Smith he seems not a Carolinian
at all, but an English liberal of the Cobden-Bright school. He adopted
the principle of _laissez faire_, the gospel of progress, the attitude
of optimism. He accepted the theory of the beneficence of commerce as
a universal civilizing agency, and he looked forward confidently to an
eventual parliament of man, a future federation of the world. Commerce
in the end must outlaw war, and peace with freedom would spread the
blessings of civilization to the ends of the earth.[409]
A convincing object-lesson in the sufficiency of the principle of
_laissez faire_, he discovered in the amazing progress of America. The
mainspring of that progress he found in economic freedom--freedom “from
those undue restraints and that impertinent interference of government
in the interests properly belonging to individuals.” “I know,” he said,
“that the cardinal spring and source of our success is freedom--freedom
of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of commerce”
(_Writings_, Vol. I, p. 306). The greatest of these was free trade
between the states. His travels in England and the contrast between
English progress and continental backwardness confirmed him in this
belief. “The doctrine of Free Trade,” he asserted, “is a great
fundamental doctrine of civilization. The world must come to it at
last, if the visions of improvement in which we love to indulge are
ever to be realized” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 272). He went further and
accepted the Industrial Revolution with its division of labor as a
necessary agency of social amelioration. “It is evidently in the order
of nature, and we must take it with all its good and all its evils
together.” In forecasting the effect of that revolution he was troubled
by no fears.
Sir, it is a favorite phrase of those who boast of what is called
“the march of intellect,” that things are thus changed because
the “schoolmaster is abroad.” But I tell you that something far
more effective than the schoolmaster, a mightier than Solomon, is
abroad. It is the +STEAM-ENGINE+--in its twofold capacity of a
means of production and a means of transport--the most powerful
instrument by far of pacification and commerce, and therefore of
improvement and happiness that the world has ever seen; which,
while it increases capital, and multiplies beyond all imagination
the products of industry, brings the most distant people into
contact with one another ... effaces all peculiarities of national
character, and promises, at no distant period, to make the whole
Christian world, at least, one great family....
A people well clad and well housed will be sure to provide
themselves with all the other comforts of life; and it is the
diffusion of these comforts, and the growing taste for them, among
all classes of society in Europe--it is the desire of riches as
it is commonly called, that is gradually putting an end to the
destructive and bloody game of war, and reserving all the resources
hitherto wasted by it, for enterprises of industry and commerce,
prosecuted with the fiery spirit which once vented itself in scenes
of peril and carnage. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 285-286.)
Remembering how dependent were southern cotton interests on English
industrialism and commerce, one can understand Legaré’s acceptance
of _laissez faire_ economics. His idealism, his local pride, his
romanticism, were all enlisted in its behalf, and he painted in glowing
colors. But his frank advocacy of capitalism is harder to understand,
except perhaps on the ground that Charleston was a considerable
shipping port and his clients were engaged in commerce. In the bitter
dispute with Jackson over the Bank, Legaré adopted northern views on
national finance. Although nominally a Democrat, he had never been an
agrarian, and he went with Webster and Clay against the subtreasury
scheme and a metallic currency. His thoughtful speech on _The Spirit of
the Sub-Treasury_, delivered in 1837, was thoroughgoing Whig doctrine,
asserting the excellence of the modern banking system and extolling the
economic fruitfulness of credit. He repudiated every principle of John
Taylor; denied every dogma of agrarian economics; and eulogized the
English financial system as the germinal source of English greatness.
Applying the principle of credit to American conditions, he discovered
the secret of American expansion in the principle of speculative
borrowing, and expanded his doctrine of economic freedom by asserting
that freedom to borrow was a necessary preliminary to freedom to work.
“A people have been enriched by debt,” he argued, overlooking the
possible fallacy of a _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, “and ‘by owing,
owe not.’” As he contemplated the amazing progress of the nation, his
lyric enthusiasm becomes prologue to a somewhat lame conclusion that
enthrones the banker as the fairy godmother of the hardy pioneer.
There is a grandeur and a majesty in this irresistible onward
march of a race, created, as I believe, and elected to possess and
people a continent.... We may become so much accustomed to such
things that they shall make as little impression upon our minds as
the glories of the Heavens above us; but, looking on them, lately,
as with the eyes of the stranger, I felt, what a recent English
traveller is said to have remarked, that far from being without
poetry, as some have vainly alleged, our whole country is one
great poem. Sir, it is so; and if there be a man that can think of
what is doing, in all parts of this most blessed of all lands, to
embellish and advance it, who can contemplate that living mass of
intelligence, activity and improvement as it rolls on, in its sure
and steady progress, to the uttermost extremities of the west; who
can see scenes of savage desolation transformed, almost with the
suddenness of enchantment, into those of fruitfulness and beauty;
crowned with flourishing cities, filled with the noblest of all
populations; if there be a man, I say, that can witness all this
passing under his very eyes, without feeling his heart beat high,
and his imagination warmed and transported by it, be sure, sir,
that the raptures of song exist not for him....
But of this rational, diffusive liberty, among a people so
intelligent as ours, the credit system is the natural fruit, the
inseparable companion, the necessary means and instrument. It is
part and parcel of our existence. Who ever heard of +CREDIT+ in
a despotism, or an anarchy? It implies _confidence_--confidence
in yourself, confidence in your neighbor, confidence in your
government, confidence in the administration of the laws,
confidence, in a word, in your destiny, and your fortune, in the
destinies and the fortunes of the country to which you belong;
as, for instance, in the case of a great national debt. It is the
fruit, I say, of all that is most precious in civilized life, and
to quarrel with it is to be ungrateful to God for some of the
greatest blessings he has vouchsafed to man. (_Writings_, Vol. I,
pp. 306-307.)
Such ebullient rhetoric fits the mouth of the politician rather than
the scholar, and such careless logic comes oddly from a southern
intellectual. In his ignorance of the economics of John Taylor, Legaré
was unprovided with principles to reply to his own arguments, and
unaware of the lameness of his confident conclusions. But though he
might glow with optimism as he contemplated the westward expansion, for
the future of the South and of his own beloved state he was deep in
pessimism. From the first he had dissented vigorously from the program
of Nullification. An ardent Union man, he believed with his friend
James Petigru that secession meant ruin for South Carolina. Calhoun
seemed to him a monomaniac, consumed by a single idea. He feared the
hot passion of the states-rights party and he was troubled over
slavery. His travels abroad had acquainted him with European views on
the subject; he watched the spread of English humanitarianism and he
had come to recognize the institution as an anachronism. It seemed to
him impossible for the South to withstand much longer the augmenting
pressure of civilized opinion. He could justify slavery in his own eyes
both by ancient law--_servitus est constitutio juris gentium_--and by
comparison of the condition of the negro with that of the English wage
worker. The ideal of a Greek democracy was vastly congenial to his
aristocratic temperament, but he knew that it was a romantic dream, and
he was oppressed by the shadow of impending ruin. Writing from Brussels
on April 8, 1833, he concluded an anxious letter thus:
It ends in my not knowing what to think, except that dangers are
around and above and below and within our poor little State,--which
may God preserve us from! I ask of heaven only that the little
circle I am intimate with in Charleston should be kept together
while I live,--in health, harmony and competence; and that, on my
return, I may myself be enabled to enjoy the same happiness, in my
intercourse with it, with which I have been hitherto blessed. _We_
are (I am quite sure) the _last_ of the _race_ of South-Carolina;
I see nothing before us but decay and downfall,--but on that very
account, I cherish its precious relics the more.... Yet my heart
sinks within me often when I think of what may too soon be, and I
say, in those touching words, “Why should not my countenance be
sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lieth
waste, and her gates are burnt with fire.” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p.
215.)
Thus like old John Winthrop two hundred years before, this descendant
of southern Pilgrims, this Charleston lawyer and intellectual, found
the words of the Hebrew Scriptures rising to his lips in moments of
deep emotion. In spite of travel and many books and ripe culture and
catholic sympathies, Hugh Legaré remained Puritan at heart, sorely
puzzled with life, the burden of his days heavy upon him, walking
soberly in the way of duty. North or south, the Puritan was still
Puritan, whether he were Theodore Parker, the Boston radical, or Hugh
Swinton Legaré, the Charleston conservative.
IV • William Gilmore Simms • Charleston Romancer
From the background of old Charleston emerged, about the year 1825,
the figure of Gilmore Simms, lately a drug clerk but now come to the
dignity of admission to the bar; a tall, vigorous young fellow, with
little formal schooling, no Latin or Greek, without land or slaves, but
heavily involved in Byronic odes and like unprofitable investments;
a social nobody soon to be married at the age of twenty to a girl of
no better station than his own, who offered himself as candidate for
the poet laureateship of the South. A somewhat presumptuous proceeding
on the part of a plebeian quite outside the cultivated circle of the
Petigrus and Grimkés and Hugers and Legarés, who were the accepted
custodians of Charleston culture and who did not take kindly to
ambitious newcomers. They regarded literature as a polite art that
could flourish only in polite circles, and they turned a cold shoulder
upon a young man whose ways suggested the Carolina buckra.
After all these years one may well cherish a grudge against the amiable
little city for its shabby treatment of Gilmore Simms. The most richly
endowed of any son she ever gave birth to, he was snubbed for years
by the social oligarchy and suffered keenly from the ostracism. His
extreme parochialism made him the more sensitive to the slight. An
ardent Southerner, loyal to all the Carolinian totems and taboos, he
accepted the Charleston judgment in literature and politics as the very
law and the prophets. He loved the soil of South Carolina, he loved the
people and the way of life, and he was steeped as no other Carolinian
in local history and tradition. He could perceive no shortcomings
in a society he warmly admired, and he accepted the Charleston
provincialisms as the lover accepts the mole on his mistress’ cheek.
The more Charleston snubbed him, the more admirable he professed
to believe was an aristocracy that so jealously guarded its fine
exclusiveness. His lifelong ambition was to receive recognition from
his native city, and when after the death of his first wife and his
marriage to the daughter of a prosperous planter, he gained admission
into the ranks of the lesser gentry, he eagerly made common cause
with them. He accepted the Carolinian standards and conventions; he
advocated social caste: he honored the southern gentleman as God’s best
handiwork; he unconsciously reflected an aristocratic arrogance towards
all social inferiors. He abandoned the Jeffersonian philosophy of his
youth and adopted the revised gospel of Calhoun. He became, in short,
a Carolina Fire Eater. He set up as a militant defender of slavery and
collaborated with other eminent Carolinians to develop the pro-slavery
argument.[410] He could have escaped the subtle compulsions of the
southern system only by emptying his mind of his dearest prejudices,
and this he had neither the will nor the wish to do. And so in spite
of the fact that his every instinct was democratic, and every natural
impulse generous and manly, he fought the battles of the peculiar
institution as stoutly as if he had been born to his three hundred
slaves; and he suffered in consequence the loss of pretty nearly
everything, including his art. After his death, his friend Paul Hayne
wrote of him: “Simms’s genius _never had fair play!_ Circumstances
hampered him!” The judgment is just. Parochial Charleston brought about
his literary undoing.
In taste and temperament Simms was a pronounced realist, but his
career took shape from a generation given to every romantic excess.
His genius, in consequence, was always at cross purposes with the
popular taste. His realism turned naturally to low-life adventure;
his upper-class romance became stilted and posturing, and his love
of action degenerated into swashbuckling. That he survived such
mishaps at all, suggests the enormous vitality of the man. If there
had only been a little more of the intellectual in him, if he could
have detached himself as an artist from the immediate and present,
he might have risen superior to his unfortunate environment. But he
was constitutionally incapable of aloofness, and hence incapable of
criticism. To analyze, compare and judge was impossible to so ardent a
nature. He must be partisan to a people and a cause, rather than to his
art. The South that he loved was romantic, and he would appeal to the
world as a Southerner. He wore his sectional prejudices as the southern
politician wears his rumpled Prince Albert coat, broad-brimmed hat and
black string tie. He never realized what a clutter of useless luggage
he carried into his study. It is a pity that he constricted himself to
the shell of an outworn order, instead of realizing that social orders
and institutions are significant to the novelist only as he stands
apart from them, observing their ways and considering their interplay
in the lives of men and women. It was a major loss to American letters
that he should not have striven to be an artist first, and a southern
romantic only at a later and more convenient season. If he had served
his art more jealously, if he had learned from Poe to refuse the
demands of inconsequential things, he would have viewed his beloved
Charleston with keener eyes and portrayed it more adequately.
But he would not serve his art alone. Unhappily he conceived that
he owed an imperative duty to his native commonwealth, and in
fulfillment of that duty he frittered away his enormous vitality in
delivering patriotic orations and occasional addresses, serving in
the Legislature, pottering over politics, lecturing upon literature,
founding and editing magazines and essaying to bring culture to
Charleston by fiery impetuosity of appeal. He struggled as few other
Americans have done to further the cause of letters in a desperate
environment; but creative literature could neither be cajoled nor
coerced to take up an abode in the indolent little city, and Simms wore
himself out in a fruitless undertaking. Our literature has suffered
few greater losses than this wasting of the genius of Gilmore Simms
in trumpery fields that belong to the literary dray horse. It was the
inevitable outcome of the conflict between the creative artist and the
citizen of South Carolina.
Little as he is known to later readers Simms is by far the most virile
and interesting figure of the Old South. He was built on a generous
plan. He was endowed with a rich and prodigal nature, vigorous,
spontaneous, creative. There was in him much of Whitman’s largeness
and coarseness, much of his delight in the good things of earth. He
wrote with extraordinary gusto, and his fine strong face suggests that
he lived with equal gusto. As a professional man of letters he turned
out an incredible amount of work, by ordinary two tales a year--solid
works of five hundred pages each--together with poems and plays and
pot-boiling stuff to tax the capacity of two or three hack writers. He
poured out his material copiously, lavishly, with overrunning measure.
His stories flow as generously as his Jamaica rum. He is a veritable
geyser of invention, an abundant sea of salty speech. He has no sense
of restraint; he does not stop to prune the tangle of his imagination;
he refuses to strip the plot of extraneous incident to hasten its
action. He is as episodic as Dickens at his worst, piling up action
and multiplying threads till the story bogs down. The major plot is
always struggling from hummock to hummock in the endless swamp where
his characters slip in and out, rarely getting to firm ground, yet
never quite submerged. Prodigal of adventure and loving action, clumsy
as the natural man when confronted with sentiment, he is an American
Fielding with a dash of Smollett. He is at ease only out of doors, in
the fields and swamps and highways; there his speech becomes racy, and
there the rich poetry of his nature, which somehow rarely got into his
verse, comes to abundant and spontaneous expression. When he enters the
drawing-room his stilted language betrays his lack of ease. He writes
with his pen and not with his heart. The plantation tradition has him
in its grip and his fine ladies and gentlemen are done up with much
literary starch. But let him come upon a happy-go-lucky blackguard
and he loves him as Fielding would have loved him. The amusing scene
in which Lieutenant Porgy heaves a pot of hot hominy in the face of a
Scotch dragoon is quite evidently reminiscent of Parson Adams’ recourse
to a dish of hog’s blood in a certain tavern brawl.[411] Like Fielding
also is his criterion of morality. A frank and generous nature is his
infallible test of worth, and if his patriotism led him to bestow a
large share of generosity on the patriots, and a correspondingly meager
share on the Loyalists and British, he was but exercising an ancient
prerogative of the romancer.
Contemporary romanticism engrafted on a nature fundamentally realistic
developed a pronounced strain in his work which, for lack of an exacter
word, we may call picaresque. This comes out at its worst in the crude
border tales of _Richard Hurdis_ and _Border Beagles_, stories marked
by the coarseness of the eighteenth century, backwoods versions of
_Jonathan Wild_. At its best it created a goodly company of blackguards
that are an asset to American literature. Simms dearly loved a rogue,
and the more picturesque the latter’s knavery the more he loved him. A
gentleman villain turns to a thing of wood in his hands, but a low-born
rascal he creates out of living flesh and blood. A surprising number
of low figures, both rogues and honest men, enliven his cluttered
pages, individual, racy, often poetic. Realistic in speech and action,
they are men of special gifts, nimble of wit and rich in imagination,
sometimes fallen to base uses and sometimes ennobled by affection for
their superiors. Thumbscrew, Supple Jack Bannister, and Joe Ballou, the
partisan scouts; Isaac Muggs, mine host of the Black Riders; Goggle
the half-breed; Hell Fire Dick of Tophet, the blackguard converted by
_Pilgrim’s Progress_; Sam Bostwick the Squatter--these are admirable
figures, done with inimitable spirit, the choicest collection of
homespun in American literature. They impart life and drama to Simms’s
tales. Remove them, and his romances are only a welter of stilted
language and starchy situations. The scene, for example, between Jack
Bannister and Isaac Muggs, in which the latter is converted to true
republican principles by appeal to a backwoods ordeal by battle, is
magnificent in its broad humor, and it is a pity that Simms did not
give freer rein to his genius for such work. It is incomprehensible
that a man who could put into the mouth of Thumbscrew such language as
the following could have stooped to scribble the love scenes between
Ernest Mellichampe and Janet Berkeley:
When it so happens that the things a man’s got to love gits fewer
and smaller, they gits more valuable, Airnest, in his sight; for
he knows mighty well, if he loses them, that he’s jist like an old
bird that comes back to the tree when the blossoms and the flowers
have all dropped off, and are rotting under it. It’s mighty nigh to
winter in his heart then, Airnest--mighty nigh--and the sooner he
begins to look out a place to sleep in, the wiser man you may take
him to be. (_Mellichampe_, Chapter IX.)
But Simms was too inveterately episodical to construct a pretty plot,
and too careless in his generous southern hospitality to discriminate
between guests at his board. He throws a huge miscellany on the table
from which each may choose what pleases his taste.
Here again romanticism did him an evil turn. Southern taste was too
aristocratic to like coarse fare. Gentlemen must dine like gentlemen
even though black rascals served as waiters. Common fellows were well
enough in the background, but they must not presume to crowd their
betters from the table. In such matters Simms was constrained to follow
the orthodox literary tradition. From Shakespeare to Scott the notion
prevailed that legitimate romance must be conceived of as a flitch of
bacon, the lean of vulgarity alternating with the fat of gentility.
Hence Simms was forced to keep a weather eye on the popular taste
lest it be offended by too free an offering of the low. His negroes,
such as Scipio and Bram and Benny Bowlegs, are more worth while than
their masters, and his swamp-suckers are done with more gusto than
the officers; but when the plot demands the appearance of the gentry
he sends his black-bottle rapscallions about their business. Except
in occasional instances, as in the case of old Colonel Sinclair,
the Carolinian baron--a testy old gentleman done in the best gouty
manner--Simms does the “quality” badly and the canny reader soon learns
to skip the genteel passages in order to visit with Lieutenant Porgy or
follow the adventures of Hell Fire Dick or Supple Jack Bannister. There
is ample fare at his generous board, but one must pick and choose.
The critics have made quite too much of the Gothic extravagancies
that mar so many of his pages. It is true that Simms was a generous
purveyor of “blood-pudding” romance with its gory exploitation of
crime and mystery. Nothing can excuse or extenuate such folly in
the abstract; but it is easily comprehensible. It was a part of the
price which the professional man of letters had to pay as caterer to
a provincial reading public. After the surprising success of _Guy
Rivers_, Simms deliberately tested the taste of his readers by sending
forth _Richard Hurdis_ under a pen name; and the equal success of the
latter convinced him that American readers liked such fare. He had a
living to make; the market was limited, and he resolved to give the
public what it wanted. This accounts for his major sins. An enormous
number of chapters, together with whole volumes such as _Charlemont_
and _Beauchampe_--preposterous accounts of a notorious murder case in
Kentucky--deserve no better fate than the rubbish heap. They are in no
sense literature; yet unfortunately the very great powers of Simms are
too commonly measured by such trash, instead of by his Revolutionary
tales.
Simms was a loving student of older English literature and drew much
of his water from excellent wells. A happy instinct led him back to
the robust time of Elizabeth and those masculine playwrights whose
ample natures were so like his own. Shakespeare may be reckoned his
particular master--especially the prose of Shakespeare with its
Cheapside colloquialisms and racy idiomatic rhythms. No better training
school could be desired, and his loving apprenticeship to the older
vernacular serves to explain the source of Simms’s greatest literary
virtue. From long familiarity with the Elizabethans he derived his
mastery of English idiom that sets him widely apart from most other
contemporary Americans. In easy outpouring of picturesque speech, of
the lithe and muscular idiom of the older literature, he was without
a rival in his generation. Many an old Elizabethan phrase lingered
in the southern backwoods, and many an indigenous turn of speech had
sprung from homely new-world experience. All such Simms seized upon
with the relish of a gourmand, stirring them into the great pot from
which he ladled such generous spoonfuls. Later critics have been
singularly obtuse in their failure to do justice to his rich linguistic
equipment. Quite too much comment has been devoted to his careless
slips in rhetorical construction, and quite too little to his command
of masculine English prose. It is absurd to couple him with Cooper in
sinning against good writing. They are as unlike as two men could well
be. Simms is incomparably the greater master of racy prose, as he is
much the richer nature. The only contemporary indeed who approaches him
is Melville in _Moby Dick_. He is careless and slovenly enough in all
conscience; when he goes on a rampage he mouths his lines like any town
crier. But though he keeps a sharp eye on the groundlings, though he is
often preposterous, he is rarely wooden, never feeble.
The Elizabethan influence comes out strikingly in the character of
Lieutenant Porgy, the spoilt child of his imagination, who runs through
the Revolutionary romances as a sort of comic chorus. Despite Professor
Trent’s opinion to the contrary, Porgy is a South Carolinian Falstaff,
quite evidently done with a close eye to the original. He is a very
mountain of a fellow, with huge paunch and spindling shanks from too
much sitting at the table and in the saddle--the most amusing and
substantial comic character in our early fiction. As a South Carolina
gentleman, Porgy of course was no liar or coward or woman cheater. In
battle he is an avalanche of patriotic valor, and in his deference to
the weak and dependent, in his free-handed generosity that encumbers
him with penniless hangers-on, he is model of southern chivalry. But
in the far greater matters of the belly, he is strikingly Falstaffian.
He is not so much a valiant trencherman, as an artist in food and
drink. He lived to eat and he ate to speculate on the virtues of a
good dinner. “He took philosophy with him to the table, and grew wise
over his wine” (_Woodcraft_, Chapter XVIII). He is an epicure in
words, a gourmand of wit. The copious stream of his speech runs on in
an endless flow, sometimes roily but never stagnant. A pat aphorism
or a picturesque phrase is as succulent to him as Carolina terrapin.
When philosophy fails he stoops to horseplay, but his practical jokes
are carried off with theatrical splendor, with colossal assurance.
Like Falstaff he is fond of practicing his wit on his followers. His
Bardolph is a certain Geordie Dennison, the swamp poet of the troop;
and Porgy honors him as one artist honors the craft of another.
But the most satisfying comradeship lies between Porgy and Black Tom,
fellow practitioners of the gentle art of cookery, sworn liegemen to
roasts and soups and stews. Together they make the swamp commissariat
bloom like a Covent Garden market. They are master foragers untroubled
by an overnice conscience. “Do as much stealing in an honest way as
you can,” the lieutenant remarks to Tom. “D--n the patriotism that
can’t eat stolen fruit!” At a pinch the native resources of the swamp
are boldly commandeered. The creative masterpiece of the valiant Porgy
was a notable banquet which he proffered General Greene and his staff
in their swamp quarters. His infinite resourcefulness in this great
affair, his huge inventiveness, elevate the dinner to the rank of a
culinary epic. The swamp frogs that he speared by moonlight, and the
young alligators that he took by subtle stratagem, were transmogrified
into delectable dishes served to his guests under the alluring names
of _alerta_ and _lagarta_.[412] The scene is done with a gusto that
only the worshiper of fleshpots could achieve. Simms delighted in
Porgy because he was himself something of a Porgy. There is good fare
for those who sit at table with the fat humorist of _The Forayers_;
the ready talk does not lack the salt of wit. The later Porgy of
_Woodcraft_ scarcely comes up to the earlier. His debts weigh too
heavily on his spirits for the easy play of his fancy; he is less
redoubtable as a wooer than as a warrior; nevertheless there is
excellent humor to be enjoyed at Glen Eberle, and some extraordinary
pranks.
The two major themes with which his romances deal, as has been
often pointed out, are the frontier and the Revolution; but the
intimate connection between them has not been so commonly remarked.
In much of his better work the two themes blend into one. The
conditions of civil war in the South thrust into sharp relief the
cultural and psychological frontier that clung to the outskirts of
the plantations--the ragged edges of a society that kept the poor
whites submerged and bred a numerous progeny of coarse and primitive
creatures, little better than social outcasts. Not the least of the
curses of slavery--as Helper pointed out--was its blighting effect
on the less prosperous whites who environed every plantation with
its special frontier. With his strong bias towards realism Simms
refused to romanticize what was inherently unlovely. Like Baldwin
in his _Flush Times of Mississippi and Alabama_, he discovered an
ample supply of blackguards and sharpers in the no man’s land beyond
the settlements. The log cabins of the swamp country harbored their
motley crew in no wise different from their fellows of the farther
frontier along the Mississippi; and these precious rascals he drags
from their lurking-places to exhibit in the light of day. The frontier
in consequence is rarely absent from his stories, and it is this
picaresque interpretation that sets him so sharply off from Cooper.
A recent student, in commenting on the contrast between the frontier
of Cooper and Simms, suggests that “perhaps the earlier frontier had
been intrinsically more dignified than that which Simms had observed;
perhaps the difference is that Cooper’s had lain deeper under the
softening shadow of the past” (Van Doren, _The American Novel_, p.
65). But this is quite to miss the point, both of Cooper and Simms.
The real explanation is to be sought in the different interpretations
of the romantic and the realist. Cooper’s frontier existed only in his
imagination. When he came face to face with the reality, as in the
case of old Aaron Thousandacres and his lawless brood, he hated it
too frankly to portray it justly. The stern Puritan squatter and his
fiercer wife are magnificent caricatures, drawn to serve a partisan
purpose. They provide a romantic contrast to the honest Chainbearer,
spokesman of the psychology of the settlements; but set beside Simon
Suggs, master of the frontier technic of easy money, as depicted by
Joseph Baldwin, they are as romantic as Cooper’s Indians.
The picaresque note is frankly emphasized in Simms’ Revolutionary
tales. All the swamp-suckers and rapscallions found their heaven-sent
opportunity in the disorders of civil war. No realist could write about
the Revolution in South Carolina without noting the flocks of buzzards
gathering to fall upon the carrion. War is not a heroic thing in
these stirring pages. It invites debauchery and encourages brutality.
Blackguards put a black stain on military glory. In the preface to _The
Scout_, Simms remarks:
To burn and slay were not the simple performances of this reckless
period and ravaged country. To burn in wantonness and to murder
in cold blood, and by the cruellest tortures, were the familiar
achievements of the time: ... The face of the country was overrun
by outlaws. Detached bands of ruffians, formed upon the frontiers
of Georgia, and in the wilds of Florida--refugees from all the
colonies--availed themselves of the absence of civil authority to
effect a lodgment in the swamps, the forests, and the mountains.
These, mounted on swift horses, traversed the state with the wind;
now here, now there; one moment operating on the Savannah, the next
on the Peedee; sometimes descending within sight of the smokes of
the metropolis; and anon, building their own fires on the lofty
summits of the Appalachian ridge.
Now and then in his pages war flashes out in romantic or heroic
episodes, but for the most part it is mean and degrading, a thing to
be hated. Simms loved action too keenly not to make the most of the
countless onsets and forays, the ambushing of Hessians and the cutting
off of wagon trains; he found in them material for many a brisk page
and stirring adventure; but in the end it is the brutality of it all,
the unhappy loosing of evil passions, that gives him most concern. It
was a hard world, and the soft-hearted Jack Bannister, speaking with
the tongue of Simms, could find comfort only in stoicism. “A man ought
not to be too soft about the heart, in a world like this, so full of
rascals that need the knockings of a hard and heavy hand.”
It is this strong seasoning of the picaresque, perhaps, that accounts
for the neglect that has befallen the work of Simms. Many blackguards
and generous potations of Jamaica rum consorted ill with the genteel
tradition in letters that grew up in the days following the Civil
War; and romantic memories of a lost cause threw an idyllic haze over
earlier times. The Revolutionary War lay too far in the past for a
generation suffering from a great tragedy to concern itself with, and
the vivid and vital work of Simms scarcely outlived its creator. The
Revolutionary tales have been largely forgotten, and from his abundant
work only _The Yemassee_ has survived in popular affection, and this
partly from the vogue of Cooper. The winnowing has been severe and
scarcely just. The best of Simms is not in _The Yemassee_, but in those
stirring tales of Marion’s men who carried on a bushwhacking campaign
under the hot sun of the dog days. _The Partisan_ and _The Forayers_
and _Woodcraft_ deserve a better fate than has befallen them. The ghost
of Cooper does not haunt their pages to challenge comparison, as it
does _The Yemassee_, and bring into question their relative merits.
There Simms is at home, in the swamps and fields and villages, with men
whose ways he knew and loved, and his generous nature followed its own
impulses.
But in dealing with the Indians he entered a domain preëmpted by the
romantic, and his picaresque realism suffered a disastrous rivalry.
Like Robert Montgomery Bird’s _Nick of the Woods, The Yemassee_
is heavily marked by the frontier psychology. It was unfortunate,
perhaps, that Simms did not follow Cooper’s example and plunge into
the wilderness, leaving behind him the squatter and settler with their
sordid prose. Instead, his Indians are encompassed by a dark background
of civilization, and their tragic destiny is poignantly dramatized in
the fate of young Occonestoga, besotted with the white man’s rum, and
doomed to a destruction far less poetic than befalls Uncas fighting
his hereditary foes. Nevertheless a wealth of romantic material is
crowded into the volume, enough to serve Cooper for half a dozen tales.
In simplifying his plots to the uncomplicated problem of flight and
pursuit, the latter gains in dramatic swiftness of movement, but he
loses in abundance of accompanying action--the sense of cross purposes
and many-sided activities, which _The Yemassee_ so richly suggests.
The latter is an elaborately carved and heavily freighted Spanish bark
that is left far astern by the trim Yankee clipper ship; yet its cargo
of the gold of the Indies is far richer. It is the familiar story of
southern prodigality and wastefulness--an exuberant nature pouring out
its wealth in spendthrift fashion, and failing to achieve the greater
results attained by a simpler nature held in closer restraint. After
all it is idle to compare Cooper and Simms, and even more futile to
catalogue the latter as a disciple of the Cooper school. Simms was
far too rich in his own right to live as a dependent on anyone, and
certainly far too original to be an imitator. Nature was lavish in
her gifts to him, and as if his fame as a story-teller is less than
Cooper’s, the debit must be charged against his unfortunate environment.
The later years of Simms were utterly devastated by the unhappy war,
in which, as was to be expected, he was a stalwart and uncompromising
partisan. His native commonwealth that had long treated him shabbily,
sacrificed him in the end to her folly. It was his own fault of course,
but how could one warped by the pervasive southern provincialism hope
to escape? Scratch a Carolinian of the Calhoun school and you find a
Fire Eater. In this respect Simms was not different from the McDuffies
and Hamiltons from whom he took his cue--gentlemen whom, because they
were politically prominent, he regarded as socially intelligent. That
a man of such native powers as Simms should have taken seriously
the Charleston politicians--blown up like a pig’s bladder after
butchering; that he should himself have aspired to become another such
bladder--these are sobering facts to remind us that the man of letters
is very likely to be a child outside his study walls. What was wrong
with Simms that he read the signs of the times so badly? This, that
he lived in a world of unreality, of social and economic romanticism,
that was forever benumbing his strong instinct for reality. His
father-in-law owned seventy slaves; his neighbors and acquaintances
owned slaves; all South Carolina gentlemen owned slaves; and in
judging this matter of slavery Gilmore Simms went unquestioningly with
his little world. He who had drunk of the rich wine of Elizabethan
culture came at last to drink himself under the table with his drafts
of Charleston Jamaica. The dream of a Greek civilization based on
black slavery was discovered in the bottom of the cup of southern
romanticism. And Simms emptied his bottle with the rest. Charleston,
no doubt, has paid a sufficiently heavy price for her too copious
potations, but she can never atone for the undoing of her greatest
son--for the foolish intoxication that befuddled the generous mind of
Gilmore Simms. The loss is not Charleston’s alone; it is a loss to our
common American literature. There is food for thought in the words of
the epitaph which he composed for himself: “Here lies one who, after a
reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labors, has
left all his better works undone.” Juster words could not have been
written, nor more tragic.
Footnotes
[408] See _Writings_, Vol. II, p. 104.
[409] See “The Arbitrament of National Disputes,” in _Writings_, Vol.
I, pp. 355-357.
[410] See above, page 102.
[411] See _Katherine Walton_, Chapter XLI.
[412] See _The Forayers_, Chapters XLIII-XLVI.
Part Three: The Romance of the West
Chapter I • New Worlds
I
While Calhoun was instructing the South in the theory of a Greek
democracy, other sons of the South were learning, in the new world
to which they had removed, the ways of a very different democracy--a
democracy native to the frontier and quite unconcerned with Greek
ideals. In the Ohio valley was gathering a multitude of rough
libertarians who had exchanged the restrictions of the old settlements
for the freedom of the new. To these bumptious levelers rulership by
established authorities made no appeal. They attached no respect to
broadcloth, but preferred to manage their affairs in their own way
by appeal to the majority. Taught by experience the worth of certain
Jeffersonian principles, they took seriously the doctrine of equality
and proposed to put it into practice. They were coonskin apostles of
liberty and equality--if not of fraternity--backwoods democrats who
by virtue of numbers established in common practice the principle of
the sovereignty of the popular will. Springing up naturally on the
frontier, the practice of democracy received from it a new validity
and became the determining factor in the nationalism that America
was creating in the early years of the nineteenth century. That it
was a crude and often shoddy democracy, that it never justified its
pretentions in the eyes of a critical realism, did not lessen the zeal
with which men clung to it or weaken their loyalty. Democracy became
the common faith of the West, and in becoming the common faith of the
West it was put in the way of becoming the common faith of America.
If the romantic temper is a spontaneous by-product of social change,
that temper found in the upheaval attending the western migration
a plentiful aliment that had been wanting in the static eighteenth
century. In that older world men had been held fast in the grip of the
customary and familiar; but in the free West all was new and strange.
The crossing of the Appalachian barrier that had long held back the
settlements was an adventurous undertaking that fired the imagination.
Romantic in spirit and scope, it was meanly picaresque in a thousand
unlovely details. Plain men engaged in it, provident and improvident,
hard-working and shiftless; heroes had a share in it, but blackguards
and outlaws and broken men--the lees and settlings thrown off from the
older communities--had a share as well. The world that provided a stage
for the courage of Daniel Boone and the fighting qualities of George
Rogers Clark bred also the Davy Crocketts and Mike Finks and Col.
William Suggses, who discovered there opportunities for the development
of less admirable qualities; and it engulfed in its depths a host of
nameless adventurers who drifted into the wilderness settlements, drank
and quarreled and begot children, suffered from the chills and ague,
spread a drab poverty along the frontier, and were put away under
ground and forgotten by the more fortunate who salvaged prosperity from
the abundant wreckage.
From this crude society emerged the new states with governments
designed to serve simple ends. Jealousy for his sovereign right to
do as he pleased was the chief concern of the free western voter;
as a sovereign citizen he refused to be subject to the creature
commonwealth. If governors and legislators and judges got uppish he
would throw them out of office and put in others who better understood
the rights of free Americans. It was this rude equalitarianism that
marked the early stage of western commonwealth building. Naïve
Jeffersonians, these frontier citizens had not learned from Hamilton
how useful the political state may become to those who know how
to control its policies to their particular ends; but that lesson
they were soon to learn. The citizens of Georgia received excellent
instruction from no less a man than Chief Justice Marshall in the
matter of the Yazoo frauds; and as such lessons sank into their minds
their political philosophy underwent a silent change. The coonskin
individualism that created Jacksonian democracy was gradually
undermined by a middle-class individualism that inclined to the
Whiggery of Henry Clay. The former was a spontaneous expression of the
frontier spirit, the latter a calculating expression of the maturing
settlement. The one discovered its native habitat on the backwoods
farm, the other in the county seat town. The one was agrarian _laissez
faire_, the other was exploitative paternalistic. The followers of
Jackson wanted the state kept simple and frugal, the followers of Clay
wanted it to engage in ambitious programs of internal improvement;
and from these antagonistic principles emerged a bitter feud between
Democracy and Whiggery that in western townships revived the old
alignment of agrarian and Federalist of earlier times.
In such a contest the principle of Whiggery must eventually triumph.
It was an expression of “the genius of the times.” Economics and
psychology were daily arguing in its behalf. From the first early
settlements of the Ohio valley, it must be remembered, circumstances
were creating a new middle class that was to stamp itself indelibly on
western life and institutions. The spirit of speculation had entered
the wilderness with the early surveyors. With its vast resources the
Inland Empire offered the first opportunity to exercise the newly
won right to exploit the western hinterland, and it was seized upon
greedily. Agriculture was still the common business and land hunger
the common passion. The irruption of the land-hungry hordes upon
the fertile Ohio valley, it will be recalled, synchronized with the
speculative debauch that followed the conclusion of the peace of
1783, and this in turn was a by-product of the sudden expansion of
the new capitalistic finance. Speculation had suddenly become every
man’s business, and wild lands and wild-cat banks, joining fortunes
for better or worse, brought forth a characteristic progeny. The new
gospel of progress found more willing hearers than the old gospel of
righteousness. Every adventurer into the Ohio valley was a potential
speculator, and every settler was eager to sell out to a later comer
at an advance. The real estate agent followed close on the footsteps
of Daniel Boone, quick to profit from the explorations. Land was the
staple commodity and such a turnover had never before been known in
America. Every clearing in the woods was speedily capitalized, and
every townsite was reckoned rich in potential values. The new cities
were founded in unearned increment and prospered with its increase.
With European peasants flocking to the West from their poverty-stricken
countries, and the exploited of the East seeking new openings there,
it was an unlucky speculator who could not exchange his paper values
for substantial equivalents. Law, religion, education, culture,
were pressed into the service of speculation. How widely the spirit
permeated the West is suggested in the experience of Timothy Flint,
frontier missionary. Writing from Saint Charles, Missouri, in 1818, he
commented somewhat bitterly:
Religion, when I came here was considered contemptible. The phalanx
of opposition was in array from one end of the street to the
other. Why did they invite me here? On speculation. A minister--a
church--a school--are words to flourish in an advertisement to sell
lots. (John Ervin Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, Appendix B,
p. 293.)
From the determining factors, then, of abundant wild lands, rapid
increase in population, and an elastic credit, operating on a vast
scale, came the optimistic, speculative psychology of the new West.
It is the common disease of every period of unstable economics. It
had traveled west with every extension of the frontier; and it became
acute in the Ohio valley in the romantic days following the War of
1812. In colonial times before the upheaval of the Revolution, prices
of land and commodities had been stable. The basic silver currency
varied little in quantity or value; coin was scarce, but the occasional
emission of paper money produced little disturbance, for the reason
that the farmer habitually reckoned his income in the produce of his
farm and fireside. But with the unsettling of exchange values by
the wide use of bank notes, prices at once shifted to a speculative
basis. The familiar commodities ceased to have a fixed use value, and
a cash psychology superseded the traditional commodity value. The old
stability was gone. The familiar domestic economy that functioned
primarily in terms of consumption rather than profit disintegrated
under the workings of a paper system and gave place to a speculative
economy.
It was this revolution that set apart the new West from the older
traditional America and made it the special repository of the new
middle-class spirit of progress. The change had been long preparing.
Writing from Boonesborough in January, 1776, the agent of the
Transylvania Land Company pointed out that the western country
“abounded with land mongers,” and that his company had already issued
nine hundred patents.[413] These adventurous spirits were only pioneers
pointing the way for later hordes that after 1815 pushed eagerly
onward. “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,”
commented a traveler in 1817 as he watched the long line of Conestoga
wagons moving towards Pittsburgh; and in the fall of the same year
Timothy Flint said of Saint Charles, Missouri, that “there was an
average of one hundred people every day coming to the town, or passing
to near-by points. Nearly all were poor and not one family in fifty had
a Bible” (Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, p. 102). “This western
fever has seized old and young,” remarks a character in Cooper’s _Home
as Found_, “and it has carried off many active families from our parts
of the world.... Most of the counties adjoining our own have lost a
considerable portion of their population.” One reason for this vast
exodus from the East is suggested by a recent student who remarks:
“A considerable part of the significance of the frontier lies behind
the frontier. In one sense, the westward expansion of the American
people was a flight from the new industrialism” (Norman Ware, _The
Industrial Worker_, p. xx). To these adventurers from the East was
added an increasing immigration. During the period from the close of
the Revolution to the War of 1812, the annual immigration averaged no
more than four or five thousand. In the year 1817 it rose to 22,000,
and thereafter an augmenting stream poured into America and filtered
westward. They were natural prey to shrewd promoters, and in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ Dickens has drawn a picture--not wholly caricature--of what
befell some of them. But whatever might be their individual fate, they
provided fuel to the fire that was consuming the old agrarianism and
clearing the ground for the western middle class.
II
With land as its staple commodity the West naturally interpreted
progress in terms of increasing land values; and these in turn were
dependent on better markets, better roads, and a freely flowing tide of
immigration. In a country of such vast distances internal improvements
were an everyday necessity. With every mile that a turnpike was driven
into the wilderness new opportunities were opened up. Monies paid for
wild land went into the Federal treasury; it was only just, according
to the western view, that such monies should return to the West in the
form of public improvements, for with such improvements tax values were
increased, prices of all commodities rose, and progress was furthered.
The Federal government could not fairly leave its offspring to shift
for themselves, but must consider itself _in loco parentis_ to the
rising commonwealths. It was a persuasive argument, appealing alike to
farmer and speculator, to town and country, but it played havoc with
the older Jeffersonianism. Jefferson thought always in terms of the
agrarian producer functioning in a stable economic world; speculation
was not in his philosophy; unearned increment was a crop he never
calculated on; and in sympathy with an older liberalism he would reduce
the state to the narrow rôle of policeman. But the new West, thinking
in terms of its immediate needs, desired a broad and benevolent
paternalism. It wanted the Federal government to butter its bread
regardless of the ultimate cost of the butter.
The complete embodiment of this spirit of paternalistic progress was
the master politician of the times, whose dramatic career, beginning
as a Jeffersonian and ending as a Hamiltonian, suggests the confusions
of a world in transition. Henry Clay was the hero of the new West, the
spokesman of the new ambitions. A man of great personal charm, engaging
manners, buoyant temperament, exuberant patriotism, and persuasive
tongue, he migrated in 1797 at the age of twenty-one from Richmond,
Virginia, to Lexington, Kentucky, then a booming county-seat town only
twenty-two years removed from the building of its first blockhouse. The
population of the state had more than doubled in seven years, and by
1797 it had risen above 180,000. Of this aggressive little world Clay
soon became the accredited representative at Washington. He had been
brought up under the old domestic economy and carefully tutored in the
Jeffersonian philosophy. For four years he had been private secretary
to George Wythe, a distinguished Virginian of the older generation,
a profound lawyer and teacher, a scholarly political thinker, a
humanitarian, and a confirmed agrarian. When Clay left Virginia he
carried with him the Jeffersonianism of Wythe; but he was wanting in
the trained intellect of his preceptor and his views were inadequately
grounded. His subsequent career revealed him as an impressionable
nature modifying his convictions with his environment. In Kentucky the
spirit of speculative expansion seized him and inoculated his mind with
the new gospel of progress. He early convinced himself that government
was not doing its full duty unless it helped its citizens to make
money, and he persistently pressed on Congress the need of federal aid
to develop the West. In 1812 he fell victim to the war psychology,
turned jingo, and substituted an ardent patriotism for sober reason.
Thereafter he became increasingly nationalistic, demanding a strong
army and navy, pleading for a loose construction of the constitution,
arguing for paternalism. His Jeffersonianism was quietly put away
like a garment out of style. Grossly ignorant of the schools of
economic thought, he was an opportunist who shifted from the older
domestic economy to the later capitalistic, without comprehending the
significance of the change. Unread in history and political theory,
he trusted his fluency to get him out of any inconsistencies he might
blunder into. In the course of his long career he found himself
at different times on both sides of every important question; yet
gravitating to the middle-class position, the exponent of exploitation
in the name of progress, spokesman of the commercial, financial and
manufacturing interests, a new-model Federalist passionately defending
the new money economy--a curious ending for one who began as a pupil of
George Wythe.
And yet not curious when one considers the ambitions of the world that
molded him. Clay was a born politician who rarely came to grips with
reality. Devoted to the principles of republican liberty as he found
them in the Constitution, he professed to believe that government
could be trusted to distribute favors with impartial hand. Personally
honest, he never realized how often he allowed himself to become the
unconscious tool of powerful economic interests. With his desire to
please everybody he was an easy prey for skillful lobbyists. He had
been at one time attorney for the Bank, yet he denied vehemently
that his defense of the institution had been influenced by such
connection. He had become a Hamiltonian without gaining Hamilton’s
clear understanding of the economic basis of politics. A brilliant
opportunist, he was guided by no fixed political principles but tacked
with the shifting winds. A brilliant romantic, he was the persuasive
prophet of an age that was dreaming of a prosperity that should gather
in certain favored reservoirs through the agency of subsidies and
taxes, and trickle thence through all the land to water the roots
of industry. It was fitting that such a man should be the father of
Whiggery, and fitting also that he should stand as the embodiment of
the spirit of compromise. One great lesson, at least, he had learned,
that greater men too often do not learn, the lesson that republican
government rests on good will and that such good will demands a
policy of give and take among rival interests. Compromise may be
displeasing to earnest souls, but it is implied in any workable system
of democratic rule.
Like Calhoun and Webster, Clay was a victim of changing times. If he
had lived a generation later, when the middle-class revolution had been
accomplished and the principle of capitalism was in undisputed control,
he would have achieved a far greater personal success. But capitalism
was not yet strong enough to uphold him against rival economies, and
he failed of his lifelong ambition to be President. He was broken by
the Jacksonian revolution, in spite of the fact that no other American
politician has been so loved by a hero-worshiping electorate--and it
should be added, has been so lovable.
Footnotes
[413] See James Hall, _Romance of American History_, Appendix.
Chapter II • Two Spokesmen of the West
I • Andrew Jackson • Agrarian Liberal
Clay’s pleasant dream of a paternalistic prosperity for America got
its first rude awakening from General Jackson and his motley following
of western equalitarians and eastern proletarians. Gentlemen were
suddenly reminded that the plain people had been overlooked in the
distribution of benefits. The waters of prosperity, it would seem, had
been trickling somewhat too scantily to them from the great reservoirs
where they were impounded; and as they saw the wealth pouring into
private ponds through governmental pipe lines, a natural human envy
took possession of them. In theory the pipe lines belonged to them,
and the impounded waters were to be used for common irrigation; but
in practice the mains seemed to conduct only to Lowell industrialists
and Philadelphia and New York capitalists, and the waters turned out
to be privately owned. As the recognition of this fact came home to
the producing mass it provided a rallying point for an anti-monopolist
movement and determined the great objective of the Jacksonian attack,
the assault on the Bank.
The driving force of the new Democracy was the same class-feeling
that had done service a generation before, the will to destroy the
aristocratic principle in government. This conscious class-feeling
had been strengthened by the spread of the dogma of equalitarianism
through the frontier, and this in turn had brought about an extension
of manhood suffrage which enfranchised a numerous body of voters who
turned against an aristocracy that had long resisted their demands for
the vote. The spirit of 1798 was rising afresh, and the re-alignment
assumed the form of a democratic-aristocratic struggle, which for
the moment obscured the more significant fact of an emerging middle
class. The battle seemed to lie between homespun and broadcloth for
control of government, and this serves to explain the odium that
quickly attached to Jacksonian Democracy in polite circles. In drawing
together mechanics and frontiersmen, the new party inevitably became
a lower-class instrument, offensive to gentlemen of the old school
of politics. The records of the times carry abundant evidence, often
amusing, of this aristocratic contempt. In the early forties a girl
of seventeen living on a Mississippi plantation, describing Jefferson
Davis--whose wife she afterwards became--was surprised at the contrast
between his politics and his manners. “Would you believe it,” she
wrote, “he is refined and cultivated, and yet he is a Democrat!”
(_Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his Wife_, Vol. I, p. 192.)
There were quite evident reasons for this aristocratic contempt. The
new Democracy was heavily weighted with what gentlemen were pleased to
call the rabble. Fresh Democratic recruits had been gathering since
Jefferson molded the first party of protest. Industrialism was creating
a city proletariat, and the frontier was producing the coonskin voter;
neither as yet possessed any adequate political philosophy, but they
needed no philosophy to enlist against the traditional privileges and
perquisites of broadcloth. They had had their fill of such rule. The
stake-in-society theory was worn threadbare, and other philosophies
were preparing. Meanwhile in the person of Old Hickory they saw the
visible embodiment of their vague aspirations, and they turned to
him with an unquestioning loyalty that nothing could weaken. He was
our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. If he
aroused a wild enthusiasm in breasts covered by linsey-woolsey, it
was because he believed that linsey-woolsey had its stake-in-society
equally with broadcloth. He was one of our few Presidents whose heart
and sympathy were with the plain people, and who clung to the simple
faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the
rich. Believing so, he could not be turned aside from his course by
paid clamor, but with a courage rare in the White House he dared make a
frontal attack on the citadel of exploitation in the face of an army of
mercenaries.
The dramatic career of Andrew Jackson, so unlike that of Jefferson,
which was determined by a speculative temperament and founded on a
critical examination of diverse systems of society and politics, was
shaped in large measure by prejudice and circumstance. A man of iron
will and inflexible purpose, he was almost wholly lacking in political
and social philosophy. His conclusions were the reactions of a simple
nature of complete integrity, in contact with plain fact. Fundamentally
realistic, he cherished few romanticisms. There was no subtlety in his
mental processes and this lack kept him free from the temptation to
follow devious paths beloved of politicians. He must take the shortest
way to his objective, crashing through such obstacles as lay in his
path. He was never a bookish man. He was surprisingly ill read, and his
grammar and spelling were those of the plain people. He loved horse
racing and was a master of profanity; yet in spite of characteristics
that link him with Davy Crockett, he possessed an innate dignity and
chivalry that set him far above the wag of the canebrakes. He was a
born leader whose headlong onslaughts and rash mistakes might imperil
the cause but could not shake the confidence of his followers. All
who knew a man when they saw one respected Andrew Jackson. Imperious
and dictatorial, he knew how to command but not to obey; he took
orders from no one, not even his superiors, unless such orders fell
in with his own plans. In short General Jackson represented the best
which the new West could breed in the way of capable and self-reliant
individualism, and the backwoodsmen loved him for the enemies he made,
and backed him loudly in his fight against the aristocratic East.
When Jackson settled in Nashville in 1788, at the age of twenty-one,
the Cumberland valley had somewhat under five thousand inhabitants
scattered a distance of eighty-five miles along the river. The first
settlements had been made only nine years before, and Nashville was a
frontier post with frontier manners. Into this rough society the young
Scotch-Irishman fitted easily. His smattering of the law sufficed to
gain him clients and he soon became a local political leader. When
he was only twenty-nine he was sent to Philadelphia as the first
Congressman from the state of Tennessee, where he came in contact with
the “aristocratic Neebobs” of the government and heartily disliked
them. The next year he was sent to the Senate, but a single session
satisfied him and he resigned to accept a judgeship in the state
Supreme Court, which post he held for six years. During these early
years he was unconsciously following the path that conducted straight
to a middle-class philosophy. He threw himself into speculation,
bought and sold land in great blocks, traded in horses and slaves,
set up a general store, and was well on the road to wealth when the
panic of 1795 caught him unprepared. He lost most of his extensive
holdings, including his homestead and many of his slaves, and removed
to a six hundred and forty acre tract eight miles from Nashville--the
Hermitage--which was to become one of the famous places of America.
With this removal his middle-class ambitions fell away and he became a
planter with a simple agrarian point of view; and this old-fashioned
agrarianism became in later years the determining force in all his
political thinking.
He was fifty-eight when he emerged as a potential candidate for the
Presidency in 1822, and for years his sole interests, other than those
of his plantation, had been military. He was singularly wanting in any
formulated political philosophy, and his reëlection to the Senate two
years later did little to supply the lack. He had picked up some shreds
of the protectionist theory and in a letter written in 1824 he went so
far as to declare for a “judicious” protective tariff, basing his view
on the grounds of the country’s economic unpreparedness at the time
of the War of 1812, on the lack of markets for the produce of western
farms, and on the desirability of drawing labor from the farm to the
factory. But he added a significant passage that reveals the agrarian
bias of his mind. To the end of his life he insisted that he was an old
Republican of 1798, and this comment of 1824 suffices to connect his
later attack on the Bank with Jefferson’s attack on Hamilton’s fiscal
policy.
Beyond this, I look at the Tariff with an eye to the proper
distribution of labor and revenue; and with a view to discharge our
national debt. I am one of those who do not believe that a national
debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic;
inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration
a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.
(Quoted in Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. I, p. 346.)
The tariff was the only question on which he was receptive to Whiggish
arguments, and although he never openly repudiated a protectionist
policy he soon grew lukewarm in its support. Such other fragments of
Whiggery as found accidental lodgment in his mind were swept away in
the fierce struggles that marked his years in the White House. During
those eight years Jackson found himself, and the man who emerged from
the struggle was an agrarian of the old Virginian school. As he came to
understand the significance of the principle of exploitation he learned
to interpret social classes in terms of economics. He instinctively
hated all aristocrats, extending his dislike to the circle that
pretended to social preëminence in Tennessee, speaking of them
contemptuously as the “aristocrats of Nashville.” But in these later
years a change in his vocabulary appeared; his favorite phrases became
“the monied capitalists” and the “hydra of corruption.” He had come to
associate aristocracy with the control of the economics of society. He
was learning how aristocracies are built up through the instrumentality
of the state; and as that lesson sank into his mind his opposition to
such class favoritism hardened into adamant. He would put a stop to
such practices, cost what it might. His attack on the Bank was perhaps
the most courageous act in our political history; he knew how fiercely
it would be defended; yet he was amazed at the number of hornets that
issued from the shaken nest. “Such has been the scenes of corruption
in our last congress,” he wrote in 1833, “that I loath the corruption
of human nature and long for retirement, and repose on the Hermitage.
But until I can strangle this hydra of corruption, the Bank, I will
not shrink from my duty.” And a little later, “I want relaxation from
business and rest, but where can I get rest; I fear not on this earth”
(Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. II, pp. 635, 637).
As his policy unfolded it became clear that Jackson had not changed
with the changing times. He remained to the last the product of an
earlier domestic economy, with an old-fashioned horror of debt. He
was too generous to be frugal, too kind-hearted to be thrifty, too
honest to live above his means. He desired a simple independence for
himself and for his country. He believed that the government should
pay its debt, reduce its revenues, and live simply. In his austere
personal rectitude he exhibited a Puritan conviction of the sacredness
of stewardship; he must return to the common people, who had put their
trust in him, an honest reckoning of that trust. It was not in his
nature to betray their faith. He would have nothing to do with the
new theory that government is an agency to help business. To take
profits from an instrument erected supposedly for the common good was
abhorrent to his old-fashioned views; it was impossible for him to
lend the sanction of his office to particular or special interests;
and when circumstances made the Bank the central vexing problem of his
administration, his position was predetermined by every conviction of
his mind. While he was President he would not allow the government to
be used for business ends; he would not permit its funds or credit to
be turned to private profits; he would not tolerate a money monopoly,
no matter how conventionally correct its operations might be proved to
be, that challenged the sovereignty of the national government. The
twin powers of the purse and sword--to recall Clay’s famous phrase
that every Whig orator used on the stump--were in Jackson’s opinion
the ultimate tests of sovereignty; and to turn over the money of the
government to private hands for private use, he believed, was as grave
an abrogation of sovereign rights as would be the use of the army and
navy by private interests for private ends.
In the judgment of many critics Jackson, in his ignorance of the
intricacies of capitalistic finance, wantonly destroyed a necessary
credit system, thereby bringing a devastating panic on the country.
Whether or not that judgment is true is of little importance today.
More interesting historically is the fact that in his attitude towards
the Bank, as in his attitude towards internal improvements, Jackson
returned to the agrarian position of Jefferson and John Taylor,
nullifying for a time the victories gained by the middle class
during the boom period of nationalism. The more he learned about
the methods of capitalistic finance, the more he distrusted it. His
prejudices were his strength. He disliked speculation and he could
see nothing permanently wise or sound in a speculative economy that
put American industry at the mercy of bankers to expand or contract
credit. With an old-fashioned love of a stable currency he gave his
warm support to the project to return the country to a specie basis.
“The great desideratum, in modern times,” he said in his message to
the twenty-fourth Congress, “is an efficient check upon the power of
banks, preventing that excessive issue of paper whence arise those
fluctuations in the standard of value which render uncertain the
rewards of labor.” The establishment of additional mints to provide an
adequate coinage of gold or silver became therefore a natural corollary
of his attack upon bank currency. It was John Taylor’s economics
written into the law of the land.
In his attitude towards the state Jackson followed the nationalistic
tendencies of the West. He was as patriotic as Clay, and in spite of
strong states-rights sympathies he contemptuously rejected Calhoun’s
theory of nullification. But he had no love for an omnicompetent
state. More and more he drifted back to the Jeffersonian position in
his conception of the powers and duties of the federal government.
Replying to the vote of censure of 1834, he stated his ideal of
government in words that would have become Jefferson’s first inaugural
speech. He had been charged with being ambitious, to which he replied:
The ambition which leads me on, is an anxious desire and a fixed
determination, to return to the people, unimpaired, the sacred
trust they have confided to my charge--to heal the wounds of the
constitution and preserve it from further violation; to persuade
my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is not in a splendid
government, supported by powerful monopolies and aristocratical
establishments, that they will find happiness, or their liberties
protected, but in a plain system, void of pomp--protecting all, and
granting favors to none--dispensing its blessings like the dews of
heaven, unseen and unfelt, save in the freshness and beauty they
contribute to produce. It is such a government that the genius of
our people requires--such a one only under which our States may
remain for ages to come, united, prosperous, and free. (Benton,
_Thirty Years’ View_, Vol. I, p. 427.)
The evils entailed on America by the Jacksonian revolution were many,
but they cannot properly be charged against Andrew Jackson. They
came in spite of him, and they came as a result of the great object
lesson in the manipulation of the majority will that his popularity
had laid bare. His instincts and the main outline of his policy were
Jeffersonian; but neither he nor any other man was strong enough
to stop the current of middle-class individualism then running.
The American people were wanting in an adequate democratic program
suited to the changing times, as they were wanting in desire for a
social democracy. And when his capable hands fell from the machine
he had created, it was seized by the politicians and used for narrow
partisan ends. Yet one far-reaching result survived the movement, the
popularization of the name of democracy and the naïve acceptance of the
belief that the genius of America was democratic. In choosing a party
name the Jacksonians were shrewder politicians and better prophets than
the Whigs. For better or worse the American masses, and in particular
the nationalistic West, had espoused the principle of democracy, and
interpreted it in terms of political equalitarianism--a principle that
had inspired a fanatical hatred in the breasts of old Federalists.
To gentlemen of that earlier school democracy had meant the right of
the propertyless majority to plunder the minority in the name of the
law. The later Whigs did not make so blundering a mistake. Instead of
proclaiming democracy the mother of all mischiefs, they welcomed it as
an effective aid in vote-getting. Learning their lesson from Jackson,
the Whig politicians outdid him in democratic professions. They had
discovered that business has little to fear from a skillfully guided
electorate; that quite the safest way, indeed, to reach into the public
purse is to do it in the sacred name of the majority will. Perhaps the
rarest bit of irony in American history is the later custodianship
of democracy by the middle class, who while perfecting their tariffs
and subsidies, legislating from the bench, exploiting the state and
outlawing all political theories but their own, denounce all class
consciousness as unpatriotic and all agrarian or proletarian programs
as undemocratic. But it was no fault of Andrew Jackson if the final
outcome of the great movement of Jacksonian democracy was so untoward;
it was rather the fault of the times that were not ripe for democracy.
II • Lincoln • Free-Soil Liberal
The equalitarian West that bred Andrew Jackson bred Lincoln also,
a man with the same homespun mind, the same sterling integrity of
nature, the same instinctive democracy, but shaped by an environment
in which the new philosophy of progress had displaced the older
agrarianism. The road of middle-class ideals he traveled further
than Jackson, but in the end he also turned back to pick up once
more the democratic faith then being repudiated by the proponents
of slavery, north as well as south. Long an ardent Whig of the Clay
school, and thoroughly indoctrinated in a paternalistic nationalism,
he was brought, as every thoughtful American of the times was brought,
to weigh the program of slave imperialism in the scales with the
Declaration of Independence. The doctrines of that great document lay
before every man’s feet in those uncertain days, to get over as one
could. They could not easily be evaded or got round; they must be
dealt with. Rufus Choate, representing Boston Toryism, had come upon
them and dismissed them as “glittering and sounding generalities.”
Calhoun, representing southern imperialism, had come upon them and
essayed to destroy them by a critical realism. Lincoln, embodying the
spontaneous liberalism of the West, came upon them and paused to take
his bearings afresh. He could neither wave them aside nor destroy
them. The deep-rooted equalitarianism of his simple social philosophy
found in them an eloquent pronouncement of its democratic faith, that
set him upon considering how such doctrine might be squared with the
reality of slavery. The agrarianism of John Taylor and the Whiggery of
Henry Clay could tell him nothing about that; he must seek elsewhere;
and the solution he found in an amalgamation of equalitarianism and
free-soilism, in an adaptation of western Whiggery to Jeffersonian
principles.
Whatever party name he might call himself by, in his love of justice
and his warm humanity Lincoln was essentially Jeffersonian. He
respected property rights, but other rights he believed more sacred.
And as he watched the emergence in the South of the ideal of a Greek
democracy, as he considered how the party of Jackson had become
the party of Calhoun and Douglas, bent solely on strengthening and
spreading the institution of slavery, his equalitarianism took alarm.
He could not sit quiet while the principles of the Declaration of
Independence were being openly flouted; he must speak out; he must
arouse the idealism of the people to deal with the iconoclasts. In an
important pronouncement written in 1859, he set the problem before them
thus:
Remembering ... that the Jefferson party was formed upon its
supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding
the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior
... it will be ... interesting to note how completely the two
[parties] have changed hands as to the principles upon which they
were originally supposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold
the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict
with another’s right of property; Republicans, on the contrary,
are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the
man before the dollar.... But, soberly, it is now no child’s play
to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this
nation.... The principles of Jefferson are the principles and
axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with
no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering
generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies!”
And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.”
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and
effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and
restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.... They
are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. (Letter to H. L.
Prince and Others, April 6, 1859, in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 125-126.)
Two conceptions were here competing in Lincoln’s mind, the older
equalitarianism that sprang from French humanitarianism and the newer
economics that came from English _laissez faire_; and the attempt to
reconcile them suggests how far he had traveled along the path of
western Whiggery. With the spirit of enterprise he had no complaint;
the ideal of progress was associated in his mind with a fluid economics
that permitted the capable to rise through skillful exploitation. He
had no love for the stable economics of the eighteenth century that
Jackson preferred; the profit motive, functioning freely, he regarded
as the legitimate driving force of society; but he was concerned that
competition should be open to all on equal terms. As he watched the
transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, he found himself
more in sympathy with the new than the old. Accepting the principle
of exploitation he came to the position of the little capitalist who
believed that in America capitalism could be democratized by the simple
method of keeping the opportunities for exploitation open to every
citizen. It was common view of western Whiggery, and in so far Lincoln
remained a Whig, content with a system which he accepted as peculiarly
suited to the genius of the American people. In a late speech he summed
it up thus:
What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is
best to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he
can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a
man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while
we don’t propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the
humblest man an equal chance to get rich with anybody else. When
one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is
such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that
there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.... I want
every man to have a chance--and I believe a black man is entitled
to it--in which he can better his condition--when he may look
forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work
for himself afterwards, and finally to hire men to work for him.
That is the true system. (Speech at New Haven, March 6, 1860, in
_Works_, Vol. V, pp. 360-361.)
But as a western man Lincoln was far more concerned over the
application of _laissez faire_ to the problem of western lands, and as
he contemplated the practical workings of “squatter sovereignty” he
learned how the free functioning of _laissez faire_ may be interfered
with by economic imperialisms. That lesson determined his final stand.
The virgin prairies beyond the Mississippi were coveted equally by
northern and southern exploiters; and who should finally possess them,
whether the small freeholder or the slave-master, was a question that
could not be put off forever. None knew this better than the small
farmers who were already staking out homesteads there. If Congress
yielded to the pro-slavery demands their economic future would be
endangered. It was the free-soil West that sent the first anti-slavery
men to Washington and provided the backbone of the new party. Not the
respectable West, but the plain people, Whig as well as Democrat. “Much
of the plain old Democracy is with us,” said Lincoln in 1858, “while
nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking Whiggery is against us. I
don’t mean nearly all the old Whig party, but nearly all of the nice
exclusive sort” (Letter to A. C. Henry, in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 95). It
was no humanitarian regard for the rights of the negro that welded them
into a militant party. Racially and economically the free-soiler was
hostile to the black, whether slave or free. The Topeka constitution
adopted by the Kansas free-soilers barred all negroes from the new
state; Kansas was to be a white man’s country. The free labor of the
West wanted no competition with an alien race, and was prepared to
fight both the white master and free black for exclusive possession of
the national domain. There were few John Browns among these western
homesteaders--uncompromising idealists who rebelled at the injustice
done the negro. The free-soiler hated slavery because it threatened
his immediate interests; nevertheless as the great struggle developed,
the moral injustice of slavery was thrust to the fore and imparted a
humanitarian motive to the free-soil argument. This humanitarian motive
Lincoln seized upon, wedded it to the ideal of national union, and thus
doubly armed went forth to the fight.
To amalgamate idealism and economics is no easy task. “Public opinion,”
he said in a speech at Hartford, “is founded, to a great extent, on a
property basis.” But it is not the sole basis. The ideal of justice
comes in to upset all purely economic calculations. “The property basis
will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right
and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make
a man’s course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle” (_Works_, Vol. V, p.
330). Beyond question it was this recognition of the perennial conflict
between economics and justice, between realism and idealism, that
explains the hesitancies and harassing doubts that marked Lincoln’s
development. To reconcile the principle of exploitation with the
Declaration of Independence it was necessary to stick like a flea to
_laissez faire_--to eliminate slave labor and accept only free labor.
Lincoln was a slow man and cautious, and he pulled himself forward
to such a position by main force. He was not a rare intellect like
Thoreau, to think swiftly to a conclusion and abide the consequences.
He was a political leader rather than an intellectual, and he could
advance only a little ahead of the slow-moving mass he sought to draw
after him. A hundred invisible ties held him back--his belief in
the rights of local democracies, his respect for law and order, his
devotion to the Constitution, his recognition of property interests in
the slave, his understanding of the complexity of the problem, with
the entire economy of the South resting on a slave basis. Here were
difficulties enough to trouble an honest mind. His practical sense,
which is only another name for political realism, restrained his
idealism and made him of necessity an opportunist, willing to yield
much if he might save the Union. A simple, tolerant, easy-going man,
he was at bottom a realist who had come to understand what may be
considered the greatest truth in political science, namely, that an
enduring state must rest on willing allegiance. Force cannot compel
loyalty; authority may put down revolt but it cannot destroy the
seeds of discontent; for that only the sovereignty of good will is
competent, and in free states the sovereignty of good will must rest
upon compromise. Lincoln was a better democrat than Jackson, for he
would rather persuade than drive. If Hamilton embodied the aristocratic
principle of coercive government, Lincoln embodied the democratic
principle of give and take, that prefers compromise to bayonets. With
a cause resting on the common good will it might safely be trusted to
muddle through.
Slowly pushed forward by his cautious realism, Lincoln was forty-nine
before he reached the “divided house” position of the Douglas debates,
that was to entail such consequences. It was a bold pronouncement to
address to a generation desperately engaged in erecting sham defenses
against reality, in fleeing from the truth that cried aloud to be
heard. But he would not let men stop their ears longer; the truth must
be spoken to their understanding.
In my opinion [he said] agitation will not cease until a crisis
shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against
itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to
be dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect
it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all
the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its
advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in
all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. (Speech
at Springfield, June 16, 1858.)
The situation could not have been put more neatly. It was an appeal of
honest realism to put away all shoddy romanticisms, all mean evasions,
and to face the situation fairly; and it cut across the murky clouds
like a flash of lightning. Thenceforth there could be no longer a
conspiracy of silence; the problem of slavery had been brought home to
the common mind and common conscience, the question of its relation to
our national unity and national well-being had been brought out into
the realm of homely discussion. It is the democratic way, and as an
honest democrat, Lincoln stripped away all the protective coloring of
lies that politicians use and appealed to the honesty of plain men. The
same method he applied to the Dred Scott decision. He proposed to bring
to the bar of the majority opinion the stale legal romanticisms of the
Supreme Court. He refused to accept the divine right of the courts to
rulership, he denied the sovereignty of the judiciary, and proposed
to make a political issue of the matter. He would have it settled
in town-meetings and at the polls, by the plain people, and not by
lawyers and judges. It was a reversion to Jeffersonian principles, to
the simple democratic creed that fundamentals of public policy must be
determined by the people themselves.
Lincoln had thought his way slowly to the “divided house” position,
but he could not pause there. Those were hurrying times, and the
liberalism of yesterday was inadequate for the liberalism of today. A
weak man or a time-server would have gone upon the rocks, and a man of
unyielding policy must have broken; to be certain of one’s conclusions
was possible only to one who saw less than the whole. Patience and an
open mind alone could be relied on, an intelligent opportunism alone
would serve during the months the country was fiercely debating with
itself; and the heart-breaking hesitation of Lincoln, the troublesome
doubts and perplexed questionings, reveal as nothing else could the
simple integrity of his nature. He must go forward, but he must carry
the people with him, the North as a whole, the border states it
possible, even the rebellious South if charity might suffice. Though in
arms, they were Americans, and their hearts must be brought to willing
allegiance; how otherwise could a democratic people emerge from the
bitterness of civil war? He was not made for a dictator, and blood and
iron he accounted poor cement to mend the sundered democracies. He
trusted the better impulses of men to prevail in the end, because with
Jefferson he believed in the essential justice of the plain people. In
this faith he exemplified his democracy. Not a great political thinker,
he was a great leader because he never forgot that he was one with
those he led.
The slow unfolding of Lincoln’s mind is sufficiently revealed in the
changing quality of his speeches. He was rarely eloquent--never after
the ornate fashion of the time; and the bits of Hebraic poetry that
have come to be associated with his name are singularly few and belong
to the last years of his life. His usual style was plain homespun,
clear and convincing, but bare of imagery and lacking distinction of
phrase. The thought seems to break into speech hesitatingly, in the
way of a man visibly seeking to adapt his words to his meaning. Matter
he judged to be of greater significance than manner. Few men who have
risen to enduring eloquence have been so little indebted to rhetoric.
Very likely his plainness of style was the result of deliberate
restraint, in keeping with the simplicity of his nature. When he let
himself go he discovered a well of poetry in his heart. When he chose
he could even play the rhetorician. In those rare moments when he put
caution behind him, his words fell into a stately rhythm that suggests
the orator. Witness such a passage as this:
In those days our Declaration of Independence was held sacred
by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making
the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed
and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if
its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all
recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining
against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy
follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry.
They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person,
and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they
have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him,
as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys
in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a
hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to
what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be
produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than
it is. (Speech at Springfield, June 27, 1857, in _Works_, Vol. II,
pp. 327-328.)
But he did not often let himself go. As one reads his speeches one
feels that an English diffidence held him back--this and the strong
prose of his environment. Like a true Anglo-Saxon he was reluctant
to speak out, afraid to let his emotions seize upon his speech. Only
at the last did that diffidence yield to complete unconsciousness.
The Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural are marked by the
sincerity and self-effacement that ennobled the words of John Brown
in the Virginia court-room--it is the eloquence which rises from the
heart when life has been felt in its tragic reality, an eloquence that
Webster could not rise to. Such words come only to those who have been
purified by fire; they are the distillation of bitter experience.
But the mass of his speeches are in quite another manner--that of
the simple, everyday world that bred him. He had none of the itch of
publicity that afflicts the second-rate mind. Webster was a magnificent
poseur; Edward Everett repeated the same academic oration a hundred
times; but Lincoln was too modest to pose and too honest to turn parrot
and speak by rote. He was a man who loved to talk with his neighbors
in homely metaphor, and it was then that his thought clothed itself in
whimsical humor. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve, but like Mark
Twain he let it slip out in a witticism.
Even more than Washington has Lincoln suffered at the hands of the
myth makers. Of late years he has come to be looked upon too often as
the invaluable asset of the political party that he honored in its
founding, and too rarely as the embodiment of the kindly, liberal soul
of our native democracy in the simpler days of a fluid economics and
an unsophisticated equalitarianism. With his instinctive kindliness,
his abiding faith in the good will of men, his dislike of coercion,
his readiness to compromise, he may seem old-fashioned to a generation
that has grown intolerant--but that is a reflection on our own times
rather than on Lincoln. The real Lincoln can grow old-fashioned no
more than Jefferson. As he went back in a day of sordid imperialisms
to the earlier liberalism of the great Virginian, seeking to rescue
the idealism of the Declaration of Independence from the desecration
of the market place where it was openly flouted, so in a day of vaster
imperialisms and greater complexity we may take counsel of his
humanitarianism, his open-mindedness, his trust in tolerance and good
will, his democratic faith that held firm in spite of disappointment.
The market place is mighty now as it was then, and liberalism finds as
few friends there; but when did its gods become immortal?
Chapter III • The Frontier in Letters
When the West began to appear in literature in the late twenties and
early thirties, it was the Ohio valley that became the beneficiary of
the new interest, and over the vast region through which flowed the
Beautiful River--as far as the Mississippi and beyond--was thrown the
romance of the settlement. It was a beguiling theme with its background
of dark forests and bloody Indian fights, with its venturesome
flatboats that drifted with the current, its picturesque rivermen,
“half horse, half alligator,” who towed their heavy crafts upstream,
its rude miscellany of settlers who intrusted their families and goods
and cattle to great rafts and set forth hopefully on waters that were
to bear them presumably to the Promised Land--a theme to appeal to
imaginations easily stirred to romance. There was a darker side to
be sure; wrecks in plenty littered the shores, wrecks of fortune and
character and life; outlaws and blackguards thronged the river and
preyed on the adventurers; but in spite of such misadventures the great
movement was invested with dramatic interest, and the Ohio valley
became the particular repository of the romance of the frontier, a
monopoly which later times never despoiled it of and which only the
Golden Coast of California ever remotely rivaled. It was fortunate
in that its early history was recorded by a romanticizing generation
that wove its myths about the wilderness scouts, that delighted in the
picturesque talk of river boatmen and discovered themes for epics in
the founding of new commonwealths.
From the first, therefore, the literature of the new West fell
naturally into the romantic note. The early writers who essayed to deal
with frontier materials were eastern men who proposed to exploit the
romance of the Inland Empire as frankly as their fellow adventurers
were exploiting the material resources. Gradually in their work two
main conceptions crystallized, which came to overshadow all lesser
themes: one localized itself in Kentucky and took form in the poetic
conception of the Dark and Bloody ground; the other associated itself
first with the rivermen but quickly diffused its spirit through the
backwoods and took form in the conception of western humor. The first
was a heritage from the early days when the Indian tribes fought for
their ancient hunting grounds and fell upon the isolated stations with
knife and tomahawk; the second grew up with a later generation that had
penetrated far into the wilderness, where, stimulated by much whisky,
its rough vigor found issue in exaggerated boasting. Each created its
legendary hero about whom popular imagination wove its myths: the
figure of Daniel Boone came to symbolize the heroic qualities of a race
of scouts and backwoodsmen who matched their wits in woodcraft with
the Indians and proved the quality of their Kentucky rifles in many a
brush with the warriors; and the figure of Davy Crockett came to embody
in the popular mind the loquacious eccentricities and exaggerated
wit that were already passing into a literary tradition. Many hands
contributed to the common work: writers as different as James Kirke
Paulding with his _Westward Ho!_, Robert Montgomery Bird with his _Nick
of the Woods_, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker with his _George Balcombe_,
Albert Pike with his _Prose Sketches and Poems_, Augustus Longstreet
with his _Georgia Scenes_, and Joseph G. Baldwin with his _Flush
Times of Alabama and Mississippi_--to name only a few. From such
diverse elements was created the new literature of the West that was
contemporary with the rise of Jacksonian democracy and that gave wide
currency to certain romantic conceptions.
I • The Romantic Frontier
Of this very considerable group of writers the two who earliest
wrote from immediate first-hand knowledge of frontier life were
Timothy Flint, Harvard graduate and missionary, and Judge James Hall,
Pennsylvania lawyer, both of whom spent a considerable portion of their
mature lives in the West. Of Timothy Flint’s restless wanderings and
periodic settlements, at Saint Charles, Missouri, at New Orleans, at
Alexandria on the Red River in Louisiana, at Cincinnati, with frequent
returns to his native Massachusetts and a short editorial experience
in New York City, it is impossible to speak in detail; they suggest,
however, the breadth and intimacy of his knowledge of the West got from
twenty-five years’ experience there from 1815 to his death in 1840.
Few men traveled so widely through the frontier, or carried with them
such keenly observant eyes. He wrote much, conducted for several years
a literary magazine in Cincinnati, was for a short time editor of _The
Knickerbocker Magazine_ on the withdrawal of Charles Fenno Hoffman, and
established a considerable reputation as a representative of western
letters. Much of his work was frankly casual, but his _Recollections
of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings
in the Valley of the Mississippi_, published in 1826, and his four
novels published between 1826 and 1830, make up the first important
contribution to the new literature of the West.
In temperament Timothy Flint seems to have been something of a realist.
In his daily life he was frankly outspoken and critical, often to his
own hurt, and some of the many troubles he met with in his honest
preaching to frontier heathen, resulted from this plain speaking. He
refused to measure life and conduct by the crude western standards,
and the enmities resulting from such refusal brought about a rupture
with the home society that had supported his missionary undertaking.
It was this intellectual honesty that filled his _Recollections_ with
an invaluable body of observation and criticism, and constituted
it an important source-book for later historians. Paulding early
made use of it writing his _Westward Ho!_--published in 1832--and
in his introduction, after paying tribute to Flint’s “picturesque
description,” he went on to say that the work “has not met its deserts,
and he should be highly gratified if this passing notice served in any
way to call public attention to its interesting details.” Unfortunately
the occasional realism of the _Recollections_ gave place in his novels
to romance saturated with sentiment and heavily coated with moralizing.
With a fund of exact information at his disposal he chose to turn
away from reality and project his stories into regions he had visited
only in imagination. _Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot_, deals
with a Southwest far beyond his extremest journeyings; _The Life and
Adventures of Arthur Clenning_ is a romanticized version of Robinson
Crusoe; and _The Shoshonee Valley_ is a romance conceived out of tales
told him by far western travelers, woven into an extravagantly romantic
plot. The only one of his tales that makes use of familiar settings is
_George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or “Don’t Give up the Ship,”_
in which he put some of the materials gathered in his journeyings up
and down the Mississippi, but sentimentalized and moralized out of
all realism. It is a pity that Flint should have fallen in with the
extremest mode of the times, for in many essential respects he was the
best qualified man of the West to write an honest account of a world
just taking form.
The literary reputation of Timothy Flint soon came to be overshadowed
by that of Judge Hall. “Among writers of short narratives, the most
characteristically Western fiction of the time,” remarks a recent
student, “James Hall was clearly preëminent; and he became the
central figure in a kind of school of experimenters in the materials
of frontier life” (Ralph Leslie Rusk, _The Literature of the Middle
Western Frontier_, Vol. I, p. 274). In the early twenties he had ridden
the circuit in Illinois as a very young lawyer, when the settlements
were scattered thinly through the southern portion of the state. At
Vandalia he started the _Illinois Monthly Magazine_, which survived for
two years, when he removed to Cincinnati and established _The Western
Monthly Magazine_, which in the four years from 1832 to 1836 became
one of the “most important of the pioneer period.” “The purpose,” says
the student above quoted, “was not so much to introduce the East to
the West as to make the West conscious of itself” (Rusk, _ibid._, Vol.
I, p. 173). To this end Hall was writing and publishing short tales
and descriptions, and he had already collected a miscellany of prose
and verse by several hands which he issued as an annual, _The Western
Souvenir, a Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_. Thus launched on a
literary career, he wrote in the next twenty years a very considerable
amount, including tales, sketches of manners, history and casual
comment.
His best-known story is probably _Harpe’s Head_, which he later
incorporated with other tales in a volume entitled _Legends of the
West: Sketches Illustrative of the Habits, Occupations, Privations,
Adventures and Sports of the Pioneers of the West_, and published
in 1832. The work proved popular and passed through half a dozen
editions. Sketchy and loose in construction, it belongs to the school
that hovered between the essay and the romance, delighting in the
picturesque, exuding sentiment, and going out of its way to exploit the
pleasantly horrible. It is a mingling of Virginia chivalry and frontier
bravery, woven about a central plot of a daughter of a Virginia house
who removes to Kentucky under tragic circumstances, is abducted by a
roving band of Indians, and subsequently rescued. Additional romantic
interest is sought in the melodramatic deeds of the title hero--a
well-known border ruffian with an insatiable blood-lust who murders his
unsuspecting victims wherever he comes upon them--and in the curious
exploits in rattlesnake killing of Hark Short, a waif from the Carolina
swamps who lives like a fox in his den. The interest of the story
today lies in the pleasantly idealized descriptions of such scenes as
the barbecue and the camp meeting, rather than in the portrayal of
backwoods characters. Although Hall frequently professed his devotion
to realism, there is little evidence of it; occasional figures like
Pete Featherton, whose rifle had been bewitched, and occasional
indulgence in a conventionalized backwoods dialect, serve only to
heighten the somewhat gaudy romance of the whole. Yet even such timid
ventures brought on his head criticism from a Cincinnati editor “for
tiring the reader with vulgar backwoods expressions” (Rusk, _ibid._,
Vol. I, p. 282).
That Hall’s interest in backwoods eccentricities of speech and manner
suffered a heavy handicap from the romantic taste of his readers may
easily be believed. Matter excluded from his tales he sometimes put
into his introductions. Thus in the third edition of _Harpe’s Head_
he analyzed at some length certain characteristics of the crude
pioneers who were creating the psychology of the West--their fondness
for drinking, betting, horse-trading, stump-speaking, swearing.
Particularly it is the exuberance of their picturesque language that
he emphasized, an exuberance that was already becoming a literary
tradition and that flowered in the cento of western folk ways that were
gathered into the Davy Crockett myth. A single passage will suffice to
suggest some of the elements from which Davy was created:
Though usually taciturn in the presence of strangers, [the
frontiersman] is communicative to his friend or guest, has often
strong colloquial powers, with quaint, singular, figurative,
and even eloquent forms of expression. His language, which is
commonly brief, sententious, and abrupt, becomes, when excited by
the interest of the subject or by passion, highly expletive, and
redundant with exaggerated forms and figures of comparison. When
he swears--and he is probably not more given to this exceedingly
vulgar vice than other men--but when he does swear in earnest, his
philology becomes concentrated, and explodes with an appalling
energy, which would have astonished even the celebrated army in
Flanders. (_Ibid._, Introduction, p. xii.)
In his last collection, _The Wilderness and the War Path_, published
in 1846 and including some earlier tales, Hall contributed little that
was new. There is the same heavy romance with touches of realism, and
by way of reply to Bird’s interpretation of the Indian character he
exploits the romantic qualities of the red man; but his failures are
commoner than his successes, and his work as a whole must be regarded
as a sacrifice to the bad taste of his generation. From this judgment,
perhaps, should be excepted his _Romance of American History_, which is
still pleasantly readable.
II • The Realistic Frontier
Far more vital than these literary tales with their heavy coating
of romance are the few realistic sketches--only too rare in those
exuberant days of the high-flown--that preserve the authentic ways
of backwoods life in their rude vernacular. Of such sketches those
that most faithfully reveal the impress of the frontier, preserving
down to the present the note of verisimilitude, are _Georgia Scenes_
by Augustus B. Longstreet, and the _Autobiography of Davy Crockett_,
to which may be added, perhaps, Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of
Alabama and Mississippi_.
1 • Augustus Longstreet • The Georgia Frontier
For some reason no glamour has ever gathered about the Georgia
frontier. It may be that fate conspired against it in bestowing
no idealizing historian to throw a romantic haze over life in the
pine woods. Or perhaps it was the Georgians themselves who did the
commonwealth an evil turn. As a matter of sober fact what could even
romance do with the raw materials that went to the making of this
crude southern Yankee state? How could the most confirmed romantic
discover rare graces in the indigenous Cracker, or weave poetry about
the ubiquitous peddler with his pack of Yankee notions? Any honest
historian could hardly avoid taking into account the ungainly throng
that attended a gander pulling, or depict Ransy Sniffle as other than
a pallid, pot-bellied, clay-eating grotesque. Crude, uncouth, drab,
with primitive passions and unlovely manners, Georgia offered scanty
materials for the most ardent eulogist. Frontier life there ran a
petty round between fist fights and horse races, between politics and
religion. These were the staples of everyday existence, as necessary
to the natural man as whisky and salt pork; and the honest Georgian
preferred his whisky straight and his politics and religion red-hot.
The Jeffersonian hated the Federalist vindictively; and Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Methodist regarded each other malignantly, convinced that
the devil was stoking his fires for the lost neighbor who persisted in
sitting under the wrong preaching. Denominationalism on the Georgia
frontier was as harsh and unforgiving as political partisanship.
Alexander H. Stephens believed that the plain people of Georgia were
the most democratic on the face of the earth, and the kindliest;
yet the pugnacious little democrat was himself nearly butchered by
a democratic neighbor. In depicting such a society realism was the
only honest method; but to make it palatable it must be well seasoned
with humor. If it were garnished with moralizing, so much the better.
There must be no subtleties in the treatment, no literary touches. The
humor must be in the backwoods vernacular, and the preaching open and
aboveboard--frank pulpit-thumping lessons to awaken the surliest sinner.
For such business Gus Longstreet was ideally fitted. A true child of
the Georgia border, he never quite outgrew his early environment.
Born in Augusta in 1790 of New Jersey parents, Holland Dutch but with
a large admixture of English blood,[414] he came of plain stock. A
driving, robust, energetic fellow, never squeamish, with a ready
wit, he was at home amongst the plain people, the greatest wag in
every gathering. He could knock a man down or shoot out a squirrel’s
eye with any champion of them all; he could enter into a dance or a
revival meeting with equal ardor, or take the stump against a seasoned
campaigner. A fellow must be simple-minded who would expect to get the
best of him in swapping horses, or in the way of a practical joke. It
came hard for so vigorous a plebeian to settle down as a substantial
citizen, and the dignified titles that he gathered in the course
of a long and prosperous career--judge, doctor of laws, doctor of
divinity--fitted him somewhat incongruously. On the whole one prefers
the plain Gus Longstreet to Judge Longstreet, but his neighbors, who
thought they knew a man when they saw one, thrust his titles upon him.
Besides he had gone to college and was thereby lifted to a place of
distinction which he could not avoid. The process of scraping off the
bark of the frontier followed orthodox southern lines. A few years’
schooling at Dr. Moses Waddell’s celebrated Academy, where at different
times Calhoun, Crawford, McDuffie, Petigru and Legaré prepared for
college, and two years at Yale, provided him with a stock of rusty
Latin to suffice a college president; and a winter or two at the law
school in Litchfield, Connecticut, following Calhoun’s high example,
furnished him with enough Blackstone to meet the demands of Georgia law
courts. Thus provided intellectually, he went forth boldly to cope with
the Georgia world as he found it.
It was a plebeian world that approved his plebeian qualities. There was
nothing of the southern patrician in Gus Longstreet, nothing of the
ascetic Puritan that marked so deeply men like Calhoun, Legaré, and the
Grimkés. In his strong instinct of acquisitiveness, his canny thrift
that never failed to seize advantage by the forelock, his desire to
get on in the world while serving God, he was a Georgia Yankee, with
an emotional religion that took comfort in discovering that God was
always on his side of any controversy. Yankee also was his knack of
doing many things well enough to impress his less capable neighbors. He
was a frontier jack-of-all-trades, passing easily from one profession
to another, lawyer, newspaper editor, writer, minister, politician,
teacher, and between times busying himself with all sorts of odd jobs,
doing everything readily and nothing thoroughly well. A good talker,
his chief interests were politics, religion, and money-making. He wrote
much in careless haste, apologizing always for the lack of finish; but
except for the sketches which were gathered under the title of _Georgia
Scenes_, he produced nothing that needs to be remembered. At the age of
forty-eight he quitted the law for the Methodist ministry, proved to be
a mediocre preacher, and was soon given the berth of president of Emory
College, a denominational school then recently established at Oxford,
for which his literary reputation and his reputed scholarship seemed to
fit him. Later he was president for a few months of Centenary College,
Louisiana, but found the place uncongenial, resigned, and was chosen
president of the University of Mississippi, where he served seven years
and made full use of the opportunity to speculate in real estate. At
the age of sixty-six he was made president of the University of South
Carolina, where he ruled patriarchally till the school was closed by
the war.
How great a man he was judged to be by his fellow Georgians is hard
for us to realize today. Throughout his later years he was regarded
by his friends as the brightest ornament of Georgia society, a
Christian gentleman who was a model to southern youth, a scholar who
had brought honor to the commonwealth, an author who had silenced
the reproach that the state had produced no literature. Yet it must
be confessed that the Judge shrinks in compass when taken out of his
native environment. Beside John P. Kennedy or Hugh Legaré, he lacks
distinction either of mind or manner; compared with Gilmore Simms he
is only an amateur in letters. His latest biographer[415] has sifted
a mass of material to prove the solid and eminent worth of the man;
yet no impression of intellectual vigor emerges from the analysis;
one must take it on the authority of somewhat incompetent witnesses.
The figure that emerges from the clutter of contemporary estimate is
that of a capable, expansive, middle-class soul, disputatious in the
lordly southern manner, genially domineering, magnificently superior
to logic, given to erecting an imposing structure of convictions on
the slightest of foundations, impatient of contradiction and inclined
to lose his temper when the argument went against him--a witty,
agreeable gentleman, at home amongst mediocre preachers, and an oracle
to admiring friends. He was on terms of intimacy with not a single
first-class mind. He had no intellectual curiosity and was incapable of
rigorous intellectual processes. Yet good fortune had marked him for
her own. A small investment in letters, made at odd moments between
law cases and farming operations, returned him such dividends in the
way of contemporary fame that for forty years thereafter he lived in
the sunshine of a literary reputation. No other American, unless it
were William Wirt, ever drew such ample revenues of popular praise from
a casual investment, and certainly none ever expanded with greater
self-satisfaction. To the end of his life he was the much-sought-after
author of _Georgia Scenes_, and the most ambitious southern magazines
were glad to publish his frequent effusions; in all of which the Judge
delighted, for he was a simple soul and accounted himself an apostle of
southern culture, a mentor of southern taste, and he loved to see his
name in print.
As a man close to the people Longstreet reflected the current Georgia
views on politics. He was an idolatrous admirer of Calhoun and George
McDuffie. The former he rated “above William Pitt, or any other premier
who ever lived before or since his day” (Wade, _Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet_, p. 124) and the latter he regarded as “hardly inferior to
him in anything.” Calhoun’s innate Hebraisms, so deeply imbued with a
patriarchal spirit, fitted to a nicety his own Hebraized conception of
a Jeffersonian order. Writing of Calhoun, in after years, Longstreet
remarked with evident approval:
I believe that he regarded the government of the children of
Israel in the wilderness, the most perfect that ever existed on
earth. Be that as it may, he called my attention to it more than
once as exactly the government ours ought to be, or was intended
to be. “There,” said he, “each tribe had its place on the march
and in the camp, each managed its own concerns in its own way,
neither interfered in the slightest degree, with the private
affairs of another, nor did their common head interfere with any of
them in any matters, save such as were of equal interest to all,
but unmanageable by them as separate and distinct communities.”
(_Ibid._, p. 60.)
The background of his political thought was Jeffersonian agrarian.
He was always a countryman at heart, and his dearest interests were
agricultural. But he seems to have been quite unread in political
theory, and probably had never heard of John Taylor’s economic
principles. Suffering from an incurable political itch, he was one of
the earliest and most ardent of states-rights advocates. He went for
Nullification before either Calhoun or McDuffie had espoused it; and
he followed his premises through to the logical end of secession. But
with the growth of northern Abolitionism his Jeffersonianism began
to disintegrate. Garrison’s appeal to equalitarianism and the rights
of man aroused all his southern prejudices. A philosophy that could
be turned against the sacred institution was no philosophy for a
southern gentleman, and like Calhoun he repudiated the whole French
liberal philosophy that he had imbibed in his youth. He even went so
far as to play with Calhoun’s doctrine of economic representation.
Writing to President Lamar, of Texas, in the late thirties, he said,
“A government should have a legislative assemblage to represent
each of its large economic interests, one, say, agricultural, one
manufacturing, one commercial. No bill not acceptable to all three
of these assemblages should become a law” (_ibid._, p. 138). But in
defense of slavery he argued as a minister rather than an economist. He
declined to consider it an economic question; he would not discuss it
as a social question; political theories, he believed, had nothing to
do with it. The right to hold slaves he regarded as a moral question
to be determined exclusively by the authority of the Bible, and on
such a question he professed to speak with assurance. He was vastly
annoyed at the Abolitionists’ unchristian appeal to the old doctrine
of equalitarianism, and in 1845 he wrote angrily, “Will not some
of you accept my ideas and then argue through the question on that
basis, without taking recourse to the Declaration of Independence or
throwing up a breastwork out of the long-forsaken rubbish of the Social
Contract, or bewildering your pursuers in the mazes of metaphysical
subtlety?” (_ibid._, p. 282). His religion was deeply involved in
the institution of slavery, and it seemed to him uncharitable for
an intellectual like Theodore Parker to question the sufficiency of
a southern minister’s texts, or to drag him beyond his intellectual
depths. So exasperated did he grow that finally he would have no
fellowship with northern Methodists, and was a prime mover in the great
schism that rent the church into sectional branches. Abolitionism
seemed to him hypocrisy and blasphemy and as a minister of Christ
he could not hold fellowship with those who rejected the Master’s
word. After the war, in reviewing the long controversy, his Christian
pugnacity flared up anew, and he flung at the northern churches the
accusation that they had been “the most man-astounding, God-offending
foes that we had” (_ibid._, p. 367).
There could be no more telling commentary on the literary poverty of
_ante-bellum_ Georgia than the extraordinary popularity of Longstreet’s
sketches. Written for the most part between the years 1832 and 1836,
while he was publishing the _State Rights Sentinel_, they profess to
be authentic documents of frontier life in Georgia in the early years
of the century, and the deliberate note of realism contributes to the
impression of authenticity. The love of the romantic that spread like
the plague among southern men of letters during the long reign of Sir
Walter, fortunately did not infect the robust nature of Longstreet.
The best of the sketches are spun out of the vernacular; they are
as objective as Longstreet could make them--conscious studies in
the local, done with obvious delight in butternut ways and frontier
dialect. The quality of the work improves as he draws nearer the
backwoods, and comes upon the unregenerate Cracker in his native
habitat. There his humor has free play, exuding in practical jokes and
ready repartee, in boyish pranks and homely idiom. And there he finds
characters to his liking and bits of realistic drama. If one were to
single out the sketch that is most indigenous to the Georgia frontier,
the truest local document, the choice might well fall on _The Fight_,
an account of a bloody meeting between backwoods gladiators brought
on by skillful diplomacy of Ransy Sniffle, a grotesque clay-eater and
Longstreet’s favorite character. Other excellent sketches are _The
Gander Pulling_, _The Shooting Match_, _Georgia Theatrics_, _The Horse
Swap_, _The Militia Company Drill_--stories that throw an unromantic
light on the ways of the Georgia Cracker. Longstreet was as uncritical
as his readers and his frequent failures are glaring in their badness.
Perhaps the worst of the sketches are the absurd _The “Charming
Creature” as a Wife_, a crude sermon on the folly of marrying a lazy
woman; _The Song_, an overdone burlesque, and the puerile _The Debating
Society_, a heavy practical joke which for some inexplicable reason Poe
thought the best of the whole.
Slight though the sketches in _Georgia Scenes_ are, they embody
solid merits; they are not literary and they are quite unaffected by
Irving and the exploitation of the picturesque. Realism was only too
rare in those days of high-flown romance, and how honestly realistic
was Longstreet’s work is revealed by a comparison with James Hall’s
contemporary stories of the West, such as _Harpe’s Head_, or even with
Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_. After all Gus Longstreet was an original,
and he set the style that was followed in a long series of frontier
sketches, and established the tradition of frontier humor that flowered
at last in Mark Twain.
2 • The Davy Crockett Myth
_The Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee_
was woven from the same stuff that Longstreet made use of, but the
fabric is of far better texture. It is the great classic of the
southern frontier, far more significant than _Georgia Scenes_, far
more human and vital. Realistic in method, it is romantic in spirit.
In its backwoods vernacular it purveys the authentic atmosphere of
the cabin and the canebrake; it exhibits the honesty, the wit, the
resourcefulness, the manly independence of a coonskin hero; it
reveals, in short, under the rough exterior of a shiftless squatter and
bear-hunter, qualities that are sterling in every society where manhood
is held in repute. It is an extraordinary document, done so skillfully
from life that homespun becomes a noble fabric and the crudest
materials achieve the dignity of an epic.
The thing had long been waiting to be done. The literary romantics had
tried their hand at the frontier materials and had failed, and then
came a realist of the Georgia school who used the stuff as he found it
and created a lasting document. A practiced writer collaborated with a
picturesque talker, and the fame of the Tennessee Congressman was made.
Romantic America found a new hero and Davy Crockett reaped a surprising
reward. He had the good fortune to preëmpt the romance of the
backwoods, to file on an unsurveyed tract of western life, and when the
lines were run it was found that his claim embraced all that was native
and picturesque along the Mississippi frontier. Popular imagination
seized upon him and endowed the mighty hunter of the canebrakes
with the fugitive romance that had been gathering for years. He was
erected into a mythical figure that drew to itself the unappropriated
picturesque that sprang spontaneously from the crude western life. How
this astonishing result came about, how good fortune came to single out
Davy Crockett for her smiles, offers a somewhat amusing commentary on
the ways of an unsophisticated generation.
That in its later development, if not in the beginning, the Davy
Crockett myth was a deliberate fabrication scarcely admits of doubt,
nor that its immediate purpose was frankly partisan. It did not
spring from the soil of the Tennessee canebrakes; it was created at
Washington. It was not the spontaneous product of popular imagination;
it was the clever work of politicians. The successive stages through
which it passed in its triumphant progress can be traced fairly
accurately with the aid of a little historical imagination. Roughly
they were three; the exploitation of Davy’s canebrake waggery, the
exploitation of his anti-Jackson spleen, and the exploitation of
his dramatic death at the Alamo. The first phase is embodied in the
_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee_
(1833); the second, in _An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North
and Down East_ (1835), and _The Life of Martin Van Buren_ (1835); and
the last, in _Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas_ (1836).
Midway between the first and second stages stands _A Narrative of the
Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee_ (1834), which may
be accepted in the main as authentic autobiography. None of the five
was written by Crockett. He probably had a hand in the first in spite
of his repudiation of the work, for most of the important facts of his
life and the language of many of the picturesque episodes were taken
from its pages to be reproduced in the _Narrative_. The _Tour_ and
_Martin Van Buren_ were claimed by him and were certainly done under
his eye and with his help, but the _Exploits_ is quite as certainly
sheer fabrication, done by a hack writer after Davy’s death. It was
the politicians who contributed most to the success of the myth. They
exploited Davy as a convenient weapon against Jackson, saw their work
prosper beyond all expectation, get out of their hands, enlarge itself
to a cento of backwoods romance and pass into folklore. It was an
unforeseen outcome that must have been vastly amusing to those who set
the thing going.
The early thirties, it will be remembered, were robustious times when
broadcloth in politics had suddenly gone out of style and homespun had
come in. The new coonskin democracy had descended upon Washington,
and picturesque figures provided with ample plugs of tobacco were
making themselves free with Congressional perquisites. Nothing like
it had been seen before in the city of dignified politicians, and the
spectacle must have delighted the wags of the capital. But to the
members of the overthrown dynasty the Jacksonian votes which these
picturesque backwoodsmen represented were very far from amusing. The
loss of desirable offices was a hard lesson that taught them the need
of catering to this new element of the great American democracy. In
their remunerative occupation as representatives of the prosperous and
genteel constituencies of the East, the old-school politicians had too
long overlooked the power of the plain voter which the progress of
manhood suffrage was daily increasing. Hence began a desperate campaign
to counteract the Jacksonian appeal. The coonskin vote could no longer
be ignored and shrewd plans were laid to capture the backwoods for the
new Whig party. The program of internal improvements was well enough
in its way, and the old Revolutionary cry of the sword and the purse
might prove useful; but the party needed a picturesque figure to draw
the coonskin democracy to its standard. Men rather than principles
appealed to the West, self-made men, speaking the western vernacular,
imbibing western views with their whisky, uncorrupted by broadcloth.
This explains the tremendous Whig hurrah over log cabins and hard cider
that marked a later campaign; and this explains likewise the singular
fate that overtook Davy Crockett, the bear-hunter from the canebrakes.
Davy had first come to Washington during Adams’ administration, and in
four years’ loafing and boasting at the Congressional bar had achieved
some distinction as a picturesque original with the tongue of a wag.
He spoke rarely in the House and the few records in the _Congressional
Debates_ are sadly commonplace. Until after he broke with Jackson his
political influence at Washington was negligible. But that fortunate
break was the beginning of his fame. He had unwittingly made himself.
He had become a valuable asset to the Whig party. To find a native
Tennesseean, a real coonskin democrat, one who had served under Jackson
and been sent to Congress as a Jacksonian, as authentic a Westerner as
the General himself, at bitter personal odds with Old Hickory, ready to
talk out in meeting and eager to repudiate the latter’s attack upon the
Bank, was a find indeed to the hard-pressed Whigs; and they would have
been no politicians if they had not used what God sent. In consequence
Davy soon found himself talked about. His picturesque eccentricities
began to be exploited. His rugged western honesty was applauded; his
shrewd backwoods intelligence was praised; his frontier humor was
skillfully touched up; his characteristic motto, “go ahead,” was seized
upon as an expression of the progressive spirit of the lusty young Whig
party. In short he was speedily turned into a myth by ways not unknown
in our time, and sent forth as useful campaign material in the fight
for political righteousness. Davy was vastly surprised at his sudden
rise to fame. He had never realized how great a man he was; but he
accepted it as an agreeable fact and went ahead.
The work had already begun with the publication of the _Sketches and
Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett_, that came from the clever pen
of some journalist with a liking for the new vein of backwoods humor.
A Whig bias runs through the pages, but the book is more a character
sketch than a political document. The first embroiderings laid upon
the original homespun are seen in an extravagance of picturesque
language--an extravagance quite lacking in the more realistic
_Narrative_. A well-known passage professing to relate an occurrence
on Davy’s first trip to Washington will serve to reveal an early stage
of the myth-making process--the fathering upon Davy of a type of humor
then being exploited by clever young writers:
I was _rooting_ my way to the fire, not in a good humour, when some
fellow staggered towards me, and cried out, “Hurrah for Adams!”
Said I, “Stranger, you had better hurrah for hell, and praise your
own country.” Said he, “And who are you?”
“I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods,
half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the
snapping-turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon
a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey
locust; can whip my weight in wild-cats--and if any gentleman
pleases, for a ten-dollar bill, he may throw in a panther--hug a
bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.”
(_Ibid._, Chapter XIII.)
The touching up of the picturesque in the _Sketches_ seems to have been
a little too much for Davy, who resented the note of clownishness; but
he was not the man to permit undue modesty to blight so agreeable a
myth in its tender stage. He loved to swagger in the public eye too
much for that, and he joined heartily with his new political friends
to clothe it in more dignified dress. His incredible egotism was
aroused and he swallowed the Whig bait, hook, line and sinker. He began
to take himself seriously and set about the business of propagating
the myth. He conceived the plan of issuing in his own name books
which he humorously claimed to have written in the same way that the
President wrote his state papers. Some wag having suggested his name
for the presidency to succeed Jackson, Davy was at great pains to
advertise the fact to the world. To link himself with Jackson in the
public eye and to contrast his own rugged honesty with the latter’s
reputed abandonment of democratic principles, was the single purpose
of these Whig documents. The autobiography was quickly followed by
the _Tour_, and this by the _Life of Martin Van Buren_, each more
obvious propaganda than the last, and frankly designed to undermine
the popularity of the President and his advisers with the coonskin
democracy. Who the writer was that lent his pen to the work has never
been determined. A recent student has adduced testimony to prove that
it was Augustin S. Clayton, a Georgia Congressman, a ready talker and
writer, a man of sound culture, a close friend of Longstreet and fond
of the backwoods vernacular. The argument is plausible, but the case
is not established.[416] In the _Life of Martin Van Buren_ the mask
is dropped and all the malicious gossip of the Congressional lobby is
poured out on “little Van,” the “heir-apparent to the ‘government.’”
The backwoods character is retained only in an occasional coarseness
or deliberate lapse of grammar inserted in a text that is written
with vigor and skill. The book is far less amusing than Kennedy’s
_Quodlibet_. Davy is pretty much lost out of its pages and its
contribution to the myth was probably slight.
It is in the _Tour_, on the title page of which Davy formally accepts
the brevet dignity of Colonel conferred upon him by the writer of the
_Sketches_, that the myth expands more genially. A clever and amusing
campaign document, it is a masterpiece of Whig strategy to gull the
simple. The loquacious Davy joined heartily with his managers to cash
in on his reputation. His egotism was played upon at every turn and
he was quite unconscious that he had become a mere cat’s-paw to pull
Whig chestnuts out of the coals. He was paraded at meetings with
Daniel Webster, given great dinners, applauded for his rustic wit and
homespun honesty, presented with a fine rifle; and he seems never to
have realized how grossly he was being exploited. His self-esteem was
proof against disillusionment and he accepted the applause greedily.
Wherever he went he was taken in charge by the young Whigs. Everything
was carefully arranged beforehand. News was sent forward that he was
coming; crowds were gathered to greet him; publicity was attended to;
morning, noon, and night he was invited to speak, and the speeches were
carefully reprinted--not the authentic speeches, probably, but good
campaign material nevertheless. It was a gratifying experience and Davy
swelled up like a turkey cock.
As a result of his tour he was immensely strengthened in his new
political faith and became a staunch nationalist. When he first went
to Congress he was anti-tariff and had won his seat on that issue; but
he was invited to Lowell, shown an idyllic picture of contented and
prosperous mill-hands, dined, given a prepared table of statistics
proving how industrialism “is calculated not only to give individual
happiness and prosperity, but to add to our national wealth and
prosperity,” and bidden Godspeed in the work of spreading the true
gospel among the honest, simpleminded and patriotic frontiersmen.
After having been presented by Mr. Lawrence with a fine suit of
domestic broadcloth, Davy would have been an ingrate not to vote for a
protective tariff. But alas! the opportunity never came. A backwoods
constituency that had never been dined by Lowell capitalists and
had little use for fine broadcloth, a constituency that persisted
in throwing up coonskin caps for Old Hickory in spite of Lowell
statistics, resented his apostasy from the Democratic faith and at
the next election invited him to stay in the canebrakes. The gorgeous
bubble was pricked. Davy had expanded under prosperity and could not
now endure adversity. In a fit of anger he quitted his family and the
state of Tennessee, went off on the mad chase to Texas and in March
of the next year fell at the Alamo. Vain, ignorant Davy Crockett! A
simple-minded frontiersman, he went down to Jericho and fell among
thieves, and when they were done with him they left him despoiled
politically but invested with a fame that has grown to this day. After
his death other hands took up the work, wove around his name the humor
and romance of the frontier, and made of him a legendary figure. It
would have pleased Davy to know how the myth had prospered.[417]
Yet from this crude romanticism, this picturesque propaganda of
coonskin days, one solid contribution remains--the autobiography. It
is a striking bit of realism, done after the manner of the Longstreet
school. There is politics in it, of course. Written just after Davy had
gone through a bitter campaign from which he had emerged triumphant, it
is a bold pronouncement that he wears no collar marked “My dog--Andrew
Jackson.” In the campaign of 1830 he had been defeated by the
Jacksonians, but two years later he “made a mash” of his opponents, and
the elation of that victory adds a certain cockiness to his habitual
swagger. But it is much more than a political tract; it is a vital
frontier document. The main facts of his biography, as set down there,
may be accepted as true, and the general picture of backwoods existence
in Tennessee; but the humor has been elaborated and the effect of the
picturesque heightened by his collaborator. Such added touches were
only natural. The real Davy was very far from romantic. An honest
picture of the Tennessee democracy in its native habitat would reveal
few idyllic features. It was a slovenly world and Davy was pretty
much of a sloven. Crude and unlovely in its familiar details, with its
primitive courtships and shiftless removals, its brutal Indian campaign
and fierce hunting sprees, its rough equality, its unscrupulous
politics, its elections carried by sheer impudence and whisky, the
autobiography reveals the backwoods Anglo-Irishman as an uncivilized
animal, responding to simple stimuli, yet with a certain rough vigor of
character. Wastefulness was in the frontier blood, and Davy was a true
frontier wastrel. In the course of successive removals he traversed the
length of Tennessee, drinking, hunting, talking, speculating, begetting
children, scratching a few acres of land to “make his crap,” yet living
for the most part off the country; and his last squatting place on the
Obion River, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, was as primitive
as the first. Willing to endure almost incredible hardships to obtain
a keg of gunpowder to celebrate Christmas, risking his skin to kill a
bear with a butcher knife, he was never much given to mending fences
or enlarging his plow lands. He was a hunter rather than a farmer,
and the lust of killing was in his blood. With his pack of hounds he
slaughtered with amazing efficiency. A later generation would call
him a game-hog. His family must have had Gargantuan appetites to have
consumed one-tenth of the meat that fell before his beloved Betsy; the
rest went to the dogs and hogs and buzzards. His hundred and five bears
in a single season, his six deer shot in one day while pursuing other
game--two of which were left hanging in the woods--serve to explain
why the rich hunting grounds of the Indians were swept so quickly
bare of game by the white invaders. Davy was but one of thousands who
were wasting the resources of the Inland Empire, destroying forests,
skinning the land, slaughtering the deer and bear, the swarms of
pigeons and turkey, the vast buffalo herds. Davy the politician is a
huge western joke, but Davy the wastrel was a hard, unlovely fact.
Strip away the shoddy romance that has covered up the real man and the
figure that emerges is one familiar to every backwoods gathering, an
assertive, opinionated, likable fellow, ready to fight, drink, dance,
shoot or brag, the biggest frog in a very small puddle, first among the
Smart Alecks of the canebrakes. Davy was a good deal of a wag, and the
best joke he ever played he played upon posterity that has swallowed
the myth whole and persists in setting a romantic halo on his coonskin
cap. Yet in spite of the romantic machinery the play turns out to be
broad farce.
Footnotes
[414] The family name of Langestraet was given an English form by his
grandfather.
[415] John Donald Wade, _Augustus Baldwin Longstreet_.
[416] See John Donald Wade, “The Authorship of David Crockett’s
_Autobiography_,” _Georgia Historical Quarterly_, September, 1922.
[417] Among the miscellaneous material gathered together in the
_Exploits and Adventures in Texas_ and attributed to Davy is
Longstreet’s _Georgia Theatrics_, lifted verbatim from _Georgia Scenes_.
Book Two • The Mind of the Middle East
The literature of the Middle East during the years of the romantic
revolution, unlike contemporary letters north and south, revealed
no coalescing unity of spirit and purpose; it was rather the casual
and somewhat fortuitous expression of two cities, both of which were
divided by language and custom into fairly equal groups, and neither
of which had developed a homogeneous native culture. There were no
intellectual hinterlands to Philadelphia and New York, as there were
to Boston and Charleston and Richmond; no common ideals spread over
broad areas, no dominant schools of thought, no branching roots by
which a common literature might be nourished. In consequence it may,
perhaps, be reckoned a misuse of terms to speak of the mind of the
Middle East, as one may speak of the mind of New England or of the
Old Dominion, where in spite of pronounced variations of individual
temperament a common culture had set its mark on the literature. There
were few common ties and few intellectual sympathies to bind together
the men of letters of New York or Philadelphia. Certainly Irving and
Paulding and Cooper and Melville and Whitman reveal none of that strong
community of taste and purpose that marks the Concord group, or the
Boston-Cambridge group, or even the Charleston group. They expressed
no common culture, they had been disciplined in no common faith,
and they were held together by no common economic or political or
intellectual interests; as a result their writing is a frank expression
of individual temperament and taste, unfettered by schools, drawing its
nourishment from no common soil. They stand on their own feet, and to
understand them requires no critical examination of a complex cultural
background. And yet this very diversity may prove to be symptomatic of
the hurrying changes that the rise of the middle class was bringing
to America--to the city perhaps even more dramatically than to the
country. The confusions and diversity of thought that mark the
literature of Philadelphia and New York may, perhaps, most adequately
suggest the mercurial temper of the revolutionary transition from the
eighteenth century to the nineteenth, of which the romantic spirit was
the natural expression.
Chapter I • The Old Capital
I
In the year 1800 one might well have expected Philadelphia to retain
indefinitely its proud ascendency as the cultural capital of America.
For decades no other colonial city had come near to rivaling it as a
pleasant center of wealth and refinement. Its society was accounted the
politest and most agreeable in America, and during the Revolutionary
War young British officers had found its hospitable drawing-rooms
an agreeable substitute for London clubs. It had long prided itself
on its culture and it was on chatty terms with the fine arts, with
books and music and painting, with actors and plays and playhouses.
It was the recognized center of the publishing business, and its busy
presses turned out books and magazines and newspapers for remote
colonial readers. Ambitious young men were drawn to it as by a magnet,
and Matthew Carey from Ireland and William Cobbett from England
were outstanding figures amongst the many who found Philadelphia as
attractive as Franklin had earlier found it. Certainly it was the least
provincial spot in America in 1800, managing to keep abreast of the
latest English fashions in letters as well as smallclothes; and when
the supercilious Tom Moore favored the city with his presence in the
summer of 1804, he found there the companionship which in some measure
compensated for the meanness of the rest of America, where he professed
to see:
One dull chaos, one unfertile strife,
Betwixt half-polish’d and half-barbarous life,
Where every ill the ancient world can brew
Is mixed with every grossness of the new.[418]
The pronounced intellectual stir expressed itself not only in
_belles lettres_, and in the scientific experiments of Franklin
and Rittenhouse, but more adequately still in politics. Political
disputation would seem, indeed, to have been the common Philadelphia
passion. Party forces were more equally divided than in Boston. From
the beginnings of the Revolutionary disputes Philadelphia had produced
notable disputants on both sides--pamphleteers like Joseph Galloway
and John Dickinson, and satirists like Joseph Stansbury and Francis
Hopkinson. In the succeeding decades partisan pens had augmented rather
than abated their vigor. During Washington’s administration the French
Revolution shook Philadelphia as it shook no other American city, and
the fierce battle between Federalist and Jacobin was waged with amazing
fury and limitless invective. The deadly journalistic duel between
Freneau and Fenno in their two _Gazettes_ was reflected in the equally
bitter duel of couplets between Matthew Carey and William Cobbett. If
Philadelphia was not more catholic than Boston, it was at least better
informed on party questions, for clever writers were daily flinging
their arguments at its head. So long as the political capital of the
nation remained in Philadelphia the city was clearly the place for the
young American to sharpen his wits, inform his mind, and quicken his
literary enthusiasm.
Economically the future of the city seemed equally bright. A younger
generation of speculative merchants had taken the place of the older
conservatives, and great fortunes were being made with a rapidity
before unknown. When title to the western lands passed from the crown
to the new republic, Philadelphia merchants took the lead in land
speculation, and Robert Morris entered upon a spectacular career that
profoundly impressed his generation. The city became the chief center
of land speculation to which western and southern investors looked.
Economic opportunities increased with the setting up of the new
government, and the stir of national politics increased the general
activity. With the establishment of the Bank, Philadelphia became the
financial capital of the country, receiving and disbursing the monies
of the government and attracting outside funds for investment. The
decade of the nineties was its golden age. Then came the removal of the
seat of the Federal government to Washington, and the gay little city
underwent a swift eclipse. It was an unwilling victim to the topography
of the North American continent. Between it and the Inland Empire,
on which rested its future economic expansion, lay the Appalachian
mountain range. To be sure, the opening of the Pittsburgh turnpike
seemed to promise that Philadelphia should become the shipping port
for the Ohio valley; but the law of gravity sent the produce of the
back-country downstream to New Orleans, rather than upstream to the
East. Mountains were a serious barrier then to cheap transportation,
and in consequence the contributory hinterland to Philadelphia was
narrowly restricted, and with the rise of the more fortunately situated
New York her economic ascendency was lost past recovery.
A like unforeseen fate overtook the cultural aspirations of the
ambitious little city. In the year 1799 Timothy Pickering, Secretary
of State in Adams’ cabinet, invited to Philadelphia as his secretary
Joseph Dennie, a young Boston lawyer who had achieved a wide reputation
as a writer of Addisonian essays; and with his coming the literary
vigor of Philadelphia flared up in a last brilliant blaze. He
established _The Port Folio_, gathered a club of congenial spirits, and
gained an extraordinary reputation throughout the country at large.
Dennie was a fierce Federalist who hated French Jacobinism with more
than the ardor of his party, and he was encouraged by Tom Moore, who
wrote,
Long may you hate the Gallic dross that runs
O’er your fair country and corrupts its sons.
But with the swift decay of Federalism Dennie’s own fortunes fell into
a like decay, and with the suspension of _The Port Folio_ in 1809 the
golden age of Philadelphia came to a definite end. Though it long
retained its primacy as a publishing center, and though later _Godey’s
Lady’s Book_ became almost a national institution, its intellectual
vigor lessened, and its literary leadership passed to other cities. It
succumbed to the tastes of Victorianism and became the acknowledged
home of “female genius” that for years fed the American reading public
on cambric tea. It enjoyed no such renaissance as came to Boston and
Charleston, and ambitious young writers abandoned it for more promising
fields. While other cities were caught up in the swirl of romantic
expansion that followed the War of 1812, Philadelphia remained content
with the ways of the eighteenth century, immersed in an old-fashioned
culture. With its geographical position disqualifying it to reap the
harvest of the westward movement, and with no Merrimac falls to invite
industrial development on a great scale, its fate was sealed. It had
been a delightful capital for an older America, but it was too narrowly
environed, too straitened in potential resources for exploitation, to
become the capital of a more expansive and ambitious generation.
II
Yet it enjoyed a brief moment of literary creativeness before the hand
of fate finally settled upon it. In the twilight of the eighteenth
century the new liberalisms that were turmoiling Europe found their
way to Philadelphia, and for the moment it seemed as if the city were
to lead the thought of America in its venture into new fields. It was
a convenient port for the unloading of foreign romanticisms, and under
the stimulus of national politics the demand for such commodities was
greatly increased. Certainly in no other American city did the French
upheaval quicken so sympathetic a ferment, and with this ferment came
a more romantic spirit in letters. The English pre-romantics found
there responsive readers. In the verse of young Philadelphians began to
appear a note of the vague, the mysterious, the melancholy, echoes of
Gray and Cowper and Ossian, as a pleasant relief from vigorous satire
as practiced by the Hartford Wits. But it was in the field of fiction
that the new spirit most adequately revealed itself, and particularly
in the work of a young Philadelphian who had broken wholly with the
Federalism that immured the sympathies of young poets like William
Cliffton, and welcomed the romantic philosophies then being formulated
by radical thinkers in France and England.
Brockden Brown was fortunately spared the fate that might well have
been his if circumstances had not determined otherwise. As a boy he
had meditated epics on romantic historical figures, inspired perhaps
by Dwight and Barlow; but from so profitless a career he was saved by
an early introduction to overseas fashions. By William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft he was influenced as profoundly as was young William
Ellery Channing a few years afterward, and with like results. Later
generations have too carelessly forgotten how persuasive to young
intellectuals, a century or more ago, was the philosophy of Godwin. To
generous minds there was something vastly attractive in his confident
appeal to reason and justice; and to a new world and a new venture
in government it came with double appeal. How could the republican
experiment better justify itself than by establishing justice in
the new social order--justice for men and justice for women who had
too long suffered under narrow handicaps? It was certainly an ideal
worth serious consideration--particularly since the French school had
suggested that the germinal source of social injustice must be sought
in institutions rather than in the nature of man. It was natural enough
for gentlemen who profited by social wrong to charge that injustice was
inherent in human nature--that man’s innate selfishness was to blame
for the ills of society. But the new thinkers were of an inquiring turn
of mind, and under their critical scrutiny the old conception was seen
to rest on a perversion of fact. Gentlemen had got the cart before the
horse. The crying evils of civilization, when analyzed, were traceable
to vicious environment, to social and political maladjustments; not
to human nature. The mind of the infant is plastic. Very well. If it
is molded by social environment, why is it so often misshapen and
perverted to base purposes, if institutions are not at fault? why may
it not be molded to nobler ends under more beneficent institutions?
Reason is a common possession; the ideal of justice is a common ideal.
The evil genius that has hitherto thwarted their benevolent work is
the overgrown political state, debased to selfish ends. Once let the
beneficent sway of social instincts supersede the exploiting machinery
of the political state, and reason must conduct to justice. The heart
of man is sound. Let it be free to follow its natural promptings and
war must give way to peace, the selfish struggle of classes disappear
in a common brotherhood.
To an ardent young American like Brockden Brown, with the Hamiltonian
struggle for power before his eyes, such a philosophy must have come
with immense appeal. America confronted a future unmortgaged to the
past; why should it repeat the old follies and mistakes that had
reduced Europe to its present level? Here the pressure of vicious
institutions was light as yet. Here the appeal to reason and justice
was less hampered by selfish preëmptions. Let social commendation be
bestowed on the uncorrupted heart, on generous impulses, on native
integrity of character. Let education be a natural unfolding of humane
instincts, not a sharpening of wits to overreach one’s fellows. Let
rewards go to frank, outspoken truth, rather than to chicanery and
deceit. Inspired by such sentiments, Brockden Brown proposed to
make fiction serve social ends. He would spread the gospel of Mary
Wollstonecraft and Godwin by means of popular tales. The views of
the former he elaborated in _Alcuin; A Dialogue_, which in the year
1798 presented for the consideration of the American people the
Wollstonecraft feminism in such passages as this:
Marriage is an union founded on free and mutual consent. It
cannot exist without friendship. It cannot exist without personal
fidelity. As soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous, it ceases
to be just. This is the sum. If I were to talk for months I could
add nothing to the completeness of the definition.
But it is in _Arthur Mervyn_ that he gives his fullest pronouncement
of what he conceives must be done in America. He takes his hero fresh
from the plowtail, one of nature’s noblemen, and traces his triumphant
course through the thick of sordid intrigue to a happy end. Generous
in instincts, impulsive in sociability, responsive to suffering,
hating injustice, loving the pure and disinterested, Arthur Mervyn
is a Godwinian figure drawn to captivate the imagination with the
social ideal. It is not so much the plot of the story that reveals
the enormous influence of Godwin--patent as the likeness is to _Caleb
Williams_, but rather the expansive nature of the title hero, whose
instincts bid him espouse justice, and whose life is an implied
criticism of all that is sordid and mean.
With the political romanticism of his work was joined a literary
romanticism that likewise came from England, where it was muddying
the stream of English fiction and turning it aside from the vigorous
realism of the middle eighteenth century. The movement that Paulding
dubbed the “blood-pudding school” was one of the by-products of the
romantic development that ran a far more disastrous course in America
than in England, distorting the growth of native fiction for half
a century. It was perhaps unfortunate for the American novel that
_Wieland_ should have been Brockden Brown’s most finished work, for
it contributed in consequence more powerfully to the spread of the
melodramatic. Lacking his strain of rationalism, other writers reveled
increasingly in the luridly picaresque, till the popular taste was so
debauched that Gilmore Simms found it well-nigh impossible to struggle
against it. For this of course Brown was not to blame; yet his gross
romanticisms of manner persisted long after his Godwinian romanticisms
had faded out of the popular mind, if indeed they ever found lodgment
there.
III
Brockden Brown’s career was in a sense symbolic of the fate of his
native city--a few brilliant years and then a swift decline. Death cut
him down before he fulfilled his promise. Something of a like fate
befell his most brilliant successor, Robert Montgomery Bird, probably
the ablest man of letters that Philadelphia produced. Caught up by
the romantic movement at the beginning of his precocious career, he
plunged into dramatic writing and from 1830 to 1834, between the ages
of twenty-four and twenty-eight, he wrote four plays for Edwin Forrest,
one of which, _The Gladiator_, met with extraordinary success, both
in this country and in England; and another, _The Broker of Bogota_,
kept the stage for years. At the age of thirty he gave over the writing
of plays and turned to other fields. The explanation of so unusual a
course, according to a recent historian, is not far to seek. He had
been overreached by Forrest, and after parting with his manuscripts
to the actor, the playwright found himself in the condition of the
farmer who after shipping his potatoes to market discovers himself to
be in debt to the commission merchant.[419] That he determined to try
a different crop was natural enough, but unfortunate for the American
drama.
Of his subsequent ventures into the field of romantic fiction, one at
least was an extraordinary success, rivaling if not surpassing _The
Gladiator_ in popular favor. _Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_
still remains one of the few outstanding tales of the Kentucky
settlement. Published in Philadelphia in 1837, it has been reissued in
successive editions, more than twenty in all down to the present. It
was translated into German in 1838, into Dutch in 1877, and into Polish
in 1905. There is abundant reason for its popularity. It is a story of
calculating revenge, done with extraordinary vividness and set against
a romantic background. A frontier Quaker, trusting in the spirit of
good will, finds his non-resistance futile; he is set upon by Indians,
his family murdered before his eyes, and himself scalped and left for
dead beside his burnt cabin. Recovering, he sets forth on a fierce
career. Under the mask of a non-resistant, so effectively worn as to
awaken the contempt of the frontier Indian-haters, he became a hunter
of men, and his secret passages through the wilderness leave no other
trail than the marked bodies of slaughtered warriors. The Jibbenainosay
is an uncanny figure who strikes with appalling suddenness, a Nemesis
that fills the hearts of border Indians with terror and turns their
dreams to nightmares--one of the most striking and fearful figures
in our early fiction. The Indians whom he pursues so remorselessly
are depicted as thorough savages. In describing them Bird has put all
his romanticisms aside. There is no sentimentalizing of the noble
red man in the brisk pages of _Nick of the Woods_; the warriors are
dirty drunken louts, filled with an unquenchable blood-lust, whom
the frontiersman kills with as little compunction as he would kill a
rattlesnake. The ugly feud that so long soiled the Border is depicted
with almost startling frankness, and through its worst phases moves the
figure of Bloody Nathan, professing to be a man of peace whilst cutting
an appalling lot of notches in his gun, an epileptic who perhaps
deceives even himself.
If one likes stirring action that is certain to end in blood-letting,
there is good foraging in _Nick of the Woods_, despite its excesses
of conventional romance. And there is much else as well. Bird had
evidently studied his western materials with some care, and he did
his part to popularize certain conceptions that literature had come
to associate with the Ohio valley. The character of Ralph Stackpole
is clearly suggestive of the wild antics supposed to be common to the
river boatmen. “The history of this wild scape-gallows,” says Bird,
“his prowess in the pin-fold and the battle-field, his adventure on
the beech-tree, and his escape from the meshes of the law, with other
characteristic events not included in our relation, are recollections
still cherished in some parts of Kentucky, and made the theme of many
a gleesome story.” But what seems more suggestive today is Bird’s
conscious attempt to reproduce the new type of western humor that
found its expression in the Davy Crockett myth. Perhaps the wild
extravagance of Ralph Stackpole’s vocabulary goes back to Mike Fink,
perhaps it derives from Davy himself; at any rate the mode had spread
so widely by 1837 that this Philadelphia man of letters had come to
believe that such was the indigenous form of humor in the new West of
the Ohio valley, and he took particular pains to draw the irrepressible
Ralph with vigorous touches. A pronounced romantic, Bird unconsciously
contributed his mite to the myth of western humor.
Footnotes
[418] Quoted in Oberholtzer, _Literary History of Philadelphia_, p. 178.
[419] See A. H. Quinn, _A History of the American Drama, etc._, pp.
244-248.
Chapter II • The New Capital
I
Very different from the gay and cultivated Quaker City was the
commercial port of Manhattan, with its Yankee energy ingrafted on the
stolid Dutch stock, which fate seized upon and transformed into the
greatest of our new cities, the favorite home of the genius of American
enterprise. Never a cultural capital as Philadelphia had been, and
as Charleston was becoming--a fact which Fenimore Cooper untactfully
announced to the world--it was ambitious to acquire commercial and
financial ascendency; and this ascendency of the economic over the
cultural, this frank evaluation of progress in terms of exploitation,
marks the definite transition from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth, the triumph of an aggressive middle class over the
leisurely ways of an older landed aristocracy. The romance of expansion
was creating there a new psychology, and this new psychology was
preparing the city for leadership in the new age that was rising. Its
strategic position brought to it the produce of the new settlements
that were pushing west to the great lakes and beyond; its aggressive
traders were reaching out for a share in the markets of the world;
the plodding methods of money-getting that had satisfied an earlier
generation no longer satisfied men who had discovered the richer
possibilities of capitalistic manipulation. The potentialities that lay
in the capitalistic system were shrewdly explored, and the necessary
machinery of the new finance was devised. The acquisitive spirit of the
city found itself in a position to profit from the rage of speculation
that was running through the country, and it quickly outdistanced its
rivals in the race for financial supremacy.
The changes that came to New York in the last years of the old century
were enough to muddle a head stronger than Rip Van Winkle’s. The quiet
ways of colonial times were gone, and in their stead was a restless
activity that had no leisure for its pipe and mug in the sleepy tavern.
Business and politics could not wait on men who like Wouter Van Twiller
pickled their dreams in tobacco smoke. The bewilderment of old Rip
on his return from the hills was the bewilderment of the colonial
mind in the presence of a new order. When Washington came to New York
to assume the presidency, the town contained approximately 29,000
inhabitants, some two thousand of whom were slaves. Fifty years later
the census of 1840 set down its population as 312,710. In 1789 Albany
was a Dutch village of four or five thousand, and a few miles to the
West lay an unbroken wilderness. Within the narrow zone of the quiet
settlements old and new dwelt in close proximity. The most feudal of
American aristocracies fringed the banks of the Hudson from Albany to
Manhattan; and reaching out through the Mohawk valley that aristocracy
was laying a network of speculative land-holdings through which a flood
of Yankee pioneers was making its way from the long-settled lands of
Connecticut and Massachusetts. The frontier was close at hand; the
leveling spirit was near neighbor to the feudal; potential economic
rivalries were becoming actual, and the days of a static, power-proud
Dutch aristocracy were numbered. The spirit that had dominated the
commonwealth from its founding was tenacious of life, but on January
26, 1839, died Stephen Van Rensselaer, last of the Patroons, courteous,
dignified, a worthy embodiment of the old patriarchal virtues, who
had outlived his age; and hard upon his death came the final break-up
of the traditional order. The small men got the land they had long
tilled and the influence of the Dutch gentry slowly disintegrated.
A new order was rising that had discovered shorter roads to wealth
than feudal rents. While the more energetic of the old order, men
like Gouverneur Morris and Judge William Cooper, were deep in land
speculation, in Manhattan a new aristocracy of capitalism was rising.
Wall Street was losing the distinction of housing the most exclusive
of the landed gentry, to gain a greater distinction as the home of
the new aristocracy of credit. By 1825 the rise of industrialism, the
development of banking, the completion of the Erie Canal, the influx
of proletarian immigrants, and the drift of population to the towns
had fixed the destiny of the city. In becoming the chief repository of
the new capitalism New York had become the first and greatest of our
middle-class capitals.
Of this new Manhattan the representative citizen was a man whose
aggressive ambitions differentiated him sharply from Stephen Van
Rensselaer, and whose dramatic career of exploitation seemed to
Washington Irving to embody the romantic potentialities of America.
John Jacob Astor was to the New York of 1825 what Robert Morris had
been to Philadelphia a generation before--an evidence of the wealth
that was to be got by those who would boldly exploit the vast resources
of America. A German immigrant who landed in America with small funds,
immediately following the Peace of Paris, Astor embarked in the fur
trade, acquired a fortune which he invested in Manhattan land, and
then laid his plans to engage in a great venture in imperialism.
Stirred by the Lewis and Clarke expedition, he proposed to explore
the virgin resources of the far Pacific Northwest. With the tacit
approval of the government he undertook the hazardous project of the
Astoria settlement, sent his agent to the Russian posts of Alaska, and
by subsidizing an army of trappers proposed to gather the peltries of
the entire Northwest for the rich Canton market. It was a grandiose
conception worthy of a feudal baron of commerce. It was knit up
with dreams of conquest; it necessarily entailed open warfare with
the English companies whose ambitions were equally grandiose; it
was certain to be attended by bitter hardships on the part of the
venturesome agents to whom it was intrusted; and the outcome was
uncertain as a gambler’s chance. Irving has thrown over his narrative
of the great venture a glamour of patriotism; to him it appeared as
a plan of empire building; but whether patriotism or profit was the
determining impulse in the mind of John Jacob Astor, the settlement of
Astoria suggests the romantic aspirations that were making over the
lethargic world of Dutch Manhattan, in the venturesome days of the new
capitalism. Stephen Van Rensselaer and John Jacob Astor would have had
difficulty in understanding each other.
II
In sharp contrast with Boston, New York was wanting in intellectual
background and intellectual stimulus. It had never gone to school to
dogmatic theology and neither clergy nor laity had been disciplined by
a severe Puritan regimen. Gentlemen were little given to metaphysical
speculation and the subtleties of creed never provided the staple of
talk in the farmer’s kitchen. The terrors of hell rarely troubled the
sluggish imagination of the Dutch, and the extraordinary stimulus that
came to the serious-minded New Englander from long contemplation of
the ways of God, was lacking amongst a more prosaic people. No other
stimulus supplied the want and in consequence ideas and books were
held in low esteem and the things of the mind suffered. The English
gentry commonly sent their sons to the English universities, but the
Dutch by common report seem to have been indifferent to schooling
and opportunities for education were sadly inadequate. The result
was a low plane of intellectual life, which even in Cooper’s time
was remarked by him. There were brilliant and cultivated intellects,
wits like Gouverneur Morris and statesmen like John Jay; yet even
under the stimulus of Revolutionary and Constitutional controversy
the contribution of New York to political theory was far slighter
than that of New England or Virginia. _The Federalist_ was its single
notable production, and even in that the papers of Madison were no
inconsiderable part. As a commercial port it attracted young men
ambitious to rise in the world of affairs rather than in the world of
letters. Unlike Philadelphia it had never been a cosmopolitan meeting
ground for aspiring young intellectuals and purveyors of polite
culture, nor an important center of printers, publishers and book
dealers. Aside from Philip Freneau, who had long since established
himself in New Jersey when he was not at sea, it had contributed little
to pure literature, or even to the political satire that deluged
Philadelphia. As a creative center it ranked far below Hartford,
Connecticut, where in the seventeen-eighties and nineties wit had
become a staple commodity for export. And yet despite its intellectual
lethargy it was a pleasant little town, with a note of cosmopolitanism
that rendered life amongst the upper classes genial and urbane. The
spirit of aristocracy was as yet little weakened by alien newcomers
from the more republican New England, and city and commonwealth were
ruled by a little group of old-fashioned gentlemen who upheld the rigid
Federalism of the tie-wig school.
In the year 1800 the political leaders of the state were men of long
established reputations, Hamilton, Jay, Gouverneur Morris, Rufus
King, with whom was closely associated the brilliant lawyer James
Kent, afterward Chancellor. Only two of the five were of the older
New York stock: Rufus King was from Maine, Hamilton from the West
Indies, and Kent was of Yankee Presbyterian ancestry. Politics were
already becoming turmoiled by faction, with bitter cleavages and
vindictive struggles for the spoils of office that sadly confused the
logic of the earlier alignment. The old Federalist party was led by
the distinguished gentlemen named above; the Democratic party was led
by the Livingstons and Clintons; and outside both was the ambitious
Aaron Burr who played a lone hand against the field. After the death of
Hamilton the disintegration of the old parties went forward rapidly.
The Livingstons and Clintons broke, and a fierce political feud arose
between them. The former were accounted the true Jeffersonians, but
under the name of Lewisites they drifted towards the Federalist
remnant; the Burrites went to pieces after the disgrace of their
leader; and the Clintonians remained masters of the field, with a
motley support drawn from Tammany Hall Irish, Wall Street bankers, and
odds and ends of all factions. From this sordid situation, rendered
conspicuous by the extension of suffrage under the new constitution,
emerged two master politicians, adepts in all the arts of party
manipulation, who exploited the prejudices of the voting masses in a
way to justify the gloomy fear of demagoguery that haunted the minds of
the old Federalists. Martin Van Buren and Thurlow Weed, Democrat and
Whig, were finished products of the new school of practical politicians
who held that office-holding was the great end of partisan struggle,
and that principles must not stand in the way of success.
III
Through this fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last the dignity and distinction of an
earlier age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were
devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles
of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall
and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springes to catch
unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over their
victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of placing
the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the English law.
An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig, he reveals in
his precise thinking the intimate relations that everywhere exist
between economics, politics, and legal principles. With John Adams he
accepted the dictum of Locke that “the great and chief end ... of men’s
uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government,
is the preservation of their property”; and believing that the English
Common Law was the securest of all agencies devised to safeguard the
subject in the enjoyment of his property rights, he made no difficulty
in imposing that law upon the Constitution, circumscribing the
written document by Common Law fences. Government he conceived to be
a patriarchal institution erected for the single purpose of coercing
the vicious, and as such it must remain in the hands of the good, the
wise and the wealthy. It did not need the authoritative pronouncement
of his great master to convince him that the wealthy included the good
and wise. Observation of the “barbarian Jackson” and his rude followers
was enough to convince him of the truth of the fact. “All theories of
government that suppose the mass of the people virtuous,” he wrote to
Webster, “and able and willing to act virtuously, are plainly utopian,
and will remain so until the Saturnian age” (William Kent, _Memoirs and
Letters of James Kent_, p. 207). Profoundly distrustful of democracy,
he brought all his wide reading in the history of ancient and medieval
republics to demonstrate the favorite Federalist conviction--a
conviction that Paulding in his _Letters from the South_ paid his
respects to[420]--that democracy is only a euphemism for mob-rule and
that it must speedily conduct to anarchy and despotism. All leveling
principles he repudiated without waiting to hear cause. Until necessity
counseled otherwise he looked with suspicion on the holders of liquid
wealth, as likely to prove wanting in the wisdom and goodness that came
naturally to the landed proprietor. He would have the many ruled by the
few, but those few he would have owners of great estates.
After all, the learned Chancellor was only a transplanted Yankee of the
Fisher Ames school, with something of the austerity and intellectual
vigor of his two Puritan grandfathers. An ardent admirer of Hamilton,
he early broke with the more liberal faith of his family and joined
himself to the extreme Federalists. He was advanced rapidly by Governor
Jay, enjoyed for years both office and distinction, and ably defended
the party of his choice. Fearful of agrarian laws and the sequestration
of property by the enfranchised poor, he fought stubbornly every
proposal for an extension of suffrage or a larger measure of
self-government for the cities. Defeated in the great constitutional
convention of 1821 he soon after lost his office and retired to write
his _Commentaries on American Law_, a work that was to exercise a
creative influence on the later development of our jurisprudence. That
American law came to be deeply colored by Federalist political theory,
that it upheld from the bench principles that had been repudiated at
the polls, was due in no little measure to the legal scholarship of
this last of the New York Federalists. What a recent historian has
borrowed to describe another applies with equal felicity to Chancellor
Kent--“his pigmy hope that life would some day become somewhat better,
punily shivered by the side of his gigantic conviction that it might be
infinitely worse” (Fox, _Decline of Aristocracy in New York Politics_,
p. 243). As he contemplated the ways of the triumphant Jacksonians, he
found such consolation as he could in turning back to an older century
with its narrow outlook and sober culture. Writing to his brother in
1835, he said:
There never was such misrule. Our Tory rich men are becoming
startled and alarmed at our downhill course. My opinion is that
the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are
incompatible with government and security to property, and that the
government and character of this country are going to ruin. This
suffrage is too great an excitement for any political machine. It
racks it to pieces, and morals go with it. It is probable England
is going the same way. We are becoming selfish, profligate,
crazy.... Give me the writings of Addison and Locke, and the
Presbyterianism of Dr. Ripley, Dr. Stiles, and old Dr. Rogers.
(Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, pp. 218-219.)
IV
With the extraordinary upheaval in economics and politics New York
unfortunately underwent no corresponding intellectual revolution. The
renaissance that a generation earlier had created a new Virginia, and
that was awakening in Massachusetts a many-sided intellectual activity,
touched the mind of New York only lightly. The ground was unprepared
for the new philosophies. To Virginia, French romantic theory had
come with the appeal of a new gospel for the reason that plantation
economics fell in with the major premises of Physiocratic liberalism,
and the old-world dogmas seemed to find new-world justification. To
New England, German idealism had come likewise with the appeal of a
new gospel, after Unitarianism had broken the fetters of Calvinism and
set free its traditional idealism. But among the young men of New York
in 1825 neither France nor Germany was a determining influence. With
an inadequate cultural background and no responsive economics, they
were attracted only casually to the current European liberalisms. They
were wanting in idealism and in consequence the major intellectual
and social movements of the times influenced the form and content of
the new Knickerbocker literature far less profoundly than was the
case in New England. New York was as insular as Charleston. That
the growing economic unrest would ultimately find expression in a
controversial or Utopian literature, was a matter of course; and that
the cosmopolitanism of the city should make for vigorous discussion,
was equally a matter of course. Nevertheless Albert Brisbane, William
Leggett, Parke Godwin and Horace Greeley were far less representative
of the dominant literary spirit than Irving and Halleck and Willis of
the earlier group, or Stedman and Stoddard later.
The Knickerbocker movement was inaugurated by four young men whose
clever sketches caught the provincial ear of polite society and set the
new fashion in prose and verse. Irving and Paulding in _Salmagundi_,
and Halleck and Drake in the _Croaker Papers_, were lucky adventurers
whose slight crafts made the most prosperous of voyages. Bright young
fellows with a charming literary swagger, they aspired to be wits and
exploit the amusing foibles of Broadway. Twelve years separated the
two ventures, and in the interval Byron and Scott had been supplanting
Moore and Campbell in the esteem of the Town, and the literary mode of
New York was changing. From their gay provincialism, happily Irving and
Paulding later freed themselves; Drake died at the age of twenty-five;
but Halleck retained to the end of a leisurely life the mannerisms of
the Croaker period--a crochety wit who affected persiflage, a brisk
young buck who gently slid into a _blasé_ old buck, a free lance in
verse who lived in state on the income of a small literary investment
made in his twenties.
The very considerable reputation of Fitz-Greene Halleck resulted in
part from the literary sterility of New York in his early days, and in
part from the personal popularity of the man. A Connecticut Yankee,
descended on his mother’s side from old John Eliot, he was drawn to
the city as a promising field for an accountant, and eventually found
his way into the office of John Jacob Astor by whom he was later
pensioned. He accepted the views and shared the antipathies of his Wall
Street associates, but with a certain affectation of individuality that
took delight in shocking them by whimsical pronouncements in favor of
the Catholic church and the monarchical system. There is perhaps a
suggestion of seriousness in the remark that Bryant has preserved: “The
ship of state,” so he reports Halleck as saying, “must be governed and
navigated like any other ship, without consulting the crew. What would
become of the stanchest bark in a gale, if the captain were obliged to
call all hands together and say: ‘All you who are in favor of taking
in sail, will please to say ay’” (_Orations and Addresses_, p. 186).
His political affiliations were Federalist-Whig, and his satire exudes
much of the old prejudice against the democratic mass. The pompous
long-winded DeWitt Clinton was a fair mark for his shafts;[421] the
demagoguery of office-seeking politicians was a fruitful theme for
his wit;[422] and Halleck’s satire plays upon them with good-natured
raillery. But his gayety cannot hide a certain animus in dealing with
the tousled-headed democracy. When the labor movement was painfully
getting under way in New York Halleck contemplated the curious
phenomenon with a tolerant contempt--in something of the spirit of a
wit of pre-Revolutionary times who amused the Town with his couplet:
Down at night a bricklayer or carpenter lies,
Next sun a Lycurgus or Solon doth rise.
As an illustration of the attitude of polite society in New York a
hundred years ago towards the aspirations of the proletariat, Halleck’s
forgotten _Epistle to Robert Hogbin, Esq., Chairman of the Committee of
Working-Men, etc._, deserves quotation:
Mr. Hogbin,--I work as a weaver--of rhyme--
And therefore presume with a working-man’s grace,
To address you as one I have liked for some time.
Though I know not (no doubt it’s a fine one) your face.
There is much in a name, and I’ll lay you a wager
(Two ale-jugs from Reynolds), that Nature designed,
When she formed you, that you should become the drum-major
In that choice piece of music, the Grand March of Mind.
A Hogbin! a Hogbin! how cheering the shout
Of all that keep step to that beautiful air,
Which leads, like the treadmill, about and about,
And leaves us exactly, at last, where we were!
Yes, there’s much in a name, and a Hogbin’s so fit is
For that great moral purpose whose impulse divine
Bids men leave their own workshops to work in committees,
And their own wedded wives to protect yours and mine!...
When the moment arrives that we’ve won the good fight,
And broken the chains of laws, churches, and marriages,
When no infants are born under six feet in height,
And our chimney-sweeps mount up a flue in their carriages--
That glorious time when our daughters and sons
Enjoy a _blue Monday_ each day of the week,
And a clean shirt is classed with the mastodon’s bones,
Or a mummy from Thebes, an undoubted antique--
Then, then, my dear Hogbin, your statue in straw,
By some modern _Pig_malion delightfully wrought,
Shall embellish the Park, and our youths’ only law
Shall be to be Hogbins in feeling and thought.
In Halleck’s better work there is sometimes evident a certain critical
detachment that permitted him to see both sides of his theme. In
the lines to his native Connecticut he has taken pretty accurately
the measure of the Puritan and the Yankee. He rests under no awe
in presence of the old worthies, and he throws overboard the pious
fairy-tales of Cotton Mather--“that slanderer of the memory of our
fathers”--only to forgive the preacher who scolded his friends
“up from earth to heaven” because of the “sour grapejuice in his
disposition.” Unfortunately little of his work possesses the virility
of _Connecticut_. His most ambitious poem, _Fanny_, is a feeble and
discursive satire on the social climber. It was a great favorite at
the time and passed through several editions, but the sparkle is gone
out of its affected jauntiness and little has been lost in its being
forgotten. Halleck’s casual literary activity continued only for the
brief period between the years 1819 and 1828; thereafter for close on
forty years he was content to turn out an occasional _jeu d’esprit_,
enjoy the deepening twilight of his reputation, and watch his fellow
Yankee, Willis, invest his talents in the ephemeral. The day of the wit
was past in New York.
Footnotes
[420] See _Letters_, etc., Vol. I, p. 207.
[421] See _Governor Clinton’s Speech_.
[422] See _The Recorder_.
Chapter III • Two Knickerbocker Romantics
I • Washington Irving
Fortunately the stolid New York of earlier days was not to pass away
without bequeathing to posterity some fragments of its chronicles.
In the midst of a pleasant society of smallclothes and tie-wigs, of
feudalism and Federalism, appeared young Washington Irving at the
precise moment when Sansculottism was beginning to make a stir in
the land, and gentlemen were putting away their knee-breeches to
don a republican dress--a decline in taste to which he would not
easily reconcile himself. A boyish wit from the eighteenth century,
a genial loiterer in the twilight of the old, he found himself out
of humor with the ambitions that were making over the little city he
loved. The present seemed to him not so amusing as the past, nor so
picturesque. That he had any business with the world of trade and
speculation he could not believe. Its concerns were not his. Its
new Wall Street counted for less in his eyes than the pipe of old
Diedrich Knickerbocker. Its decadent Federalism that was clinging
to the wreck of its hopes, and its roistering Democracy that wore
greasy clothes, spoke with an Irish accent, and was marshaled to the
polls by Tammany Hall, were of less consequence to him than the black
bottle that brought such curious adventures to Rip Van Winkle. The
wit and romance he took pleasure in were of another sort than the
kind his generation was getting drunk on--more insubstantial, less
heady, picturesque rather than profitable. So Irving gently detached
himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end
of a loitering life, untroubled by material ambitions, enjoying the
abundance of good things that fell in his way, mingling with prosperous
folk and liking everybody--men as diverse as John Jacob Astor and
Martin Van Buren and John P. Kennedy--and unconsciously taking the
color of his environment, careful to turn into limpid prose such
romantic tales as he came upon and achieving thereby both reputation
and profit--a pleasant blameless way of living, certainly, yet
curiously unrepresentative of the America in which chance had set him
and which was to claim him as its first man of letters.
An incorrigible _flâneur_, Irving’s business in life was to loaf
and invite the picturesque. A confirmed rambler in pleasant places,
in the many lands he visited he was a lover of the past rather than
the present, seeking to recreate the golden days of the Alhambra or
live over the adventurous mood of the fur trader. The immediate and
the actual was an unsatisfying diet for his dreams. There was in him
nothing of the calm aloofness of the intellectual that stands apart
to clarify its critical estimate, and none of the reforming zeal of
the Puritan that is at peace only in the thick of a moral crusade. The
duty of saving the world was not laid on his untroubled soul. No man
of his generation was less of a rebel than Irving, and he went his
way unconcerned at things that quite upset Fenimore Cooper’s peace of
mind. In his early days, to be sure, he broke with the ambitious middle
class--if gently drawing away can be called breaking--because he could
not bring himself to like its ways and the devastation those ways were
entailing on the leisurely world he loved. Revolutions seemed to him
somewhat vulgar affairs. The French Revolution had brought destruction
on too many lovely things, and the industrial revolution was taking
too heavy a toll of the picturesque, to please him. He thought it a
pity that steam should drive the clipper ship from the seas and put
an end to snug posting in the tally-ho. Progress might be bought at
too dear a price. The bluff squire with his hounds, the great hall
with its ancient yuletide customs, the patriarchal relations between
master and man, seemed to him more worth while than the things progress
was substituting for them; so he turned away from the new and gently
ingratiated himself into the past in order to gather up such fragments
of the picturesque as progress had not yet destroyed.
But only for a time. His dislike of capitalism rested on no more
substantial basis than its substitution of vulgar trousers for
gentlemanly smallclothes. It was too new to have achieved dignity or
the charm of assured position. When that time should come and masters
of finance should stand before the world as generous dispensers of
patronage, when the development of business should have produced its
new barons, Irving’s dislike would lessen and he would associate with
the new capitalism on the same easy terms that he associated with the
old feudalism. In the meantime he stood apart, unconcerned with praise
or blame. The industrial revolution might work itself out as it would.
The seventeen years he spent abroad on his great pilgrimage were black
years for England. Wretchedness and poverty were all about him if he
chose to see. The “condition of England” question was rising out of the
factory smoke to challenge the conscience of England. But he did not
choose to see and his conscience was untroubled. As he idled about the
countryside or visited the hospitable manor houses, his eye was caught
by the grace of medieval spires rising from parish churches rather than
by the condition of the proletariat. He saw no children working in the
coalpits, for he did not choose to visit the collieries. He sympathized
vaguely with the new social movements then getting under way, but it
was not in his nature to be partisan to a cause. He may not have been
a Tory but he had lived so long with Tories and enjoyed so frankly
the charm of upper-class society, that his outlook was unconsciously
determined by such intimate contacts. While Secretary to the Legation
at London in the reform years from 1829 to 1831, he was aware of the
tremendous stir all about him, but his infrequent references to the
Reform Bill in his letters turned usually on its disastrous effects on
the publishing business. Only once during his long residence abroad
does he seem to have felt deeply the significance of the current
revolutionary unrest, and the mood that swept him away from his
habitual indifference bears the marks of a sudden awakening. Writing
from London on March 1, 1831, he said:
We are in the beginning of an eventful week.... However, _the great
cause of all the world_ will go on. What a stirring moment it is
to live in. I never took such intense interest in the newspapers.
It seems to me as if life were breaking out anew with me, or
that I were entering upon quite a new and almost unknown career
of existence, and I rejoice to find my sensibilities, which were
waning as to many objects of past interest, reviving with all their
freshness and vivacity at the scenes and prospects opening around
me. I trust, my dear Brevoort, we shall both be spared to see a
great part of this grand though terrible drama that is about to
be acted. There will doubtless be scenes of horror and suffering,
but what splendid triumphs must take place over these vile systems
of falsehood in every relation of human affairs, that have been
woven over the human mind, and for so long a time have held it down
in despicable thraldom. (Pierre M. Irving, _Life and Letters of
Washington Irving_, Vol. II, p. 199.)
Irving lacked a month of being forty-nine when he wrote this confession
of interest in matters political. It marks the first appearance of
liberalism in his thinking, and the last--somewhat vague to be sure,
unduly bottomed on romantic expectations, yet significant in so placid
a life and explanatory of his course, when a year later he returned to
America to knit up once more the raveled threads of his interests. It
was as an incipient liberal that he came back to a land then in the
first flush of the Jacksonian victory, eager to discover a romantic
charm in the vast changes that had come during the seventeen years
he had been abroad. He plunged into the business of re-discovery
with enthusiasm. He was in want of new literary materials, and as
he took his bearings, his creative interest was stirred to write on
American themes. He went to Washington and for three months listened
to the great debate on Nullification. He talked with business men
and politicians, with those who were prosperous and prominent, and
he drifted easily with the tide of liberalism. To be sure he could
scarcely be called a Jacksonian. Parties and causes did not greatly
interest him even then. An intelligent man, indeed, could hardly be
less concerned about political principles. Thirty years before, as a
clever young man about town, he had gone with the dominant Federalism
of the times, and had amused himself with political ambitions. His
brother Peter was editor of the Lewisite paper the _Chronicle_, but
Josiah Ogden Hoffman, with whose firm Irving was connected during his
desultory incursion into the law and to whose daughter Matilda he
was betrothed, was an old Loyalist and ardent Hamiltonian. His wife,
to whom Irving was warmly attached, was a daughter of John Fenno,
Hamilton’s editor. Under such tutelage it was natural for Irving to
poke good-natured fun at President Jefferson’s red velvet breeches in
_Salmagundi_; but his venture into practical politics proving little to
his taste, he quickly gave over such ambitions. In a letter to a clever
young lady of Republican sympathies, he thus announced his abandonment
of political hopes:
I am as deep in mud and politics as ever a modern gentleman would
wish to be; and I drank beer with the multitude; and I talked
hand-bill fashion with the demagogues; and I shook hands with the
mob, whom my heart abhorreth.... Truly this saving one’s country
is a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty
virtue,--prythee, no more of it. (_Life and Letters_, Vol. I, Chap.
XI.)
Years now separated him from that youthful experience. His long
absence from his native land had completely alienated him from
the fierce partisanship of contemporary America and he could view
matters political with calm detachment. Inclined to make the best
of any government _de facto_, he found it easy on his return to
accept Jacksonianism, and he soon discovered a genuine liking for Old
Hickory. “The more I see of this old cock of the woods,” he wrote
from Washington, “the more I relish his game qualities” (_ibid._,
Vol. II, p. 255). No doubt his early friend Paulding had much to do
with his ready acceptance of the new order, although he had come
in close contact with Martin Van Buren at the London legation and
was drawn to him. “He is one of the gentlest and most amiable men I
have ever met with,” he wrote to his brother, “with an affectionate
disposition that attaches itself to those around him, and wins their
kindness in return” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 220). Although distrustful
of some of the “elbow counsellors” of the Democracy he found little
cause for criticism and soon came to be regarded as one with them. The
Jacksonians were eager to make political capital out of his literary
reputation, and he was urged by Tammany Hall to stand for Congress and
later to accept a mayoralty candidacy. In 1837, probably through the
intervention of Paulding, he was offered a post in Van Buren’s cabinet.
These partisan offers he had the good sense to decline, but when in
1842 he was tendered the post of Minister to Spain he gladly seized the
opportunity to revisit a land he loved. His nephew is explicit in his
statement that the offer came wholly unsolicited, but Fenimore Cooper
was of another opinion.[423] Very likely Cooper was misinformed, but
whatever the truth the appointment was a godsend to Irving. His affairs
were in a bad way. The popularity of his writings was on the wane, the
panic had caught him with much of his capital invested in unprofitable
land speculations, and the “Roost” at Tarrytown was a heavy drain,
although he wrote whimsically, “I beat all the gentlemen farmers in
my neighborhood, for I can manage to raise my vegetables and fruits
at very little more than twice the market price” (_Life and Letters_,
Vol. II, p. 320). Only a severe nature like Cooper, sorely wounded
by the angry reception of his own honest criticism, would cavil at an
appointment so honorable to the government.
A friendly nature, Irving discovered friendliness wherever he went. His
own generosity appealed to the generosity of others, and he found it
easy in consequence to take a kindly view of men and parties. He was
harassed by none of Cooper’s quick suspicions and rigid principles, and
it must be added he had none of Cooper’s intuitive penetration into the
secret springs of human action that made the latter so acute a critic
of contemporary America. The sharp contrast in moods in which the two
men returned to America from their travels, the one harshly critical
of middle-class economics and frontier leveling, the other responding
naïvely to the enthusiasm for speculative expansion and eager to
exploit the romance of the westward movement, sufficiently reveals
the difference between them. The one was a dogmatic Puritan with the
dictatorial ways of the quarter-deck, the other was a play-boy of
letters temperamentally incapable of critical analysis. There was not a
grain of realism in Irving’s nature. His cheerful optimism was little
more than the optimism of the prosperous. Wholly ignorant of economics,
he never comprehended the significance of the revolutions in process
all about him, and this _naïveté_ blinded him to the motive of John
Jacob Astor in financing Astoria, as it blinded him to all the major
forces of the times. He was easily brought to see the romance of the
great struggle between rival companies for mastery of the fur trade,
but he did not comprehend how the glamour he threw about the venture
must inevitably strengthen his patron’s investment in imperialism.
Gullible as a child, he discovered nothing more significant in the
great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism for control of
government than the ungenerous suspicions and novel theories it bred.
For the outstanding liberals of New York he had scant sympathy. William
Leggett, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, William Cullen Bryant,
influenced his views far less than did the masters of Wall Street; and
from the courageous movement of Locofocoism he drew back in distrust.
The one letter in which he elaborated such political convictions as he
had come to hold, is an interesting document that deserves quotation.
As far as I know my own mind, I am thoroughly a republican,
and attached, from complete conviction, to the institutions of
my country; but I am a republican without gall, and have no
bitterness in my creed. I have no relish for puritans either in
religion or politics, who are for pushing principles to an extreme,
and for overturning everything that stands in the way of their own
zealous career. I have, therefore, felt a strong distaste for some
of those locofoco luminaries who of late have been urging strong
and sweeping measures, subversive of the interests of great classes
of the community. Their doctrines may be excellent in theory, but,
if enforced in violent and uncompromising opposition to all our
habitudes, may produce the most distressing effects. The best of
remedies must be cautiously applied, and suited to the taste and
constitution of the patient.... Ours is a government of compromise.
We have several great and distinct interests bound up together,
which, if not separately consulted and severally accommodated, may
harass and impair each other.... I always distrust the soundness
of political councils that are accompanied by acrimonious and
disparaging attacks upon any great class of our fellow-citizens.
Such are those urged to the disadvantage of the great trading
and financial classes of our country. You yourself know ... how
important these classes are to the prosperous conduct of the
complicated affairs of this immense empire. You yourself know,
in spite of all the common-place cant and obloquy that has been
cast upon them by political spouters and scribblers, what general
good faith and fair dealing prevails throughout these classes.
Knaves and swindlers there are doubtless among them, as there are
among all great classes of men; but I declare that I looked with
admiration at the manner in which the great body of our commercial
and financial men have struggled on through the tremendous trials
which have of late overwhelmed them, and have endeavored, at every
pecuniary sacrifice, to fulfill their engagements. (_Life and
Letters_, Vol. II, pp. 312-313.)
This persuasive presentation of the philosophy of compromise, with its
implicit defense of capitalism, marks Irving’s drift back to the middle
class with which he had long before broken. In the six years since his
return he had watched the country react to the great panic, and he went
with it in its veering towards the Whiggery of Henry Clay. The fragile
bonds of his attachment to the Democracy were becoming tenuous; other
attachments were insensibly drawing him towards the more congenial
representatives of wealth. He had all his life associated with the
Tory classes and it was easy for him to transfer his loyalty to the
American Tories. Under such influences began a slow _rapprochement
cordial_ towards the new philosophy of progress. He was seized with
the common mania of speculation and made some unfortunate investments
in wild lands and railways that seriously hampered him later, and he
commercialized his literary reputation by such money-making ventures as
_Astoria_ and the _Adventures of Captain Bonneville_. He discovered a
new romance in the great business of exploitation, and found the hand
of God in the profits of unearned increment. In the letter above quoted
from, he justified the ways of speculation thus:
There are moral as well as physical phenomena incident to every
state of things, which may at first appear evils, but which are
devised by an all-seeing Providence for some beneficent purpose.
Such is the spirit of speculative enterprise which now and then
rises to an extravagant height, and sweeps throughout the land....
The late land speculations, so much deprecated, though ruinous to
many engaged in them, have forced agriculture and civilization
into the depths of the wilderness; have laid open the recesses of
primeval forests; made us acquainted with the most available points
of our immense interior; have cast the germs of future towns and
cities and busy marts in the heart of savage solitudes, and studded
our vast rivers and internal seas with ports that will soon give
activity to a vast internal commerce. Millions of acres which might
otherwise have remained idle and impracticable wastes, have been
brought under the dominion of the plough, and hundreds of thousands
of industrious yeomen have been carried into the rich but remote
depths of our immense empire, to multiply and spread out in every
direction, and give solidity and strength to our confederacy.
All this has in a great measure been effected by the extravagant
schemes of land speculators. I am, therefore, inclined to look upon
them with a more indulgent eye than they are considered by those
violent politicians who are prescribing violent checks and counter
measures, and seem to have something vindictive in their policy.
(_Life and Letters_, Vol. II, p. 314.)
Thus did Irving become completely domesticated in the new world that
Rip Van Winkle had found so disconcerting when he came upon it out
of the quiet colonial past. The rediscovery of America proved to be
an agreeable business, and profitable in a professional way. His
enthusiasms, which in 1831 he felt were “waning as to many objects of
past interest,” were stimulated by the vast stir of the country, and
the spirit of romance once more ran briskly in his veins. The better
part of a year he rambled widely about the country, in order, as he
said, to get at home “upon American themes.” He visited Boston and the
White Mountains, then West to Ohio and St. Louis, then with an Indian
commissioner he penetrated the southwest prairies as far as the wild
Pawnee country beyond the South Canadian River, then to New Orleans and
Charleston, finally settling down in Washington to immerse himself in
politics. From there he passed over the Potomac for an extended trip
through the Old Dominion, returning to New York where he spent some
time with Astor at Hell Gate, finally in 1835 settling at Tarrytown
which was to be his home to the last. He had definitely determined on
his new field of work. His imagination had been stirred by his visit
to the prairies; the romance of the westward expansion was beginning
to find expression in the works of Timothy Flint and James Hall; the
public interest was ripe and John Jacob Astor was at hand to encourage
him. Thus stimulated Irving proposed to make the field of western
romance his own, with the result that he published in quick succession
_A Tour of the Prairies_, _Astoria_, and _The Adventures of Captain
Bonneville_.
On the whole the new venture did not prosper. The spirit of the
West was not to be captured by one whose heart was in Spain. In
_A Tour of the Prairies_ there is a certain homely simplicity and
straightforwardness that spring from a plain recital of undramatic
experience; and in _Astoria_ there is an unembellished narrative of
appalling hardship and heroic endurance, with none of the tawdry
romantics that mar the work of Flint and Hall. Yet neither is
creatively imaginative, neither stirs one with a sense of high drama.
The atmosphere of Snake River could not be created in the quiet study
at the “Roost”; it needed the pen of a realist to capture the romance
of those bitter wanderings in mountain and sagebrush. It is journeyman
work, and on every page one is conscious of the professional man of
letters faithfully doing this day’s allotment. It is much the same
with his _Life of Washington_. In this last great undertaking Irving
no longer writes with gusto. The golden days of Diedrich Knickerbocker
and Rip Van Winkle are long since gone; the magic is departed from
his pen; and a somewhat tired old gentleman is struggling to fulfill
his contract with his publisher. It was a mistake to venture on
the work, despite the fact that he had long been planning it. His
historical equipment was inadequate. He might make a pretty story out
of Washington’s early life and his days with the army, but he was far
too ignorant of politics, too credulous in judging his materials, to
interpret justly the fierce party struggles that seethed about the
President. Quite unconsciously in this last work he returned to the
political prejudices of his youth, and wrote an account of Washington’s
administrations deeply colored by his Federalist sources.
The most distinguished of our early romantics, Irving in the end was
immolated on the altar of romanticism. The pursuit of the picturesque
lured him away into sterile wastes, and when the will-o’-the-wisp was
gone he was left empty. A born humorist, the gayety of whose spirits
overflowed the brim, he was lacking in a brooding intellectuality,
and instead of coming upon irony at the bottom of the cup--as the
greater humorists have come upon it after life has had its way with
them--he found there only sentiment and the dreamy poetic. As the
purple haze on the horizon of his mind was dissipated by a sobering
experience, he tried to substitute an adventitious glamour; as romance
faded, sentiment supplied its place. So long as youth and high spirits
endured, his inkwell was a never-failing source of gayety, but as the
sparkle subsided he over-sweetened his wine. This suffices to account
for the fact that all his better work was done early; and this explains
why the Knickerbocker _History_ remains the most genial and vital of
his volumes. The gayety of youth bubbles and effervesces in those magic
pages, defying time to do its worst. The critic may charge the later
Irving with many and heavy shortcomings, but the romantic smoke-clouds
that ascend from Wouter Van Twiller’s pipe cannot be dissipated by the
winds of criticism.
II • James Kirke Paulding
Far more native to the limitations and hardships of American life and
far more loyal to its homely aspirations was James Kirke Paulding,
whose literary reputation came to be so deeply overshadowed by that
of his early friend. Sprung from plain stock--whether English or
Dutch his son remained in doubt, although inclining to believe the
former--and cradled in the fierce partisanship of the Revolutionary
struggle, he never abandoned his inherited liberalism or found his
love of country growing less. To the end of his life he remained a
primitive American of an earlier generation, somewhat puzzled by the
ways of another age that speculated in prosperity by running in debt,
and measured a man’s wealth by the amount he owed. His father had been
an active Whig in a Tory neighborhood who did not stint his service
to the Revolutionary cause. He was a member of the local Committee of
Safety, and acted as State Commissary to the Revolutionary forces, a
post which in the end brought him to ruin. In the dark days of the
struggle he pledged his private credit for supplies, and was never
reimbursed by a negligent commonwealth. The outcome was financial
disaster. The father was imprisoned for debt and his courage broken,
and the family long suffered from want. “We were not only poor,” the
son wrote later, “but steeped in poverty.” But there was excellent
stuff in the awkward, dreamy country boy. He was “built of stubborn
oak,” he remarked whimsically, “seasoned in the school of poverty,
like an old chimney-piece in a log cabin.” When at the age of nineteen
he was suddenly plunged into the world of New York City, he was shy,
uncouth, self-educated, and felt himself an alien in Wall Street and
Broadway. For the Federalist upper class he seems to have felt the
instinctive hostility of the outsider; but through the agency of the
Irvings--an elder sister having married William Irving--he was brought
into the companionship of a group of clever young men, and under the
stimulus of high talk and exuberant pranks, the latent idealism of his
nature expanded freely. This was his university, and while it left
something to be desired in the way of discipline, suffering too free
a rein to his discursive fancy, it quickened his native wit, awakened
his creative imagination, and put him to school to the pleasant craft
of writing. The _Salmagundi Papers_ were the first fruits of the
literary apprenticeship of the group, and although Irving has come to
receive the chief credit for them, the wit of Paulding seems quite as
sprightly, and his gayety as fresh.
That his later career in letters was less notable resulted in part from
the fact that he was an inveterate rambler by nature, and partly from
the fact that writing with him was occasional, a pleasant relief from
humdrum duties, and he did not choose to lay a curb on his vagrant
ways. In letters as in life he was always discursive, forgetful of his
objective in his delight at the beauty of the countryside, loading
his pages down with nature descriptions and clogging the action
of his tales with somewhat tedious homilies. After forty years of
writing he remained still an amateur, incapable of pruning the wilful
tangle of his fancy--an essayist of the leisurely school who ventured
incautiously into the realms of verse and fiction without mastering the
technic of the business. There was perhaps too much of the homespun
in him to permit him to become an artist. The experience of his youth
marked him too deeply, and all his life he remained as conscious a son
of the people as Hamlin Garland was later, delighting to chronicle the
ways of the obscure, somewhat militant in proclaiming the excellence
of homely virtues. Formed in an environment that bred a spontaneous
democracy, he was a confirmed equalitarian, untroubled by the itch to
rise in the world or exploit his fellows. Alone among the Knickerbocker
group, he was a Jeffersonian in the fundamentals of his social creed;
not in the lesser matters of Kentucky Resolutions and the like, but in
his Physiocratic leanings, in his profound distrust of all middle-class
programs and his preference for the simple country ways over the city
economy; and it was this deep-rooted agrarianism that set him against
capitalism and made him a later Jacksonian. In him there spoke out the
authentic New York, not of Broadway merchants or Wall Street bankers,
but of the plain rank and file of the people. Untouched by foreign
travel but widely acquainted with his native America, he was fashioned
out of the wool from the fireside loom and domestic dye-pot.
A writer so consciously and completely American would find abundant
occasion to put his pen to the service of his country at a time when
every English traveler turned critic and on his return home published a
volume of truculent disparagement of ways and things American. For the
most part those volumes were a defense of Toryism by the easy method
of attacking democracy, and they annoyed Paulding beyond measure. He
would not let them go unanswered, and from _The Diverting History
of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_ (1812) to _John Bull in America_
(1825), he published five different replies, varying his attack from
argument to burlesque. Something more than loyalty to his country
seems to have spurred him on. His dislike of England was inveterate,
partly because of the old Revolutionary feud, partly because of later
antagonisms. Almost at the hour of his birth the Paulding family had
been forced to quit their home for fear of the British and Tories who
daily threatened them; and a deep hatred of the British Tory he drew
in with his mother’s milk. To him England was a Tory country, reeking
with social injustice, the home of ancient abuses, and necessarily the
implacable enemy of democratic America. He was convinced that want and
tyranny and subserviency dogged the daily life of the English common
people; and the English Reviews that attacked the ways of democracy
with caustic British superiority, filled his honest republican heart
with wrath, and he jabbed his quill into the tough skin of John Bull
with patriotic vigor. The shame of the burning of the capitol rankled
in the American heart, and Paulding discovered fresh grievances in
remembering that from England had come the banking system and the
“shin-plaster dynasty” that would breed in the new country the evils
of the old if they were not looked to. He was convinced that the mother
country wished ill to her offspring, and he thanked God in successive
volumes that democratic America was not what Tory England was.
For despite the English travelers--Weld, Parkinson, Ashe, Bradbury,
Hall, Trollope, and all the rest of the loquacious tribe--Paulding was
persuaded that America constituted the hope of the future. Here in
this land he believed that men should eventually achieve a measure of
well-being undreamed of in the old world; already the old tyrannies
had been destroyed, the ancient poverty abated. From this stubborn
idealism nothing could turn him aside. It finds expression in an early
poem, and it provides the theme for his last novel. _The Backwoodsman_,
published in 1818, is a rambling and somewhat plethoric idyll of the
West, the hero of which is an archetype of the oppressed and exploited,
who finds a generous asylum in the free land beyond the Alleghenies,
and like Crèvecœur’s Andrew the Hebridean, expands the horizons of
his mind under the beneficent touch of freedom. _The Puritan and His
Daughter_, written over thirty years later, deals with a different
phase of the same general theme. It is a vivid picture of the strife
engendered in America by immigrant families who bring hither their
old-world feuds and animosities, and the curative influence of the
free environment that, in discovering the good rather than the bad in
neighbors, draws together the younger generation despite the jealous
parental authority that would keep them apart. The bigoted fathers make
trouble enough--the fanatical Puritan who fought with Cromwell and the
headstrong Cavalier who defended divine right--wilful men whom even
the common frontier perils cannot reconcile or make tolerant; but they
are powerless to thwart the ways of nature. The son of the Cavalier
discovers an attractive woman in the daughter of the Puritan, and when
love walks in the twilight what matters theology or politics. Youth has
its own notions of divine right; in its creed the dogmas of John Calvin
and Robert Filmer have no place; and if the lovers are more tolerant
than the fathers it only proves that a freer environment will manage
to soften the traditional animosities and beget a kindlier race from
the merging of classes. Such at least is the characteristic thesis
that Paulding elaborates through two volumes of discursive narrative
interspersed with bits of vigorous action.
Of this kindly melting pot Paulding himself was a product. He had
rid himself wholly of all ties that would bind him to Europe. He was
partisan to no cause or party, literary or political, of the old world.
He was content to be American and suffer his native land to bound his
loyalties. In his own literary practice he refused to imitate the
current English fashions and he spoke his mind freely to the American
reading public for its greedy swallowing of cheap imported food. He did
not take kindly to the English romantic writers, and went often out of
his way to have a dig at his two pet aversions, Scott and Byron.[424]
His amusing tale of _Koningsmarke, the Long Finne_, is a good-natured
burlesque of certain romantic mannerisms of the Waverley novels, and
a defense of Cooper’s _Pioneers_ for its homely realism. Paulding’s
dislike of the “blood-pudding” fiction that had come over from England,
and that proved so disastrous to the genius of Gilmore Simms, was
inveterate, and in his whimsical dedication of _The Puritan and His
Daughter_ to the sovereign people he comments on the public taste thus:
I am not ignorant of your preference for high-seasoned dishes
of foreign cookery, most especially blood-puddings, plentifully
spiced and sauced with adultery, seduction, poisoning, stabbing,
suicide, and all other sublime excesses of genius. I am aware also
that Your Majesty, being yourself able to perform impossibilities,
believed nothing impossible. Possessing this clew to Your Majesty’s
royal approbation, I solemnly assure you I have gone as far as I
could to secure it, with a safe conscience. I have laid about me
pretty handsomely, and sprinkled a good number of pages with blood
enough, I hope, to make a pudding. If I have any apology to make
to Your Majesty, it is for permitting some of my people to die a
natural death, a thing so unnatural that it has been banished from
all works of fiction aiming at the least semblance to truth....
But, may it please Your Majesty, I am troubled with weak nerves,
and my great grandfather was a Quaker. I am, therefore, naturally
averse to bloodshed, and have more than once nearly fallen into
convulsions over the pages of Monsieur Alexandre Dumas, whom
I consider a perfect Guillotine among authors. In short, may
it please Your Majesty, I abjure poisoning, or smothering with
charcoal, and confess myself deplorably behind the spirit of this
luminous age, which is as much in advance of all others, as the
forewheel of a wagon is ahead of the hind ones.
In his politics--and as a good American of the times he took his
politics seriously--Paulding found in the popular drift towards
Jacksonian democracy an expression of his deepest convictions. It
was moving in the direction he had long faced, and he went with
it whole-heartedly, enjoyed some of the emoluments of office, and
eventually served as Secretary to the Navy in the cabinet of Van Buren.
With Jackson’s attack on the Bank he must have been in deep sympathy,
for his dislike of the new financial system was of long standing. His
father had suffered heavily from a depreciated Continental currency,
and he early came to distrust all banks and banking. His political
views, indeed, were pretty much determined by the Physiocratic
convictions that underlay his thinking. He had been a Jeffersonian
long before the rise of Jacksonianism. Portions of his _Letters from
the South_, published in 1817, seem like excerpts from the agrarian
writings of John Taylor of Caroline. There is the same contemptuous
analysis of the “shin-plaster dynasty,” the same concern at the growth
of trading towns, the same conviction that cities and poverty and low
morals go hand in hand, the same trust in the perennial wholesomeness
of country life. Such a passage as this will suffice to reveal his
leanings towards a Physiocratic economy:
I was saying, that we have too many people living in cities,
in proportion to our farmers, who, after all, are the backbone
of every country, whence originates its riches and its solid
strength.... Yet our people cling to the towns and cities,
attracted by the hope of sudden wealth, and despising the slow,
yet sure, rewards of agriculture, which, without leading a man to
inordinate riches, secure him for ever from the chances of sinking
into beggary or want. The race of paupers receives no recruits
from them; for in all my sojournings, I may say with truth, that
I never saw an industrious farmer forsaken, “or his seed begging
bread.” One great cause of the disproportion of numbers ...
between the agricultural and other classes of the community, is
the great system of paper money, which has struck at the root of
regular, persevering industry, whose rewards, though slow, are
always certain. For some years back, hardly a tradesman in our
cities, and of late in our little towns (each of which, however
insignificant, has now its snug little bank) thinks of growing rich
by his industry. No; he must get accommodations at some bank, and
plunge into speculations: nor can you now go into a cobbler’s stall
without seeing a bank notice, or perhaps two or three, stuck up
with an awl at the chimney-piece, to remind the honest gentleman
that he owes a great deal more than he can pay. Thus is the axe
laid to the very root of national morals, and consequently national
prosperity, and the whole American people, farmers excepted, sunk
into an abject subjection to banks and their directors. (_Letters
from the South_, Vol. I, pp. 100-102.)
So confirmed an agrarian would easily arrive at agrarian conclusions in
his meditations on the nature and functions of the political state.
Unlike Irving, who, having no political convictions, was equally
pleased with Whig or Democrat if he happened to be a gentleman,
Paulding was something of a political philosopher with clear-cut
doctrines. He was too shrewd an observer of ways political to be
caught by party cries, or to ignore the class selfishness that would
make government a party to its ends. As a Jeffersonian he retained an
old-fashioned distrust of the political state. As an eighteenth-century
liberal he would keep the state within narrow bounds. Jealous for a
freedom worthy of free citizens, he wanted government to keep hands
off what did not concern it. He would not have the state used as a
cat’s-paw to pull anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire, whether in the
form of Clay’s American System, or what not. For protective tariffs
and internal improvements--those grandiose schemes for hastening
prosperity--he felt an old-fashioned repugnance that found issue
in amusing caricature. In _Westward Ho!_ he introduces a French
publican of a Mississippi River village who does not care for Yankee
improvements and describes them thus:
Diable! monsieur, another improvement; last year they assess me for
one grand public improvement! one road to go somewhere, I don’t
know. Eh bien! I pay the money. Well, this year they assess me for
one other grand public improvement--very grand--voilà, monsieur,
one other road, right alongside the other, both going to the same
place. Diable! I no want to travel on two turnpike roads. Ah!
monsieur le colonel, I shall be very rich, O! very rich indeed,
by these grand improvements. They take away all my land to make
room for the grand improvement; they take away all my money to
pay for him, and then they tell me my land worth four, six time
so much as before. Peste! what that to me when my land all gone
to the dem public improvement, hey? I shall be very rich then.
Diable! I wish myself gone to some country where every thing was
go backwards--what you call tail foremost, instead of forwards,
for the dem march of improvement shall ruin me at last. (Vol. II,
Chapter XVI.)
Satire aimed at the new gospel of progress is not infrequent in
Paulding. In _Koningsmarke_ he drew the picture of a politician that
was perhaps intended for a burlesque of Henry Clay. The worthy Wolfgang
Langfanger, member of the council of Elsingburgh, having “brought
his private affairs into great confusion, by devoting too much time
to the public good,” began “to think it high time the public good
should repay some part of its weighty obligations. He had accordingly
invented, and persuaded the Heer Piper to put into practice, a system
of internal improvement, which has been imitated, from time to time,
in this country ever since with great success. The essence of his plan
consisted in running in debt for the present, and living afterwards
upon the anticipation of future wealth” (Book Second, Chapter VI). Big
with his wonderful idea the busy councilor projected great docks and
wharves for the commerce that was to be invited to come, a fine canal
that would cut off a full six miles for barges that were not yet on
the stocks, and a magnificent plan of new streets that led through
houses that must be pulled down and fields that must forego their
usual harvests. Such goodly improvements naturally cost money, and to
maintain the public credit taxes were levied, and still more taxes,
until, like the French tavern-keeper, the good people of Elsingburgh
were brought to doubt the wisdom of investing in future prosperity at
so high a present cost.
But the masterpiece of Langfanger’s policy was that of pulling
down an old market, and building a new one in another part of the
village, in the management of which business he is supposed to have
laid down the first principles of the great and thriving science of
political economy, or picking people’s pockets on a grand scale.
He caused the people living near the old market to pay roundly
for its removal as a nuisance; and then he caused the people that
lived about where the new one was to be built, to pay roundly for
the vast pleasure and advantage of its neighbourhood. Thus he
pinched them through both ears, and got the reputation of a great
financier. (Book Seventh, Chapter III.)
_Koningsmarke_ is Paulding’s most interesting work, and the utter
neglect that has overtaken it is far from deserved. It is native and
original, full of shrewd comment and sly satire, and it embodies most
of Paulding’s pet theories and aversions. Few books of the time are
more amusing than this tale of the Long Finne who moves in a dark cloud
of mystery woven by Bombie of the Frizzled Head, barks his sturdy
shins on many a blood-curdling adventure, proves a true knight to his
lady, and in the end turns out to be a very ordinary fellow who has
been blown up to heroic size by the black art of romance. Paulding
must have had great fun writing it, for his wit still preserves its
freshness after a hundred years. It is a whimsical satire on the ways
of the hour, literary and other, set against the background of an
old Swedish settlement on the banks of the Delaware; but the chief
purpose of its quizzical pages is the pouring of a broadside into
the picturesque hull of contemporary fiction. It is an attack on the
abundant extravagance of current romance that had been inflated by
“Monk” Lewis and Sir Walter. Paulding cleverly hits off the high-flown
and ghostly, the love of blood pudding, the snobbish contempt for the
homely and native. Written in 1823, the year of Cooper’s _Pioneers_,
it defends the realism of characters and setting in that work against
the charge of vulgarity and commonplace, but it takes pains to satirize
Cooper’s noble red man of the forest. Paulding’s Indians are more like
Bird’s than Cooper’s, material for burlesque rather than romance, but
as he runs over the names of the warriors--“the Big Buffalo, the Little
Duck-Legs, the Sharp-Faced Bear, the Walking Shadow, the Iron Cloud,
the Jumping Sturgeon, the Belly Ache, and the Doctor, all legitimate
sovereigns, with copper rings in their noses, blanket robes of state,
and painted faces”--amusement at their childishness is tempered by the
recognition that they have been overreached and dispossessed by the
grasping white men.
In some of his later work the line between burlesque and serious is not
so clearly marked, and one hesitates to pronounce whether _Westward
Ho!_ is a sober attempt at popular romance or a _reductio ad absurdum_
of the current romantic flummery. Certainly it is a preposterous story
with its melancholy hero driven mad by fear of madness and indulging in
gibberish that comes straight out of Shakespeare, and with its ample
crop of stock characters--Master Zeno Paddock and Mrs. Judith Paddock
with their prying inquisitiveness, Colonel Dangerfield the easy-going
Virginia gentleman who in staking his estate on a horse race embodies
the plantation tradition, and Bushfield the backwoodsman who cannot
live in a world that has left off its moccasins, and removes to a place
where there are no laws and no lawyers and where constables do not
visit a man who has thrashed his neighbor. _Westward Ho!_ is not an
amusing book; it is quite lacking in local color, and its casual bits
of realism and occasional satire are too inconsequential to signify.
_The Dutchman’s Fireside_, written at about the same time, is far more
successful. It purports to be an account of the Knickerbocker society
in the days of the Old French war, and it contains some lovely pictures
of old times that one reads with pleasure; but it indulges somewhat
freely in adventure amongst the Indians and in the war, and its love
story is needlessly romantic. Although Paulding still protests against
a blood-pudding diet, he indulges occasionally in the high-flown, to
the detriment of the idyllic note. Romance was all about him and
he could not wholly escape its compulsions. Too casual in his work,
too undisciplined in the craft of writing, he remained to the end an
amusing amateur, a homespun man of letters who never took the trouble
to master his technic. There was excellent stuff in him, solider
perhaps than in Irving, but his failure suggests the difference between
the journeyman and the artist.
Footnotes
[423] Writing to his wife a month afterwards, Cooper said: “By the
way, Mrs. Willing has let out the secret of Irving’s appointment. He
wrote to Webster to remember him _if any good thing offered_. So that
instead of not asking for the office, he asked for anything that was
good. There has been more humbug practised concerning this man than
concerning any other now living” (Cooper, _Correspondence of James
Fenimore-Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 469).
[424] See _Letters from the South_, Vol. I, _Letter XXII_.
Chapter IV • James Fenimore Cooper • Critic
Fenimore Cooper is one of the puzzling figures of his generation.
In his substantial character was embodied what may well appear no
more than a bundle of contradictions. Romancer and social critic,
feudal-minded yet espousing a republican faith, he pretty much baffled
his own generation in its testy attempts to understand him, as he has
pretty much baffled later times. No other major writer, unless it be
Whitman, has been so misunderstood, and no other offers a knottier
problem to the student of American letters. The stubborn clay of
his nature was molded to a pattern unlike that of his fellows, and
the difference was long accounted to him as a grave shortcoming.
His outspoken individualism was a constant irritant to a sensitive
majority, and his aloofness from the common enthusiasms was reckoned
no better than treason to his native land. The right of the individual
to question the herd pronouncements was a right not acknowledged by
the herd, and the more it tried to silence Cooper’s tongue the more
caustic and loquacious it became. He refused to be silenced though
it should come to open warfare. His later years in consequence were
rendered unhappy by a thousand petty vexations, and his creative work
was brought only this side of shipwreck.
How and why so great a misadventure befell him are questions of
prime importance to which little attention has been given. That his
tactlessness was at fault is commonly believed--his tactlessness and a
certain pugnacious virtue that would inculcate righteousness by means
of a broken head. But such an explanation, true enough so far as it
goes, does not go far enough. The trouble lay deeper than that; it lay
in the mind of Cooper himself, in the doubts and uncertainties that
dwelt side by side with stubborn dogmatisms, troubling his speculations
and perplexing his plainest counsels. And that trouble must be traced
to an underlying conflict between the man and his age, between the
ideal and the real, between high loyalties and petty fact. Fenimore
Cooper was the barometer of a gusty generation, sensitive to every
storm on the far horizon. No other observer of that changing generation
suffered so keenly in mind and conscience from the loosening of ancient
ties, and none labored so hard to keep his countrymen to the strait
path of an old-fashioned rectitude. His busy life covered the middle
years of the great shift from an aristocratic order to a capitalistic
order, and this revolutionary change provided him ample materials for
brooding speculation. At every turn in the road fresh doubts assailed
him. The perplexities and dogmatisms that clutter so many of his later
pages, playing havoc with his romantic art, are a testimony to the
confusions of a generation in the midst of epic changes. As honest a
man as ever spoke his mind frankly, he endeavored to reconcile the
irreconcilable, and establish sure standards amid the wreck of all
standards. He could not drift. He must discover some working agreement
between the old America and the new, between the reputed excellencies
of the traditional aristocratic order, and the reputed justice of the
democratic ideal. But unfortunately for this difficult business he was
temperamentally ill-equipped. He was always at war with himself. His
loyalties and his conscience ran at cross-purposes. His mind was packed
with prejudices as an egg with meat. He was too partisan to compromise,
and too honest to be content with the shoddy. His instinctive
romanticisms were always being buffeted by fact, and his troubled mind
in consequence was forever constructing laborious defense-mechanisms.
For those deep confusions that marred his later work and brought
such bitter misunderstanding upon him, his heritage was much to
blame. A romantic at heart, he was out of sympathy with the dominant
romanticisms of his generation. Certain hold-overs from the past held
him back from hearty participation in the present. He loved the world
that was falling into decay too much to put away its virtues with its
smallclothes; he would preserve what was excellent in the old to enrich
and dignify what was excellent in the new; he would have the young
democracy learn the decorum of a staid aristocracy. It is this fond
lingering between worlds that sets Cooper apart from his fellows. He
was an English squire of the old school turned republican, who did not
quite like the company he found himself in. He was equally puzzled at
the bumptious leveling of the coonskin democracy, and the exploitative
spirit of Wall Street Whiggery. But though he railed at the newfangled
ways with the testiness of a squire, he was too confirmed a republican,
too deeply concerned that the great venture in republicanism should
demonstrate its wisdom, to overlook its shortcomings. He would have
it be so true to its ideal that the world would acknowledge its
excellence. He could not circumscribe his duties to election-day
hurrahs; he must ferret out treason in the market place; he must be
faithful in counsel though he utter unwelcome truths. It was the very
faithfulness of Cooper to his conception of an ideal republic that
brought him into collision with his fellows and filled his later days
with bitterness.
It is easy to see where Cooper got those stubborn notions that marked
him as the last of our eighteenth-century squires and left him obsolete
after the adoption of the Constitution of 1821. From his father, from
the Tory rector of St. Peter’s, Albany, who first schooled him, from
the Loyalist family of De Lancey into which he married, from Governor
Jay and the old gentry with whom he was brought up, he imbibed certain
stalwart conservatisms--political, religious, social, economic--that
mingled in his blood and nourished the tissues of caste prejudice
from which his maturer social philosophy struggled in vain to escape.
In spite of his deliberate acceptance of the democratic principle,
as he understood that principle, he remained at heart as sturdily
eighteenth-century as any fox-hunting master of English acres. He
had early been bred in the old traditions at Otsego Hall where he
spent his boyhood. His father, Judge William Cooper, “a testy and
choleric gentleman easily wrought into passion,”--whom he idealized as
Judge Temple in _The Pioneers_--was an old-school politician of high
Federalist persuasion, a vigorous, not to say truculent, embodiment of
the stake-in-society principle of statecraft. Smitten with the common
itch for large land holdings, he had got his hands on a huge virgin
tract which he managed in the old baronial fashion. He was a real lord
of the manor and late in life he recalled that “there were 40,000 souls
holding land, directly or indirectly, under me”; and in the year 1800
“he set up a claim to having placed the plough upon more acres than any
other man in America” (quoted in D. R. Fox, _The Decline of Aristocracy
in the Politics of New York_, p. 136). Otsego Hall in Cooperstown was
a frontier citadel of Federalism defending the western marches against
Jeffersonian democracy, and Judge Cooper used his economic power
over tenants with telling effect. He “rode far and wide in the cause
of Jay and later Aaron Burr, always preaching the musty doctrine that
government had better be left to gentlemen, and that simple folk should
vote as they were told” (_ibid._, pp. 136-137). When persuasion failed
he resorted to threats, and in 1792 he was before the legislature on
impeachment charges. From the testimony it appears that the patriarchal
Judge used direct methods with tenants in arrears; he “had been round
to the people and told them that they owed him, and that unless they
voted for Mr. Jay, he would ruin them” (_ibid._, p. 140). By such
arguments it was thought some seven hundred votes had been brought into
the Federalist column by this exemplar of the old virtues.
But Cooper had drifted with his age far from such old-fashioned methods
of class domination. In spite of his great love for his father he
seems never to have espoused the latter’s political creed. With the
disintegration of Federalism the young man went with the country in
its turning towards French romanticism. When and why he adopted the
democratic faith is not apparent, but until middle life it would seem
that he concerned himself little with political theory. He remained a
provincial American with an intense pride of patriotism. But his long
stay in Europe, lasting from June, 1826, to November, 1833, and the
Jacksonian revolution that took place during his absence, put him upon
an anxious examination of first principles, and thereafter to the end
of his life the social and political problems of America were a burden
on his conscience. He arrived late at a reasoned political faith, as
he arrived late at his literary art, and it is impossible to trace the
steps of his intellectual development; yet confused though his thinking
was, and shot through with narrowing prejudices, he persistently sought
for the light; and the germinal source of his dissatisfactions was the
deepening conviction that, in Franklin’s phrase, the affairs of this
world are preposterously managed. From this conviction Cooper never
swerved. The contrast everywhere between the real and the ideal took
hold of his mind as an obsession, and put an end to his contentment.
His romantic art suffered from the intrusion of realism; the romancer
was constantly impelled to turn critic. It was his travels more than
anything else that destroyed his provincial contentment. The perturbing
influence of that experience abroad has never perhaps been adequately
considered by his critics. No other American was so unsettled by
contact with European civilization. It was a Europe in the throes
of revolution and Cooper threw himself with enthusiasm into French
politics, hoping for a wise republican issue from the overturn. But
it was a Europe also of dignified and generous culture that was a
challenge to his Americanism. It made a critic of him and turned his
mind to political and social problems. Europe appealed to his native
aristocratic prejudices, but repelled his democratic; Jacksonian
America appealed to his democratic prejudices, but rode roughshod
over his aristocratic. He found himself nowhere at home. Puzzled and
perturbed, he leveled his shafts at both worlds and sought a haven of
refuge in vicarious existence, at times in the wilderness beyond the
soil and smutch of the Jacksonian frontier, at times in the Utopian
world of _The Crater_ where an honest man could find free play for his
creative energy, until the trouble makers came upon him.
In temperament and outlook this later Cooper was another John Adams
modified by changing times. A realist in his long brooding over social
and political evils, he was at heart an idealist greatly concerned
with justice amongst men, with a romantic fondness for dwelling on
the virtues of earlier days. Like Adams he understood very well that
equality is a Utopian dream; that social classes exist in every society
that has accumulated property, and that sovereignty in the long run
will fall into the hands that control the social economics.[425] The
problem he set himself to consider was the problem of reconciling this
universal fact with his own predilection in favor of democracy. That
he regarded himself as a democrat his emphatic assertions suffice
to prove; but no more than Emerson was he deceived by the spurious
democracy of the times. “The writer believes himself to be as good a
democrat as there is in America,” he said in the Introduction to _The
American Democrat_. “But his democracy is not of the impracticable
school. He prefers a democracy to any other system, on account of its
comparative advantages, but not on account of its perfection. He knows
it has evils; great and increasing evils, and evils peculiar to itself;
but he believes that monarchy and aristocracy have more. It will be
very apparent to all who read this book, that he is not a believer in
the scheme of raising men very far above their natural propensities.”
He would lift his voice in no hurrah for the majority, for he knew
that the majority was very likely to be the tool of the demagogue. He
saw no peculiar virtue or special intelligence in a coonskin cap, and
he discovered no advantage in log cabins and hard cider as a training
school for statesmen. He had watched the disgraceful campaign of 1840
with concern that gentlemen should stoop to the demagoguery that marked
that electoral debauch; and it confirmed him in the conviction that
“old-fashioned, high principled gentlemen” of an earlier age would
never have been guilty of such traffic in votes--men like Chancellor
Livingston who devoted his later years to raising Merino sheep, or John
Jay who after filling with dignity many high offices retired to his
estate to concern himself with new varieties of melons.
Hating all humbug, Cooper made it his business to free his mind from
the several varieties of cant that were overrunning America like
pigweed. “Had a suitable compound offered,” he said of _The American
Democrat_, “the title of this book would have been something like
‘Anti-cant.’” Roughly, the history of his essays in criticism falls
into two broad phases: the struggle to pull himself out of the bog
of eighteenth-century caste philosophy--from that stake-in-society
theory which his father upheld; and the struggle to escape the
fallacies of the nineteenth-century philosophy rising about him--from
the rude equalitarianism of Jacksonian democracy, and the materialism
of capitalistic exploitation. His abandonment of the principle of
gentleman-rule marks his definite break with the philosophy of
Federalism and the substitution of democracy. It cost him a prolonged
struggle, for the social-stake theory ran with many of his oldest
predilections, and the evidence of that struggle is scattered broadly
through the pages written in the late thirties; but having convinced
himself of the social wrong involved in the principle, he was tireless
in refutation. In _The American Democrat_ he laid down the principle
that “A government founded on the representation of property, however
direct or indirect, is radically vicious.... It is the proper business
of government to resist the corruptions of money, and not to depend
on them” (_On Property_, p. 141). But it is _The Monikins_, a strange
book much laughed at by the critics, rarely read and little understood,
that concerns itself most largely with the theory. Sadly bungled though
the satire quite obviously is, it is nevertheless a spirited attack on
the social-stake principle that reveals how far Cooper had traveled
from the doctrines of Hamilton and Webster, of Federalist and Whig.
Both England and America--Leaphigh and Leaplow--show meanly under his
caustic analysis, the former perhaps more meanly than the latter; their
institutions, societies, politics, manners, are an unlovely compound of
cant and hypocrisy; and the root of the common meanness he discovers
in human selfishness. He conceives of man as a queer mixture of good
and evil from whom much is not to be expected; something nearer to
Swift’s conception than William Ellery Channing’s; with too much of the
Monikin in him to pass for a child of God; prone to error even under
a republican system; insolent, tyrannical, loving fetishes, given to
brag, too poor-spirited to be free, gilding his fetters and belying
Locke’s saying that chains are an ill wearing. There are depths of
bitterness in _The Monikins_ that startle the reader. It is a tale of
doubt and disillusion, Gulliver-like in its fierceness of attack, that
strikes through all the shoddy romanticisms of the times and reduces
the current democracy to humbug. Subjected to such analysis the old
Federalist shibboleth of men of principle and property is no more than
the East wind in empty bellies. The possession of money does not change
human nature; rich as well as poor are driven by selfish interest, and
to give a loose to property power is to invite political disaster.
Your social-stake system supposes that he who has what is termed a
distinct and prominent interest in society, will be the most likely
to conduct its affairs wisely, justly, and disinterestedly. This
would be true, if those great principles which lie at the root of
all happiness were respected; but unluckily, the stake in question,
instead of being a stake in justice and virtue, is usually reduced
to be merely a stake in property.... Now, all experience shows
that the great property-incentives are to increase property, to
protect property, and to buy with property those advantages which
ought to be independent of property, viz., honors, dignities,
power and immunities. I cannot say how it is with men, but our
[Monikin] histories are eloquent on this head. We have had the
property-principle carried out thoroughly in our practice, and the
result has shown that its chief operation is to render property as
intact as possible, and the bones, and sinews, and marrow of all
who do not possess it, its slaves. (_The Monikins_, Chapter XXVII.)
But though Cooper might deny the validity of the eighteenth-century
social-stake theory, he saw no valid reason to abandon his
eighteenth-century economics. In his preference for a social order
founded on agriculture he was as confirmed a Physiocrat as Franklin or
Jefferson; and this preference determined his judgment on the economic
revolution under way in America. A people living close to the soil was
living more wholesomely, he believed, than a city people immersed in
trade and manufacture. For the capitalistic expansion that followed the
new fiscal system of the seventeen-nineties, he felt an instinctive
repugnance. Banking and the manipulation of credit seemed to him mean
and sordid, and the spirit of speculation that was overrunning the
land he believed was destructive of common morality. The activities
of Wall Street he looked upon with the eyes of an English squire. To
expect any sane progress from such worship of money, to assume that a
high and excellent civilization could result from such worship, seemed
to him plain madness. “God protect the country that has nothing but
commercial towns for capitals,” he wrote his wife in 1839 (Cooper,
_Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 404), and the
comment found amplification in many a caustic passage in his novels of
criticism. A materialistic middle class with its gospel of progress
interpreted in terms of wasteful exploitation seemed to him the hateful
progeny of a period of “moral occultation”; and against this “Yankee”
philosophy he waged an unrelenting warfare. In _The Monikins_ he drew
a gloomy picture of the America of the thirties when the land had come
under a great moral eclipse; and in _Home as Found_ and _The Redskins_
he commented bitterly on the universal restlessness that was driving
thousands to the new West to seek their fortunes. The settlement of
the Inland Empire was no romance for him. The Great Migration seemed
to imply the break-up of the older America he loved; and the impact of
the frontier spirit upon the country seemed likely to destroy the last
excellence of an earlier age. It marked for Cooper the final triumph
of the acquisitive Yankee spirit, grasping and lawless in its crude
leveling.
From these germinal sources--his love of the dignified ways of the old
manorial families, his contempt for the middle class, his dislike of a
bumptious leveling, his hatred of brag and cant and enterprise--came
those sharp contrasts in his pictures that set the vulgar present
over against the dignified past. His criticism was in no small part
the reaction of a romantic to the unlovely works of an economic
revolution. From his loyalty to the old came that subtle romanticizing
of the eighteenth century that lends a charm to his tales, and from it
came also that vindictive hatred of the frontier that spurred him to
ill-balanced criticism. He could not like the new that was destroying
the old. Like Emerson he was a man without a party, but unlike him he
sought consolation in the past rather than the future. The excellence
he yearned for he found in that older world whose stable ways were as
yet unsettled by the romantic revolution, and from the meanness of the
present he stole away to find consolation in the dignity and worth of
honester times. The late eighteenth century became, therefore, his
romantic haven and City of Refuge to which he returned gladly. He
was always seeking to revitalize the old in an environment where, as
he lamented, “the eighteenth century may be set down as a very dark
antiquity.”
That Cooper unconsciously romanticized the past is only too evident.
Too often he accepted its self-proclaimed virtues as sober fact and
created a race of squires that never existed outside his pages.
Realist though he was in certain moods, he abandoned his realism in
the presence of the tie-wig gentry. His father was as graspingly
eighteenth century as Gouverneur Morris and saw to it that his own nest
was well feathered; yet the son failed to perceive that the dignified
professions of those old gentlemen were little more than splendid
gestures. He made the mistake of taking them at their face value.
Honest himself, he attributed an equal honesty to the older generation,
and he watched with unfeigned regret the disintegration of an order
that seemed to him the repository of much that was excellent. Fragments
of its ideals he clung to; its dignity, its concern for breeding
and manners, its fine distinction. Fragments also of its political
convictions: its concern for law and order, its belief that all just
law is founded in morality, its insistence that American government
is one of principles and not of men. He put his finger shrewdly on
certain fallacies of eighteenth-century theory, but he took too many
of its values at par. The twilight is a mighty sorcerer and Cooper was
bewitched by the half light that lingered softly on the familiar past.
This suffices to explain the grounds of the charge of aristocratic
leanings that Cooper was persistently brought under. His bold defense
of the landed gentry gave mortal enmity to the Jacksonians, and the
tactlessness with which he pointed out the crude provincialisms of
America--the bumptious plebeians he set over against the priggish
gentlemen--was rubbing salt on open sores. _Home as Found_ and _The
Redskins_ were onslaughts on the ways of the sacred majority that
America could not forgive him for. Yet no counter criticism ever moved
Cooper from his conviction that gentlemen of an earlier generation
possessed dignity, principles, character, far beyond the speculators
and politicians and “small-potato lawyers” of the present time of
“moral occultation”; and the difference in favor of the old he traced
to the economic basis of the tie-wig gentry. Believing with John Adams
that an aristocracy is implicit in every established society, he
frankly preferred a landed to a capitalistic aristocracy. Gentlemen of
the old school were neighborhood patriarchs. Secure in position and
possessions they disdained to keep an ear to the ground or court a
silly popularity. They were squires with a high sense of responsibility
to themselves and society. Their stake in the land was a stabilizing
influence in their lives; and their ample way of living, their
well-bred leisure, their courteous bearing learned from a cosmopolitan
experience, seemed to Cooper a desirable influence in a society lacking
refinement and exact standards. To supplant them with the new gentry of
Wall Street seemed to him plain folly, and he watched the decay of the
old families with a pathetic concern. The Anti-Rent novels are a long
defense of a thesis that comes to final expression in such a passage as
this from _The Redskins_:
I say that, in a country like this, in which land is so abundant
as to render the evils of a general monopoly impossible, a landed
gentry is precisely what is most needed for the higher order of
civilization, including manners, tastes, and the minor principles,
and is the very class which, if reasonably maintained and properly
regarded, would do the most good at the least risk of any social
caste known. (Chapter XXVI.)
It is not hard, indeed, to understand Cooper’s preference for Stephen
Van Rensselaer the Patroon, to John Jacob Astor the fur trader, or
Commodore Vanderbilt the ferryman; yet such preference was charged
against him as un-American.
It was this revulsion from the meanness of the present that sent
Cooper into the wilderness or out on the high seas, to seek adventure
in the company of nature’s noblemen, and forget the sordidness of the
real. Here again the French school prompted his thinking, if only to
supplement the romance of his boyish recollections. Natty Bumppo is
quite evidently man as he came from the hand of nature, uncorrupted by
the vices of the settlements; indeed one might question whether the
back-to-nature literature can show another figure so enduringly vital
as the Leatherstocking. From this same material is fashioned Uncas
and the younger Chingachgook and still other lovable figures of his
romances. They belong to the free wilderness beyond the settlements,
where the dramatic flight and pursuit go on unchecked by impertinent
fences. Here their native virtues expand and their generous gifts find
ample play. They shunned the settlements as Cooper shunned them. On the
frontier, the middle ground between nature and civilization, Cooper’s
spirits flagged. He had no love for the stumpy clearings, the slovenly
cabins, the shiftless squatters; the raw devastation of the ax grieved
him and he breathes contentedly only after he has left the last scars
behind and is in the deep woods beyond the smell of rum. Such a man
obviously was unfitted to write a just account of the frontier as
it straggled westward. He hated its ways too fiercely to do justice
to it, and when he comes upon it in his tales, when he introduces a
frontier figure such as Ishmael Bush in _The Prairie_ or old Aaron
Thousandacres in _The Chainbearer_, it is to depict the unhappy state
of society where the virtues of nature are gone and the refinements
of civilization not yet come. No writer has set down a more sweeping
indictment of the frontier than Cooper, and he set it down because the
frontier seemed to him the muddy source of the vulgar leveling he hated
so heartily. A gentleman, whether Indian or squire or scout, Cooper
loved to be with; but a vulgarian he could not endure, and a rascal
stirred his Puritan wrath. In consequence there runs through his work
little of the amusing picaresque strain that the heartier nature of
Gilmore Simms delighted in, and that made him a truer chronicler of
frontier ways.
Democrat though he professed to be, Cooper shrank from the logical
application of the democratic principle. The adoption of manhood
suffrage in New York brought in its train a sorry scramble of
demagogues to sway the popular will, a debasement of the press, and
a vulgarizing of political life that proved a sore trial to Cooper’s
faith. He was too severely moralist to enjoy the little weaknesses of
human nature, but must set himself up as custodian of public morals.
Affronted by a bumptious vulgarity, he became the assailant rather than
the critic of Jacksonian ways. The land to which he returned in 1833
was a broad target for his shafts and he sent them into the white. The
America of log cabins and hard cider seemed to him to have repudiated
the traditional standards, moral as well as cultural, and he attributed
the disintegration to the corruption that came from the extension of
the suffrage to classes unprepared to use it wisely. It was this that
embittered his criticism in the caustic pages of _Homeward Bound_ and
_Home as Found_. He was startled and resentful at the changes. “You
have been dreaming abroad,” remarked one of the characters in the
former, “while your country has retrograded, in all that is respectable
and good, a century in a dozen years” (_Homeward Bound_, Chapter XVII).
The colossal brag, the meaningless unrest, the abysmal provincialism,
he marked as the natural by-products of the mob mind. In throwing off
its old restraints America was coming to deny all standards of decency
and excellence. “What then do you deem our greatest error--our weakest
point?” asks one of his characters, and the reply is explicit:
Provincialisms, with their train of narrow prejudices, and a
disposition to set up mediocrity as perfection, under the double
influence of an ignorance that unavoidably arises from a want of
models, and of the irresistible tendency to mediocrity in a nation
where the common mind so imperiously rules. (_Home as Found_,
Chapter XXV.)
It was during the bustling decade of the forties, when the agrarian
unrest in York State was putting in jeopardy the old manorial system,
that Cooper’s antagonism to the spirit of leveling became bitterest;
and it was in defense of the old system that he wrote the Anti-Rent
trilogy that should always be set over against the Leatherstocking
tales. Taken together the two series contain pretty much the whole
of Cooper, his sea tales excepted; either alone gives an inadequate
and partial view. The one is a social study, the other a romantic
epic. The one gives a picture of the changes the years have brought
to a given region, the other follows the retreating wilderness as the
frontier moved westward. The Anti-Rent novels present the reverse of
the romantic picture of the Leatherstocking tales. Their central figure
is Aaron Thousandacres the squatter, who has come out of Connecticut
to possess what pleases him, regardless of legal rights. Offspring of
generations of covetous, psalm-singing Puritans, he has no difficulty
in justifying his lawlessness by Yankee logic. The devil can quote
Scripture, and in this respect old Thousandacres is the devil’s own
son. When Scripture fails the easy gospel of natural rights comes to
his aid; the written law may be on the side of the title-holder, but
natural law is on the side of the squatter.
“There’s two rights to all the land on ’arth, and the whull world
over,” the squatter replied to Chainbearer’s legal argument. “One
of these rights is what I call a king’s right, or that which
depends on writin’s, and laws, and sich like contrivances; and
the other depends on possession. It stands to reason, that fact
is better than any writin’ about it can be.” (_The Chainbearer_,
Chapter XXV.)
Such lax doctrine, to Cooper, was the evil fruit of the spirit of
lawlessness that was laying a blight upon America. A retributive bullet
ends the fierce career of old Thousandacres, but his tigress wife,
his rough sons and slattern daughters are driven from their home to
plunge deeper into the wilderness, there to beget other generations of
squatters whose vicious doctrines return to plague society. No romance
blends with the tale of their lives; no sympathy softens the picture of
the stern old Yankee. He has set himself against law and order and must
yield or be destroyed. It is the old story of the struggle for land, a
struggle that went on for generations between speculator and squatter,
between rich and poor, with much wrong and much right on both sides;
yet Cooper’s sympathies are cold to the squatter’s plea and he enlists
God, morality, and the law, in defense of a title to forty thousand
acres wheedled from the Indians for ninety-six pounds, York currency,
spent in trinkets. Righteousness without a sense of humor is not easy
to live with.
In much of his later work Cooper’s romantic impulses are held in check
by a growing tendency towards realism. It was there from the first but
as he grew more critical it spread over more of his pages. He tried
to hold the scales of his judgment even, but his realism was marred
and distorted by his vehement nature. A mind exuding prejudice is
ill equipped to deal objectively with material, and Cooper was too
inveterate a moralist to accept the principle of impersonal detachment.
He prided himself on facing fact, but he loved to preach; and having
pointed out the wrongfulness of vicious morals he must follow it
with a vigorous homily on right conduct. And yet despite his gross
shortcomings there is a deal of realism scattered through his volumes.
He consciously tried to be a chronicler of manners, to depict America
truly, to recreate fairly present and past, red man and white, Dutch
and Yankee. His prejudices certainly got the better of him in dealing
with New England, and his romance certainly got the better of him in
describing the Mohicans. Yet though he might romanticize Uncas he
did not romanticize Saucy Nick in _Wyandotté_, but drew an excellent
picture of the struggle between the drunkard and the warrior in the
heart of the Tuscarora that reveals much of the Indian nature--an
analysis that holds the scales more evenly than they are held in _The
Last of the Mohicans_ or in Bird’s _Nick of the Woods_. The book as a
whole, indeed, is an excellent example of Cooper’s desire to substitute
a critical for a romantic treatment of materials. In his discriminating
analysis of the motives separating families in the Revolutionary war,
there is no glorification of partisanship, no prejudiced espousal of a
sacred cause, no division of sheep and goats. Cooper will have none of
the cheap romance of patriotism, but probes skillfully into the motives
and impulses that divided honest men amid the difficulties of civil
war. More than that, he makes his villain one of the patriot party who
uses the unsettlement of the times to cover his dirty tracks. It is a
characteristic document that deserves to stand beside _Satanstoe_ as an
example of his later work.
Politics was all about Cooper while he was writing these tales, and
his sporadic incursions into criticism led him into the field of
political theory. So doughty a warrior must break a lance when all
America was engaged in a great political tourney. While Whig and
Democrat were loudly professing allegiance to the new doctrine of
majority rule, Cooper was making his way back to the principles of
the eighteenth century and discovering the essence of good government
in self-restraint. The mistake of the new school, he was convinced,
lay in confusing the present will of the majority with the rule of
the people; the mistake of the old school lay in confusing the will
of the minority with the rule of the people. Above and beyond both
majority and minority is the eternal principle of justice, and any
government that flouts that principle is bad government, no matter
how sanctioned. In a republic which foolishly believes that the voice
of the people is the sole criterion of right, the problem of justice
is peculiarly difficult, for what remedies are available in cases “in
which the people themselves happen to go astray, _en masse_”? It is the
problem that attends every ethical interpretation of sovereignty, and
it awakened acute concern in Cooper’s mind. He could find no solution
except in the good sense of the people, and with a vicious press and
persuasive demagogues doing their best to befuddle the public mind,
the outlook seemed dark. It was not the people he distrusted, but the
self-seekers who set up to be leaders of the people. All the noise was
made by demagogues who proclaimed their own mouthings to be authentic
public opinion. How ineffectively Cooper struggled with the problem is
written down in many a passage in his critical novels.
God help the nation [he said in _The Redskins_] where
self-government, in its literal sense, exists.... When a people
that has been properly educated by experience calmly selects its
agents, and coolly sets to work to adopt a set of principles to
form its fundamental law or constitution, the machine is on the
right track, and will work well enough so long as it is kept there;
but this running off and altering the fundamental principles every
time a political faction has need of recruits, is introducing
tyranny in its worst form--a tyranny that is just as dangerous to
real liberty as hypocrisy is to religion. (Chapter XIII.)
Some observers pretend that ... respect for law is gradually
decreasing among us [he argued in _The Chainbearer_] and that
in its place is sensibly growing up a disposition to substitute
the opinions, wishes, and interests of local majorities, making
the country subject to men instead of principles. The last are
eternal and immutable; and coming of God, men, however unanimous
in sentiment, have no more right to attempt to change them, than
to blaspheme His holy name. All that the most exalted and largest
political liberty can ever beneficially effect is to apply these
principles to the good of the human race, in the management of
their daily affairs; but when they attempt to substitute for these
pure and just rules of right, laws conceived in selfishness and
executed by the power of numbers, they merely exhibit tyranny
in its popular form, instead of in its old aspect of kingly and
aristocratic abuses. It is a fatal mistake to fancy that freedom
is gained by the mere achievement of a right to govern, unless the
manner in which that right is to be both understood and practised
is closely incorporated with all popular notions of what has been
obtained. The right to govern means no more than the right of the
people to avail themselves of the power thus acquired to apply the
great principles of justice to their own benefit, and from the
possession of which they had hitherto been excluded. It confers
no power to do that which is inherently wrong, under any pretense
whatever. (Chapter XXVIII.)
Like Hugh Henry Brackenridge before him, Cooper was a democrat who
criticized the ways of a reputed democracy because of his love for
an ideal republic. Too few of his kind have arisen in America; too
few who dare to speak their minds unterrified by public opinion. An
individualist of the old English breed, he could not be intimidated
or coerced in the matter of his rights by any clamor, whether of
newspapers or mobs. He had his shortcomings in plenty, both as
romancer and critic. Testy, opinionated, tactless, forever lugging
in disagreeable truths by the ears, he said many wise things so
blunderingly as to make truth doubly offensive, and he hewed at his art
so awkwardly as well-nigh to destroy the beauty of his romance. Yet the
more intimately one comes to know him, the more one comes to respect
his honest, manly nature that loved justice and decency more than
popularity. His daily life became a long warfare with his fellows, who
exacted of him a great price for his idealism; but later generations
should love him none the less for the battles he fought. That America
has been so tardy in coming to know him as a man and a democrat, as
well as a romancer, is a reflection upon its critical acumen.
Footnotes
[425] See the Preface to _The Redskins_.
Chapter V • Some Contributions of New England
It was the good fortune of New York to draw to the bustling city some
of the best and most vigorous minds of New England. If the sons of
Yankees flocked thither, the sons of Puritans came likewise, and the
contributions of these latter to the idealism of a society rather too
fond of material progress must not be overlooked. The literature of
New York in particular was heavily indebted to New England. One need
only run over a list of writers who came from New England to realize
how great was its total contribution to the production of the New York
group. Bryant and Halleck and Willis and Greeley and Beecher and Curtis
and Tuckerman and Parke Benjamin and Stedman and Stoddard and even, in
a sense, Melville, were products of that more serious-minded world that
was to create transcendentalism and issue in strange projects of social
reform; they were men who would easily share the ethical enthusiasm of
their Puritan fellows, and create a literature concerned with other
than aesthetic values. Not all of them were Puritan in ideals; Halleck
and Willis quite evidently not; nevertheless the severe idealism of
their work sets it apart from the productions of the Knickerbocker
school. Perhaps not above, but certainly apart; and this unlikeness
calls for some special consideration. Over against Irving and Paulding
and Cooper may be set Bryant and Greeley and Melville, and the sharp
contrast between them will serve to differentiate the native mind of
New York from that of New England.
I • William Cullen Bryant • Puritan Liberal
For upwards of half a century now too much of Bryant has been
obscured by the brightness of his early fame. Since his death a
serious injustice has been done him by the critics, who have dwelt
too exclusively on his work in the field of verse to the neglect of
other work in fields perhaps quite as significant. The journalist
has been forgotten in the poet, the later democrat who spoke for
American liberalism has been displaced by the youthful versifier who
described American scenery. For this our bellettristic historians, who
are impatient of any incursions into matter of fact, are to blame.
Yet to ignore so much of Bryant results in underestimating him, and
this serves to explain the thin and shadowy quality of his present
reputation. He was a much larger man and more significant than the
critics have made him out to be. His active and many-sided life is very
inadequately expressed in the slender volume of his verse, excellent
as much of that is. The journalist and critic who for fifty years sat
in judgment on matters political and economic as well as cultural,
who reflected in the _Evening Post_ a refinement of taste and dignity
of character before unequaled in American journalism, was of service
to America quite apart from his contribution to our incipient poetry.
He was the father of nineteenth-century American journalism as well
as the father of nineteenth-century American poetry. In the columns
of the _Evening Post_ the best liberalism of the times found a place,
inspired and guided by Bryant’s clear intelligence. The lucidity of his
comment and the keenness of his humanitarian criticism set the editor
apart from shriller contemporaries, and made him a power for sanity in
a scurrilous generation. But with his death the evanescent character of
even the highest journalism asserted itself, and with the fading of his
journalistic reputation the earlier Bryant of _Thanatopsis_ shouldered
aside the Bryant of the _Evening Post_, and an unconscious distortion
of his career began, a distortion made easier by the fact that no
outstanding work of the later period remained to restore the balance.
In this he is like Jefferson. He is scattered piecemeal through his
occasional writings as the latter through his letters, and the task of
piecing him together and visualizing his work as a whole has not yet
been done.
It will not prove an easy task. The narrow but real genius of Bryant
is peculiarly elusive. His was essentially a self-pollenizing nature
that needed few contacts with other minds. He lived within himself,
little swayed by modes of thought, slowly maturing the native fruit of
his speculation. The very tenacity and persistence of his intellectual
life, the rigid integrity of his thinking, suggest the confidence of
one who drew his nourishment from within, whose life was an organic
growth. It is impossible to mistake his origins. The roots go down
to deep substrata of Puritan seriousness and Puritan austerity, and
the fruits which they nourish--somewhat scanty it may be but of firm
texture and good keeping qualities--possess the slightly acrid flavor
of old Puritan orchards where the care of the husbandman is pitted
against harsh seasons and a meager soil. There is no pagan luxuriance,
no riot of color or scent. The ethical idealism of New England is
given stately form if not rendered altogether lovely; the passion for
righteousness is held in restraint but it retains much of its tempered
acidity. Happily there was little of the schools in Bryant, and nothing
of the intellectual play-boy. His early life in the Berkshire hills, on
his father’s farm, as student at Williams College for a few months, and
as a country lawyer, threw him upon his own intellectual resources and
made possible a normal unfolding of his mind. He was fortunately spared
a much-coveted life at Yale, where the narrow classicism and ungenerous
dogmatisms could have done him little good. From Timothy Dwight the
young Bryant could have got little to enrich his mind, and he might
have got some disastrous checks. Left to himself he appropriated such
nourishment as fell in his way and went forward on the path of a sober
liberalism.
That he went forward at all is sufficient testimony to his native
integrity of character. In 1825 when he removed to New York, the
intellectual renaissance of Boston was just at the beginning, and in
his new environment he never quite kept pace with the transcendental
enthusiasms that so stimulated the New England radicals. At Great
Barrington where he had been growing more discontented with his
“shabby” profession of the law, he discovered little to encourage
an independent liberalism. Bred up in an environment of intolerant
Federalism and an equally intolerant Calvinism, he had much to outgrow
and little to feed on. Few innovating ideas penetrated to the Berkshire
hills where he was brooding on life and poetry, and the training of
his youth was strong upon him. As a mere boy he had expostulated
with President Jefferson in shrill heroic couplets, declaiming on
the latter’s reputed moral lapses and inviting him to resign his
high office. He had summoned Napoleon to the bar of Cummington
respectability and adjudged him guilty of high crimes against humanity;
but such rhetorical outbursts were only echoes of a narrow world he
was soon to outgrow. The blight of the tie-wig school of Fisher Ames
did not fasten itself deeply on him, and by the time he had reached his
twenties he was moving towards the twin goals towards which liberal
New England was moving--the Unitarianism of Channing and the democracy
of Jefferson. It was far more difficult for a Berkshire man to think
his way through to such revolutionary goals than for a Concord; yet
the unschooled Bryant who had never visited Boston till he went there
in his twenty-seventh year to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa
society at Harvard had already outstripped the Cambridge scholastics
in the great work of setting his mind free. The stages through which
he passed cannot easily be traced, but the fact of his decisive break
with the dogmas of his youthful world is plain enough. During the last
years at Great Barrington he put himself upon a course of reading and
thinking, and from that provocative experience emerged the Bryant that
we know. Calvinism and Federalism he put away, and he went up to New
York completely new-outfitted in a fashion he never afterwards saw
reason to change. In politics and religion, as in poetry, he was a man
of few ideas, but those ideas were creative, and determined all his
thinking.
For this change that was unconsciously preparing him for his later work
on the _Evening Post_, Bryant owed something to his father, who had
turned moderate Unitarian, but very much more to the Berkshire family
of Sedgwicks, one of whom, Catherine M. Sedgwick, was just beginning
her modest career as a “lady novelist;” another, Henry M. Sedgwick,
was at the head of the New York bar, wealthy and liberal-minded; and
a third, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., was a trusted adviser on legal and
economic matters, on whose pen Bryant came to rely in a difficult
situation. Theodore Sedgwick seems to have been a liberal of the
English school of Bright and Cobden, a confirmed free trader, and he
induced Bryant to undertake a course of reading in political economy.
During the years 1822 to 1824 the young man turned away from poetry and
law to study Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, together with a number
of pamphlets that issued from the Parliamentary debates over free trade
in 1820. The adventure proved stimulating and definitely determined
his attitude towards men and measures at a moment when American ideas
were in a state of flux. It was therefore as an English liberal that he
judged Jackson and Clay and Webster, and as an English liberal that he
weighed the Utopian programs of Greeley and Brisbane and Ripley. There
is no evidence that he read the works of the French romantics, although
the major ideas of Rousseau came to him in the guise of Unitarianism;
and this aloofness from the social enthusiasm of French thought, this
failure to sympathize with the idealism of the new sociology, may
perhaps be accounted his greatest intellectual shortcoming. Rousseau
and Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft could have taught him much that
he needed to know, could have warmed his cool blood and awakened his
Puritan sense of justice to the wrongs of an exploitative order. A dash
of Utopian enthusiasm would have made him a better poet and a better
editor; but lacking that he found himself sometimes out of sympathy
with men and women whom he should have understood better. A liberal
might smile at the measureless zeal of Fanny Wright and Robert D. Owen;
might dislike the militancy of the Abolitionists; he might well counsel
moderation; but he should not add his shaft to the flight sent against
them. But unfortunately Bryant too often distrusted those who outran
him, and would rather attack than restrain them.[426]
As an English liberal it was inevitable that Bryant should turn
Democrat and support Jackson against Clay and Adams; and an ardent
Democrat he remained till the re-alignment over the slavery question
turned him into a free-soiler. He early supported Lincoln for the
Republican nomination--the more easily because members of his family
had removed to Illinois and there followed the career of Lincoln
sympathetically--and he accepted the Republican faith till the open
alliance of the party with post-war capitalism aroused his opposition
and weakened his allegiance. Democrat though he was in conviction
and sympathy, Bryant was never a Jeffersonian, perhaps not even a
Jacksonian, but rather an anti-Whig, who measured the new America of
the industrial revolution and capitalistic finance by the yardstick of
eighteenth-century liberalism. As a disciple of Adam Smith, believing
in the sufficiency of _laissez faire_, he looked askance at an
engrossing political state that enlisted its sovereign powers on the
side of the longest purses, and he viewed with scorn the mercenaries
of the bench and Senate who defended the new citadels of capitalism.
In spite of his augmenting wealth he remained a simple countryman
at heart, never a city man, never liking the ways of Wall Street,
concerned with other things than money-making. If he had supplemented
Adam Smith with Du Pont de Nemours he might easily have followed
Jefferson into a Physiocratic agrarianism; if he had been bred in the
frontier West he might have discovered more sympathy for a coonskin
equalitarianism with its engrossing majority will. As it was, he
occupied a middle ground between Jefferson and Jackson, an economic
individualist who refused to conceive of the political state as a fat
cow to be milked by whoever could lay hands on her. He wanted no share
of the milk for himself and he saw no reason why others should have
any. He turned his back on all middle-class temptations, refusing to
speculate, not grasping at unearned increment, believing that America
had a nobler destiny in store than could be measured by exploitation.
An old-fashioned liberal, he set himself resolutely against the
exploitative spirit that was clamoring for internal improvements, a
protective tariff, speculative profits. The bitter struggle over the
Bank and the American System, in which he was drawn to Jackson by
principle as well as by admiration for his courage, laid the emphasis
in his mind on financial and industrial problems and made him the
outstanding journalistic opponent of Henry Clay. From first to last
Bryant was anti-Whig.
There were times, to be sure, when he went further than that;
times when his ingrained liberalism threw off its cool restraint
and flamed up in dangerously disturbant fashion. In the depths of
his Puritan nature was a quick sense of justice that might uncover
strange potentialities; and associated as he was in the intimacies
of daily work with two of the most radical spirits in New York,
William Leggett and Parke Godwin, he could not remain untouched by
their social enthusiasms. The former was a man of immense vitality
and boundless sympathies, to whom social justice was a religion. A
left-wing equalitarian democrat, Leggett hated all tariffs, subsidies,
monopolies, credit manipulation, everything that the new capitalism
represented. His sympathies were enlisted on the side of the new
proletarian movement, and with the zeal of a knight-errant he greeted
every opportunity to do battle for the cause. A home-made radical,
created out of the native economics of the industrial revolution, he
has been called by a late historical writer “one of the most sincere
and brilliant apostles of democracy that America has ever known.” His
political leaders in the _Evening Post_ aroused the admiration of such
different men as Whittier and Walt Whitman, and were “perhaps the most
potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy” held by the latter
(Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, p. 141). His son-in-law,
Godwin, on the other hand, was a radical of the imported school,
an ardent disciple of Fourier, deeply concerned with communistic
experiments at Brook Farm and elsewhere, and an assistant editor
of _The Harbinger_, the mouthpiece of Brook Farm after it passed
from transcendental to Fourierist control. His _Democracy, Pacific
and Constructive_, was accounted by Horace Greeley the best of the
contemporary studies of collectivism. Less militant than Leggett, his
radicalism ebbed with the years and growing prosperity, but it sufficed
to instruct Bryant in the elements of the current Utopian philosophies.
With such associates the older man was led somewhat unwillingly into
the thick of social struggle and his mind shifted unconsciously to
the left. The movement of Locofocoism in particular absorbed Leggett
and drew Bryant after him. Set on foot by a combination of reforming
economists opposed to banks, paper money, and monopolies, and the
rising proletarian movement then beginning its long struggle to
unionize the city workers, Locofocoism represented the extreme left
wing of democratic equalitarianism, the avowed objective of which
was to take government out of the hands of bankers and lodge it in
the hands of the producers. It was one of the first native attempts
at conscious class alignment between capital and labor. “What
distinguishes the present from every other struggle in which the human
race has been engaged,” wrote Fanny Wright, “is that the present is
evidently, openly and acknowledgedly a war of class.... It is the
ridden people of the earth who are struggling to overthrow the ‘booted
and spurred riders’ whose legitimate title to work and starve will
no longer pass current” (quoted by Fox, _Aristocracy in the Politics
of New York_, p. 396). How the democratic radicalism of Leggett was
received by conservative New York is thus described by the historian of
the _Evening Post_:
He was charged [says Nevins] with Utopianism, agrarianism,
Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack Cade-ism. His writings were
said to set class against class, and to threaten the nation with
anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called Leggett a “knave.” The
advance of the Locofoco movement was likened to the great fire
and the great cholera plague of these years. When Chief Justice
Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett unsparingly assailed
him and Hamilton as men who had tried “to change the character of
the government from popular to monarchical,” and to destroy “the
great principle of human liberty.”... Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was
handed that editorial on the Albany steamboat by Charles King, and
dropped the journal with the vehement ejaculation, “Infamous!”
“This is absolutely a species of impiety for which I want words to
express my abhorrence,” he entered in his diary. (Allan Nevins,
_The Evening Post, etc._, p. 152.)
The enthusiasm of Leggett sometimes carried further than the more
tempered liberalism of Bryant could follow. He shared Leggett’s
distrust of Marshall and Hamilton, but he seems to have been only a
moderate supporter of Locofoco principles. The paper had been brought
close upon financial breakers by its attack on the money-interests. The
working classes read it eagerly, but their indorsement could not make
good the loss of advertising and patronage by the wealthy; yet even
in such straits Bryant remained true to his liberalism and joined his
associates in upholding the proletarian cause. The labor union movement
had aroused the wrath of the employers and the courts were appealed to
to suppress it. In May, 1836, “twenty-one journeymen tailors who had
formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious to trade and
commerce,” and after a trial the presiding judge charged the jury to
bring in a verdict of guilty. Bryant at once attacked the judge in the
_Evening Post_:
We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that
the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner
such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better.... The
idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages
are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that
the current prices of the markets, which are always the result
of understandings and combinations, are injurious. (_Ibid._, pp.
164-165.)
When the tailors were heavily fined by the court Bryant returned to
the attack. He again pointed out the fatuousness of the legal logic
by showing how the very price current was a similar evidence of
conspiracy, and then appealed to a sense of common fairness:
Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of
generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the
legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is
not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of
associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman,
and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the
soil. (_Ibid._, p. 165.)
From defending the rights of free labor to defending the rights of free
speech, was an easy step. When James G. Birney’s Abolitionist press
was suppressed by a Cincinnati mob, Bryant spoke out vigorously. “So
far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall
neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the
subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject
for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference
between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians
and Calvinists” (_ibid._, p. 171). And when Elijah P. Lovejoy was
murdered and his press thrown into the river, Bryant replied to those
who believed that the Abolitionists had got their deserts: “Whether
they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction
of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them;
nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy that
yielded only to death” (_ibid._, pp. 171-172). From the defense of free
speech Bryant went forward to the defense of free soil, and in 1848 he
bolted Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee, and joined the “Barnburner”
movement that nominated Martin Van Buren. The terse pronouncement of
the convention, indeed, might well be taken as an epitome and summary
of Bryant’s lifelong liberalism--“We inscribe on our banner Free Soil,
Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”
A trenchant critic of the rising capitalism, delighting in exposing
the fallacies of the new economics and in pricking the bladders of
political reputations--suggesting, for example, that it was scarcely
god-like of the great Webster to accept a purse of $65,000 from his
high tariff friends--Bryant was perhaps the most distinguished of the
liberals created by the revolutions that were enthroning the middle
class in power. The simplicity of his _laissez-faire_ philosophy, like
his admiration for “Old Bullion” Benton--whom he rated one of the
greatest statesmen of the times--may seem somewhat old-fashioned today;
but his ingrained democracy, his sturdy defense of the rights of free
men, his championship of unpopular causes, his tolerance and fairness
and keen sense of justice, ought not to seem old-fashioned. He may not
have been a great poet, but he was a great American.
II • Horace Greeley • Yankee Radical
Horace Greeley has suffered far more disastrously than Bryant the
common fate of journalists, yet his place in nineteenth-century America
was too important and his influence on current democratic ideals
too great, to be carelessly ignored. A Yankee radical transported
to New York, he was the spokesman of the common sense and practical
intelligence of the plain people of the North, seeking to understand
the revolutionary upheaval then going forward, and bring it if possible
to some issue in elementary justice. Far from being the visionary he
was so often accounted, he was the most practical of men, accepting
fact and seeking to square theory with reality; as ready to adopt
new social machinery as the mill-owner to adopt a new invention. If
there were social maladjustments, why should they not be set right?
The patent confusions of the times seemed to him a challenge to the
common intelligence. If civilization meant anything it ought to mean a
generous life for the producing mass, and with the abundant resources
of America the common well-being would never lie in jeopardy if simple
justice prevailed. America had not yet fulfilled its promise; it had
not yet become the haven for the poor and outcast its potential means
allowed; nor with its growing cities where poverty found a congenial
home, and its patrimony of raw lands flung to speculators, was it
likely to become so unless greater ingenuity were applied to the
problem. The industrial revolution was driving western civilization
into uncharted seas; clearly, it was only common sense to take bearings
and lay as fair a course as possible. To accomplish this Greeley was
ready to entertain any promising suggestion. Intellectually curious,
he had the wit to understand that the older agrarian America was being
destroyed by forces that could not be stopped; they could only be
guided. His eyes were wide open to what was taking place. He foresaw
certain consequences implicit in the industrial revolution that his
fellows were blind to. If it brought material advancement and the
multiplication of conveniences--things excellent in themselves--it
brought as well a sinister exploitation of the producers, as England
with her Manchester slums had learned to her sorrow. If America were
driving straight toward such dead-seas of wretchedness, surely only a
conscienceless fool would refuse to help trim the sails.
No more admirable Yankee than Horace Greeley ever went West to make his
fortune. With his Yankee capacity for hard work, his daring enterprise,
his vigorous independence, he embodied an extremely sensitive social
conscience, keen sympathy for those who do the work of the world,
and a transparent honesty of mind and purpose. Bred up in the narrow
poverty of the Vermont hills, remote from the culture of Boston and
Cambridge, he retained the angularities that marked his frontier
origin. His ungainly and shabby exterior was the outward, visible
sign of a niggardly youth; yet underneath the uncouth exterior was
as warm a heart as ever beat in Yankee bosom. His early life was a
bitter struggle, aggravated by the succession of economic depressions
that from 1819 to 1838 repeatedly brought hardship upon the country.
Cradled thus in the anxieties attending the transition from an agrarian
to a capitalistic order, nurtured in the harassing uncertainties that
followed the break-up of the old static economy, he longed for a more
rational social system, unsoiled by the heart-breaking wreckages that
drifted into the new slums, unembittered by the lonely tragedies that
laid a blight on the frontier. He believed that the honest worker,
whether in the factory or on the farm, deserved a better fate than
commonly fell to his lot. It was a scandal that poverty should dog his
footsteps in a land potentially so rich as America; that those who did
the necessary work of society should find themselves reduced to the
status of the slave, whether black or white; and he early determined to
explore the reasons why the workingman received so small an increment
of the augmenting wealth of the industrial revolution. His struggles
to gain a foothold in New York set him upon thinking, and before he
was thirty he began those speculations on ways and means of returning
to the producer a fair reward for his work, that were to occupy his
mind to the last. The farmer and the wage-earner he took to his heart,
and the furtherance of their well-being--despite the persistent and
vindictive opposition he encountered--became a major objective of _The
Tribune_.
Greeley’s mind was as homespun as his clothes, and he never quite
outgrew certain Vermont parochialisms that retarded his intellectual
development. The environment in which he was bred was staunchly
Federalist-Whig, marked by the exuberantly nationalistic spirit that
sprang from the War of 1812; and the seeds of his national economy
were sown in those years when to become nationally self-sufficient
was the great ideal of America. It was natural for him to accept the
leadership of Clay, whom he idolized, and to look to the Federal
government for an adequate policy of internal improvements and national
development. “We Vermonters were all Protectionists,” he said in
his _Recollections_. In 1828 the village of Poultney, where he was
serving his apprenticeship, gave 334 votes for John Quincy Adams
and only four for Jackson. Starting with this back-country faith in
a benevolent paternalism, Greeley early began his speculations on
an ideal national economy; and the conclusion to which he came, and
which he never saw reason to question later, was that government
must impose an intelligent wardship upon economic forces, that, left
to themselves, tend always to the anarchy of individualism. He had
suffered in his own person from the inadequacy and uncertainty of the
financial and industrial machinery of the times; he was impatient of
all purposeless floundering; the more he read the more rational it
seemed that statesmanship must be judged by its intelligent concern to
lessen the social waste and reduce the social friction. _Laissez faire_
he pronounced a “suicidal” policy; it was an invitation to anarchy; it
had impoverished India, and must impoverish America. From a critical
study of the teachings of the Manchester school he came to two major
conclusions: that agriculture and manufacturing are complementary
industries, and the closer they are drawn together the better for the
nation; and that a wide national economy can result only from investing
the state with adequate regulatory powers. Hence his approval of Clay’s
American System. The judicious intervention of government by means of a
protective tariff to foster the “infant industries,” would secure them
a domestic market that would--he allowed himself to hope--be regulated
by domestic competition, would do away with the waste represented by
transportation charges, and would return to the farmer an increase in
price represented by those charges. In his opinion, however, protection
was a temporary expedient, necessary only until American industries
should get on their legs. “Protection is the shortest way to get free
trade,” he said in 1851 (_The Tribune_, January 23).
Greeley was never the tool of capitalistic interests that such an
argument might seem to imply. All his mature life he persistently
fought the aggressions of capitalism; yet in this crucial matter
of protection his influence was thrown powerfully on its side, and
the ingenious argument he expounded was at once taken over by the
industrialists and used with telling effect. What particular turn he
gave to the older Whig statement, adapting it to the prejudices of a
more democratic electorate, a present-day economist has thus summarized:
The protective tariff, favored by the Whigs, was something
different in his hands. The tariff arguments of his boyhood had
been capitalistic arguments. Protect capital, their spokesman said,
because wages are too high in this country. Eventually wages will
come towards the European level and we shall not need protection.
Greeley revised this plea; protect the wage earner, he said, in
order that he may rise from this present condition of slavery. The
only way to protect him against the foreign pauper is to protect
the price of his product. But since capital owns and sells his
product, we must needs protect capital. We know right well, he
says, that a protective tariff cannot redress all wrongs.... The
extent of its power to benefit the laborer is limited by the force
and pressure of domestic competition, for which Political Economy
has as yet devised no remedy. (John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley
and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” _Political
Science Quarterly_, Vol. XXIV, pp. 468-488.)
The argument for protection has been little improved since it came
from Greeley’s hands in the late forties and early fifties.[427]
Nor, it must be added, has political economy devised the remedy for
the evils of competition, that Greeley was concerned about, unless
monopolistic control be regarded as such. Considering his extraordinary
influence with the mass of farmers north and west, it must be accounted
a calamity to agrarian prospects that _The Tribune_--a paper that
Professor Commons characterized as “the first and only great vehicle
this country has known for the ideas and experiments of constructive
democracy”--should have thrown its influence on the side of artificial
industrial expansion. That the mind of the northern farmer became so
deeply inoculated with protectionist views, and has since persistently
remained so, was due to Horace Greeley far more than to any other man.
The irony of it becomes apparent when the deeper spirit of Greeley’s
life is probed. Though he called himself a Whig, he was in all
fundamental interests and conceptions a Jeffersonian, seeking in the
spirit of the great Virginian to fashion a new philosophy to suit
the new times, more like him in free speculation than any other
northern thinker of the day. It needed years for him to throw off
the Federalist-Whig prepossessions of his youth, and work back to
Jeffersonian fundamentals; but in the end he did work back, and in the
end--always excepting this one matter of protection with its corollary
of state paternalism--he came by his own path to the major conclusions
Jefferson had reached a half century before. He was a spokesman of the
older America seeking a way out of the confusions the middle class
was bringing on the later America. In his social-mindedness that
set justice above exploitation; in his readiness to change existing
institutions in order to achieve justice; in his strong preference for
an agrarian order as more wholesome than an industrial; in his trust in
the good will of the plain people and faith in the local democracies;
in his acceptance of the principle of states rights that during the
struggle over slavery led him to advocate that the South be suffered
to depart in peace:--in such conceptions he was a Neo-Jeffersonian,
seeking to adapt the old principles to the needs of a different order.
Greeley had never read the works of the French Physiocrats; he was
unacquainted with their doctrine of the _produit net_; very likely he
would not have accepted their teachings to the extent that Jefferson
did. Nevertheless from his own experience he had come to agree with
them in the exaltation of agriculture over other forms of labor, as he
had come to agree with them in their social-mindedness. Greeley may be
accounted a stepson, at least, of the old French school.
That for so long a time he should have turned aside from the path
of Jeffersonianism to immerse himself in Utopian speculations and
adventures may appear strange; and yet for so eager and hopeful a
temperament it was the most natural thing in the world. It marked a
step in the speculations through which he passed in pursuit of that
remedy for domestic competition which the political economists had
not provided. He was twenty-nine when Albert Brisbane’s _The Social
Destiny of Mankind_ appeared in 1840, and on October 21, 1841, the
first comment on Fourier socialism was printed in _The Tribune_,
then only six months old. Thereafter for years _The Tribune_ was the
chief organ for the spread of collectivistic principles in the United
States, Brisbane expounding Fourierism in the fifties, and Karl Marx
contributing a weekly letter on European movements in the sixties,
while lesser men contributed freely according to their special Utopian
lights. With all this Greeley was in profound sympathy. Much of the
theory he did not agree with; many of the plans and specifications
seemed to him ill conceived; but convinced of the gross evils of
civilization he welcomed free speculation as promising the only hope
for their cure. Like Jefferson and William Ellery Channing, he put
his trust in the unshackled mind, for like them he believed in the
essential excellence of human nature when unperverted by vicious
institutions.
It was this romantic faith that induced him to invest heavily in time,
thought and money, in the Fourieristic foundations of the forties,
the North American Phalanx in particular offering an opportunity for
experiment on a considerable scale. In his deep concern over the
selfishness of the competitive struggle, he was willing to turn from
the bankrupt political economists to consider the plans of the “social
architects.” From Plato down those architects had been engaged on plans
of ideal commonwealths, wherein the principle of brotherhood should
supersede the principle of competition, and he believed the time had
come when the great experiment might be tried with some reasonable hope
of success. If the principle of collectivism could be successfully
substituted for a chaotic individualism, the solution of the ancient
problem of social injustice might be in a way to be achieved. This in
itself, he believed, “would do for domestic competition what protection
would do for foreign competition” (John R. Commons, _Horace Greeley,
etc._). When associationism failed, Greeley turned his thoughts eagerly
to coöperation as a promising means of eliminating the waste of the
middleman and destroying the wage system.[428] Somehow the middleman
must be got rid of, he believed, if labor were to reap an adequate
reward from its work. If one method did not achieve the result, another
must be tried. To leave off seeking a solution was to acknowledge that
society must remain a pigsty, with the strongest hogs appropriating the
swill.
Such persistent venturing into Utopian experiment made Greeley the
laughing-stock of more practical men who accepted the acquisitive
instinct as the voice of God and were busily engaged in exploitation
for their individual advantage; more important, it reveals how tenuous
were the ties that held him to the Whiggery he still professed.
Stalwart Whigs of the Webster school, middle-class bankers and
industrialists, grew impatient with such pestilent heresies as exuded
from _The Tribune_, and denied that Greeley was a Whig. In 1847 _The
Courier and Enquirer_ angrily protested:
There can be no peace in the Whig ranks while the old New York
Tribune is continued to be called Whig.... The _principles_ of the
Whig party are well defined; they are _conservative_ and inculcate
a regard for the laws and support of all established institutions
of the country. They eschew _radicalism_ in every form; they
sustain the constitution and the laws; they foster a spirit of
_patriotism_.... The better way for the Tribune would be at once
to admit that it is only Whig on the subject of the Tariff ...
and then devote itself to the advocacy of Anti-Rent, Abolition,
Fourierite, and Vote Yourself a Farm doctrines. (_The Weekly
Tribune_, August 21, 1847; quoted in Commons, _Horace Greeley,
etc._, p. 473.)
The real animus of the middle-class dislike of Greeley is to be sought
in his active championship of the great exploited classes, the farmer
and wage-earner. He was always sowing the seeds of discontent amongst
them. The betterment of their condition, he believed, was fundamental
to any sound social progress. He was convinced that their well-being
was interrelated; that whatever affected the one must affect the other.
If the city proletariat were prosperous, the farmer’s produce sold at
better prices; and if the farmers were prosperous, the country would
draw off the surplus labor from the towns and thereby sustain the wage
scale. The key to the situation, he came to believe, lay in the land
situation. The application of science to farm processes was a necessary
preliminary to agrarian improvement, and he put the great influence
of _The Tribune_ behind the movement for scientific instruction in
crop handling. But far more fundamental and immediate was the need of
a drastic change in the Federal laws governing land sales. Believing
that the wild lands of the West were a natural refuge for those who
fled from the exploitation of the factory, he was concerned that those
lands should be made available to the poorest settler. Greeley very
well knew that the ruthless exploitation of the English proletariat was
an inevitable consequence of the enclosure movement. Dispossessed of
their land and lacking means to emigrate, the peasant had been thrown
like sheep to the industrial wolves. Sunk in a hopeless wage-slavery,
the Manchester factory-hand was an object-lesson in the fate that
awaits the landless, too striking for a shrewd observer like Greeley to
miss; and his agrarian program was proof that he had taken Goldsmith’s
warning to heart:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
The freeholder, whatever the hardships of his lot, was still a free man
and a free citizen, no fodder to fling to a huge-bellied industrialism.
To keep him thus free and independent, Greeley put himself vigorously
into the great agrarian movement of the forties and fifties--the
movement to democratize the national land policy that eventuated in
the Homestead Act of 1862. The conception of the strategic usefulness
of the western lands as a refuge for the city proletariat he derived
from George Henry Evans, who in 1828 had established _The Working Man’s
Advocate_, was active in organization work with the mechanics of New
York City, and contributed to the cause numerous pamphlets, one of
which, issued in 1844, was entitled _Vote Yourself a Farm_. The pioneer
work had been well done when, in 1845, Greeley joined the movement,
accepted the arguments, and thenceforth was tireless in spreading the
doctrine. The principle on which he should work he laid down in _The
Tribune_:
The freedom of the public lands to actual settlers and the
limitation of future acquisitions of land to some reasonable
amount, are ... measures which seem to us vitally necessary to the
ultimate emancipation from thraldom and misery. What is mainly
wanted is that each man should have an assured chance to earn and
then an assurance of the just fruits of his labors. (Quoted in
Commons, _Horace Greeley, etc._, p. 482.)
To accomplish this result Greeley introduced into Congress the first
Homestead bill, according to the proposed terms of which any _bona
fide_ settler might file on one hundred and sixty acres of public
land, to be paid for within seven years at the rate of $1.25 an acre;
all public lands not thus filed on by actual settlers were to be
listed at $5.00 an acre.[429] Greeley’s bill was aimed directly at
the old scandal of favoring wealthy speculators at the expense of the
small man, a scandal that ran far back into the past. The traditional
argument had been that the government could not go into the retail land
business, but should sell in great blocks to responsible men who should
in turn put settlers on the land. The policy had bred huge corruption,
it had aroused bitter opposition, and had roiled the politics of
more than one state holding western lands. In the early years of the
century the province of Maine had repudiated Massachusetts Federalism
and turned to the Republican party by reason of discontent with the
old system[430] and the fierce Anti-Rent riots in New York State were
of recent occurrence. It was against this policy of favoritism that
Greeley protested, thereby bringing on his head sharp criticism from
the respectable class, who declaimed bitterly against the demagoguery
of a man who openly advocated a “vote yourself a farm” policy. To pay
a middleman’s price for public land, after that land had been wheedled
from Congress in the dark of the moon, seemed to many gentlemen the
only honest and patriotic way; but Greeley was unconvinced by such
reasoning, and his concern over the problem became acute when the
railroads began to appropriate huge tracts of the public domain. The
policy of subsidizing them thus seemed to him wasteful and vicious; it
ran directly counter to his fundamental principle of limitation of land
holdings; it was repeating on a vast scale the ominous landlordism of
the past.
Man has a _natural right_ to produce and acquire property [he
wrote], and therefore, I condemn a system of Land Monopoly, which
robs the producer of one-half to seven-eighths of the fruits of his
toil; and often dooms him to absolute starvation on the soil which
he has faithfully and effectively tilled! The right of owning land
is one thing: the right to own thousands and even millions of acres
of land is another. The problem is learning to distinguish the one
from the other. (_The Tribune_, April 24, 1849.)
“Settle the lands compactly and railroads will be constructed through
them rapidly and abundantly,” he said later. “The grants do essentially
interfere with the true policy of granting lands in limited allotment
to actual settlers” (_ibid._, March 16, 1852). His proposed policy was
far-sighted and socially just, but it was repudiated by a speculative
middle class that would not have its unearned increment curtailed by
visionaries.
Thoughtful as was Greeley’s concern for the farmer, his concern for the
city worker was even greater. The wretchedness of the New York slums
was daily under his eye, and his honest heart was troubled at what he
saw. That he should have sympathized with the emerging labor movement
was inevitable; his conscience dictated his stand, but his eager mind
drove him to intelligent inquiry and vigorous support. He was the first
American of wide reputation and influence to give serious consideration
to the effects on the working class of the industrial revolution with
its gospel of exploitation. The exploitation of natural resources
was well enough; but the exploitation of human life was a different
matter. A material prosperity based on social injustice, a civilization
founded on slavery, he would have none of. That this great matter of
slavery was inadequately understood and too narrowly interpreted by the
Abolitionists, he was early convinced. He agreed with William Grayson
and the southern apologists, that slavery existed in New York as well
as in Charleston. “The worker of the Nineteenth Century,” he said in
_The Emancipation of Labor_, “stands a sad and care-worn man”; in
America as well as in Europe he is falling into “that train of thought
which is beginning to encircle the globe, and of which the burden may
be freely rendered thus--‘_Why should those by whose toil ALL comforts
and luxuries are produced or made available enjoy so scanty a share
of them?_’” If Theodore Parker could have lived a few years longer he
must have shared Greeley’s concern; but amongst the Abolitionists only
Wendell Phillips joined with him in espousing the cause of the working
class. Others held aloof. When appealed to in the middle-seventies to
aid the labor movement, William Lloyd Garrison denied the existence of
wage-slavery in America, and indignantly declined to take part in the
proletarian agitation.[431]
Greeley’s views would be reckoned advanced even today; before the
Civil War they were regarded as incendiary, calculated to awaken class
prejudice in a country where, as all patriotic Americans knew, classes
did not exist. What, for example, could simple-minded Abolitionists
make of a letter he wrote declining to attend an anti-slavery
convention in Cincinnati in 1845?
You will readily understand that, if I regard your enterprise with
less absorbing interest than you do, it is not that I deem Slavery
a less but a greater evil. If I am less troubled concerning the
Slavery prevalent in Charleston and New-Orleans, it is because
I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my
first efforts.... [I would not] undertake to say that the Slavery
of the South is not more hideous in kind and degree than that
which prevails at the North. The fact that it is more flagrant
and palpable renders opposition to it comparatively easy and its
speedy downfall certain. But how can I devote myself to a crusade
against distant servitude, when I discern its essence pervading my
immediate community and neighborhood?
_I understand by Slavery, that condition in which one human being
exists mainly as a convenience for other human beings_--in which
the time, the exertions, the faculties of a part of the Human
Family are made to subserve, not their own development, physical,
intellectual, and moral, but the comfort, advantage, or caprices of
others.... In short, wherever service is rendered from one human
being to another ... where the relation ... is one not of affection
and reciprocal good offices, but of authority, social ascendency
and power over subsistence on the one hand, and of necessity,
servility, and degradation on the other--there, in my view, is
Slavery. (“Slavery at Home,” in _Hints toward Reforms_.)
Here is a definition that may well be considered Utopian; but however
transcendental his general conception, Greeley was far too practical to
pursue abstractions. Having diagnosed the common disease that infects
all modern civilization, he was willing to use remedies that came to
hand. Before 1845 he opposed labor legislation, on the ground that the
evil was social; but later he supported the movement to limit the legal
working day by statute. More and more, however, he came to believe
that any lasting betterment must come from effective organization of
the workers; that the salvation of labor lay in its own hands; and the
great end towards which he looked was coöperation. The stumbling-block
that stood in the way of coöperative effort was the common distrust and
suspicion that poisoned the minds of working men; until they emptied
their hearts of that evil, the path that labor must follow would be
flinty and its life meager and hard.
An incorrigible idealist, clearly, was this Yankee plebeian whom Cooper
believed a vulgarian, Godkin held in contempt, and Bryant turned his
back on and would not speak to--a strange, child-like figure, with
his round moon-face, eyes blinking through spectacles and a fringe
of whiskers that invited the pencil of the cartoonist--yet carrying
the sorrows of the world in his heart and vexing his soul with all
the problems of society; an idealist who in the most sordid place in
America, and after years of fruitless experiment, could still stand
before his fellow Americans and thus sum up his social philosophy--“the
avocations of Life, and the usages and structure of Society, the
relations of Power to Humility, of Wealth to Poverty, of served to
servant, must all be fused in the crucible of Human Brotherhood, and
whatever abides not the test, rejected” (_Hints toward Reforms_, p.
400). In this faith--foolish it may be accounted by practical men, and
futile, but certainly not mean, not ignoble--Horace Greeley lived and
worked; to it he gave such strength and powers as were his, and he died
at sixty-one of a broken heart. He foolishly wished to be President,
but the American electorate that read his paper refused its votes, and
his hopes were destroyed by the careless many who were untroubled about
industrial pigstys.
III • Herman Melville • Pessimist
Set down beside the austere Bryant and the plebeian Greeley, Herman
Melville seems grotesquely out of company; and yet such proximities may
suggest, better perhaps than words, an explanation of the futility of
his dreams and the irony of the bitter penance of his days. Lifelong
he was lacerated by the coldly moral in his environment, and harassed
by the crudely practical; and without forcing the comparison, one may
feel that Bryant and Greeley embodied in nobler form the twin forces
that seized upon his bold and rich nature, and bound it to the rocks to
be fed on by eagles. Like Jacob he wrestled all night with an angel,
yet got no blessing from the touched thigh. Instead, his free spirit
was tormented and his adventurous heart seared with fire. Far more
truly than of De Quincey might one say of Melville: _Eccovi_, this
little child has been in hell! All the powers of darkness fought over
him, all the devils plagued him. They drove him down into the gloom of
his tormented soul, and if they did not conquer, they left him maimed
and stricken. The golden dreams of transcendental faith, that buoyed
up Emerson and gave hope to Thoreau, turned to ashes in his mouth;
the white gleams of mysticism that now and then lighted up his path
died out and left him in darkness. Life could not meet the demands he
made on it, certainly not life in America in the eighteen-fifties; the
malady lay deeper than Greeley thought--it lay in the futility of life
itself; and so after pursuing his vain dreams to the ends of the seas,
the rebellious transcendentalist withdrew within himself while awaiting
annihilation. There is no other tragedy in American letters comparable
to the tragedy of Herman Melville. Bryant’s melancholy is only the
gentle pensiveness of twilight compared to the midnight of his
pessimism. Hawthorne’s gloom is no more than the skeptical questioning
of life by a nature that knew no fierce storms; Poe’s is only the
atrabilious wretchedness of a dipsomaniac.
In the presence of a nature so tempestuous and fiercely honest, it
is a rash critic who will dogmatize. There is no simple clue to his
mystery, no common pass-key to unlock his mind. Raymond Weaver in
his brilliantly creative study has perhaps done all that the critic
can to light up the darkness, and later commentators can only follow
in his footsteps. In so far as a simple explanation may suffice, the
biographer finds it in certain frustrations that curdled the milk of
his romance and turned it sour. Like Mark Twain in later years, he
recoiled savagely from the smug conventions of society; but when he
spoke out his views--instead of discreetly locking them up in his
safe--and found himself fiercely assailed for unorthodoxy, he bade the
world go to the devil and would have nothing more to do with its praise
or blame. A proud sensitive nature, he took the world’s contumely _au
tragique_, and suffered it to mortify him. Or perhaps he was more
like James Branch Cabell than Mark Twain. An arch romantic, he vainly
sought to erect his romantic dreams as a defense against reality, and
suffered disaster. In love with the ideal, and pursuing it in a wild
adventure into the South Seas--his magic realm of Poictesme--yet “not
so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern,”
he found there only disenchantment. Seeking his satisfactions in love
of mother and wife, he came upon utter disillusion. The austerely prim
and coldly correct Maria Gansevoort, to whom his boyish heart yielded
itself passionately, was clearly no woman to satisfy his need of
intelligent sympathy, and he fled moodily from the pale negations of
a stifling environment. Even the finely loyal Elizabeth Shaw whom he
married seems only to have completed his disillusion, and he withdrew
into his study, and falling into “Plato’s honied head,” like Tashtego
into the whale’s head, “sweetly,” or wretchedly, “perished there.” It
is the plague of the idealizing mind that is forever comparing a wife
in her morning kimono with the Helen of his dreams. It is the curse of
possession that plays havoc with romance; and because Melville’s dreams
were passionately beautiful, because he made heavy demands on life, his
disillusion was bitter. And so like Felix Kennaston in Cabell’s _Cream
of the Jest_, and like Shelley in _Epipsychidion_, Melville fashioned
his dream-figure to love. The elusive figure of Yillah in _Mardi_,
whom he loves and loses and seeks, in a madly grotesque and satirical
pursuit through all the civilizations of his land of Poictesme, is so
suggestive of Cabell’s _Domnei_, that it perhaps may be accounted the
latter’s prototype.
Remembering the mingled strains of Melville’s ancestry, the critic
is tempted to discover in his New England blood the source of his
transcendental visions. Yet the influence is not easy to trace. Half
Dutch and half Yankee, he certainly got his vigorous physique and hot
temper from the former. His maternal grandfather, Major General Peter
Gansevoort, was a huge bulk of a man who achieved high distinction in
the Revolutionary War, and whose traditional prowess filled the boy’s
heart with pride. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, whom the son closely
resembled in physique, was crossed in blood with that of the Van
Rensselaers, the Ten Broecks, the Van Schaicks--the proudest families
of the old Dutch _régime_--and was deeply imbued with the distinction
of her patroon ancestry--“a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense
of her name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears” (Weaver,
_Herman Melville_, p. 34). His debt to the New England strain is not so
easily appraised. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville of
Boston, a graduate of Princeton and wealthy in his own name and through
his wife Priscilla Scollay, was not without his flashes of enthusiasm
in early life, taking part with Joseph Story’s father in the Boston
Tea Party. But his incipient radicalism was soon washed out of him; he
turned rigidly conservative, and to his death in 1832 he lingered in
the twilight of the eighteenth century. As Federal naval officer of the
port of Boston, he was a familiar figure in his cocked hat and knee
breeches; and it was of him that Holmes wrote the verses, _The Last
Leaf_.
He was of Scotch descent, and Melville’s father traced the family
line back to the thirteenth century, Herman Melville being twentieth
in direct descent from Sir Richard Melvill, who in 1296 was forced
to swear allegiance to Edward I of England. The blood seems to have
run somewhat thin in Allan Melville, a conventional, pragmatic soul,
who after making five trips to Europe, at the age of thirty-two,
having carefully weighed the advantages, fixed his affections on Maria
Gansevoort whom he met at Albany, and wooed with more propriety than
passion. He entered business in New York city as an importer of French
goods; but hard times descended on “the greatest universal mart in
the world,” and in 1832, when Herman was thirteen, Allan Melville
died leaving Maria Gansevoort and her eight children pretty nearly
penniless. The struggle with poverty set its mark on the cold, proud
woman whose ambitions centered about the success of affluence; and it
left a mark of quite another sort on the son who was soon to measure
her ideals with devastatingly critical eyes. The ways of mother and son
were at the parting.
The volcanic passions pent up in Herman Melville’s heart, the ardent
imagination that sent him forth on long quests and brought him home
empty-handed, can scarcely be traced to any source in Maria Gansevoort
or Allan Melville. A strange, incomprehensible child he seemed to his
mother, and strange and incomprehensible he remained in the eyes of
the family--an ugly duckling of another breed than theirs. A bitter
sense of aloofness and alienation from the intimacies of family
sympathy seems early to have taken possession of him, and he felt
himself quietly thrust out of the circle of respectable contacts.
Melville’s writings are filled with thinly veiled autobiography, and
it is a careless reader who does not see in _Pierre_ and _Moby Dick_
confessions as frank as Rousseau’s. “Call me Ishmael,” is the opening
injunction of the latter, and the book closes with a glimpse of “the
devious cruising _Rachel_, that in retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_, p.
62). An Ishmael Melville unhappily conceived himself to be, an outcast
and wanderer on the earth because man is an outcast and wanderer,
to whom Nirvana is the only comfort and hope; and when he returned
disillusioned from the South Seas, when he found no home by his own
fireside, when he discovered his transcendental craftsmanship driving
on the rocks of economic necessity, when the public rejected his
mystical dreams and he was inexorably “damned by dollars,” he perforce
turned in upon his own broodings and sought solace in Plato. Driven by
need from his hill farm in the Berkshires, he buried himself in the
“Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” to pass long years pottering about
the customhouse. It was the vast futility of life as he experienced it,
that sent him to his study to find there such compensation as he might.
The stages in Melville’s progress towards Nirvana are sufficiently
marked by the four books, _Typee_, _Mardi_, _Moby Dick_, and _Pierre_.
The first is his answer to the French romantic Utopia of man in a
state of nature. That the rankling wounds in man’s heart are poisoned,
if not originally inflicted, by social institutions, he was partly
convinced, and he felt a lively concern lest western civilization
should bring its futile restlessness to the simple island people.
The kindliness and simplicity of life in the valley of Typee, the
compensating virtues of the unsophisticated primitive, he found
lovable; but as the unhappy heir of centuries of Christian conscience,
as a child of Hebraic ideals of righteousness, he could not eradicate
the deep roots of ethical unrest. With Fayaway it was different.
“Civilization had given her no veils; Christianity had given her
no compunctions. She was neither a mystery nor a sin” (_ibid._, p.
260). But he could not become a simple child of nature had he wanted
to. He could never find his Nirvana in mere sensuousness; he could
not sink into the mud of animal existence. Even while he bathed in
the languorous calm of Typee, floating idly with Fayaway on the
stream of being, his heart was beyond the narrow hills, and a cosmic
nostalgia seized upon him. That chapter of his life ended in futility,
and so he made his way back once more to the familiar places, with
expectation still undaunted. Certain of his experiences on that return
journey he has recorded in _White Jacket_, the story of his cruise
on a man-of-war; and how near it brought him to oblivion is told in
the episode of the threatened flogging before the mast, when fate
intervened to save Melville from flinging himself overboard, carrying
with him the brutal captain of the _Neversink_.
Amidst the constrictions of the old world to which he had come back, a
fresh vision of happiness opened to him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw,
and he made a desperate plunge into marriage. The post-thalamion of
that thwarted romance was _Mardi_--a far-ranging “pilgrimage for a lost
glamour,” “a quest after some total and undivined possession of that
holy and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his
courtship” (_ibid._, p. 279). _Mardi_ is a vast welter of satire and
idealism, formless and wild, which in turn was no more than prologue
to _Moby Dick_. This colossal book, fierce as _Gulliver_, broad as
Rabelais, with its _saeva indignatio_ that laughs as it rends life, is
the great confession of his defeat. “It is good to laugh,” he says in
_Mardi_, “though the laugh be hollow. Women sob, and are rid of their
grief; men laugh and retain it. Ha! ha! how demoniacs shout; how all
skeletons grin; we all die with a rattle. Humor, thy laugh is divine.”
And the conclusion to which the philosopher comes is this: “Beatitude
there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from
great woes--no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love. Sadness
makes the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal
and eternal” (_ibid._, p. 279).
After _Moby Dick_, what remained but to put the external world of
experience aside and turn in upon his own thwarted hopes to analyze
them? _Pierre, or the Ambiguities_ is his spiritual autobiography,
the confession of a stricken soul. In the inconsequential matter of
plot, a story of incest and murder and suicide, in its deeper purpose,
it is a wild fierce tale of mortal passions, that traces the _élan_
of mystical idealism to the buried depths of procreative instinct.
It is the last bewildering attempt to understand the sources of the
dream that had ridden him, and it is discovered in the passionate
struggles of Enceladus, titanic offspring of the incestuous union
between Heaven and Earth, to regain the kingdom from which he has been
thrust. In _Mardi_ the search for Yillah had been carried on under the
watchful eye of Hautia, the temptress, whom “his whole heart abhorred,”
yet to whom at last he went in her bower of Flozella-a-Nina--“The
Last-Verse-of-the-Song”; for in “some mysterious way seemed Hautia and
Yillah connected.” In _Pierre_ Hautia reappears as Isabel, likewise
a child of Heaven and Earth, who is set over against Lucy--the pure
daughter of Heaven alone; and this dark Isabel robed in the midnight
of her hair, by appealing unconsciously to Pierre’s noblest impulses,
draws him from the safe orbit of the Gansevoort moralities, and makes
of him “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.”
Isabel is wild, unquestioning, mysterious passion, untouched by any
Hebraisms; and this half-sister of his blood, this lovely embodiment of
his star-crossed dreams, drives him unwittingly to destruction. Pierre
learns at last that the vision brings poison in its kisses, for the
divine in the heart of Enceladus is mingled with the clay of earth. The
dream is man’s final ironical curse; Yillah and Hautia and Lucy and
Isabel--changing embodiments of the same mystical idealism--bring death
to their lovers--this is the conclusion of _Pierre_, a conclusion that
Mr. Cabell would not take kindly to. It was a black and bitter book,
like _Moby Dick_ “broiled in hell-fire,” to fling at an easy-going
public that cherished its Gansevoort conventions. With its fierce
disillusions _Pierre_ is the apogee and Nirvana of the spiritual
romanticisms of the day.
That Melville was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques, that the
consuming nostalgia he suffered from was mortal, the most casual
acquaintance with his passionate rebellions should make clear; and
that his pessimism was a natural end and outcome of his transcendental
speculations, once those speculations had come to intimate contact with
life, is perhaps equally clear. Transcendentalism in Concord village
and at Walden pond, was one thing. Emerson’s infrequent anger at the
folly of men was soothed by the perfect art with which he phrased it,
and never seriously ruffled his temperamental placidity. Thoreau’s
mystical communings were with the young god Pan; he was too wise to
seek to domesticate a woodland nymph, and he was fortunate in escaping
the dun twilight that gathers about the slow years of physical decay.
But transcendentalism in the forecastle of the whaler _Acushnet_,
transcendentalism that drove fiercely into the blood-red sunsets of
dwarfing seas, transcendentalism in the hot and passionate heart of
a man whose vast dreams outran his feet--this was something very
different from the gentle mysticism of cooler natures and unembittered
hearts where no Promethean fires were raging.
For Herman Melville, amidst the nameless obscenities of an alien
environment, to keep his faith in the goodness of life strong and
sweet, would have needed the boundless charity and simple paganism
of Walt Whitman. But unfortunately for his peace of mind, though he
might immerse himself in Plato, Melville was no Greek; he was Hebraic
rather, out of Ecclesiastes, and Solomon and Jesus. “Away,” he cries
in _Pierre_, “ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato,
who once did all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a
tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot. Tell me
not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe cannot
spare thee and thy immortality.... Already the universe gets on without
thee.... Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo!
I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from
which the meat hath been sucked” (Chapter XXII--3). From the lips of
the ancient Preacher he had learned that all is vanity--even Pan. “The
truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “and the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe. All is vanity. +ALL+.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,
Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free
lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not
that man is fitted to sit down on tombstones, and break the green damp
mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_,
pp. 151-152). After _Pierre_ came _Clarel_--years later--in which the
theological doubts and religious unrest that mark the poetry of Arnold
and Clough in England came to expression in a world that was untouched
by them.[432] The abyss that lay between Melville and America had
become deeper and wider.
Like all the transcendentalists Melville was a democrat, but his
democracy sprang rather from his sympathies than from his philosophy.
It was a democracy learned rather from Ecclesiastes than from Emerson;
it sprang from his pessimism rather than from any transcendental faith
in the divinity of man. He knew only too well how weak and foolish
are the children of Adam; but in presence of the common fate to which
the indifferent years hurry us, how stupid and callous are the social
distinctions that society erects! Why should not life be a leveler, as
well as death? His experience before the mast had taught him sympathy
for the common man; he regarded quizzically the ways of the exploiting
few and the sufferings of the exploited many; and he smiled ironically
at the neat little classification that divides the human animal into
sinners and saints. He was as comprehensive a democrat as Whitman, of
the same all-embracing school that denied the common social and ethical
categories of excellence; but alienated from his fellows, not drawn to
them as Whitman was. It was not a sense of social aloofness that held
him apart, but the isolation of loneliness. “When you see or hear of
my ruthless democracy on all sides,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “you may
possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but
nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail
is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.... It seems an
inconsistency to assert unconditioned democracy in all things, and yet
confess a dislike to all mankind--in the mass. But not so” (_ibid._,
pp. 320-321). He then goes on: “But truth is the silliest thing under
the sun,” and does not deign to explain. “Believe me,” he says of
_Pierre_, “you will pronounce Pierre a thoroughgoing Democrat in time;
perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy” (_ibid._, p. 37).
Such a man would not so much turn critic as embody criticism. His
life--even more than Emerson’s--laid upon America, was a yardstick to
measure the shortcomings of a professed civilization. Cooper was a
critic whom America could understand, and America hated him for his
unpleasant frankness. Melville it could not understand, and it turned
away and ignored him. Perhaps it was well enough that his generation
could not comprehend his devastating speculations, and called him mad;
or it would have cried out to crucify this maligner of all the tribal
fetishes. He would level every barrier against the unpleasant that his
age was erecting. He outran Thoreau in contempt for current material
ideals. To turn scornfully away from the triumphs of his fellows--from
the fruits of the industrial revolution and the romantic gospel of
progress--this was incomprehensible blasphemy! Yet what had Herman
Melville in common with middle-class America? Its hopes and fears were
not his. He was troubled about life, and not about things. He was not
concerned about politics or the political state. He was not concerned
with trade, or money-getting, or romantic imperialisms. He was not even
greatly concerned with political democracy, although in his time he had
been as hot a republican as the best of them. The shoddy democracy of
his time made his gorge rise; and to this shoddy democracy that shrilly
proclaimed its excellence he paid his respects in words that suggest
Lowell’s _Cathedral_, but with a depth of significance that Lowell was
incapable of. In the poem _Clarel_, into which Melville crowded so much
of his later speculations, he comments thus:
This world clean fails me: still I yearn....
This side the dark and hollow bound
Lies there no unexplored rich ground?
_Some other world_: well, there’s the New--
Ah, joyless and ironic too!
Ay, Democracy
Lops, lops; and where’s her planted bed?
The future, what is that to her
Who vaunts she’s no inheritor?
’Tis in her mouth, not in her heart.
The past she spurns, though ’tis the past
From which she gets her saving part--
That Good which lets her evil last.
Behold her whom the panders crown,
Harlot on horseback, riding down
The very Ephesians who acclaim
This great Diana of ill fame!
Arch strumpet of an impious age,
Upstart from ranker villeinage:
Asia shall stop her at the least
That old inertness of the East....
But in the New World things make haste:
Not only things, the _state_ lives fast--
Fast breed the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles,
Sure to explode. ’Twill come, ’twill come!
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?...
Indeed, those germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pigmy parts--
Debased into equality:
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy....
Your arts advance in faith’s decay:
You are but drilling the new Hun
Whose growl even now can some dismay;
Vindictive in his heart of hearts.
He schools him in your mines and marts
A skilled destroyer....
Old ballads sing
Fair Christian children crucified
By impious Jews: you’ve heard the thing:
Yes, fable; but there’s truth hard by:
How many Hughs of Lincoln, say,
Does Mammon, in his mills, to-day,
Crook, if he does not crucify?
The impieties of ‘Progress’ speak;
What say _these_, in effect to God?
‘How profits it? And who art Thou
That we should serve Thee? Of Thy ways
No knowledge we desire; _new_ ways
We have found out, and better. Go--
Depart from us!’ And if He do?
Is aught betwixt us and the hells?...
For Herman Melville, at least, the barriers betwixt him and the hells
had long been gone, and only Nirvana awaited him.
Footnotes
[426] See his satire on Fanny Wright in _The Evening Post_, January 29,
1829, quoted by Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, pp. 126-127.
[427] For his statement, see “Labor’s Political Economy,” in _Hints
toward Reforms_.
[428] See “The Organization of Labor,” in _Hints toward Reforms_.
[429] See Charles Sotheran, _Horace Greeley_, p. 255.
[430] See William A. Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_,
pp. 43-45.
[431] Garrison, _Life of Garrison_, Vol. IV, p. 248.
[432] See Weaver, p. 365.
Book Three • The Mind of New England
The New England renaissance was tardy in appearing and of brief
duration, yet in the few years of its extraordinary vigor it imparted
a stimulus to American life that its historians have not greatly
exaggerated. We are now far enough from it to see that it was the last
flowering of a tree that was dying at the roots, but in the tumultuous
thirties it seemed to be a new birth of the native New England mind,
opening on new worlds and great adventures. Though its prophecies might
be little heeded at its own fireside, and unheard in the vast stretches
of the West where men were clearing and building after quite different
plans than the Concord architects were drawing, its significance in the
development of American idealism--the ethical imprint it stamped on
American culture--endured long after it had spent its force. It was the
last and in certain aspects the most brilliant of the several attempts
to domesticate in America the romantic thought of revolutionary Europe;
and with its passing, civilization in this western world fell into the
hands of another breed of men to fashion as they saw fit.
The revolutions in thought that lie between the eighteenth century
with its aristocratic rationalism that conceived of human nature as
evil, and the nineteenth century with its middle-class economics that
conceived of human nature as acquisitive, are more clearly defined
in New England and more sharply differentiated, than elsewhere in
America. The flood of romantic speculation with its humanitarian
emphasis on the potential excellence of man and the equality of human
rights, that in Europe had diffused itself widely, in Massachusetts
flowed into narrow channels prepared by Puritan discipline, and swept
away habits of thought that had dominated New England for two hundred
years. The intensity of the Puritan nature, once it embraced the new
conceptions, imparted to them an intellectual and emotional unity that
serves to explain the creativeness of the New England renaissance, as
it serves to explain its failure to spread widely beyond the confines
of Massachusetts. Appearing a generation later than in Virginia, it
drew its inspiration more largely from Germany than from France; it was
intellectual and ethical rather than political and economic; and in
consequence it held little in common with the Physiocratic agrarianism
of Jefferson. The latter was sufficiently native to American economics
to appeal to the common man from Maine to Georgia; the former was
native only to New England Puritanism. Its idealism appealed only to
rare souls, disciplined by speculation and trained in ethical values,
men of strong character and fine distinction who counted for much more
than numbers.
After all it is the ethical note that marks the Puritan. That New
England has run so different a course from other parts of America has
been due chiefly to its desire to serve God even though it might be
serving self. Its material life has always been plentifully seasoned
with the salt of religion. It sat under the teachings of an austere
ethics, as it lived under the compulsions of a narrow economics; and
the result was the development of a middle class distinct from that of
the West where the desire to get on was less hampered by the desire
to get to heaven. The outstanding social figures in early New England
were the minister and the merchant; and these twin authorities--joined
after the Revolution by the rising profession of the law--ruled in
patriarchal fashion the inarticulate mass of the yeomanry. From these
traditional leaders the policy of New England received a twofold bent:
a bent to the ethical and a bent to the practical. The two have rarely
fused in a harmonious and fruitful life, but for the most part have
dwelt side by side under a covenant of noninterference, the character
of current social ideals taking its impress from one or the other as
it gained a temporary ascendency. In the three hundred years of New
England history the minister has enjoyed two periods of intellectual
ascendency: the first during the early days of the theocracy, when
the commonwealth was ruled by the laws of God and John Calvin; and
the second, between the years 1830 and 1850, when John Calvin was
finally put aside and New England was in the way of being remodeled in
accordance with the plans of God alone. Between these brief periods of
ethical enthusiasm lies the main history of New England, a history that
counts for little in our intellectual and aesthetic development, but
that meant much and ill to the cramped minds of her sons.
This long stretch, arid and unlovely, was dominated wholly by the
merchant. Its parsimonious thrift, relieved by few generous impulses,
was hostile to all change and to the romance that is bred of change.
There was no rapid inflow of settlers to bring fresh energy and
expansion. The exuberant growth of other parts of America was never
shared by rural New England, and in consequence the harvest of
unearned increment was rarely reaped from her sterile acres. Except
in the shipping towns there was little economic development. On its
secluded little farms New England was living a narrow parochial life,
cooping up its mind in a rigid theological system and disciplining its
character by a self-denying ordinance. Public affairs were managed
by the squire, for the minister was too busy defending John Calvin
against the Arminians to have a care for much except morality and
dogma. The renaissance became of necessity, therefore, a movement of
liberalism--a vehement protest against the torpor of the dogmatist
whose mind was shut up in a dead system. It was a sudden reawakening
of the ethical passion of Puritanism that had slept for two centuries;
a vision of a new heaven and a new earth that it proposed to take by
storm. It proposed to rid the mind of New England of its decadent
loyalties--the nightmare dreams of Calvinism that debased human
nature, and the counting-house dreams of Federalism that conceived of
man as an exploitative animal. It had discovered anew the beauty of
righteousness, and in the name of righteousness it proposed to throw
off the old tyrannies and create a society wherein the mind should be
free and the soul enjoy its religion. The battle against Calvinism was
only preliminary to greater battles which constituted the intellectual
revolution that marked the renaissance.
It was the New England minister, and the spiritual heirs of the
minister--a group of intellectuals and reformers more notable than
New England had before bred--that gave to the movement its pronounced
ethical quality. It was freedom for individual righteousness that they
sought; not freedom for intellectual epicureanism, for romance, for
aesthetic or pagan beauty. The transcendentalists and reformers had
little time to amuse themselves with such things. They were too eager
for the coming of the kingdom to dawdle over fiction or patronize the
playhouse. They had been bred from their youth up on printer’s ink;
they came of a race that had long respected the printed page. Literary
men by inheritance, they esteemed themselves stewards of a great
cause. In rejecting their fathers’ hell they became the more zealous
to make a heaven of this world; and although the more practical Yankee
was skeptical of their plans and would not suffer them to turn Boston
into a transcendental Utopia, they succeeded in making such a stir as
New England had never before known. For a brief time, at least, liberal
ideas found a welcome in homes where they had hitherto been strangers;
for a brief time the intellectual and not the merchant dominated New
England.
Part One: the Twilight of Federalism
Chapter I • The Passing of the Tie-Wig School
I • Old Boston
The year 1815, that brought to a close the unfortunate American
venture into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic wars, may be conveniently
taken to mark for New England the transition to the nineteenth
century. With the rise of Unitarianism and the development of the new
industrialism, a ruder and more vigorous age entered Boston. It met
with a somewhat chilly reception. The patriarchal eighteenth century
still clung to its warm chimney corner, not liking to be dispossessed
by heirs of whom it testily disapproved. The old order stood on
its dignity, tenacious of its habitual authority. It lived quietly
in an aristocratic past, unregardful of the vigorous commonwealths
rising beyond the Appalachian mountains, and contemptuous of the new
political philosophy that preached the rights of man. A persistent
continuity of temper marked the ruling class, a continuity little
disturbed by the tumultuous revolutions of the past two generations.
Although nearly half the voters of Massachusetts, in the year 1800,
were Jeffersonian republicans, the knowledge of that fact only
stiffened the backbones of the regnant caste. It colored their minds
with a virtuous pessimism, but it edged their temper with the zeal of
righteousness. The Boston mobsters, it would appear, were republican,
and when the present custodians of the ark of decency were gathered
to their fathers, very likely evil days would come upon the land; but
while the righteous lived they would be faithful to their stewardship.
Their own households, at least, they would keep clean of all democratic
pollution; and so Boston and New Haven and Hartford--the capitals
of New England culture--drew about them the garments of Federalist
righteousness. Since the Revolution of ’76 a new authority had risen
on the ruins of the old Tory authority, but in spite of the change
of personnel and outward political forms, the spirit of respectable
New England remained pretty much what it had always been. John Quincy
Adams and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy were little different in
character and aims from Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Sewall and Daniel
Leonard--they were common chips from the tough old New England oak.
High-minded yet narrow; devout yet not emotionally religious; thrifty
yet generous in approved causes; engaged in overseas commerce yet
oddly parochial--they were men fashioned by a rugged environment into
vigorous stock, that would hold tenaciously to what they had got and
would tolerate no insubordination on the part of their social inferiors.
With its twenty-five thousand inhabitants Boston ranked fourth in size
among American cities. Philadelphia, the social capital of America,
was nearly three times as large; New York nearly two and a half times;
and even Baltimore had lately come to exceed her in population. The
economic forces that make for liberalism had become largely impotent.
Free land had long since been exhausted in Massachusetts and social
lines were fixed. The northern frontier of Maine and New Hampshire
was rugged and uninviting, and York State lay to the West. Except in
the Connecticut valley the soil was thin and farming unproductive,
and in consequence the more ambitious turned to commerce and
manufacture which the physical conditions of the country invited. The
dominant interest of Boston was commercial, and the ruling coterie of
merchants and lawyers was narrowly Whiggish. They had modified their
pre-Revolutionary political philosophy no further than to substitute
the word republican for monarchical. The aristocratic temper dominated
the town meetings, and the principle of property rule was commonly
accepted as the essence of political wisdom. In substituting Federalism
for Toryism there was no easing of the restrictions on rebellious
plebeians. Quite repudiated were the rude leveling ways of the great
Revolutionary adventure. Boston gentlemen had come to understand too
well the danger of encouraging the mob, for as Fisher Ames pointed out
in 1787, “The people have turned against their teachers the doctrines,
which were inculcated to effect the late revolution” (_Works_, p.
11). Boston had had enough of revolutions since Daniel Shays had got
up one of his own aimed at the Boston purse, and French Jacobins had
let loose their devastating ideas upon a gullible world. Revolutions
that were not made in Boston, by Boston gentlemen, were quite certain
to be wicked and seditious; and Boston had definitely gone out of the
revolution business. It wanted above all things to undo the mischief
that had already been done, and take back into safe hands the political
power which in the days of revolutionary enthusiasm had been seized by
the agrarian democracy.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century the intellectual isolation
of New England was sharply accentuated and the consequent intellectual
stagnation became more disastrous. In other portions of America French
revolutionary theories of man and society were spreading widely and
shouldering aside the outworn past. A romantic equalitarianism,
based on the doctrine of human perfectibility, was displacing the
traditional economic realism, established on the dogma of total
depravity. The leveling movement, in consequence, was provided with
a persuasive idealism that awakened troublesome aspirations in the
disfranchised majority and gave a strong impetus to the democratic
movement. But New England leaders stood resolutely apart, accounting
all equalitarianism sheer romantic folly. The old stubborn realism held
its ground, interpreting political principles in terms of economics,
and dogmatically maintaining the sacred rights of property. Boston
Federalism refused to have anything to do with “atheistic France,” the
fruitful mother of Jacobin follies. Pollution, it was convinced, must
result from any commerce with infidel and innovating ideas. Gunpowder
that was played with might explode, and New England wanted no blowing
up of her excellent society. Virginia had lent credulous ears to the
voice of France, and the result was the atheist Jefferson and the
rabble of his licentious followers. Massachusetts was not gullible
and it would tolerate no Jeffersonian atheisms. And so instead of
adapting French romantic philosophy to new world needs, seizing upon
its social idealism to leaven the crude American lump--as Jefferson
and Colonel Mason and John Taylor and many another Virginia gentleman
had done--Boston Federalism rejected French ideas in the mass, dubbed
French idealism Jacobinism, and turned back upon a stubborn reaction.
The disastrous consequences of that rejection upon the mind of New
England cannot easily be measured. It is clear enough, nevertheless,
that the renaissance was delayed a full generation, and when it
came it assumed certain provincialisms that greatly lessened its
permanent influence upon the rest of America. The impress of its
contribution upon our national thought has been far less permanent than
that of Virginia, that came a generation earlier and was primarily
economic and political. It is a suggestive fact that in the work
of adapting the new Federal Constitution to democratic ends, New
England contributed no creative leader, none in any way comparable to
Jefferson; but on the contrary her most representative leaders--and
in particular Webster--followed the eighteenth-century tradition in
combating the equalitarian advance in the interest of economic groups.
Some explanation of this fact may be found, perhaps, in the selfish
isolation of New England Federalism, that closed the door on the
liberal thought of France.
In consequence of such isolation Boston became the recognized home of
the philosophy of a stake-in-society. If it clung tenaciously to an
old-fashioned Federalism after it had been abandoned elsewhere, it
was because Boston was more middle-class than Charleston, and had not
learned from experience with Jacksonianism how easily the majority will
may be shaped and controlled to particular ends. It inherited the old
Tory contempt for democracy and relied on the old stock arguments to
combat it. Its habitual tone was one of virtuous arrogance. The one
great and ever-present fear that haunted the pillows of worthy Boston
merchants and turned their dreams to nightmares, was fear of the mob
getting out of hand; and democracy, for them, was only a euphemism
for the mob--the ever-present menace to sober and decent government.
In the judgment of Theodore Dwight, brother of Timothy, “there could
be nothing more dreadful this side of hell.” Nowhere else in America
did the reaction against the democratic ideal carry so far as in
Boston. The church and the merchant associations joined with polite
society to cry it down, and upon the head of the democrat fell the
most extravagant vituperation. For a generation few respectable New
Englanders raised their voices in defense of democracy, but gentlemen
of principle and property followed the lead of the little clique that
was driving straight towards the Hartford Convention--blind sailors
navigating the Dead Sea of Federalist pessimism.
All this was before the reputed time of plain living and high thinking.
Intellectual Boston was as parochial as political Boston. The lights
whom Bostonians regarded as the torch-bearers of New England culture
have long since been extinguished and their names forgotten even in
Beacon Street. Amongst the literati of the little Boston of 1800 the
historian need concern himself with no more than two or three: Fisher
Ames (1758-1808), the Federalist lawyer-wit, and Robert Treat Paine
(1773-1811), esteemed the ninth wonder of the Boston world. Other
figures there were, of course, in addition to the literati: Harrison
Gray Otis, the eloquent voice of Faneuil Hall, and Josiah Quincy, whom
Lowell likened to an old Roman of the elder virtuous days, and who
during a long life of ninety-two years was an example of stalwart and
antiquated Federalism. Old Boston bred dignified figures in plenty,
men admirably equipped to be college presidents, ambassadors, orators
on formal occasions, purveyors of cultivated inutilities and polished
commonplace--men like Edward Everett, whom all Boston praised while
they lived and forgot when they were dead; but it bred no thinkers or
men of letters who count in the larger history of America. Boston was
still parochial, content with little things.
II • Fisher Ames • The Oracle of the Tie-Wig School
Of this testy little world that clung to its smallclothes and tie-wig,
refusing to adopt the Jacobin innovation in dress and manners and
politics, declining to temper its prejudices to the gusty whims of a
leveling age, Fisher Ames was the universal counselor and oracle. A
vivacious little gentleman to whom politics was the breath of life,
he achieved so tremendous a reputation in his short lifetime that all
New England looked to him for leadership and Harvard College wanted to
make him its president. He came of vigorous stock, prone to consult
its own will and speak its opinions with no squeamish concern for a
neighbor’s views. His brother, Dr. Nathaniel Ames, was as violent a
Republican as Fisher was a Federalist, a hater of all lawyers whom
he accounted the “pettifogging interest”; and when the two members
of the family came together at dinner the talk must have been worth
hearing. Diverse worlds and hostile philosophies faced each other over
the roast, and the sauce no doubt was well spiced. Dr. Nathaniel had
a pretty gift himself in the way of pungent speech, and Fisher’s wit
was the admiration of all New England. When Gouverneur Morris--reputed
the greatest wit in America--visited Massachusetts, Fisher Ames was
pitted against him, and Boston believed that the honor of the Bay
State was worthily upheld. His pet hobby was the inherent tyranny of
all democracies, and when he once got astride his wooden horse and dug
in the spurs, the onset was tremendous. The letters that have come
down to us are a gold mine of picturesque vituperation, from which
one may dig a wallet of choice nuggets. The vivacity of his anathemas
is delightful, and one would give much to have heard Dr. Nathaniel’s
retort militant.
There are the solidest grounds for regarding Fisher Ames as the
representative citizen of Boston in the year 1800. He was the cleverest
and most intelligent spokesman of a social and political circle quite
untouched by the new French liberalisms, content with the habitual and
familiar, and mightily concerned that the future should be as like
the past as one generation of oysters is like another. A lawyer who
shared the strong property consciousness of the Boston merchant, and a
churchman who accepted the moral leadership of the Calvinist clergy, he
offered stout and uncompromising resistance to innovation. “A change,
though for the better, is always to be deplored by the generation in
which it is effected,” he said. “Much is lost and more is hazarded”
(_Works_, p. 15, edition of 1809). The new gospel of progress that came
in with French romanticisms, he would have none of. In the face of a
noisy Jacobinism that threatened to carry all before it, he fought a
spirited fight, turning pamphleteer when his broken health removed him
from Congress, counseling and scolding his fellow Federalists with his
last breath. Others might truckle and compromise, but not Fisher Ames.
His faith was founded on the solid granite of Yankee prejudice.
The very solidity of that prejudice made him the trenchant spokesman
of the older Boston conservatisms--that and the vivacity of his prose
style which is approved Augustan, uncorrupted by what he dubbed
“pompous Johnsonian affectation.” His contemporary reputation was
enormous. Accounted a great orator, he was accounted an even greater
political philosopher, and his pamphlets were appraised by President
Kirkland of Harvard as “the light of genius and wisdom darted athwart
the gloom of our political chaos.” “In the character of Mr. Ames,”
said the Harvard president, “the circle of the virtues seemed to be
complete, and each virtue in its proper place” (_Works_, Introduction,
p. xxviii). Yet in spite of so authoritative a pronouncement, Fisher
Ames does not seem today so great a man as he seemed to his own
generation. From the data collected in a stout volume published soon
after his death as “a voice of instruction and warning to his country,”
and from the letters published by his son in 1854, it is plain enough
that this “powerful and original genius” was a retailer of somewhat
shopworn goods, a complete Federalist Tory after the current Boston
fashion. To Fisher Ames Federalism, as understood in New England, was a
religion. He defended it with the ardor of the moralist, convinced that
it included all the political virtues, and that whoever rejected it was
a child of the devil. Whenever he considered the unpromising state of
the country--which luxury he often indulged--whether in the midst of
Shays’s Rebellion or of the Jeffersonian revolution, he fell into black
pessimism. He grew hot from fires of his own kindling, and the gloomier
he became the more vigorously he blew the bellows.
To the sinful publican self-conscious virtue is peculiarly irritating,
and since Fisher Ames accounted most of his generation political
publicans, he was at odds with all but a scant remnant of Federalist
saints. From this isolation, from the defeat that overwhelmed his party
in the great election of 1800, and from aggravating ill health, which
beginning when he was thirty-seven incapacitated him three years later
for public life, he fell into a state of chronic political despondency
that extracted a grim pleasure from the contemplation of democratic
follies and the anarchy towards which the country was hastening. During
his last years his wit became acid; his letters are filled with caustic
comment to sharpen the temper of those on the fighting line. Of these
racy comments, so characteristic of Federalist spleen, a few examples
must serve to convey the spirit: “Our country is too big for union,
too sordid for patriotism, too democratic for liberty.” “We are in the
hands of the philosophers of Lilliput.” “I have as loyal and respectful
an opinion as possible of the sincerity in folly of our rulers.” “As
to liberty, we are to have none--democracy will kindle its own hell,
and consume in it.” “Democracy is a troubled spirit, fated never to
rest, and whose dreams, if it sleeps, present only visions of hell.” In
his last years Fisher Ames had become a shrill Jeremiah crying in the
gates of an Israel that mocked the old prophets.
His political philosophy was simple, yet so native to Calvinist-Yankee
New England, and historically so characteristic, that it provides
a useful candle to throw light into the old New England garrets.
In certain aspects it is close kin to the Whiggery of Locke and
Pitt, particularly in its concern for the sacred right of property
rule--a principle that he casually recognizes in his frequent
assertion that “the mass of the federalists are the owners of the
commercial and monied wealth of the nation” (_Works_, p. 426).
But in post-Revolutionary Boston, suffering from the acute fright
inflicted by Daniel Shays, this English Whiggery had come to assume
a particular native form that differentiated it from its original.
In the primitive Calvinist-Yankee world political theory had been
shaped by the theocratic conception of stewardship, by which was
meant an authoritative leadership reposing in the best and wisest,
yet subject to the will of God as revealed in the Bible. Minister
and magistrate, therefore, professed to justify their acts, not by
expediency or interest, but by absolute ethical standards. From this
early practice developed the pronounced ethical temper of New England
political thought that set it apart from the Virginia school, a temper
that persisted after the transfer of authority from Puritan minister
and magistrate to Tory merchant and lawyer. With the growth of the
aristocratic spirit in the middle eighteenth century, the squirearchy
assumed unchallenged political leadership, and it was from the remnant
of the old gentry remaining after the expulsion of the Loyalists,
strengthened by a new generation of merchants and lawyers, that Boston
Federalism drew its personnel. It professed republicanism, but it was
instinctively aristocratic. It was true to its Puritan origins in
expounding its political philosophy in terms of an absolute morality,
and true to its aristocratic origins in assuming to be the special
custodians of law and order. It no more questioned its special right
to rulership in the state than it questioned its social position; and
in both politics and society it professed the ancient doctrine of
stewardship.
The kinship between the political philosophy of Fisher Ames and John
Adams is quite evident. They are cut out of the same Puritan-Yankee
cloth, but the former is a more careless tailor. Founded on less
adequate analysis and lacking the wide historical appeal of Adams,
assuming rather than proving the fact of a universal property
aristocracy, and the economic origins of political power, the
philosophy of Ames postulates the same ideal of justice as the end of
government, discovers in faction the dragon to be slain, and concludes
that only a static division of powers can insure political stability.
Nevertheless the difference between the two men is enormous. John Adams
was a philosopher, and Fisher Ames was only a lawyer-politician. The
ideal of justice which the former postulated was fundamentally noble,
whereas the ideal of justice which the latter assumed was narrowly
legal. Both accepted the Puritan doctrine of human wickedness--a
doctrine derived from medieval Toryism--and from it deduced the
necessity of a coercive sovereignty; but Fisher Ames went further and
assumed that the Puritan doctrine of the elect and the Yankee doctrine
of the successful were one and the same, and that God’s remnant in
Israel was no other than the prosperous merchants and lawyers of
Boston. All the great multitude of the unprosperous, by the same
doctrine, were the mass of the unregenerate, condemned for the good of
society to be ruled by a rod of iron.
The noble doctrine of justice, therefore, became for Fisher Ames
little more than the divine right of the minority to coerce the
majority, in the name and through the agency of laws and statutes. In
his view justice was little more than a drab realist in a lawyer’s
wig, adjudicating title deeds, and delivering its findings out of law
books. Its one concern was to safeguard what had been got, rather than
to secure just and equal rights. It dreaded all rude and tumultuary
innovation, and would tolerate no change that was not implicit in
legal principles. Its golden rule was due process of law. Love of
one’s neighbors was, no doubt, an excellent private virtue, but it was
impractical, if not immoral, in the state. Concern for the improvident
sinners must not influence government to impair the rights of the
thrifty saints; for government was instituted and exists to safeguard
established things. “The chief duty and care of all governments,” he
argued, “is to protect the rights of property and the tranquillity of
society” (_Works_, p. 125). Hence to Fisher Ames government was the
common policeman and judge, whose function was to arrest the turbulent
and bring them to the bar of the Common Law. Its beginning and end
was the Tory principle of coercion. Its sovereignty was arrogant
and domineering, taking no account of the democratic principle of
good will. “The motives to refuse obedience to government are many
and strong,” he explained; “impunity will multiply and enforce them.
Many men would rebel, rather than be ruined; but they would rather
not rebel, than be hanged” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius Brutus”). With
government thus conceived of, naturally he desired that it should be
strong; that it should impose its will ruthlessly upon the rebellious.
Naturally also he regarded every idealist, the Rousseaus and Paines and
Jeffersons--all the mischievous hosts of “democratick babblers”--as
a dangerous enemy of law and order, desperately bent on overturning
the rights of vested interests and the tranquillity of society. This
is sufficient to explain the vindictiveness of his assault upon Shays
and his followers, as “bankrupts and sots, who have gambled or slept
away their estates”--while in the Revolutionary army--and were now
engaged in the business of treason against the commonwealth, and the
characteristic conclusion that he draws--“the certainty of punishment
is the truest security against crimes” (_Works_, “Lucius Junius
Brutus,” p. 3). To Fisher Ames and Daniel Shays, justice seems to have
had very different aspects.
To the uncritical there is a certain persuasive dignity in the
philosophy of Boston Federalism. Gentlemen like Fisher Ames were
careful to appear well in public; they liked to be regarded as
faithful stewards of the common weal. Concern for the _res publica_
they professed so heartily that it seems ungracious to question their
motives. How excellently they could make out a case for themselves will
appear from the following exposition of Fisher Ames’ philosophy, as it
was understood by a Harvard president:
Mr. Ames was emphatically a republican. He saw that many persons
confounded a republick with a democracy. He considered them as
essentially distinct and really opposite. According to his creed,
a republick is that structure of an elective government, in
which the administration necessarily prescribe to themselves the
general good as the object of all their measures; a democracy is
that, in which the present popular passions, independent of the
publick good, become a guide to the rulers. In the first, the
reason and interests of the society govern; in the second, their
prejudices and passions. The frame of the American constitution
supposes the dangers of democracy.... [The constitutional checks]
are contrivances and devices voluntarily adopted by the people
to restrain themselves from obstructing, by their own mistakes
or perversity, the attainment of the publick welfare. They are
professed means of insuring to the nation rulers, who will prefer
the durable good of the whole to the transient advantage of the
whole or a part. When these provisions become ineffectual, and
the legislator, the executive magistrate, and the judge become
the instruments of the passions of a people, or of the governing
majority, the government, whatever may be its form, is a democracy,
and the public liberty is no longer safe. True republican rulers
are bound to act, not simply as those who appoint them _would_,
but, as they _ought_; democratick leaders will act in subordination
to those very passions which it is the object of government to
control.... Then it is, that men, not laws, govern. (_Works_,
Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv.)
“The durable good of the whole” is an excellent phrase; but when the
skeptical critic asks for more exact plans and specifications, the only
answer is a request for a vote of confidence. The representative is
presumed to be wiser and more patriotic than his constituents--quite
above passion or interest--and may safely be intrusted with “the
publick good.” “The love of country,” Fisher Ames was fond of
insisting, “is the morality of politics,” and the Federal Constitution
he believed to be so happily balanced that partisan selfishness must
transmute itself into patriotism. But when we dismiss these amiable
generalities--which reveal to what straits gentlemen were reduced in
their contest with democracy--and examine the political principles that
lie behind them, they do not appear so amiable. They imply as necessary
corollaries a continuous aggrandizement of the political state, the
principle of coercion, and the psychology of fear. It is no other than
the old Tory arrogance, new-modeled to suit republican taste. Fisher
Ames seems to have had no faith in the principle of good will or the
expediency of compromise; his contempt for the opposition was as frank
as Hamilton’s.
Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reasons
or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power
of the community compelling the obedience of individuals. If that
is not done, who will seek its protection, or fear its vengeance.
(“Lucius Junius Brutus,” _Works_, p. 5.)
For let it be remarked, that a feeble government produces more
factions than an oppressive one; the want of power first makes
individuals legislators, and then rebels. Where parents want
authority, children are wanting in duty. It is not possible to
advance further in the same path; the one will conduct us first
to anarchy, and next to foreign or domestick tyranny; the other,
by the wise and vigorous exertion of lawful authority, will lead
to permanent power, and general prosperity. I am no advocate for
despotism; but I believe the probability to be much less of its
being introduced by the corruption of our rulers, than by the
delusion of the people. (“Camillus,” _Works_, p. 17.)
A weak, government, Ames argues insistently, is no other than a
hotbed of faction, and faction is the fruitful mother of democratic
anarchy. Again and again he returns to an exposition of the familiar
eighteenth-century dogma that found its classic exposition in the
tenth number of _The Federalist_; and his argument takes on darker
colors from the Calvinist background of his mind. To those who have
been reared on the sour doctrines of reprobation and election, the
children of Adam become a major political concern. If God has cast
off and denied the mass of the unregenerate, how shall the political
philosopher hope to redeem them? If divine wisdom has granted them no
part in the congregation of the righteous, what rights have they in
the republic of the patriotic? To Fisher Ames town and village and
farm showed plentiful examples of those whom the devil had marked for
his own, and if they were gathered into a numerical democracy with the
saints, how should the minority of the latter safeguard the Ark of
the Sanctuary? How should the durable good of the whole be provided
for? Thrift and godliness were not exactly synonymous terms to the
Calvinist-Yankee, but it was clear that the godly will practice thrift,
and those who have thriven, have _ipso facto_ made out a case for their
godliness. In this uncertain world two things seemed reasonably clear:
that the poor are in a more doubtful state than the rich; and that in
a moral world only the elect may be expected to serve the cause of
morality. The wicked incline to democratic faction, but the prosperous
serve the durable good of the whole.
To one cradled in such prejudices, the current phrase, “gentlemen of
principle and property”--a phrase that provides the chorus to his
thought--lacked the savor of cynicism that it suggests to modern ears.
It was compounded of the ideals of Puritan and Yankee, and Fisher Ames
seems never to have questioned its adequacy, or doubted its finality.
To gentlemen of principle and property he looked to provide a bulwark
against the immoral multitude; they were the stewards of society, on
whom devolved the duty of protecting the whole from democratic faction.
They had erected the Federal Constitution, which Jacobins were seeking
to destroy; and in defense of that Constitution he brought forth his
heaviest artillery. He contributed nothing new to the discussion; but
he repeated the familiar arguments with the gusto of a dogmatist.
“Simple governments,” he asserted, “are despotisms; and of all
despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent”
(_Works_, “American Liberty,” p. 382). The mortal weakness of all
democracies he discovered in their immorality. A democracy will make
every people “thoroughly licentious and corrupt.” “The known propensity
of a democracy is to licentiousness, which the ambitious call, and the
ignorant believe to be liberty.”
The great object, then, of political wisdom in framing our
constitution, was to guard against licentiousness, that inbred
malady of democracies, that deforms their infancy with grey hairs
and decrepitude. (_Ibid._, p. 384.)
There is universally a presumption in democracy that promises
everything; and at the same time an imbecility that can accomplish
nothing, not even preserve itself. (_Works_, “Falkland,” p. 151.)
“Politics should have no passions,” this caustic old Federalist
professed to believe, yet his bitterness against the Jeffersonians who
threatened to overturn the funding law, the national bank, the midnight
judicial appointments, and other measures of the best Federalist minds,
was almost unseemly. It would appear that “the durable good of the
whole” flew out at the window, when danger to commercial interests came
in at the door. To erect a strong government and then lose control of
it was a disaster indeed. With the political state in the hands of
atheistic democrats, Fisher Ames was prepared to welcome the coming of
anarchy, and his pessimism throve on the prospect. But that no warning
might be lacking he laid down the whole theory of government in plain
terms, that even Jefferson might understand:
But the essence, and almost the quintessence, of good government
is, to protect property and its rights. When these are protected,
there is scarcely any booty left for oppression to seize; the
objects and the motives to usurpation and tyranny are removed. By
securing property, life and liberty can scarcely fail of being
secured: where property is safe by rules and principles, there is
liberty. (_Works_, “Phocion,” p. 181.)
This is pure Federalism, stripped of all cant, speaking out frankly.
It is the philosophy of John Locke brought in to serve the rising
capitalism of New England, threatened by a Physiocratic agrarianism.
The dogma of political morality has yielded to economic realism. The
stake-in-society principle is the reply of the Puritan-Yankee to the
democratic romanticism of Jefferson and Madison--a principle which,
fortunately, “these apostles from the race-ground and the cock-pit”
paid little heed to.
To a sophisticated generation, long familiar with the political ways of
gentlemen of principle and property, Fisher Ames appears as a caustic
little gentleman, vivacious and intolerant, who nodded his tie-wig
dogmatically, and spoke his opinions oracularly. He quite evidently
relished his ample store of old-fashioned prejudices, cherished them
carefully, and prided himself on the wit with which he set them forth.
If he was not the repository of all political wisdom that he believed
himself to be, he was at least no demagogue, and in honoring him the
Boston of the year 1800 was but painting its own portrait. It would be
ungracious, perhaps, to add that Fisher Ames and Boston Federalism,
defeated in their cherished projects, were both suffering from an
extraordinarily aggravated case of the political spleen.
III • Robert Treat Paine, Jr. • Wit
Young Tom Paine, who took his brother’s and his father’s name--partly
because a certain other Tom Paine had achieved a fame that Boston did
not regard as enviable--shared with Fisher Ames the literary renown
of the New England capital, a renown so great that Boston paid him
quite astonishing sums for such couplets as his indolence suffered him
to turn off. The popularity of his wares was a notable instance of
the working of the law of supply and demand. The patriotism of Boston
preferred domestic to imported goods, and he offered his verses to a
public not very critical of quality. Boston had never had a poet of her
own, while Connecticut with her Hartford Wits was the envy of all New
England. Certain poetesses to be sure, had tried with “hallowed hands”
to “attune Columbia’s lyre”--to quote Paine’s eulogy of Mrs. Sarah
Wentworth Morton, “blest Philenia, noblest of the choir” (_Works_,
“Menander to Philenia,” p. 129)--but their sentimentality was a bit
cloying, and when genius appeared in the person of a Harvard graduate,
graced with wit and adorned with all the learning of the schools,
Boston was quick to acclaim him as her own.
The young man thus seized upon, and as it were raped by fame, was
the last of the eighteenth-century wits, the most dashing product of
a generation that patched its verse with tags of the classics and
called it lisping in numbers. In temper and manners he belonged wholly
to the tie-wig school that swaggered till the War of 1812 and then
became obsolete overnight. As a young man about town he displayed
the latest London clothes and set himself up as the very glass of
fashion. Although he wore his own hair, he clung to smallclothes and
like an honest Federalist refused to adopt Jacobin trousers. He was
indisputably clever and he cultivated a pretty wit as assiduously
as any Augustan. He talked in epigrams, and a convivial evening--of
which he was quite too fond for his own good--was a failure that did
not produce a _bon mot_ to run through the town. His biographer has
preserved a number of such for the amusement of posterity, and one
at least deserves to be remembered by our younger critics. When the
prohibition against the theater was repealed in 1793, he remarked, “The
Vandal spirit of puritanism is prostrate in New-England.” In cleaving
to wit and abandoning Puritanism, Paine broke with sober Boston
convention, and soon all respectable folk began to shake their heads.
A thriftless fellow, he played with the devil openly in the eyes of
all Boston. He drank too much, he gambled, he haunted the theater and
was a favorite of the greenroom, he became the first dramatic critic
born and bred in New England, and when he married the daughter of an
English actor, his father disowned him. Quite naturally he came to
poverty, dissipated his strength, suffered many a humiliation, and died
at the age of thirty-seven, leaving his widow and young children to be
provided for by a public benefit at his beloved Federal Street theater.
Little of his wit, unfortunately, found its way into his verse, which,
modeled ostensibly on Dryden and Pope, lacks their vigorous common
sense, and laboring to be sublime succeeds in being heavy. His couplets
swell sonorously, but his thought does not keep pace with his rhetoric.
He follows his recipe carefully; adjectives duly support the nouns;
the caesuras are justly spaced and the balance of the parts is as nice
as if weighed in an apothecary’s scales. He seasons the whole with
the staples of personification and poetic diction; everything has
been provided for, and yet the cake is fallen that he takes from the
oven. Something is lacking to lighten the sodden mass. A contemporary
critic, viewing the finished product, expressed his judgment thus:
Of Mr. Paine, as an author, we cannot speak in terms of unmingled
praise. His verse, indeed, seldom loiters into prose; but it
must be confessed, that his prose is here and there “tricked and
frounced, till it outmantles all the pride of verse.” His numbers
are, perhaps, never feeble or faultering, but a wild and frolic
imagination, occasionally, wantons through his periods, and
sometimes displays itself in contemning the chaster elegancies,
and sometimes in neglecting the severer decencies of thought and
diction. (_Works_, Introduction, p. lxxviii.)
It is certainly a partial eye that discovers a wild and frolic
imagination in these lumbering imitations of Pope, or in the occasional
excursions into the languorous fields of Della Cruscan sentiment.
When Paine ceases to be a wit he becomes an offense. To his admiring
contemporaries his poetry seemed to be pure metal, but to later
generations it is only plate, with the brass showing through the worn
spots. _The Ruling Passion_, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society in 1797, is perhaps the first poem of Paine’s that is much more
than vacuous and turgid rhetoric; and this is redeemed, in spite of
liberal helpings from Pope, by a certain vivacity of satire, phrased
with Augustan smartness. Such couplets as these still preserve a jaunty
literary swagger for later ears; how they tickled the more susceptible
ears of our grandfathers must be imagined:
Where you send genius, send a fortune too;
Dunces by instinct thrive, as oysters woo!
For ne’er were veins of ore by chymist found,
Except, like Hebrew roots, in barren ground!
Paine early grew old, and before he had reached his thirties his mind
had taken a rigid conservative bent. His affections were fixed upon a
past that was visibly falling into decay, and its ways were endeared
to him in the measure that they decayed. It was a matter of personal
pride with him to embody in his own manners the aristocratic bearing of
pre-Revolutionary times.
Mr. Paine [says his biographer] attached great consequence to
_manners_.... He was modelled upon the _old school_. Without being
familiar, he was easy among friends, and courtly to strangers.
In colloquial discussions, he rigidly adhered to the law of
politeness; and in mixed society, he neither courted the _high_,
nor avoided the _low_.... He frequently deplored a supposed decay
of _manners_. With concern, he used to inquire “_In manners,
where is the successor of Gen. Knox to be found?_” It was with
him a constant topick of complaint, that “_The old, genteel, town
families, had been elbowed out of house and home, by newcomers_;”
that “_instead of the polished manners of a city, we should soon
exhibit that growth of gentility, which is produced by ingrafting
dollars upon village habits and low employments_.” (_Works_,
Introduction, p. lxix.)
Affecting an aristocratic bearing, Paine was as complete a Tory as
the republican environment permitted. If he despised the new, pushing
middle class that had risen since the Revolution, he held in contempt
the numerous company of those he dubbed the yokel, the peasant, the
hind, or the plow-tail. Under the circumstances the best that he
could do politically was to turn Federalist, and he embraced the
principles of Fisher Ames with genteel conviction. “In politics,”
says his biographer, “Mr. Paine was a disciple of the old federal
school. He understood the constitution, as Washington administered,
and as Hamilton had expounded it” (_ibid._, p. lxxvii). During his
undergraduate days he had dabbled in French revolutionary philosophy,
and “the fanatic Atheism of France, decorated in all the meretricious
charms of eloquence and philosophy, took a transient possession of his
mind” (_ibid._, p. lxxviii). At graduation in 1792, he read a poem
entitled _The Nature and Progress of Liberty_, in which he eulogized
“liberal thought,” proposed to follow “Reason,” declared that “the
rights of man” are a gift from heaven, proffered the hand of fellowship
to France--
May struggling France her ancient freedom gain,
May Europe’s sword oppose her rights in vain--
and launched a devastating couplet at the great English opponent of the
Revolution--
The fame of Burke, in dark oblivion rust,
His pen a meteor--and his page the dust.
Three years later, on proceeding Master of Arts, he presented a poem in
very different vein. Three years were a generation in those stirring
times, and by 1795 the penetrating vision of this genius of twenty-two
had discovered the atheist poison in the cup of French democracy. _The
Invention of Letters_ rises to a climax in a satirical elaboration
of a line from the poem of 1792--“Licentious morals breed disease of
state.” Having learned his lesson from Fisher Ames, the sapient young
Federalist announces that democracy is the mother of faction, and
faction leads on to anarchy. In this poem for the first time Paine’s
wit runs freely, and certain lines are as jaunty as he ever penned.
For place or power, while demagogues contend,
Whirled in their vortex, sinks each humbler friend.
See Crispin quit his stall, in Faction’s cause,
To cobble government, and soal the laws!
See Frisseur scent his dust, his razor set,
To shave the treaty, or to puff Genet!
In doubtful mood, see Mulciber debate,
To mend a horse-shoe, or to weld the state!
The whip’s bold knight, in barn, his truck is laid,
To spout in favour of the carrying trade!
While Staytape runs, from hissing goose, too hot,
To measure Congress for another coat;
And still, by rule of shop, intent on pelf,
Eyes the spare cloth, to cabbage for himself!
Envy, that fiend, who haunts the great and good,
Not Cato shunned, nor Hercules subdued.
On Fame’s wide field, where’er a covert lies,
The rustling serpent to the thicket flies;
The foe of Glory, Merit is her prey;
The dunce she leaves, to plod his drowsy way.
Of birth amphibious, and of Protean skill,
This green-eyed monster changes shape at will;
Like snakes of smaller breed, she sheds her skin;
Strips off the serpent, and turns--Jacobin.
In view of the fact that Governor Samuel Adams, chief of the New
England Jacobins, was to occupy the stage, President Willard had
diplomatically struck from the manuscript the ten lines last quoted;
but Paine had the audacity to re-insert them in speaking, and the
tumultuous applause was sufficient proof that it was not from a Harvard
audience that Sam Adams got the votes that annually returned him
governor.
Verse imposed some slight restraint on Paine’s rhetoric, but in prose
when he was in full career--as in the grotesque eulogy of Washington
which stirred the patriotism of Boston Federalists--the reins are
on the neck of his eloquence, and he takes all barriers with fiery
abandon. Fact troubles his wild and frolic imagination not at all, but
like any plebeian demagogue--whose factional appeals he so furiously
condemned--he blew the bellows of Federalist partisanship with
extraordinary vigor, stoking his fire with rumor and misrepresentation
and party spleen. No slander was too gross, no lie too palpable to
serve his end. He baited the democrats quite shamelessly, and aroused
the mob of Boston gentlemen like a true Tory. One of his political
orations has been preserved by his editor in the collected edition of
his works, for the enlightenment of posterity--an oration delivered
in 1799, “at the request of the young men of Boston,” on the theme of
France and democracy. In this extraordinary composition Paine seems
to have been quite ravished by his own rhetoric, that flashes in many
a feint and parry before it impales its victim. It is a Federalist
philippic, designed to destroy the good name of all who have quitted
the sacred Federalist tribe. Words could hardly go further; disregard
for truth could scarcely be more brazen. Paine’s delight in clever
antitheses overweighs any scruples in regard to just statement. “The
French Republick,” he asserted, “has exhibited all the vices of
civilization, without one of the virtues of barbarism.” One or two bits
from this tremendous oration, that in “the glow of feeling, the swell
of language, and the brilliancy of sentiments” has “very seldom been
surpassed,” and that was “received with rapturous and enthusiastic
applause,” must suffice to illustrate the justice of the Federalist
claim to the custodianship of political good manners. “Politics should
have no passions,” Fisher Ames asserted--which excellent principle
young Robert Treat Paine exemplified thus:
Political Empiricism has never attained, in any age or nation, so
universal an ascendency, as at the present day in the “Illuminated
Republick.” Unfettered by the fear of innovation, and unshackled by
the prejudice of ages, the modern Frenchman is educated in a system
of moral and religious chimeras, which dazzle by their novelty
those volatile intellects, which prescriptive wisdom could never
impress with veneration. Every Frenchman, who has read a little is
a pedant; and the whole race of these horn-book Philosophers is
content with the atheism of Mirabeau ... the absurd philanthropy of
Condorcet, and the visionary politics of Rousseau. These are the
boundaries of their literary ambition, of their political science.
Hence it is, that they pretend to be too enlightened for belief,
too virtuous for government.
The feculence of party is not yet drained of its rankest sediment.
The worshippers of democracy, though their altars are thrown down,
are not yet converted from their devotions. The frozen snake has
still some sparks of animation; and, if placed by compassion near
your hospitable fires, he will revive with exasperated venom, and
sting the hardy fool that fostered him. Deal therefore with these
ferocious demoralizers, as our crafty mariners trade with the
savages of the Indian ocean--with your men at their posts, your
guns loaded, and your slow matches burning. (_Works_, p. 319.)
For all democrats Paine had the hearty contempt of an honest man for
a rogue, but for the intellectuals who expounded the new romantic
philosophy his indignation was measureless. “The legitimate plebeian
democrat,” he asserted, is “an enemy to all government, under which
he holds no office”; but fling him a bone from the public table and
“he becomes the very scavenger of administration.” The “Illuminated
Jacobin,” on the other hand, “never changes his principles.”
His whole science is directed to unhinge society, his whole
ambition to plunder it. He is too ravenous to be content with a
system of order himself; and too selfish to permit its enjoyment
by others. Like a hog in a flower-garden, he sets no value on the
variegated foliage he destroys, and seems only desirous to root out
every twig of vegetation, that can satiate his voracity. (_Ibid._,
p. 321.)
To such fustian was he reduced when his wit left him. That a
gentleman could talk like that, and other gentlemen applaud, is a
sad commentary on the intellectual honesty of partisanship, even
amongst decent Federalists. Fustian was the order of the day, and
Paine was merely baying with his pack. If only he had not professed
such virtues his extravagance might be forgiven; but extravagance
ill becomes a distinguished repository of political wisdom. Once,
indeed, his vivacity got him into a nasty mess. While editor of _The
Federal Orrery_, he accepted in 1795 a political poem entitled _The
Jacobiniad_, the satire of which Paine “new-pointed and new-edged”
before printing. The democrats, at whom it was directed, were vastly
incensed, and a mob gathered before his lodging but was dispersed.
Later the son of one of the victims challenged him to a duel. Paine
declined but armed himself with an unloaded pistol. Accidentally
meeting his challenger in the street, he drew his weapon, but the
young fellow, standing in no awe of a favorite of the muses, struck
the pistol down and proceeded to give Paine a sound drubbing. To such
base treatment may genius come, when wit forgets that a sally of the
tongue may invite a counter sally of the fists. And so we leave him in
the dust of the street, ignobly laid low by the strength of that vulgar
democracy which was to bring down so many things held dear by Boston
Tories. His was, very largely, a wasted life--wasted by sheer indolence
and feeble will. He was a fellow of some parts, and a sentence from one
of his dramatic criticisms may not inaptly apply to him: “The character
is not a sot, but his humor has a mellower tilth for having been
husbanded and manured by ‘the excellent endeavor of drinking.’”
Chapter II • Winds of Political Doctrine
I
Into the complacent little Boston of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine
came the Embargo, the War of 1812, and the industrial revolution to
upset its static order and destroy its snug provincialism. The old
Federalism with its Hartford Convention and plans for New England
secession went the way of mortality, carrying with it to the grave the
old pessimism and the old spleen. The jealous isolationist policy was
quietly forgotten in Boston; the gospel of secession was preached no
more; George Cabot and Timothy Pickering gave way to other leaders; and
provincial Boston joined with Kentucky and Tennessee in extolling a
romantic nationalism. It sent to Washington a new spokesman, who joined
with Henry Clay in a paternalistic program of national expansion, and
took command of the forces combating the rising separatism of the South
Carolina school. By the year 1830 Boston had traveled far from the
times of the Hartford Convention.
The sufficient explanation of so striking a change is to be found,
of course, in the changing economics of Massachusetts. The Embargo
had proved a major disaster to New England shipping; and the Boston
merchants, counting their losses from idle and dismasted ships,
water-logging at the wharves, found just cause for hating the policy of
the administration. But if the shipping business was brought face to
face with tragedy, the manufacturing interests stumbled upon unexpected
prosperity. With British imports cut off, the home market offered a
tempting opportunity to Yankee enterprise. The familiar story of the
swift rise of New England industrialism need not be recounted here. It
is enough to remark that with the growth of domestic manufactures a
new group of economic leaders appeared, and the policy of New England
shifted from pro-mercantilism to pro-industrialism. It was a difficult
choice at first between the antagonistic claims of the Boston merchant
and the Lowell manufacturer; between the carriers of foreign goods who
demanded free trade, and the makers of domestic goods who demanded a
protective tariff. The traditional view of New England was strongly
for free trade. In 1807 a Federalist lawyer asserted it to be “an
unalienable right,” and in 1820 Judge Story asked, “Why should the
laboring classes be taxed for the necessaries of life?”[433] The tariff
bill of 1824 got only one vote from Massachusetts; but in the four
years between the passage of that act and the “Tariff of Abominations”
of 1828, Massachusetts went over definitely to industrialism.
Thenceforth she was to be the leader in the movement looking to
governmental paternalism, substituting the expansive Federalism of
Hamilton for the restrictive Federalism of Fisher Ames, and becoming in
consequence whole-heartedly nationalistic.
Equally significant, though less observed, was the changed attitude of
Massachusetts towards the great republican experiment. Gone was the
older generation, with its face turned to the past and its heart bound
up with the patriarchal ideals of a decadent squirearchy. Gone also
were the disturbant fears of democracy. The menace of Daniel Shays,
that had put the old Federalists in a rage at democracy, was long since
forgotten; and the nervous panic over French Jacobinism, that had
upset New England for a decade, had subsided. In the light of longer
experience with its ways democracy was seen to be far from terrifying.
The hobgoblin of faction that had benightmared the dreams of Fisher
Ames was discovered to be only a bogey to frighten naughty boys.
Massachusetts had kept off the agrarian reef, despite war and economic
unrest, and with her new constitution of 1820 property interests
were as secure as any old Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of
principle and property were still in control of the state; and if less
emphasis was laid on principle and more on property--if less regard
seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and more to
assertive self-seeking--business was no less secure than in the good
old days, and its profits were greater. And so, master of its looms and
a growing home market, New England industrialism regarded genially the
great western movement, fostered by a benevolent paternalism, confident
of extending its markets with every mile of westward expansion. To
encourage the development of the West and South by a Federal policy
of internal improvement became, therefore, common business foresight,
provided of course that the Constitution should follow population and
safeguard business interests against local agrarianism and the menace
of particularism.
By the year 1830 both dangers lay black against the political horizon.
The triumph of Jackson had enthroned the agrarian menace at Washington
and produced such a scrambling of frightened interests--such a rattling
among the old bones of Federalism and scurrying among the young limbs
of industrialism--as the country had not seen for many a year. Henry
Clay appealed to his followers in the West, and Webster marshaled his
adherents of the East, and from the coalescing of these incongruous
elements emerged the Whig party to do battle with Old Hickory. It was
a patchwork army at best. In the hour of peril, principles go by the
board. The Whig party was lineal heir of the old Federalism, but it
denied its philosophical patrimony. It substituted expediency for the
old economic realism, and began and ended intellectually bankrupt. Its
bitter and unseemly squabbles over the Bank and tariff, its platitudes
of patriotism and its pose of disinterestedness, the venom of its
personal attack upon Jackson, were the earmarks of a policy of shallow
opportunism that failed to make use of such victories as fell to its
lot, for the simple reason that it could never agree on what to do.
Such cohesive power as held it together--aside from petty antagonism to
Jackson--was the vague assumption that the well-being of the American
people was dependent on governmental patronage; the belief that each
economic group and section must receive its special favor, and that
through tariffs and bonuses and internal improvements the country as a
whole must prosper. Of this principle of special favors--a return to
the seventeenth century from which eighteenth-century liberalism was a
reaction--the American System of Henry Clay was the chief expression,
and it remains the most significant bequest of the Whig party to our
political history.
The Whig party was the first attempt of our rising middle class to
erect a political platform in accordance with middle-class ideals,
and its failure was due to the fact that the time was not ripe for
undisputed middle-class control. The merchant aristocracy of the North
was overthrown, but the planter aristocracy of the South was still to
be reckoned with; and its particularistic ambitions in the end wrecked
the Whig coalition of the West and East. By 1820 a revolutionary change
had taken place in the political philosophy of the plantation school.
From an ardent nationalism Calhoun was leading his followers back to
the earlier doctrine of states rights; and New England industrialism
found itself confronted with the doctrine which the Hartford junto
had played with, but now with far more drive behind it. The slave
economy was entertaining imperialistic dreams, and to effect its ends
was building up a new constitutional philosophy. Southern writers
had long been at work, and the weight of their authority was behind
the new particularism. _Rawle on the Constitution_, a states-rights
exposition, was the official textbook on civics at the United States
Military Academy, and from it, while a student at West Point, Jefferson
Davis declared that he first imbibed states-rights principles. Other
authoritative southern works that were widely read were John Taylor’s
two studies: _Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_
(1820), and _New Views of the Constitution of the United States_
(1823); some years later came Henry St. George Tucker’s _Lectures
on Constitutional Law_ (1843); and these were only preliminary to
Calhoun’s searching exposition in his _Disquisition on Government_ and
_An Inquiry into the Nature of the Constitution of the United States_.
To meet this theory of particularism there was need of a resurgent
Federalism, with a new nationalistic interpretation of the
Constitution. The compact theory of the Federal state must be refuted
by the organic theory; the conception of federated commonwealths must
yield to the conception of a coalescing sovereignty. The old battle
must be fought over again with fresh arguments. The sanctity of the
Constitution must be asserted, but that sanctity must be thrown over
a nationalistic rather than a particularistic interpretation. It must
be shown that despite the vehement protestations of southern loyalty,
a particularistic Constitution was a denial of loyalty and must end
in the destruction of the national union. For this difficult business
New England was as yet unprepared. The old Federalist arguments were
obsolete, and many of those Federalists had been deep in the Hartford
Convention. The new industrialism must provide its own theory, and
it was fortunate in discovering two men whose combined learning and
eloquence proved equal to the task.
II
The name of Webster has been so closely associated with the movement
of constitutional nationalism as to overshadow the just fame of one
who has many claims to be regarded as the intellectual leader of the
school. Joseph Story was a Salem lawyer whose reputation, considerable
as it is, is scarcely commensurate with his influence on our later
constitutional development. Of the same Harvard class with William
Ellery Channing, he dabbled in polite letters as a young man, but
went into the law, entered politics, became Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court, and for a time was Dane professor of law at Harvard.
He came of radical stock. His father, a physician at Boston till he
removed to Marblehead, was a militant Revolutionary Whig, one of
the score or so of Indians who made up the Boston Tea Party, and a
leader amongst the group of Sons of Liberty who seized and gagged the
sentinels and carried off two brass fieldpieces from the Common where
the British commander had posted them to overawe the town. The son grew
up an ardent republican. As a very young man he became an outstanding
leader of the unfashionable party, then in the minority, and suffered
certain humiliations on account of his political opinions; on one
occasion, according to Theodore Parker, being “knocked down in the
street, beaten, and forced to take shelter in the house of a friend,
whither he fled, bleeding, and covered with the mud of the street”
(_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 178). Of these youthful heresies
few indications appeared in his later life. Republican though he might
be, he was utterly devoid of any radical tendencies, and when he took
his seat on the Supreme Court bench he was speedily drawn into the
powerful orbit of John Marshall, shared the latter’s views on all major
constitutional questions, and turned Whig. He became a close friend
of Webster and from 1816 to 1842 he was his chief adviser on knotty
legal, constitutional, and international questions. “From that deep and
copious well of legal knowledge,” Parker asserts, Webster drew freely
“whenever his own bucket was dry” (_ibid._, p. 170).
This shift from Republican to Whig came about quite naturally. New
England liberalism, it must be remembered, produced no intellectual
leaders till late, and no clear-cut political philosophy. Though it
nominally accepted the leadership of Jefferson it never was won over to
the Physiocratic economics or states-rights principles of the Virginia
school. Story was at no time a Jeffersonian, but rather an eager and
avowed disciple of Washington, “little infected with Virginia notions,
as to men or measures.” In his _Autobiography_ he wrote:
The republican party then and at all other times embraced men of
very different views on many subjects. Nay, a Virginia republican
of that day, was very different from a Massachusetts republican,
and the anti-federal doctrines of the former state then had and
still have very little support or influence in the latter state,
notwithstanding a concurrence in political action upon general
subjects. I was at all times a firm believer in the doctrines of
General Washington, and an admirer of his conduct, measures and
principles.... I read and examined his principles, and have made
them in a great measure the rule and guide of my life. I was and
always have been a lover, devoted lover, of the constitution of the
United States, and a friend to the union of the states. I never
wished to bring the government to a mere confederacy of states; but
to preserve the power of the general government given by all the
states, in full exercise and sovereignty for the protection and
preservation of all the states. (Story, _Life and Letters of Joseph
Story_, Vol. I, p. 128.)
That he had as little sympathy with the Physiocratic economics of
Jefferson is apparent from his early activities in furthering the new
paper system. While a member of the Massachusetts legislature, as a
young man, he was active in pressing for bank franchises, and upon the
establishment of the Merchants’ Bank of Salem he became its president.
Like Washington and Marshall he espoused the new gospel of capitalism,
with none of the agrarian prejudices of the landed gentry to hold him
back. He was the political twin of the great Chief Justice, and a Whig
in spirit long before Webster. “I seem to myself,” he remarked late in
life, “simply to have stood still in my political belief, while parties
revolved about me; so that, although of the same opinions now as ever,
I find my name changed from Democrat to Whig, but I know not how or
why” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 546). Though somewhat naïve the comment is
just. Anti-federalism in Massachusetts would seem to have been largely
a capitalistic protest against the narrow tie-wig Federalism; and
while Joseph Story sat upon the Supreme Court bench, adapting legal
principles to the new needs of business, the country was moving forward
to the middle-class philosophy that he had early come to hold.
In the year 1833 he published his _Commentaries on the Constitution_,
the fruit of long labors, which was at once accepted throughout
the North as a classical authority, and which has held its ground
pretty well since. In method and temper, as well as objective, the
exposition of Story stands in sharp contrast to that of the southern
school. In its particularism the latter appealed to the history of the
Constitution in the making, and to French romantic philosophy; whereas
the former followed English constitutional theories to nationalistic
ends. Story was steeped in the Common Law and his thinking reveals the
strong influence of Blackstone. In passing through the mind of the
great Tory commentator, English constitutional theory had received a
pronounced Tory bias, and something of this remains after filtering
through the mind of Story. The ideal of a strong and efficient
political state, with its corollaries of a coercive sovereignty, of the
duties of a subject rather than the rights of a citizen, of loyalty
to government rather than concern for political justice, derives
immediately from English theory and practice. Much likewise he took
from the older Federalists: their fear of an encroaching legislative
power; their concern at faction; their faith in checks and balances
to restrain the majority will. But his chief inspiration came from
the spirit of the Common Law--that subtle influence that Jefferson so
greatly feared. His legalism was inveterate; the final, authoritative
answer to all questions he discovered in the decision of the courts.
Against such a mind, deeply read in the law and with scanty knowledge
of economics and political theory, the waves of liberal and romantic
thought broke impotently. His reasoning may be convincing to a lawyer,
but to the historian his exposition is often weak, his data inadequate,
and his conclusions not infrequently contrary to fact.
In building his argument Story drew his materials freely from _The
Federalist_, from the writings and decisions of Marshall, and from
Blackstone. The backbone of the work is Hamilton and Marshall, from
whom he quotes constantly, supplemented by a host of decisions by
Federalist judges. With its pronounced bias _The Commentaries_ must
be regarded as a partisan document, which like _The Federalist_ has
grown in authoritativeness with the triumph of its party principles.
Its surprising weakness on the historical side has come to be
overlooked since the downfall of southern particularism, but during
the debates that preceded the Civil War the work was sharply handled
by southern historians, and in his _Constitutional View of the War
between the States_ Stephens quite demolished Story’s feeble attempt
at an historical justification of the anti-compact theory. The weight
of historical evidence, to present-day students, would seem to be on
the side of the states-rights argument, although in certain aspects
both sides were innovators: Story in overleaping the period of French
ascendency when the Constitution took shape, and going back to the
older English tradition; and the compact school in reasserting the
compact theory at a time when the spirit of nationalism was undermining
it. Story seems to have been conscious of his weakness, for he
expressly repudiates the method of interpreting the work in the light
of contemporary testimony at the time of its formulation. In so doing
he not only violates the principle that a document is to be construed
in the light of the common understanding when it was drawn; but with
naïve inconsistency, he constantly appeals to _The Federalist_, pretty
much ignoring the opposition pamphlets, and interprets the Constitution
in accord with its commentary. But for the most part he clings to the
strict letter of the document. He lightly brushes aside the whole
compact argument by asserting dogmatically that the phrase, “We the
people of the United States,” must be understood in its simple literal
sense, and that thus interpreted, the Constitution is seen to derive
immediately from the individual citizens acting in their sovereign
capacity without the intermediation of the state governments. The
dispute long waged furiously about this point and Story’s analysis
touches only the fringe of the argument.
Very likely it is presumptuous for one who is not a lawyer to express
an opinion, yet these celebrated _Commentaries_ seem today very little
more than a new-modeled Federalism, adapted to changing conditions.
Underneath the somewhat crabbed and narrow legalism is a common-sense
realistic political philosophy, an embodiment of English constitutional
tradition as it grew up under a Tory régime, that reveals scant
sympathy with French romantic theories. The work is an unconscious
testimony to the tenacious hold of the English Common Law on the legal
mind of America, as well as to the rising spirit of nationalism. It
did much to strengthen both. It was a triumph of the lawyer over the
historian and political philosopher, and it marks the beginning of the
lawyer’s custodianship of the fundamental law. In spite of its somewhat
petty legalism and prosaic common sense, a note of veneration for the
great document runs through the tedious pages, constituting the work at
once both a commentary and a eulogy.
III • Daniel Webster • Realist and Constitutionalist
A far solider mind, strongly realistic and broadly philosophical, acute
in analysis and with great powers of imagination, was the mind of the
distinguished leader of the New England Whigs. Not the equal of Story
as a lawyer, he was far superior as a political thinker. No man more
richly endowed in mind and person has played a part on the stage of
our public life, and in spite of gross shortcomings in character and
the betrayal of his own promise, Webster retains an aura of the heroic
about him. He was a great man, built on a great pattern, who never
quite achieved a great life.
In Emerson and Webster were completely embodied the diverse New
England tendencies that derived from the Puritan and the Yankee: the
idealistic and the practical; the ethical and the rationalistic; the
intellectual revolutionary, ready to turn the world upside down in
theory, planting at the base of the established order the dynamite of
ideas, and the soberly conservative, understanding the economic springs
of political action, inclined to pessimism, neither wishing for Utopian
change nor expecting it. The physical contrast was as striking as the
mental. The child of the Puritan was slender, nervous, with a lambent
energy that played freely in a rarefied atmosphere; the child of the
Yankee was massive, solid, somnolently heavy till an idea awakened his
faculties, a lover of the fleshpots, careless of conventional morals,
rankly physical, and yet with an assured stateliness of manner, a slow
imagination that expanded majestically and a rich eloquence that moved
forward by regular stages to a great objective. Emerson was the child
of a long line of ministers, and ministerial in his unworldliness;
Webster was a Yankee squire, the descendant of some fox-hunting master
of broad English acres, who by a freak of fortune had got born into the
family of a New Hampshire yeoman. No Englishman was ever more English
than he. He loved the substantial things of life: his Marshfield farm;
his cattle and horses and crops; his rides afield and the return to
good dinners and rich wines. Nothing is more characteristic or more
likable--more redolent of the natural Webster--than his concern for
agricultural improvements. His homely talk on _The Agriculture of
England_, filled with facts that had come under his observant eye,
reveals a side that is too little known. It is an English country
squire talking to his neighbors about the homely things they all care
for; and when after long years and disappointed ambition and utter
weariness, he returned to his Marshfield farm to die, it was his cattle
and his fields that offered a last solace to the broken man.
Webster’s intellectual development falls into distinct and rather
sharply defined periods. Before 1825 his mental processes were still
under the dominion of the solid, rationalist eighteenth century, with
its realistic politics and its _laissez faire_ economics. With the
emergence of the constitutional disputes at the end of the twenties,
when the lawyers and historians were busy at their commentaries, he
came increasingly to take a legalistic view of government. During the
acrimonious forties, with slavery dividing the country into hostile
camps, he was bitten deeply by presidential ambitions, and thenceforth
to the end of his life he was little more than a politician--a rôle for
which he was singularly ill-fitted, and which brought bitterness and
disillusion to his last days. Since his death both earlier and later
phases of his career have fallen into the background, and the middle
period of constitutional interpretation has stamped itself indelibly
upon his fame. Yet in many respects the solid reasoning of the
political philosopher is more valuable than the stately but somewhat
ill-grounded declamation of the defender of the Constitution; and his
just fame is increased rather than lessened by recalling his earlier
contribution to our institutional development.
Webster was a sound political scholar, if not an outstanding creative
thinker. He was of the distinguished line of political realists, from
Harrington through Locke and Burke, to Hamilton, Madison and John
Adams. He derived equally from seventeenth-century liberalism and
eighteenth-century Federalism. He was widely read in the political
classics, and his vigorous mind laid hold upon major principles
and examined them closely. His intellectual master was the acute
thinker of the English Commonwealth period, James Harrington, whom
he pronounces “one of the most ingenious of political writers,” and
to whose suggestive doctrine of economic determinism he returns
persistently. That Harrington was not the originator of the doctrine
he was well enough read to have discovered; but he pays him high
tribute as the thinker who gave the doctrine form and currency. It
is the substantial realism of the _Oceana_ that appealed to a mind
thoroughly indoctrinated with political realism, before the rise of
manhood suffrage and the spread of equalitarianism had brought a
change in American political theory. Both his major premises and his
mode of reasoning bear the impress of the classic English school. In
the year 1820, within a single week, he made two speeches, which as
expositions of his political philosophy are the most illuminating he
ever uttered, and which should stand side by side: the _Basis of the
Senate_, delivered before the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention,
and the Plymouth speech on _The First Settlement of New England_. They
supplement each other and together give an admirable elucidation of
the stake-in-society principle that embodied a conviction he never
abandoned. They are compact of Harrington, Montesquieu and John
Adams--the last authentic expression of the old Federalism, before the
democratic storms had driven it into new roadsteads and whipped its
flag from the halyards where it had long waved.
In his admirable argument Webster accepts as axiomatic the theory
of division of powers, with the attendant machinery of checks and
balances. He accepts equally the familiar view of eighteenth-century
liberalism, that the legislature as the self-conscious custodian of the
popular will is certain to prove the engrossing member of government
whose ambition is most to be feared. To expect a stable balance between
Senate and House when their characters are undifferentiated by diverse
modes of selection--a result that must follow from choosing both on the
numerical majority principle--seems to him the judgment of political
inexperience. The wiser method, he believed, was to seek counsel of the
philosophers and the clear teachings of history. The first, Webster
insisted, have rightly laid down the principle of a stake-in-society as
the true measure of political justice:
I take the _principle_ to be well established, by writers of the
greatest authority. In the first place, those who have treated of
natural law have maintained, as a principle of law, that, as far as
the object of society is the protection of something in which the
members possess unequal shares, it is just that the weight of each
person in the common councils should bear a relation and proportion
to his interest. Such is the sentiment of Grotius, and he refers,
in support of it, to several institutions among the lesser states.
(“The Basis of the Senate,” in _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 13-14.)
At the basis of the stake-in-society principle is the doctrine of
economic power as the controlling factor in determining the form
and scope of the political state. In support of this doctrine of
determinism Webster appeals to Harrington:
It is his leading object, in his _Oceana_, to prove, that power
_naturally_ and _necessarily_ follows property. He maintains that
a government founded on property is legitimately founded; and
that a government founded on the disregard of property is founded
in injustice, and can only be maintained by military force. “If
one man,” says he, “be sole landlord, like the Grand Seignior,
his empire is absolute. If a few possess the land, this makes the
Gothic or feudal constitution. If the _whole people_ be landlords,
then it is a commonwealth.” “It is strange,” says an ingenious
person in the last century, “that Harrington should be the first
man to find out so evident and demonstrable a truth as that
property being the true basis and _measure_ of power.” In truth,
he was not the first. The idea is as old as political science
itself. It may be found in Aristotle, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter
Raleigh, and other writers. Harrington seems, however, to be the
first writer who has illustrated and expanded the principle, and
given to it the effect and prominence which justly belong to it. To
this sentiment, Sir, I entirely agree. It seems to me to be plain,
that, in the absence of military force, political power naturally
and necessarily goes into the hands which hold the property. In my
judgment, therefore, a republican form of government rests, not
more on political constitutions, than on those laws which regulate
the descent and transmission of property....
The English Revolution of 1688 was a revolution in favor of
property, as well as of other rights. It was brought about by men
of property for their security; and our own immortal Revolution
was undertaken, not to shake or plunder property, but to protect
it. The acts which the country complained of were such as violated
the rights of property. An immense majority of all those who had
an interest in the soil were in favor of the Revolution; and they
carried it through, looking to its results for the security of
their possessions. (“The Basis of the Senate,” in _Works_, Vol.
III, pp. 14-16.)
Harrington’s principle that “if the _whole people_ be landlords, then
it is a commonwealth,” Webster justified by appeal to American history.
The spontaneous birth of republican institutions out of colonial
experience he attributed to the wide diffusion of property. The land
tenure of primitive New England was the creative source of her popular
government.
Their situation demanded a parcelling out and division of the
lands, and it may be fairly said, that this necessary act _fixed
the future frame and form of their government_. The character of
their political institutions was determined by the fundamental
laws respecting property.... The property was all freehold ...
alienation of the land was every way facilitated, even to the
subjecting of it to every species of debt. The establishment of
public registries, and the simplicity of our forms of conveyance,
have greatly facilitated the change of real estate from one
proprietor to another. The consequence of all these causes has
been, a great subdivision of the soil, and a great equality of
condition; the true basis, most certainly, of a popular government.
“If the people,” says Harrington, “hold three parts in four of the
territory, it is plain there can neither be any single person nor
nobility able to dispute the government with them; in this case,
therefore, _except force be interposed_, they govern themselves.”
(“The First Settlement of New England,” in _Works_, Vol. I, pp.
35-36.)
Wholly English then, after the soundest English liberal tradition,
was Webster’s political philosophy in the year 1820, compact of sober
eighteenth-century realism, quite unaffected by French romantic
equalitarianism. The great principle to which he adhered was the
principle that government to be stable must be founded in men’s
interests; thus founded no cause is given for revolutionary upheavals.
“The disastrous revolutions which the world has witnessed, those
political thunder-storms and earthquakes which have shaken the pillars
of society to their very deepest foundations, have been revolutions
against property.” Such were Webster’s convictions on the eve of
those two great upheavals, the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the
rejuvenation of the slave economy, that unseated the authority of the
old school of political realism, and turned him aside from the plain
path to lose himself in a tangle of constitutional legalism.
English also was his economic theory, to which, like Franklin before
him, he gave close thought. In the year 1820 he was a frank disciple
of Adam Smith and the _laissez faire_ school. Mercantilism he derided
as exploded;[434] and Physiocratic agrarianism seemed to him unduly
hostile to commerce. He never concerned himself, like Franklin, with
humanitarian ends. His sympathies went strongly for free trade,
individual initiative, and a competitive order--sympathies which to
the end of his life he never wholly outgrew. In those early days the
mercantile interests commanded his loyalty far more readily than
the manufacturing interests. Next to his Marshfield farm he loved
a full-rigged ship, and the thought of Yankee skippers plowing the
seven seas in well-freighted bottoms fired his imagination and kindled
his patriotism. But if in the background of his thought he remained
_laissez faire_, with the necessary implications of a diminished
political state and reliance upon the law of supply and demand above
tariffs, bounties, and political regulations, unfortunately in the
foreground of expediency were the loud demands of his constituents for
protective tariffs, internal improvements, and a policy of governmental
paternalism. His economics came into collision with politics, and
under the drive of necessity he went reluctantly along the path which
Hamilton had marked out a generation before.
The change came between the years 1824 and 1825. In the earlier year
he aroused himself to a strong defense of _laissez faire_ economics in
opposition to Clay’s clever campaign cry, the American System; in the
later year he endeavored half-heartedly to defend New England interests
in the game of subsidies. He was honestly ashamed of the whole mess; to
Webster any tariff was a “tariff of abominations”; but his mouth was
stopped by the clamor of the Lowell textile masters.[435] But having
chosen his side, thereafter he defended his course vigorously, and
joined forces with Clay in extolling the principle of protection. The
same dubious shift is revealed in his changing attitude towards public
finance. In 1815 he was an old-fashioned Federalist in his preference
for a metallic currency and his belief that the public credit must rest
on the public income; bank paper, stocks, bonds, and other agencies of
the new finance he distrusted as likely to encourage speculation.[436]
Twenty years later he was the outstanding champion of the Bank in its
mortal quarrel with Jackson. In defending his public career before his
constituents in Faneuil Hall in 1842, he said: “The subject of currency
has been the study of my life, in preference to all other public
topics”; and the result of those studies had made him a confirmed
bullionist. Nevertheless when “Old Bullion Benton” proposed to restore
a metallic currency, Webster derided the plan on the ground that bank
money was necessary; and when the subtreasury system was established he
denounced it bitterly.[437] He was a partisan to the cause of the Bank,
and as its attorney he defended its case before the American public, as
he defended its cases before the Supreme Court. He was no longer a free
man but was deep in the subsidies of financial interests; nevertheless
his old realism convinced him--as it had convinced Hamilton--of the
necessity of shaping the public policy to the desires of the bankers.
He justified it not only on the grounds of economic determinism, but by
professing to discover in business the strong friend of national unity.
The planters and farmers were local and sectional in outlook, but the
“mercantile classes, the great commercial masses of the country, whose
affairs connect them strongly with every State in the Union and with
all the nations of the earth, whose business and profession give a sort
of nationality to their character”--these men, he argued, gave solidity
and stability to government--they were the cohesive force that bound
the whole together.[438] In serving such clients he was but serving a
greater cause.
After 1824 the earlier Webster with his solid understanding, his
frank realism, his honest exposition of fundamental principles,
slowly gave way to the lawyer, the politician, the opportunist of
the unhappy later years. With the change the last authentic voice of
the eighteenth century was silenced; the break with the old English
tradition was complete. Immediate, domestic issues muddied his thought,
and Webster and America plunged into a bitter partisanship produced
by the new alignments of an equalitarian agrarianism, a capitalistic
industrialism, and a feudal slavocracy. Federalism was dead and in its
stead was the Whig party, patched together of odds and ends, devoid
of principles, seeking only expediency; and of this party Webster
became an outstanding spokesman. It was an ignoble time, and his great
abilities were not substantial enough to save him from the common
meanness. Whoever wishes to understand how great was his fall need
only compare the speech of 1820 on “The Basis of the Senate” with the
“Declaration of Whig Principles and Purposes” of 1840 (_Works_, Vol.
II, p. 41).
To his contemporaries, however, his position was secure. His reputation
was extraordinary, and he seemed as fixed and brilliant as the north
star. After the reply to Hayne, his fame as the defender of the
Constitution was in every mouth. That celebrated speech, perhaps the
most celebrated in our congressional history, was delivered on the
January 26, 1830, and awakened an amazing response. Men were moved to
tears by its eloquence, and its circulation in pamphlet form exceeded
that of any other pamphlet since the founding of the government. It is
not a great constitutional argument, but it better served the purpose
of inspiring in the public a grandiose conception of national unity
under the organic law, than any reasoned statement could have done.
For political purposes rhetoric was more effective than historical
argument, and its sonorous sentences, and in particular the stately
conclusion, vastly appealed to the taste of the generation. Three
years later Webster applied himself more closely to the subtleties of
the question. Calhoun’s masterly argument with its exposition of the
theory of concurrent majorities could not be answered by rhetoric, and
on February 16, 1833, Webster spoke on “The Constitution not a Compact
between Sovereign States” (_Works_, Vol. III, p. 449). His argument is
strictly legal and rests on four theses: that sovereignty inheres in
the people; that as individuals acting collectively in their sovereign
capacity, they ordained and established the Constitution; that the
Constitution thus established is the supreme law of the land, acting
immediately upon the individual citizen and recognizing no intermediary
sovereign state; and that as an “executed contract” it is irrevocable
and final, with the necessary functions to construe its powers and
execute its will.
Of these four theses, two may be regarded as Webster’s chief
contribution to the great debate: the doctrine of immediacy, and the
doctrine of an executed contract. The latter, quite obviously, is no
more than Burke’s theory of the British constitution as founded on a
compact entered into following the Revolution of 1688, and as such,
by analogy from the Common Law, inviolable without the consent of
both parties to the instrument. As developed by Burke the theory is
somewhat tenuous, but as applied by Webster to the interpretation of
a written document it is extraordinarily plausible to the legal mind.
The doctrine of immediacy, on the other hand, would seem to have been
derived from Judge Story. The argument of Webster in expounding the
principle of immediate contact between the individual citizen and the
Constitution follows the argument of Story’s _Commentaries_ too closely
to escape comment. Theodore Parker explicitly states that Webster got
his argument from Story, and circumstances bear out his assertion. The
two men had long been close friends. Webster’s speech was delivered a
month after the _Commentaries_ was finished. In his earlier speeches
such principle found no place, and it is reasonable to suppose that,
confronted by the Calhoun resolutions, Webster should have turned to
the materials gathered by his learned friend and frequent adviser. Here
was his reply ready to hand, a mass of legal fact and constitutional
exposition, together with a clear and simple theory. Nearly a month
elapsed before Webster rose to speak, and then he threw _Story on
the Constitution_ at Calhoun’s theory of compact. Whether such an
interpretation is reasonable or not, the speech added greatly to
Webster’s reputation as an expounder of the Constitution.
In 1833 he stood at the meridian of his renown; thereafter the
westering sun of his fame went slowly down. He had come to evil
times when opportunism and compromise--so imperative if the country
were to hold together at all--seemed immoral to men who insisted
that righteousness be legislated upon America, and weakness to men
who demanded their pound of flesh. The black shadow of slavery fell
across his path, and despite his wish to avoid all controversy on the
subject, he could not evade the issue. It drove him into a corner, and
the sword of the Constitution that he sought to defend himself with
was turned in the end against him. Webster’s antipathy to slavery was
of long standing and he gave frank expression to it in his speeches.
The position which he finally came to assume, in face of the growing
abolition sentiment in Massachusetts, was taken deliberately and was
worthy of a lawyer. He would oppose the extension of slave territory,
but he would not interfere with slavery in the old slave states. The
Constitution, he argued, recognized slavery as existing in certain
commonwealths by virtue of state laws, but those laws did not run
beyond the confines of the state. The territories were under Federal
law, and no injunction was laid upon Congress to extend the laws or
institutions of any state or group of states over the territorial
domain. In his speech on “Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories,”
on August 12, 1848, he stated his position thus:
It will not be contended that this sort of slavery exists by
general law. It exists only by local law. I do not mean to deny
the validity of that local law where it is established; but I say
it is, after all, local law. It is nothing more. And wherever that
local law does not extend, property in persons does not exist.
Well, Sir, what is now the demand on the part of our Southern
friends? They say, “We will carry our local laws with us wherever
we go. We insist that Congress does us injustice unless it
establishes in the territory in which we wish to go our own local
law.” This demand I for one resist, and shall resist. It goes upon
the idea that there is an inequality, unless persons under this
local law, and holding property by authority of that law, can go
into new territory and there establish that local law, to the
exclusion of the general law. (_Works_, Vol. V, p. 309.)
It was the unfortunate Seventh of March Speech that proved Webster’s
undoing--this and the Fugitive Slave Bill in which he was deeply
implicated. The situation was desperately critical, Webster was
pessimistic, and this was a last gesture of reconciliation with the
South. Presidential ambitions and runaway slaves were stewing in a
common political pot with Abolition societies and northern mercantile
interests. Webster was puzzled, hesitated, emptied another glass of
the wine of the Constitution, and went for the Fugitive Slave Bill. It
was a tragic political mistake. To be sure a tremendous address was
presented to him, signed by the most respectable persons in Boston and
Cambridge, but it was an empty honor. Webster’s influence was gone,
never to be regained. There is something pathetic in his futile attempt
to stifle the New England conscience by ramming the Constitution down
its throat:
Sir, the principle of the restitution of runaway slaves is not
objectionable, unless the Constitution is objectionable. If the
Constitution is right in that respect, the principle is right,
and the law providing for carrying it into effect is right. If
that be so, and if there is no abuse of the right under any law
of Congress, or any other law, then what is there to complain of?
(“Speech on the Compromise Measures,” in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 433.)
And there is something pathetic also in the hurt vanity of the old man
that his judgment should be questioned. His self-pride was offended
when the Abolitionists rejected his legal dogmatisms, and set up their
own dogmatisms. He regarded them as mischief-makers. “I am against
agitators, north and south,” he exclaimed petulantly. He recognized no
higher law than the Constitution and Blackstone, and he would suffer no
popular interference with Congress.
Then, Sir, there are the Abolition societies, of which I am
unwilling to speak, but in regard to which I have very clear
notions and opinions. I do not think them useful. I think their
operations for the last twenty years have produced nothing good
or valuable.... They have excited feelings.... I cannot but see
what mischiefs their interference with the South has produced ...
everything that these agitating people have done has been, not to
enlarge, but to restrain, not to set free, but to bind faster,
the slave population of the South. (“Seventh of March Speech,” in
_Works_, Vol. V, p. 357.)
I desire to call the attention of all sober-minded men at the
North, of all conscientious men, of all men who are not carried
away by some fanatical idea or some false impression, to their
constitutional obligations. I put it to all the sober and sound
minds at the North as a question of morals and a question of
conscience. What right have they, in their legislative capacity or
any other capacity, to endeavour to get around this Constitution,
or to embarrass the free exercise of the rights secured by the
Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape from them? None at
all; none at all. Neither in the forum of conscience, nor before
the face of the Constitution, are they, in my opinion, justified in
such attempt. (_Ibid._, p. 355.)
If the later Webster had no message for the conscience of New England,
neither had he any for the intelligence of New England. The realistic
Federalism that had listened to him in 1820 was gone, submerged by the
flood waters of the renaissance; and the current transcendentalism
seemed to him insubstantial and dangerous. The rising liberalism of
the forties left him wholly untouched; it could not leaven the heavy
materialism of his nature. He was quite unacquainted with the new
Massachusetts that was coming to expression; he had lived too long with
“the lawyers, the politicians, and rich merchants and manufacturers,”
to understand the greater world of Concord. While he had been living on
the subsidies of State Street, and contracting his mind to the compass
of a banker’s, the intellect of Massachusetts had become liberal. And
in becoming liberal it aroused him from indifference to hostility.
Writing to a friend in explanation of his refusal to visit Concord in
his later years, he said:
Many of those whom I so highly regarded in your beautiful and quiet
village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief, by
abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism, and other notions
which I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.
(Quoted in Sanborn, _Life of Thoreau_.)
But if he was scarcely acquainted with the little group of thinkers
and liberals--Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Parker, Garrison, Phillips,
Edmund Quincy, Whittier, Lowell, Higginson, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Margaret Fuller--they were well acquainted with him and took his
measure exactly. The intellect of Massachusetts--so long ignored by
Webster--had its revenge. Its voice carried farther than his, and it
painted his portrait in no flattering strokes. The fierce storm that
suddenly beat upon him broke the old man’s spirit. He had fed too long
on adulation to endure censure. No doubt that censure was severe, but
it was far juster than the earlier adulation had been. Whittier’s
_Ichabod_ is familiar to every American schoolboy. Lowell, then in his
liberal mood, characterized him as “a statesman who had communicated no
impulse to any of the great ideas of the century, as a statesman whose
soul had been absorbed in tariff, banks, and the Constitution, instead
of devoting himself to the freedom of the future.” Emerson, who had
long studied him critically, gave an extraordinarily just analysis of
his character:
Mr. Webster is a man who lives by his memory, a man of the past,
not a man of faith or of hope. He obeys his powerful animal
nature;--and his finely developed understanding only works freely
and with all its force, when it stands for animal good; that is,
for property. He believes, in so many words, that government exists
for the protection of property. He looks to the Union as an estate,
a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his defence
of it so far. He adheres to the letter.... What he finds already
written, he will defend. Lucky that so much had got well written
when he came. For he has no faith in the power of self-government.
Not the smallest municipal provision, if it were new, would receive
his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all
question, have been a refugee. He praises Adams and Jefferson, but
it is a past Adams and Jefferson, that his mind can entertain.
A present Adams and Jefferson he would denounce. So with the
eulogies of liberty in his writings,--they are sentimentalism and
youthful rhetoric. He can celebrate it, but it means as much from
him as from Metternich or Talleyrand. This is all inevitable from
his constitution. All the drops of his blood have eyes that look
downward. (“The Fugitive Slave Law.”)
To the transcendental mind Webster’s economic realism was peculiarly
repugnant, and it was this which inspired Theodore Parker’s critical
analysis of Webster’s career--the most scathing and explicit of
all contemporary estimates. What Parker discovers most hateful in
Webster’s career was his adherence to the principles of Federalism,
from the “Basis of the Senate” speech in 1820, to the New York speech
on November 18, 1850. The persistence of his economic realism was an
affront to the liberals of the humanitarian school that had moved
far from the position of Fisher Ames. Webster might do lip service
to humanitarian ideals, Parker asserted, but always he came back in
the end to his polar conception--“The great object of government is
the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad”
(_Works: Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 220).
It was this same persistent realism that made Webster so useful to
the rising capitalism. His work in the Senate was supplemented by his
work in the court room. He was the greatest corporation lawyer of the
day, certain to be found defending vested interests, never on the side
of the leaner purse. Probably more than any other man except John
Marshall, he contributed to the work of bringing the Constitution under
the sovereignty of the judiciary. His most significant contribution,
certainly, was his argument in the celebrated Dartmouth College
case, delivered before the Supreme Court in 1818, which resulted in
one of the foundation decisions on which later has been erected the
solid structure of our corporation law.[439] By engrafting upon the
Constitution the principle that a contract lies beyond the reach of
legislative power to annul, the decision assured greater security for
private property than exists under any other judicial system in the
world. Alexander Hamilton could not have asked for more.
It was the singular ill fortune of Webster to have been born too late
to profit from the old mercantile Federalism to which his affections
were always attached, and too early to profit by the industrial
Federalism that came to greatness after the Civil War. If fate had
been kinder to him, and he had appeared on the political horizon a
generation earlier or a generation later, he would have reaped in far
greater abundance those high civic honors he so foolishly coveted. The
economic groups whom he served would have been in position to reward
a servant so conspicuously able and useful. As a contemporary of John
Adams he might have become a notable political philosopher--provided
always that he had not turned Tory as Emerson suggested. But unhappily
for his fame he was launched between tides on a stormy sea and his
stately bark foundered in the squall of Abolitionism.
Footnotes
[433] Quoted in Theodore Parker, _Daniel Webster: Additional Speeches_,
Vol. I, p. 195. Considerable information will be found in this
excellent study.
[434] See “The Tariff,” in _Works_, Vol. III, pp. 118-122.
[435] See his “Apology and Defense,” in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 146, 240.
[436] See “The Bank of the United States,” _Works_, Vol. III, p. 35.
[437] See “Speech in Wall Street,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 55.
[438] See “The Landing at Plymouth,” in _Works_, Vol. II, pp. 204-205.
[439] Theodore Parker denied Webster credit for the argument, pointing
out that “the facts, the law, the precedents, the ideas, and the
conclusions of that argument, had almost all of them been presented by
Messrs. Mason and Smith in the previous trial of the case” (_Additional
Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 171). The statement is confirmed by Beveridge.
Part Two: The Rise of Liberalism
Chapter I • The Renaissance
To write a history of Massachusetts, I confess, is not inviting to
an expansive thinker.... From 1790 to 1820 there was not a book, a
speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State. About 1820, the
Channing, Webster, and Everett era begun, and we have been bookish
and poetical and cogitative since. (Emerson, _Journals_, Vol. VIII,
p. 339.)
In such summary fashion in the year 1852, Emerson recorded his
judgment on half a century of intellectual life in Massachusetts. It
was the comment of an exacting critic. In its characterization of
the extraordinary ferment of thought that marked the decades of the
thirties and forties, it is quite inadequate; but in its contemptuous
dismissal of the age of Fisher Ames and Robert Treat Paine it was
scarcely unjust. The utter sterility of those old times Emerson
understood only too well. It was the world of his own youth, whose
pale negations he had come to hate. The creative impulse was stifled,
the mind had grown stale from tedious iteration. But at last the old
barriers gave way, and into this narrow illiberal world, that had long
fed on the crusts of English rationalism and Edwardean dogmatism--dry
as remainder biscuit after voyage--broke the floods that had been
gathering in Europe for years, the waters of all the streams of
revolution that were running there bank-full. Before this inundation
the old provincialisms were swept away, and for the first time in its
history, and the last, the mind of New England gave itself over to a
great adventure in liberalism.
Quite evidently the renaissance resulted from the impact of the
romantic revolution upon the Puritan mind, and it issued in a form
native to New England experience. Animated by the common spirit
of Utopianism, its dreams were unlike those of Virginia or the
West, founded on a different economics and seeking different ends.
Massachusetts had discovered a particular road leading to Utopia by way
of the industrial revolution, and the textile mills on the Merrimac
began weaving a new pattern of life for New England. The old static
agricultural order was broken in upon, and with the social disruption
came naturally an intellectual disruption. The mind of that older New
England had been held in the close keeping of the church, and the
movement of intellectual emancipation became therefore at the outset a
movement leveled at theological conservatism; it was concerned first
to rid New England of the incubus of Calvinistic dogma. The Calvinists
were of tough fiber and tenacious of opinion, and to turn their flank
was no summer campaign. The result was a long battle of ideas, a fierce
struggle between the old deterministic theology and the new romantic
philosophy, with victory slowly inclining to the latter. This major
struggle gave to the renaissance its profoundly ethical spirit that
set it off sharply from the earlier renaissance of Virginia; and not
the least important of the results of the movement was the liberation
of the New England conscience from its long bondage to dogma, setting
it free to engage in a larger work in the world. What that conscience
accomplished in the brief period of its freedom; what causes it
espoused and what reforms it carried through--how it quickened a
humanitarian zeal in New England and imparted a militant spirit to its
culture--these are phases of the total movement not to be neglected by
the historian.
In the realm of ideas the renaissance was largely dominated by
old-world thought. From the abundant stores of European revolutionary
doctrine the New England liberals drew freely--more freely perhaps
from German idealism than from French Utopianism. Germany meant much
to the awakening mind of New England, by reason of its spiritual and
intellectual kinship. Plato was their common father, a transcendental
mysticism their common experience. Philosophical idealism with its
indwelling Godhood that exalted man to the divine and transformed
a mechanical universe into the dwelling place of divine love--this
was a dynamic faith, appealing to men long nurtured in faith, more
seductive to the children of Puritanism than any political or economic
romanticisms. It opened to them new heavens when the old were closed
and encouraged them to go forth on great ventures.
But the renaissance was very much more than a transplanting of German
idealism. France had a shaping hand in it, and England. Jean Jacques
came before Hegel, and Unitarianism before transcendentalism. It was
social and literary as well as philosophical. In so far as that which
was essentially one may be divided, the movement involved three major
strands: the social Utopianism that came from revolutionary France; the
idealistic metaphysics that emerged from revolutionary Germany; and the
new culture that spread with the development of literary romanticism.
To distinguish these three strands is one thing; to endeavor to
separate them is quite another. They interweave and blend in varying
patterns; they are but different, new-world phases of a comprehensive
European movement that runs far back into the preceding century--a
movement that in transferring economic and political mastery from the
aristocracy to the middle class, in destroying the worm-eaten feudal
order and clearing the way for the new capitalistic order, laid open
a broad path into the nineteenth century. The extraordinary appeal of
this vast movement to the liberal mind of America resulted from the
fact that an identical revolution was under way here. In New England,
perhaps more dramatically than elsewhere in America, the day of the
middle class was dawning, aristocratic ideals were disintegrating, and
the hopes of men were running high. To humanize this emerging society,
to awaken it to a nobler faith in human destiny, to further the cause
of social justice, to create a democracy of the spirit--this was
the deeper romantic purpose, however vaguely comprehended, that was
fermenting in the New England renaissance, and it was this that gave to
it a spirit so warmly ethical.
Now quite evidently a movement so extraordinarily complex would appeal
diversely to different minds, and in its development it drew to itself
a singularly various following. To the sons of respectable Federalism
it was the new romantic culture that appealed; to the militant
conscience of Puritanism it was the inspiration of social Utopianism;
to the emancipated intellectuals it was the metaphysical idealism. Its
many-sidedness was both confusing and stimulating. How shall we explain
a movement that embraced such different men as Everett and Channing
and Parker and Garrison and Whittier and Emerson and Longfellow and
Holmes; men often mutually repellent, sometimes sharply critical
of each other? No single mind sums up the whole--the theological,
humanitarian, mystical, critical, and cultural aspirations of the
awakening--as perhaps Goethe may be said to have done for Germany.
Emerson, Thoreau and Parker possibly embodied it most adequately; they
were transcendental individualists, intellectual revolutionaries,
contemptuous of all meanly material standards. But quite evidently
Everett would not travel far along the transcendental path they pointed
out, nor Holmes, nor Longfellow. These latter expected no romantic
Utopias, wanted no such Utopias. Cambridge and Boston satisfied their
hopes; they found the world not such a bad place for those who knew
how to meet it on its own terms. Yet they too were children of the
awakening, and in following their individual paths they contributed
in their own way to the disintegration of the old authoritarian order
that had long held the mind of New England in subjection. Each in
some measure and after his own fashion was a rebel, and their total
rebellions made up the sum of New England’s bequest to a more liberal
America. Yet in this eager and somewhat vague liberalism to which
the renaissance was dedicated in spirit, the note that runs through
the several programs is a note of reaction from the aspirations of
the middle class. It was an ethical protest against the harsh and
unjust realities of the industrial revolution that was so ruthlessly
transforming the old order of life in New England; and it took the form
of a return to a simpler life. To struggle free from the chains of the
eighteenth century, only to be bound in new chains, was an ignoble
ending to the emancipation that free men could not envisage with
satisfaction.
Chapter II • Liberalism and Calvinism
The first stirrings of new life were felt within the church, the
repository of such learning as Harvard College disseminated through
the Massachusetts villages. For two hundred years the dogmas of Calvin
had lain as a heavy weight on the mind of New England. Revolutions
had taken place in English and continental theology, but New England
Calvinism had kept closely within the narrow confines of its creed,
annually turning over the exhausted soil and reaping an ever scantier
harvest. Since the days of Edwards there had been abundant speculation
and much exercise in syllogisms, but no scrutiny of major premises.
Such an examination was long overdue, with the romantic revolution
under way in France, and new theories of human nature and the relation
of man to society and the state, spreading widely. But unfortunately
the odium which New England conservatism quickly fastened upon the
French school frightened the orthodox. The stigma of atheism was put
upon every harmless bantling of the numerous French brood, and in the
terror of reaction the pulpit, following the lead of the reactionary
pew, aroused itself to cleanse the church of every innovation. English
Arianism, even worse things, it was discovered, had stolen into
Congregational pulpits during the relaxed period of the Revolution;
a dangerous spirit of liberalism had spread silently through the
tidewater churches, capturing the strongholds of Boston orthodoxy.
By the year 1800 it was high time for the old Congregationalism of
Jonathan Edwards to take counsel with itself. “Let us guard against
the insidious encroachments of _innovation_--that evil and beguiling
spirit which is now stalking to and fro in the earth, seeking whom
it may devour,” exclaimed Jedidiah Morse, the arch reactionary, in
the days when French ideas were knocking at the doors of New England.
And by innovation the doughty Jedidiah meant any idea that had been
stumbled on, new since the days of the great Edwards. To go back to the
pure Edwardean doctrine, to purge the church of incipient Arminianism
and Arianism and Socinianism--together with such other innovations as
might show their faces anywhere--became thenceforth the chief business
of the devout New England of 1800. To timid souls the ideas of their
grandfathers seemed far safer than the ideas of their fathers; and so
theology followed politics in turning its back upon the freer, more
generous world that beckoned.
Nevertheless French liberalism slowly won its victories. It needs
high walls to keep out ideas. Excluded from the drawing-rooms and
counting-houses, ostracized in society and politics, romantic
philosophy slipped quietly into Boston by the door of theology, and
took lodgings in the homes of the first families. To those who enjoy
the little ironies of history, the easy subjugation of respectable
Boston by that very Jacobinical heresy against which Boston was so
bitter is too amusing to be overlooked. Changing its name and arraying
itself in garments cut after the best Yankee fashion, the gospel
of Jean Jacques presently walked the streets of Boston and spoke
from its most respectable pulpits, under the guise of Unitarianism.
The heretical doctrines of the excellence of human nature and the
perfectibility of man were preached to Federalist congregations so
persuasively that instead of repudiating them and asserting the total
depravity of their neighbors, simple-minded merchants approved the
doctrines and cheerfully paid their pew-rent. It was a respectable
and bloodless revolution. Under its discreet disguise Unitarianism
accomplished for New England what Jeffersonianism had accomplished
for the South and West--the wide dissemination of eighteenth-century
French liberalism. It opened the New England mind to fresh ideas. Out
of Unitarianism was to come the intellectual renaissance, with its
transcendental philosophies and social reforms, its enlarged conception
of democracy and its Utopian dreams, which made New England count so
effectively in the developments of the half century.
The twenty-five years between 1790 and 1815 were the nascent period of
Unitarianism, when it was reëxamining the old Calvinist dogmas in the
light of the new liberalism, weighing the doctrines of election and
reprobation in the scale with the doctrines of God’s beneficence and
man’s excellence, and coming definitely to reject them as blasphemy
against God and defamation of human nature. And it was during these
critical years that the upholders of the traditional orthodoxy were
most actively concerned to provide a defense for the sacred dogmas
of their grandfathers. The liberal advance produced a conservative
reaction, and the lines of battle were sharply drawn. The capture of
Harvard College by the Unitarians in 1805, and the founding of Andover
Theological Seminary by the Calvinists in 1808, were dramatic events in
a long intellectual and legal struggle that aroused much bitterness and
bequeathed to the churches a rich legacy of unchristian animosities.
Good men on both sides--to recall a contemporary witticism--were quite
too ready “to fight for the glory of God as if the very devil were in
them.”
The traditional Calvinism defended itself with spirit, asserting so
vehemently that it was still a living faith, that the corpse was not
yet an authentic corpse, that it succeeded at least in postponing
its own burial. It was deeply entrenched in the inertia of custom,
but intellectually it was in really desperate straits. It was slowly
disintegrating from dry-rot with which both minister and theology were
stricken. With its major premises tacitly denied by Yankee experience,
it was unfortunate in being defended by as humorless and ungainly a
breed of theologians as ever quarreled over the loving-kindness of God.
Clinging to the defenses which Jonathan Edwards had erected against
the incursion of old-world ideas, it declaimed its dogmas and damned
the human race with tedious iteration. Over-threshed straw makes poor
fodder, and after a two-hour battle with potential infidelities, many a
good minister descended from his pulpit lamenting that his exhortations
had been wasted on “a sermon-proof, gospel-glutted generation.” Yet
he went faithfully back to his study to consume the day in argument
with a suppositious Arminian, and in spinning cobweb systems between
the worm-eaten rafters, quite oblivious to the common-sense world
without his walls. The difficulties in which those old Calvinists
found themselves very likely seemed tragic to them; but to later
generations, endowed with some saving grace of humor, the situation
was not without its spice. The good men were undeniably caught in
a distressing dilemma. They were laboring prodigiously both to sit
tight in the old dogma of determinism and yet wriggle out; to maintain
election and reprobation and yet insert somehow the thin edge of
personal responsibility; to prove to the satisfaction of the pew that
man is both bound and free. It was a hard necessity to be under, to
damn man by predestination, and “yet worry out enough freedom for him
to be decently damned on,” as a late critic has remarked;[440] to
send him to hell by divine decree, yet prove that he went of his own
accord. Yet they must do that impossible thing if they were to justify
their theology to common-sense congregations that were drifting into
indifference.
The whole thing was monstrously unreal and it resulted in hatching such
a brood of tenuous subtleties as we have difficulty in comprehending
today. Theological fame in Massachusetts came to be measured by the
skill with which the logician made out to stand on both sides of the
fence at the same time. Had it not been for Jonathan Edwards New
England Congregationalism would have drifted comfortably with the tide
of liberalism; but his uncompromising spirit held it anchored. This
masterly spinner of theological systems bequeathed to his successors an
unfinished work; but he had clearly envisaged the problem and suggested
a line of attack. In his great inquiry into the nature of will he had
hoped to provide an infallible means of reconciling the irreconcilable
by arguing that the will is dependent on desire. The natural man,
according to the Edwardean logic, is free to serve God as the highest
good if he desires, but he lacks the desire unless God reveals himself
as that highest good, and such revelation rests with God’s pleasure.
“Moral responsibility lies in the choice, not in the cause of the
choice.”[441] With this distinction suggested between natural and moral
freedom, Calvinistic speculation went on hopefully till it attained
its culminating triumph in Nathaniel Walker’s ingenious doctrine of
certainty with power to the contrary. Walker was a pupil of Timothy
Dwight’s, and one of the foundation professors of the new Yale Divinity
School, established to combat Unitarian heresies. A tremendous rattling
of the bones of the Connecticut churches followed his pronouncement
that man’s acts are not necessitated by a rigid law of cause and
effect, but that his choices are so connected with antecedent
conditions of soul and environment, that to God’s perception it is
certain what they will be, although he possesses full power of contrary
choice.[442]
As we contemplate those old theological abstractions, dead now as
Lot’s wife, the universe of our fathers shrinks to a petty compass,
not much larger than the snug little state of Connecticut, curiously
egocentric, curiously anthropomorphic. Obviously such grotesqueries
could not endure indefinitely. Presently there must appear the
common-sense housewife with her broom, and the dusty cobwebs would
disappear. English Arianism, emerging out of English Presbyterianism,
and long under suspicion of the New England fathers, first opened the
windows and let a little fresh air into the New England churches. But
back of Arianism was the total body of eighteenth-century rationalism,
with its theology rooted in new political and social philosophies,
and its doctrines derived from conceptions of God and man hostile to
Calvinistic determinism. There could be no reconciling them. Calvinism
must extirpate English rationalism or be disintegrated by it.
But rationalism refused to be extirpated. Here and there in
Massachusetts pulpits appeared a new order of preachers, young men
who had broken with the old dogmas and were plainly bitten with the
English distemper. Of these the most notable was Jonathan Mayhew, from
1747 to 1766 pastor of the West Church, and the freest-spoken minister
in Boston. Mayhew was a thoroughgoing liberal, not to say radical,
an intimate friend of Otis and John Adams, and chief clerical leader
of the opposition to the English ministry. He had broken through the
narrow parochialism of Boston; he corresponded with the intellectual
leaders of English dissent, and while still a young man was on the
highroad to Arianism. He seems to have been a brilliant fellow, bold
and frank in speech, with great and popular powers as a preacher, and
his early death alone prevented him from anticipating some of the work
of Channing.[443] A like fate abruptly terminated the work of another
able young man, Lemuel Briant, pastor of the Braintree church from
1745 to his death in 1753. Briant was John Adams’s pastor and, like
Mayhew, an Arian, with a ready wit that his adversaries must have
found disconcerting. “I have always tho’t,” he remarked apropos of
the familiar dilemma, “that so far as any Man is pure (let it be in a
greater or lesser Degree) he is not filthy.”[444] But the coming on of
the Revolutionary disputes and the disturbance of war put a stop to the
normal development of the movement; and the general reaction following
the treaty of peace gave encouragement to the Calvinistic reaction
and temporarily strengthened the Edwardean school. Nevertheless the
liberal doctrines of Mayhew and Briant, falling in with the French
philosophy, prepared the way for the conscious Unitarian revolt at the
end of the century.
That revolt was fundamentally ethical rather than theological, and
the name Unitarian, which the liberal movement accepted somewhat
reluctantly from its opponents, very inadequately describes its special
genius. The term derives from the middle eighteenth century, before
religious thought had come under the influence of the new social
philosophy; and it suggests a primary theological bias in a movement
that was far more significantly ethical and social. The early liberals,
forerunners of Unitarianism, were theologians given to probing in
rationalistic spirit, the mystery of the Godhood. Now, denial of the
Trinity has been common to all Unitarians, although individually they
might profess an Arian or a Socinian interpretation of the nature
and rôle of Jesus; but what is more important, they have been from
the first close Scripturists, disliking exact theological systems
and setting biblical authority above human. By the time the name had
come to be generally accepted--about the year 1815--it had already
lost much of its earlier significance, for emphasis had shifted from
the mystery of the Godhood to the problem of the relations existing
between the children and the Father. On the one hand supernaturalism
tended to disappear in morality, and on the other religion tended to
seek an authoritative basis in idealistic philosophy and justify itself
by intuitionism. “The soul,” argued Channing, in his exposition of a
later Unitarian theology, “is the spring of our knowledge of God.”
“Here is our primitive teacher and light.” “The only God, whom our
thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can cling to, is the God whose
image dwells in our own Souls” (_Works_, Vol. VI, Introductory Remarks,
p. 21). Unitarianism, in other words, reversed the thought process of
Calvinism. Instead of debasing man to a mean creature, subject to a
God of wrath, it professed to discover a loving Father in the human
heart of love. Here was a revolution indeed, a revolution in which
were the seeds of transcendentalism, of social Utopias, of pretty much
the entire intellectual awakening of New England. The old Calvinism
had no weapons to meet such an attack; the new creed lay outside its
realm of thought. What that creed finally came to be, under Channing’s
influence, is thus stated by a recent historian:
Man is God’s child, made in His image and object of His love; his
reason and conscience are divine witnesses to truth and light, and
when governed by them he walks in the ways of God, safe in his
Father’s love and care. The God in whom their opponents believed--a
God of election and reprobation, capable of dooming an entire
race because its ancestors disobeyed a God of arbitrary will and
discriminating grace--seemed to them simply an immoral being and
they frankly said so. (Fenn, _Religious History of New England,
etc._, p. 125.)
In its noblest expression Unitarianism became essentially a humanistic
religion, rational, ethical, individual, yet with deep and warm
social sympathies. In Channing’s excellent phrase, it discovered the
apotheosis of religion in “the adoration of goodness.” It issued in
conduct because it developed character. The highest testimony to the
excellence of the faith is the noble company of men and women who
subscribed to its creed. And yet after all, Unitarianism was rather
an attitude of mind than a creed. It was the recovery of the original
principle of New England Separatism, lost during the long years of
orthodox conformity--the principle of the open mind and free inquiry.
Let each devout soul, each group of fellow believers, Unitarianism
announced, seek the truth where it may be found; let each give to it
such outward form as best reveals its divine nature; not seeking to
impose a particular interpretation upon others, but each taking upon
himself full responsibility for his spiritual welfare. Authority it
regarded as the prop of the weak; dogma, as the body of a faith that
is dead. As free souls, mature and self-reliant, the Unitarians would
be their own authority, would fashion their own creed. The Scriptures
lie open and the heedful eye will discover God’s revelation in their
pages. The deeper spirit of Unitarianism is not inadequately embodied
in the text, “Search the Scriptures, for they are they which testify
of me.” No abler or more devout Scripturists ever preached in America
than the Unitarian ministers, and if bolder souls like Theodore Parker
went further than others, if their free handling of old interpretations
gave offense to the timid, that fact provided no sanction to coerce or
stifle free inquiry. Toleration of differences, respect for devout free
thought--this return to the position of Roger Williams two centuries
before was the vital principle of Unitarianism. Like him, the Unitarian
was a seeker, open-minded and free. Others might be intolerant, others
might regard themselves as the sole custodians of truth, but not he.
But if the Unitarians who followed Channing were liberals in
religion, they were conservatives in well-nigh everything else.
Amongst the laity the adoration of goodness was sufficiently tempered
by Yankee thrift to keep it from interfering seriously with the
practical business of getting on in the world; and in consequence
the new faith gathered its supporters from amongst the prosperous
rather than the needy, from Federalists rather than Democrats. The
commercial dominated the intellectual and emotional in their prim
and somewhat cold congregations. “The Unitarians,” it was commonly
said, “were the cult of the arrived.” As successful men, these Boston
merchants and manufacturers did not believe that they were the sons
of Adam, children of iniquity. They thought better of themselves and
of God than Calvinism permitted them to think; “one who was born in
Boston,” the current jest put it, “had no need to be born again.”
Generous in all approved philanthropies these Unitarian laymen might
be, but emotionally religious they were temperamentally incapable of
being. Until the infusion of the rich sap of transcendentalism, that
gave it new life and brought it to bloom, Unitarianism was in grave
danger of dying at the root. But with the spread of the philosophy
of intuitionalism, the negative individualism of Unitarianism became
positive, broke with the respectable conservatism of commercial
congregations, and overflowed in a rich and generous faith. Authority,
dogma, creed, were swept away by this new faith in an indwelling
divinity, with its intuitive sanctions, and Unitarianism merged in the
larger movement of the renaissance.
II • William Ellery Channing
To the austerely spiritual Channing the guiding principle of
Unitarianism was identical with the spirit of primitive New England
separatism--the principle of freedom in religious matters, the
individual speaking his mind frankly, shepherd and flock feeding as
they would, without fear and without coercion. The soul is responsible
to itself and its own conscience; there are no orthodoxies and no
heterodoxies, but a duty is laid upon the individual to seek truth
with an open mind and be steadfast in its service. It was this spirit
of open-minded liberalism that led him along the path of unmilitant
individualism, seeking freedom only to the end of righteousness, and
counting righteousness the fine flower of freedom; desiring peace and
universal fellowship; loath to found a sect; yet driven by those who
denied freedom to themselves as well as others to become the champion
and leader of a great schism that sundered the traditional unity of
Congregationalism, and erected a new faith on the altars of the old.
Channing’s heritage was drawn from the deepest wells of New England
idealism; and filtered through his finely ethical mind it emerged pure
and limpid, the living waters of the new faith. His noble preëminence
was due to the simple spirituality of his nature. Intellectually,
he was neither great nor original. In scholarship he was distinctly
inferior to academic theologians like Andrews Norton and to omnivorous
students like Theodore Parker. Almost wholly introspective he was
influenced slowly by world-currents of thought, and such alien ideas
as found lodgment in his mind took on a native form and color from
his own convictions. Nevertheless though his meditations revolved
about the pole-star of his own experience, his theology cautiously
took shape under the pressure of two ideas that came to him from the
latter years of the eighteenth century--the ideas of God’s beneficence
and of man’s excellence. Once lodged in his mind, those ideas led to
quite revolutionary consequences, not only in their disintegrating
effect upon the Calvinistic dogmas in which he had been reared,
but in the generous romanticism which they bequeathed to Unitarian
theology. His intellectual development was late and halting, yet that
he liberated himself at all was remarkable considering the world that
bred him--Newport, frequented by wealthy planters and enriched by the
slave trade, Cambridge and Boston then in the stagnancy of Federalist
complacency. Of the same generation with Robert Treat Paine and Josiah
Quincy, only a few years older than Rufus Choate and Edward Everett,
as a boy sitting under the preaching of Samuel Hopkins--the rugged
expounder of the Hopkinsian doctrine of willing to be damned for the
glory of God, a doctrine so repugnant to the major tenets of Channing’s
theology--he belonged by temperament and training to the parochial
world that accounted Fisher Ames a great orator, and looked with
suspicion on the new century that was crowding in on its comfortable
preserves.
From the deep New England ruts Channing pulled himself with incredible
difficulty. His frequent reactions almost kept pace with his progress.
For years he oscillated between freedom and dogma, now dominated by
the Hopkinsian influence and thrown back upon a morbid Calvinism by
ill health; then resolutely casting off the evil spell; until the year
1815, when the conservative wing declaring war upon the liberals,
he was drawn into the controversy and took upon himself the burden
of defending the liberal cause. He was then thirty-five, but it was
not till four years later, in the celebrated Baltimore sermon at the
ordination of Jared Sparks, that he offered a definitive statement
of the new theology. The sermon brought him wide fame and fastened
upon him the leadership of the Unitarian movement. Comment upon the
new doctrines was widespread, and the circulation of the sermon in
pamphlet form, according to a late biographer, “was not exceeded by any
American publication until in 1830 Webster made his memorable reply
to Hayne” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing_, p. 147).
The creative influence of that sermon in clarifying certain doctrines
of Unitarianism and integrating the society should not blind us to
the fact that it embodies only a portion of Channing’s theology--the
idea of God’s beneficence. It is a reasoned attack upon Trinitarian
Calvinism, upon those dogmas which reveal--in Channing’s expressive
phrase--“how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity”; but
it takes no account of the idea which later he came to place first--the
idea of man’s excellence.
Finer than the Baltimore sermon in its restrained eloquence--an
eloquence that burns with an intensity rare in Channing--and in its
dramatic exposition of the doctrine of the atonement, is the sermon
entitled _Unitarian Christianity most Favourable to Piety_, delivered
in 1826 at the dedication of the second Unitarian church in New York
City. In this sermon Channing made use of a daring comparison which
startled his friends and gave mortal offense to orthodox Calvinists. It
is probably the most dramatic passage to be found in his writings, and
it so well exemplifies the temper of the controversy that it deserves
quotation. After discussing the Edwardean philosophy of infinite
punishment and the nature of atonement, he proceeded:
Let me, then, set it before you, in new terms, and by a new
illustration; and if in so doing, I may wound the feelings of some
who hear me, I beg them to believe, that I do it with pain, and
from no impulse but a desire to serve the cause of truth.--Suppose,
then, that a teacher should come among you, and should tell
you, that the Creator, in order to pardon his own children, had
erected a gallows in the centre of the universe, and had publicly
executed upon it, in room of the offenders, an Infinite Being, the
partaker of his own Supreme Divinity; suppose him to declare, that
this execution was appointed, as a most conspicuous and terrible
manifestation of God’s justice, and of the infinite woe denounced
by his law; and suppose him to add, that all beings in heaven and
earth are required to fix their eyes on this fearful sight, as the
most powerful enforcement of obedience and virtue. Would you not
tell him, that he calumniated his Maker? Would you not say to him,
that this central gallows threw gloom over the universe; that the
spirit of a government, whose very acts of pardon were written in
such blood, was terror, not paternal love; and that the obedience
which needed to be upheld by this horrid spectacle, was nothing
worth? Would you not say to him, that even you, in this infancy and
imperfection of your being, were capable of being wrought upon by
nobler motives, and of hating sin through more generous views; and
that much more the angels, those pure flames of love, need not the
gallows and an executed God to confirm their loyalty? You would all
so feel, at such teaching as I have supposed; and yet how does this
differ from the popular doctrine of atonement? (_Works_, Vol. III,
pp. 197-198.)
In seeking an explanation of Channing’s break with New England
orthodoxy--a breach that widened greatly with years, coming to embrace
politics and economics as well as theology, alienating many of his
own congregation and bringing acute grief to him--one can scarcely
over-emphasize the influence of his Virginia experience. During
the twenty-one months that he spent on the southern plantation,
painfully isolated and lonely, he grappled seriously with a body of
thought from which the environment of his youth had pretty much shut
him away. Virginia in 1798 was ardently Jeffersonian, and French
romantic philosophy was a commonplace in Virginia libraries. While
Channing never went over wholly to Jeffersonianism, but retained
certain Federalist prejudices after the old foundations had turned to
quicksand under his feet, he there began a long process of speculative
brooding that was to carry him far from the political principles of
Boston. French revolutionary thought provided his chief intellectual
stimulus during the critical Virginia period. Rousseau he read with
profound interest, together with Godwin’s _Political Justice_ and Mary
Wollstonecraft’s _Rights of Woman_. The Physiocratic economics that
sanctioned the agrarian bias of Jeffersonian democracy seems to have
made no appeal to a mind primarily ethical in outlook, yet he went so
far as to dabble in communistic theory, and for a time contemplated
joining a communistic community. From France, moreover, he derived
the idea of the excellence of human nature and the perfectibility
of man, ideas which became the mainspring of his later thinking,
creatively determining both his theology and his social philosophy, and
transforming his whole intellectual world.
In July, 1800, eight months before it took formal possession of the
White House, “French infidel philosophy” made its appearance in New
England in the person of a slight, health-broken youth, who returned
to his quiet theological studies, quite unmindful of the gunpowder he
had brought back in his intellectual luggage. It was long before a
spark was to strike home, but the powder was there and would do its
work eventually. In passing through Channing’s mind, the contributions
of French romanticism merged with the native heritage of New England
idealism, and supplemented by contributions from English Arian thought,
slowly assumed definite form that came to issue in three dominating
ideas, namely: God is love, man is potentially noble, religion is an
excellent life. Enveloping these master ideas, in which they were
carried as in a medium, was a pervasive ethical spirit that colored
all his thinking and eventually took form in that striking phrase into
which all of Channing is compressed, “the adoration of goodness--this
is religion.” This constituted his reply to the Edwardean theology that
debased man to the sole end of exalting a monstrous God--the doctrine
of “sweetness and light” was set over against the dogmas of reprobation
and election.
With his profound sense of justice, Channing could not follow “the
adoration of goodness” into an aloof and mystical pietism. The
temptation was strong, for his finely aristocratic and hesitant nature
prompted him to stand apart from all turmoil and partisan struggle.
He disliked controversy and distrusted all dogmatists. The world of
economics and politics was exceedingly distasteful to him; he would
gladly stop his ears against the clamor of organized groups and
strident parties. The Abolitionists, with whose purpose he deeply
sympathized, seemed to him intolerant and their tactics vulgar. There
is a measure of justice in Garrison’s comment after Channing’s death:
“His nerves were delicately strung. The sound of a ram’s horn was
painfully distressing to him. He was firmly persuaded that nothing but
a silver trumpet was needed to cause the walls of Jericho to fall; and
he did his best upon his own.”[445] And yet, however unwillingly, he
was drawn inevitably into an agitation that touched both his religion
and his humanity; and between 1835 and 1837 he issued three notable
contributions to the controversy: _Slavery_, a reply to the Southern
apologists; _The Abolitionists_, an open letter to James Birney, whose
Abolition press had been wrecked by an Ohio mob; and a noble appeal
to Henry Clay against the annexation of Texas. In the latter year he
spoke in Faneuil Hall at a turbulent meeting called to protest against
the murder of Lovejoy, the meeting at which Wendell Phillips made his
dramatic first appearance on the Abolition platform.
The point of view from which Channing approached the problem of
slavery is clearly set forth in his _Introductory Remarks_, written in
1841 for a collected edition of his works, and which constitutes his
_apologia pro vita sua_.[446] In this extraordinarily lucid and just
statement he reduces the master passions of his life to two--respect
for human nature, and reverence for human liberty--passions which were
inseparable in all his thinking. Of the first he says, “The following
writings will be found to be distinguished by nothing more than by
the high estimate which they express of human nature. A respect for
the human soul breathes through them.” This attitude he elaborates at
length:
An enlightened, disinterested human being, morally strong, and
exerting a wide influence by the power of virtue, is the clearest
reflection of the divine splendour on earth.... The glory of the
Maker lies in his work.... Those men glorify God most, who look
with keen eye and loving heart on his works, who catch in all some
glimpses of beauty and power, who have a spiritual sense for good
in its dimmest manifestations, and who can so interpret the world,
that it becomes a bright witness to the Divinity.
I have also felt and continually insisted, that a new reverence for
man was essential to the cause of social reform.... There can be no
spirit of brotherhood, no true peace, any farther than men come to
understand their affinity with and relation to God and the infinite
purpose for which he gave them life. As yet these ideas are treated
as a kind of spiritual romance.... The reception of this plainest
truth of Christianity would revolutionize society, and create
relations among men not dreamed of at the present day.... Men would
know the import of the word Brother, as yet nothing but a word to
multitudes. None of us can conceive the change of manners, the
new courtesy and sweetness, the mutual kindness, deference and
sympathy, the life and efforts for social melioration, which are
to spring up, in proportion as man shall penetrate beneath the body
to the spirit, and shall learn what the lowest human being is.
Out of this reverence for human nature flowed his “reverence for
Liberty, for human rights; a sentiment which has grown with my growth,
which is striking deeper root in my age, which seems to me a chief
element of true love for mankind, and which alone fits a man for
intercourse with his fellow-creatures.”
It is because I have learned the essential equality of men before
the common Father, that I cannot endure to see one man establishing
his arbitrary will over another by fraud, or force, or wealth,
or rank, or superstitious claims. It is because the human being
has moral powers, because he carries a law in his own breast
and was made to govern himself, that I cannot endure to see him
taken out of his own hands and fashioned into a tool by another’s
avarice or pride. It is because I see in him a great nature, the
divine image, and vast capacities, that I demand for him means of
self-development, spheres for free action--that I call society not
to fetter, but to aid his growth.
In such humanitarian idealism did French romantic philosophy come to
flower in the generous mind of this son of New England. He was no
longer narrowly Unitarian; he had become a social revolutionary with
Utopian dreams. The minister’s wealthy parishioners might worship the
common Father complacently under the shadow of slavery, black or white,
but the minister could not; he had caught a glimpse of the Promised
Land and would lead his flock towards it. Unhappily, the vast abyss
of negro slavery lay between, and Channing considered it with growing
concern. In his examination of the problem he was broadly philosophical
rather than narrowly partisan. He rested his case against slavery on an
ethical adaptation of the natural-rights theory.[447] Since man is both
rational and moral, he argued, he cannot be deprived by law or custom
of the essential prerogatives of personality. The inalienable rights
of man are in essence no other than the rights of personality--the
right to exercise his reason, to seek light of his conscience, to enjoy
the fruits of his labor, to enter into domestic relations, in short
to be free to live as a man in a state of civilization. To treat man
as property is the grossest denial and violation of that which by its
nature is inviolable and inalienable. Channing pushed his argument
further and asserted that the institution of slavery was not only
irrational and immoral, but a fundamental denial of democracy. It must
end in perverting the political state to its own evil. The southern
conception of a Greek democracy resting on black slavery he looked upon
as the final prostitution of the democratic ideal. “Those who tell us
that slavery is a necessary condition of a republic, do not justify the
former, but pronounce a sentence of reprobation on the latter.” For
those text-mongerers who professed to justify slavery by Scripture, he
had only scorn. By such methods polygamy might as readily be justified.
Inquiry into the nature and scope of individual rights brought Channing
face to face with the problem of the political state and the duties
of citizenship. Here his break with Boston Federalism was final and
complete. He judged men and institutions by ethical standards; State
Street judged them by economic standards. By his own path he went back
to the eighteenth century, and interpreting the functions and province
of government in the light of Godwin’s _Political Justice_, he arrived
at the conception of a constantly diminishing political state that
should eventually disappear. The dogma of political sovereignty he
denied: “The state is equally restrained with individuals by the Moral
Law” (“Slavery,” in _Works_, Vol. II, p. 37). The expediency of some
restraint upon individual action he accepted, but with the proviso
that it be exercised only to the end of the common well-being. “The
authority of the state to impose laws on its members I cheerfully
allow; but this has limits, which are found to be more and more narrow
in proportion to the progress of moral science” (_ibid._, p. 38). “That
government is most perfect, in which Policy is most entirely subjected
to Justice, or in which the supreme and constant aim is to secure the
rights of every human being” (_ibid._, p. 38). To such a government
loyalty will be given gladly; but in the event that expediency should
prevail over justice, and the state should prostitute its power by
exploiting one class for the benefit of another, then must loyalty be
transferred from the state to the higher law. “Justice is a greater
good than property, not greater in degree, but in kind.” “The good
of the individual is more important than the outward prosperity of
the State” (_ibid._, pp. 40, 44). In such doctrines Channing paid his
respects to the political philosophy of Webster.
The final outcome of his political thinking was a close approximation
to the position of Jefferson. His distrust of power grew more
apprehensive as he reflected on the common abuse of power, and the
cheap and paltry appeals by which the unthinking are swayed. Before
the organized power of the mass, the individual is helpless. In the
_Introductory Remarks_ he went further than he had done in earlier
writings in analysis of the state, and such a passage as this might
have been penned by John Taylor of Caroline County. It is pure
Jeffersonianism.
So fearful is the principle of which I have spoken, that I
have thought it right to recommend restrictions on power and
a simplicity in government beyond what most approve. Power, I
apprehend, should not be suffered to run into great masses. No more
of it should be confided to rulers than is absolutely necessary
to repress crime and preserve public order. A purer age may
warrant larger trusts; but the less of government now the better,
if society be kept in peace. There should exist, if possible, no
office to madden ambition.... One of the tremendous evils of the
world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands....
Is any man pure enough to be trusted with it? Ought such a prize
as this to be held out to ambition? Can we wonder at the shameless
profligacy, intrigue, and the base sacrifices of public interests
by which it is sought, and, when gained, held fast? Undoubtedly,
great social changes are required to heal this evil, to diminish
this accumulation of power. National spirit, which is virtual
hostility to all countries but our own, must yield to a growing
humanity, to a new knowledge of the spirit of Christ. Another
important step is, a better comprehension by communities that
government is at best a rude machinery, which can accomplish but
very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what
individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by
selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its
own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans
for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in
conflict with the great laws of social well-being, and the less we
rely on it the better. The less of power given to man over man the
better. (_Works_, Vol. VI, pp. 26-27.)
Channing had evidently read his _Political Justice_ to good effect,
for the spirit of eighteenth-century liberalism had passed into his
thought and given shape to his political philosophy. In his hatred of
war, his pacifism, his humanitarian concern, his social-mindedness,
his repudiation of all coercive centralizing power, he proved himself
a child of Godwin. He would have no tyranny, whether by the organized
state or by the unorganized mass. He extended to all men the right
of free thought and free speech. In no other cause did he speak
more vehemently than in defense of this democratic right. When the
Abolitionists were mobbed and their presses broken he rejoiced in their
refusal to be silenced. “From my heart I thank them,” he wrote. “I am
myself their debtor. I am not sure, that I should this moment write in
safety, had they shrunk from the conflict, had they shut their lips,
imposed silence on their presses, and hid themselves before their
ferocious assailants.... I thank the Abolitionists, that in this evil
day, they were true to the rights which the multitude were ready to
betray.” Then follows a passage that is perennially true, considering
how hardly won and easily lost is the right of free speech:
Of all powers, the last to be entrusted to the multitude of men,
is that of determining what questions shall be discussed. The
greatest truths are often the most unpopular and exasperating; and
were they to be denied discussion, till the many should be ready to
accept them, they would never establish themselves in the general
mind. The progress of society depends on nothing more, than on the
exposure of time-honored abuses, which cannot be touched without
offending multitudes, than on the promulgation of principles,
which are in advance of public sentiment and practice, and which
are constantly at war with the habits, prejudices, and immediate
interests of large classes of the community. Of consequence, the
multitude, if once allowed to dictate or proscribe subjects of
discussion, would strike society with spiritual blindness, and
death. The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first
offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and
would rejoice to crush. The right of free discussion is therefore
to be guarded by the friends of mankind, with peculiar jealousy.
It is at once the most sacred, and the most endangered of all our
rights. He who would rob his neighbor of it, should have a mark
set on him as the worst enemy of freedom. (“The Abolitionists,” in
_Works_, Vol. II, p. 161.)
High-minded and generous was this child of Puritan idealism who had
gone to school to French infidel philosophy--never untrue to the
principle of free inquiry which in demanding for himself he willingly
granted others. He calmly accepted the fact of disintegration which
is implicit in all liberalism--the denial of traditional authority
and ancient custom--partly because he believed the old ways were
bad, but in part also because he held strongly to his faith in human
nature. Despite failure and discouragement he clung to his cardinal
belief--“My one sublime idea, which has given me unity of mind, the
greatness, the divinity of the soul.” He broke the more willingly with
an ungenerous past because he envisaged a nobler future. An intuitive
individualist, he was a forerunner of transcendental individualism,
and he found himself in hearty accord with Emerson’s doctrines in
the Divinity School address. With the later rationalistic phase of
Unitarianism which began with Theodore Parker’s memorable South
Boston sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in Christianity_, in
May, 1841, he found himself only partly in intellectual sympathy.
He remained a supernaturalist after the younger generation had
rejected supernaturalism; but his sturdy adherence to the principle
of liberalism would not suffer him to join in the Unitarian hue and
cry raised against the young radical. Unitarianism turned orthodox,
and bent on erecting new dogmas, seemed to him treasonable to every
liberal hope. “As to Mr. Parker,” he wrote, “I wish him to preach what
he thoroughly believes and feels. I trust the account you received
of attempts to _put him down_ was in the main a fiction. Let the
full heart pour itself forth!” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery
Channing_, p. 357.) Sixteen months after he penned those words Channing
was dead, but the spirit of his life was embodied in the great ferment
that was rising about him when he died. “Let the full heart pour itself
forth”--to many sober Bostonians it seemed that New England had taken
that injunction quite too literally and was pouring forth disturbant
and gusty heresies, but Channing would scarcely have disapproved.
Footnotes
[440] See Fenn, _Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel
Lectures_, p. 130.
[441] See Williston Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches
in the United States_, p. 283.
[442] _Ibid._, p. 356.
[443] _Ibid._, pp. 276-277.
[444] _Ibid._, p. 272.
[445] Compare a fuller estimate in Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_,
Vol. III, pp. 239-242.
[446] In the Glasgow edition of 1844 it prefaces the sixth volume.
[447] For a brief discussion, see Merriam, _American Political
Theories_, pp. 217-221.
Chapter III • Liberalism and the Social Conscience
I • The Social Mind
Unitarianism was generous in its bequests to New England, and amongst
its contributions to a nobler life not the least valuable was its warm
social sympathy. Channing’s tender social conscience sprang directly
from his humanitarian religion. Not from the hard old Calvinism did
he get this fine flower of a humane life, but from the new French
philosophy. Not from bounding his ethics by the Decalogue, or hating
sin more than he loved generosity, did he break the hard shell of
Puritan righteousness; but by metamorphosing the sinner into a child
of God and sharing with him the divine promise. Other-mindedness came
naturally to a religion established in a God of love. The social
conscience could not remain indifferent to injustice visited upon
the children of a common Father. Yet other-mindedness was a virtue
practiced too little in Calvinist New England. That old world had been
more concerned with hopes of individual salvation, with propitiating
an angry God, than with its present obligations to its neighbors.
Hard doctrine--which the old Puritan loved--was likely to make hard
characters, and an ascetic society was likely to breed close-fisted
natures. The conscience was tender in New England, but it was tender
chiefly as the guardian and monitor of the Ten Commandments; it gave
itself too little concern about the new commandment which Jesus
laid upon his disciples. It disciplined men and women in personal
righteousness, it created self-reliant characters, it scrutinized
narrowly the neighborhood conduct; but its social issues were likely
to be mean and petty. The righteousness of which it professed to be
guardian and monitor too often fell far short of generous manly stature.
From this hardness of the old religion came the hardness of the social
conscience. When the Yankee was driven by brutal fact to admit that
he was his brother’s keeper, he usually took care to get a few honest
pennies out of his brother’s board and lodging. The village poor
were provided for by farming out, as the taxes were farmed out. The
town meeting haggled narrowly over the terms, and substantial deacons
underbid each other. Though the price might be low, some profit might
still be got from the pauper’s keep. It was a cold, hard, unsympathetic
world for the social unfortunate, whether pauper, debtor, or idiot;
and it was harsh as well to the children of all but the wealthy.
The hours of toil were long, and the public schools about which the
historians have bragged rather too loudly, were poor affairs, starved
by the common niggardliness, ill taught and ill provided. The academies
and colleges that professed to keep the torch of learning aflame were
largely perquisites of the gentry. It is beside the point to assert
that public schools existed in New England long before Virginia had
any, and that poor boys stinted and starved their way through Harvard
and Yale. Well known as such facts are, they do not testify to a high
social sense in a people supposed to have been tender of conscience.
The Calvinist was taught to fear God rather than to love him. It was a
strong man’s business to save one’s soul and make a decent living; and
in the social code of New England the weakling must take his chance.
There was helpful neighborliness of course in old New England, and
much honest kindliness. Some of the hardest of dogmatic Calvinists
were the most considerate and gentlest of men. Old Samuel Hopkins of
slave-running Newport was a generous soul who preached the gospel of
love to one’s fellows, and practiced the virtues of apostleship to
the poor and outcast. He denounced the slave trade to parishioners
who knew all the inlets of the West African coast, and got himself
well disliked. His congregation preferred his hard theology to his
inconvenient humanitarianism, and kept him poor all his days. The
dogmatic Timothy Dwight scathingly attacked slavery in his _Greenfield
Hill_, denounced the injustice done the negro, and even protested
against the extension of capital punishment. Yet for all such protests
the common conscience was untouched. The Yankee was always standing
in the way of the Puritan’s righteousness. Respectability was founded
on property, and respectability was mightier in New England than even
John Calvin. It was the brutal debtor laws that brought on Shays’s
Rebellion, which Federalist church members put down and denied the
grievances. It was no tender conscience that extinguished slavery
in Massachusetts, for long after it became unprofitable there the
Yankee skipper was still in the slave trade. Dignified Tory Row on
what is now Brattle Street, Cambridge, was built by gentlemen who
drew their wealth from West Indian slave plantations.[448] William
Lloyd Garrison’s offense in Baltimore, for which he was thrown into
jail, lay in publishing the name of a Massachusetts shipmaster from
Newburyport--Garrison’s native town--who was engaged in the coastwise
slave traffic.[449] In the year 1830 there were somewhat more than a
hundred Abolition Societies in the United States, not one of which was
in New England; and in the first number of the _Liberator_ Garrison
wrote, probably without exaggeration, that he found “contempt more
bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice
more stubborn, and apathy more frozen,” in New England, “than among
slave owners themselves.”[450] The old Puritan conscience might be
tender, but it refused pretty steadily to take on any larger job than
Sabbath-keeping and dogma-saving. It was inquisitorial rather than
humanitarian, and the sins which it hunted down were theological rather
than social.
The bridge between this older world and the later was thrown across by
Unitarianism. With its shift of emphasis from a God of wrath to a God
of love came the entering wedge that was to split away the egoism of
the old theology--its thralldom to the conception of personal sin--and
lay bare an inner core of altruism. It was another sort of conscience
that Unitarianism discovered, a conscience that welcomed the new social
thought of romantic Europe, and applying it to the facts of life in
America created the new humanitarianism which bit so deeply into the
New England of the forties. From this movement the intractable nature
of the Yankee held him back, but the Puritan speedily transformed the
hard theological conscience into a tender social conscience, that
bewildered the conventional morality with its sweeping program of
reform.
The awakening of the new spirit may perhaps be held to date from the
growing opposition to war that was an aftermath of the Napoleonic
period with its huge debts and vast social suffering. The inhumanity
of war profoundly impressed thoughtful minds that had come under the
influence of the sociological movement, and when Channing in 1812
preached his first anti-war sermon the new humanitarian spirit found
expression. In his espousal of pacifism Channing was following in the
footsteps of the social revolutionaries of the preceding century.
He fell short of Tom Paine in analysis of the economic and dynastic
sources of war, and in appreciation of its social consequences;
nevertheless his denunciation was significant of a changing social
attitude. From this early attack to the rise of the Garrisonian
Non-Resistance Society of the late thirties and early forties, the
spread of the pacifist movement was rapid. Transcendentalism was
eloquently anti-militaristic, and Emerson, Alcott and Parker were
outspoken in denunciation of the war spirit. To the war against war
soon was added the war against drink, and with the establishment in
Boston in 1826 of the _National Philanthropist_, under the patronage
of the “Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance”--a
paper of which Garrison was editor for a few months--began the long
agitation for the suppression of the liquor traffic. From such feeble
beginnings the ardor of reform grew and spread swiftly, enlarging its
program to embrace anti-slavery, woman’s rights,[451] prison reform,
repeal of the harsh debtor laws, vegetarianism, associationism, until
it caught the contagion of the perfectionist and transcendental
movements and issued in a comprehensive program of universal reform.
The golden age of New England was quite as much the golden age of the
New England conscience as of the New England mind.
II
The fame of transcendentalism has too much obscured the contemporary
movement of perfectionism, a movement which marked the extreme
expression of the new conscience, the most revolutionary of its
aspirations, the apotheosis of ethical radicalism. Its want of literary
skill narrowed its appeal and the archaic quality of its enthusiasm
lessened its following; yet in spirit it was native to Puritan
idealism, and it enlisted the active sympathy of many of the finer
souls of New England. How greatly reform was furthered by the movement
of perfectionism is not easily determined, but it is clear that its
influence permeated much of the revolutionary activity of the times.
Scratch an ardent Abolitionist and you were likely to find a potential
perfectionist.
The doctrine was first elaborated by John Humphrey Noyes, a young
Vermont mystic, who, under the influence of the revivalist excitement
of the early thirties, elaborated a social creed that reëmbodied much
of the teaching of the extreme left wing of English Commonwealth
thought. Noyes was a primitive religious nature, with the tenderest
of consciences, vastly troubled over current materialisms; and his
speculations reveal a curious throw-back to early English Puritanism.
He was a Yankee Fifth Monarchy man. Two hundred years of Yankee
experience slipped from his mind, and he walked and talked with the old
millennial spirits, the Diggers and Levelers of Commonwealth times. A
devout Scripturist, he took literally the injunction of Matthew, “Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”
A primitive Christian, he proposed to re-order society with the naïve
simplicity of the apostle Eliot. In his mystical speculations, social,
political, and religious radicalisms were stirred in a common pot and
simmered down to what may be called spiritual anarchism. Noyes was a
Yankee “root and branch” man, a single-minded apostle of “thorough.”
He would not strain at gnats and swallow camels, but he rejected the
camels first and then proposed to get rid of the gnats. In 1834 he
established a small monthly paper called the _Perfectionist_, which was
very probably as revolutionary a sheet as was ever printed in America.
He made converts, including Garrison, Edmund Quincy, son of Josiah
Quincy, the Grimké sisters, Henry C. Wright and other Abolitionists,
and made an increasing stir in the world, to the great concern of
respectable folk who swallowed their camels without a grimace.
Some notion of the main doctrines of this seventeenth-century creed may
be gained from a letter of Noyes to Garrison, written in 1837, from
which the following is taken:
I have subscribed my name to an instrument similar to the
Declaration of ’76, renouncing all allegiance to the government
of the United States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to
the throne of the World.... When I wish to form a conception of
the government of the United States ... I picture to myself a
bloated, swaggering libertine, trampling on the Bible--its own
Constitution--its treaties with the Indians--the petitions of
its citizens.... I have renounced active co-operation with the
oppressor on whose territories I live; now I would find a way to
put an end to his oppression. But he is manifestly a reprobate:
reproof and instruction only aggravate his sins. I cannot attempt
to reform him, because I am forbidden to “cast pearls before
swine.” I must therefore either consent to remain a slave till
God removes the tyrant, or I must commence war upon him, by a
declaration of independence and other weapons suitable to the
character of a son of God.
He then lays down seven reasons for choosing to make war upon the
state, amongst which are the following:
1. As a believer in the Bible I know that the territory of the
United States belongs to God, and is promised ... to Jesus Christ
and his followers....
6. The Son of God has manifestly, to me, chosen this country
for the theatre of such an assault--a country which, by its
boasting hypocrisy, has become the laughing-stock of the world,
and by its lawlessness has fully proved the incapacity of man
for self-government. _My hope of the millennium begins where Dr.
Beecher’s expires_--viz., +AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION+.
I have stated to you only ... the principal things which God has
urged upon me by his Spirit, and by which he has moved me to
nominate Jesus Christ for the Presidency, not only of the United
States, but of the world. Is it not high time for abolitionists to
abandon a government whose President has declared war upon them? I
cannot but think that many of them hear the same great voice out
of heaven which has waked me, saying, “Come out of her, my people,
that ye be not partakers of her sins and of her plagues.”... Allow
me to suggest that you will set Anti-slavery in the sunshine only
by making it tributary to Holiness; and you will most assuredly
throw it into the shade ... if you suffer it to occupy the ground,
in your mind or in others, which ought to be occupied by +UNIVERSAL
EMANCIPATION FROM SIN+. All the abhorrence which now falls upon
slavery, intemperance, lewdness, and every other specific vice,
will in due time be gathered into one volume of victorious wrath
against _unbelief_. I wait for that time as for the day of
battle ... I counsel you, and the people that are with you, if
you love the post of honour--the forefront of the hottest battle
of righteousness--to set your face towards _perfect_ holiness.
(Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 145-148.)
This curious appeal brought forth its fruit in a Peace Convention,
held in 1838, which published a Declaration of Sentiments[452] that
was quite as extraordinary a pronouncement--one that serves to explain
the utter bewilderment of prosaic souls at the strange progeny of
the times. It was only one of many strange conventions, marked by an
ebullient faith of which Emerson remarked, “The core of the comet
did not seem to be much, but the whole air was full of splendors”
(_Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 5), and on which Josiah Quincy commented,
“Such a mass of free mind as was brought together I have never seen
before in any one assembly.... There was much talent and a great deal
of _soul_.” Men who take their Biblical teachings literally are likely
to be curious fellows. Righteousness may prove a potent drink for
them that love it, begetting its own particular intemperance; and a
conscience that has slipped its leash of the practical will run many a
mad chase. If it followed its logic this perfectionism must make short
shrift of political parties, of loyalty to government, of the political
state itself, and set up instead a social order in which familiar
things would be topsy-turvy, with the just sitting in high places
and the rich and great of earth brought low; and this is precisely
what Noyes did in the Oneida Community--the most successful of the
contemporary ventures in communism--of which he was the founder. In
spite of his taste for the wine of new vintages Emerson was somewhat
taken aback at certain of its ebullitions, and when the sabbatarian
Chardon Street Convention in 1840 gathered together the choicest
repositories of New England holiness, he shook his head dubiously. His
humorous catalogue of the miscellaneous enthusiasts suggests more than
a spice of criticism.
Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians,
Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day Baptists, Quakers,
Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers,--all came
successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their
hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. (“The
Chardon Street Convention,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 374.)
And even the catholic-minded Edmund Quincy, who was one of the callers
of the Convention, confessed that “It was the most singular collection
of strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled.” The wine of
perfectionism was in high ferment in New England in 1840.
It was a curious anachronism in the midst of the industrial
revolution--this revival of the religious Utopianism of 1650, this
April renaissance of the faith of a dead _saeculum theologicum_. It
was in no sense a by-product of transcendentalism--no lunacy fringe
of metaphysical speculation. It owed nothing to French romanticism or
German idealism, not in origin at least. It was far more primitive and
native, and its affinities run back to Roger Williams and the Fifth
Monarchy millennialism, rather than to Rousseau and Kant and Jacobi. It
was a breaking through of the submerged New England spirituality, a
volcanic release from sterile conformity; and it summoned the awakening
soul to go forth and conquer the world for righteousness. Millennialism
is the prophetic hope of a primitive faith. To its disciples it is
certain of fulfillment because God’s promises are certain; but to
practical minds, unconvinced that Biblical phrases are authentic divine
contracts, any expectation of the speedy coming of the Kingdom of God
seems grotesque. The millennial enthusiast is a fair butt of ridicule,
and the perfectionists came in for a large share. It was Lowell who
leveled at the militant godliness of the new sects the wittiest attack.
Forgetting his English history he found himself puzzled, and being
puzzled he allowed himself to become ill-natured. His clever sentences
explode smartly about his subject, but there is no light in them.[453]
III
Upon another venture in Utopianism, and one far better known, the years
have laid a pleasant, idyllic haze, softening the prosaic outlines and
clothing them with romance. Brook Farm has been singularly fortunate
in the posthumous fame that has dealt with it so tenderly as to
transmute it into poetry. By virtue of the light reflected upon it by
the transcendental illumination and the literary skill it commanded,
the little communal settlement at West Roxbury has come to be regarded
as a homely Yankee pastoral, a sort of May Day adventure in brown
holland tunics, an inspiring quest of the ideal amongst furrows and
manures. It is a social poem fashioned out of Yankee homespun. No
hint of rude social leveling is associated with its aims; even its
communism suggests no stigma. Of the dozens of communistic experiments
which marked the first half of the nineteenth century in America,
few were native in origin or ventured upon in New England. They were
mostly undertaken by old-world groups, chiefly German, who sought cheap
land and a free environment for primitive religious experiments. But
Brook Farm was true Yankee, using the familiar dialect to clothe its
unfamiliar thoughts, and escaping the prejudice that confronts the
uncouth and alien; and in consequence the vagaries that all New England
once laughed at have become enshrined as a cherished New England
possession.
Perfectionism and Brook Farm embodied diverse phases of the
renaissance and made appeal to different temperaments. Fellow-ship
founded on common ownership and communal labor was an ideal that
left the religious mystic cold, whereas the anarchistic holiness of
perfectionism seemed to the Brook Farmers grotesque. Present economic
maladjustment appeared to the latter the fundamental problem of the
times. They were deeply concerned for the future that must emerge
from the chaotic individualism of the present. Unless society were
brought back to a wiser understanding of values, they foresaw only
chaos; and so in a small way they set about a great experiment.
Brook Farm grew out of the impact of the industrial revolution upon
the social conscience of New England. Industrialism and social
speculation were contemporary developments. The first cotton mill in
New England was established at Lawrence in 1822, and the following
year the Merrimac Mills were established in the newly founded city of
Lowell. By absorbing the vast Irish immigration the factory system
brought increasing wealth to Beacon Street homes, but it brought other
consequences in its train which Beacon Street carelessly overlooked.
How those consequences affected more sensitive and intelligent
minds--men like William Henry Channing, Theodore Parker and George
Ripley--is suggested by their eager talk of mutualism, association,
coöperation, as potential cures for the growing evils of competition,
discussions never before heard in New England. Describing the state
of mind of the Boston group of social thinkers, John Weiss offers the
following explanation:
A mutualism to secure culture and material welfare was consistently
desired by those who believed in a community of the sources of
moral and spiritual welfare. The social evils which result from
the struggles of competitive labour seemed to outweigh all its
benefits. Modern civilization was thought to be the culmination
of isolated selfishness, madly struggling from bread to luxury
and refined delights, which the strongest and least scrupulous
only could acquire. Prisons and punishments were the defences of
this artificial system, to repress instincts that were moral till
they become illegal. Hospitals and benevolent institutions were
also mere defences to absorb as much misery as possible ere it
became malicious, to get the social gangrene reduced to limits.
The providential impulses of the human being were forced to act in
subversive ways and directions, when they might all be harmonized
by their own inherent laws, and the blessing of mutualism succeed
to the bane of antagonism. Each man ought to be the guarantee
to all men against disorder; the carefully adjusted elements of
a selfishness which threatens continually to blow the social
fabric to atoms, would become not only innoxious but salutary in
its proper combination; and a new civilization might arise in
fair proportion from the serial development and movement of all
possible human tendencies. Then all men and women might labor and
be happy; all might earn with a minimum of toil a competence of
culture. Property would be the ally of the whole instead of the
oppressor of the many; and crime would disappear, because the
instincts would no longer have motives to be criminal. (_Life and
Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol. I, pp. 106-107.)
The transcendental basis of such social speculation is evident enough.
The new social thought was transcendental thought. A common belief
in the excellence of human instincts drew these idealists together;
but when it came to the vexing problem of reconciling individualism
and mutualism, creating an economic fellowship out of electric
personalities, the more ardent transcendentalists took fright and
prudently kept without the gates of Brook Farm. Organization seemed
to them the fatal poison in the bottom of the cup. When a community
was planned in Massachusetts in 1841, by liberal Christians of the
Universalist sect, a writer in the _Dial_ subjected the proposal to
sharp criticism:
A true community can be founded on nothing short of faith in the
universal man, as he comes from the hands of the Creator, with
no law over his liberty but the eternal ideas that lie at the
foundation of his being.... The final cause of human society is the
unfolding of the individual man, into every form of perfection,
without let or hindrance, according to the inward nature of each.
(Quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism, etc._, p. 157.)
Such a view is anarchistic rather than collectivistic, and as embodied
in Alcott’s Fruitlands, it may be regarded as the transcendental type
of Utopia. Towards all systems of socialism the transcendentalists
were instinctively hostile, as implying an industrial regimentation;
and in planning Brook Farm, Ripley rejected industrialism and reduced
regimentation to a minimum. With the agrarian background of Brook Farm
the transcendentalists were in hearty sympathy, quite oblivious of the
fact that agrarianism could offer no solution for industrialism; but
they balked at the principle of task allotment as a hindrance to the
unfolding of individual differences. Upon the later introduction of
the Fourier Phalanx their doubts grew into certainty, and they lost
their faith in the experiment. Of all the transcendentalists William
Henry Channing was clearly the most confirmed associationist, except
perhaps Ripley; to the end of his life he remained a socialist, active
in collectivistic movements and clinging fondly to his memory of Brook
Farm as a “great college of social students.” But few of his fellow
transcendentalists shared his faith.
This growing skepticism of organization is clearly shown in the
comments of Emerson’s _Journals_. In October, 1840, he set down his
first reaction to the plan as follows:
Yesterday George and Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller and Alcott
discussed here the Social Plans. I wish to be convinced, to be
thawed, to be made nobly mad by the kindlings before my eye of
a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was arithmetic and
comfort; this was a hint borrowed from the Tremont House and United
States Hotel; a rage in our poverty and politics to live rich and
gentlemanlike, an anchor to leeward against a change of weather; a
prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great questions of
Pauperism and Poverty. And not once could I be inflamed, but sat
aloof and thoughtless; my voice faltered and fell. It was not the
cave of persecution which is the palace of spiritual power, but
only a room in the Astor House hired for the Transcendentalists. I
do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little
larger. I wish to break all prisons. I have not yet conquered
my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege
of this hencoop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of
Babylon? It seems to me that so to do were to dodge the problem I
am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd.
(_Journals_, Vol. V, pp. 473-474.)
In January, 1844, noting the spontaneity of life at Brook Farm, he drew
the conclusion “that in the arrangements at Brook Farm, as out of them,
it is the person, not the communist, that avails” (_ibid._, Vol. VI,
p. 492). With the introduction of Fourierist organization he became
sharply critical. Neither in Fourier nor in Owen did he see any hope.
Fourier learned from him [Owen] all the truth he had, and the rest
of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. The
Owen and Fourier plans bring no _a priori_ convictions. They are
come at merely by counting and arithmetic. All the fine _aperçus_
are for individualism. The Spartan broth, the hermit’s cell,
the lonely farmer’s life are poetic; but the Phalanstery, the
“Self-supporting Village,” are culinary and mean. (_Ibid._, Vol.
VIII, pp. 134, 135.)
And a few days later he gave his final judgment, “Dear heart, take
it sadly home to thee, that there will and can be no coöperation”--a
judgment that explains the clever phrase with which he demolished Brook
Farm, “It is the Age of Reason in a patty-pan.”
The transcendentalist with his Puritan conscience could understand and
sympathize with the perfectionist zeal for universal righteousness;
but collectivistic systems of economy seemed alien and a community of
goods uncongenial to his Yankee individualism. Albert Brisbane, the
American apostle of Fourierism, might bring George Ripley, the least
individualistic and most prosaic of the transcendental group, to his
views of organization; but he got on badly with the others who were
quite too fluid to take a mechanical set. In consequence it was not at
Brook Farm but at the North American Phalanx that the French system
found its fairest experiment and met with its solidest success.
IV
With the awakening interest in social problems the conscience of New
England could not longer remain indifferent to slavery. The incoming
of French humanitarianism, the spread of idealistic sociology under
the teachings of Unitarianism, above all the stimulus of English
Abolitionism that provided argument and example in the freeing of
slaves in the British West Indies, wore away the indifferentism
that had calloused the mind of New England; and with the decay of
her provincial particularism the conscience of New England slowly
roused itself. The arrogance of the slave party nowhere else stirred
such deep resentment. Southern steel, striking the flinty Yankee
character, threw off sparks that would fire whatever combustible stuff
lay near; and such combustible stuff was provided in plenty by the
Utopian enthusiasts who gathered in conventions, each with a plan
of universal reform in his waistcoat pocket. Little conflagrations
were started in many an obscure Yankee soul, and the noise of the
crackling spread over New England, to the anger of the South and the
vast concern of respectable Boston merchants. Sooner or later Abolition
sentiment was bound to make a tremendous stir amongst the children of
Puritanism; and when that time came it was bound to arouse tremendous
antagonism amongst the sons of Yankees. The dominant commercial
group would not tolerate a movement that was certain to alienate its
southern customers. A mighty collision between the conscience and the
self-interest of New England was inevitable; and in that collision of
flinty characters, arguments were likely to be countered with blows.
The New England Abolitionists, men and women, were an extraordinarily
interesting group. They were good fighters, outspoken and tenacious of
opinion, unsparing in attack, refusing to be browbeaten, resilient
and tough as seasoned hickory. In them the Yankee Tory met his match;
against them coercion and intimidation, all the usual Tory weapons,
failed as earlier they had failed with the primitive Quakers. They
were daily charged with being social incendiaries. The commercial
newspapers thundered against them as atheists, Sabbath-breakers,
socialists, anarchists; the absurdest myths were given circulation;
the public mind was skillfully poisoned against them. Yet as a matter
of sober historical fact, they were the kindliest of men, with
generous sympathies and disinterested motives. No blackguard was ever
an Abolitionist--no ward-heeler, or mob-inciter, or purse-patriot;
all such convenient tools of power were found amongst the baiters
and mobsters in the commercial opposition. John Brown was the only
direct-action Abolitionist and what befell him is well known among men.
There was no money to be made, no place of honor or power to be got by
espousing Abolitionism, but only self-sacrifice and social ostracism.
Ambitious men, self-seekers, went with the dispensers of social
favors. It was the remnant in Israel that gathered to the cause, few
in numbers but the best New England had. And what an excellent company
they were: Garrison, Samuel J. May, Edmund Quincy, Jonathan Sewall,
Theodore Parker, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Chapman, Wendell Phillips,
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Sumner,
Maria White and the young Lowell--such a fighting phalanx as the New
England conscience had never before mustered, nor has since. To them
were gathered heroic souls from other states: Arthur and Lewis Tappan
and Gerrit Smith from New York, James Birney from Kentucky, Lucretia
Mott from Philadelphia, the Grimké sisters from South Carolina. Harriet
Martineau, who knew the group intimately, has left on record her
judgment of them: “A just survey of the whole world can leave little
doubt,” she wrote in 1838, “that the abolitionists of the United States
are the greatest people now living and moving in it” (Carpenter, _John
Greenleaf Whittier_, p. 107). They gave New England and the country no
peace. From their persistent agitation came the Emigrant Aid Society,
Sharp’s rifles, and the bloody struggle in Kansas; and from it came the
temporary overwhelming of the Tory minority in Massachusetts. For a few
brief years New England threw off the stifling grip of the commercial
mind and was the home of American humanitarianism.
Footnotes
[448] See T. W. Higginson, _Old Cambridge_, p. 149.
[449] See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. I, Chapter VI. The
court held that it was libelous to seek to bring into disrepute an
action that was legal.
[450] Quoted by S. E. Morison in _Harrison Grey Otis_, Vol. II, p. 263.
[451] This was an outgrowth of the anti-slavery movement and emerged
from the conservative opposition to women’s appearing on the abolition
platform. The reply of the Quakeress, Angelina Grimké, to Elizabeth
Beecher’s _Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with reference to the
Duty of American Females_, in 1837, marks the definite beginning of the
movement. See Garrison, _William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 133-134.
[452] Written by Garrison; see _ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 230-234.
[453] See the essay on Thoreau.
Chapter IV • Certain Militants
I • William Lloyd Garrison
The flintiest character amongst the New England militants, curiously
enough, was the son of an immigrant family, brought to Newburyport
and abandoned by a shiftless father. William Lloyd Garrison was not
an offspring of generations of New England Puritanism, but a waif
thrown by chance on the bleak shores of Massachusetts, and left to
shift pretty much for himself. Born in Newburyport, half English and
half Irish, with a heritage that promised ill, he was disciplined in
the sternest of schools. His capable Irish mother had a bitter time
providing for her three fatherless children, and the son suffered
the privation and found the help that were the mixed portion of the
destitute of old New England. Like Horace Greeley he ate the bread of
poverty and grew strong on it. There was iron in his nature, and the
narrow means that drove his father to drink and desertion, that sent
his brother adrift, that broke his mother and killed his sister, only
strengthened his will and toughened his fiber. As a lad he was put to
the cobbler’s bench to learn the trade that Whittier was learning at
Haverhill; later he was apprenticed to a carpenter and cabinetmaker. In
both trades he was unhappy, and it was not till a freak of fate turned
him over to a friendly printer that he found himself. For seven years
he stuck to his case, and at the end of the apprenticeship he was not
only a first-rate practical printer, but with some little knowledge of
books and master of a vigorous and serviceable prose style. With the
amazing capacity for self-training so characteristic of the Yankee, he
had picked up a sort of education and was ready to do whatever work in
the world should come to hand.
Chance threw in his way the job of village editor, and inclination
plunged him into politics. His political opinions, which he embraced
more ardently than intelligently, were faithful reflections of current
Massachusetts partisanship. He was quite ignorant of political
principles and the economics that determined political parties, and
with unconscious naïveté he espoused the cause of Boston commercialism.
He was a dogmatic, unquestioning Whig. Clay was his idol, General
Jackson his abomination; and his first political speech was in support
of Harrison Gray Otis, the discredited boss of the old Federalist
machine. But this was only a vagary of youthful hero worship.
Enthusiasm for reform was already setting up a ferment in his ardent
soul and preparing him for quite other alliances. The unhappy fate of
his father was a lesson that he took home, and he interested himself
in the temperance movement then just getting under way, serving for
a time as editor of a small temperance paper. Shortly thereafter he
stumbled upon his life work. Benjamin Lundy, a homespun hero of the
Society of Friends, had long been publishing intermittently his _Genius
of Universal Emancipation_, and in the itinerant work of begging
support he fell in with Garrison. The two discovered kindred interests
and they entered into a compact to go forth together to fight the
dragon of slavery. They sought out the den of the beast in Baltimore
and delivered their blows lustily; with the result that Garrison was
indicted by the grand jury for printing the name of a Newburyport
merchant who was picking up some honest dollars in the coastwise slave
traffic, and spent seven weeks in jail. On his release he returned
to Boston to replenish a lean purse, and January 1, 1831, he issued
the first number of _The Liberator_, a little paper that was to make
a mighty stir in the world during a long period of hand-to-mouth
existence.
Never was there a more foolhardy venture, judged by the wisdom of this
world. With no following, no weapon but a borrowed font of type in
a mean little print-shop, no money or credit, he flung his defiance
at the entrenched enemy with the courage of uncalculating youth. A
prospectus issued in the fall of 1830 thus set forth the purpose of the
venture:
I shall assume, as self-evident truths, that the liberty of a
people is a gift of God and nature:--That liberty consists in an
independency upon the will of another:--That by the name of slave
we understand a man who can neither dispose of his person or goods,
but enjoys all at the will of his master:--That no man can have a
right over others, unless it be by them granted to him.... That
that which is not just is not law; and that which is not law,
ought not to be in force:--That he who oppugns the public liberty,
overthrows his own.... That there is no safety where there is no
strength, no strength without union, no union without justice, no
justice where faith and truth are wanting:--That the right to be
free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so
to be by all that have hearkened to the voice of nature.... _Vide
Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government--the Declaration of
American Independence--the Constitutions and Bills of Rights of the
several States, etc., etc._ (_Life of William Lloyd Garrison, by
his Children._ Vol. I, p. 200.)
This pronouncement was amplified in the salutatory address in the first
number, as follows:
Assenting to the “self-evident truth” maintained in the American
Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, and
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights--among
which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” I shall
strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave
population.... I am aware that many object to the severity of my
language; but is there not cause for severity? I _will_ be as
harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,
I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation ...
urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am
in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not
retreat a single inch--+AND I WILL BE HEARD+. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp.
224-225.)
The young man just turned twenty-six who thus marked out the path
he was to follow for thirty-five years was an extraordinarily
single-minded and rugged character. His like has too rarely appeared in
America. Arrogant, dictatorial, intolerant, he might be, as his warmest
friends admitted; but it is a foolish judgment that will dismiss him
thus. Unyielding as granite, sheer Yankee will driven by a passionate
energy, he was born for hazardous leadership. He was a man utterly
unacquainted with fear. Lied about daily, threatened, bullied, charged
with every sin in the Decalogue and every crime on the statute-book, he
could not be coerced nor intimidated nor turned aside from his purpose.
An ascetic who cared nothing for ease or preferment; a pacifist who
fought only with the sword of the spirit; a stern moralist prophesying
wrath upon a nation of mockers, and pronouncing doom upon a people
that had forgotten God, he was an agitator fashioned after the ancient
Hebraic pattern. The stature of such a man cannot be measured by
conventional standards. Outwardly a somewhat prosaic Baptist, deeply
religious and in his younger days bigotedly orthodox, he was in reality
a spiritual child of the Old Testament, a modern Puritan on whom had
fallen the mantle of the Prophets. New England Calvinism never bred so
Puritan a soul. Hebraism was in his marrow--its noble austerity, its
consuming passion. He daily walked with righteousness and communed
with conscience. He carried God’s scales into the market place. He
would not accept his law of men. Constitutions and statutes were vain
and foolish pronouncements to him if he judged them to be contrary to
the divine enactments. He counted property in negroes and cotton as
nothing when weighed in the balance of justice. A human soul, whether
in black skin or white, was of far greater worth in his eyes than all
the warring kingdoms of this world. As fully as John Humphrey Noyes he
reëmbodied the root-and-branch righteousness of English Commonwealth
times. Others might lash the sins of his generation with whips; he
would scourge them with nettles and scorpions. He would raise such a
clamor about men’s ears that the drowsiest must awake. He would light
such a fire in the slave market of America that the evil thing should
be consumed as stubble in the white flame of righteousness.
Such primitive Hebraism, quite evidently, is calculated to make
troublesome citizens who are certain to get themselves heartily
disliked by those who approve of the world as it is. Any invasion of
the devil’s realms will create an uproar, for the devil is prompt
to defend his own. Righteousness may prophesy in the gates, but the
buying and selling of the poor goes on as usual. Amongst comfortable
folk conscience is rarely at home when justice knocks at the door;
it is gone a-visiting, or is busy, or is waiting upon Caesar, or is
gone forth to pray. Comfortable folk do not like clamor, even from
the prophets, and are content to leave justice to God with the hope
that He will not disturb business. If the tithes are duly paid, it is
a mean and censorious God that will ask how the money was got. Hence
comfortable folk, north as well as south, did not like Garrison; and
not liking him they were zealous to damn him. He was made out to be
a bogy man, busily engaged in stirring up Nat Turner insurrections,
inciting peaceful and contented slaves to discontent, flouting the
Constitution and seeking to disrupt the Union. His righteousness was so
great a stumbling-block that he was held to be an atheist by eminent
formalists who knew of righteousness only by hearsay, and learned
of God only from report. It was reckoned to him a major sin that he
forgot his manners, for must not the Lord’s work be carried on in
seemly fashion, and the money-changers be scourged from the temple
politely? “The first movement here at the North, was a rank onset
and explosion,” said the eminent Dr. Bushnell. “The first sin of this
organization was a sin of ill manners. They did not go to work like
Christian gentlemen.... The great convention which met at Philadelphia
drew up a declaration of their sentiments ... by which they willfully
and boorishly cast off the whole South from them” (Garrison, _William
Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 132, Note). What could be done with
a fellow who insisted that the devil is rarely put in a quake by
courteous treatment, and who had never learned that the Hebrew prophets
bore themselves like Christian gentlemen? That he spoke with plebeian
directness was unquestionably true.
These are your men of “caution,” and “prudence,” and
“judiciousness” [he exclaimed in a speech at Philadelphia, May 14,
1838]. Sir, I have learned to hate those words. Whenever we attempt
to imitate our great Exemplar, and press the truth of God, in all
its plainness, upon the conscience, why, we are very imprudent;
because, forsooth, a great excitement will ensue. Sir, slavery will
not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.
(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 215. Note.)
If clerical gentlemen disliked Garrison, gentlemen of State Street
disliked him much more heartily, and being the responsible custodians
of law and order, they upheld existing institutions in their own way.
Your Tory is always a Fascist at heart, and the Boston Tories naturally
adopted the principle of direct action. Unpleasant things happened
to Garrison in consequence. He was denounced at a most respectable
meeting in Faneuil Hall, “at which Washington was cheered for being
a slave-holder.” He was mobbed in his print-shop by “gentlemen of
property and standing from all parts of the city,” and was thrown into
jail by a timid mayor to save his life. Not since the days of Tom Paine
had such unmeasured vituperation been poured out on the head of an
American. It would seem that it was a perilous business to defend the
downtrodden or to remind church-members of the injunction “to undo the
heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free.” When conscience throws
down the gauntlet to economics it is certain to get some hard knocks.
It is ill-trained for a rough and tumble contest; its scruples will
not permit it to hit below the belt. But the Tory suffers no handicap
of scruple and plants his blows where he can. On the occasion of an
Abolition convention announced to be held within the shadows of Wall
Street, Bennett’s _New York Herald_ exemplified the sweetness and
light of the commercial mind in such pronouncements as this:
What business have all the religious lunatics of the free states
to gather in this commercial city for purposes which, if carried
into effect, would ruin and destroy its prosperity?... Public
opinion should be regulated. These abolitionists should not be
allowed to misrepresent New York.... When free discussion does not
promote the public good, it has no more right to exist than a bad
government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal.
It should be overthrown. On the question of the usefulness to the
public of the packed, organized meetings of these abolitionists,
socialists, Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but
one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism. They are
dangerous assemblies--calculated for mischief, and reasonable
in their character and purposes.... That half-a-dozen madmen
should manufacture opinion for the whole community, is not to be
tolerated. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 283-284.)
In consequence of which appeals to “prudence and patriotism” the
meeting was broken up, public opinion was judiciously regulated,
and the Bible and Constitution vindicated by a Bowery mob under the
leadership of a ward-heeler. It was from the impact of such ruthless
opposition that Garrison’s strategy took form; and it was direct and
uncompromising and outspoken--as sternly logical as Calhoun’s. There
were no shades in his thinking but only black and white, righteousness
and sin. Expediency was not in his vocabulary. He was as narrow as he
was intense. The catholic intellectual interests of the times touched
him but little. Transcendentalism lay quite outside his world of
thought. He was a religious soul rather than a speculative intellect,
and he measured all things by the principles of primitive Christianity.
As a young man he preferred the Calvinism of Lyman Beecher to the
Unitarianism of Channing, but later he came to perceive the intimate
relation between the major premises of Unitarianism and his social
ideals. It is idle to seek a political philosopher in a Hebrew
moralist. His somewhat naïve political conceptions were an amalgam of
French equalitarianism and Yankee perfectionism. The Declaration of
Independence was his one political textbook, in the light of which
he judged Congressional enactments and interpreted the Constitution.
With Channing he assumed an ethical sanction for natural rights, and
this assumption conducted straight to the doctrine of the higher law.
As early as 1830 his conscience was prepared to appeal from laws and
statutes to ethics, on the principle that “that which is not just is
not law.” By 1837 he had accepted the philosophy of spiritual anarchism
as set forth in the new gospel of perfectionism, and from this flowed
naturally the doctrines of Nullification and disunion.
With amazing frankness Garrison published his views to friends and
enemies, bringing all the hornets of conservatism about his ears. A
furious discussion arose within the Abolition ranks on the question of
loyalty to the political state, and the scandal of Garrison’s Fifth
Monarchy doctrine spread far. What that doctrine was he was at great
pains to make clear. Writing to Henry C. Wright on the Quaker doctrine
of non-resistance, he insisted on the sinfulness of all force whether
in a private or public capacity, and then asserted:
Human governments will remain in violent existence as long as men
are resolved not to bear the cross of Christ, and to be crucified
unto the world. But in the Kingdom of God’s dear Son, holiness and
love are the only magistracy. It has no swords, for they are beaten
into ploughshares--no spears, for they are changed into pruning
hooks--no military academy, for the saints cannot learn war any
more--no gibbet, for life is regarded as inviolate--no chains,
for all are free. And that kingdom is to be established upon the
earth, for the time is predicted when the kingdoms of this world
will become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, p. 149.)
From such premises he deduced the conclusion that government is a cross
that God permits men to endure as punishment for their sins. When they
shall voluntarily quit their sins political government will cease.
Human governments “are the results of human disobedience to the
requirements of heaven; and they are better than anarchy just as a
hailstorm is preferable to an earthquake, or the small-pox to the
Asiatic cholera.” From the silence of the Bible as to the _form_ of
such governments, he inferred not that each might claim a divine
sanction, “but that the kingdom which Christ has established on
earth is ultimately to swallow up or radically to subvert all other
kingdoms.”... “Shall we, _as Christians_, applaud and do homage
to human government? or shall we not rather lay the axe at the
root of the tree, and attempt to destroy both cause and effect
together?” Foolish are the speculations about the best form of
human government: “What is government but the express image of the
moral character of a people?” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 150-151.)
This is of course undiluted perfectionism, in which Garrison was
the most ardent of believers. Prosaic political theory had lost all
significance for him; he had got himself drunk on the new wine and was
in no mood to listen to the counsels of expediency. Like John Humphrey
Noyes he declared war upon the existing political state. He voluntarily
disfranchised himself. He raised the banner of “disloyalty” in the
_Liberator_, and summoned the Abolitionists to separate themselves
from the unclean government that protected the sin of slavery. That
the Constitution recognized the hateful system was sufficient proof to
Garrison that the Constitution itself was unclean. Let it be consumed
by its own iniquity. In 1843 he began an uncompromising attack upon
it by nailing to the masthead of the _Liberator_ his famous phrase,
“A Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell,” to which he soon
added the words, “No Union with Slaveholders.” He broke with many of
his oldest friends, with Whittier and Gerrit Smith and James Birney,
assailing them bitterly for meddling with third-party movements in
the hope of curing the evil by political action. There followed,
in consequence, a whirlwind and tempest of debate that brought a
disastrous schism upon the Abolition movement. Cries of disloyalty and
sedition filled all ears; but Garrison was indifferent to the storms
that gathered about his head. He would go forward though he went alone.
With every advance of the slave power his hatred of the Constitution,
under cover of which its advances were made, grew more bitter. He
outran southern fire eaters in advocacy of Nullification and secession.
It became his daily work to undo the labors of Webster and bring the
fundamental law into common contempt. The doctrine of no compromise
with sin made no account of the complexities of social problems--the
immediate, root-and-branch eradication of slavery or immediate
dissolution of the Union, were his alternatives. “We dissolved the
Union by a handsome vote, after a warm debate,” wrote Edmund Quincy
in 1843; “the question was ... wrapped up by Garrison in some of his
favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries
say” (_ibid._, Vol. III, p. 88).
It was at a Fourth of July meeting, following the Anthony Burns affair
of 1854, that Garrison made use of the striking appeal that attests his
extraordinary boldness and skill as an agitator. After contrasting the
principles of the Declaration of Independence and the present state of
the Republic, he went on:
He should now proceed to perform an action which would be the
testimony of his own soul, to all present, of the estimation in
which he held the pro-slavery laws and deeds of the nation.
Producing a copy of the _Fugitive Slave Law_, he set fire to it,
and burnt it to ashes. Using an old and well-known phrase, he said,
“And let all the people say, Amen”; and a unanimous cheer and shout
of “Amen” burst from the vast audience. In like manner Mr. Garrison
burned the decision of Edward G. Loring in the case of Anthony
Burns ... the multitude ratifying the fiery immolation with shouts
of applause. Then, holding up the U. S. Constitution, he branded it
as the source and parent of all the other atrocities,--“a covenant
with death and agreement with hell”--and consumed it to ashes on
the spot, exclaiming, “So perish all compromises with tyranny!
and let all the people say, Amen!” A tremendous shout of “Amen”
went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few
hisses and wrathful exclamations from some who were evidently in a
rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular
feeling. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 412.)
In such fashion did this disciple of the gospel of peace carry the
war into Macedonia. The law of conscience had come into collision
with the law of the land, and he followed conscience. For Garrison
majority votes held no mandate. He had come to regard the political
state as the mother of all mischiefs; for behind this thing of shreds
and patches he saw unscrupulous politicians whose profession was the
deceiving of simple minds, befogging moral issues with their myths and
cults--their appeals to patriotism and the Constitution--and bringing
the law of God into contempt. It was the spiritual bondage of the North
that held the negro in slavery, Garrison had come to believe, and to
free the conscience of the North was the great duty devolving upon the
Abolitionists. With his intense single-mindedness he saw no other duty,
and in doing that duty he would use no other weapon than the sword of
the spirit. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the prophet knows so little
of the resourcefulness of the market place on which he pronounces
judgment, or his zeal might suffer abatement. Slavery was not destroyed
by the conscience of Massachusetts, but by the economics of free
labor. The free-soilers were more dangerous to it for they fought with
material weapons; and old John Brown of Ossawatomie, more Hebraic even
than Garrison, was a sterner realist, who took care to load his Sharp’s
rifle while girding on the sword of the spirit. From the prophet to
the soldier is but a step, from the sword of the spirit to musket and
ball, from conscience to the Emancipation Proclamation. Single-minded
men--the Garrisons and John Browns--marshaling the discontent of
their generation, sometimes do succeed in removing mountains; but
unfortunately they leave a great scar, and the débris litters the
whole countryside. Other mountains may even arise from the waste of
the leveling. After the Emancipation Proclamation came the Fourteenth
Amendment, and out of that came the triumphant gospel of “due process
of law.” The devil understands the ways of the world too well to become
discouraged at a temporary set-back, for if righteousness succeed in
breaking the bonds that bind a generation, he knows that the market
place carries an ample stock of new cords to replace those that are
broken.
II • John G. Whittier • Puritan Quaker
If Garrison was the flintiest character amongst the militant
Abolitionists, Whittier was certainly the gentlest. Among many lovable
men he was perhaps the most lovable. Bred in a faith that had never
been dominant in New England, he escaped the induration that was the
price the New England conscience paid for its hard dogma. No thick
shell of Calvinism incrusted for him the soul of humanitarian religion.
In the Society of Friends righteousness was not daily twisted into
unloveliness, nor the beauty of holiness forgotten; and in consequence,
it was easier for him than for his Calvinist neighbors to fashion his
life upon the principles of the New Testament, and set Christ above the
Prophets.
Whittier’s family escaped many temptations by following quiet paths to
their own ends. Prosperity had never wooed the Massachusetts Quakers
away from the simple life, as it had done with so many Philadelphia
Friends, but a narrow domestic economy and social non-conformity
had nourished their religion of peace and good will. Long before
Channing discovered the religion of love in the teachings of French
humanitarianism, the early Quakers had found that primitive gospel in
the byways of Carolinian England, and had brought it to the new world.
There they had borne testimony in their daily lives to the excellence
of Christian fellowship, and there they had suffered the reproaches
and the blows of bigoted conformists. Their faith had been tried in
the fires of persecution, and the Society of Friends had justified
its use of that most excellent of sectarian names. In the sincerity
of their equalitarian fellowship the Quakers were the friends of
humanity, of the poor and the outcast of this world. Their religion
was of the week-day as well as the Sabbath. With its mystical doctrine
of the inner light--of the Holy Spirit that speaks directly to the
soul without the intermediation of priest or church--it unconsciously
spread the doctrine of democracy in an autocratic world. It interpreted
literally the principle that members of the Christian fellowship are
equals in the sight of God and in each other’s eyes--that on earth
there is neither high nor low but a common brotherhood in Christ.
It quietly set aside the pretentions of priestly hierarchies, and
substituted the principle that religion is a matter that lies with the
individual and God. Naturally a “hireling ministry” could not look
with favor on such doctrine, and the sharp hostility it aroused in
theocratic New England, sprang from the realization that the ideals
of the Quaker fellowship were dangerous to the ideals of a priestly
theocracy. The autocratic rulers of Massachusetts Bay could see little
good in the democracy of the Friends.
As became a Quietist, the master passion of Whittier’s life was
ethical. He was neither a transcendental nor a Utopian visionary, but a
primitive Christian, an apostle of good will and a friend of justice.
Sprung from a long line of New England yeomen, wholly of the soil,
simple in wants, quietly independent, he was the last lineal expression
in our literature of the primitive faith, the last authentic echo of
the spiritual democracy of the seventeenth century. A thorough Yankee
in character, the Yankee never dominated him. As a young man, to be
sure, he temporized with his Quakerism and dreamed fond dreams of
worldly ambition. The stirrings of youthful romance awakened the desire
to be a Byronic poet, and a Yankee knack with politics led him to
meddle with the hope of representing his district in Congress. He was
hand-in-glove with the time-serving Caleb Cushing, and the temptations
of political intrigue almost led to his backsliding; but he soon put
the devil behind him and gave security for his better behavior by
coming out for the cause of Abolitionism. That was the end of his hopes
of political preferment, and the more surely to burn his bridges he
published in 1833, at his own cost, a little Abolition tract entitled
_Justice and Expediency_, which was reissued by Lewis Tappan in a great
edition and scattered broadcast. The same year he attended as delegate
the National Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, and subscribed
his name to its pronouncement. Thenceforth for over thirty years he
gave his best strength to the cause, writing abundantly in prose and
verse, serving as editor of Abolition publications, and suffering the
unpleasant experiences common to the group, at one time being hunted by
a mob and stoned.
This deliberate alignment with an unpopular cause, this calm response
to the summons of conscience, was the fruit of his Quaker training.
It was no new experience for the Quaker to dissent. The Whittier
family had been Come-outers for generations, sacrificing material
well-being for their faith, and he had grown up in dissent. The long
struggle for democratic freedom in Massachusetts was a familiar story
to him. The record had come down by word of mouth and stories of
early persecutions were fireside tales in the Whittier household. His
ancestors had lived in the hard old Puritan theocracy, and yet detached
from it; and this detachment had rendered them shrewdly critical and
sensitive to injustice. With their quiet dissent from what the Quaker
conscience regarded as unrighteous, and their practical nullification
of unjust authority, Whittier was in full sympathy. His intimate
knowledge of early Massachusetts history had taught him certain things
which official historians had overlooked, the chief of which was that
dissent had been the ally and friend of freedom in New England. From
his youth up he had been a loving student of the old annals, of those
intimate narratives that preserve the voice and manner of the past;
and as he discovered how often persecution had left its stain on the
record, he was drawn to consider the superstitious aberrations of a
people supposedly devout. In middle life he gathered up in _Leaves from
Margaret Smith’s Journal of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-79_, materials that
he had long been collecting, and which, interpreted by a sympathetic
imagination, provides a surprisingly vivid account of life in New
England in the second generation.
All in all, it is Whittier’s most notable achievement in prose. Pieced
together out of old records, it is authentic as the yellow documents
from which it was drawn. The soft light of romance lies upon its
pages, sobered by historical fact and tempered by creative sympathy.
Loving yet critical, quite devastating at times in its implications,
it is an amazingly intimate narrative. The mind of Puritan New England
is uncovered in these unpretentious pages, and it does not show to
advantage. There was many a knot and seam in the old Puritan life,
much that was mean and ugly woven into the honest web. The Puritan
proneness to Quaker-baiting--aggravated to be sure by the ill manners
of the Ranters; their vulgar credulity that encouraged witch-hunting;
their callous treatment of the Indian and negro; their hardness of
nature that made them grasping and censorious: such knots and seams
in the Puritan character did not escape Whittier’s eye, but they
appear in the sketches of avaricious deacons, sour women, intolerant
magistrates--the Deacon Doles and Goody Lakes and Roger Endicotts,
whose bigotry tyrannized over the better natures of the community.
Whittier sifted his materials carefully to gather up what good wheat
there might be, yet the showing it must be confessed is but paltry.
Honest Robert Pine who will have none unjustly treated, good Mr.
Russ who counsels moderation in dealing with the unhappy victims of
mob suspicion. Captain Samuel Sewall who speaks up bravely for the
outcast--these are the remnant in Israel, the generous minority that
cannot leaven the dour and credulous mass. Yet even they are not heroic
figures to Whittier. His heroes are the Come-outers, and in particular
Peggy Brewster--reminiscent evidently of his great-grandmother, the
Quakeress Mary Peaslee, who married Robert Whittier in 1694--who is the
good Samaritan of the Puritan neighborhood, and whose loving-kindness
wins a reluctant good will that stops short of toleration of her
non-conformity.
Such intimate studies in the psychology of persecution were a liberal
education, and Whittier would have been no Quaker had he not learned
his lesson. He was justified in not thinking well of the social
conscience of respectable New England. Religious conformity, he
had come to understand, had not kept alive the torch of freedom in
Massachusetts, nor had Puritan righteousness befriended justice. Not
the great of earth but the simple may be counted on to do God’s work.
So taking his lesson to heart he quietly put aside ambition, and like
Peggy Brewster numbered himself among the remnant. Like her he would
be a Come-outer and bear his testimony against the uncleanness of the
American people in this matter of negro slavery. Not with musket and
ball would he fight, like old John Brown; but with the sword of the
spirit. The solution must lie with the conscience of the American
people. As a Friend, a man of peace, he would not deal harshly with
the supporters of slavery; he would not counsel violence. But as
a Yankee with a gift for politics, he would use political means to
jog a slothful conscience and marshal its forces. And so Whittier
became the politician amongst the Abolitionists. He proved himself a
skillful lobbyist. He was active in getting up petitions to Congress.
He supported John Quincy Adams and put pressure on the slippery Caleb
Cushing. He advocated the policy of boring from within the old parties,
but when such methods proved futile he became an active leader in
the third party movement. He was an early supporter of the Liberal
party--that in 1844 drew enough votes from Clay in New York to defeat
him for the Presidency--of the Free-Soil party, and later of the
Republican party.
It was this insistence upon the use of political methods that brought
about the unhappy break with Garrison. Immediately it was no more
than a difference over tactics, but it was embittered by a wide
cleavage of political theory. With Garrison’s conversion to spiritual
anarchism the Abolition movement was sundered by a division between
the perfectionists and the political actionists. The principle of
non-voting and of refusing allegiance to the Constitution aroused
strong opposition, and Whittier went with Birney and Gerrit Smith,
with Jonathan Sewall, John Pierpont and the Tappans in rejecting the
perfectionist policy. His political common sense turned naturally to
political agencies to accomplish his ends. “Moral action apart from
political” seemed to him an “absurdity.” But when he applied the Quaker
principle of Come-outism, and advocated separate party alignment.
Garrison attacked him with his habitual intolerance. The latter feared
a third party movement as certain to provide a rallying cry for the
commercial interest to muster the mob to its support, and overwhelm
the minority with the unthinking and selfish mass. “All political
minorities,” he argued, “are more or less liberal,” and by throwing
the Abolition strength to such organized minorities, the movement
would be “feared and respected by all political parties” (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. II, pp. 310-311). The wisest strategy,
he believed, was to seek to hold the balance of power between the old
parties--rewarding friends and punishing enemies--while laboring to
arouse the conscience of America, for ballots without conscience were
the enemies of justice.
Whittier was no such root-and-branch spirit as Garrison, and in
the political field he was a practical, somewhat prosaic Yankee,
little given to abstract speculation, skillful in minor strategical
skirmishes, inclined to opportunism. He belonged to no school of
political thought. His equalitarianism came as a heritage from his
Quaker religion rather than from political theory. To prepare himself
for his work he read Milton and Burke. The pamphlets of the great
Puritan appealed to him as the voice of the moral fervor of a heroic
age, but Milton’s aristocratic republicanism he seems to have examined
no more critically than Burke’s Whiggish legalism. Neither held
anything in common with Quaker equalitarianism. Rousseau and Tom Paine
and Jefferson, with whom he certainly would have sympathized, he seems
not to have been acquainted with. In Whittier’s New England they were
in ill repute, and the young Whittier was as naïvely provincial in
his political partisanship as was Garrison. Economics had no part in
his thought, and the economic interests that divided Federalism and
Anti-Federalism he seems never to have understood. Though sprung from
six generations of farmers who tilled the same acres, he reveals no
sympathy with agrarianism. He swallowed Clay and the American System
without a qualm, and as a young editor he wrote with pride of the
developing industrialism of Massachusetts. Neither in politics nor
in economics was he a rebellious soul. He was conscience rather than
intellect. He felt rather than thought. Only a moral issue could draw
him into strife, and even in such contests he was ill equipped to lead
the prosaic debates. His moral indignation found its natural expression
in verse, and he early took his place as the poet of the Abolition
movement, distilling into ready lyrics the emotion of the moment.
A great, even a noteworthy poet, Whittier certainly was not. Compared
with Whitman he is only a minor figure. Among the better known American
poets Bryant alone is so narrow in range and barren in suggestion. His
austere and meager life bred too little sensuousness of nature and
too few intellectual passions. An over-frugal watering of the wine of
paganism had left the New England character thin. The sap of humor that
ran so boisterously through the veins of the West, exuding a rough wit
from Davy Crockett to Mark Twain, was quite gone out of the Yankee
blood. His homely imagination was unquickened by a hearty village life
as was the case with the English Bunyan and the Scotch Burns. He had
become a bundle of Yankee nerves, responding only to moral stimuli.
The comment of Whitman sums up the Quaker poet adequately:
Whittier’s poetry stands for morality ... as filtered through the
positive Puritanical and Quaker filters; is very valuable as a
genuine utterance.... Whittier is rather a grand figure--pretty
lean and ascetic--no Greek--also not composite and universal enough
(doesn’t wish to be, doesn’t try to be) for ideal Americanism.
(Carpenter, _Life of Whitman_, p. 293.)
Never a great artist, rarely a competent craftsman, he wrote for the
most part impassioned commonplace, with occasional flashes that are not
commonplace.
The high-water mark of lyric indignation was reached in the lines to
Webster. Written at white heat, they have the passionate directness
of Thoreau’s prose. Like other Abolitionists, Whittier had clung
to his hopes of Webster in spite of frequent signs of the latter’s
backsliding. He did not sufficiently appreciate the economic
alliances that tied Webster to State Street, and he underrated his
presidential ambitions. But when the blow came with the Seventh of
March Speech, it staggered him--not alone the defection of Webster,
but the demonstrative approval of his wealthy constituents. For having
“convinced the understanding and touched the conscience of a nation,”
Webster was formally thanked by some seven hundred addressers from
the most respectable circles of Massachusetts--great men like Rufus
Choate, George Ticknor, W. H. Prescott, President Jared Sparks and
Professor Felton of Harvard, Moses Stuart and Leonard Woods of Andover
Theological Seminary. It was an hour of profound discouragement that
laid bare what colossal difficulties stood in the way of Abolitionism.
“The scandalous treachery of Webster and the _backing_ he has received
from Andover and Harvard,” wrote Whittier to Garrison, “show that we
have nothing to hope for from the great political parties and religious
sects” (William Sloane Kennedy, _John G. Whittier_, p. 113).
The scathing lines of _Ichabod_ were read throughout the North, and
they must have rankled in Webster’s heart. Even Whittier was troubled
by their severity and thirty years later he wrote a second Webster
poem which he set beside _Ichabod_ in his collected works. _The Lost
Occasion_ is a testimony to the kindliness of Whittier’s Quaker heart
that did not love to offend; but no kindliness of memory could change
or soften the just verdict of the lines:
Of all we loved and honored, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel’s pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.
All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul is fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!
Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
If Whittier was ill acquainted with the Boston of State Street
and the Back Bay, and the Cambridge of Harvard culture, he knew
intimately the Massachusetts of the village and the farm, and the
overwhelming repudiation of Webster and the Whig party, following
the Seventh of March Speech, would seem to have justified his lyric
confidence expressed in the vigorous heptameters of _Massachusetts to
Virginia_. For those who lived in the social world of Commissioner
Loring--professor of law at Harvard--and Rufus Choate, it was hard
not to think that Massachusetts had come to degenerate days. The fine
old-school Federalist, Josiah Quincy, commenting on the Boston that
watched Sims returned to slavery, wrote:
When the [Fugitive Slave] law passed, I did think the moral sense
of the community would not enforce it; I said that it never
would be. But now I find that my fellow-citizens are not only
_submissive_ to, but that they are earnestly active for, its
enforcement. The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston
has now become a mere shop--a place for buying and selling goods;
and I suppose, also, of _buying and selling men_. (Garrison,
_William Lloyd Garrison_, Vol. III, p. 328.)
And Lowell, living in the same mean atmosphere, wrote:
Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She’s akneelin’ with the rest,
She, thet ough’ to ha’ clung ferever
In her grand old eagle-nest.
(_Biglow Papers_, Part I, 1.)
But Whittier professed to think better of the conscience of New
England. A strong pride of the commonwealth runs through the lines
that name over the towns of Massachusetts, from “free, broad
Middlesex,” westward and northward to the hills of Hampshire:
And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay!
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,
And the cheer of Hampshire’s woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.
The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,
Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!
Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!
When at last the long controversy was over and release from the
struggle came to Whittier, his poetry grew richer and mellower. He was
not made to be a fighter, and it was with a sigh of relief that he
turned to the Elysian fields he had dreamed of, while he was turning
with his plow the rough stubble of a cause. Looking back upon those
arduous days, he sketched half whimsically his own portrait in _The
Tent on the Beach_.
And one there was, a dreamer born,
Who, with a mission to fulfill,
Had left the Muses’ haunts to turn
The crank of an opinion-mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war with wrong,
Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough
That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow.
Too quiet seemed the man to ride
The wingéd Hippogriff Reform;
Was his a voice from side to side
To pierce the tumult of the storm?
A silent, shy, peace-loving man,
He seemed no fiery partisan
To hold his way against the public frown,
The ban of Church and State, the fierce Mob’s hounding down.
For while he wrought with strenuous will
The work his hands had found to do,
He heard the fitful music still
Of winds that out of dream-land blew.
The din about him could not drown
What the strange voices whispered down;
Along his task-field weird processions swept,
The visionary pomp of stately phantoms stepped.
The common air was thick with dreams,--
He told them to the toiling crowd;
Such music as the woods and streams
Sang in his ear he sang aloud;
In still, shut bays, on windy capes,
He heard the call of beckoning shapes,
And, as the gray old shadows prompted him,
To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim.
Many excellent things he did in those quiet later years; old time
pictures like _Snowbound_, with its homely fireside economy long since
buried under the snows of forgotten winters; vigorous tales like
_Abraham Davenport_; ballads like _Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, that have
something of the spirit of the primitive. He had given thirty years of
his life to the cause of social justice, and surely none would grudge
him in old age his rambles in pleasanter fields. It was well that he
could turn to the past, for the America of the new exploitative age,
the New England of Lowell and Lawrence, he never understood. Black
slavery he understood, but wage slavery he comprehended no more than
did Garrison. To the end he remained a primitive soul, ill equipped to
understand a materialistic philosophy of society. There is something
pathetic in his _Songs of Labor_. His economics, like his democracy,
was of a bygone time, having no kinship with a scrambling free-soilism
or a rapacious capitalism. There is scant room in this world for the
Friend with his unmilitant dream of the fellowship. With his passion
for freedom, established in the gospel of righteousness, the Quaker
Whittier was fast becoming an anachronism in industrial New England
that was concerned about very different things. How old-fashioned he
had become is suggested by certain lines that phrase his greetings
to later times. Spare, somewhat halting in rhythm, yet transparently
sincere, they constitute an apologia that New England need feel no
shame for.
Yet here at least an earnest sense
Of human right and weal is shown;
A hate of tyranny intense,
And hearty in its vehemence,
As if my brother’s pain and sorrow were my own.
O Freedom! if to me belong
Nor mighty Milton’s gift divine,
Nor Marvell’s wit and graceful song,
Still with a love as deep and strong
As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine!
III • Harriet Beecher Stowe • A Daughter of Puritanism
No more Puritan mind than Mrs. Stowe’s ever contributed to the
literature of New England. Her remarkable native gifts were
unconsciously given specific shape by a rigid environment. For years
the artist in her struggled to subdue the moralist, and never quite
succeeded. Before she dipped her pen in ink her mind had taken its
set. She could not hope to escape being a preacher. Daughter of a
minister and wife of a minister, with brothers and sons ministers,
she lived all her life in an atmosphere of religion. She was baptized
in creeds and prattled the language of sermons as the vernacular of
childhood. Born at a critical time for the old New England faith, her
youth was passed amid the storm clouds of the Unitarian controversy,
in an atmosphere charged with electricity. Connecticut was the very
citadel of the Edwardean orthodoxy, and Litchfield was as rugged in
its faith as the hills it nestled among; and when the old-school
Calvinism of Boston was in danger of utter rout, it naturally turned
to a Connecticut Daniel to save the venerable cause. Stout old Lyman
Beecher was a host in himself. Son of a Connecticut blacksmith and
himself brought up at the forge before he quitted it to seek learning
at Yale College under Timothy Dwight, able, kindly, practical, with
pronounced literary tastes and a capable pen, he was a stalwart
Edwardean, militantly conservative, who damned our perverse human
nature with incontrovertible logic. Harriet was eight years old
when Channing preached his Baltimore sermon, and fourteen when her
father was summoned to Hanover Street Church, Boston. Her childish
heart had already been given to Baxter’s _Saint’s Rest_, and her
imagination awakened by Cotton Mather’s _Magnalia Christi Americana_.
Theocratic New England lay enveloped for her in a haze of romance, more
fascinating than any Sir Walter had woven about the Scottish Highlands;
she had discovered there noble figures and heroic deeds to kindle
an ardent hero worship. At fourteen she was converted--too easily
it seems, for she could not demonstrate to the satisfaction of her
spiritual counselors that she had been sufficiently under conviction
of sin. Thereafter to the end of her life the greatest of all dramas
for her was the drama of the soul concerned with the great business of
salvation.
The surest clue to Mrs. Stowe’s literary secret is to be found in
her sympathetic understanding of the spiritual life of Puritan New
England. She was a lifelong student of New England psychology, with
its “profound, unutterable, and therefore unuttered melancholy” that
resulted from open-eyed contemplation of grim fact. The past that
lay bleak and stern behind the sober present she understood as few
others did. Before her sympathetic eyes it fell into just proportions,
and quite naturally she became the historian of her people. The
autobiographical material that fills her later work--her husband’s
recollections in _Old-Town Folks_, and her own in _Poganuc People_--is
much more than autobiography; it is intimate history of New England,
written by one who in distilling her own experience was writing
the chronicle of a race. In a brilliant chapter of the former work
she gives a remarkable analysis of the intellectual development of
Puritan New England, and provides the setting against which her own
intellectual life should be placed. To overlook it is to miss the most
suggestive commentary on her work that has ever been written.
This daughter of Puritanism traces her intellectual antecedents
back to the long struggle of Puritan rationalism with feudal custom
and medieval ideas. The old English Puritans, “by nature the most
reverential and most loyal portion of the community,” in destroying the
divine-right sovereignty of King Charles, were impelled to transfer
that sovereignty to a higher King. In pulling down the temporal, they
erected a divine sovereignty; and their passionate attachment to the
new Sovereign was the natural response to “the pleading and yearning
within them of a faculty robbed of its appropriate object, and longing
for support and expression.” But the theologies to which they yielded
intellectual allegiance were a “legacy from past monarchical and
medieval ages.” To free themselves from this unhappy legacy, and create
a democratic theology, was an arduous work that needed two hundred
years to accomplish; and not until the Revolution spread a new social
philosophy through America, did the work go forward rapidly. Wanting
such a democratic philosophy Puritan New England wandered in the old
theological fogs. It was Jonathan Edwards who first turned the New
England mind to rationalism, and began that long “controversy” that
was to unsettle so much. But unhappily the rationalism of Edwards
was turned aside to reactionary ends, and his _Treatise on True
Virtue_ was “one of the strongest attempts to back up by reasoning
the old monarchical and aristocratic ideas of the supreme right of
the king and upper classes.” Nevertheless he set all New England to
rationalizing, and it was this severe discipline that carried her
people soberly through the Revolutionary War, and preserved them from
the excesses which followed the Revolution in France. And it was this
same discipline that prepared them for the eventual re-discovery of
the humanity of Jesus and the democracy of his religion. New England
had been struggling towards democracy through the bog of its feudal
theology; it became consciously democratic with the appearance of the
new theology (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter XXIX).
This rationalistic bias of eighteenth-century New England suffices to
explain for Mrs. Stowe the stern temper and angular individuality of
the old Puritan Yankee. Her particular hero and saint was Jonathan
Edwards, and her lesser hero and saint was Samuel Hopkins; and in both
it was the courageous rationalism that appealed to her. In them, and
more particularly in the former, she discovered the creative force that
quickened a religion that was falling into dead formalism, that gave
it fresh vitality and made it the central fact of everyday New England
life. Across the world of her youth lay the shadow--or the light--of
the great Edwards, and the great Hopkins was his intellectual heir.
In another chapter of _Old-Town Folks_ she sketches the Edwardean
influence in bold outline.
The ministers of the early colonial days of New England, though
well-read, scholarly men, were more statesmen than theologians.
Their minds ran upon the actual arrangements of society, which were
in great measure left in their hands, rather than on doctrinal and
metaphysical subtleties. They took their confession of faith just
as the great body of Protestant reformers left it, and acted upon
it as a practical foundation, without much further discussion,
until the time of President Edwards. He was the first man who began
the disintegrating process of applying rationalistic methods to the
accepted doctrines of religion, and he rationalized far more boldly
and widely than any publishers of his biography have ever dared to
let the world know. He sawed the great dam and let out the whole
waters of discussion over all New England, and that free discussion
led to all the shades of opinion of our modern days. Little as he
thought it, Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were the last results
of the current set in motion by Jonathan Edwards. (Chapter XIX.)
In this flood let loose by the metaphysical saw of Jonathan Edwards,
Mrs. Stowe found the material for her New England tales. In no other
pages does one realize so fully the tremendous, vital significance
of religion to the children of Puritanism, nor appreciate how narrow
a course their lives ran between the farm and the meeting-house. A
domestic economy and a parochial theology absorbed their energies,
and they took on sharp and angular imprints from a severe routine.
It was a school of discipline that created individual character,
and Mrs. Stowe possessed a loving eye for the odd and original. She
delighted in emphasizing the theological differences that ran through
Yankee families, giving little twists to character, and rising to the
tongue in scraps of confirmatory Scripture. Large-hearted, motherly
Grandmother Badger, in _Old-Town Folks_, was a stern Calvinist who
daily threw predestination in the face of her easy-going Arminian
husband, and exchanged syllogisms in a Sabbath-day “battle of the
Infinities” with her son from Yale. Theology provided the staple of
talk in the farmer’s kitchen; it was the axis on which turned the
simple country life. _Old-Town Folks_ and _Poganuc People_ are cross
sections of old New England, with its lingering prejudices in favor of
rank,[454] its Arminian Parson Lothrop in wig and gold cane, and its
Calvinist Dr. Cushing hostile to all democratic Jacobinism, its country
yokels, its stubborn yeomen who parade their independence by voting the
democratic ticket openly in the face of gentlemanly Federalists, its
sharp contrasts of a stately old order and a somewhat bumptious new,
yet with the hard New England granite snugly laid up and bonded with
the mortar of religion--a strange dead world that emerges distinctly
through the haze of Victorian sentiment. For Mrs. Stowe was a child
of her own romantic generation as well as a daughter of Puritanism,
and it was easy for her to discover suggestions of Utopia in a world
where minister and people mingled theology with their corn-huskings and
apple-bees.
Between these sketches and the Abolition novels stands _The
Minister’s Wooing_, with its Puritan heroine bleached into pure
holiness under the cold sunshine of Hopkinsian theology, and its
unworldly minister who demonstrated the sincerity of his creed of
disinterested benevolence--of willing to be damned for the glory of
God--by voluntarily yielding his betrothed to an earlier lover. It
is a love story without sex, as befits the wooing of a Puritan nun
by her spiritual father, set against a Yankee background of capable
housekeeping and dignified tea-drinking, subdued to proper decorum by
religion, and touched with tragedy by the shadow of damnation that
falls on the unregenerate--a world in which the beauty of holiness is
somewhat pale and austere, and where disinterested benevolence finds a
thin and obdurate soil to strike root in. Mrs. Stowe was drawn to the
theme, very evidently, by the impulse of her two Utopian enthusiasms,
her interest in Abolition and her affection for the ways of old New
England. Such romance as blossomed under those bleak skies she loved
to gather into a Yankee nosegay, and in her sympathetic hands the old
slave-running Newport becomes almost lovable and human. She might
find the theology hard, but she forgave the sermon out of love for
the preacher. As the historian of the human side of Calvinism she
tempered dogma with affection. In unsympathetic print those old sermons
were almost unbelievably harsh and ungainly; as theologians those
bewigged preachers were dry as the chips of last year’s woodpile; but
as husbands and fathers and neighbors, they were usually kind and
unselfish and helpful. Her father Lyman Beecher was an arid dogmatist
on the Lord’s Day, but on week-days he fished and hunted rabbits and
went nutting with his sons, made garden or smoked hams, or helped a
neighbor with plowing or haying, and was an unusually capable and
cheery member of a busy little world. In the light of such domestic
exegesis the bleakness of his theology was softened, and the dogmatic
theologian became a very human person.
Thus instructed Mrs. Stowe found no difficulty in discovering the human
side of Dr. Samuel Hopkins, or understanding how the hard doctrine
might cover the gentlest of souls--that the very intensity of devotion
to the logic of a stern creed betokened a depth of religious sincerity
that would find issue in generous deeds. A thinker who can dig from
the harsh soil of Calvinism the doctrine of disinterested benevolence
will discover a tender conscience in his own bosom. One might hazard
a guess, indeed, that the story of Samuel Hopkins was an unconscious
defense of the New England ministers against the sharp charges of
the Abolitionists that the clergy were half-hearted in the cause or
openly hostile. With her conviction of the unselfish nobility of their
lives, Mrs. Stowe must have taken a secret pleasure in revealing the
good Doctor as a forerunner of the Abolitionists, and in pointing
out that the crabbed logician of the Edwardean school, the theologian
immersed in the abstractions of a grotesque system, was nevertheless
a light set upon a hill, a primitive Christian with heart overflowing
with loving-kindness, who understood the iniquity of slavery and
turned shepherd to the outcast to his own hurt. The figure of the
unworldly minister is drawn with loving hand and his angularities made
less rugged. His noble spirituality shrivels and consumes the mean
excuses of his slave-running parishioner; it spreads quietly over
the countryside, and his daily life is a sermon that quickens hearts
that his theology leaves cold. There is preaching aplenty in the
book--quite too much for later stomachs; but it scarcely detracts from
the significance of the story as a document of Puritan New England,
revealing how a tender conscience was stirring beneath the crabbed
exterior of the old Calvinism.
In the light of such antecedents and such training Mrs. Stowe’s
passionate concern over slavery becomes easily comprehensible. Her
Puritan conscience was quickened by her warm human sympathies. She had
come close to the hateful thing during the years spent at Cincinnati,
where the Abolition sentiment of the Lane Seminary students aroused
such bitter opposition that President Lyman Beecher was forced to
approve the decision of the trustees to forbid any discussion of
slavery, with the result that so great a hegira of students took
place from Lane to Oberlin that the seminary was forced to close.
Only the fact that two miles of Ohio mud provided defensive outworks
saved the building and the houses of the teachers from the hands of
the Cincinnati mob. She had visited in Kentucky; she had been to the
slave markets; she had seen her father and brother aid runaway slaves
by means of the underground railway. A profound sense of the iniquity
of the system oppressed her, and when the Fugitive Slave Bill came
to fill up the measure of her wrath, she poured out her heart in
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Despite its obvious blemishes of structure and
sentimentalism it is a great human document that stripped away the
protective atmosphere from the sacred institution, and laid bare its
elementary injustice. It brought the system home to the common feeling
and conscience. The strong religious coloring emphasized the Abolition
argument that slavery trafficked in Christian souls, and rendered it
hateful to every humanitarian instinct. It was noble propaganda, and
the humor and pathos, the passion for social righteousness, still
linger in its pages to make a later generation wonder that our fathers
should so long have tolerated this evil thing.
Five years later she published _Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal
Swamp_, a thoughtfully elaborated statement of the complex problem,
with a suggested solution that only thrust into relief the fact that it
had indeed become an irrepressible conflict--the same solution that had
been hinted at thirty years before in Kennedy’s _Swallow Barn_, namely,
a system of paternalistic emancipation, based on the historical analogy
of the extinction of English villeinage, the slaves to be treated as
wards by the masters and educated for gradual emancipation. It was a
feudal solution of a feudal problem, but it took higher humanitarian
ground than human nature can, and Mrs. Stowe recognized the complex of
passion and interests in which the problem was involved, by removing
her southern emancipationist to Canada to try his experiment. More
striking, perhaps, is the shift from the Christian pacifism of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_ to the economics of _Dred_. The former had made appeal
to the humanitarianism of the North; the latter proposed to appeal to
the self-interest of the South. The slave states, Mrs. Stowe’s heroine
argued, were being ruined by slavery, and if they were to expect a sane
economic future, they must destroy the wasteful system. The contrast
between Yankee thrift under free labor and plantation shiftlessness
under slave labor had been pointed out by Whittier in his _Justice and
Expediency_ as early as 1833 and by Caruthers in his _Kentuckian in
New York_ in 1834--statements that perhaps drew Mrs. Stowe’s attention
to the economic phases involved; nevertheless the recognition of the
complexity of the problem, and the attempt to deal with it adequately,
lessened the popular appeal of _Dred_. The book is more skillfully
done than _Uncle Tom_, it is far richer in background material--in
vivid sketches of poor whites, of revivalist preachers, of plantation
life--it provides in Old Tiff a delightful study of the negro servant
and it suggests the perennial fear of a negro uprising; but it lacks
the singleness of appeal that makes for telling propaganda. It was not
its melodrama that hindered its success. The public had swallowed that
in _Uncle Tom_ with a hearty appetite. It was rather the dissipation
of dramatic interest, the want of a striking figure to capture the
imagination and sympathy. It is a better sociological study but a
weaker story.
It was hard for the New England conscience to quit the pulpit and turn
artist; and it was particularly hard for Mrs. Stowe with her ardent
nature and multiplying domestic cares. She could bring her soul under
discipline but not her art. She never trained herself in craftsmanship,
never learned restraint, but suffered her pen to range freely as her
emotions directed. The creative instinct was strong in her but the
critical was wholly lacking. Richly endowed though she was her work
has suffered the fate that pursues those who forget that beauty alone
survives after emotion subsides.
Footnotes
[454] “It’s a hard struggle for our human nature to give up titles and
ranks, though,” said Miss Mehitable. “For my part, I have a ridiculous
kindness for them yet. I know it’s all nonsense; but I can’t help
looking back to the court we used to have at the Government House in
Boston.” (_Old-Town Folks_, Chapter VI.)
Part Three: The Transcendental Mind
Chapter I • The Genesis of Transcendentalism
From the doctrine of the open mind that was the core of Unitarianism,
came the transcendental movement that marked the full flowering of
the New England renaissance. It was the native response of the mind
of New England to the summons of revolutionary romanticism, and its
ardor was the greater for being so long delayed. Creatively influenced
though it was by French Utopianism and German mysticism, its manners
and mode of thought received a particular impress from an environment
long preparing and that was natively congenial. “Practically,” says
its most penetrating historian, transcendentalism “was an assertion of
the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the
immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural
attributes to the natural constitution of mankind.”[455] It was the
glowing expression of philosophic Utopianism, the flaring up of old
fires of idealism, before the scientific and materialistic reactions
destroyed its romantic dreams. It accepted kinship with the social
idealism of the Declaration of Independence; it accepted the dynamic
principle of equalitarianism; but it sought to go farther and provide a
sure defense and justification of an idealism that it professed to find
established in human nature, by establishing it in metaphysics.
The explanation of this curious throwback to earlier times in the mind
of transcendental New England is clear enough to anyone acquainted with
the history of Puritan thought struggling with the mystical element of
Christian experience. Since the far-off days of Roger Williams--the
seeker and mystic who was so great a puzzle to his realistic
brethren--idealism had been starved in New England. Its mystical
aspirations had been repressed by dogma, and its elusive dreams brought
to nothing. Jonathan Edwards struggled life-long to hold his idealism
in subjection to theology, and ended in abortive reaction; a potential
Emerson, another Berkeley, he re-welded the bonds of dogma on the mind
of New England, putting off for two generations the day of its release.
Even in the freer minds idealism suffered from the repressions of the
common rationalism; with Locke and Hume in the ascendancy the mystic
found the times uncongenial to his needs. The dawn of a new day seemed
to be breaking with the shift of interest from theology to politics,
during the stirring days of the Revolution. The submerged idealism of
New England came to expression in the dreams of homespun democrats
like Sam Adams, and expanded in the sunshine of French Utopianism; but
unfortunately Boston Federalism reasserted the old dogmatisms and put
a speedy end to the movement. It shut the door upon all democratic
aspiration and bade it go about its business. It was from such a
narrow environment that the rising movement of Unitarianism received
its impress. From a sterile rationalism, a respectable close-fisted
conservatism, it could not escape; and in consequence the new movement
of liberalism was taken over by Federalism and became a new orthodoxy.
“The pale negations of Boston Unitarianism”--to use Emerson’s
well-known phrase--provided little nourishment for transcendental hopes.
Nevertheless Unitarianism carried within it the seeds of the new
faith--in its intellectual attitude, if not in its philosophy. “The
Unitarians as a class,” remarks Frothingham, “belonged to the school
of Locke, which discarded the doctrine of innate ideas, and its
kindred beliefs.... Unitarianism ... has rarely, if ever, been taught
or held by any man of eminence in the church who was a Platonist”
(_Transcendentalism in New England_, Chapter VI). But in spite of
its eighteenth-century nurture--because of it, indeed--Unitarianism
was a profoundly liberalizing movement. It was a narrow and local
phase of a world-wide revolution; the special contribution of Boston
to the great work of disintegrating the past to make ready for the
future. It loosened the grip of dogma on the Puritan mind and widened
the field of reading and thinking. But it did very much more--it
recovered the original principle of Protestantism, the principle of
individual responsibility, that had been tacitly denied by Calvinistic
orthodoxy. It asserted the essential decency of human nature--men may
not be the children of God but they are assuredly not children of the
devil; and it summoned this decent human nature to live decently in
accordance with its nature. It would not coop up the mind in dogma; it
would not close all roads to heaven but one. The Unitarians might be
instinctively conservative, as was natural to prosperous persons, but
they at least acknowledged “themselves to be friends of free thought
in religion.” Their doctrine was not a creed but an attitude of mind.
If they themselves were not Seekers, they professed a willingness
for others to become Seekers. Very likely few of them measured up to
the full stature of such liberalism; nevertheless they “honestly but
incautiously professed a principle broader than they were able to
stand by, and avowed the absolute freedom of the human mind as their
characteristic faith” (_ibid._, Chapter VI).
All this was excellent, but it was not enough. It remained to see
what the free mind should discover in its venturesome quest into the
unknown. Intellectually emancipated, with the bleak dogmas of election
and reprobation put away, with the God of wrath dethroned and the
God of love lifted up, and with the dynamic principle of freedom of
inquiry in their possession, the younger generation of New England
intellectuals naturally opened their eyes to discover what winds of
new doctrine were blowing in the world. They were pretty much all
Unitarians--the young transcendentalists--and largely clergymen; their
primary interest was metaphysical and they had already abandoned Locke
for Plato. The rationalistic eighteenth century was dead to them and
they set forth to discover another age. Hints and suggestions of
that better age had come to them from overseas--from Wordsworth and
Shelley, from Cousin and Madame de Staël, from Coleridge and Carlyle;
and the fresh beauty of that new poetry, the enormous stimulus of that
new metaphysic, fired them with a desire to seek this inspiration at
its source and drink from the living waters. And so they discovered
romantic Germany where the new idealism had quite routed the philosophy
of sensationalism, and a great school of transcendental thinkers was
in triumphant possession of the field. It was a profoundly stimulating
discovery, and from it dated the rise of New England transcendentalism.
The immediate creative influence of the new contact with Germany was to
strengthen the incipient Platonism of the rebellious intellectuals, and
provide it with an added sanction. Transcendentalism, it must always
be remembered, was a faith rather than a philosophy; it was oracular
rather than speculative, affirmative rather than questioning; and it
went to Germany to find confirmation of its faith, not to reëxamine
its foundations. Faith preceded metaphysics, and if the metaphysics
had been lacking intuition would have supplied its place, poetic
inspiration would have sufficed the needs of transcendental minds. They
had found God for themselves before the philosophers justified them;
they took to Germany what they sought there. Nevertheless it was a
tremendous experience to come upon their own philosophy there, erected
into a system, supported by a complete metaphysic; a philosophy that
had put to rout the fashionable skepticism of Voltaire and Condillac,
established on the sensationalism of Locke, and offering justification
for faith in God and man--faith in a divinity indwelling in nature
and the individual soul--by a masterly dialectics. That experience
determined the development of New England transcendentalism. The
metaphysic of Kant, the mysticism of Jacobi, the idealistic egoism of
Fichte, the transcendentalism of Schleiermacher--the new gospel of
the renascent German spirit--these were the living waters of truth to
the thirsty minds of the New England intellectuals, from which they
drank eagerly, never doubting their sufficiency. They were poets and
prophets; they were young and strong in faith; others might concern
themselves with the dialectics of idealism, they would apply it in
their daily lives.
In essence this new transcendental faith was a glorification of
consciousness and will. It rested on the rediscovery of the soul that
had been dethroned by the old rationalism; and it eventuated in the
creation of a mystical egocentric universe wherein the children of God
might luxuriate in their divinity. The Unitarians had pronounced human
nature to be excellent; the transcendentalists pronounced it divine.
They endowed it with great potentialities; made of it a dwelling place
of the Most High; discovered the secret voice of God in the buried life
that men call instinct; refused to heed any other command save this
inner voice of God. With ebbing faith men may deny their own divine
nature, but the divinity is not destroyed; the music of the indwelling
Godhood murmurs in the shell till the tide returns to flood it again.
The one great miracle is the daily rebirth of God in the individual
soul; every day is a new day; every act is a fresh wonder; faith, hope,
trust, accompany man in his adventurous journeyings. Why, therefore,
demanded the transcendentalist, should he not trust himself? Why should
he not walk confident in his own high purpose? Why should he doubt and
question the buried compulsions that urge him forward? If he is indeed
a child of God, let him live as unto God; and if it should turn out
that there has been some mistake in the premises and he proves to be a
child of the devil, then let him live as unto the devil. Better so than
not to trust himself.
Quite obviously they were arch-romantics--these young poets of the new
faith; children of an age given over to new hopes and disintegrating
revolutions; inexperienced prophets of a world in flux, before the
scientific spirit had stripped them of their wings. The fascinating
book of nature and of man had been newly opened to them, and like
Miranda they were ready to exclaim,
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!
They could see only God because in their thinking God had filled
their minds. No evil lurked in the secret places of their hearts to
whisper doubts concerning the goodness of life; no ominous clouds
veiled the divine light that wrapped their universe about. After
two hundred years of discipline in righteousness the old dogmatic
pessimism was dissipated, leaving not a rack behind. The evil was gone
and God remained; and in this new world the sons of God were to be
henceforth heirs of the kingdom, free to fulfill that good which is
the final reality. Arch-romantics, they were dreaming a transcendental
dream, as other arch-romantics were dreaming their Jacksonian dream,
their imperialistic dream, their Utopian dream. Romanticism comes to
different issues in different men and different times: Emerson and
Jefferson were unlike enough, as their worlds were unlike; but they
were both romantics and their idealism was only a different expression
of a common spirit.
Years after the transcendental ferment had subsided, one of the lesser
prophets of the movement offered a statement of the faith that deserves
to be recalled:
Transcendentalism [he said] relies on those ideas in the mind
which are laws in the life. Pantheism is said to sink man and
nature in God; Materialism to sink God and man in nature;
and Transcendentalism to sink God and nature in man. But the
Transcendentalist at least is belied and put in jail by the
definition which is so neat at the expense of truth. He made
consciousness, not sense, the ground of truth.... Is the soul
reared on the primitive rock? or is no rock primitive, but the
deposit of spirit--therefore in its lowest form alive, and ever
rising into organism to reach the top of the eternal circle again,
as in the well one bucket goes down empty and the other rises
full? The mistake is to make the everlasting things subjects of
argument instead of sight.... Our soul is older than our organism.
It precedes its clothing. It is the cause, not the consequence,
of its material elements; else, as materialists understand, it
does not exist.... What is it that accepts misery from the Most
High, defends the Providence that inflicts its woes, espouses its
chastiser’s cause, purges itself in the pit of its misery of all
contempt of His commands, and makes its agonies the beams and
rafters of the triumph it builds? It is the immortal principle.
It is an indestructible essence. It is part and parcel of the
Divinity it adores. It can no more die than he can. It needs no
more insurance of life than its author does. Prove its title? It
is proof of all things else. It is substantive, and everything
adjective beside. It is the kingdom all things will be added to.
(C. A. Bartol, quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism in New
England_, Chapter XIV.)
This is sheer mysticism, and mystics in greater or less degree all
the transcendentalists were--isolated and lonely in the midst of men,
seeking always a larger fellowship, awaiting those fleeting moments
of illumination that should light up the meaning of life. “Mine is
a certain brief experience,” says Emerson, “which surprised me in
the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time,--whether
in the body or out of the body, God knoweth,--and made me aware
that I had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law
existed for me and for all; that to me belong trust, a child’s trust
and obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool
more” (_The Transcendentalist_). Fleeting and incommunicable are such
illuminations, yet like the clear sunlight to eyes that are open. “If
you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my
face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If
you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say” (_ibid._).
And because the realist found himself quite incapable of such
understanding, the transcendentalist turned away from him to live by
himself. “They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when
they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend.”
Such an attitude of mind may easily become the father of criticism.
Communing with the ideal rarely begets complacency; the actual
seems poor and mean in comparison with the potential. Hence the
transcendentalists, willingly or not, were searching critics of their
generation. They were impatient of any falling short of the ideal, and
their lives in consequence Became an open indictment of a Yankee world
given over to materialism. “By their unconcealed dissatisfaction,” said
Emerson, “they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of man to
man.” “Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind,
but with his degree. There is not enough of him,--that is the only
fault.... They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts
every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a finished man!”
(_The Transcendentalist._)
As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of
men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of
this vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered by the men,
there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained.
Nay, they have made the experiment, and found that, from the
liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the
courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the
cotillion-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly
compromise and seeming, which indicates a frightful skepticism, a
life without love, and an activity without aim. (_Ibid._)
Idealists though they were, they could not escape meddling with the
real which encompassed them on all sides--with institutions, laws,
society, with the state itself. They were far more interested in God
than in Caesar, and they found it impossible to divide loyalties
that too often clashed. When Caesar essayed to impose his will upon
theirs, when he put their ideals in jeopardy by demanding allegiance
to laws they did not approve, they quietly denied him sovereignty and
followed their own paths. With such men nothing could be done; their
very lives were a criticism and a judgment on New England and America.
Transcendentalism may have run into its follies, but foolish in its
critical judgment--blind to the gap between profession and reality--it
was not. It might be severe, but it was honest and intelligent, and
honest intelligent criticism America stood greatly in need of.
Footnotes
[455] See Frothingham, _Transcendentalism in New England_. Chapter VI.
Chapter II • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Transcendental Critic
At the age of thirty-six the man who was to become the most searching
critic of contemporary America expressed his conception of his mission
in the following passage:
What shall be the substance of my shrift? Adam in the garden, I am
to new-name all the beasts of the field and all the gods in the
sky. I am to invite men drenched in Time to recover themselves
and come out of time, and taste their native immortal air. I
am to fire with what skill I can the artillery of sympathy and
emotion. I am to indicate constantly, though all unworthy, the
Ideal and Holy Life, the life within life, the Forgotten Good, the
Unknown Cause in which we sprawl and sin. I am to try the magic of
sincerity, that luxury permitted only to kings and poets. I am to
celebrate the spiritual powers in their infinite contrast to the
mechanical powers and the mechanical philosophy of this time. I am
to console the brave sufferers under evils whose end they cannot
see, by appeals to the great optimism, self-affirmed in all bosoms.
(_Journals_, Vol. V, p. 288.)
Seven days before Emerson set down this transcendental pronouncement,
he had written in his journal a different comment:
A question which well deserves examination now is the Dangers of
Commerce. This invasion of Nature by Trade with its Money, its
Credit, its Steam, its Railroad, threatens to upset the balance of
man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than
Babylon or Rome. Very faint and few are the poets or men of God.
Those who remain are so antagonistic to this tyranny that they
appear mad or morbid, and are treated as such. Sensible of this
extreme unfitness they suspect themselves. And all of us apologize
when we ought not, and congratulate ourselves when we ought not.
(_Ibid._, Vol. V, pp. 285-6.)
In such comments and others scattered plentifully through his Journals,
Emerson essayed to make clear to himself the function of transcendental
criticism as he felt himself called to practice it. It was to be
no trivial or easy duty. In the midst of a boastful materialism,
shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every insincerity, fat and
slothful in all higher things, the critic proposed to try the magic
of sincerity, to apply the test of spiritual values to the material
forces and mechanical philosophies of the times. His very life must
embody criticism; his every act and word must pronounce judgment on
the barren and flatulent gods served by his countrymen. He must be a
thinker and as such he must summon to the bar of a nobler philosophy
the current standards of value and conduct. Men of the greatest
reputation must not be spared; he must “issue a _quo warranto_ and
revoke the characters of fame,” overruling the verdict of newspaper
editors and the acclaim of the electorate. Here was a revolutionary
business indeed, that the critic was proposing to himself; and the
calm serenity with which he set about it was disconcerting. A thinker
loose in the America of Daniel Webster, a thinker who proposed to
test men and measures by the magic of sincerity, was likely to prove
an unpleasantly disturbant factor in a world of pretense. Measured by
such standards the current philosophies must bate and dwindle, and the
common ideals shrink to the mean and paltry. The life of an honest
thinker laid on the America of 1840 would reveal how far short it came
from the stature of intellectual manhood.
Emerson the critic has been too much obscured to common view by Emerson
the brilliant dispenser of transcendental aphorisms. The oracular
_Essays_ with their confident wisdom--the sententious expression of
the middle period of a life that came to late maturity--interpose
themselves between the young priest whose intellectual interests
quietly detached themselves from Unitarian orthodoxy, and the mature
critic whose loyalties quietly detached themselves from the gods of his
generation. The very brilliancy of the _Essays_ conceals the laborious
processes by which their abundant wisdom was distilled. One must go
to the _Journals_ for that--to those intimate records that reveal how
patiently he sought for truth and how honestly he followed it. Wisdom
did not come to him of its own accord; it was painfully groped for.
As an introspective Puritan youth he began early to keep a diary of
his intellectual life, gathering into successive journals the savings
from his discursive readings. For years as a quiet student he lived
in a world of moral aphorisms, a cold, thin atmosphere where gnomic
phrases bloomed and ancient oracles uttered judgment. This was the
seedtime of his mind. He was making acquaintance with the noble dead,
gathering their utterances to make for himself a new testament. “No
man could be better occupied,” he said later, “than in making his own
bible by harkening to all those sentences which now here, now there,
now in nursery rhymes, now in Hebrew, now in English bards, thrill
him like the sound of a trumpet.” As a young man he made this his
chief concern. His early journals are an ample nursery where cuttings
from all philosophies are set out, there to grow into such plants as
circumstance should permit. The ancestral cult of the book was in his
blood, and living as he did under the threat of ill health, none too
confident that the years would lengthen out before him, he forced
himself to a severe intellectual regimen. To invest his days wisely
was his single purpose. He wanted only the best securities for his
investments, and what he got he carefully deposited, together with
the increments of his own thought, to draw upon at later need. There
were no wastrel forays in his intellectual life, no unpruned riot of
growth, but the very odds and ends of his meditation were carefully
treasured to be used when other materials were lacking. Fortunately
the stuff was of good quality that outlasted many makings-over, till
finally he got the cut to his liking. From this discipline of years
came his superlative mastery of the sententious sentence; his brilliant
utterances are rich with the thought he has crammed into them.
The cheerful serenity that never deserted him was a triumph of will
over circumstance. It was a singularly cheerless world that bred him,
subsisting by sheer will power, eating its heart out with heroic
ambitions, too grimly earnest to enjoy what it got so laboriously--the
lean aftermath of two centuries of asceticism. The business of plain
living and high thinking was a joyless manner of life, and the young
Emerson got little pleasure from it. A nature less insulated must have
broken under the strain. It was a world stricken with tuberculosis.
Of the five brothers one was mentally defective, another burnt up his
vitality and went to the West Indies to die, a third of brilliant
powers succumbed to consumption, his first wife died of the same
scourge, his second wife and Emerson himself were long affected with
incipient tuberculosis. To ease such anxious lives there was need of a
great solace, and that solace was sought in religion. The ascetic youth
ran as naturally to religious meditation as a normal child to play.
No call to conversion ever came to him; the natural man postulated
in Calvinistic dogma was washed out of him before he was born. The
earlier jottings in the journals, before philosophy came to soften the
inherited asceticism, and a transcendental revulsion from the common
pessimism had turned him into a serene optimist, often are as bleak and
austerely introspective as those morbid human documents that fill the
old libraries of Puritanism. Such meditations are thin gruel for the
nourishment of a vigorous life, and Emerson must have suffered from
innutrition if he had not come upon more substantial food.
Fortunately the old Puritan anchors were already dragging, and
Emerson was pretty well adrift when the romantic surge caught him
and sent him far along new courses. The Puritan moralizer became
the transcendental seeker; the curious-minded loiterer in the gates
of the temple, who had studied the moral winds by watching the tiny
straws of circumstance--erecting unconsidered trifles into ethical
signposts--calmly quitted the church and set forth on his intellectual
quest. The ties had long been loosening, but it was his year abroad
where he discovered ways of thinking unknown to Concord and Boston,
that effectively liberalized his mind and released him from the
narrow Yankee provincialisms. On that momentous trip Goethe, Landor,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, set him speculating on new themes,
stimulating afresh the love of Plato, in whom he had long found
inspiration. Continental idealism with its transcendental metaphysics
refashioned Emerson and put him upon his life-work.
Speaking of the intellectual revival of New England later in life, he
remarked that “Goethe was the cow from whom their milk was drawn”; but
it would seem that the influence of Wordsworth proved more immediately
stimulating, for on his return home Emerson set about the systematic
contemplation of nature which left so considerable a deposit in his
mind. Before this he had been too intent on his soul to consider the
sunshine on the fields, but thereafter he made his pilgrimages into the
country with the seriousness of one conducting a novel experiment. In
this new concern for nature there was a deliberate self-consciousness.
In temperament he was a bookish recluse, in love with the printed
page. He was not a Thoreau to love his Walden Pond for its own sake,
and it needed an effort of the will to send him as far as Auburn
wood, to lie on his back and translate nature into metaphysic. But
he had come to the point where his developing philosophy must send
him into the fields. He had looked within himself and discovered the
divinity of the individual soul; but he had not probed the non-self,
the great encompassing universe of matter by which the individual
is circumscribed and of which he is a part. To discover there the
diffused presence of God, to feel his kinship with man, to understand
that the soul is a microcosm, were necessary preliminaries to the
unfolding of his transcendental philosophy, and he went about the work
with painstaking thoroughness. From this creative contact with nature
emerged the Emerson we know, radiant with idealism, glad of life; and
this radiant gladness he put into his maiden essay, _Nature_.
This was in 1836 when Emerson was thirty-three years of age. In the
next two years he published _The American Scholar_, quintessence of
transcendental individualism, and the _Divinity School Address_, the
bible of transcendental religion. With the appearance of the second
series of _Essays_, six years later, the major ideas of his philosophy
were fully elaborated. Stripped of its idealistic phraseology, of its
beauty and fervor, the master idea of the Emersonian philosophy is the
divine sufficiency of the individual. In accepting himself he accepted
his fellows, and he accepted God. The universe he conceived of as a
divine whole, whereof each man is his own center from whom flows the
life that has flowed in upon him, perennially fresh, perennially a new
creation. The law for things is not the law for mind; man is unkinged
in acknowledging any lesser sovereignty than the sovereignty of self.
Statutes, constitutions, governments, schools, churches, banks,
trade--the coercing sum of institutions and customs--these things do
not signify; they are only idols with clay feet that blind men worship.
The true divinity dwells elsewhere, in the soul of man; and that
divinity must rule the world and not be ruled by it. The apotheosis
of individualism--such in briefest terms was the gospel of Emerson;
new only in its radiant dress and idealistic sanctions, the final
transcendental form of a doctrine spread widely by the French romantic
school. It was the same revolutionary conception that Channing had come
upon, that Jefferson had come upon, that Rousseau had come upon--the
idea which in the guise of political romanticism had disintegrated
the _ancien régime_, and in the form of philosophical romanticism
had disintegrated eighteenth-century rationalism--the idea that was
providing Utopian dreams for an ebullient democratic faith.
Thus equipped with a philosophy Emerson was prepared to begin his work
as a critic. The ideal he had drunk of was a perennial condemnation of
the material. The mean and ignoble ends pursued by a mean and ignoble
society were a challenge to the serenity of his faith, and he must set
himself to analyze the causes of the low estate to which the potential
sons of God had fallen. Lesser revolutions in thought were implicit in
this greater one, revolutions which Emerson was bound to go through
with. Despite the jaunty optimism of which he was often accused, his
eyes were never blind to reality; to see, and measure, and judge,
was to become his life business. He did not shrink from the ugliest
fact, and the unhappy condition he discovered men to be in would have
discouraged a less robust faith. At times even he doubted. At times he
seems half persuaded, with Cotton Mather, that the potential children
of light are “strangely and fiercely possessed of the devil.” “Human
nature is as bad as it dares to be,” he commented in his journal; and
at another time, “If it were possible to repair the rottenness of human
nature ... it were well” (_Journals_, Vol. VIII, p. 259).
In seeking an explanation of the tragic gap between the real and the
ideal, he came to attribute a large measure of the cause, like the
eighteenth-century romantics, to pernicious social institutions which
stifle the nobler impulses and encourage the baser; and he became
convinced likewise that the work to which the critic was called was
the work of liberation, setting the mind free from false and ignoble
loyalties that it might serve the true. He prepared therefore to lay
his transcendental yardstick on the little world of Yankee reality and
judge how far short it came of its potential divinity. New England had
never been scrutinized so searchingly, measured so justly. Serene,
imperturbable, he set the ideal in one pan of the scales, and all the
New England realities in the other, and bade his neighbors see how the
balance tipped. For a generation he was the conscience of America, a
pricker of inflated balloons, a gauger of the national brag and cant
and humbug. With keen insight he put his finger on the mean and selfish
and the great and generous. He surveyed his world with the detachment
of posterity and anticipated the slower judgment of time. His
penetration was uncanny and few of his judgments on men and measures
have suffered reversal in the court of final jurisdiction.
So shrewd a critic must concern himself greatly with the Jacksonian
revolution that was hurrying America towards the acceptance of
political equalitarianism. By every compulsion of his transcendental
philosophy Emerson was driven to accept the abstract principle
of democracy. He understood well what hopes for human betterment
were awakened by the principle of majority rule, and as he followed
the noise and tumult of the political campaigns he was driven to
definition. In 1834 he commented in his journal:
The root and seed of democracy is the doctrine, Judge for yourself.
Reverence thyself. It is the inevitable effect of the doctrine,
where it has any effect (which is rare), to insulate the partisan,
to make each man a state. At the same time it replaces the dead
with a living check in a true, delicate reverence for superior,
congenial minds. “How is the King greater than I, if he is not more
just?” (_Journals_, Vol. III, p. 369.)
Somewhat later in the same year he suggested:
Democracy, Freedom, has its root in the sacred truth that every man
hath in him the divine Reason, or that, though few men since the
creation of the world live according to the dictates of Reason, yet
all men are created capable of so doing. That is the equality and
the only equality of all men. To this truth we look when we say,
Reverence thyself; Be true to thyself. (_Ibid._, Vol. III, p. 390.)
When I ... speak of the democratic element, I do not mean that ill
thing, vain and loud, which writes lying newspapers, spouts at
caucuses, and sells its lies for gold; but that spirit of love for
the general good whose name this assumes. There is nothing of the
true democratic element in what is called Democracy; it must fall,
being wholly commercial. I beg I may not be understood to praise
anything which the soul in you does not honor, however grateful may
be names to your ear and your pocket. (_Ibid._, Vol. IV, p. 95.)
His deepening concern over the state of politics in America--the
property-mindedness of the Whigs and the mob-mindedness of the
Democrats--drew him into an analysis of political parties and the
nature of the political state. He was little read in the political
classics, and although he professed a mild approval of Montesquieu
and was never tired of praising Burke, he was little influenced by
either. The latter’s political theory, indeed, was so fundamentally
hostile to Emerson’s major convictions--so legalistic in its
reverence for government from the grave, so explicit in denial of
new-born rights--that it is a fair assumption that Emerson never
took the trouble to understand him but was content to enjoy his
glowing rhetoric. Later commentators are too much given to glossing
over Emerson’s political theory, not approving its implications; or
explaining it away by appeal to certain comments jotted down when
his nerves were tried by enthusiasts;[456] but there is no explaining
away a theory that was the logical expression of his transcendental
philosophy, unless his whole philosophy be explained away. Emerson
knew very well where his political theory led, and he had no timid
compunction about following it through.
In his speculations on the nature and functions of the ideal
republic--a theme that was much in his mind--he elaborated what we
may call the transcendental theory of politics, a theory closely akin
to philosophical anarchism. All the elaborate machinery devised by
political thinkers like Montesquieu and John Adams, with their schemes
of checks and balances to preserve the _status quo_, he calmly throws
overboard; constitutions he is not interested in, nor the complicated
props of coercive sovereignty. The single, vital, principle on which
the true republic must found itself, he insists, is the principle of
good-will. Since “governments have their origin in the moral identity
of men,” the recognition of a common human nature with common interests
must induce rational men to enter a common political brotherhood; and
until men become wise enough voluntarily to coöperate to the common
well-being, no good government is possible. The history of governments
hitherto is a history of the tragic failure of men to achieve a
rational political state. “The idea, after which each community
is aiming to make and mend its law,” he suggests in the _Essay on
Politics_, following Carlyle, “is the will of the wise man. The wise
man, it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts
to secure government by contrivance.” But he does not push his “wise
man” theory to the patriarchal absolutism of Carlyle; with Channing he
postulates an ethical sovereignty above the instrument. “Absolute right
is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy.”
The doctrine of good-will establishes government in “moral identity”;
it “separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the
same time to the race”; and in so doing it accepts the sovereignty of
the ethical absolute. This major conception of Channing’s Emerson took
over and made his own. He is explicit in his assertion of the need of a
moral interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights. The doctrine of
an ethical sovereignty, he asserts,
... promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal
freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be
employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of
love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.... There will
always be a government of force where men are selfish; and when
they are pure enough to abjure the code of force they will be wise
enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the
highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and
libraries, of institutions of art and science can be answered.
Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the
character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right
and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for men, and abstain
from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our
means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I
find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake
the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into
false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength
than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong,
but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and
nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a
practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the
blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of
the world.... For any laws but those which men make for themselves
are laughable.... This is the history of government,--one man does
something which is to bind another.... Hence the less government
we have the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power.
The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of
private character, the growth of the individual ... the appearance
of the wise man; of whom the existing government, is, it must be
owned, but a shabby imitation.... To educate the wise man the State
exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.
The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise
man is the State. (_Essay on Politics._)
Thus in transcendental fashion does Emerson range himself on the side
of Jefferson, in opposition to a coercive sovereignty. A strong and
energetic government he feared as an efficient instrument of tyranny;
and of the several contrivancies by which it enforced its will, he
considered the police power the stupidest. As a sensible man he bore
with the state; he would pay his taxes; he would not strain at gnats;
but as a free man he would not suffer the state to coerce him; he would
destroy it first. There is a passage in his journal, written at the
time of the declaration of war against Mexico--when Alcott and Thoreau
refused to pay their taxes--that states his position with whimsical
directness:
The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means
friendly. A poor cow who does well by you,--do not grudge it its
hay. It cannot eat bread, as you can; let it have without grudge
a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield
you milk from its teat. You, who are a man walking cleanly on two
feet, will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful
of clover and welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the
fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat. (_Journals_, Vol.
VII, p. 220.)
With equal emphasis he rejected the economic interpretation of
politics. As a child of the romantic revolution he understood quite
clearly how the waves of humanitarian aspiration broke on the reefs
of property rights, how economic forces were in league against the
ideal republic. There could be no true democracy till this matter of
economics was put in subordination to higher values. Both the political
parties, the respectable Whigs and the voluble Democrats, he was
convinced, were debauched by it; the one served property openly, the
other secretly. “From neither party, when in power, has the world any
benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate
with the resources of the nation.” Emerson did not deny the fact of
the universal appeal of economics. He could not, of course, accept the
theory of economic determinism; but he was convinced that the whole
matter must be probed deeply:
The philosophy of property, if explored in its foundations, would
open new mines of practical wisdom, which would in the event
change the face of the world; would destroy the whole magazine
of dissimulation, for so many ages reckoned the Capital art of
Government. It would purge that rottenness which has defamed the
whole Science until _politic_ has come to mean cunning.... It would
go deep into ethics and touch all the relations of men. (_The
Present Age._)
Pending such exploration it was clear to Emerson that the
Federalist-Whig theory of a stake-in-society, or rulership by persons
of principle and property, was wholly vicious:
The theory of politics which has possessed the minds of men, and
which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and
in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two
objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all
have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This
interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst
the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access
to reason, their rights in property are very unequal.... Personal
rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the
ratio of the census; property demands a government framed on the
ratio of owners and owning.... That principle no longer looks
so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly because
doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed
in laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as
allowed the rich to encroach upon the poor, and keep them poor;
but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure
and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on
its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons
deteriorating and degrading; that property will always follow
persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men.
(_Essay on Politics._)
In such suggestions as he offered touching the form of the ideal
republic, where “every child that is born must have a just chance
for his bread,” Emerson reveals a pronounced bias in favor of
the Physiocratic theory of society. He was at one with Jefferson
in preferring an agrarian to an industrial order. Manchester
economics--the doctrine of the economic man, of the iron law of wages,
and other obscenities of the school--he quite frankly loathed. He did
not, he said, “look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing
village, or mart of commerce”; but he would not glorify the machine,
nor reduce man to a factory hand. He questioned the sufficiency or
finality of the division of labor. There is more than a suggestion of
William Morris in the doctrine elaborated in _Man the Reformer_; that
the industrial revolution with its factory system, must be judged in
the light of its effect upon the workingman, that the true function of
work must be explored and every man ply his tool to his own good. The
suggestion that “a man should have a farm or mechanical craft for his
culture,” was an implicit denial of industrialism in the days of its
first triumphs--a denial that Morris would have indorsed.
We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate
entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.
We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety
of our spiritual faculties, or they will not be born. Manual labor
is the study of the external world. The advantages of riches
remains with him who produces them, not with the heir.
I should not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of
some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded
from a preference of the agricultural life out of the belief,
that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that
calling.... But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that
every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the
world, ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of
his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some
dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties;
and for this reason, that labor is God’s education; that he only
is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the
secret of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from nature its
sceptre. (_Man the Reformer_.)
In all this--in the doctrine of the minimized state, of the sacred
rights of the individual, of the wholesomeness of an agricultural life;
in his concern for social justice and his tenderness for the poor and
exploited among men--Emerson proved himself a child of the romantic
eighteenth century, who by his own transcendental path had come upon
the Utopia that an earlier generation had dreamed of, and which he
sketched in the lovely poem prefacing the _Essay on Politics_. Much of
Emerson is compressed in these lines:
Fear, Craft, and Avarice,
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust....
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.
The contrast between such Utopian conceptions and the realities of
America in the forties was calculated to edge the critical judgment
with a certain asperity. The older agrarian simplicity of New England
was being submerged by the industrial revolution, and in the midst
of the change Emerson quietly pronounced judgment upon the new idols
of his generation, upon State Street and Beacon Street, upon Webster
and Clay and Douglas, upon Everett and Choate, upon black slavery and
white, upon the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Bill, upon the
stolid poor and the callous rich. His judgment was severe but it was
never unjust. His later journals are a rich storehouse of critical
comment, keen, illuminating, disastrous in its analysis of all cant
and humbug. At times--in his comment on Webster, in his hatred of
State Street, in his criticism of the common materialism--he is almost
savage; at other times he is consumed with a vast sympathy for the
long-suffering, exploited mass of the people. “Alas, for the majority,”
he exclaimed, “that old, inevitable dupe and victim. What a dreary
Iliad of woes it goes wailing and mad withal. Some dog of a Cleon
or Robespierre or Douglas is always riding it to ruin” (_Journals_,
Vol. VIII, p. 449). When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed he wrote:
“This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people
who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God” (_ibid._, Vol.
VIII, p. 236). In smug and prosperous Boston he found no comfort--the
Boston that applauded when “Thank-God Choate thanked God five times” in
denouncing “the trashy sentimentalism of our lutestring enthusiasts.”
Emerson would have none of Boston:
In Boston is no company for a fine wit. There is a certain
_poor-smell_ in all the streets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon,
as well as in the lawyers’ offices, and the wharves, and the same
meanness and sterility, and leave-all-hope-behind, as one finds in
a boot manufacturer’s premises. (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 363.)
With Theodore Parker he judged Boston to be the home of Hunkers, of
that “cotton aristocracy” that Webster served. It groveled servilely
before State Street; how should the homely moralities get a hearing in
such a place? Even Harvard College he charged with being a tool of the
Boston counting-houses.[457]
It was the crass materialism of America, of the Democrats equally
with the Whigs, of the northern capitalists equally with the southern
planters, that drove him to exasperation, and tempered his optimism.
There is no jaunty optimism in a passage written during the panic days
of ’37:
... Society has played out its last stake; it is checkmated.
Young men have no hope. Adults stand like day-laborers idle in
the streets. None calleth us to labor. The old wear no crown of
warm life on their gray hairs. The present generation is bankrupt
of principles and hope, as of property. I see man is not what man
should be. He is a treadle of a wheel. He is the tassel at the
apron-string of society. He is a money-chest. He is the servant
of his belly. This is the causal bankruptcy, this the cruel
oppression, that the ideal should serve the actual, that the head
should serve the feet.... Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who
jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and
made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and
Love,--behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and
unconquered still. What answer is it now to say, It has always
been so? I acknowledge that, as far back as I can see the widening
procession of humanity, the marchers are lame and blind and deaf;
but to the soul that whole past is but one finite series in its
infinite scope. Deteriorating ever and now desperate. Let me begin
anew; let me teach the finite to know its master. (_Journals_, Vol.
IV, p. 242.)
To be a critic rather than a fighter, and a critic because he was a
poet and philosopher--this was the duty laid upon Emerson; and yet he
was sorely troubled when men from the skirmish line of social conflict
reported to him the need of leaders. Why should he be privileged to
remain in his study when slaves were abducted on the streets of Boston
and John Brown was fighting at Harper’s Ferry? With the extremest
reluctance he was drawn into the struggle--it was not his fight.
I waked at night [he recorded in his journal] and bemoaned myself,
because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of
Slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured
voices. But then, in hours of sanity, I recover myself, and say,
“God must govern his own world, and knows his own way out of this
pit, without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it
but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to
wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the
brain of man,--far retired in the heaven of invention, and which,
important to the republic of Man, have no other watchman, or lover,
or defender, but I.” (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 316.)
But always in the end he was drawn in, and none spoke wiser or braver
words to a careless generation. He never faltered, never compromised;
the prophet of the ideal faced the real and told the truth about it,
serenely and with clear insight. His heroes were not the heroes of
State Street; Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Henry
Ward Beecher, he accounted the great Americans of his day, and not
Everett and Webster and Clay and Calhoun. A friend of civilization, he
was partisan only to the ideal; to justice, truth, righteousness. A
Yankee of the Yankees, a Puritan of the Puritans, he had emancipated
himself from all that was mean and ungenerous in the one and harsh
and illiberal in the other. A free soul, he was the flowering of two
centuries of spiritual aspiration--Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards
come to more perfect fruition.
Footnotes
[456] See, for example, _Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 221.
[457] “Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State
Street votes it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted
there which goes to adorn Boston whiggism: ... but that which it exists
for,--to be a fountain of novelties out of heaven, a Delphi uttering
warning and ravishing oracles to elevate and lead mankind,--_that_ it
shall not be permitted to do or to think of. On the contrary, every
generosity of thought is _suspected_, and gets a bad name.” (_Ibid._,
Vol. IX, p. 215.)
Chapter III • Henry Thoreau • Transcendental Economist
“Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her”; yet “she
teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and fortitude; than which
men can have in their life nothing more profitable.”
The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of
eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a
satisfying life. His one concern, that gave to his ramblings in Concord
fields a value as of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning
of wealth. Honest, fearless, curiously inquisitive--a masterless
man who would give no hostages to fortune--he proved his right to
be called a philosopher by seeking wisdom as a daily counselor and
friend, and following such paths only as wisdom suggested. Out of his
own experience, tested in the clear light of the Greeks, he wrote a
transcendental declaration of independence that may be taken as the
final word of the Concord school touching the great issues of practical
living. _Walden_ is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to refute
Adam Smith and transform the round of daily life into something nobler
than a mean gospel of plus and minus.
It was the common opinion of his neighbors that Henry Thoreau was a
queer fellow who had somehow got all his values topsy-turvy. And yet
the more thoughtfully one considers him, the more doubtful it appears
whether the queerness lay with him or with his critics. Unfortunately
a wholly honest and original man is so rare as to fall under common
suspicion. To the inmates of Bedlam a sane man will appear queer. In a
society of serfs a masterless man will be accounted an outlaw. To the
Concord farmers Thoreau appeared strange only because he applied in
his daily life a truth they assented to on the Sabbath. The principle
that life is more than the meat and the body than raiment was familiar
enough to the Sunday doctrines of Concord; but that a man should
seriously apply it on week-days; that he should propose to regulate his
mid-week activities by the economy of the Sermon on the Mount, passed
the comprehension of practical Yankees who followed quite another
economy. It was Thoreau’s conduct that perplexed them, rather than his
philosophy.
From first to last that conduct was serenely logical. To this disciple
of the ancient wisdom, Sabbath and week-day were one, and in seeking
to square his daily life with the ancient precept, Thoreau became the
arch-rebel of his group, the most individual amongst the “lunatic
fringe” of the transcendental movement, the one who escapes elusively
from the grip of an adjective. He slips out of all phrases devised
to imprison him. “A bachelor of nature,” Emerson, with his gift for
cryptic phrase, called him; “poet-naturalist,” Ellery Channing who
knew him intimately, chose to call him. “I am a poet, a mystic, and a
transcendentalist,” Thoreau said of himself, disregarding his nature
writings. Yet none of these phrases, true as they are, quite adequately
sums him up. At the risk of committing a fresh futility, one may
perhaps suggest that he was a Greek turned transcendental economist.
His life seems to have been a persistent experiment in values. A
philosopher of the open air who kept his mind clear and his nerves
robust by daily contact with wind and weather; a mystic who pried
curiously into the meaning of nature and was familiar with Hellenic
and Oriental systems of thought; a Yankee, skilled in various homely
crafts, yet rather interested in proving for himself what things were
excellent and taking nothing on hearsay--Thoreau’s chief business
would seem to have been with life itself, and how it might best be
lived by Henry Thoreau; how a rational being, in short, might enjoy
the faculties God has given him, following the higher economy and not
enslaving himself to the lower, so that when he came to die he might
honestly say, I have lived.
Amongst the members of the transcendental school Thoreau was the one
Concord man, born and bred there, literally of the soil and loving
the things of the soil. His tireless rovings were commonly bounded
by the familiar Concord horizons. His life had taken deep root in
the Concord fields, and he refused to join the restless multitude
of the _déracinés_, who seek novel experiences in a succession of
transplantings. No English peasant ever clung to the home-acres with
more loving tenacity. He was a countryman in instinct, distrusting the
great city twenty miles away that disseminated its virus through the
outlying villages and farms. The city was wedded to the economy of
industrialism and exploitation. But as a child of Jean Jacques, Thoreau
chose to believe that the road to heaven ran through the fields and
not over the cobblestones of Boston; he discovered an honest integrity
of character oftener in the country than in Lowell mills, yet none
too often there. It was easier to be free there, yet even in Concord
village the herd mind was always laying springes to catch the unwary;
and Thoreau would not be caught. He was poet and philosopher as well as
countryman, and he weighed his own life and the life of his neighbors
in the scales of Hellenic thought. He was surveyor of broader fields
than his neighbor’s wood-lot; was acquainted with other mysteries than
the mystery of pencil-making. He desired other ends than those his
shopkeeping, farm-tending neighbors served; he would not be encumbered
as they were. He could not carry such gross impedimenta in his pack
and be a free man; the pack was too heavy; and he proceeded to lighten
it with a thoroughness that startled Concord. He “signed off” from
Dr. Ripley’s church; with Alcott, he refused to pay his poll tax: he
severed his allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the
Federal government; he rid himself of all concern at what Concord
thought of his ways; he spoke out his honest convictions in the village
Lyceum--convictions about John Brown and slavery and Massachusetts’
part in sending negroes back to their masters--quite careless of the
disapproval of Judge Hoar and other Concord dignitaries. Such a man had
never before walked the village streets, and the spectacle filled his
neighbors with amazement.
With so much useless luggage got rid of, Thoreau was ready to set
about the high business of living. To outward appearance a somewhat
angular Yankee, practical and capable, he was at heart a Greek, with
the delight in the simple round of the seasons and a responsiveness
to natural beauty that belonged to the older civilization. Brought
up under the “pale negations” of Dr. Ripley’s theology, he emerged a
pagan. He was the most widely read in Greek literature of the Concord
transcendentalists; had translated _Prometheus Bound_, and much of
Pindar; and was completely at home in the clear Greek atmosphere. Who
but a Hellenist could utter such words as these which serve as his
apology for the Walden experiment?
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could learn what
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living
is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow
of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout
all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and,
if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. (_Walden_, “What I Lived For.”)
To seek Pan in a tired world and recover joys that have long been
forgotten is a business that only a romantic will engage in; yet
Thoreau set out on the quest with a clear-eyed purpose:
... My Good Genius seemed to say,--Go fish and hunt far and wide
day by day,--farther and wider,--and rest thee by many brooks
and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the
days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek
adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night
over-take thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields
than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild
according to thy nature, like those sedges and brakes, which will
never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it
threaten ruin to farmer’s crops? that is not its errand to thee.
Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the
land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are
where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like
serfs. (_Ibid._, “Baker Farm.”)
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and
life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is
more elastic, more starry, more immortal,--that is your success.
All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily
to bless yourself.... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat
as intangible and indiscernible as the tints of morning or evening.
It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I
have clutched. (_Ibid._, “Higher Laws.”)
To save one’s soul has always been accounted in New England a matter
worthy of a man’s best effort, and Thoreau’s days were given over to
it with a single-heartedness without parallel even in New England.
The Puritan, he believed, had suffered his high spiritual mission
to be sacrificed to the economic; he would recover that mission by
sacrificing the economic to the spiritual; but he would interpret
the spiritual as a Hellenist rather than a Hebraist. The Christian
other-worldliness seemed to him unduly regardless of the loveliness of
this world. “Christianity,” he says in the _Week_, “only hopes. It has
hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land.
It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with
joy.”
I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the
liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God....
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his
ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and
his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the
great God Pan is not dead, as was rumored. Perhaps of all the gods
of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his
shrine. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)
His extraordinarily frank evaluation of the New Testament, and
of Calvinistic New England that had too long chewed the cud of
conscience--“they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their
lives of course yielded no milk”--is the work of a pagan from whom all
creeds slip easily. Few more searching sermons have been preached in
Massachusetts than the sermon that composed itself as Thoreau’s boat
floated down the Concord River, past the Billerica meeting-house where
the honest villagers were worshiping the God of New England--a sermon
that with fine irony summons minister and congregation to consider the
deeper teachings of their sacred book.
I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly
strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than
Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There
are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud but
once. “Seek first the kingdom of heaven.”--“Lay not up for yourself
treasures on earth.”--“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that
thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven.”--“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole
world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?”--Think of this, Yankees!... Think of repeating these
things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly,
till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can
read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out
of the meeting-house? They never _were_ read, they never _were_
heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any
pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that
meeting-house upon another.
... When one enters a village, the church, not only really but
from association, is the ugliest-looking building in it, because
it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is
most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long
cease to deform the landscape.... Really, there is no infidelity,
now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath,
and rebuilds the churches. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)
As Thoreau understood the problem of economics there were three
possible solutions open to him: to exploit himself, to exploit his
fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The
first was quite impossible--to imprison oneself in a treadmill when
the morning called to great adventure, to burden oneself with useless
fardels when the pack must be kept light, was the folly of a slave
mind. He had observed his neighbors closely and found little good in
their way of self-exploitation.
I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops,
and offices, and field, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be
doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... How many a poor
immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its
load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn
seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture and
wood-lot.... The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the
soil for compost. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
To exploit one’s fellows seemed to Thoreau’s sensitive social
conscience an even grosser infidelity. The leisure of a slave driver,
got by imprisoning his fellows in a treadmill, was an ignoble leisure
from which came the empty vulgarity of modern life. “If I devote myself
to other pursuits and contemplations,” he said, “I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.
I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too.”
Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material
well-being, for he was only giving up the lesser to enjoy the greater,
as was the privilege of the philosopher.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor
even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according
to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,
and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only
theoretically, but practically.... When he has obtained those
things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative
than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life
now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. (_Walden_,
“Economy.”)
It was the reply of the arch-individualist to the tyrannous
complexities of society, and it set him apart even in the world of
transcendentalism. Other members of the group professed to have found
a better way out of the dilemma--the way of Brook Farm and Fruitland;
a richer life was to be achieved not by espousing poverty but by
coöperation. But Thoreau could not adopt the coöperative solution; he
must either accept society as it was or remove. Convinced that it was
not worth accepting--that one made a foolish bargain in selling oneself
to it--he was content to remove to Walden Pond. “I came into this
world,” he said, “not chiefly to make this a good place to live in,
but to live in it, be it good or bad.” “I desire to speak impartially
on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of
the present economical and social arrangement.” He did not advocate
that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish
to dogmatize concerning the best mode of living--each must settle that
matter for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, that
the fox should somehow get free even though he left his tail in the
trap, he was vitally concerned about. “The youth may build or plant or
sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he
would like to do.” Let him at least rid himself of the false gospel of
creature comforts, which men pay too high a price for.
The story of Thoreau’s emancipation from the lower economics is the one
romance of his life, and _Walden_ is his great book. More restrained
than the _Week_ and lacking the exuberant beauty of the latter--its
noble talk and scathing criticism--it is “informed by a more explicit
unifying philosophy.” It is a book in praise of life rather than of
Nature, a record of calculating economies that studied saving in order
to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in
spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose, and in its speculations
much of Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris crops out. In considering
the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that “the cost
of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to
be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Conceive of life
as cheap, a poor thing to be exploited, and the factory system becomes
the logical economic order; but conceive of it as dear, and the common
happiness the great objective of society, and quite another sort of
industrialism will emerge. Thoreau did not look with approval on the
rising city of Lowell, with its multiplying spindles and increasing
proletariat, and he did not understand why Americans should boast of
a system that provided vulgar leisure for the masters at the cost of
serfdom for the workers.
Where is this division of labor to end? [he asks] and what object
does it finally serve? I cannot believe that our factory system is
the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the
operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;
and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or
observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and
honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be
enriched. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
The whole middle-class philosophy of exploitation was hateful to him,
the middleman equally with the manufacturer. “Trade curses everything
it touches; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole
curse of trade attaches to the business.” Men have been deceived by a
false economy--lured by the bog lights away from the open fields to
flounder in the miasmic marshes. While Ruskin was still pottering over
Turner, Thoreau was elaborating in _Walden_ the text: The only wealth
is life.
In other bits _Walden_ is curiously like _Hopes and Fears for Art_,
and the drift of the whole is one with the revolutionary teachings of
Morris, that the abiding satisfactions are those which spring from free
creative work. This Yankee Greek had learned that it is a beautiful
life back of the tool that creates beauty, and that if the work of our
hands is ugly, it is because our liver are mean and sordid, affording
no outlet for the free creative spirit. In New England, Puritan and
Yankee alike had conspired against beauty, and the gods had taken
revenge by clothing life in drab.
Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls
must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful
living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful
is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no
housekeeping.
What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown
from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the
indweller, who is the only builder,--out of some unconscious
truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the
appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined
to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of
life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the
painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and
cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants
whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces
merely, which makes them _picturesque_; and equally interesting
will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as
simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is no
straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (_Walden_,
“Economy.”)
Thoreau needed only to have lived in a world that honored craftsmanship
to have opened fully the vein of gold that Morris dug his philosophy
from; he had the instinct of the craftsman but not his training. His
turning from the workshop to the fields, hearing no call in the humdrum
village economy to develop a beautiful craftsmanship, was an implied
criticism of the common sterility of labor in every-day Concord; yet
the honest sincerity of his nature led him to the conclusion that lies
at the heart of the philosophy of the great English craftsman:
None have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn
their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is true
materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly
and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to
earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to
them.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to
maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,
if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not
necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his
brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau’s mind was serene as
the open spaces; but this Greek serenity was rudely disturbed when he
returned to Concord village and found his neighbors drilling for the
Mexican War, and when authority in the person of the constable came
to him with the demand that he pay a due share to the public funds.
The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid and unjust, waged for the
extension of the obscene system of negro slavery; and Thoreau was
brought sharply to consider his relations to the political state that
presumed to demand his allegiance, willing or unwilling, to its acts.
Under the stress of such an emergency the transcendentalist was driven
to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the
state. He was not political-minded; he had concerned himself little
with political theory; he would gladly let the government alone if
government would let him alone; he was even prepared to make excuses
for government. But he would not compromise with his conscience; and
when the state applied the principle of coercion, he applied the
counter principle of passive resistance. It was while he was domiciled
in Walden cabin that the hand of the law seized him and thrust him
into Concord jail. He went with the constable quietly, but there was
a dangerous contempt in his heart. It seemed absurd that a man could
not go to the cobbler’s for a pair of mended boots, but he must be
interfered with by a neighbor playing the rôle of constable. Constable,
jailer, the magistrate on the bench, all the elaborate machinery of
the law, Thoreau contemplated quizzically and judged his neighbors
fools to have exchanged their freedom for such masquerades. Those who
got anything from such instruments--lawyers and propertied men--might
think well of them, but they were a mere impertinence to Thoreau who
wanted to go huckleberrying. When they let him out he went quietly
after his berries, and discovered there was “no state in sight among
the berry bushes.” “I saw,” he remarked casually, “that the state was
half-witted, that it was as timid as a lone woman with her silver
spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost
all my remaining respect for it and pitied it.”
But Thoreau was not done with the comedy. It set him upon thinking,
and the result was the essay, _Civil Disobedience_. Taken by itself
alone, it is a somewhat astonishing performance. This Yankee
transcendentalist quite evidently has turned philosophical anarchist.
But read in the light of Emerson’s _Journals_, or in the light of
Godwin’s _Political Justice_, it is easily comprehensible. It is no
more than transcendental individualism translated into politics, with
all comfortable compromises swept away. Its sources run straight back
to eighteenth-century liberalism with its doctrine of the minimized
state--a state that must lose its coercive sovereignty in the measure
that the laws of society function freely. Very likely Thoreau had never
read Godwin, yet his political philosophy was implicit in _Political
Justice_. In Godwin’s thinking the problem of man in society is the
problem of a voluntary adjustment of the individual to the state; and
it is only by establishing economics and politics on morality, that
political justice is possible. The moral law is the fundamental law,
superior to statutes and constitutions; and to it the citizen is bound
to render allegiance. “The object of the present state of society is
to multiply labor,” asserted Godwin; “in another state it will be to
simplify it.” “The only adequate apology of government is necessity.”
“Government however reformed” is “little capable of affording solid
benefit to mankind.” “Give us equality and justice but no constitution.
Suffer us to follow without restraint the dictates of our own judgment,
and to change our forms of social order as fast as we improve the
dictates of our own judgment.” “The pretense of collective wisdom is
the most palpable of all impostures.” “The true reason why the mass of
mankind has so often been the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious
and complicated nature of the social system. Once annihilate the
quackery of government, and the most homespun understanding will be
prepared to scorn the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead
him.”
By his own path Thoreau came to identical conclusions. There is
little in _Civil Disobedience_ that is not in _Political Justice_. To
neither thinker is there an abstract state, society or nation--only
individuals; and to both, the fundamental law is the law of morality.
Political expediency and the law of morality frequently clash, and
in such event it is the duty of the individual citizen to follow the
higher law. Thoreau went even further, and asserted the doctrine of
individual compact, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual
nullification; no government, he said, can have any “pure right over my
person or property but what I concede to it.”
I heartily accept the motto,--“That government is best which
governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more
rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to
this, which also I believe,--“That government is best which governs
not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the
kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but
an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments
are sometimes, inexpedient.
A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot
be based on justice.... We should be men first and subjects
afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,
so much as for the right.... How does it become a man to behave
toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot
without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant
recognize that political organization as _my_ government which
is the _slave’s_ government also.... There is but little virtue
in the action of masses of men.... It is not a man’s duty, as a
matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any,
even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other
concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and
contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue
them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him
first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.... If the law is
of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice
to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter
friction to stop the machine.... As for adopting the ways which
the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such
ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone....
Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union.... Why do
they not dissolve it themselves,--the union between themselves and
the state,--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?[458]
(_Works_, Vol. X, pp. 131-170.)
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”--in this
doctrine of individual syndicalism Thoreau’s conception of the relation
of the citizen to the state is tersely summed up. In so far as he
was a democrat it was of the transcendental school, rather than the
Jacksonian. He would be governed by the majority no more than by the
minority. The scorn of a fine ethical mind for practical government by
politicians could scarcely be more tellingly phrased than in the bit of
verse he tucks into _Civil Disobedience_:
A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.
Such a man quite evidently would go for Nullification as fiercely as
Garrison. Even though he might wash his hands of society, the cries of
those who suffered injustice followed him, and when the Fugitive Slave
Law passed, it robbed him of his peace, destroying his pleasure in
wonted things. The slave hunters were in Boston streets, and justice
in the person of Commissioner Loring was sending Anthony Burns back to
slavery. As he contemplated the spectacle his wrath against a coercive
government flamed up. “My thoughts are murder to the state,” he
complained bitterly, “and involuntarily go plotting against her.”
I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and
Americans only at a late and convenient hour.... I hear a good deal
said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not go out
of his way to do that. This law rises not to the level of the head
or the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and
bred, and has its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with
the feet; and he who walks with freedom, and does not with Hindoo
mercy avoid treading on every venomous reptile, will inevitably
tread on it, and so trample it under foot,--and Webster, its
maker, like the dirt-bug and its ball. (“Slavery in Massachusetts,”
in _Works_, Vol. X.)
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make
the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the
law when the government breaks it.
Thoreau was a stern judge, and he held his age in low esteem. His
Concord neighbors seemed to him poor fellows with too little spirit to
be free men; they were the raw material of standing armies, militia,
jailors, constables, and the _posse comitatus_. And then one day into
the field of his vision came a plain Yankee, primitive and heroic,
John Brown of Ossawatomie. In the contemplation of his life and death
Thoreau felt a shock of new faith run like an electric current through
his veins. The age was no longer dead to him, for it had bred a man.
“I rejoice that I live in this age,” he exclaimed, “that I am his
contemporary.” He had found his hero--not in past times as Carlyle and
Emerson had done, but in the present and among his own Yankee kind. He
had talked with John Brown in Concord and recognized him as a primitive
idealist of rugged mold, a stern moralist who set justice above the
law. That this man should be so grossly misunderstood by lesser men, so
foully slandered, filled him with sorrow and with wrath also. “When a
noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble
themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of
John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either
much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind” (“The
Last Days of John Brown,” in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 241). His trial and
conviction Thoreau regarded as a judgment, not on John Brown, but upon
America; the lawyers and editors and politicians who judged him were
only convicting themselves.
His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to
pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor
and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if
not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and
devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for
the benefit of his fellow-man. It may be doubted if there were so
many more their equals in these respects in all the country,--I
speak of his followers only,--for their leader, no doubt, scoured
the land far and wide, seeking to swell his troop. These alone were
ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely they
were the very best men you could select to be hung. That was the
best compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her
gallows. She has tried a long time, she has hung a good many, but
never found the right one before.
I do not believe in lawyers, in that mode of attacking or defending
a man, because you descend to meet the judge on his own ground,
and, in cases of the highest importance, it is of no consequence
whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial
cases. Business men may arrange that among themselves. If they were
the interpreters of the everlasting laws which rightfully bind man,
that would be another thing. A counterfeiting law-factory, standing
half in a slave land and half in a free! What kind of laws for free
men can you expect from that? (“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in
_Works_, Vol. X, p. 197.)
In Thoreau the eighteenth-century philosophy of individualism, the
potent liberalisms let loose on the world by Jean Jacques, came to
fullest expression in New England. He was the completest embodiment of
the _laissez-faire_ reaction against a regimented social order, the
severest critic of the lower economics that frustrate the dreams of
human freedom. He was fortunate in dying before the age of exploitation
had choked his river with its weeds; fortunate in not foreseeing how
remote is that future of free men on which his hopes were fixed:
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched
uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out
all the muskrats ... such is the character of that morrow which
mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out
our eyes is darkness to us. There is more day to dawn. The sun is
but a morning-star. (_Walden._)
With the dawning of that day perhaps men will sit once more at the feet
of the ancient wisdom and fashion their lives upon the principle that
the soul is more than the meat and the body than raiment. Perhaps they
may even shape for themselves new heroes--“above and after all, the Man
of the Age, come to be called workingman.” He and his deeds are looked
down upon in our time--“It is obvious that none yet speaks to his
condition, for the speaker is not yet in his condition.” “Literature
speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future; how much
to the East, how little to the West” (“Thomas Carlyle and his Works,”
in _Works_, Vol. X, p. 118). One of the great names in American
literature is the name of Henry Thoreau. Yet only after sixty years is
he slowly coming into his own.
Footnotes
[458] Compare the following entry in his _Journal_ under date of March
26, 1842: “I must confess I have felt mean enough when asked how I was
to act on society, what errand I had to mankind. Undoubtedly I did
not feel mean without a reason, and yet my loitering is not without
defense. I would fain communicate the wealth of my life to men,
would really give them what is most precious in my gift.... I know
no riches I would keep back. I have no private good unless it be my
peculiar ability to serve the public.... This is the only individual
property.... It is hard to be a good citizen of the world in any great
sense, but if we do render no interest or increase to mankind out
of that talent God gave us, we can at least preserve the principal
unimpaired.”
Chapter IV • Theodore Parker • Transcendental Minister
Theodore Parker was described by one of his biographers as “the best
working-plan of an American yet produced,” and by a fellow minister as
“a conscience since Luther unsurpassed.” The two comments suggest still
another, that he was completely and adequately New England. Yankee
and Puritan contributed equally to his making. His rich and plastic
mind was two-sided: one-half was wholly English, practical, logical,
concrete, lucid; loving fact and tireless in its acquisition; master
of everyday affairs and competent in dealing with this world; the
other was emotional, mystical, idealistic, deeply and spontaneously
religious, living daily with God as a son with the Father, carrying
the sorrows of men in his heart and the wrongs of the world on his
conscience. One of the greatest of New England ministers, he was
shepherd as well as counselor, pastor as well as teacher. “I wish to
stand on the earth,” he said with true critical insight, “though I
would look beyond the stars. I would live _with men_, but think with
philosophers” (Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_,
Vol. I, p. 115). The generous amplitude of his nature was too large
for the narrow walls of a church; he took all Boston for his parish,
all New England for his congregation. Amazingly active and vital, he
consumed whole libraries in his pursuit of knowledge. “His mind,”
says Weiss, “was like the republican idea itself; it could afford to
be hospitable, but could not afford to be exclusive” (_ibid._, Vol.
I, p. 178). Conversant with many fields of knowledge, with a memory
extraordinarily retentive, he was master of many languages--nineteen
or twenty, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--and at home in the
most abstruse subjects. He spent his vast energy with the prodigality
of Cotton Mather, and he achieved what Cotton Mather with his inbred
parochialism could not achieve, an intellectual cosmopolitanism that
judged Boston by broader standards than it could gauge.
A first-class fighting-man was this child of yeoman New England--none
braver, not even Garrison, none more effective; and yet
tender-hearted, sympathetic, with the shrewd common sense of his
homespun forebears. The son of a Lexington farmer and mechanic,
self-trained, endowed with indomitable will, he came of the soundest
stock in Massachusetts. His grandfather was captain of the Minute Men
who faced the British troops on Lexington Common in April, 1775; and
a conscious pride of ancestry broke out frequently in his speech.
The words uttered before the Ministerial Conference in May, 1851,
in justification of his repudiation of the Fugitive Slave Law, were
characteristic: “I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care
nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my
reputation.” He then goes on:
I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol
in my desk,--loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action.
Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I
have done in Boston; in the midst of the nineteenth century; been
obliged to do it to defend the (innocent) members of my church,
women as well as men! You know that I do not like fighting....
But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the
first bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of men who
first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington,
it is “sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind”; those men
fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country.” This is the
first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My
grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers
fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to
this which courses in my veins today. Besides that, when I write
in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my
fathers prayed over, their morning and evening prayer, for nearly
a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my
grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried
at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of
Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the
first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather.
With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in
me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued
by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take
her in and defend her to the last? (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I,
pp. 13-15.)
With his sensitive conscience visited by such memories--a child of ’76
living in the evil days of the Fugitive Slave Law, a devout freethinker
borne on the crest of transcendental thought--Theodore Parker became
the embodiment and epitome of the New England renaissance. More
completely perhaps than any other representative, he gathered up and
expressed the major revolutionary impulses of his time and world: the
idealistic theism implicit in the Unitarian reaction from Calvinism;
the transcendental individualism latent in the doctrine of divine
immanence; and the passion for righteousness, to make the will of God
prevail in a world where the devil quite openly kept his ledgers. He
was an eager and thorough iconoclast, impatient to break the false
images--the God of John Calvin with its slanders of human nature,
and the god of State Street with its contempt for justice--which New
England, he believed, had worshiped too long, forgetting the ideals of
the Revolutionary fathers. The mind and conscience of Boston seemed
to him stifled by the strait-jacket of respectability. Righteousness
like a fugitive slave, was driven into hiding, or must walk the open
streets with a Derringer in its pocket. As a free soul loving freedom,
and a righteous man loving righteousness, he believed a duty was laid
on him to cut away the strait-jacket, to shame the Boston that sold
the poor in the gates for a pair of shoes. He must labor to set free
the mind and conscience of Boston that they might go forth purified to
work a beneficent work in a world that is God’s and not the devil’s.
His attack was keen and unsparing; he laid on with gusto; he used
homely words; he was just rather than polite. Impatient of humbug and
self-seeking he dealt in searching criticism rather than conventional
eulogy. At his touch distinguished reputations shrank to the mean and
commonplace, and inflated dignitaries collapsed like a pricked balloon.
Intellectually honest, he spoke the truth he had been at immense
pains to gather, and in consequence those who suffered the sting of
his attack--ministers and lawyers and merchants and politicians, men
in high position, distinguished leaders of Boston society--were not
slack in crying out against him as a demagogue and agitator. Next to
Garrison he became the most hated man in New England; and something of
that contemporary hatred, fierce and unforgiving, clings to his name
still, coloring later estimates of his worth, hinting that his manners
were not on a level with his morals.[459] An extraordinarily vital and
interesting person, in short, was this Yankee preacher with his Puritan
conscience--this transcendental critic with his quiver full of facts;
one not to be ignored in casting up the accounts of the New England
renaissance.
With his memorable sermon _On the Transient and Permanent in
Christianity_, preached in May, 1841--a sermon that ranks in the
history of Unitarianism with Channing’s Baltimore sermon--the
Unitarian movement entered upon its second broad phase. It abandoned
supernaturalism established on the sufficient authority of the
Scriptures, and adopted the conception of an evolutionary theism, of
God progressively revealing himself to the developing faculties of
men and speaking through the conscience. Under Channing’s guidance
Unitarianism had abandoned the major dogmas of Calvinism--total
depravity, predestination, a God of wrath; it had shifted the emphasis
from stable will to boundless love; and by such teachings it had
captured the greater churches of Boston. By 1830 it had become securely
established as the religion of Boston respectability, with implied
bounds set to its intellectual liberalism. As the first ardor abated it
fell to defining the new orthodoxy, resting content with what already
had been won. It was against this new orthodoxy that held fast to the
old supernaturalism that Theodore Parker protested. “The defect of
the Unitarians was a profound one,” he pointed out; “ceasing to fear
‘the great and dreadful God’ of the Old Testament, they had not quite
learned to love the all-beautiful and altogether lovely [God] of the
universe.”[460] He would have no pausing of the movement of adventurous
thought, no settling back into the ruts of dogmatism; and so he threw
himself with immense energy into the work of liberating Unitarianism
from a premature orthodoxy.
For this work he was admirably equipped. The greatest scholar of
his generation of New England ministers, deep in German theology
and philosophy, with the latest results of higher criticism on his
study table, he was critically trained to separate historical fact
from ecclesiastical tradition, and establish his theology on a basis
of naturalism. He was at once scientific and transcendental. He had
translated De Wette’s _Introduction to the Old Testament_ and was
intimately acquainted with Strauss’s _Leben Jesu_. He knew the oriental
backgrounds of Hebraic thought, had studied comparative religion with
its suggestive record of taboos and fetishism, and was gathering
materials for a comprehensive history of religion from primitive times.
Intellectually acquisitive and curious, he far outran the less informed
and courageous of his Unitarian brethren. But he was far more than
a critic, he may well be accounted a religious genius. A convinced
intuitionist, he tested every authority by appeal to transcendental
experience. He frankly abandoned faith in the supernatural, with its
corollaries of miracles and its “fetishism of the Bible,” and was
far advanced in a theism that compensated for the supernatural by a
passionate love of God. Thus established in personal experience his
religion issued in conduct. Love of God was more to him than historical
faith embodied in an historical church; love to his fellow men was
more appealing than dogma. Hence the profoundly ethical quality of
his religion, warm, palpitating, generous, that set it apart from
the colder and austerer ethicism of the conventional Unitarians. The
spirituality of Channing was enriched in Parker by the ardency of his
loving nature.
The three major doctrines of his theism, as elaborated in his “Letter
to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society,” were the
infinite perfection of God, the adequacy of man to all his functions,
and the sufficiency of absolute, natural religion. In his elaboration
of these doctrines the controlling influence of transcendental thought
is everywhere apparent. A metaphysical optimism throws a golden light
on all his thinking. The trinitarian Godhead, equally with the devil,
vanishes in “the infinitely perfect God,” “immanent in the world of
matter, and in the world of spirit, the two hemispheres which to us
make up the universe”--a universe created “from a perfect motive, for a
perfect purpose, of perfect substance, and as a perfect means.” Hence
it follows in Parker’s logic, that
there must be a complete solidarity between God and the two-fold
universe which He creates. The perfect Creator is thus also a
perfect providence; indeed, creation and providence are not
objective accidents of Deity, nor subjective caprices, but the
development of the perfect motive to its perfect purpose, love
becoming a universe of perfect welfare. I have called God Father,
but also Mother ... to express more sensibility, the quality of
tender and unselfish love, which mankind associates with Mother
more than aught else beside. (“Letter,” etc., in Weiss, Vol. II,
pp. 470-471.)
The doctrine of the adequacy of man flows logically from the doctrine
of the immanence of God, but Parker was not content to rest it on
such basis alone. The conception of human perfectibility, as it
filtered down to him through different strata of thought, romantic
and idealistic, found a high sanction in his transcendentalism; but
his practical nature demanded that it be established if possible on
a scientific foundation. Anthropology must substantiate philosophy.
Parker was not convinced that it could be thus adequately established;
nevertheless he would travel the objective path as far as it might
lead. Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ was published after Parker was
seized with his fatal illness, yet in much of the latter’s thinking he
was groping his way toward some similar conception of “the unity of
life of the human race,” with its “progressive development” from “the
state of ignorance, poverty, and utter nakedness of soul and sense,
the necessary primitive conditions of the race, up to the present
civilization.” In the deep-buried scattered records of the past, slowly
being gathered together and interpreted by science, he found “proof of
time immense, wherein man, this spiritual Cosmos, has been assuming
his present condition, individual, domestic, social, and national,
and accumulating that wealth of things and thoughts which is the mark
of civilization.” The doctrine of human perfectibility might not be
capable of scientific proof, but it was more than a reasonable hope; it
was implicit in all the past.
But this progressive development does not end with us; we have
seen only the beginning; the future triumphs of the race must be
vastly greater than all accomplished yet. In the primal instincts
and automatic desires of man, I have found a prophecy that what
he wants is possible, and shall one day be actual.... What good
is not with us is before, to be attained by toil and thought, and
religious life. (_Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 471-472.)
Of this slowly and painfully evolving man with his expanding ideals,
religion Parker believed to be the highest ultimate expression; and
religion, as the eyes of men slowly open to larger truths, will be seen
to be answerable to the needs of daily life, to embody the highest
ideal of social excellence. The noblest religion he believed was
not supernatural, but natural. “The absolute religion which belongs
to man’s nature, and is gradually unfolded thence,” “is the idea of
humanity, dimly seen but clearly felt, which has flitted before the
pious eyes of men in all lands and many an age, and been prayed for
as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’” It is forever refashioning its ideal,
re-embodying its vision, in every devout soul, in every creative age.
“The religious history of the race is the record of man’s continual
but unconscious efforts to attain this ‘desire of all nations’”
(_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475). But unhappily every new advance soon
crystallizes in dogmas and institutions; taboos and fetishisms are
quick to re-imprison the mind that struggles to be free. Old forms,
therefore, must be daily broken to make room for evolving experience.
Religion must be free; it must rise spontaneously from the depths
of life. Christianity has suffered grievously from a fetishism of
the Bible, from its worship of the supernatural, from an ungenerous
sectarianism beloved of “ecclesiastic skeptics,” who believe “there is
no place for the Christian Church or the Bible till they have nullified
the faculties which created both, and rendered Bible-makers and
Church-founders impossible.” Every age must write a new Bible out of
its God-given instincts, permeated with the divine love that is slowly
shaping society to the divine purpose.
No more is the atheistic mocker or the ecclesiastic bigot
commissioned to stop the human race with his cry, “Cease there,
mankind, thy religious search! for, thousand-million-headed as
thou art, thou canst know nought directly of thy God, thy duty,
or thyself. Pause, and accept my authenticated word; stop, and
despair!” (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 475.)
It was this ethical quality of his religion that kept Theodore Parker
so sensitive to wrongs and so generous in response to the call of
social justice. His religion quickened his social conscience and
summoned him to serve the plentiful reform movements of the day. With
Garrison and Wendell Phillips he organized the militants of Boston
radicalism. His political principles were simple and uncompromising,
woven from the strands of English and French libertarianism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Sidney, Locke, Rousseau,
the great leaders of the natural-rights school. One who accepted as
axiomatic the nobility of human nature and the perfectibility of man,
might be a political romantic, but he was certain to be a liberal.
Parker was a primitive democrat, whose democracy was bone of his bone
and flesh of his flesh. But the democracy that answered the needs of
his dream of the kingdom was, like Emerson’s and Channing’s, ethical
rather than political or economic--it was “the enactment of God’s
justice into human laws” (“The Nebraska Question,” in _Additional
Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 327). “The democratic idea has had but a slow
and gradual growth even in New England,” he pointed out; nevertheless
he was convinced that it was spreading, and “government becomes more
and more of all, by all and for all”[461] (_ibid._, p. 33). He hated
Federalism with an intensity equaling Jefferson’s, and ecclesiastical
Federalism that twisted the authority of the church to the side of
wealthy pewholders, using Scripture as a sanction for exploitation, he
denounced as scathingly as Garrison. The power of the political state
he feared, because he discovered the political state to be the friend
of the rich rather than the poor, of selfish advantage rather than of
God’s justice. With other Abolitionists he distrusted the machinery
of centralization that was being skillfully erected at Washington.
“Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America,” he
remarked; “I hope it will be always young” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 29).
But he was no partisan to the rule of the majority, if it determined
contrary to his conscience. A transcendental individualist, he went
for the nullification of an immoral statute in the name of the Higher
Law.[462]
Parker was never blind to the economic basis of politics. He saw
so clearly, indeed, the close alliance between group interests and
governmental statutes, that his political activities were almost
wholly determined by that recognition. As a political critic he was
the shrewdest realist of his generation. He was one constituent whom
politicians talking for Buncombe could not befuddle. He was too deeply
read in American history, gifted with too keen historical insight,
to be impressed by the glittering rhetoric of the Rufus Choates. He
had his own views of the American government, and majestic appeals to
the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted, “is
a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of
the Declaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and
South.” America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy,
aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in their places the “institution
of money--the master of all the rest.” The economic basis of society in
America he considered to be open and patent. In church and state, money
“is this day the strongest power of the nation.” He declined to be
deceived by party cries and platforms, either Whig or Democratic; both
parties served economics rather than justice.
So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central
nucleus and idea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party;
its motive is pecuniary.... It sneers at the poor; at the many;
has a contempt for the people. It legislates against the poor,
and for the rich ... the few who are born with the desire, the
talent, and the conventional position to become rich. “Take care
of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,” is its secret
maxim. Everything must yield to money.... With this party there
is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong.... There is Expediency
and Inexpediency.... Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by this
party as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal;
he alone has attained “the measure of the stature of a perfect man.”
The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority,
right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law.... There is ... no vital
difference between the Whig party and the Democratic party; no
difference in moral principle. The Whig inaugurates the Money got;
the Democrat inaugurates the Desire to get money. That is all the
odds.... There is only a hand rail between the two, which breaks
down if you lean on it, and the parties mix ... a Democrat is but
a Whig on time; a Whig is a Democrat arrived at maturity; his time
has come. A Democrat is a young Whig who will legislate for money
as soon as he has got it; the Whig is an old Democrat who once
hurrahed for the majority--“Down with money! there is a despot!
and up with the desire for it! Down with the rich, and up with
the poor!” The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous, in 1812
was a Democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, and
accordingly “one of our eminent citizens,” in 1851 he was a Whig,
and went a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. (“The
Nebraska Question,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, pp. 331-335.)
The America of Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker
knew it, and like Lincoln he did not disapprove. Honest thrift he found
wholly desirable, and wealth if it were honestly got. But speculation
dissociated from creative work he regarded with old-fashioned distrust.
“If a man fully pay in efficient, productive toil and thought, he is
entitled to all he gets, one dollar or many million dollars ... and
if his estate be but what he has thus actually and honestly paid for
with service given, equivalent to the service received, what he can
virtuously keep or humanely apply and expend, then it will never be
too large.”[463] But he believed there were other gods, and greater,
than the god of getting on; social justice was more desirable than
unearned increment; and he set his face like flint against the common
materialism of America. “I come to build up piety and morality; to
pull down only what cumbers the ground,” he said; but he had learned
that the temples of State Street were not easily leveled; that they
would not fall without a mighty crash. A less courageous man would
have hesitated, but Parker was utterly fearless. Boston he knew “was
a Tory town.” “The Mother city of the Puritans is now the metropolis
of the Hunkers” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 111). But the
spirit of ’76 was strong in him and he would “appeal from Boston drunk
with gold, and briefly mad with hate, to sober Boston in her hour to
come.” He would appeal from Whiggish Boston to Revolutionary Boston;
from State Street to Lexington common; from the Faneuil Hall of Rufus
Choate to the Faneuil Hall of Sam Adams. He would awaken the ancestral
idealism of Boston that slept uneasily under the spell of middle-class
ambitions--that had sold its Puritan heritage for southern trade
profits. Such an appeal Boston had never before listened to, ardent,
unsparing, the Hebraic and the Yankee vernacular curiously mingled; and
Boston writhed uncomfortably and pronounced the prophet ill-mannered.
When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed, the six New England states lay
fast asleep: Massachusetts slept soundly, her head pillowed on her
unsold bales of Cotton and of woolen goods, dreaming of “orders
from the South.” Justice came to waken her ... and she started in
her sleep, and being frightened, swore a prayer or two, then slept
again. But Boston woke,--sleeping, in her shop, with ears open, and
her eye on the market, her hand on her purse, dreaming of goods for
sale,--Boston woke broadly up, and fired a hundred guns for joy. O
Boston, Boston! if thou couldst have known, in that thine hour, the
things which belong unto thy peace! But no: they were hidden from
her eyes. She had prayed to her god, to Money; he granted her the
request, but sent leanness into her soul. (“The Boston Kidnapping,”
in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 89.)
But he offended the Boston code of good breeding even more seriously.
He became personal. He named names. Before vast congregations, in
printed books, he pronounced judgment on Bostonians respected in
the Back Bay, mighty in State Street. Boston gentlemen had never
before suffered such tongue-lashings. How mercilessly he excoriated
Commissioner Loring, judge of probate and Harvard professor, for
soiling his hands in the Anthony Burns case! How neatly he pricked
the empty culture of Edward Everett for his pro-slavery ardor--“a
Cambridge professor of Greek, he studied the original tongue of the
Bible to learn that the Scripture says ‘slaves,’ where the English
Bible says only ‘servants’!” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 115.)
What an utterly devastating attack he made on the great Webster for
the latter’s subserviency to local economic interests! Much honest
realism underlies that criticism, and much honest American history. The
“Nebraska Address” and the “Webster Address” are notable historical
documents, incisive analyses--rare in those romantic days--done by
one who has kept a shrewd eye on current politics, and understands
the hidden springs of party policy. Into the Webster address he put
his vast knowledge, his power of analysis, his frank idealism. It was
“a sad and dreadful day” when duty bade Theodore Parker speak on the
man whose uncommon powers he had long admired; but he did his work
thoroughly, refusing to shut his eyes to ugly fact, refusing to indulge
in commonplace eulogy. It was the eighteenth-century economic realism
of Webster that stirred the wrath of the transcendentalist--that and
the lapses from integrity. Parker’s text was found in Webster’s dictum
that “the great object of government is the protection of property at
home, and respect and renown abroad”; and how starkly it runs counter
to his own ideal of government, “the enactment of God’s justice into
human laws,” is laid bare in page after page of scathing commentary.
To the exacting ethics of Parker, Webster was wanting in principles;
he followed expediency rather than justice; and how surely expediency
digs pitfalls for its own undoing he discovered tragic illustration of
in the career of the great senator. It is a hard fate for a politician,
accustomed to the cheap praise of the gullible public, to fall into the
hands of a critic who is honest and searching; and Webster had too many
weak points to emerge from such an analysis with credit. It is probably
the most critical examination of Webster’s career that has ever been
made, and withal just.
Surprisingly modern, far more so than Channing, was this brilliant
preacher--impulsive, colloquial, natural, whose every arrow was
pointed with a fact and feathered to fly true; concerned more with
righteousness than with policy; hating the dull commonplace and empty
dignity of Tory ways; careless of convention, somewhat spectacular,
with a keen relish for combat--a vital, vivid man, the apostle of
conscience, the advocate of every unpopular cause. He possessed an
amazing gift of words, yet he was too impatient, too practical, to
become an artist; preferring immediate ends to more lasting reputation,
and spending himself with a free prodigality. He was always the speaker
rather than the writer and his printed pages bear the unmistakable
marks of impetuous oral discourse. Emerson accounted him one of
the four great men of the age. Whether or not that judgment holds,
whether he was too eager a militant to become a great transcendental
philosopher, the historian sees in Theodore Parker one of the greatest,
if not the last, of the excellent line of Puritan preachers.
Footnotes
[459] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 348.
[460] See “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational
Society of Boston,” in Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore
Parker_, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 482. This account of his “Experience
as a Minister” constitutes a brief intellectual autobiography, of first
importance to the student of Parker.
[461] This phrase of Parker’s was probably the source of Lincoln’s
phrase.
[462] See “The Law of God and the Statutes of Men,” in _Additional
Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 181.
[463] Quoted in Weiss, Vol. II, p. 488.
Chapter V • Margaret Fuller • Rebel
The fame of Margaret Fuller has waned greatly since her vivid
personality was blotted out in the prime of her intellectual
development. Misunderstood in her own time, caricatured by unfriendly
critics, and with significant facts of her life suppressed by her
friends out of a chivalrous sense of loyalty, the real woman has been
lost in a Margaret Fuller myth and later generations have come to
underestimate her powers and undervalue her work. Yet no other woman
of her generation in America is so well worth recalling. She was
the completest embodiment of the inchoate rebellions and grandiose
aspirations of the age of transcendental ferment; for to the many
grievances charged against the times by other New England liberals, she
added the special grievance of the stupid inhibitions laid upon women.
Transcendental radical and critic, like Emerson and Thoreau and Parker,
she was feminist also; and to the difficult business of freeing her
mind from the Cambridge orthodoxies, she added the greater difficulty
of freeing her sex.
The written record that Margaret Fuller left is quite inadequate to
explain her contemporary reputation. In no sense an artist, scarcely
a competent craftsman, she wrote nothing that bears the mark of high
distinction either in thought or style. Impatient of organization and
inadequately disciplined, she threw off her work impulsively, not
pausing to shape it to enduring form. Yet she was vastly talked about,
and common report makes her out to have been an extraordinary woman
who creatively influenced those with whom she came in contact. Like
Alcott, her power lay in brilliant talk. Her quick mind seems to have
been an electric current that stimulated other minds to activity, and
created a vortex of speculation wherever she passed. Hungry for ideas,
intellectually and emotionally vibrant, she caught her inspirations
from obscure impulses of a nature thwarted and inhibited from normal
unfolding; and in her sensitive oscillations she was often drawn
away from polar principles to which she would later swing back. There
was quite evidently a fundamental unrest within her, a conflict of
impulses, that issued in dissatisfaction; and this contradiction was
aggravated by intense emotions, which both quickened her mind and
distorted it.
A product of Cambridge bookishness, Margaret Fuller was both a wonder
and a riddle to a generation that made little account of the psychology
of sex. She was commonly looked upon as an intellectual monstrosity,
the most fearful of Yankee bluestockings, and a later Bostonian has
gone so far as to suggest that she was “an unsexed version of Plato’s
Socrates” (Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 300). But to
present-day psychology her character is an extraordinarily suggestive
document, and a recent critic has read her seeming contradictions
like an open book.[464] Before Miss Anthony’s penetrating analysis
the Margaret Fuller myth vanishes, and a very real, natural, and
unfortunate woman takes its place. She came of vigorous stock,
independent, outspoken, opinionated. Her grandfather was a clergyman
who was unfrocked by his church for being lukewarm in the Revolutionary
War. Her father, Timothy Fuller, and her four uncles, worked their
way through Harvard. In Timothy Fuller there was a large measure of
Puritan grimness and severity that locked the door on the passions of
his heart, that none might know of them; yet there seems to have been
a volcano in the man who held off the world so brusquely. The rebel
was strong in him. The Fullers were not of Brahmin stock and had no
wish to please their social superiors. While a Harvard undergraduate,
Timothy Fuller turned Jeffersonian republican and lost his place as
first honor man by joining in an undergraduate protest against certain
hated regulations. As a lawyer and politician he repudiated respectable
Federalism, and although he was representative in Congress for four
terms and enjoyed certain other offices, his non-conformity in the end
cost him dear. No doubt he had counted on that, for he was stubborn oak
that might break but would not bend. The tragedy of Margaret Fuller’s
life seems to have been sketched before in the life of Timothy Fuller.
To an extraordinary degree the daughter was the child of the father,
in ideas and sympathies as well as blood. Like him she was a rebel,
but for the daughter to turn rebel involved greater hazards than
for the father. Her sex was a heavy handicap, for the experience of
Fanny Wright and Lucretia Mott had revealed that American chivalry
had definite bounds; it did not shield the woman who ventured beyond
the pale. Yet considering her blood and training, how could she help
thus venturing into freer fields without? From her earliest years her
father treated her as a comrade and gave her the training of a boy. In
her studies he dealt with her as James Mill dealt with his brilliant
son. Perhaps it was a mistake to force her into the rigid groove of
classical learning when she should have been playing with her dolls.
From it she got very unusual acquisitions, but overstimulation broke
her health, and isolation turned her mind in upon itself and made her
the victim of somnambulism and freaks of imagination. The result was
the development, on one side of her nature, of a female counterpart
of Cotton Mather--precocious, domineering, moody, visionary, given to
long hours of greedy reading, gorging herself on books and well-nigh
ruining her intellectual digestion as well as her health. Against this
unfortunate overstimulation her vigorous nature struggled for years,
and never quite successfully. Her emotions were forever embroiling
her intellect. To conceive of her as sexless is curiously to miss the
point of her emotionalism. She was rather the victim of sex. Her ardent
friendships with other women, her flashes of mystical experience, her
fondness for children, her love of luxury and creature comforts, her
eager love affair with James Nathan who unchivalrously found safety in
flight, her friendship with Mazzini and her more intimate friendship
with Count Ossoli, that ended in an unconventional marriage after her
situation rendered it necessary--such reactions can be explained on
no other hypothesis. Her ardent nature was the victim of disastrous
frustrations, rendered the more acute by premature development. If
she had married early, as Harriet Beecher did, and her excessive
energy had been turned into domestic channels, her life must have been
less tragic, whatever the effect might have been on her intellectual
development.
The acutest contemporary analysis of her contradictory character is
that given by her friend William Henry Channing, who found his clue in
the clash between endowment and environment:
Here was one fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the
tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate
excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought,
sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with
imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in
their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an
equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and
early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging,
descendants of prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have
discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of
beauty for which her spirits pined, she would have developed into
one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern
literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of
her fate she keenly felt. (_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_,
by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Vol. II, pp.
36-37.)
This disastrous clash between endowment and environment is strikingly
exemplified in her delight in Europe when at thirty-four she found
herself there--in her admiration for Georges Sand, and in particular
the extravagance of her love for Rome, where her starved heart found
satisfactions she had long dreamed of. “Italy receives me as a
long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here,” she wrote in 1847;
and a few weeks later, “I find how true was the lure that always drew
me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here
find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten
years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has
been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the
right soil” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 225). She was too eagerly pagan to be
satisfied with either Puritan or Yankee Cambridge. The pale ethicism of
New England was thin gruel for such an appetite for life. Even Emerson
she found cold, and her stomach rebelled at the food he throve on. But
this was only half the story; the other half was this:
But the tragedy of Margaret’s history was deeper yet. Behind the
poet was the woman,--fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested
woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush
of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was
the confession that her heart had found no home. A “book-worm,”
a “dilettante,” a “pedant,” I had heard her sneeringly called;
but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin
pride, and her absorption in studying the natural vent of emotions,
which met no object of life-long attachment. At once, many of her
peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes
of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitutions of
fancy for fact ... were now referred to the morbid influence of
affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still
more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness,
by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be
led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst
upon me, and ... I saw how faithful she had kept to her life
purposes,--how patient, gentle, and thoughtful of others, how
active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she
had been,--I could not but bow to her in reverence. (_Ibid._, Vol.
II, p. 37.)
The inchoate rebellions in her heart were stimulated and given form by
her reading. From the English, French, and German romantics she drew
much of her intellectual food. The long hours spent with her father
over Jefferson’s letters were the best of preparation for Rousseau
and Mary Wollstonecraft, and French romanticism provided an excellent
introduction to the German. Her emotions were in high ferment when she
came upon the German school, and she yielded her heart to it without
reserve. Novalis, Richter, above all Goethe, became a passion and
swept her along the path that Hedge and James Freeman Clarke were
following. For years she gathered materials for a life of Goethe, but
a feeling of self-distrust held back the project. Her love for him was
the great literary enthusiasm of her life. “It seems to me,” she wrote
in 1832, “as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe.... I am
enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had
so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully; but when I shut the book,
it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked
with such an immense variety that belongs to things I had thought
so different” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 119). Later, with more critical
analysis of Goethe, she found her enthusiasm modifying; she was
repelled by his calm, aloof intellectuality;[465] but she never wavered
in loyal recognition of his commanding powers.
Her romantic idealism was in full career when the transcendental
movement caught her up and put its stamp upon her. It came as an
emotional appeal to the vague aspirations of a life inadequately
motivated, and she threw herself eagerly into the new philosophy
and became the most hectic of its expounders. The intellectual
foundations of her transcendentalism were so slight in comparison
with the equipment of Hedge and Parker as scarcely to justify her
pretentions to their fellowship. But what she lacked in knowledge of
Kant and Fichte she made up in enthusiasm, and none questioned her
right to speak for the group. The editorship of the _Dial_ provided a
convenient safety valve for her energy, but it neither absorbed her nor
sufficed to satisfy her limitless desires. She needed to espouse a
cause more concrete and dramatic, personal in its demands, calling for
high sacrifice. Abolitionism was at hand, but it repelled her by its
narrow dogmatisms. Garrison was never a hero of hers. She regarded him
with “high respect” for his “noble and generous” course; but “he has
indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the
temper of his mind” (“Frederick Douglass,” in _Life Without and Life
Within_, p. 122). Later, when she was in Europe, she looked back half
regretfully at her indifference to the movement.
How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never
endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so
narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after
all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and
life. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, p. 229.)
Even Brook Farm repelled her as much as it attracted her. Though
she loved many of the members, bore her share in the discussions
preliminary to its establishment, and often visited there, she would
not join the venture. She had had enough of farm life at Groton. To
open a road to Utopia with a common plow was, perhaps, too prosaic a
business for her romantic nature, and when the Fourier Phalanx was
introduced she grew skeptical. Fourierism seemed to her too mechanical
a conception, in spite of her sympathy for the humanitarian spirit that
lay behind it. As she looked back upon it from the vantage point of her
French experience, she modified her judgment somewhat, although the old
transcendental bias that Emerson had voiced still colored her views.
The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic
of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or
stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of
these subjects,--such as is animated by the hope of prevention.
Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its
faults; in attempts to reorganise society, he commits the error
of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the
clothing of the soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover
of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views
are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these
subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest
sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance
with the population of London or Paris, could seek to hinder a
study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes.
(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 206.)
It was in part from Fourier, certainly from the collectivistic
theories discussed so generally by the transcendental group, that
she received her equipment for the cause which, more than any other
except the dramatic Roman revolution, appealed to the deeper rebellions
of her soul. She had dealt much with the woman question in her
“Conversations,” and in 1844 she published _Woman in the Nineteenth
Century_, a work that made a great stir in America. The “little book
was the first considered statement of feminism in this country”
(Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller_, p. 80), and its novelty was
emphasized by its boldness. The question of woman’s place had emerged
sharply from the Abolition movement, when the appearance of women on
the platform had aroused opposition even from radical reformers, and
Angelina Grimké had encountered insults when she spoke at Abolition
meetings. But Margaret Fuller was the first since Mary Wollstonecraft,
fifty years before, to undertake a reasoned defense of the claims of
woman to emancipation from man-made custom. It was a somewhat shocking
book to fling at respectable Boston bluestockings--male as well as
female--for not only did she discuss equality of economic opportunity
and equality of political rights for women, but she went further and
spoke frankly about sex equality, marriage, prostitution, physical
passions--pretty much everything that was taboo in Boston society. It
was a bold thing to do, needing more courage even than to engage in a
Fourieristic onslaught upon the conventions of private property. Only a
first-class rebel would have had the temerity to offer such morsels to
wagging tongues.
This was her parting shot at a world that had done its best to stifle
her. Thenceforth her field was to broaden out immensely. In 1844 she
went to New York to live in the family of Horace Greeley and write
critical reviews for _The Tribune_--a shift that marked the beginning
of her intellectual maturity, the end of her mystical sentimentalism.
She was thirty-four years of age, and she plunged vigorously into the
work of criticism, never perhaps very successfully, certainly never
with high distinction. Her judgments were penetrating and individual,
she awakened some Cambridge animosities by her comment on certain
Cambridge poets, but she was not a notable critic. A fine craftsmanship
she never attained. A light touch she could never command. Nevertheless
the experience was sobering. Honest, practical Horace Greeley, with
his pugnacious fondness for social reform, was an excellent antidote
to Concord transcendentalism; and an awakening sociological interest
discovered ample opportunities in New York for the expression of her
mother-instinct. She took to her stormy bosom the inmates of Sing Sing
prison, the poor and outcast of the city. At last she went to Europe,
fell in with Mazzini, and found a cause dramatic enough and real enough
to satisfy her rebellious instincts. She was profoundly stirred by the
Roman revolution, took charge of one of the hospitals, and spent her
strength freely. On the tragic failure of the revolt she started home
with her husband and child, only to perish on the sandy shores of Fire
Island--a fate she did not turn her finger to escape. Perhaps it was
well. She had only too good reason to be fearful of her reception and
of the future. Tongues that had wagged before would certainly have
risen to a virtuous gabble over her misadventure in Italy. On the whole
one must be glad that her friends refused to permit her good name to
be thrown to the gossips. Why shouldn’t gentlemen lie stoutly if by so
doing they can cheat the salacious?
A sensitive emotional nature offers the best of social barometers,
and Margaret Fuller’s tragic life, despite its lack of solid
accomplishment, was an epitome of the great revolt of the New England
mind against Puritan asceticism and Yankee materialism. She was the
emotional expression of a rebellious generation that had done with
the past and was questioning the future. Not a scholar like Theodore
Parker, not a thinker like Thoreau, not an artist like Emerson, she was
a ferment of troubled aspiration, an enthusiasm for a more generous
culture than New England had known--the logical outcome of the romantic
revolution which, beginning with Channing’s discovery of humanitarian
France, and leading thence to idealistic Germany, was to break the
indurated shell of life in New England, and release its conscience and
its mind. She was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques even more than of
Goethe--a fact that she eventually came to realize. Writing from Paris
in 1847, she said:
To the ... Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the
manuscripts of Rousseau, treasured in their library. I saw them and
touched them,--those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them,
written on fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded
age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire
of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which
his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we
most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course
of his actual life made some _detours_ through villainous places;
but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human
nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given
birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are
too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with
Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of
genius,--to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat
they complain. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, pp. 206-207.)
The rebel pays a heavy price for his rebellions, as Margaret learned to
her cost. She suffered much in her daily life, but it was her art that
suffered most. She was evidently a far richer nature than her printed
works reveal. Intense in her extravagant demands upon life, a radical
humanitarian in all her sympathies and instincts, generous in response
to whatever was fine and high, living unduly an inner life as became a
daughter of Puritanism--Margaret Fuller was too vivid a personality,
too complete an embodiment of the rich ferment of the forties, to be
carelessly forgotten. The deeper failure of her career--its vague
aspirations and inadequate accomplishment--was a failure that may be
justly charged against the narrow world that bred her. Perhaps no
sharper criticism could be leveled at New England than that it could do
no better with such material, lent it by the gods.
Footnotes
[464] See Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller, A Psychological
Biography_.
[465] See _Life Without and Life Within_, pp. 23-60.
Part IV: Other Aspects of the New England Mind
Chapter I • The Reign of the Genteel
I
The discussion of the New England mind hitherto has kept pretty much
to the outskirts of Boston, to Concord and Roxbury and undistinguished
precincts; it has not penetrated the Back Bay where dwelt the authentic
representatives of Brahminism, nor has it concerned itself greatly
with Cambridge that was a lesser Back Bay. Nevertheless there were
other ideals than those of transcendentalism and social reform in the
New England of the renaissance--ideals of culture, of scholarship, of
_belles lettres_, to which the Brahmin mind contributed, and which
after the subsidence of the ferment came to dominate genteel New
England and for a generation largely influenced American letters. To
the revolutionary aspirations of the forties the Back Bay contributed
little. Brahmin Boston might turn Unitarian with Channing, but it
was at heart neither French romantic nor German idealist; it desired
rather culture for its own sake, and scholarship it regarded as the
handmaid of culture. It hoped of course that righteousness and the
will of God should ultimately prevail in human affairs, but it was not
exigent in its demands. Occasion and means it willingly left to God,
anticipating that the walls of Jericho must fall of their own weakness.
It is surprising how little the greater issues of the time ruffled the
serenity of the Brahmin mind, and how uncritical were its judgments on
such issues as came under its review. Divided between State Street and
the Back Bay, its life ran a smoothly agreeable course with no hint of
potential antagonisms between exploitation and culture. It followed so
strictly the injunction, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth, that the two were almost total strangers to each other. Like
Edith Wharton’s contemporary Knickerbockers, the Brahmins conceived
the great business of life to be the erection of barriers against the
intrusion of the unpleasant. They took it ill when those barriers were
assaulted by rude militants, and when indisputable Brahmins--men like
Edmund Quincy and Wendell Phillips--took part in the assault, the Back
Bay regarded them as more than a little queer.
The immediate consequence of this concern for defensive breastworks
was the reign of the genteel in life and letters, a reign that set up
a court of critical jurisdiction over the domain of American letters.
The essence of the genteel tradition was a refined ethicism, that
professed to discover the highest virtue in shutting one’s eyes to
disagreeable fact, and the highest law in the law of convention. Gone
were the franker days of Robert Treat Paine when a wit might find his
choicest _bons mots_ in the bottom of his cups. Coarseness had given
way to refinement. It was the romanticism of Brahmin culture, with all
Falstaffian vulgarity deleted, and every smutch of the natural man
bleached out in the pure sunshine of manners. It was Victorianism of
a more maidenly purity than the English strain, so carefully filtered
by passing through the close Puritan mesh that the smallest impurities
were removed. The first of literary commandments was the commandment
of reticence. Literature was conceived of as belonging to the library
and the drawing-room, and it must observe the drawing-room amenities.
Only a vulgarian would lug a spade there. Any venture into realism was
likely to prove libidinous, and sure to be common. Certainly Margaret
Fuller had overstepped the bounds of decency with her remarks about
women of the streets. The Adamite school was the vulgar expression
of the natural man, and Continental realism--the French and the
Russian--was only bringing the gutter into the library. Literature
must be fine and pure and noble, and as such it will serve decency and
manners; what excuse is there for it otherwise? The case for the true
church of literature, as against the Adamite and other heresies, was
admirably stated by Lowell:
I have not seen Swinburne’s new volume--but a poem or two from it
which I have seen shocked me, and I am not squeamish.... Why should
a man by choice go down to live in his cellar, instead of mounting
to those fair upper chambers which look towards the sunrise of that
Easter which shall greet the resurrection of the soul from the body
of this death? _Virginibus puerisque?_ To be sure! let no man write
a line that he would not have his daughter read.... But I have
outlived many heresies, and shall outlive this new Adamite one of
Swinburne. The true Church of poetry is founded on a rock, and I
have no fear that these smutchy back-doors of hell shall prevail
against her. (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 377.)
II
Though it willingly recognized the superior claims of poetry and the
essay, the Brahmin mind found a more congenial field for its literary
ambitions in history; and the quiet scholarship that it pursued with
exemplary diligence was likely to flower in substantial historical
studies. Excellent work much of it is, brilliant in certain instances;
yet it too is subtly marked by the psychology of the environment that
produced it. The renaissance of Boston scholarship began with Everett
and Ticknor, whose German training was imposed on natures instinctively
aristocratic, swayed by the older Federalist prejudices. The latter
applied himself to Spanish literature, but his colleague and fellow
historian, Jared Sparks, proved that in the American field even
painstaking scholarship could not subdue the temptation to improve upon
reality. Sparks applied Boston ethics to biography and conceived that
his mission in writing the life of a great American like Washington
was to portray a national hero as a model to the youth of the land. In
pursuance of this aim he studiously perfected nature by correcting all
the little blemishes of manner and little weaknesses of character in
order to produce an immaculate effect. He edited Washington’s letters
with a free hand, not only correcting the grammar and spelling, but
silently deleting such passages as did not become the hero he had in
mind. He did not of course go to the absurd lengths of Parson Weems
in inventing episodes and effects, but he refused to deal with his
materials realistically and the result was a falsifying of the total
impression.
The greatest and in certain respects the most characteristic work
of the period was George Bancroft’s _History of the United States_,
to which with single-minded purpose he devoted sixty laborious
years. Trained in Göttingen, he gathered his materials with German
thoroughness, but the underlying spirit and purpose of his exposition
were native to the ardent nationalism of Jacksonian America. Bancroft
was the only important member of the New England group of historians
who was a militant Democrat, and he set out to justify to the world
the ways of democratic America. It was a great undertaking and in the
opinion of Ranke, the German historian, it justified itself. “Your
history is the best book ever written from the democratic point of
view,”[466] he wrote Bancroft. The praise was perhaps not excessive.
Conceived in the early days of the Jacksonian triumph, it reflects
the grandiose conception of the future of America and the beneficent
influence of republican institutions on western civilization, that
were common in the golden days of equalitarianism and that even such
a scholarly legalist as Hugh Legaré shared. But unfortunately, with
his generation Bancroft had lost his economic bearings, and he drove
forward somewhat too confidently into the new seas of political
idealism trusting to the pole-star of emancipated human nature. As a
democrat he was too easily persuaded that democratic America lay in
the particular keeping of Providence, and he assumed too readily that
the democratic development of American institutions was in response to
the divine will. It reflects something of the partisanship of honest
patriots who believe God is on their side; but it served to correct
the teachings of Federalists like Richard Hildreth who insisted that
God was on the side of Federalism. Till Bancroft took up his pen the
bias of American chronicles had been anti-democratic. Every Federalist
with leisure, a quill, and a smattering of historical knowledge, had
added his mite to the Federalist myths that long constituted the body
of our history. The democratic interpretation ran so counter to Boston
tradition that Bancroft found little congeniality amongst his fellow
historians, and he eventually quitted his native state and took up his
home in Washington.
More representative of the Brahmin spirit was the work of William H.
Prescott, John L. Motley, and Francis Parkman, who constitute what may
be called the romantic school of Boston historians. They sought the
romantic in theme and aspired to the romantic in treatment quite as
consciously as did the contemporary novelists. Of excellent Brahmin
strain, with leisure, wealth, opportunity, they were free to pick
and choose as they would. Prescott and Motley turned away from the
partisanships of America, and while Jacksonianism was in full swing
the former wrote his _Ferdinand and Isabella_, and while the country
was wrangling over slavery the latter wrote his _Rise of the Dutch
Republic_. Broad in conception and dramatic in treatment, they are
admirable works, yet they suggest that aloofness from the sordid
realities of America so characteristic of the Brahmin mind. Far more
brilliant and significant was the work of Francis Parkman who turned
his imagination to the far West over which the struggle for exploration
and conquest had long persisted between the French and English. In his
twenties he had made a venturesome trip to the great plains, and that
experience gave life and vitality to his later historical writings,
that were enriched by close research, a brilliant style, and a creative
imagination. The theme he set himself was not alone a “history of the
American forest,” but a clash between civilizations--the “feudal,
militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial,
and Protestant England”; and with fine tenacity of purpose, in the
teeth of ill health, he wrought at his project till the America of the
old French War times was gathered into his pages. The Brahmin mind has
contributed to American letters no more brilliant work than came from
the pen of Francis Parkman.
III
If the highest aspirations of the Brahmin nature sought satisfaction
in poetry, Longfellow may be reckoned its most characteristic product.
In his work the romantic, the sentimental, and the moralistic,
blended in such just proportions, and expressed themselves with such
homely simplicity as to hit exactly the current taste and establish a
reputation that later generations have difficulty in understanding.
A gentle, lovable soul, widely read and in maturer years possessing
a ripe literary scholarship, he was a skillful purveyor of gentle,
lovable ideals. Although he drew his materials from Spain and Sweden
and Italy, from primitive New England and aboriginal America, it was
Germany that largely provided the staple of his romance. With Emerson
and Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker, he found Germany a singularly
congenial land--not Königsberg with its transcendental metaphysics, nor
Weimar with its pagan culture, nor Tübingen with its higher criticism.
Such things, transcendental and critical, he was not concerned about;
it was the minor romantics, Freiligrath rather than Heine, the gentle
melancholy and pervasive _Sehnsucht_ of the German folk-nature, that
drew him irresistibly and quickened his sympathetic pen. There was
little intellect in Longfellow, little creative originality. He was the
poet of an uncritical and unsophisticated generation, as yet untroubled
by science and industrialism, and his mind was detached from politics
and his conscience rarely disturbed by social questions. He came of
excellent Federalist stock, his father having been a delegate from
Maine to the Hartford Convention; and with his courteous manners he
fitted easily into the little world of Cambridge Brahmins. However one
might question his poetry, none could question that he was a gentleman
amongst gentlemen.
If he was never the omnivorous bookman that Lowell was, he was
distinctly a poet of the library. His placid and singularly happy
life was pretty much bounded by his library walls. One could scarcely
have lived more detached from contemporary America, more effectively
insulated against the electric currents of the times. Though Thoreau
might flee to Walden he carried his questioning intellect with him;
even the constable would not leave him alone there. But Longfellow’s
door shut securely against all intrusion. The winds of doctrine and
policy might rage through the land, but they did not rattle the windows
of his study to disturb his quiet poring over Dante. The translation
of the _Divina Commedia_ would go forward even while the country was
being torn asunder. In a sense such work was his refuge against the
storm and stress of malignant forces that troubled him. He did not like
the tumult and the shouting, and much of Longfellow is compressed into
the sonnets that preface the translation, much of the gentleness of his
evasion, and much of the finer craftsmanship of his later years.
Oft have I seen at some cathedral door
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o’er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,
And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away,
While the eternal ages watch and wait.
How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!
But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!
Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This mediaeval miracle of song!
A single incursion Longfellow made into the field of Abolition
controversy, prompted perhaps by Dickens, whose “grand chapter on
slavery” in _American Notes_ he had read in London. The seven poems
were written to beguile the tedium of a sea voyage. They are unreal
enough to seem quite harmless, yet they created a decided stir on
their appearance. For a Harvard professor to express publicly even a
mild sympathy with the Abolition movement, may well have been somewhat
perilous, considering the fate of Professor Follen; and the sacred
institution may have scented a real danger in such romanticisms.
Grotesque as these academic poems were, with their burnt-cork figures,
they perhaps served to romanticize and sentimentalize the negro
for northern minds, as _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ did a decade later with
tremendous effect. Slavery had no weapon against such an attack, and
no doubt Longfellow’s contributions proved serviceable to the cause
of Abolitionism. But this one venture satisfied him, and having got
safely back to his library, he shut the door on the whole vexatious
question of slavery. He was not made for battle, and causes commanded
an unwilling allegiance. Little remained of his Puritanism save
conscience, a sense of struggle against somewhat vague and indolent
powers of evil, a pleasant melancholy that transmuted itself into
pleasant verse. He lived vicariously the lives of other poets, sharing
their emotions, repeating their thoughts, reproducing their pictures;
yet adding some individual color from his own sincere nature. Not
richly endowed, he was more than an echo. He marked the transition
from the nebulous ferment of the creative renaissance to the scholarly
culture of Brahmin Cambridge. After Longfellow came Charles Eliot
Norton in whose blameless life that culture flowered, and after that
came sterility.
Footnotes
[466] Quoted in Stanton, _Manual of American Literature_, p. 101.
Chapter II • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Skeptic
After his immersion for some months in the Utopian dreams of Brook
Farm, Miles Coverdale in _The Blithedale Romance_ discovered that he
had drifted far from reality. “No sagacious man,” he remarked, “will
long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and
progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled
system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old
standpoint.”
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk
with the conservatives, the writers of the North American Review,
the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which
had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
In this suggestive pronouncement the intellectual position of Hawthorne
is revealed. Cool, detached, rationalistic, curiously inquisitive,
he looked out upon the ferment of the times, the clash of rival
philosophies and rival interests, only to bring them into his study
and turn upon them the light of his critical analysis. One after
another he weighed the several faiths of New England, conservative and
transcendental and radical, and ended skeptic. He was too much of a
realist to change fashions in creeds. Time, experience--he is always
remembering--have created men as we find them, and very likely only
time and experience can make them over into something different. The
conservatives would seem to have common sense on their side, for they
are seeking to retain what has hitherto been won; but the reformers
are not without justification as well, for impelled by an ardent
faith they are seeking to win new conquests. But whether that which
the conservatives defend so valiantly is worth defending, or whether
the goal towards which the reformers drive so furiously is worth the
trouble, are questions about which the rationalist may be permitted his
doubts. The universe in which he found himself was a moral universe,
Hawthorne on the whole believed; and if that were true then man’s
chief business and urgent problem was the matter of a sufficient
morality.
Radical in his intellectual processes, he could never become
greatly interested in specific radicalisms. He is often thought of
as a transcendentalist, and his association with the Peabodys and
his venture into Brook Farm might seem to lend color to such an
interpretation. Yet nothing in his intellectual sympathies marks him
as of the school. The polar conceptions of transcendentalism repelled
rather than attracted him. Political and metaphysical speculation
left him cold, and the twin revolutionary forces of the time, French
romanticism and German idealism, never deeply affected his thinking.
Amid all the flux he retained much of the older Calvinist view of
life and human destiny. Though nominally a Unitarian he did not share
Channing’s faith in the perfectibility of man. The buried voice of God
that the transcendentalists professed to have discovered in instinct,
he greatly distrusted. Man seemed to him quite as likely to turn out
to be a child of the devil as the first-born of God. Perhaps through a
long and uncertain process he may grow into something nobler than he
now is, but for the present the fact remains that the human heart, if
not desperately wicked, is at least on familiar terms with evil; too
often it is cold, selfish, malignant, and its secret promptings need
watching. Doubting the indwelling presence of the divine Over-soul,
he could find no justification for the transcendental faith in the
excellence of the universe, out of which came the genial optimism
of the Emersonians. Too pronounced a rationalist to comprehend the
mysticism that lurked in the heart of the transcendental faith, he
remained cold to the revolutionary criticism that was eager to pull
down the old temples to make room for nobler. Eager souls, mystics and
revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with
their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret
places of the heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while
the Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child
of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the question of evil as
it appeared in the light of his own experience. It was the central,
fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a
solution he probed curiously into the hidden, furtive recesses of the
soul.
The isolation in which he chose to brood over the problem, seeking to
take the solution by surprise in unguarded moments, was the natural
consequence of his temperament and his habits. He lived singularly
remote from common interests, singularly self-sufficient. Both as
thinker and artist he suffered from his self-imposed isolation.
The twelve years of his apprenticeship, closely immured and given
over to spinning cobwebs about the old Puritan rafters, drawing the
stuff of his romance out of his own bowels, may have facilitated the
development of technic, but it laid narrow limitations on the matter
of his art. Intellectually unlocalized in his Yankee world, he was
the romancer of a dead but unforgotten past, at home only where the
New England conscience brooded over sin--subduing the old nightmares
to less terrifying dreams, intruding his doubts into old dogmas yet
never emerging from the old shadows. Although he was a child of the
liberation and had broken the web that Calvinism had woven about the
mind of New England, he did not choose to quit the world from whose
bondage he had freed himself. He would examine the old problem in a
new light. In rejecting Calvinism as a religion, he retained it as a
background for his inquisitive probing. It appealed to his imagination
after his reason had rejected its dogmas; it determined his art after
it had ceased to command his loyalty. In consequence, all his life
Hawthorne dwelt between worlds. Though at times he tried to establish
contact with Yankee reality, though he essayed to establish an
intellectual _rapport_ with his generation, he never quite succeeded,
but remained to the last isolated, a frequenter of the twilight.
Only in a narrow and very special sense was Hawthorne a romantic.
With the romance of love and adventure he was never concerned; what
interested him was the romance of ethics--the distortions of the soul
under the tyranny of a diseased imagination. How little he shares in
common with other romantics is revealed in his detachment from his
native Salem. The place was not lacking in picturesque charm, present
and past. During the long years he spent in his Salem study, the city
was rising to the zenith of its brisk sea life, with its ships in the
China trade, its venturesome fisheries, its echoes of the whaling
industry at Nantucket. Materials for romance were lying all about
the Salem wharves--such a show of canvas and spars and rigging, such
briny smells, such suggestions of far voyages to outlandish places,
such strange figures slipping in from the ends of the earth--such
romantic promptings in short as would have intoxicated the imagination
of Herman Melville, and that Joseph Hergesheimer wove into the rich
tapestries of _Java Head_. A romantic could scarcely have found
in America a setting better calculated to awaken a sense of brave
adventure than in old Salem; yet for three years Hawthorne sat in the
Custom House, with such materials all about him, and then turned away
to the seventeenth century to write of Hester Prynne. For a man gifted
with imagination to fail to lift his eyes to the horizon beyond which
the hurrying ships were seeking strange markets, and instead to turn
them in upon a shadowy world of half unreal characters; to overlook
the motley picturesque in the foreground of the actual, in order to
brood over an old adultery and twist it into theological sin, can be
explained only on the ground that Hawthorne was concerned with ethical
rather than romantic values, that he was interested rather in the
problem of evil than in the trappings of romance. Aloofness of time and
place served to isolate the problem, stripping away the wrappings of
the physical, delocalizing it, transmuting the individual act into the
universal. Thus isolated, Hester’s sin becomes a symbol of that ancient
evil which forever waylays human life and by strange perversions
brings havoc to our hopes--the greatest havoc to him whose heart, like
Chillingsworth’s, is cold, selfish, malignant.
This temperamental aloofness from objective reality was both the
strength and the weakness of Hawthorne’s art. In choosing to follow
the way of the inner life he was true to his Puritan breeding. The
perpetual turning-in of the mind upon itself, the long introspective
brooding over human motives, came naturally to one who lived in the
shadow of a Puritan past. In their anxious concern over sin the
Puritans had become in some measure psychologists; how else could
the secret impulses of the soul be probed and its dark workings laid
bare? Hawthorne was only doing what Jonathan Edwards before him had
done in his psychological clinic of the Great Awakening--examining
the reactions of sin on conscience and character. From this comes the
simplicity of his theme and the compelling unity of his handling. To be
sure it is pathological phenomena that he deals with, as the phenomena
that Edwards dealt with in his _Narrative of the Surprizing Work of
God_, were pathological; and like Edwards, Hawthorne is led into
insubstantial and tenuous regions where he breathes with difficulty.
The substantial world of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew,
Hawthorne seems scarcely to have been aware of; he created instead
his own Puritanism, fantastic and unreal. He was forever dealing
with shadows, and he knew that he was dealing with shadows, and this
consciousness was a perennial source of doubt and uncertainty that
bred self-distrust. In setting himself the task of dramatizing sin
rather than sinners, of creating romance out of the problem of evil,
he encountered difficulties that oppressed him. The well-springs of
his imagination were constantly running dry and he must wait till they
filled again slowly. Hence the “development of his art is towards
ever greater elaboration of scantier and scantier materials, until
the joy of the whole becomes lost at last in the milder pleasures of
detail.”[467]
From the grave difficulties inherent in his theme came the inveterate
habit of sliding into symbolism and allegory--from this and from
the narrowness of his emotional life and the restrictions of
his sympathies. The cold thin atmosphere of his work, one comes
increasingly to feel, was due not alone or chiefly to the severity
of his artistic restraint that forbade all rioting of the sensuous
imagination; it was due rather to a lack of nourishment, to a poverty
of ideas and sensuous imagery. His inveterate skepticism robbed him of
much, but his inhibitions robbed him of more. A romantic uninterested
in adventure and afraid of sex is likely to become somewhat graveled
for matter. Like the Pyncheon fowls, Hawthorne’s imagination had
suffered from too long inbreeding; it had grown anemic, and every grain
of fancy is clucked over and picked at and made much of. Once an idea
comes into his head he is loath to let it go, but he must turn it about
curiously and examine it from every angle. The striking chapter in
_The House of the Seven Gables_, where the death of Judge Pyncheon is
played upon so persistently, is only an extreme example of his habitual
method. The tongues that wagged over the minister’s black veil were no
more inquisitive and tireless than Hawthorne’s when his imagination
is fired by a vivid image. He will not let it go till it is sucked as
dry as last year’s cider cask. It is the way of one to whom ideas are
few and precious. Knowing how little is in the bottle he will linger
out the flavor of every drop. Hence his fondness for symbolism, and
hence his frequent lapse into allegory when imagination grows dull.
Because Hawthorne was an artist he was saved from the shipwreck that
such a method might seem to invite; yet perhaps it is not unreasonable
to suggest that he was an artist for the reason that only through the
mastery of a refined technic could his scanty stock of ideas make any
show at all.
The intellectual poverty that resulted from his long immuring himself
in a void is sufficiently revealed in his _American Note-Books_.
In the somewhat tedious volume covering the eighteen years between
1835 and 1853--the most vigorous years of the renaissance--there
is no suggestion of interest in the creative ideas of the time, in
metaphysics or politics or economics or humanitarianism. It is the
occasional record of one who lived an unintellectual life, and it
makes but a paltry showing when set beside the journals of Emerson
for the same years. Few books are referred to; systems of thought lie
beyond his ken. Compared with the thinkers and scholars of the time he
is only an idler lying in wait for such casual suggestions as he may
turn into stories. Almost childish is his delight in marvels. There is
something of the spirit of Cotton Mather in his persistent recording of
the gruesome and fantastic, in the hope that they will open a quarry
for his art. In the year that Emerson wrote _Nature_, Hawthorne set
down the following amongst some dozens of similar suggestions: “A
snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen to
thirty-five years, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some
other evil passion.” The _Note-Books_, of course, are very inadequate
records of his life, and yet that a mind should lie in wait for such
grotesqueries, and treasure them, offers food for speculation. After
his marriage they are much less frequent and his jottings become more
normal--a change which the Freudians, no doubt, would be ready enough
to explain.
The one great adventure of Hawthorne’s life was the plunge into Brook
Farm Utopianism, a plunge that only proved the waters colder and less
hospitable than he had hoped. It was a curious adventure for one of
his temperament to engage in, and his eventual disillusion might
have been foretold. Perhaps it may be explained as reaction from his
long isolation. The glowing enthusiasms of the times must often have
tempted him to leave his narrow walls, and share the intellectual and
emotional stimulus that others professed to discover in the work of
making society over. Whatever the explanation the venture turned out
to be a failure. His skepticism followed him there and came to later
expression in _The Blithedale Romance_, a work as thin and unreal as
anything he ever did. It is worse. There is in its pages more than a
hint of ill humor that colors his interpretation of the Fourieristic
stage of the experiment, and slips out in his portraiture of the
major characters. Hollingsworth both fascinates and repels him. A
dramatization of the intransigent spirit of reform, his single-minded
zeal for righteousness, is subtly fused with an intolerant egotism
that destroys Zenobia, cows Priscilla, and wrecks the venture. Perhaps
Albert Brisbane may have been in the background of Hawthorne’s mind
when he drew Hollingsworth, for it was Brisbane who influenced the
change he seems to have resented; perhaps Garrison may have served to
fill out the picture. Whoever it was, the figure of Hollingsworth is
Hawthorne’s reply to the summons of the social conscience of the times,
done by a critic whose insistent skepticism will not shut its eyes, but
discovers under a new masquerade the ancient evil of a cold imperious
heart. Seventeen years before he wrote _The Blithedale Romance_, he had
jotted down in his _Note-Book_ the conception out of which came the
later portrait:
A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,--a type of the extreme
doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such
topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently,
and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors
are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a
mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of the idea.
(_American Note-Books_, pp. 20-21.)
Hawthorne’s interpretation of Margaret Fuller is not so easily
explained. Perhaps it came out of a subconscious personal spleen. Her
rich paganism may well have disturbed a nature so reticent as his,
so restrained by certain Puritan inhibitions. In an early sketch he
commented on the unfitness of authorship for women, on the ground
that “there is a delicacy ... that perceives, or fancies, a sort
of impropriety in the display of woman’s natal mind to the gaze
of the world, with indications by which its inmost secrets may be
searched out” (quoted by Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the
Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne”). Margaret’s frankness in displaying
her natal mind to the gaze of the world, her bold discussion of
prohibited subjects like prostitution, could not fail to rub across
Hawthorne’s deepest prejudices. She was too vigorous and outspoken,
too consciously endowed with sex, too frankly feminist, not to have
ruffled his instinctive squeamishness. It was not her radical feminism
in the abstract that offended him, if he may be trusted; but certainly
in the concrete. A sexless feminism would not greatly disturb a mind
tolerantly familiar with the current radicalisms; but the frank
avowal of sex touched a sensitive nerve. It offended certain latent
Puritanisms in him. He was fascinated by Zenobia and yet afraid of
her--or of himself; so his hero falls in love with the anemic and
witless Priscilla. How characteristic of a mind long fed on symbols, to
turn away from the wealth of reality and prefer a shadow!
After Brook Farm came no further experiments in the unsatisfactory
business of a _rapprochement_ with his generation. His marriage with
Sophia Peabody brought with it the prosaic duties of providing for a
family, and he had no leisure to play with social reform. Abolitionism
he would have none of, nor perfectionism, nor Jacksonianism--the
futility of such things became for him a fixed idea. That he once
had the courage to make his plunge he seems to have rejoiced over:
“Whatever else I may repent of,” Miles Coverdale wrote, “let it be
reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and
force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny,--yes!--and
to do what in me lay for their accomplishment.” Yet the truer Hawthorne
is to be found in the judgments set down in the _Note-Book_: “It is my
opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap,
or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.”
“Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it
without becoming proportionably brutified.” The man who wrote that had
much to learn about life and society, much that he might have learned
from Thoreau. But Hawthorne never grappled with economics as Thoreau
did, and he learned no more from him than from Melville, or from
Emerson, or from any of the books he read by the wise of other days.
Self-sufficient he remained to the last, hard-headed and practical,
yet missing many a deeper truth that more receptive minds discover.
He was traveling the path that leads to sterility, and the lifelong
business of playing Paul Pry to the secrets of the conscience brought
him at last to the comment, “Taking no root I soon weary of any soil in
which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I sometimes
feel, or conceive of, as regards this earthly life.” He was the extreme
and finest expression of the refined alienation from reality that in
the end palsied the creative mind of New England. Having consumed his
fancies, what remained to feed on?
Footnotes
[467] Amy Louise Reed, “Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel
Hawthorne,” _Studies in Philology_, Vol. XXIII, No. I.
Chapter III • The Authentic Brahmin
I • Oliver Wendell Holmes • Beacon Street Wit
Since the death of Holmes in 1894, his reputation has shrunk and
dwindled with that of his group. With the rise of other literary
schools, New England standards have been submitted to a somewhat rude
overhauling, and Brahmin ideals are no longer reckoned so authoritative
as they were once believed to be, nor the supremacy of Boston genius
so indisputable. Concord has risen as Cambridge and Beacon Street
have declined, and in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau, the wit of
Back Bay is in danger of being obscured. Unsupported by his physical
presence, his writings seem far less vital than they did when the
echoes of his clever talk were still sounding through them. Certain
intellectual shortcomings are more obvious when his works are brought
together in a library edition: in the mass his prose seems far more
discursive and his verse thinner and more jingly than when the several
bits appeared singly, personally sponsored by the author in whose
cleverness everybody delighted. Read with sprightly vivacity to a
group of sympathetic listeners at the mellowest hour of the dinner,
his occasional verse must have sparkled brightly and have gone off
with such a crackle of laughter as to convince the Back Bay that the
asthmatic little gentleman with bubbling spirits was a veritable poet,
on the same friendly footing with the muse that he was with Beacon
Street. So frequently on pleasant occasions did Holmes appear before
his classmates and friends copy in hand, so often and so happily did he
respond to the invitation to write something, that it would have been
ungenerous of Boston--and Boston meant the Back Bay, the Saturday Club
and Harvard College--not to have crowned him with a wreath of her own
ivy.
For upwards of half a century, throughout the prime and on past the
Indian Summer of the New England renaissance. Holmes was Boston’s own
wit, inexhaustible in clever sayings, bubbling over with satire and
sentiment, the autocrat of her social gatherings, the acknowledged
head of her mutual admiration society. Not since Robert Treat Paine
had there been such a master of Yankee small talk. If he monopolized
the conversation he dealt generously with his listeners. The stream
was copious and the waters were never bitter or astringent, but with
just enough effervescence to suit the Boston palate. As a young
man the wit sparkled more brightly; as an old man the humor exuded
more gently. At twenty-five he described William IV of England with
republican irreverence: “The King blew his nose twice, and wiped
the royal perspiration repeatedly from a face which is probably the
largest uncivilized spot in England”; late in life he commented on
his obvious fondness of praise: “I was always patient with those who
thought well of me, and accepted all their tributes with something more
than resignation.” Taste had changed with the times in Boston. Wit was
yielding place to humor; eighteenth-century frankness had given way to
nineteenth-century refinement; Victorianism was in full and vigorous
bloom in the Beacon Street of 1850, and so Holmes became a Yankee
Victorian. The morals of an impeccable society required no castigation,
and he was under no obligation to satirize vice. Audacious sallies
would have been reckoned in bad taste. If the old-fashioned masculine
wit of Robert Treat Paine, with its echoes of Charles Churchill,
had presumed to intrude itself into the teacup society of Back Bay
drawing-rooms, the indignant Doctor would have shown it the door, and
the small talk would have flowed again, decorous and clean and amiable,
far more refined than the wit that had delighted their fathers.
And yet, though a full-blown Victorian in manners and tastes, Holmes
was something of a child of the eighteenth century at heart. The
situation in which he found himself might have proved disconcerting
if he had chosen to speculate upon it. By nature a thoroughgoing
rationalist, he lived in a romantic age. A gentleman of “parts and
learning,” with a quick and lively fancy that blossomed in the
pat phrase and neat couplet, he loved wit and hated dullness with
true Augustan zeal. The great days of Queen Anne were a perennial
inspiration to him. He clung to the heroic couplet through all the
changes of romantic styles. He moralized in rime with the fluency
if not the finish of Pope.[468] He satirized Calvinism with an
honest wrath that he might have learned of Swift. He commented in his
table-talk on the manners of the times with the chatty discursiveness
of Addison. Like the earlier wits, he discovered a deep sympathy for
the maturity and ripe wisdom of the classics. Writing to his friend
John O. Sargent, he remarked:
I wish I had become as familiar with some classic author as you
are with Horace. There is nothing like one of those perennial old
fellows for good old gentlemenly reading; and for wit and wisdom,
what is there to compare with the writings of Horace? You make
me envious,--I vow I shall have to get up Juvenal or Catullus,
naughty but nice, or somebody that nobody else knows.... I get so
tired of the damp sheets of all sorts of _literati_ (worse than
the “screeching women of Marblehead”) and clamorous essayists,
that I want something always by me, calm, settled beyond cavilling
criticism,--a cool, clear draught of Falernian that has been
somewhere near two thousand years in the cellar. (Morse, _Life and
Letters_, Vol. II, p. 311.)
But unhappily what could he do? He was the most sociable of persons,
and he lived and moved in an atmosphere surcharged with various
and sundry romanticisms. How could he preserve the spirit of quiet
rationalism, or assure himself gentlemanly leisure, with a host of
“isms” clamoring in his ears? He was amongst them even if he was not
of them. He strove to keep himself aloof, unfuddled by heady idealisms
and untroubled by strident reforms, but he could not shut his study
door against the infection. He could not deny his generation, and
inevitably he suffered his thought to be streaked and pied with the
current romanticism. He gave Lyceum lectures on Wordsworth and Keats
and Shelley, and their influence seeped into his verse. The Longfellow
fame was all about him, and he fell to composing ballads and idyls and
tales, quite as if he did not know better. Romantic garments fitted
him ill, yet he persisted in trying them on. He even got to like
them, and came finally to prefer _The Chambered Nautilus_ above his
other poems--a strange perversion of taste for a rationalist. _The
One-Hoss Shay_ is worth a volume of such pretty moralizing. _Parson
Turell’s Legacy_ and _The Moral Bully_ are in better vein--witty,
lucid, critical--than any half-hearted ventures in romanticism. The
eighteenth-century wit does not appear to advantage patched with
Victorian sentiment, and he should have been rationalist enough to know
it.
As a Beacon Street Victorian Holmes was as full of virtuous prejudices
as an egg is full of meat; but as a rationalist, with a modest
scientific equipment that came from his professional training, he
kept the windows of his mind open to the winds of scientific inquiry
that were blowing briskly to the concern of orthodox souls. Many a
barnacled craft was foundering in those gales, and Holmes watched
their going-down with visible satisfaction. He was perhaps the most
militant Unitarian amongst Boston laymen. Hatred of Calvinistic dogma
was an obsession with him; it dominated his thought and colored much
of his work, _Elsie Venner_ and his table-talk as frankly as _The
One-Hoss Shay_. The criticism to which he subjected the old-school
dogmas was always vehement, often vindictive. Long after the battle
had been won he kept annoying the retreating enemy. His father, Abiel
Holmes, was a rigorous follower of the Edwardean school, who after
nearly forty years’ service lost his pulpit for refusing to compromise
with Unitarian liberalism that had gained the fortress of the near-by
College Yard; and the stalwart among his congregation, having to yield
the building, the endowment and the communion plate, were forced to
establish themselves anew. In this unhappy schism that came about the
time Oliver Wendell Holmes was graduating from Harvard in 1829, the
latter went with the liberals. He had broken with the Calvinism of his
father, and in the reaction he went further than most along the path
of Unitarian rationalism--not the path of Channing that led to French
romanticism and transcendentalism, but the path of Andrews Norton that
led to a harder-headed rationalism. The reasons for this shift are
sufficiently evident in his writings. At his father’s table he had
watched too many “whey-faced” brethren to like the breed--men with “a
weedy flux of ill-conditioned hair,” whose
acrid words
Turn the sweet milk of kindness into curds,
Or with grim logic prove, beyond debate,
That all we love is worthiest of hate,
As the scarred ruffian of the pirate’s deck,
When his long swivel rakes the staggering wreck!
(_The Moral Bully._)
The words are bitter, but they reveal the length of his reaction from
the Calvinism on which he had been over-fed at home and at Phillips
Andover Academy; and they suggest also why, next to Theodore Parker,
Holmes came to be the best hated of Boston Unitarians amongst the
orthodox. On this one subject he was militantly radical, never
shirking debate, but whetting the edge of his satire and impaling his
victim neatly with his logic. He took sardonic delight in turning
Calvinism against itself, in the clever _reductio ad absurdum_ of the
Edwardean argument. Perhaps this major intellectual interest appears
most adequately in his picture of the Master, the autobiographical
rationalist whom he introduces into _The Poet of the Breakfast Table_.
A dabbler in the law, theology and medicine, a philosophic contemplator
of the Order of Things, who refused to permit “the territory of a man’s
mind” to be “fenced in,” who agreed with the Poet in thinking somewhat
ill of the specialist who dedicated his life to the study of beetles,
preferring to range widely through time and eternity, who followed
Darwin and was deep in bacteriology, trying “curious experiments in
spontaneous generation”--this was Holmes on the intellectual side, a
genial disseminator of the latest scientific speculations, a tolerant
amateur of the things of the mind, a friendly dabbler in absolute
moralities, who hoped “to do some sound thinking in heaven” if he ever
got there, but who was too pleasantly engaged with Beacon Street to
settle things now.
In his own special way, then, as a Brahmin of the Brahmins, Holmes
was a rebel, a puller-down of worm-eaten structures, a freethinker
rejoicing when free thought tossed a cargo of obsolete dogma into
Boston Bay, or drew out a linchpin of some respectable social coach.
He loved Boston the more because he believed that Boston was the home
of free thought and free speech, the capital of American brains, the
intellectual rebel of the continent. He did not agree with Emerson’s
strictures, or Parker’s. He would not concede that Boston was the “home
of the Hunkers.” It was provincial; it had crooked little streets; but
I tell you Boston has opened, and kept open, more turnpikes that
lead straight to free thought and free speech and free deeds than
any other city of live men or dead men--I don’t care how broad
their streets are, nor how high their steeples. (_The Professor at
the Breakfast Table_, p. 4.)
When he contemplated the future of America, with Boston as its
intellectual leader, he was carried on the crest of an exuberant
optimism:
A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest
of ’em for washbasins! A new race, and a whole new world for the
new-born human soul to work in! And Boston is the brain of it,
and has been any time these hundred years! That’s all I claim
for Boston--that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and
therefore of the planet. (_Ibid._, p. 104.)
If the mind is free other things will take care of themselves--this
pretty much sums up Holmes’s social philosophy. Only, he would add,
when the mind is used to its freedom, it will create a culture that
is well-mannered, that does not run to extravagant agitation, that
considers time, place, and outward circumstance in effecting needful
changes--the quiet decency of Channing rather than the noisier way
of Parker. The Brahmin way, after all, was the better way, Holmes
believed; and Channing was a Brahmin:
Parson Channing put a little oil on one linchpin, and slipped it
out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was the wheel of
that side was down. T’other fellow’s at work now; but he makes more
noise about it. When the linchpin comes out on his side, there’ll
be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the old cart, and
they pretend to say that there are valuable things in it which may
get hurt. Hope not--hope not. But this is the great macadamizing
place--always cracking up something. (_Ibid._, p. 19.)
Certainly not on the intellectual side could Holmes be set down as
a conservative. He did not relish any such imputation and defended
himself with vigor:
If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke
up and keep the soul’s windows down--to shut out the sun from the
east and the wind from the west--to let the rats run free in the
cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul’s typhus
is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or
rave in its delirium--I, Sir, am a _bonnet-rouge_, a redcap of the
barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative. (_Ibid._, p.
18.)
It was this spirit of rationalism that made him--at some risk of
unpopularity--an unsparing critic of romantic equalitarianism. Here
again is an echo of the older century. Neither the Jacksonian nor the
transcendental version of the new gospel found favor in his eyes;
both seemed to run counter to the open facts of history. As a realist
he discovered justification for John Adams’s doctrine of economic
determinism: all society, he was convinced, tends to stratify in lines
of wealth distribution, in America as well as in Europe, and no dogmas
can prevent it. He went further and insisted that the possession of
wealth makes possible comfort, ease, leisure, culture; that those
lacking wealth are necessarily unfree and their lives in consequence
are meaner and narrower. Much of his criticism of Yankee villagers
and countrymen--and except Cooper, he was perhaps the most critical
commentator on Yankee provincialisms of speech and manners--springs
from the conviction that a niggardly economics had created a niggardly
society. He desired more wealth to the end of more culture. He was too
completely Brahmin to set material well-being as the ultimate goal
of the competitive struggle; that seemed to him the object of State
Street and of the plutocracy he frankly detested. In _The Poet at the
Breakfast Table_ he apologizes for calling one of his characters a
capitalist, on the ground that “the word seems to be equivalent to
highway robbery in the new gospel of Saint Petroleum.” Wealth as a
means to power he would have none of; but wealth as a means to leisure,
and leisure as a means to cultivated living, he was fond of extolling.
The machinery of Brahmin life must be well oiled, but the life is more
than the machinery. Always he returned to the intellectual as the
hallmark of every society that may be accounted excellent, and his
instinctive dislike of the middle class was founded on its intellectual
sterility. It lived opulently but meanly; its rich dinners wanted the
spice of wit, its ostentatious display lacked the salt of manners. It
was vulgar at heart, and Holmes hated vulgarity even more than he hated
John Calvin’s dogmas.
Unfortunately his Brahminism sealed pretty tightly certain windows of
his mind that might better have been kept open. A radical in the field
of theology where personal concern brought him to serious grappling
with the problem, a tolerant rationalist in the realm of the intellect,
he remained a cheerfully contented conservative in other fields. He was
unconsciously insulated against the currents of social and political
thought flowing all about him. Economic inequality he accepted rather
too complacently. His daily life ran so easy and comfortable a course
as never to prod him into questioning how other lives might be running.
By instinct and training he was an aristocrat, and he was never at
pains to conceal his preference for the well born and well mannered. He
professed a philanthropic sympathy for the cause of the slave, but he
shared the Beacon Street dislike of agitation--it was not well bred and
it might bring down more things than he cared to have brought down. The
most completely class-conscious of the Boston writers, he deprecated
all proletarian appeals. They were not, in his opinion, “wholesome
moral entertainment for the dangerous classes. Boys must not touch off
their squibs and crackers too near the powder-magazine.” The less said
about the wrongs of labor, the better--at least publicly. Social strata
being determined by economics, the agitator is little better than a
firebrand.
You can’t keep a dead level long, if you burn everything down flat
to make it. Why, bless your soul, if all the cities of the world
were reduced to ashes, you’d have a new set of millionaires in a
couple of years or so, out of the trade in potash. In the meantime,
what is the use of setting the man with the silver watch against
the man with the gold watch, and the man without any against them
both?... Here we are travelling through the desert together like
the children of Israel. Some pick up more manna and catch more
quails than others, and ought to help their hungry neighbors more
than they do; ... but we don’t want the incendiary’s pillar of a
cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead us in the march
to civilization, and we don’t want a Moses who will smite the rock,
not to bring out water for our thirst, but petroleum to burn us all
up with. (_The Poet at the Breakfast Table_, pp. 5-6.)
In his attitude toward the present comfortable arrangement of society,
Holmes was no rebel. He was not callous to the evils of society, but
he was willing to take a longer time in the march towards civilization
than more exigent souls wished; it was a pleasant march on the whole,
and why quarrel over the difference in packs? If his attitude was
not the indifferentism of the well-to-do, it was near kin to it. He
reflected the negative qualities of Unitarianism, rather than the
positive, the free mind rather than the tender conscience. His social
bias is sufficiently revealed in the tributes of praise he bestowed
so generously. Among those whom he delighted to honor, the names of
Garrison, Phillips, Parker, Thoreau, Greeley, John Brown, do not
appear; instead he offered his praises to Everett, Webster, Bryant,
Whittier, Agassiz, Parkman, Wilkie Collins, the Grand Duke Alexis,
and a host of lesser celebrities known to the Back Bay. His heroes
were respectable souls rather than militant. As a critic his vision
seems to have been blurred by certain astigmatisms, and he discovered
heroic qualities more readily in the militant dead than in the militant
living. He delighted in the Boston of ’76, but it is reasonably
certain that if he had lived then he would have walked the streets of
that older Boston as a genial Tory, and would have suffered the fate
of other gentlemen who found it desirable to withdraw with Gage’s
Redcoats--unless, indeed, his love of the place had held him despite
his politics.
In his literary work Holmes was always the talker rather than the
writer. The charm of the vivid and racy colloquial marks every page.
A clever aphorism or telling pun is the objective of every paragraph,
and it explodes with a brilliant shower of sparks. But like every
talker his discursiveness is inveterate; he wanders far in pursuit
of his point and sometimes returns empty-handed. He was always an
amateur; life was too agreeable for him to take the trouble to become
an artist. The essay was his most congenial form--his novels are to be
taken no more seriously than his occasional verse. _Elsie Venner_ wraps
up the familiar problem of moral determinism in pleasantly discursive
chat of Yankee bumpkinism in contrast with Yankee Brahminism, and he
returns his impeccable hero to Beacon Street, after his sojourn in
the provinces, to reward him with the Brahmin rewards--a munificent
practice, a charming wife, and an exalted social position. What richer
reward could be desired by one who had tasted to the full the mellow
flavor of that society? Staid, delightful, self-satisfied, righteous
little Beacon Street! Last refuge and citadel of the old Brahmin
respectability; basking in the afternoon sunshine of its culture, not
realizing that its sun is already well past the meridian; in love with
its own virtues and unaware that the morrow will see the invasion of
the Huns and Vandals of plutocracy, to whose plethoric bank books
Brahmin culture must eventually bow--who would not have liked it?
It was something after all to have been its favorite wit, its ready
oracle, its clever poet, who in praising his fellow Brahmins was well
aware that he discreetly praised his own admirable qualities. Kindly,
delightful, fortunate Dr. Holmes! chief citizen of the Hub of the
Universe! He was born and lived with a silver spoon in his mouth, and
if a grudging posterity inclines to rate him and his little world
somewhat lower than he rated them, what difference can that make to
him? Tolerant himself, we should perhaps emulate his example, and not
insist too rudely that he is only a minor figure in American literature.
II • James Russell Lowell • Cambridge Brahmin
Whatever the critics may eventually come to say about Lowell, he was
certainly the ablest and most distinguished of the old Cambridge
breed, in the days when the Brahmin caste was disintegrating and
Brahmin ideals losing their hold on New England--a man of fine native
abilities in whom Harvard culture did its best to strike fire and light
and understanding to serve as a beacon to the rest of America. He was
not of the Concord line of transcendental individualists, nor of the
militant strain of reforming enthusiasts; but of the true Brahmin line
of Josiah Quincy and Edward Everett and Oliver Wendell Holmes--men of
sound culture who could serve God valiantly in the social station in
which He had placed them, without wanting to pull down the old church
to build a new. Like Charles Eliot Norton--_clarum et venerabile
nomen_--he had no plans of a new building in his pocket, but was
content to enlarge and embellish the old. He would serve culture rather
than causes. His gifts were Brahmin gifts, his prejudices were Brahmin
prejudices; and so in spite of a “certain sprightliness of brain”
that tempted him to rebel at the aridity of the scholastic commons on
which he fed, and in spite of certain youthful vagaries and incursions
into indiscreet places, he remained at bottom a Harvard conservative,
content with his birthright, hopeful that his ways were God’s ways.
This suffices to explain the extraordinary reputation of Lowell in
Cambridge circles, and the difficulty with which it made headway
elsewhere. Though he traveled much in his library--as Thoreau would
say--his prejudices remained narrowly local. To the last he remained
extraordinarily parochial.
Yet the culture he served so faithfully never fruited in wisdom. He
was never quite certain of himself, of what he really believed. He was
fond of standing off and studying himself quizzically, to learn what
sort of person he was; yet he was swayed by so many impulses he was
never quite sure what sort of legs were under him. He was hopelessly
bewildered by his own vast disorder. His mind was as cluttered as
a garret, filled with an endless miscellany of odds and ends. Life
puzzled him, as it puzzles every serious mind; but he allowed himself
to be too easily discouraged by his inveterate unwillingness to
think. He never speculated widely or analyzed critically. Ideas,
systems of thought, intellectual and social movements, he had no
interest in; he was content to remain a bookish amateur in letters,
loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and
verbal curiosities. With all his reading, history remained a blank
to him; and science he would have none of. “I hate it,” he confessed
late in life; “I hate it as a savage hates writing, because I fear
it will hurt me somehow.” A good many things hurt him in those later
years, and it was characteristic of him to say, “I continue to shut
my eyes resolutely in certain speculative directions.” He defined
culture as “intelligent purpose”; yet of such intelligent purpose his
intellectual life revealed little. Naturally he did not relish the
theological unsettlement that came with the advance of scientific
inquiry. Leslie Stephen’s rationalism troubled him, and after reading
the former’s _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, he wrote, “I
am very much in the state of mind of the Bretons who revolted against
the Revolutionary Government and wrote upon their banners, ‘Give us
back our God!’” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 168.) Neither did he relish
the economic unsettlement the industrial revolution was bringing to
Cambridge and America, but he looked back longingly to the quiet
days “before our individuality had been trampled out of us by the
Irish mob.” Standing between the older America and the new, with the
foundations disintegrating under his feet, he confused the disorder in
his own mind with the disorder in the external world of society, and
desperately sought to cling to his ancient hopes. A pathetic yearning
for orderliness in an age that has grown heedless of it was natural
enough in a mind that had come to expect little of life; but surely
orderliness, like charity, should begin at home.
It was, perhaps, not altogether his fault. His impulses were liberal
and his mind generous, but he was never strong enough to overcome the
handicap of the Lowell ancestry and training. When he spoke of himself
half whimsically as a natural Tory, he was putting his finger on the
Brahmin strain. The sanctity of the Lowell blood is a commonplace in
New England; but that it was Tory blood is less frequently remarked.
His grandfather, John Lowell, to be sure, was visited by certain
humanitarian compunctions, and in 1772 convinced himself that at
Common Law slavery could not stand, and was eager to put it to the
test in Massachusetts. But John Lowell was high in the councils
of the Federalist party, and a judge, and it is a safe guess that
his radicalism did not go deep. Certainly, the next generation was
stalwartly conservative. The three brothers represented the three major
professions of law, theology, and business, that constituted the New
England hierarchy. His father, Charles Lowell, after traveling abroad,
was settled as pastor of the West Church, Boston--Jonathan Mayhew’s
church--a post he held for fifty-six years. He was a stout Federalist,
a good hater of Jefferson,[469] a pleasant, cautious gentleman who
refused to be drawn into the bitter Unitarian-Trinitarian controversy
of the day--as unlike the militant Mayhew as a conventional soul could
well be.[470] His uncle, John Lowell, was a capable lawyer-politician,
one of the directing minds of the Federalist machine, earnestly
engaged in defending Massachusetts against the wicked Republicans.
Another uncle, Francis Cabot Lowell, was an enterprising capitalist,
founder of the city of Lowell, whose multiplying spindles, it was
hoped, would turn the wives and daughters of Yankee farmers, and the
poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, into efficient revenue-producers for
State Street securities.
From this pleasant background of Brahmin conservatisms, Lowell went
forth into a world given over to momentous changes, contemptuous of
all Brahmin standards, to find his way as he might. An original mind
would have marked out its own path, as Emerson did; a conventional mind
would have gone with the better sort, as Josiah Quincy did; but Lowell
was neither Emerson nor Quincy. Sensitive to change, he was rarely
self-reliant; generous in sympathies, he was timid in convictions. He
was no Come-outer to stand alone against the world, but unconsciously
he took color from his environment and was always glad to find a
staff to lean on. It was fortunate for his peace of mind that he
never realized how frequently he was no more than an echo of other
minds; yet the confusions and contradictions that mark off the several
periods of his life can be explained in no other way. From Brahminism
he drifted to radicalism, and from radicalism back to a modified
Brahminism; and these changes resulted from no native intellectual
unfolding, but from certain dominant personalities who drew him aside
from his natural orbit. He quitted college as a pleasant young Tory,
who paused in his Commencement Poem to address some pointed remarks at
Abner Kneeland--the last man imprisoned in Massachusetts for religious
opinion--upon the wickedness of an atheism that denied the faith of
Charles Lowell. But the ferment of the times was already working in
him, and when he was nineteen he wrote with youthful fervor, “I am
fast becoming ultra-democratic.... Liberty is now no longer a cant
word in the mouths of knaves and fools” (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 33).
Within a year he had met Maria White, whose influence till her death
in 1853 was the determining factor in his intellectual life. She was
an ardent Abolitionist and reformer, and under her pleasant tutelage
Lowell was indoctrinated in the current philosophy of radicalism. He
spoke at Abolition meetings, and contributed to the Abolition press.
More important, he conceived that he had come upon his true mission
in letters. In an ode beginning “In the old days of awe and keen-eyed
wonder,” he put into verse his new creed, a prose statement of which
he elaborated in a letter explaining his _Prometheus_ in 1843, a year
before his marriage to Miss White:
Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all
handled the subject in modern times, you will find that I have
looked at it from a somewhat new point of view. I have made it
_radical_, and I believe that no poet in this age can write much
that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency. For
radicalism has now for the first time taken a distinctive and
acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its spirit as poets in
former ages have attained (and from their purer organization they
could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by reason. It
has never till now been seen to be one of the two great wings that
upbear the universe.... The proof of poetry is, in my mind, that it
reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which
is floating in all men’s minds, and so renders it portable and
useful and ready to the hand. (_Letters_, Vol. I, p. 73.)
Six years later he asserted confidently, “I am the first poet who has
endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and
by.” Yet within a few months he found the vein nearing exhaustion.
In a survey of his course up to 1850, he remarked that he had served
love and freedom hitherto, and he now proposed to serve beauty, adding
the significant comment, “I find that Reform cannot take up the whole
of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about
us sometimes, and not to be always looking forward.... I am tired
of controversy” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 173). Between these several
confessions lies the bulk of Lowell’s contribution to the “causes”
of the times, and how adequately he served them is revealed in the
successive poems that came from his pen.[471] Their equal as a whole
is not to be found in the work of other contemporary radicals. The
better work is solidly vigorous, with competent iambs that often rise
to the dignity of such lines as “Slowly the Bible of the race is writ.”
The eager rhetoric of _The Present Crisis_ was the highwater mark of
Abolition argument in verse; but its serviceableness for quotation
cannot make it so good a poem as _Prometheus_ with its muscular blank
verse, or as _A Glance behind the Curtain_ with its portrait of
Cromwell, strong in his faith, ready for all needful iconoclasms:
I have no dread of what
Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart
Because we tear a parchment more or less.
This is frank transcendental radicalism, yet the truer Lowell of those
days of youthful enthusiasm is found in the _Biglow Papers_, first
written with spontaneous gusto out of his hatred of the imperialism of
the Mexican war, and later carefully embedded in the heavy machinery of
the prose setting. The native clutter of Lowell’s mind is there laid
bare--the grotesque mixture of homely satire, moral aphorisms, Yankee
linguistics, literary criticism--an unwieldy mass that he could neither
simplify nor reduce to order. The machinery spoils the propaganda and
weighs down the satire; yet the verse has survived because for once
Lowell let himself go and hit such heads as he had a mind to.
Lowell saw fit to retain most of his radical verse in the definitive
edition of his works, but his radical prose he disowned, and it was
left for pious hands to gather together long after his death. It was
perhaps as well for his reputation that the ambassador at the Court
of St. James’s should not be plagued by his youthful indiscretions.
In those prose writings were combustible materials. He went with
the Abolitionists in their brisk assaults on law, order, and the
Constitution. Whatever revolution was stirring anywhere found him
sympathetic. He was strong for the workingman’s revolution of 1848 in
France; it was social injustice that was to blame for mob violence, and
the fetish of _laissez faire_ was a sorry enough god to worship.
The great problem of the over-supply of labor is not to be settled
by a decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpower or
starvation.... The giant Labor did not merely turn from one side
to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose up, “Like
blind Orion hungry for the morn.”... They had learned by bitter
experience that it was on the body of old King Log _Laissez-faire_
that King Stork perched to devour them. _Let-alone_ is good policy
after you have once got your perfect system established to let
alone. (Quoted in Scudder, _James Russell Lowell_, Vol. I, pp.
205-206.)
In common with the Abolitionists, Lowell appealed to the Declaration of
Independence against the Constitution. He took delight in satirizing
his Federalist forebears, who, he asserts, beginning to fear the light
of freedom, ingeniously constructed a “Sacred Parasol” for the new
Goddess of Liberty, “to prevent her from being tanned”:
A stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and,
under the respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed
wherever there seemed to be danger from the hostile incursions of
light. Whenever this is spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing
than absolute darkness, reigns everywhere beneath its shadow....
This contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has
acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, p.
210.)
No wonder Lowell later disowned such apostasies, for after Maria
White’s death in 1853 came the dun professorial period of his life,
when Harvard laid hands on him and came near to reducing him to
its own ways. It revived the old Brahmin instincts that had lain
dormant during the years of his Abolitionism, without reviving the
old sanctions. Left without a cause, half ashamed of his youthful
indiscretions yet ill content to drift, he turned bookman and for
twenty-one years wandered with Norton and Longfellow and Child in the
Sahara of medieval scholarship. It was not a happy time with him.
There is plenty of evidence of his restlessness and dissatisfaction
that occasionally prompted the wish to turn wholly scholar and keep
his note-books in order; that prodded him to salvage the mass of his
accumulation by turning his lecture-notes into literary essays; and
that in other moods induced him to turn half savagely upon his dead
enthusiasms and find solace in clever satire. His vigorous salvagings
were scarcely worth the trouble. He had nothing important to say
about Dante or Pope or Wordsworth, and he said it with a good deal of
needless verbal exertion. The essay on Thoreau, written in 1865, was a
different matter. Here he was brought face to face with a past which
it still hurt him to remember; and the ill nature that colors his
comment is sufficient testimony to the painfulness of his memories.
Certainly he did not understand Thoreau, was incapable of understanding
him; yet might not his dislike have been prodded by the consciousness
that Thoreau had refused to make terms with Harvard culture as he had
done? An intelligent reading of Thoreau must have been an unpleasant
experience in Lowell’s mood, keenly aware of certain backslidings of
his own; and the essay is suggestive for the light it throws on Lowell,
not on Thoreau.
To this period belong most of the essays on which rests Lowell’s
reputation as a critic of letters and politics. Bright as that
reputation long was, it is beginning to show tarnish. Subjected to
the scrutiny of eyes unblinded by the congenialities of the Cambridge
coterie, it appears that Lowell’s brilliancy covered over certain grave
shortcomings that unfitted him for serious critical judgment.[472]
He had no standards other than ethical, only likes and dislikes; no
interest in ideas, only a pottering concern for the text; no historical
backgrounds, only isolated figures dwelling in a vacuum. He was puzzled
over new schools and unfamiliar technic, and was at ease only in
praising established reputations and confirming approved judgments.
He scoffed at Taine instead of going to school to him, and made merry
over Masson’s _Life of Milton_; yet he was wholly incapable of dealing
with men from whose fruitful minds came ideas that summoned throngs of
followers. In almost the last year of his life he spent weeks rereading
Rousseau, and was satisfied to dismiss him with the comment, “a
monstrous liar, but always the first dupe of his own lie” (_Letters_,
Vol. II, p. 424). _Leaves of Grass_ he dismissed as affected, not
original. He was shocked at Swinburne’s “Adamite” heresy--“When a man
begins to lust after the Muse instead of loving her, he may be sure
that it is never the Muse that he embraces” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 377).
He admired Howell’s prose style and loved the man, but he could not
bring himself to approve his literary and social theories.
During those sterile professorial years he was closing one door after
another. Scarcely an important movement of contemporary thought
awakened his interest. The hypothesis of evolution he rejected somewhat
flabbily. “I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetish of
their protoplasm before long,” he said in 1879. “Such a mush seems
to me a poor substitute for the Rock of Ages--by which I understand
a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid
under their feet in all weathers” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 245). And as
late as 1886 he wrote, “I am a conservative (warranted to wash) and
keep on the safe side--with God as against evolution.” Naturally so
provocative a doctrine as economic determinism never showed its face in
his study; Karl Marx was not one of his intellectual companions. Even
the home-bred knight-errant, Henry George, did not greatly interest
him. “Why, who in the world buys such a book as that,” he exclaimed of
_Progress and Poverty_; and learning that a friend had subscribed for a
thousand copies, he remarked, “He _must_ be getting eccentric.”[473]
The political principles that he discovered in the smoke of his
professor’s pipe were equally naïve. He took himself seriously as a
guide and mentor in matters political. He was fond of talking about the
“noble science of politics”; yet he never took the trouble to ground
himself in the elements of the subject. He had scarcely read the primer
of political theory. Burke was probably the only political writer
who ever made any impression on his mind. Of American constitutional
history he was as ignorant as a politician, and when in Civil War
days he began to scratch the field of politics, he only uncovered
certain old Federalist prejudices that lay hidden under his later
accumulations. The extreme parochialism of the Brahmin mind is revealed
in Lowell’s incapacity to understand the South. The comment on Sibley’s
_Harvard Graduates_--“I do not know when the provincialism of New
England has been thrust upon me with so ineradicable a barb”--should be
turned upon Lowell’s dogmatic essays in American politics. He had not
the slightest comprehension of Calhoun’s doctrine of majorities; yet he
dismissed it contemptuously, after attributing it to one of Calhoun’s
followers.[474] He speaks of the “weak and wicked element” of states
rights--which he supposes the South owed to “the unhappy ingenuity of
Mr. Jefferson”--as an unhistorical repudiation of the principle of
coercive sovereignty established by the fathers, quite overlooking
the Hartford Convention. His treatment of Jefferson Davis and Andrew
Johnson is marked by the dogmatisms of one who is defending God’s will
against the devil’s sophistries. He will have no other interpretation
of history than an ethical interpretation, in which good and evil are
eternally at combat; and he closes his volume of political essays with
a comment that embodies for him the sum of all political wisdom:
We have only to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true
America of our hope and belief, and whatever is American will rise
from one end of the country to the other instinctively to our side,
with more than ample means of present succour and of final triumph.
It is only by being loyal and helpful to Truth that men learn at
last how loyal and helpful she can be to them. (_Ibid._, Vol. V, p.
326.)
Into the stagnant atmosphere of the Elmwood study came on a happy day
in the middle sixties the vibrant personality of Edwin Lawrence Godkin,
and under the stimulus of his crisp thinking there began for Lowell
what may perhaps be reckoned an intellectual renaissance. Godkin was
a moderate English liberal, a man of complete self-assurance, whose
tart comment on politics and economics was pointed by a conviction
of the finality of his own conclusions. Under such teaching Lowell
made rapid progress in the new school of criticism fathered by _The
Nation_. The delight with which he read Godkin’s comment and the eager
faith with which he greeted his ideas suggest that his own ethical
interpretation of politics was giving way under the strain of post-war
experience. From Godkin he got some casual instruction in _laissez
faire_, and certain of its teachings snuggled down comfortably in his
mind beside the principles of coercive sovereignty and a centralizing
state, without awakening any suspicion of their incompatibility of
temperament. He never went over wholly to _laissez faire_; he was too
strongly Brahmin Federalist for that; but his leanings often carried
him into the English camp. It was a tonic to his native conservatism
that was troubled about the new theories of collectivism, and it
awakened strong doubts about the experiment in democracy. The reaction
against the radicalism of his Abolition days became sharp and final.
“We have got to work back from a democracy to our original institution
as a republic again,” he wrote Leslie Stephen in 1879 (_Letters_,
Vol. II, p. 161); and in 1888 he asserted that the republic would
endure only “so long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue
dominant” (_The Independent in Politics_, Vol. VI, p. 207). He warned
Thomas Hughes against the extension of suffrage in England,[475] and he
was more and more inclined to think that democracy meant a slough of
mediocrity underlain with the mud of corruption--that it might prove
to be “a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of
fools” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 159).
From the vigorous movements of protest of the seventies and eighties,
the agrarian uprising of the Middle Border and the proletarian
organization in the industrial centers, he drew added confirmation of
his fears. In his attitude towards both he was little more than an
echo of Godkin, who was laying about him briskly, hitting both farmer
and workingman with fine impartiality. He shared the latter’s contempt
for all agrarian programs, without quite understanding them. He knew
little of America. The continent was scarcely more than a hinterland
to Cambridge, a hinterland that he explored with some bewilderment
on a trip that carried him as far as Cincinnati. Equally ignorant of
economics and of the Middle Border, he had no basis for any opinion;
a juster man would have put the agrarian question aside as beyond his
competency; at least he would have been careful to clear his mind of
prejudice. But Lowell was as much a victim of capitalistic prejudice
as Thomas Bailey Aldrich and other Boston pseudo-intellectuals. The
old Brahminism was close to the surface in those later years, and a
scratch would reveal it. In the matter of the “Haymarket Riot” he
wrote Howells that “he thought those Chicago ruffians well hanged”--a
comment that recalls the Abner Kneeland episode of fifty years before.
Physically Lowell was in close proximity to the labor problem, but
intellectually he was worlds removed. He looked upon the labor unions
with heavy misgivings. He frankly feared the power of the proletariat
and was bitter in denunciation of social legislation. In 1869 he wrote
Godkin, “Pray give Henry Wilson a broadside for dipping his flag
to that piratical craft of the eight-hour men.... I have a thorough
contempt for a man who pretends to believe that eight is equal to ten”
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 31). And somewhat later he wrote Norton:
I sometimes feel a little blue over the outlook here, with our
penny-paper universal education and our workingmen’s parties, with
their tremendous lever of suffrage, decrying brains.... But the
more I learn, the more am I impressed with the wonderful system
of checks and balances which history reveals (our Constitution is
a baby-house to it!) and the more my confidence in the general
commonsense and honest intention of mankind increases.... I take
great comfort in God. I think He is considerably amused with us
sometimes, but that He likes us, on the whole, and would not let us
get at the match-box so carelessly, as He does, unless He knew that
the frame of His Universe was fire-proof. How many times have I not
seen the fire-engines of Church and State clanging and lumbering
along to put out--a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy
what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty! (_Ibid._, Vol. II, p.
51.)
The ways of the Gilded Age were a rude shock to Lowell’s ill-grounded
idealism. The crude post-war exploitation and the political corruption
that marked the buccaneer stage of the rising plutocracy filled
him with anxiety. As an honest man he was angered by the common
scoundrelism of the politicians and the press and troubled at the
apathy of the public, but his dislike for economics did him a grave
disservice. In seeking out the guilty he went wide of the mark. To
trace the source of the virus that was poisoning the public life to an
exploiting economics, would have brought him close home. He chose to
think it was spread rather by western agrarians and city ringsters,
than by respectable New Englanders; yet after passing through the
_Crédit Mobilier_ scandal he was visited by unpleasant suspicions. “I
suspect,” he wrote after his return from the Cincinnati Convention
in 1876, “that few of our Boston men who have had to do with Western
railways have been more scrupulous [than the western Grangers.] I
rather think they set the example of tempting legislators with the hope
of questionable gains” (_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 170). With the open
facts of a Congressional investigation before him, Lowell got no deeper
than that. Yet his indignation must find outlet and he contributed
two poems to _The Nation_--“The World’s Fair, 1876,” and “Tempora
Mutantur”--in one of which he wrote:
Show ’em your Civil Service, and explain
How all men’s loss is everybody’s gain; ...
Show your short cut to cure financial ills
By making paper-collars current bills;
Show your new bleaching-process, cheap and brief,
To wit: a jury chosen by the thief;
Show your State legislatures; show your Rings;
And challenge Europe to produce such things
As high officials sitting half in sight
To share the plunder and to fix things right;
If that don’t fetch her, why, you only need
Your latest style in Martyrs--Tweed:
She’ll find it hard to hide her spiteful tears
At such advance in one poor hundred years.
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 155.)
This is Godkin translated into the Lowell vernacular, and what issued
from his indignation was Godkin also--an apostolic ardor for civil
service reform. He had learned at least, that democracy had not yet
been achieved in America; that, indeed, such spontaneous liberalism
as had been bred by free land was in danger of being destroyed by
evils that issued from the loins of this same heedless frontier
order.[476] In 1876 he wrote, “Let us all work together (and the
task will need us all) to make Democracy possible. It certainly is
no invention to go of itself any more than the perpetual motion”
(_Letters_, Vol. II, p. 159). Yet in spite of his zeal, one may
be permitted to doubt that Lowell really desired any other than a
Brahmin democracy. In those later years his conception of an ideal
society was unconsciously colored by memories of Cambridge fifty years
before--a simple, patriarchal world, amenable to the rule of the better
sort. In such a world democracy seemed possible; but in the rising
proletarian-plutocratic order, what reasonable hope was there?
From his growing perplexities Lowell found a happy relief in his
mission abroad. The experience was a godsend to a mind that was growing
torpid. In 1869 he had written, “I fancy if I were suddenly snatched
away to London, my brain would prickle all over, as a foot that has
been asleep when the blood starts in it again. Books are good dry
forage; we can keep alive on them; but, after all, men are the only
fresh pasture” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 24). London, in this mellow
autumn of his life, ripened Lowell. He slipped into the congenial
environment as easily as Irving had done a generation before, and
found English society as delightful. He loved England with unaffected
heartiness, and under the stimulating experience he expanded into a
kindly English Liberal. The extreme Liberals--men like Mill and Arnold
and John Morley--he found less sympathetic; and radical thinkers like
William Morris he seems not to have known of. But English Liberalism
of the Gladstone type was own cousin to Cambridge Brahminism; it
united dignity and conscience; it seemed to him the ideal type of
government--the rule of God-fearing gentlemen who strove to be faithful
to their trusteeship, and who ruled because they were best fitted to
rule. Into such a world no other American of the times could have
entered more appreciatively than Lowell. If congeniality to the host
be a prime requisite in an ambassador, President Hayes made no mistake
in sending him to the Court of St. James’s. He was a distinguished
representative of Brahmin culture; but whether he was a representative
of the solid realities of America is not so certain.
Footnotes
[468] See _A Rhymed Lesson_.
[469] See _Letters_, Vol. I, p. 82.
[470] See Hale, _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, p. 10.
[471] The more significant titles are: _Prometheus_ and _A Glance
behind the Curtain_, 1843; _Columbus_ and _The Present Crisis_, 1844;
_On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington_, 1845; _Biglow
Papers_, begun in 1846; _The Pioneer_, 1847; _Bibliolâtres_, 1849;
_Anti-Apis_, 1851.
[472] See C. Hartley Grattan, “Lowell,” in _The American Mercury_, Vol.
II, pp. 63-69.
[473] Five years later he was more sympathetic, but hopelessly
confused. See _Democracy_, Vol. VI, p. 35.
[474] See “The Rebellion,” in _Prose Works_, Vol. V, p. 134.
[475] See _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 175.
[476] See _The Independent in Politics_, Vol. VI, pp. 204-209.
Conclusion
To the ebullient romanticisms with which the foregoing pages have
dealt, the Civil War brought diverse fortunes; and from the titanic
conflict emerged an America rid of one of the feculent sources of
domestic schism. The romantic imperialisms of the slave economy were
gone forever. So much at least was cleared from the path of its
destiny, and the field of potential conflict was narrowed to the rival
imperialisms of eastern capitalism and western agrarianism. Both had
been vastly strengthened by the war. In the eastern centers was a
greatly stimulated industrialism, fed from the reservoirs of liquid
capital gathered in the process of financing the northern armies, ready
to turn to transcontinental railway-building, large-scale manufacture,
and a gigantic exploitation of the raw materials of mine and forest
and field. Along the Middle Border the old romance of the settlement
came to new life as the flood of homesteaders, augmented by disbanded
soldiers, poured over the prairie spaces beyond the Mississippi, to
repeat there the story of commonwealth building. East and West would
eventually clash, for their diverse economic needs were driving towards
a collision; but that would not come for a generation till the conflict
of interests was thrust into sharper relief.
In the meantime many familiar things were becoming anachronisms
over night, though they might linger on for years. As the romantic
revolution began with the laying aside of the smallclothes and tie-wig
of eighteenth-century aristocratic conservatism, so the new age began
with the putting away of the outworn dress of eighteenth-century
romantic liberalism. In the hurrying new days there was no time or
place for abstract theories of natural rights, for equalitarian
democracy, for local home rule--these relics of the past were thrust
aside in the scramble for wealth and power. The old philosophies were
swept out on the rubbish heap--Jefferson and Lincoln with Calhoun and
Stephens--and Hamilton and Marshall came to their own again. The lost
cause carried down to defeat much more than slavery, it carried down
the old ideal of decentralized democracies, of individual liberty; and
with the overthrow of the traditional principles in their last refuge,
the nation hurried forward along the path of an unquestioning and
uncritical consolidation, that was to throw the coercive powers of a
centralizing state into the hands of the new industrialism. Here was a
revolution that was to engulf the older romantic America, its dignified
literary ideals as well as its democratic political theory. In the
world of Jay Cooke and Commodore Vanderbilt, the transcendental dream
was as hopelessly a lost cause as the plantation dream; it was in even
worse plight, for it left no tragic memories to weave a new romance
about the fallen hopes. Emerson in Concord was as much out of date as
Lowell in Cambridge, or Gilmore Simms in Charleston. A new age had come
and other dreams--the age and the dreams of a middle-class sovereignty,
that was busily surveying the fields of its future conquests. From
the crude and vast romanticisms of that vigorous sovereignty emerged
eventually a spirit of realistic criticism, seeking to evaluate the
worth of this new America, and discover if possible other philosophies
to take the place of those which had gone down in the fierce battles of
the Civil War. What form this critical spirit assumed, and what replies
it returned to the strident challenge of the time, are questions not to
be answered here.
Bibliography
Only the more important titles dealt with in the present study are
listed hereunder, together with selected biographical and critical
material. The invaluable bibliographies in the _Cambridge History of
American Literature_, 4 vols., New York, 1917-22, cover most of the
writers considered, and the reader is referred to them.
Book I: Part I
Information will be found in the _Library of Southern Literature_ by E.
A. Alderman and others (16 vols., New Orleans, 1908-13) and in Montrose
J. Moses, _Literature of the South_ (New York, 1910). See also Carl Van
Doren, _The American Novel_ (New York, 1921).
I. The Old Dominion. See Thomas J. Wertenbaker, _Patrician and Plebeian
in Virginia_ (Charlottesville, Va., 1910).
II. For the economics of Jeffersonianism, see Charles A. Beard, _The
Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_ (New York, 1915; Chapter
XII). Also Charles Gide and Charles Rist, _A History of Economic
Doctrines_ (translated by W. Smart and R. Richards, Boston).
John Taylor: His works are out of print. Important titles are:
_An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the United States_
(Fredericksburg, Va., 1814). _New Views of the Constitution of the
United States_ (Washington, 1823). _Correspondence_ (edited by W. E.
Dodd, Richmond, 1908).
See “John Taylor, Prophet of Secession” (by William E. Dodd, in _Branch
Historical Papers, II_, Richmond, 1908). See also Beard, _Economic
Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_.
III. John Marshall: Sufficient materials will be found in Albert J.
Beveridge, _Life of John Marshall_ (4 vols., New York, 1916-19).
IV. For the plantation tradition, see Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_ (New York, 1924).
William Wirt: His works are out of print. _Letters of a British Spy_
(Richmond, 1803). _The Old Bachelor_ (2 vols., Richmond, 1810). _Life
and Character of Patrick Henry_ (Philadelphia, 1817; also several later
editions).
See John P. Kennedy, _Memoirs ... of William Wirt_ (Philadelphia, 1849).
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: His works are out of print. _George
Balcombe; a Novel_ (2 vols., New York, 1836).--_The Partisan Leader;
a Tale of the Future_, by Edward William Sidney (printed for the
publishers, by J. Caxton, 1856 [_i.e._, Washington, printed by Duff
Green, 1836], 2 vols.): reissued as _A Key to the Disunion Conspiracy:
The Partisan Leader_ (2 vols. in one, New York, 1861); edition issued
at Richmond, 1862.
Some information about Tucker will be found in W. P. Trent, _William
Gilmore Simms_ (Boston and New York, 1892).
V. William Alexander Caruthers: _The Kentuckian in New York. Or, the
Adventures of Three Southerns. By a Virginian_ (2 vols., New York,
1834).--_The Cavaliers of Virginia, or the Recluse of Jamestown.
An Historical Romance of the Old Dominion_ (2 vols., New York,
1834-1835).--_The Knights of the Horse-Shoe; a Traditionary Tale of the
Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion_ (Wetumpka, Ala., 1845; New York,
1882, 1909).
John P. Kennedy: _Works_ (3 vols., New York, 1854; 9 vols., New York,
1871, with life by H. T. Tuckerman, Vol. X). _Swallow Barn, or a
Sojourn in the Old Dominion_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1832; several
later editions). _Horse-Shoe Robinson; a Tale of the Tory Ascendency_
(2 vols., Philadelphia, 1835; numerous later editions, the latest
in 1906). _Rob of the Bowl; a Legend of St. Inigoe’s_ (2 vols.,
Philadelphia, 1838; later editions). _Quodlibet: Containing Some Annals
Thereof ..._ (Philadelphia, 1840; 1860).
Edgar Allan Poe: The bibliography is extensive. See the _Cambridge
History of American Literature_.
Book I: Part II
II. John C. Calhoun: _Works_ (6 vols., Columbia, S. C., 1851; New
York, 1853-55). _Correspondence_, edited by J. F. Jameson (American
Historical Association, _Annual Report_, 1899, Vol. II).
Biographies: W. E. Dodd, in _Statesmen of the Old South_ (New York,
1911). H. von Holst, _John C. Calhoun (American Statesmen Series_,
Boston, 1882, 1899). W. M. Meigs, _Life of John Caldwell Calhoun_ (2
vols., New York, 1917). G. M. Pinckney, _Life of John C. Calhoun_
(Charleston, 1903). W. P. Trent, _Southern Statesmen of the Old Régime_
(New York, 1897).
Alexander H. Stephens: _Constitutional View of the War between the
States_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1868).
See L. B. Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_ (Philadelphia, 1908).
Francis Lieber: _The Stranger in America_ (2 vols. in one, London,
1834). _Political Ethics_ (Philadelphia, 1838; edited by Theodore D.
Woolsey, Philadelphia, 1890; with introduction by Nicholas Murray
Butler, Philadelphia, 1911). _Essays on Property and Labor_ (New York,
1841). _Civil Liberty and Self-Government_ (2 vols., Philadelphia,
1853; London, 1859; edited by Theodore D. Woolsey, Philadelphia, 1891).
_Miscellaneous Writings_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1881; edited by Daniel
C. Gilman, Philadelphia, 1916).
See L. R. Harley, _Francis Lieber: His Life and Political Philosophy_
(New York, 1899).
III. For the southern position, see Jeannette Reid Tandy, “Pro-Slavery
Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties” (in _South Atlantic
Quarterly_, January March, 1922). Francis Pendleton Gaines, _The
Southern Plantation_ (New York, 1924; Chapter III).
William J. Grayson: _The Hireling and the Slave_ (Charleston, 1856).
IV. William Crafts: _A Selection in Prose and Poetry, from the
Miscellaneous Writings of the Late William Crafts. With Memoir by
Samuel Gilman_ (Charleston, 1828).
Hugh Swinton Legaré: _Writings_ (2 vols., Charleston, 1846; with
memoir).
William Gilmore Simms: His works have never been collected and most of
them are out of print. _Border Romances_ (17 vols., New York, 1859,
1866, 1879; 10 vols., New York, 1882; 15 vols., Chicago, 1885; 17
vols., Chicago, 1888; 17 vols., Atlanta, 1901 [?]). See W. P. Trent,
_William Gilmore Simms_ (New York, 1892)--an excellent study. Also see
J. Erskine, _Leading American Novelists_ (New York, 1910).
Book I: Part III
Excellent bibliographical material for western literature will be found
in Ralph Leslie Rusk, _The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier_
(2 vols., New York, 1925). See also W. H. Venable, _The Beginnings of
Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley_ (Cincinnati, 1891).
II. Interesting material will be found in Claude G. Bowers, _Party
Battles of the Jackson Period_ (Boston, 1922).
III. Timothy Flint: His works are out of print and rare. _Recollections
of the Last Ten Years_ (Boston, 1826). _Francis Berrian, or the Mexican
Patriot_ (Boston, 1826; Philadelphia and London, 1834). _The Life and
Adventures of Arthur Cleaning_ (Philadelphia, 1828). _George Mason,
the Young Backwoodsman; or, “Don’t Give up the Ship”_ (Boston, 1829;
with changed title, London, 1833). _The Shoshonee Valley; a Romance_
(Cincinnati, 1830).
See John Ervin Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, Pioneer, Missionary,
Author, Editor_ (Cleveland, 1911)--an excellent study with bibliography.
James Hall: _Works_ (4 vols., New York, 1853-56). _Legends of the West_
(Philadelphia, 1832, 1833; five later editions).--_The Soldiers Bride;
and Other Tales_ (Philadelphia, 1833).--_The Harpe’s Head; a Legend of
Kentucky_ (Philadelphia, 1833); as _Kentucky. A Tale_ (London, 1834, 2
vols.).--_Tales of the Border_ (Philadelphia, 1835). _The Wilderness
and the War Path_ (New York, 1846; New York and London, 1849).
See J. L. Davis, “Judge James Hall, a Literary Pioneer of the Middle
West” (in _Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society Publications_,
October, 1909).
Augustus Longstreet: _Georgia Scenes_ (Atlanta, Ga., 1835; New York,
1840; several later editions).
See John Donald Wade, _Augustus Longstreet, a Study of the Development
of Culture in the South_ (New York, 1924), an excellent study with
bibliographical material.
Davy Crockett: Five titles are grouped under the name of Crockett:
_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee_
(1833). _A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of
Tennessee_ (Philadelphia, 1834; seven editions in one year). _Life of
Martin Van Buren_ (1835). _An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the
North and Down East_ (1835). _Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures
in Texas_ (1836). The _Narrative_ is reprinted with an introduction by
Hamlin Garland, in _The Modern Student’s Library_, under the title,
_The Autobiography of David Crockett_ (New York, 1923).
There is no life of Crockett; such so-called works are uncritical
jumbles of fact and fiction. Some information will be found in John
Donald Wade, “The Authorship of David Crockett’s Autobiography”
(_Georgia Historical Quarterly_, September, 1922); S. H. Stout, “David
Crockett” (_American Historical Magazine_, Vol. VII, No. I, Jan.,
1902)--uncritical; Chester T. Crowell, “Davy Crockett” (_American
Mercury_, Vol. IV, No. 13).
Book II
For Philadelphia, see Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, _The Literary History
of Philadelphia_ (Philadelphia, 1906). Also H. M. Ellis, “Joseph Dennie
and His Circle” (_University of Texas Bulletin_). For the politics
of New York, see Dixon Ryan Fox, _The Decline of Aristocracy in the
Politics of New York_ (New York, 1918).
I. Charles Brockden Brown: _The Novels of Charles Brockden Brown ...
with a Memoir_ (Boston, 1827; Philadelphia, 1857, 1887). _Wieland; or
the Transformation_ (New York, 1798; best recent edition in _American
Authors Series_, New York, 1926). _Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the
Year 1793_ (Philadelphia, 1799; Second Part, New York, 1800; numerous
later editions).
No adequate life has been written. The best is by William Dunlap, _The
Life of Charles Brockden Brown_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1815). See John
Erskine, _Leading American Novelists_ (New York, 1910), and Annie R.
Marble, in _Heralds of American Literature_ (Chicago and London, 1907).
Robert Montgomery Bird: For a list of his plays, see A. H. Quinn, _A
History of the American Theatre_ (New York, 1923).
_Calavar; or, the Knight of the Conquest: a Romance of Mexico_ (2
vols., Philadelphia, 1834; about ten later editions).--_The Hawks of
Hawks-Hollow. A Tradition of Pennsylvania_ (2 vols., Philadelphia,
1835; two London editions).--_The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico_ (2
vols., Philadelphia, 1835; London, 1835).--_Nick of the Woods, or, the
Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1837; upward
of twenty later editions).
For his life, see Clement Foust, _Life and Dramatic Works of Robert
Montgomery Bird_ (1919).
II. James Kent: _Commentaries on American Law_ (4 vols., New York,
1826-1830; many later editions).
For his life, see William Kent, _Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_
(Boston, 1898).
Fitz-Greene Halleck: _Poetical Works_ (New York and Philadelphia; eight
editions between 1847 and 1859). _Poetical Writings with Extracts from
those of Joseph Rodman Drake_ (edited by J. G. Wilson, New York, 1869,
1885).
For a life, see J. G. Wilson, _The Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene
Halleck_ (New York, 1869). Also see W. C. Bryant, _Some Notices on the
Life and Writings of Fitz-Greene Halleck_ (New York, 1869).
III. Washington Irving: The standard edition of his works is in forty
volumes, New York, 1887.
The standard life is by Pierre M. Irving, _The Life and Letters of
Washington Irving_ (4 vols., London, 1864; New York, 1879, 1883).
See also _The Letters of Washington Irving to Henry Brevoort_ (edited
by George S. Hellman, 2 vols., New York, 1915). A recent study is
George S. Hellman, _Washington Irving, Esq_. (New York, 1925).
James Kirke Paulding: _Works_ (15 vols., New York, 1834-1839; 4 vols.,
1867-1868).--_The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_
(New York, 1812).--_Letters from the South_ (2 vols., New York,
1817).--_The Backwoodsman. A Poem_ (Philadelphia, 1818).--_Salmagundi,
Second Series_ (2 vols., New York, 1820).--_Koningsmarke, the Long
Finne, A Story of the New World_ (New York, 1823; 2 vols., New York,
1834; three London editions, and a German).--_Westward Ho! A Tale_ (2
vols., New York, 1832, 1845; three London editions, a French and a
German).--_The Dutchman’s Fireside. A Tale_ (2 vols., New York, 1831;
latest edition, 1900).--_The Puritan and his Daughter_ (New York, 1849,
1850; also London, 1849, two editions, and one German).
No adequate life has been written, but see W. I. Paulding, _Literary
Life of James K. Paulding_ (New York, 1867).
IV. James Fenimore Cooper: The editions of Cooper’s novels are
numerous; as good as any is the one in thirty-two volumes (New York,
1895, 1896-97). Much of his controversial work and critical articles
have not been reprinted. See _Notions of the Americans; Picked up by a
Travelling Bachelor_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1829). _A Letter to His
Countrymen_ (New York, 1834). _The American Democrat; or Hints on the
Social and Civic Relations of the United States_ (Cooperstown, 1838).
_The History of the Navy_ (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1839). Also his eight
volumes of European travels.
No satisfactory life has been written. The best is by T. R. Lounsbury,
_James Fenimore Cooper_ (New York, 1883). See also _Correspondence of
James Fenimore-Cooper_ (edited by his grandson, James Fenimore Cooper,
2 vols., New Haven, 1922). W. C. Brownell, in _American Prose Masters_
(New York, 1909). Carl Van Doren, in _The American Novel_ (New York,
1921).
V. William Cullen Bryant: The standard edition is edited by Parke
Godwin (6 vols., New York, 1883-1889: 1-2, _Biography_, 1883, 3-4,
_Poetical Works_, 1883, 1901; 5-6, _Prose Writings_, 1884-1889). Much
information on his work in journalism will be found in Allan Nevins, _A
Century of Journalism_ (New York, 1921).
Horace Greeley: His works have not been collected. See _Hints towards
Reform_ (New York, 1850). _Recollections of a Busy Life_ (New York,
1868). _Essays Designed to Elucidate the Science of Political Economy_
(Boston, 1870). _The American Conflict_ (Hartford and Chicago,
1864-1866).
For his life, see James Parton, _The Life of Horace Greeley_ (Boston,
1868). Charles Sotheran, _Horace Greeley_ (New York, 1915). See also
John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley and the Working-Class Origins of
the Republican Party” (_Political Science Quarterly_, Vol. XXIV, pp.
468-488).
Herman Melville: The best edition is The Standard (16 vols., London,
1922-23). Also see _Works_ (4 vols., edited by A. Stedman, New York,
1892, 1896; Boston, 1900, 1910). Convenient editions of _Typee_,
_Omoo_, and _Moby-Dick_ are plentiful.
The indispensable life is Raymond Weaver’s _Herman Melville: Mariner
and Mystic_ (New York, 1921), with bibliography. Also see John Freeman,
_Herman Melville_ (in _English Men of Letters Series_, New York, 1926).
Book III: Part I
I. For the political backgrounds, see A. E. Morse, _The Federalist
Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800_ (Princeton, 1909). W. A.
Robinson, _Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_ (New Haven, 1916).
Samuel Eliot Morison, _Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis_ (2
vols., Boston. 1913).
Fisher Ames: _Works_ (with memoir by J. T. Kirkland, Boston, 1809).
_Works, with a Selection from his Speeches and Correspondence_ (edited
by his son, Seth Ames, 2 vols., Boston, 1854).
Robert Treat Paine: _Works in Prose and Verse_ (with memoir, Boston,
1812).
II. Joseph Story: _Commentaries on the Constitution of the United
States_ (3 vols., Boston, 1833; numerous later editions).
See W. W. Story, _Life and Letters of Joseph Story_ (2 vols., Boston,
1851).
Daniel Webster: The best edition of his works is The National--_The
Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster_ (18 vols., Boston, 1903).
_Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster_ (2 vols., Boston, 1857).
_Letters_ (edited by C. H. Van Tyne, New York, 1902).
See George Ticknor Curtis, _Life of Daniel Webster_ (2 vols., New York
and London, 1870). For a critical contemporary estimate see Theodore
Parker, _Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster_ (Boston,
1853). See also Charles A. Beard, _The Economic Basis of Politics_ (New
York, 1922).
Book III: Part II
I. Unitarianism: See George Willis Cooke, _Unitarianism in America:
A History of its Origin and Development_ (Boston, 1902). Williston
Walker, _A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States_
(New York, 1894).
William Ellery Channing: _Works_ (5 vols., Boston, 1841; sixth volume
added in 1843; numerous later editions).
An excellent life is J. W. Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing, Minister
of Religion_ (Boston, 1903). See also William H. Channing, _Memoir of
William Ellery Channing_ (3 vols., Boston, 1848).
II. Perfectionism: For materials see Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd
Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).
Brook Farm: See Lindsay Swift, _Brook Farm; Its Members, Scholars
and Visitors_ (New York, 1906; contains bibliography). J. T. Codman,
_Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs_ (Boston, 1894). Nathaniel
Hawthorne, _Blithedale Romance_.
Abolitionism: Sufficient materials will be found in Garrison, _Life
of William Lloyd Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889). See also
Catherine N. Birney, _Sarah and Angelina Grimké_ (Boston, 1885); and
_James C. Birney and His Times, by His Son, William Birney_ (New York,
1890).
III. William Lloyd Garrison: See Garrison, _Life of William Lloyd
Garrison_ (4 vols., New York, 1885-1889).
John G. Whittier: _The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier_ (Riverside
Edition, 7 vols., Boston, 1885-1889).
See G. R. Carpenter, _John Greenleaf Whittier_ (in _American Men of
Letters Series_).--T. S. Pickard, _Life and Letters of John Greenleaf
Whittier_ (2 vols., Boston, 1894).--F. H. Underwood, _John Greenleaf
Whittier. A Biography_ (Boston, 1884).
Harriet Beecher Stowe: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 16 vols., Boston,
1896; with life by Mrs. Field, 17 vols., 1898).
See Mrs. J. T. Fields, _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_ (Boston,
1897).
Book III: Part III
I. Transcendentalism: The literature is abundant. See _The
Dial_ (4 vols., Boston, 1840-1844).--_The Harbinger_ (4 vols.,
New York, 1844-1848).--Harold Clarke Goddard, _Studies in New
England Transcendentalism_ (New York, 1908).--O. B. Frothingham,
_Transcendentalism in New England. A History_ (New York, 1876).--See
also Sylvester Judd, _Margaret. A Tale of the Real and Ideal_ (2 vols.,
Boston, 1845; revised edition, 1851).
II. Ralph Waldo Emerson: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, edited by James
Eliot Cabot, 12 vols., Boston, 1884-1893; London, 1884-1893; Centenary
Edition, with biographical introduction and notes by E. W. Emerson,
12 vols., Boston, 1903-04; London, 1904).--_Journals of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, with Annotations_ (edited by Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo
Emerson Forbes, 10 vols., Boston, 1909-1914).--_Uncollected Writings.
Essays, Addresses, Poems, Reviews and Letters by Ralph Waldo Emerson_
(New York [1912]).
See George Willis Cooke, _Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (Boston,
1908). James Eliot Cabot, _A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (2 vols.,
Boston, 1887). George Willis Cooke, _Ralph Waldo Emerson; His Life,
Writings, and Philosophy_ (Boston, 1881). Oscar W. Firkins, _Ralph
Waldo Emerson_ (Boston, 1915). W. C. Brownell, _American Prose Masters_
(New York, 1909).
III. Henry David Thoreau: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 11 vols., Boston,
1894; Manuscript Edition, 20 vols. [Vols. VII-XX contain the Journals],
Boston, 1906).
See Francis H. Allen, _A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau_
(Boston and New York, 1908). William E. Channing, _Thoreau, the
Poet-Naturalist_ (Boston, 1873, 1902). F. B. Sanborn, _Henry D.
Thoreau_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston, 1882, 1910);
_The Personality of Thoreau_ (Boston, 1901); _The Life of Henry
David Thoreau_ (Boston and New York, 1917). Léon Bazalgette, _Henry
Thoreau--Bachelor of Nature_ (translated by Van Wyck Brooks, New York,
1924).
IV. Theodore Parker: _Collected Works_ (edited by F. P. Cobbe, 14
vols., London, 1863-71). _The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings of
Theodore Parker_ (Boston, 1843). _Speeches, Addresses and Occasional
Sermons_ (2 vols., Boston, 1876). _The American Scholar_ (with notes by
George Willis Cooke, Boston, 1907).
An excellent study is J. W. Chadwick, _Theodore Parker, a
Biography_ (Boston, 1900), containing a bibliography John Weiss,
_Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker_ (2 vols., New York,
1864)--indispensable.
V. Margaret Fuller: Her works have not been collected. Important titles
are: _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ (New York and London, 1845; with
additional papers and introduction by Horace Greeley, New York, 1855).
_Life Without and Life Within_ (Boston, 1860; New York, 1869). _Papers
on Literature and Art_ (2 vols., New York and London, 1846).
An excellent study is Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller: A
Psychological Biography_ (New York, 1920). See also R. W. Emerson, W.
H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, _Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_ (2
vols., Boston, 1833). Thomas Wentworth Higginson, _Margaret Fuller
Ossoli_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston, 1884), containing
bibliography.
Book III: Part IV
I. Henry W. Longfellow: _The Writings of ... with Bibliographical and
Critical Notes_ (11 vols., Boston, 1886 [Vols. I-VI, _Poetical Works_;
VII-VIII, _Prose Works_; IX-XI, _Dante_]).
See Samuel Longfellow, _Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ (3
vols., Boston and New York, 1891). T. W. Higginson, _Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow_ (in _American Men of Letters Series_, Boston and New York,
1902).
II. Nathaniel Hawthorne: _Works_ (12 vols., Boston, 1871-76; Fireside
Edition, 12 vols., Boston, 1879; Riverside Edition, 12 vols., Boston,
1883; Standard Library Edition, 15 vols., Boston, 1891 [contains
_Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, by Julian Hawthorne]; New Wayside
Edition, 13 vols., Boston, 1902).
The best-known life is Julian Hawthorne, _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His
Wife_ (2 vols., Boston, 1885). Henry James, _Nathaniel Hawthorne_
(in _English Men of Letters Series_, London, 1879; New York, 1885,
1887). See also W. C. Brownell, _American Prose Masters_ (New York,
1909). John Erskine, _Great American Novelists_ (New York, 1910). Carl
Van Doren, _The American Novel_ (New York, 1921); Stuart P. Sherman,
_Americans_ (New York, 1923).
III. Oliver Wendell Holmes: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 13 vols.,
Boston, 1891, additional volume, 1892; Autocrat Edition, 13 vols.,
Boston and New York, 1904).
See George B. Ives _A Bibliography of Oliver Wendell Holmes_ (Boston
and New York, 1907). John T. Morse, _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell
Holmes_ (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1896).--Lewis W. Townsend,
_Oliver Wendell Holmes. Centenary Biography_ (London, 1909).
James Russell Lowell: _Works_ (Riverside Edition, 13 vols., Boston
and New York, 1902 [contains Scudder’s _Life_]; Elmwood Edition, 16
vols., Boston, 1904 [four volumes of letters]). _Anti-Slavery Papers_
(2 vols., Boston and New York, 1902). _Letters of James Russell Lowell_
(edited by Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols., New York, 1893; 3 vols.,
Boston, 1904). _Early Prose Writings of ..._ (2 vols., New York, 1903).
G. W. Cooke, _A Bibliography of James Russell Lowell_ (Boston and
New York, 1906). H. E. Scudder, _James Russell Lowell: A Biography_
(2 vols., Boston, 1901). Ferris Greenslet, _James Russell Lowell: A
Biography_ (2 vols., Boston, 1901). Ferris Greenslet, _James Russell
Lowell: His Life and Work_ (Boston, 1905). See also C. Hartley Grattan,
“Lowell” (_The American Mercury_, Vol. II, p. 69): Harry Hayden Clark,
_Lowell’s Criticism of Romantic Literature_ (“Publications of the
Modern Language Association,” March, 1926); W. D. Howells, _Literary
Friends and Acquaintances_ (New York, 1902); Henry James, _Essays in
London and Elsewhere_ (New York, 1893); J. J. Reilly, _James Russell
Lowell as a Critic_ (New York, 1915); and John M. Robertson, _Lowell as
a Critic_ (_North American Review_, February, 1919).
Index [Volume Two]
_Abolitionists, The_, 333, 337
_Abraham Davenport_, 370
_Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East_, 173,
174, 176
Adams, John, 13, 15, 17, 22, 78, 82, 95, 119, 187, 198, 226, 231,
282, 283, 305, 306, 316, 325, 393, 456
----, John Quincy, 242, 249, 276, 365
----, Samuel, 292, 380, 423
Addison, Joseph, 31, 35, 199, 453
_Additional Speeches_, 297 n, 300, 316, 415, 420, 421 n, 422, 423
_Adventures of Captain Bonneville_, 209, 211
_Aeneid_, 32
Agassiz, Louis, 458
_Agriculture of England, The_, 304
Alcott, Bronson, 342, 348, 349, 394, 402, 426
_Alcuin, A Dialogue_, 189
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 469
_Alexander H. Stephens, Life of_, 83, 86, 89, 91
Alexis, Grand Duke, 458
_American Democrat, The_, 226, 227
_American Liberty_, 287
_American Mercury, The_, 466 n
_American Note-Books_, 447, 448, 449
_American Notes_, 441
_American Novel, The_, 133
_American Political Ideas_, 94, 334 n
_American Scholar, The_, 390
Ames, Fisher, ii, 19, 21, 36, 109, 113, 116, 119, 198, 241, 276,
279-288, 291, 293, 296, 297, 315, 317, 329
----, Dr. Nathaniel, 279, 280
_Anarchiad, The_, 24
Anne, Queen, 452
Anthony, Katharine, 427, 432
_Anti-Apis_, 464 n
Anti-Rent Novels, 231, 233
_Apology and Defense_, 309 n
_Arbitrament of National Disputes, The_, 121 n
Aristotle, 307
Arnold, Matthew, 265, 472
_Arthur Mervyn_, 190
Astor, John Jacob, 195, 201, 203, 208, 211, 231
_Astoria_, 209, 211
Ashe, Thomas, 215
_Augustus Baldwin Longstreet_, 169 n, 170
_Authorship of David Crockett’s Autobiography, The_, 177 n
_Autobiography of Davy Crockett_, 166
_Autobiography of Joseph Story_, 300
_Backwoodsman, The_, 215
Bacon, Lord, 31, 307
Baldwin, Joseph G., 133, 162, 166
Bancroft, George, 437-439
_Bank of the United States, The_, 309 n
Barlow, Joel, 188
Bartol, C. A., 384
_Basis of the Senate, The_, 306, 307, 310, 315
Bassett, John, 148, 149
Baxter, Richard, 371
Beard, Professor Charles A., 13 n, 15, 18-19
_Beauchampe_, 130
Beecher, Elizabeth, 342 n
----, Henry Ward, 238, 344, 351, 399
----, Lyman, 357, 371, 375, 376
Benjamin, Parke, 238
Bennett, James Gordon, 102 n, 356
Bentham, Jeremy, 166
Benton, Thomas H., 14, 55, 151, 246, 309
Berkeley, Bishop, 380
Beveridge, Albert J., 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 316 n
_Bibliolâtres_, 464 n
Biddle, Nicholas, 55
_Biglow Papers, The_, 368, 464, 464 n
Bird, Robert Montgomery, 135, 162, 166, 190-192, 220, 235
Birney, James G., 246, 333, 351, 359, 365
Blackstone, 31, 35, 47, 113, 117, 120, 168, 197, 302, 313
_Blithedale Romance, The_, 442, 448
Blücher, Marshal, 94
Boone, Daniel, 138, 139, 162
_Border Beagles_, 128
_Boston Kidnapping, The_, 423
Bourlamaqui, 117
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 236
Bradbury, John, 215
Brevoort, Henry, 205
Briant, Lemuel, 325, 326
Bright, John, 241
Brisbane, Albert, ii, 101, 108, 200, 208, 242, 251, 350, 448
_British Spy, The_, 31, 33, 41
_Broker of Bogota, The_, 191
Brown, Charles Brockden, 188-190
----, John, 155, 159, 360, 364, 399, 402, 412, 458
Brownson, Orestes, ii, 108
Bryant, William Cullen, 201, 208, 238-246, 247, 257, 258, 366, 458
Buckminster, Rev. Joseph Stevens, 113
Bunyan, John, 366
Burgess, John W., 94
Burke, Edmund, 12, 15, 31, 94, 305, 311, 366, 392, 467
Burns, Anthony, 359, 360, 411, 423
----, Robert, 366
Burr, Aaron, 197
Bushnell, Rev. Horace, 356
Byrd, Col. William, 8
Byron, Lord, 111, 116, 200, 216
Cabell, James Branch, 259, 260
Cabot, George, 296
_Caleb Williams_, 190
Calhoun, John C., 4, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69-82,
83, 89, 91, 93, 102, 109, 115, 120, 123, 126, 136, 137, 144,
150, 152, 153, 168, 170, 299, 311, 312, 357, 399, 467, 468, 473
Calvin, John, 215, 272, 273, 321, 340, 416, 457
_Camillus_, 285-286
Campbell, Thomas, 200
_Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington, On the_, 464 n
Carey, Matthew, 185-186
Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 101, 111, 381, 389, 393, 406, 412
Carpenter, G. R., 351, 367
Caruthers, Dr. William Alexander, 28, 41-46, 377
Cass, Lewis, 246
_Cathedral, The_, 266
Catullus, 453
_Cavaliers of Virginia, The_, 41, 45
Chadwick, John White, 330, 338
_Chainbearer, The_, 232, 234, 236
_Chambered Nautilus, The_, 453
Channing, William Ellery, 188, 252, 300, 314, 317, 319, 325, 326,
327, 328-338, 339, 342, 357, 361, 371, 390, 393, 420, 435, 443,
454, 456
----, William Ellery (Younger), 401
----, William Henry, 108, 228, 241, 347, 348, 428, 429
Chapman, Mrs., 351
_Chardon Street Convention, The_, 345
_Charlemont_, 130
Charles I, King, 372
“_Charming Creature” as a Wife, The_, 172
Chase, L. B., 102
Chaucer, 47
_Chicora and Other Poems_, 103
Child, Francis, 465
----, Lydia Maria, 351
Choate, Rufus, 152, 329, 367, 368, 397, 398, 421, 423
_Chronicle, The_, 206
Churchill, Charles, 452
_Civil Disobedience_, 409, 410, 411
_Civil Liberty and Self-Government_, 95
_Clarel_, 265, 266-267
Clark, George Rogers, 138
Clarke, J. F., 429, 430
Clay, Henry, 4, 34, 37, 46, 48, 67, 69, 71, 122, 138, 139, 142-144,
145, 150, 152, 153, 209, 218, 242, 243, 249, 296, 298, 309,
333, 353, 365, 366, 397, 399
Clayton, Augustus S., 176
Cleon, 398
Cliffton, William, 188
_Climbing the Natural Bridge_, 46
Clinton, De Witt, 201
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 265
Cobbett, William, 185, 186
Cobden, Richard, 241
Coke, Sir Edward, 15, 47, 117
_Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas_, 173, 178 n
Coleridge, Samuel T., 58, 381, 389
Collins, Wilkie, 458
_Columbus_, 464 n
_Commentaries on American Law_, 199
_Commentaries on the Constitution_, 301-303, 311, 312
Commons, John R., 250, 252, 253, 254
Comte, Auguste, 30
Condillac, Etienne de, 382
Condorcet, Marquis de, 10, 11, 293
_Congressional Debates_, 175
Congreve, William, 54
_Connecticut_, 202
_Constitutional History of Greece, The_, 116
_Constitutional View of the War between the States_, 9, 56, 83, 88,
89, 90 n, 91, 302
_Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States, The_, 311
_Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_, 299
Conway, Moncure D., 90
Cooke, Jay, 474
----, John Esten, ii, 28
Cooper, James Fenimore, 37, 131, 133, 135, 141, 183, 193, 196, 204,
207, 208, 216, 220, 222-237, 238, 257, 266, 457
----, James Fenimore (grandson), 207 n, 229
----, Judge William, 194, 224, 225
----, Dr., 72
_Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper_, 207 n, 229
Cotton, Rev. John, 118
_Country, The_, 103
_Courier and Enquirer, The_, 253
Cousin, Victor, 381
Coverley, Sir Roger de, 52
Cowper, William, 188, 264
Crafts, William, 112-114
_Crater, The_, 226
Crawford, W. H., 168
_Cream of the Jest, The_, 259
Crèvecœur, Hector St. John de, 215
_Croaker Papers_, 200
Crockett, Davy, 45, 138, 147, 162, 165, 172-179, 192, 366
Cromwell, Oliver, 213, 464
Cruse, Peter Hoffman, 48
Cujacius, 117
Curtis, George William, 238
Cushing, Caleb, 362, 365
_Daniel Webster_, 297 n
Dante, 440, 466
Darwin, Charles, 419, 455
Davis, Jefferson, 4, 62, 65-66, 70, 86, 146, 299, 468
_Debating Society, The_, 172
_Declaration of Whig Principles and Purposes_, 310
_Decline of Aristocracy in New York Politics_, 199, 224, 244
_Democracy_, 467 n
_Democracy, Pacific and Constructive_, 244
Dennie, Joseph, 187
De Quincey, Thomas, 258
Dew, Professor, 102
_Dial, The_, 348
Dickens, Charles, 47, 127, 141, 441
Dickinson, John, 186
_Discourses on Government_, 354
_Disquisition on Government, A_, 75 n, 77, 79, 299
_Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan, The_, 214
_Divina Commedia_, 440
_Divinity School Address_, 337, 390
_Domnei_, 260
_Don Quixote_, 31
Douglas, Stephen A., 153, 397, 398
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 200
_Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp_, 377
_Dred Scott_, 157
Dryden, John, 31, 104, 289
Dumas, Alexandre, 216
_Dutchman’s Fireside, The_, 220
Dwight, Theodore, 278
----, Timothy, 71, 188, 240, 324, 340, 371
_Early Spanish Ballads_, 116
_Ecclesiastes_, 264
_Echo, The_, 24
_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, The_, 13 n, 15, 19
Edward I, King, 260
Edwards, Jonathan, 71, 321, 323, 324, 372, 373, 379, 399, 445
Eliot, Rev. John, 201, 343
_Elliot’s Debates_, 83
Elliott, S. K., 102
_Elsie Venner_, 454, 459
_Emancipation of Labor, The_, 256
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 108, 226, 230, 258, 264, 266, 304, 314, 316,
317, 319, 337, 344, 349, 373, 379, 380, 383, 384, 385, 386-399,
401, 409, 412, 420, 426, 429, 431, 433, 439, 447, 449, 451,
455, 462, 474
_Encyclopedia Americana_, 94
_English Serfdom and American Slavery_, 102
_English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, 461
_Epipsychidion_, 259
_Epistle of Robert Hogbin, Esq._, 201
_Essays_ (Emerson), 387, 390
_Essay on Politics_, 393, 394, 396, 397
_Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of
American Females_, 342 n
_Essay on Thoreau_, 346 n
Evans, George Henry, 254
_Evening Post, The_, 102 n, 239, 242 n, 244, 245
Everett, Edward, 109, 159, 317, 319, 320, 329, 397, 399, 423, 437,
458, 460
_Examination of the Late Proceedings in Congress Respecting ... the
Secretary of the Treasury, An_, 15
_Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories, On the_, 312-313
“Falkland,” 287
_Fanny_, 202
_Federal Orrery, The_, 294
_Federalist, The_, 24, 196, 286, 302, 303
Felton, Professor, 367
Fenn, William W., 324 n, 327
Fenno, John, 186, 206
_Ferdinand and Isabella_, 434
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 382, 430
Fielding, Henry, 128
_Fight, The_, 172
Fillmore, President Millard, 47
Filmer, Sir Robert, 215
Fink, Mike, 138, 192
_First Settlement of England, The_, 306, 307-308
Flint, Rev. Timothy, 51, 140, 141, 162-163, 211
_Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 133, 162, 166
Follen, Professor Charles, 94, 441
_Forayers, The_, 132, 134
Forrest, Edwin, 191
Fourier, François Charles Marie, 30, 244, 251, 348, 349, 431
Fox, Dixon Ryan, 199, 224, 244
_Francis Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot_, 163
Franklin, Benjamin, 11, 185, 225, 228, 308
_Frederick Douglass_, 431
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 439
Freneau, Philip, 186, 196
Frothingham, Octavius B., 348, 379, 380, 384
_Fugitive Slave Law, The_, 315
Fuller (Ossoli), Margaret, 314, 349, 426-434, 436, 439, 448
----, Timothy, 427
Gage, General, 459
Gaines, Francis Pendleton, 102 n
Galloway, Joseph, 186
_Gander Pulling, The_, 172
Gansevoort, Maria, 259, 260, 261
----, Major-General Peter, 260
Garland, Hamlin, 213
Garrison, William Lloyd, 256, 314, 319, 332, 341, 343, 351, 352-361,
365, 366, 411, 415, 416, 420, 431, 448, 458
Genêt, Citizen, 292
_Genius of Universal Emancipation, The_, 353
_George Balcombe_, 162
George, Henry, 467
_George Mason, the Young Backwoodsman; or “Don’t Give up the Ship_,”
163
_Georgia Historical Quarterly, The_, 177 n
_Georgia Scenes_, 51, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 178 n
_Georgia Theatrics_, 172, 178 n
_Gladiator, The_, 191
Gladstone, W. E., 472
_Glance Behind the Curtain, A_, 464, 464 n
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_, 187
Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 257, 468, 471
Godwin, Parke, 200, 243, 244
----, William, 11, 22, 33, 188, 189, 190, 242, 331, 335, 336, 409
Goethe, 389, 430, 433
Gournay, Vincent de, 11
_Governor Clinton’s Speech_, 201 n
Grant, General U. S., 48
Grattan, C. Hartley, 466 n
Gray, Edward, 48
----, Elizabeth, 48
----, Thomas, 31, 188
Grayson, William J., 103-108, 110, 111, 256
Greeley, Horace, 101, 107, 108, 200, 208, 238, 242, 244, 247-258,
352, 399, 432, 458
Green, Duff, 36
Greene, General, 132
_Greenfield Hill_, 340
Grimké, Angelina, 342 n, 432
---- Sisters, 343, 351
Grotius, 117, 306
_Gulliver’s Travels_, 262
_Guy Rivers_, 130
Hale, Edward Everett, 462 n
Hall, Captain Basil, 215
----, James, 51, 140 n, 162, 164, 172, 211
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 200, 238
Hamilton, Alexander, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 36, 48, 89, 93, 94, 95,
138, 143, 148, 156, 196, 197, 198, 206, 227, 245, 285, 291,
297, 305, 309, 316, 473
Hammond, Governor, 102
_Harbinger, The_, 244
Harper, Chancellor, 102
_Harpe’s Head_, 164, 165, 172
Harrington, James, 5, 305, 306, 307
_Harrison Gray Otis_, 341 n
Hartford Wits, The, 24, 188
_Harvard Graduates_, 467
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 259, 265, 442-450
Hayes, President Rutherford B., 472
Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 126
----, Robert Young, 310, 330
Hedge, Frederick Henry, 430
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 318
Heine, Heinrich, 439
Helper, Hinton R., 133
Henry, Patrick, 33, 34
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 445
_Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic_, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265
Hervey, James, 31
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 314, 344 n, 351, 414
Hildreth, Richard, 438
_Hints toward Reforms_, 250 n, 252 n, 257
_Hireling and the Slave, The_, 103, 104, 108
_History of the American Drama, A_, 191
_History of the Congregational Churches in the United States_, 324 n,
325 n
_History of the United States_, 437-438
Hoar, Judge, 402
Hobbes, Thomas, 78
Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 163
----, Josiah Ogden, 206
----, Matilda, 206
Holmes, Abiel, 454
----, Oliver Wendell, 260, 319, 320, 451-459, 460
_Home as Found_, 141, 229, 230, 233
_Homeward Bound_, 233
Hone, Philip, 245
_Hopes and Fears for Art_, 407
Hopkins, Samuel, 329, 340, 373, 375-376
Hopkinson, Francis, 186
Horace, 453
_Horace Greeley_, 254 n
_Horace Greeley and the Working-Class Origins of the Republican
Party_, 250, 252, 253, 254
_Horseshoe Robinson_, 41, 51, 53
_Horse Swap, The_, 172
_House of the Seven Gables, The_, 446
Howells, William Dean, 466
Huger, Alfred, 103
Hughes, Thomas, 469
Hume, David, 385
Hunt, Gaillard, 71, 72 n, 80
Hutchinson, Governor Thomas, 276
_Ichabod_, 315
_Illinois Monthly Magazine, The_, 164
_Independent in Politics, The_, 471 n, 469
_Industrial Worker, The_, 141
_Inquiry into the Nature of the Constitution of the United States,
An_, 299
_Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the
United States, An_, 15
_Inquiry into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public
Measures, An_, 15
_Introductory Remarks_, 326, 333-334, 336
_Introduction to the Old Testament_, 417
_Invention of Letters, The_, 291
Irving, Pierre M., 205
----, Washington, 29, 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 172, 183, 195, 200,
203-212, 213, 218, 238, 471
----, William, 213
Jackson, Andrew, 4, 8, 26, 29, 34, 36, 37, 55, 63, 90, 122, 139,
145-152, 154, 156, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 198, 207, 241, 242,
243, 249, 298, 309, 353
----, Stonewall, 65, 70
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 345, 382
_Jacobiniad, The_, 294
_James Russell Lowell_, 465
_James Russell Lowell and his Friends_, 462 n
_Java Head_, 445
Jay, John, 196, 198, 224, 225, 227
Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 21, 22, 26, 33, 38, 61,
62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 77, 84, 88, 89, 90, 111, 119, 120, 142,
146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 158, 159, 206, 228, 239, 240, 241,
243, 251, 252, 272, 277, 278, 284, 287, 288, 300, 301, 302,
335, 366, 383, 390, 394, 396, 421, 430, 462, 468, 473
_Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his Wife_, 146
_Jeffersonian Democracy in New England_, 255 n
Jeremiah, 282
_Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians_, 116
_John Bull in America_, 214
_John G. Whittier_, 367
_John Greenleaf Whittier_, 351
Johnson, Andrew, 468
----, Dr. Samuel, 35, 109
_Jonathan Wild_, 128
_Journal_ (Thoreau), 411 n
_Journals_ (Emerson), 317, 344, 349, 386, 387, 391, 392, 393 n, 395,
398, 399, 409
_Justice and Expediency_, 362, 377
Juvenal, 453
Kane, Elisha Kent, 50
Kant, Emmanuel, 343, 382, 430
_Katherine Walton_, 128 n
Keats, John, 111, 453
Kennedy, John Pendleton, ii, 28, 37, 41, 46-56, 160, 172, 177, 203,
377
----, William Sloane, 367
Kent, Chancellor James, 117, 196, 197-199
----, William, 198
_Kentuckian in New York, The_, 41, 45, 46, 377
King, Charles, 245
----, Rufus, 196
Kirkland, President, 280, 281, 284-285
Kirkpatrick, John Ervin, 140, 141
Kneeland, Abner, 463, 469
“Knickerbocker” _History_, 212
_Knickerbocker Magazine, The_, 46, 163
_Knights of the Horse-Shoe, The_, 45
Knox, General, 291
_Koningsmarke_, 216, 218, 219
Lamar, L. Q. C., 62
----, President, 170
_Landing at Plymouth, The_, 3 n
Landor, Walter Savage, 389
_Last Days of John Brown, The_, 412
_Last Leaf, The_, 260
_Last of the Mohicans, The_, 235
_Law of God and the Statutes of Men, The_, 421 n
_Leaves of Grass_, 466
_Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal of Massachusetts Bay_, 363
_Leben Jesu_, 417
_Lectures on Constitutional Law_, 299
Lee, General Robert E., 29, 65
Legaré, Hugh Swinton, ii, 96, 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114-124,
168, 169, 438
_Legends of the West_, 164
Leggett, William, 200, 208, 243, 244, 245
Leonard, Daniel, 276
_Letter to A. C. Henry_ (Lincoln), 155
_Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society of
Boston_, 417 n, 418, 419, 420
_Letters of James Russell Lowell_, 437 n, 461, 462 n, 463, 466, 467,
469, 470, 471
_Letter of Mr. Paul Ambrose on the Great Rebellion in the United
States_, 56
_Letters from the South_, 198, 216 n, 217
_Letters on Slavery_, 102
Lewis, Matthew Gregory (“Monk”), 220
_Liberator, The_, 341, 353, 359
_Life and Adventures of Arthur Clenning, The_, 163
_Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker, The_, 347-348, 414, 417 n
_Life and Letters of Joseph Story, The_, 301
_Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, The_, 453
_Life and Letters of Washington Irving, The_, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210
_Life of Andrew Jackson_, 148, 149
_Life of William Lloyd Garrison_, 256 n, 332 n, 342 n, 344, 344 n,
353-354, 356, 358, 359-360, 365, 368
_Life of James Louis Petigru_, 103, 104, 111
_Life of John P. Kennedy_, 48
_Life of John Marshall_, 22, 24
_Life of Martin Van Buren_, 173, 174, 176, 177
_Life of Milton_, 466
_Life of Henry David Thoreau_, 314
_Life of Washington_, 211
_Life of Whitman_, 367
_Life Without and Life Within_, 430 n, 431
_Literary History of America, A_, 416 n, 427
Lieber, Francis, 93-98
Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 66, 152-160, 242, 420 n, 422, 473
_Literary History of Philadelphia_, 185
_Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, The_, 164
Livingston, Chancellor, 227
Locke, John, 197, 198, 199, 228, 282, 287, 305, 380, 381, 382, 420
Longfellow, Henry W., 319, 320, 439-441, 453, 465
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 51, 162, 166-172, 176, 178
_Lord Byron’s Character and Writings_, 116
Loring, Commissioner Edward G., 360, 368, 411, 423
_Lost Occasion, The_, 367
Lovejoy, Elijah P., 246, 333
Lowell, Rev. Charles, 402, 463
----, Francis Cabot, 462
----, James Russell, 266, 314, 315, 351, 368, 436, 440, 460-472, 474
----, John, 461, 462
_Lucius Junius Brutus_, 284, 285
Lundy, Benjamin, 353
_Lyrical and other Poems_, 114
McDuffie, Governor George, 62, 81, 136, 168, 170
Madison, James, 6, 71, 196, 288, 305
_Magnalia Christi Americana_, 371
_Man the Reformer_, 396, 397
Mann, Horace, 399
_Manual of American Literature, A_, 438 n
Marcy, Governor William M., 244
_Mardi_, 260, 261, 262, 263
_Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography_, 427 n, 432
Marshall, John, 8, 20-27, 47, 94, 138, 197, 245, 300, 301, 302, 316,
473
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 141
Martineau, Harriet, 351
Marx, Karl, 251, 467
Mason, Col. George, 277
_Massachusetts to Virginia_, 368
Masson, David, 466
Mather, Cotton, 202, 371, 391, 414, 428, 447
May, Samuel J., 351
Mayhew, Jonathan, 325, 326, 462
Mazzini, 428, 433
_Mellichampe_, 129
Melvill, Sir Richard, 260
Melville, Allan, 260, 261
----, Herman, ii, 58, 131, 183, 238, 258-267, 445, 449
----, Major Thomas, 260
_Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, 198
_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_, 429, 430, 431, 434
_Menander to Philenia_, 288
Merriam, Charles A., 72 n, 94, 334 n
Metternich, Prince, 94
_Militia Company Drill, The_, 72
Mill, James, 428
----, John Stuart, 104, 472
Milton, John, 109, 366
_Minister’s Wooing, The_, 374
_Minutes and Debates of the Constitutional Convention_, 72
Mirabeau, Marquis de, 10, 293
_Moby Dick_, 131, 261, 262, 263
Modestinus, 117
_Monikins, The_, 227, 228, 229
Monroe, James, 71
Montesquieu, Charles, 73, 75, 76, 94, 306, 392, 393
Moore, Tom, 30, 111, 114, 185, 187, 200
_Moral Bully, The_, 453, 454
Morison, S. E., 341 n
Morley, John, 472
Morris, Gouverneur, 194, 196, 230, 280
----, Robert, 8, 21, 183, 195
----, William, 396, 406, 407, 408, 472
Morse, Jedidiah, 321
----, John T., 453
----, S. F. B., 50
Morton, Mrs. Sarah Wentworth, 288
Motley, John Lothrop, 83, 438
Mott, Lucretia, 35, 428
Napoleon, 240
_Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee_,
172, 174, 175
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, 445
Nathan, James, 428
_Nation, The_, 468, 470
_National Philanthropist, The_, 342
_Nature_, 390, 447
_Nature and Progress of Liberty_, 291
_Nebraska Question, The_, 420, 421-422, 424
Nemours, Du Pont de, 3, 10, 243
Nevins, Allan, 102 n, 242 n, 244, 245
_New England Chattels_, 102
_New Views of the Constitution of the United States_, 299
_New York Herald, The_, 102 n, 356-357
_Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_, 135, 191, 192, 235
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 94
Nightingale, Florence, 107
_North American Review, The_, 111, 442
Norton, Andrews, 329, 454
----, Charles Eliot, 441, 460, 465, 470
Novalis, 430
Noyes, John Humphrey, 343-346, 355, 359
Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, 185
_Oceana, The_, 306, 307
_Old Cambridge_, 341 n
_Old-Town Folks_, 372, 373, 374
_One-Hoss Shay, The_, 453, 454
_Orations and Addresses_, 201
_Origin of Species, The_, 419
_Origin, History and Influence of Roman Legislation, The_, 116
_Ossian_, 31, 111, 186
Ossoli, Count, 428
Otis, Harrison Gray, 279, 353
----, James, 325
Owen, Robert, 30, 242, 349
Page, J. W., 102
----, Thomas Nelson, 28
Paine, Robert Treat, 113, 279, 288-295, 317, 329, 436, 452
----, Thomas, 11, 12, 22, 88, 96, 284, 288, 342, 356, 366
Papinian, 117
Parker, Theodore, 108, 115, 124, 171, 256, 297 n, 300, 311, 314,
315, 316 n, 319, 327, 329, 338, 342, 347, 351, 373, 398, 399,
414-425, 426, 430, 433, 439, 455, 456, 458
Parkinson, Richard, 215
Parkman, Francis, 438-439, 458
_Parson Turell’s Legacy_, 453
_Partisan, The_, 53, 134
_Partisan Leader, The_, 35, 36, 37
Pascal, 264
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, 7, 8
_Patrick Henry, Sketches of the Life and Character of_, 31-33
Paulding, James Kirke, 162, 163, 183, 190, 198, 200, 207, 212-221, 238
Peabody, Elizabeth, 443
----, Sophia, 443, 449
Peaslee, Mary, 364
Pendleton, L. B., 83, 86, 87, 91
----, Nancy, 47
_Perfectionist, The_, 343
Perry, Commodore, 50
Petigru, James Louis, 103, 110, 123, 168
Phillips, Wendell, 108, 256, 314, 333, 351, 420, 436, 458
_Phocion_, 287
Pickering, Timothy, 187, 296
Pierpont, John, 365
_Pierre, or the Ambiguities_, 261, 263, 264
Pike, Albert, 162
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 129
Pinckney, General Charles Cotesworth, 110
Pindar, 402
_Pioneer, The_, 464 n
_Pioneers, The_, 216, 220, 224
Pitt, William, 170, 282
Plato, 252, 259, 264, 318, 381, 427
_Plea for Captain John Brown, A_, 413
Poe, Edgar Allan, 57-59, 127
_Poet of the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 457, 458
_Poganuc People_, 372, 374
_Political Ethics_, 95
_Political Justice_, 331, 335, 336, 409-410
_Political Science Quarterly, The_, 250
Pope, Alexander, 31, 104, 114, 289, 290, 452, 466
_Port Folio, The_, 187
_Prairie, The_, 232
Prescott, W. H., 367, 438
_Present Age, The_, 395
_Present Crisis, The_, 464, 464 n
Prince, H. L., 154
_Professor at the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 456
_Progress and Poverty_, 467
_Prometheus_, 463, 464, 464 n
_Prometheus Bound_, 402
_Pro-Slavery Argument_, 102
_Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties_, 102
_Prose Sketches and Poems_, 162
Pufendorf, Baron von, 117
_Puritan and his Daughter, The_, 215, 216
Quesnay, François, 3, 10, 11
Quincy, Edmund, 314, 343, 345, 331, 359, 436
----, Josiah, 276, 279, 329, 343, 368, 460, 462
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 191 n
_Quodlibet_, 37, 51, 55, 56, 177
Rabelais, 262, 265
_Raciad, The_, 114
Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 111
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 307
Randolph, John of Roanoke, 8, 9, 26, 30, 31, 35, 57
Ranke, Leopold von, 437
_Rawle on the Constitution_, 299
_Rebellion, The_, 468 n
_Recollections of a Busy Life_, 249
_Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences
and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi_, 163
_Recorder, The_, 201 n
_Red Book, The_, 48, 51
_Redskins, The_, 226 n, 229, 230, 231, 236
Reed, Amy Louise, 446, 448
_Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel Lectures_, 324 n, 327
_Rhymed Lesson, A_, 452 n
Ricardo, David, 241
_Richard Hurdis_, 128, 130
Richter, Jean Paul, 430
_Rights of Man, The_, 12
_Rights of Woman_, 331
Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 199, 402
----, George, 101, 108, 242, 347, 348, 349, 350
----, Sophia, 349
_Rise of the Dutch Republic, The_, 438
Rittenhouse, David, 185
_Rob of the Bowl_, 51, 53, 54
Robespierre, 398
_Robinson Crusoe_, 163
Robinson, William A., 255 n
Rogers, Dr., 199
_Romance of American History_, 140 n, 166
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 11, 22, 242, 261, 264, 284, 318, 331, 345,
366, 390, 402, 413, 420, 430, 433, 434, 466
_Ruling Passion, The_, 290
Rusk, Ralph Leslie, 164, 165
Ruskin, John, 101, 406, 407
_Saint’s Rest_, 371
_Salmagundi_, 200, 206, 213
Sampson, Abbot, 101
Sanborn, F. B., 314
Sand, Georges, 429
Sargent, John O., 453
_Satanstoe_, 235
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 58
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 382
Scollay, Priscilla, 260
Scott, Sir Walter, 28, 30, 47, 111, 120, 129, 171, 200, 216, 220, 371
_Scout, The_, 133
Scudder, H. E., 465
Sedgwick, Catherine M., 241
----, Henry M., 241
----, Theodore, Jr., 241
_Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 446, 448
_Seventh of March Speech, The_, 313, 314, 367, 368
Sewall, Jonathan, 351
----, Joseph, 276
----, Samuel, 364, 446
Seward, William Henry, 107
Shakespeare, 47, 129, 130
Shaw, Elizabeth, 259
Shays, Daniel, 276, 282, 284, 297, 340
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 111, 259, 381, 453
_Shooting Match, The_, 172
_Shoshonee Valley, The_, 163
Sibley, J. L., 467
Sidney, Algernon, 354, 420
“Sidney, Edward William,” 36
Simms, William Gilmore, ii, 37, 39, 47, 53, 54, 102, 110, 112,
125-136, 169, 190, 232, 474
_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West
Tennessee_, 173, 175, 176, 177
_Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, 370
_Slavery_, 333, 335
_Slavery in Massachusetts_, 412
_Social Destiny of Mankind, The_, 251
Socrates, 427
Solomon, 264, 265
_Song, The_, 172
_Songs of Labor_, 370
Sotheran, Charles, 254 n
_South Atlantic Quarterly, The_, 102 n
_Southern Plantation, The_, 102 n
_Southern Quarterly Review, The_, 39
_Southern Review, The_, 112, 114
Smith, Adam, vii, 3, 121, 241, 242, 243, 308, 400
----, Gerrit, 351, 359, 365
Smollett, Tobias, 128
_Snowbound_, 370
Sparks, Rev. Jared, 330, 367, 437
_Spectator, The_, 31
_Speech on the Compromise Measures_, 313
_Speech at New Haven_, 154
_Speech at Springfield_, 157, 159
_Speech in Wall Street_, 309 n
Spinoza, 264
_Spirit of the Sub-Treasury_, 122
Spotswood, Governor Alexander, 7, 45
Staël, Madame de, 381
Stansbury, Joseph, 186
Stanton, Theodore, 438 n
_State Rights Sentinel, The_, 171
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 200, 238
Stephen, Leslie, 461, 469
Stephens, Alexander H., 39, 56, 62, 64, 65, 69, 82-93, 94, 167, 302,
473
Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 33, 35
Stiles, Rev. Ezra, 199
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 200, 238
Story, Joseph, 83, 88, 93, 117, 197, 260, 297, 300-303, 304, 311
----, W. W., 301
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 107, 314, 371-378, 428
_Stranger in America, The_, 95
Strauss, David Friedrich, 417
Stuart, Moses, 367
_Studies in Psychology_, 446
_Sullivan’s Island_, 114
Sumner, Charles, 106, 351
_Swallow Barn_, 28, 41, 50, 51, 52, 172, 377
Swift, Jonathan, 228, 453
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 436, 466
Swinton, Mary, 115
Taine, Hippolyte, 466
Tandy, Jeannette Reid, 102
Tappan, Arthur, 351
----, Lewis, 351, 362
_Tariff, The_, 308 n
Taylor, John of Caroline, ii, 14-19, 20, 21, 29, 61, 90, 122, 123,
150, 153, 170, 217, 277, 299, 336
----, Zachary, 71
_Tempora Mutantur_, 470
_Tent on the Beach, The_, 369
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 47, 54
_Thanatopsis_, 239
_Thirty Years’ View_, 14, 151
_Thomas Carlyle and his Works_, 413
Thoreau, Henry David, 156, 258, 264, 266, 314, 319, 367, 389, 394,
400-413, 426, 433, 440, 449, 451, 458, 460
Thornton, W. T., 241
Ticknor, George, 116, 367, 437
_Timothy Flint, Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor_, 140, 141
Toombs, Robert, 39, 62, 86, 91
Tocqueville, Alexis de, vi
_Tour of the Prairies, A_, 211
_Transcendentalism in New England_, 348, 379, 380, 381
_Transcendentalist, The_, 384, 385
_Transient and Permanent in Christianity, On the_, 338
_Treatise on True Virtue, A_, 372
Trent, Professor William Peterfield, 39, 131
_Tribune, The_, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255
_Tristram Shandy_, 31, 47
Trollope, Mrs., 215
Tucker, Henry St. George, 299
----, Nathaniel Beverley, ii, 35-40, 41, 42, 47, 57, 119
Tuckerman, Henry T., 48, 238
Turner, J. M. W., 407
----, Nat, 355
Twain, Mark, 159, 172, 259, 366
Tweed, “Boss,” 471
Tyler, President John, 8, 116
_Typee_, 261
Ulpian, 117
_Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginia and Tom without one in Boston_,
102
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 102, 376, 377, 441
_Unitarian Christianity most Favorable to Piety_, 330-331
Van Buren, Martin, 36, 55, 197, 203, 207, 217, 246
Vanderbilt, Commodore, 231, 474
Van Doren, Carl, 133
Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 194, 195, 231
Vattel, Emrich von, 117
_Virginians, The_, 54
Voet, 117
Voltaire, 382
_Vote Yourself a Farm_, 254
Waddell, Dr. Moses, 168
Wade, John Donald, 169, 170, 177 n
_Walden_, 400, 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 413
Walker, Nathaniel, 327
----, Williston, 324, 324 n
Ware, Norman, 141
Washington, George, 7-8, 21, 48, 159, 194, 211, 265, 291, 292, 300,
301, 356, 437
_Waverley Novels_, 216
Weaver, Raymond, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265
_Webster Address_, 424
Webster, Daniel, 37, 67, 69, 88, 90, 94, 116, 122, 144, 159, 177, 207
n, 227, 242, 246, 252, 278, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304-316, 317,
330, 335, 359, 367, 368, 387, 397, 398, 399, 412, 424, 458
Weed, Thurlow, 197
_Week, The_, 404, 406
Weems, “Parson,” 437
Weiss, John, 347, 412, 417 n, 422 n
Weld, Isaac, 215
Welles, Gideon, 64
Wendell, Barrett, 416 n, 427
Wertenbaker, Thomas J., 7, 8
_Western Monthly Magazine, The_, 164
_Western Souvenir, The; A Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_, 164
_Westward Ho!_, 162, 163, 217, 220
Wette, Wilhelm Martin de, 417
Wharton, Edith, 435
_White Jacket_, 262
White, Maria, 351, 463, 465
Whitman, Walt, 127, 183, 222, 244, 264, 265, 366, 367
Whittier, John G., 244, 314, 315, 319, 351, 352, 359, 361-370, 377
----, Robert, 364
_Wieland_, 190
_Wilderness and the War-Path, The_, 165
Willard, President, 292
William IV, King, 452
_William Ellery Channing_, 330, 338
_William Gilmore Simms, Life of_, 39
Williams, Roger, 97, 327, 345, 379, 399
Willing, Mrs., 207 n
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 200, 202, 238
Wilson, Henry, 469
_Windsor Forest_, 114
Winthrop, John, 124
----, Robert C., 47, 49
Wirt, William, 29, 30-35, 47, 48, 49, 56, 169
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 188, 189, 242, 331, 430, 432
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, 432
_Woodcraft_, 131, 134
Woods, Leonard, 367
Woolsey, Theodore, 94
Wordsworth, William, 111, 381, 389, 453, 466
_Working Man’s Advocate, The_, 254
_World’s Fair, The_, 470
Wright, Fannie, 242, 244, 428
----, Henry C., 343, 358
_Wyandotté_, 235
Wythe, George, 25, 29, 142, 143
Yates, Robert, 72
_Yemassee, The_, 134, 135
Young, Edward, 31, 111, 254
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America [Volume Three]
Vernon Louis Parrington
The sudden death of Professor Vernon Louis Parrington in England, June
16, 1929, cut tragically short his labors on the last volume of _Main
Currents in American Thought_. Of this third volume approximately the
first half had been completed, which, together with the outline of
the work and some scattered essays in sections otherwise undeveloped,
constitutes all that the author left. Unfinished it is, yet no
completion by another can be justified. That anyone could duplicate
his felicity of style, so unobtrusively individual, so sensitively
adjusted to the freighted thought, is hardly to be hoped for; and
more important, that another scholar could accurately reproduce his
interpretation is an assumption not to be warranted. The decision to
publish the author’s incomplete work is a tribute to his brilliance.
Nevertheless it is possible to know Professor Parrington’s chief
intentions, particularly when one understands, as his associates did,
his principles for organizing materials and his standards of value.
Students as well as associates first of all noticed beneath the
richness and complexity of his thought a constancy of purpose as clear
as the treatment of mass in a Gothic cathedral. Indeed it was through
a delight in architecture pursued as a hobby for many years that
Parrington expressed this desire for a unity, balanced, harmonious, and
properly proportioned.
This architectonic feeling, abundantly illustrated in his writing
habits, was carried over not only into his classroom procedure and
conversation, but also into his varied interests. Painting as well as
architecture had long intrigued him. Though few people knew it, he
wrote poetry distinguished for restraint in expression and clarity of
form; while in conversation he persistently sought the appropriate
phrase, spiced it with wit, salted it with homely realism; for no
gentleman of the eighteenth century was more conscious of the charms of
good discourse.
Professor Parrington’s classroom procedure had a reputation that
attracted students not much interested in literature and which appealed
to all ranges of intellect. The source of that popularity was the
personality of the teacher, together with his gift for presenting
ideas and evoking a response. By means of a Socratic cross-examination
Parrington made the student discover his intellectual deficiencies;
while the class, to its astonishment and delight, found the quest for
truth both elusive and exciting. Surprise and satisfied expectation
kept the easily bored from sinking into apathy, for there was no
telling from day to day just what Professor Parrington was going to do.
He paired every occasion with a fitting response; yet this flexibility
did not degenerate into an aimless drifting, since he persistently
simplified his main objectives and concentrated the material to be
studied, while expressing its meaning through a significant symbol
or a telling phrase. His classes in the eighteenth century, for
example, were given the concept of harmony, balance, and proportion.
They found it in architecture, they saw it in dress, they heard it in
conversation, they watched it work out in the heroic couplet, they
pursued it in Addison, Pope, and Swift; in short, they analyzed the
whole social structure of the age and discovered it everywhere. A
germinal idea, Parrington liked to call it, while he held it before the
class like a many-faceted crystal, slowly turning it around and around
so the student could see every face. As a result no student who had
taken the course ever forgot the significance of this architectonic
trilogy.
In writing habits there was a similar all-encompassing purpose. He
habitually began with his thesis--a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing
figure. This was examined and stripped of its implications as one
would peel an onion layer by layer. So imperious was the habit of this
procedure that his ability to write would be blocked until he had in
mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one
sentence. An example of this occurred shortly before he left on his
trip to England. He had been working on the period that Mark Twain had
labeled the “Gilded Age,” but found the title inadequate to his idea,
and, as a result, his writing did not get on. Another day some weeks
later there was an obvious satisfaction expressed in his bearing and an
exceptionally pronounced twinkle in his eye. “I have found the phrase,”
he said; “I will call it The Great Barbecue.” Similarly, the three
volumes of this work began in a single paragraph which by progressive
unfoldings he expanded to its present scope.
After having made a provisional outline, with each section condensed
into a single sentence, he began writing, completing a unit here or
there as circumstance and mood directed. When it was completed the
process of readjustment began. Each portion was inspected for its
length, which had to be fitted to its relative importance; an emphasis
here was shifted to balance an emphasis there; the mood of one part
was altered to make it harmonize with the mood of its neighbor. As
many as twelve times he rewrote a single section in this complex and
delicate effort for harmonious adjustment. Finally, he made from this
his finished outline.
Knowing Professor Parrington’s methods one can now understand the
problem he faced and the solution he found when bent on the task of
writing a history of American literature. Although he was by nature
partial to the claims of aesthetics, yet it was obvious to him that
such an approach was foredoomed to failure. All too few of the American
writers would deserve treatment on any aesthetic test, while many
who were undeniably significant could not possibly be left out even
though inferior artistically. Moreover, one only had to look at the
numerous attempts already made to see the failure of the belletristic
interpretation. What were these histories of American literature?
Sprawling lists of names arranged in a fashion that gave little save
conventionalized data and some dubious evaluations. Already there was
a widespread demand for a new interpretation growing out of these past
failures.
Professor Parrington found the first step to a solution when he
remembered the day he opened Taine’s _Histoire de la littérature
anglaise_. It had come as a new and inspiring discovery to find a
method that envisaged the literature of a people as the inevitable
outgrowth of their racial peculiarities, environment, and epoch. It is
true that the claim set up by Paine, that his method was scientific
and could account for every phenomenon, proved to be unfounded;
but nevertheless his work was epoch-making; it gave a unity and a
significance never before attained, and this was what attracted
Parrington. Nothing less unifying than Paine’s method was thinkable.
A second source of inspiration came from a close friend and colleague,
J. Allen Smith, another pioneer figure, who applied to the abstract
theorizings of political science the economic realities that underlie
and determine them. The method was so fruitful of results that it
quickly spread to a group of American political scientists, from whose
findings much of Parrington’s significant work received its first
flattering confirmation. Under such a stimulus Parrington was quick to
realize the fruitfulness of economic determinism when applied even to
literature.
A third idea completed the synthesis. When he envisaged American
literature as American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was
broken and he was free to reëvaluate American writers, to follow the
trail of their work wherever it led; for at last he had found a method
true to facts, yet one which would satisfy his insatiable demand for
a significant unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned.
The economic forces imprint their mark upon political, social, and
religious institutions; literature expresses the result in its thought
content.
But a technique, though vitally necessary, is not the end of the
story. There still remains, even for the most impartial scholar, the
final and, be it admitted, inescapable evaluation. Parrington was
too honest with himself to dodge the issue; he made his choice and
abided the result. In the foreword to the first volume he made his
confession: “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate
the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather
than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I
went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.
Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes,
and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life
again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and
prejudices of the time I have dealt with may have found an echo in my
judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my
interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.”
Professor Parrington’s _Main Currents in American Thought_ has, then,
for its subject the adventures of American liberalism. To anyone alive
to the issue an adventurous story it is, as becomes more apparent
when the author’s own liberalism is completely understood. Those
sections where his sympathies are kindled, where he stamps his seal of
enthusiastic admiration, provide the clue which his treatment of Roger
Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau,
Channing, and Theodore Parker assuredly verifies. All of his latent
enthusiasms burst into bloom until, as in his essay on Roger Williams,
nothing less than the cadence and passion of the Song of Solomon would
express it. “Running through his writings is a recurrent echo of the
Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with glowing mysticism:
‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the
lilies.... I will arise now, and go about the city in the streets, and
in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.’ But when he
went into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world where the lover might dwell with his
bride.”[477]
The liberalism of Parrington had this great virtue, which all too
many creeds lack: it was built on an obligation first to examine and
understand all points of view before exercising the right to condemn
them. Although he disliked the personalities and groaned at the dreary
pages of men like Cotton Mather, yet he was not satisfied until he got
at their marrow. And again there was an abiding sense of the humane
in Parrington before which all abstractions, generalizations, and
logical systems had to pass in review. He feared above all, as did the
sensitive Jefferson, the cancer of power. “Man,” he used to say, “has
never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows,
nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice
to others.” Combined with this love of freedom was an urbanity and
a sense of personal integrity not subject to the interference of
outside forces in convention or mob--an integrity which so impressed
everyone having contact with the man, that he has been often called
an aristocrat. Parrington would not have objected to the label, nor
have seen it as contradictory to the principles of liberalism, since
in his opinion only liberalism expressing itself in a democratic
society provides for the free exercise of personal rights. Elevating
oneself by riding on the shoulders of others, a common device of the
pseudo-aristocrat, was to him but a vulgar gymnastic performance.
When he described Jefferson “with his aristocratic head set on a
plebeian frame”[478] he was unconsciously describing himself, for there
was a deep love of the soil in Parrington. One saw it, surprisingly, in
his hands. They were thick and sturdy, blunted at the ends as if from
too much delving into the black loam of his flower garden, where roses,
peonies, and crocuses were cherished companions, and the delight of his
leisure hours. He secretly suspected the apartment dweller as any true
farmer would; and though there was a twinkle in his eye when he called
New York a Babylon or spoke of its corrupting influence on scholar and
artist, yet there was a meaning implied more serious than the jest.
It was Parrington’s hope to vindicate this liberalism “stemming,” as
he said, “from the fruitful loins of the eighteenth century.” As he
diagnosed it, that era had two creative currents of thought: a hopeful,
vigorous liberalism, together with a sturdy realism which did not balk
at men’s selfishness or deny the economic basis of social forces.
Unfortunately the nineteenth-century liberal attended only to hopes
and neglected the realism, while the swelling forces of industrialism
accepted the economic realities but cynically brutalized them. Failure
was the inevitable result; the liberals despair while Babbitt, regnant,
infests the country with his blustering agents. In the unfinished
section of this last volume it was Parrington’s purpose to show this
parlous state of twentieth-century America, to discern the hopeful
gleam in the darkness, and to uncover the hidden forces working for a
more stable and just society. Parrington’s point of view then, was that
of a staunch and kindly liberalism, the motif in the three volumes,
the theme never absent from a page of the whole composition. It is a
liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political
party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can
envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of
favors than any known past. Wise to the ways of man, such a liberalism
refuses confinement in the strait-jacket of any set formula, yet
escapes the emasculation awaiting mere enthusiasm; for it can separate
foes from friends and recognize the point where compromise means
surrender.
If my analysis thus far is to any purpose it will suggest what these
main objectives that Parrington never completed were to have been. The
unfinished Book Two was to chronicle three parties of revolt against
the plutocracy born of the Gilded Age. Of these rebellions the first
was engendered on the Middle Border, where the farmers, beset by hard
times, struck out against the source of their ills. As the agrarians
diagnosed the situation, these economic maladjustments were brought on
by a currency manipulated for the benefit of creditors, and further
enhanced by capitalistic control of the political machine. One of the
last of Parrington’s completed units deals with the economic phase of
the revolt; the next section was to record the farmer’s effort to
democratize the government. Through pressure of third-party movements
the farmers tried to inject such reforms as the initiative and
referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the income tax; until,
seduced by Bryan’s oratory, they joined with the Democrats in an attack
upon the intrenchments of capitalism. As Parrington saw it, these
agrarian descendants of Jefferson, lacking the intellectual leadership
which the South had contributed in earlier days, at a tactical
disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose
their last great uprising.
Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the
Middle Border. Such writers as Edward Eggleston and E. W. Howe had
already initiated a realism that revealed the drabness of frontier
life and suggested its smoldering discontent, although the pastoral
note fathered by the genial and romantic James Whitcomb Riley did not
lack its prose children. Notably did Meredith Nicholson, William Allen
White, and Booth Tarkington[479] portray the village neighborliness,
its wholesomeness, its spirit of democracy, until they cast such a fog
of sentiment over the scene as to blur all the realities. But the true
spirit of Populism is represented in the impassioned work of Hamlin
Garland, whose “admirable realism and passionate democracy” Parrington
depicts in a chapter that he completed.
The second chorus of dissent came from the very citadels of plutocracy,
for the wage-earners, unable to escape slavery by flight to an
unshackled frontier that no longer existed, were brought to bay. The
doctrine of class war, which had been ignored since the eighteenth
century, was revived by the German socialists and given an added
plausibility by the employers’ unscrupulous use of injunction, black
list, and lockout. T. V. Powderly, who found a solution to the labor
problem in syndicalism, organized the Knights of Labor. Although this
union had a promising inception, it was soon wrecked, while the craft
unionism recommended by Samuel Gompers forged to the front because of
its middle-class ideology and spirit of compromise. On the other hand
the left wing of the labor cause embraced various brands of socialism.
The tragic flare-up of the Haymarket riot, which resulted in a “red”
scare and persecution of the humane Governor Altgeld, served Parrington
as a dramatic illustration of the obloquy that descended upon the
leaders of socialism, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor
Berger. Needless to say, Parrington had planned a vindication of them
horn of his desire to see more justice in the world.
There were echoes of this proletarian strife manifested in the world
of letters. Certain writers following Edward Bellamy joined the quest
for a socialistic Utopia. Parrington had completed his passage on
Bellamy, but of the party formed to agitate for principles advanced in
_Looking Backward_ and of the other writers of Utopian novels, such as
Tourgée, he left no treatment. A second set of writers were grouped
together by reason of their common concern over the darkening future
of American civilization. Edwin Markham, his humanitarian sympathies
aroused, penned an indictment of wage exploitation in his “The Man with
the Hoe” that caused no little concern in its day and spurred defenders
of the existing economic system to offer liberal prizes for an equally
convincing reply. The emergence of naturalism, seen in Stephen
Crane[480] and Frank Norris,[480] was also a response to the darkening
social outlook. Parrington defined naturalism as “a pessimistic realism
that sets man in a mechanical world.” He traced this pessimistic
determinism to the machine industrialism so overwhelming in its power
as to impress man with his own impotence, to the centralization of
wealth, which causes a caste regimentation of society, and finally to
the great city, which reduces the inhabitant to an infinitesimal unit
of a vast beehive. Other writers, equally oppressed by this state of
affairs, concentrated on the phenomena of the city. It was here that
Parrington intended to discuss Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Robert
Grant, and Edith Wharton.[481]
The third party of revolt was a hesitant one--the South, still
convalescing from the Civil War and further weakened by divisions in
its counsels. Though burdened by parochial creeds, weakened by lack of
intellectual leadership, the agrarian South, largely plebeian, joined
the Middle Border in its uprising. The middle-class South, represented
by Henry W. Grady, proposed a surrender to the Yankee principle of
industrial exploitation, while the remnant of the old aristocracy
resisted the new and clung to the traditions of the past. Thomas Nelson
Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Murfree, and George Washington Cable
attended to these romantic traditions of the plantation, the negro, the
mountaineer, and the creole; while Sidney Lanier[482] became the poet
of southern landscape and sunrise. Far more significant in Parrington’s
eye was the rebirth of a southern intelligentsia represented in letters
by Ellen Glasgow, W. W. Woodward, the debunker, and James Branch
Cabell,[483] the ironic romanticist. Professor Parrington, who had
been among the first to appreciate Cabell, admired the competence of
his style and the effectiveness of his ironic commentary on American
civilization.
Book Three was to present the movement of liberalism from 1903 to
1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called
this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These
liberals announced that the democratic hopes of earlier days had not
been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument
nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to
create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They
then determined upon a new program based on their discovery of the
relations between economics and politics. Such relations made necessary
the control of property by the collective will, and to that end they
endeavored to squeeze the Hamiltonian state into a Jeffersonian
mold.[484]
The muckrakers of 1903 to 1910 attacked the plutocracy where its joints
creaked. In effect this group of writers from Henry D. Lloyd to Charles
Edward Russell, Gustavus Meyers, and A. M. Simons popularized economics
and made the liberals conscious of what was going on behind the closed
doors of the directors’ meetings. On the other hand, the movement of
Progressivism, engaged in the hopeless task of directing the political
machinery to democratic ends, was typified by Robert La Follette,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Only one, La Follette, remained
true to the colors; the other two compromised, then surrendered, and
the hopes of liberalism went down in a tragic _débâcle_.
In the realm of letters this liberalism found expression in three major
groups of writers. A set of intellectuals turned critical began to
scrutinize the economic, political, and social institutions of America.
Of these critics Parrington considered Randolph Bourne and Charles A.
Beard[485] the most important. Another set turned to fiction, shifting
their point of view from liberalism to radicalism, from politics to
economics. Winston Churchill[486] had discovered the emptiness of
the profit motive with its resultant destruction of beauty, freedom,
and creative craftsmanship. Similarly Robert Herrick[486] became a
pathologist of the city, investigated its ethics, and then rebelled
at the predatory egoism which ruled its life to the destruction of
all ethical integrity. At his best Jack London[487] wrote of the
revolution, though later selling out to bigger and better royalties;
while Upton Sinclair became the revolutionary sleuth spying upon the
indecencies of the capitalist system. Perhaps these novelists were too
seriously engaged in social criticism and reform propaganda to become
great craftsmen, yet they were to Parrington important writers, because
they were in touch with deep currents of American thought.
Still a third set of writers turned to a realistic technique
appropriate to the times, yet avoided the weakness inherent in direct
propaganda. The poets Masters,[488] Sandburg, Frost, and Robinson,
Parrington chose for consideration as realists with an art, an
underlying criticism of conditions, and a philosophy that set them
above the other poets of the time. For the same reasons he had planned
a section on Huneker. Theodore Dreiser,[489] because of his massive
documentation, his deterministic philosophy, and his sense of the
inevitable tragedy inherent in life, Parrington labeled a modern,
meaning by this that Dreiser most adequately and most thoroughly
represented modern America.
The last section of the book was to be a consideration of the post-war
reaction to the liberalism of the preceding period. The economic
democracy which liberals had marked for their goal was now attacked
by the younger intellectuals. H. L. Mencken turned to farce and
burlesque for methods adequate to express his contempt of American
democracy. Biologists pointed to the inescapable laws of heredity as a
refutation of the liberals’ hopes for social improvement; while some
psychologists, discovering morons, ruled out all equalitarian Utopias.
Parrington could find little sympathy in his heart for a return to
the spirit of aristocracy. This narrow, doctrinaire biology, denied
by the more careful biologists and the behaviorists who assert that
environment is determining, cannot rule out all environmental changes.
As long as the _milieu_ is an effective force in molding the organism,
room is left for social betterment by social readjustments. A disputed
psychology dealing in primitive sex drives, gland secretions, and
intelligence scores is no more conclusive on the subject.
The attack on industrialism is nearer to the heart of Parrington’s
ideals, because it proved to him that liberalism is not by any
means dead. Such a comprehensive movement enlisting first-class
minds--intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists--revealed clearly
to him the increasing criticism of a dehumanized economics, and such
criticism proceeds from an implicit liberalism.
The attack on the middle class is seen best in Zona Gale,[490] Evelyn
Scott, and particularly in Sinclair Lewis,[491] whom Parrington
rated the chief of our younger satirists. This satire is a searching
criticism of the _bourgeois_ ideals and habitat, its tyrannical
herd-mind, its poverty-stricken materialism. By its nature this
satire clearly suggests a set of new ideals which grow out of a free
individualism rather than a political or economic socialism. The
emphasis is shifted by implication from externalities to things of the
spirit. This is more clearly seen in the new philosophies just now
arising, which deny the finality of economic law, turn in politics to
the ideal of a decentralized state, and in science to new syntheses
emphasizing the pragmatic and relative aspects of scientific law.
The latest literary fashions that Parrington intended to consider
embody a psychological emphasis seen in the impressionism of biography,
in the brutal but frank pacifism of war novels,[490] and most
significantly of all in the impressionism and expressionism of Sherwood
Anderson.[491] Parrington felt that there were rich potentialities
latent in these new methods although the writers of the new school
were themselves painfully at sea. In technique as well as in direct
statement there was to be seen, though obscurely, a renewed emphasis
upon individual integrity, the necessity for creative expression, and
the reaffirmation of what some may choose to call spiritual values.
In effect he believed that all is not lost. Through the influence of
science we are recovering the neglected realism of the past; we are
not only reaffirming it but making its acquaintance more intimately
than ever before. Weld that science to enlightened and humane
aspirations (Parrington believed that there was nothing in the findings
of science that prevented the union) and a revivified liberalism will
make the world a fit place to live in. It is by no means an easy
program, for it requires knowledge of fact, and ability to carry
knowledge into the sphere of effective action. It is made doubly
difficult by the untimely death of one of its chief proponents, yet in
the young men and women whom he liked to have around him there must
be, however obscurely, a feeling and a groping for the way out. They
will be guided and inspired by such utterance as Parrington’s diagnosis
of Sinclair Lewis, where he quarries out a vein of his own enduring
liberalism.
“Some lingering faith in our poor human nature he still clings to. In
the great American mass that human nature is certainly foolish and
unlovely enough. It is too often blown up with flatulence, corroded
with lust, on familiar terms with chicanery and lying; it openly
delights in hocus pocus and discovers its miracle-workers in Comstocks
and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But for all its pitiful flabbiness
human nature is not wholly bad, nor is man so helpless a creature of
circumstance as the cynics would have us believe. There are other and
greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped in America, worthier things
than hocus pocus; and in rare moments even Babbitt dimly perceives
that the feet of his idol are clay. There are Martin Arrowsmiths as
well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it will, can pull itself
out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes bad men. Put the banker
in the scullery instead of the drawing-room; exalt the test-tube and
deflate the cash register; rid society of the dictatorship of the
middle class; and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a
civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a
thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned
from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean
Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment--thin and far-off, no
doubt, but still an authentic echo.”
“Thin and far-off, no doubt,” is this contemporary liberalism, yet
Parrington found hints of it in the midst of the war fiasco that
culminated in reaction and despair. Death did not grant him the
opportunity to show what he found, but the young men who learned
from him the love of sound craftsmanship, who were inspired by his
enlightened dreams, will some day complete the monument. In the
meantime Vernon Louis Parrington would like to be held in memory as
he held his friend, J. Allen Smith--as a “scholar, teacher, democrat,
gentleman.”
E. H. Eby
_University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
March, 1930_
Footnotes
[477] Vol. I, p. 65.
[478] _Ibid._, p. 343.
[479] See Addenda for notes on these men.
[480] See Addenda for lecture notes on these writers.
[481] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[482] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[483] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[484] “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” which is included in the
Addenda, deals with this subject, with the muckraking movement, and
with post-war realism.
[485] See Addenda, “A Chapter in American Liberalism.”
[486] See “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism,” in the
Addenda.
[487] See Addenda for notes on London.
[488] See Addenda, “Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_.”
[489] See Addenda for lecture notes on Dreiser.
[490] See Addenda for brief notes.
[491] See Addenda, “Sherwood Anderson: a Psychological Naturalist.”
Foreword
With the present volume I bring to a close my studies in the main
currents in American thought. The broad drifts of American opinion,
as I interpret that opinion, should now be sufficiently clear. The
volume immediately preceding the present one dealt with the romantic
revolution in America--one of the most stimulating experiences the
American mind has undergone--which was traced to twin forces: the
influence upon an expansive generation of French romantic thought, and
the spirit of robust individualism resulting from a fluid economics;
and the creative result was the spontaneous emergence in America of
a buoyant spirit of hopefulness that expressed itself in democratic
programs and faith in a benevolent progress. The present volume deals
with the slow decay of this romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds,
and the cause of that decay is traced to three sources: the stratifying
of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of a
mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which,
under the pressure of industrialism, the teachings of the physical
sciences, and the lessons of European intellectuals, is resulting in
the questioning of the ideal of democracy as it has been commonly held
hitherto, and the spread of a spirit of pessimism. The custodianship of
America by the middle class has brought unsuspected consequences in its
train.
Thus after three hundred years’ experience we have returned,
intellectually, to the point from which we set out, and the old
philosophy brought to the new world from the compact societies of
Europe, with its doctrine of determinism and its mood of pessimism,
has come back in changed form to color the thinking of our generation.
Emersonian optimism, that was the fullest expression of the romantic
faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional
doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing
skepticism. Our intellectual history thus conceived falls into three
broad phases: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic
pessimism. Between the first and the last lies the America of yesterday
that shaped the American mind and American institutions; and with
the submergence of that native world we are in the way of repeating
here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations
reproduced on a larger scale and in more mechanical fashion. Once more
a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind.
Whether it will enter and take possession of the household, no one can
predict as yet. This much nevertheless is clear: an industrialized
society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the
passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence
of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is
shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick
concern for human rights, that was the noble bequest of our fathers
who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried
over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to
leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to
which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope
that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the
intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt.
* * * * *
It ought not to be necessary to add that in these volumes I have
not essayed to write a history of American literature--that rather
difficult task for which no scholar is as yet equipped. But I have
suffered so many gentle reproofs for failing to do what I did not set
out to do, that it may be well to repeat what I said in the Foreword
to Volume I, that I have been concerned in the present study with the
total pattern of American thought--the broad drift of major ideas--and
not with vagrant currents or casual variations. In particular I
have been repeatedly taken to task for a seeming slight put upon
certain of our artists, and it has been inferred that I slighted
them because I chose to ignore whatever did not fit into a rigid
scheme of economic determinism. Let me say in rebuttal that I hold
no brief for a rigid scheme of economic determinism. I recognize the
rich culture potentialities that inhere in individual variation from
type, and I realize that the arts are likely to receive their noblest
gifts from men who should be classed biologically as cultural sports
or variations from the cultural type. But in such a study as I have
undertaken, individual variation is significant not for its own sake,
but rather for the help it may offer in determining the type. After
due consideration I see no cause to apologize for my treatment of Poe,
for example, if indeed I have done so. I am content to have placed
him historically and culturally in relation to the whole, leaving the
fascinating problem of his variation from type to those who deal with
such problems.
V. L. P.
Introduction[492]
In the second volume of my studies I laid down the thesis that at the
beginning of our national existence two rival philosophies contended
for supremacy in America: the humanitarian philosophy of the French
Enlightenment, based on the conception of human perfectibility and
postulating as its objective an equalitarian democracy in which
the political state should function as the servant to the common
well-being; and the English philosophy of _laissez faire_, based on
the assumed universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating
a social order answering the needs of an abstract “economic man,”
in which the state should function in the interests of trade. And I
pointed out further, with adequate backing up, I hope, that the first
of these antagonistic philosophies was accepted by the agrarian leaders
of America and found issue in the Jeffersonian program; that the
second came to dominate the thinking of the mercantile, capitalistic
America and took form in Hamiltonian Federalism. Unfortunately this
logical alignment of diverse economic groups was obscured by the
needs of practical politics, and in passing through the explosive
Jacksonian revolution both philosophies underwent subtle changes.
Jacksonianism imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which
all must thereafter do lip service, but it lost its realistic basis
in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political
equalitarianism; and the Whiggery that issued from Federalism turned
to the work of converting the democratic state into the servant of
property interests. Both political parties contented themselves with an
egoistic individualism that took no account of social ends, forgetful
of the humanitarian spirit that underlay the earlier democratic
program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in
consequence the major parties chose to follow the economic interests of
master groups, heedless of all humanitarian issues.
But the spirit awakened by the earlier democratic enthusiasm could
not be kept in political strait-jackets. The Jacksonian revolution
overflowed all narrow party dikes, expressing itself in diverse
humanitarian and reform movements and quickening the minds of ardent
Americans with larger democratic aspirations. The noble idealism of
successive third parties that have sprung up reasserted the democratic
principles flouted by the major parties. The Locofoco movement, the
Free-soil Party, the early Republican Party, the Greenback Party, the
Populist Party, the Progressive Party, have had a common objective,
namely to carry further the movement inaugurated by the Jeffersonians
to make of America a land of democratic equality and opportunity--to
make government in America serve man rather than property. The
third-party movements have always been democratic movements, and though
they have failed in their immediate objectives they have served the
purpose of reminding the major parties--oftentimes rudely--that America
presumes to be a democratic country. Thus interpreted the history of
the political struggle in America since 1790 falls into three broad
phases: the Jeffersonian movement that asserted the ideal of political
democracy; the Jacksonian movement that established it crudely in
practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted
to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend the field, and to
perfect the machinery of democratic government.
As a result of the long struggle the abstract principle of
democracy--during the period under consideration--was firmly
established in the popular mind; but as it fell under the successive
custodianship of different economic groups it came to receive strangely
diverse interpretations. Interpreted by the coonskin Jacksonians
it meant political equalitarianism; by the slave economy it meant
a Greek democracy; by the industrial economy it meant the right of
exploitation. It has changed service with each new master. Always the
principles of Jeffersonianism--of democracy as a humane social order,
serving the common well-being--have been lost out of the reckoning, and
except in so far as the tendency has been checked by the third-party
threat, democratic professions have been only a thin cover under
which the old class warfare has gone forward vigorously. In the
decades immediately following the Civil War democracy passed under the
custodianship of the middle class, who were busily engaged in creating
a plutocracy, and the major ideas of the earlier movement took on
a characteristic middle-class coloring. The idea of a beneficent
progress, which was the flower of the doctrine of human perfectibility,
came to be interpreted as material expansion with constantly augmenting
profits; and the idea of democracy came to be interpreted as the right
to use the government of the whole for the benefit of the few.
* * * * *
Considered historically perhaps the chief contribution of the
Progressive movement to the democratic cause is to be found in its
discovery of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the federal
Constitution. That so obvious a fact so long escaped recognition
was due to political causes easily understood. For a century the
Constitution had been a symbol of national unity, a cohesive
force amidst the drift of expansion, a counter influence to the
disintegrations of states-rights particularisms; and as such it had
appealed to the national loyalties of men in every commonwealth. To
criticize it was reckoned disloyal. The long process of interpretation
had remained in the hands of the lawyers and had been wholly
legalistic and antiquarian. In all this earlier commentary--except
for a small group of left-wing Abolitionists who repudiated the
entire instrument--no question as to the democratic spirit of the
Constitution was raised, no doubts as to its sufficiency as a
fundamental democratic law were suggested. The class divisions that
presided at its making were ignored, and the aristocratic spirit of
its creators was forgotten. But with the rising revolt against the
custodianship of government by financial and industrial interests came
a new critical interest in the fundamental law. Discovering that its
hands were tied the democracy began to question the reason for the
bonds that constrained its movements. The latent distrust was quickened
by what was regarded by many as judicial usurpations of power, such
as the act of the Supreme Court in declaring unconstitutional the
federal income-tax law, and the question of the desirability of an
eighteenth-century document that by its complexity unduly impeded the
functioning of the democratic will, was thrust into the foreground of
political debate. It was the struggle of 1789 over again.
The new school of criticism was historical rather than legalistic. It
was concerned primarily with origins--and it must take into account
the political theories and class interests of the eighteenth-century
gentlemen who framed the document. It refused to look upon the Fathers
as supermen, devoted unselfishly to high patriotic duty, but chose
to regard them as capable statesmen, saturated with aristocratic
prejudices, who fearful of losing control of the new venture in
republicanism, took care to shape an instrument that threw sharp
restrictions about the majority will.
* * * * *
The theme of the present volume is the industrialization of America
under the leadership of the middle class, and the consequent rise of a
critical attitude towards the ideals and handiwork of that class. It
concerns itself primarily with the spirit of realism that under the
constrictions of industrialism and with the spread of scientific modes
of thought emerged to question the ardent romanticisms of an earlier
age, and bring under doubt the excellence of a social order created by
the Industrial Revolution.
The field to be traversed is thus predetermined. The interpretation of
our literature since 1860 must be fitted into the broad lines of our
national experience and will follow the main divisions of development.
I. The conquest of America by the middle class and its
custodianship of democracy. The philosophy of the middle class.
II. The challenge of that overlordship by:
1. The older democratic agrarianism as expressed chiefly in the
third-party movements.
2. The new proletarian philosophy that came likewise out of the
ferment of the French Revolution, but that traveled a different
course--through Europe and the earlier continental Industrial
Revolution, and thence to America.
III. The intellectual revolution brought about by science with the
results:
1. The recovery of a spirit of realism.
2. The appropriation of science by the middle class.
IV. The rise of a detached criticism by the younger intellectuals.
In dealing with this material it will be necessary to follow sectional
lines in the earlier decades until the encompassing movement of
centralization finally obliterated them and produced a common national
spirit and purpose.
In the welter that is present-day America militant philosophies with
their clear-cut programs and assured faiths are wanting, and many feel,
as Matthew Arnold felt fourscore years ago, that they are dwelling
between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. The old
buoyant psychology is gone and in the breakdown and disintegration of
the traditional individualism no new philosophies are rising. Builders
of Utopias are out of a job. Political and economic theory is in
charge of paymasters and is content with the drab rim of the familiar
landscape. Retainer-fees have blotted out for it the lovelier horizons
that earlier thinkers contemplated. Academic political scientists and
economists have largely joined the Swiss guards, and abdicated the high
prerogative of speculative thought. It is the men of letters--poets and
essayists and novelists and dramatists, the eager young intellectuals
of a drab generation--who embody the mind of present-day America; not
the professional custodians of official views. They at least decline
to block the path to the Promised Land with retainer-fees; they at
least are free souls, and in the measure of their abilities, free
thinkers. It is to them therefore that one must turn to discover the
intellectual currents of later America--to their aspirations as well
as to their criticisms. Literature at last has become the authentic
voice of this great shapeless America that means so much to western
civilization. Not theologians any longer, nor political philosophers,
nor industrial masters, nor bankers, are the spokesmen of this vibrant
life of a continent, but the intellectuals, the dreamers, the critics,
the historians, the men of letters, in short; and to them one may turn
hopefully for a revelation of American life.
The period dealt with in the present study marks the complete
triumph of the middle class and the final defeat of the traditional
agrarianism. The disintegration of the earlier romanticisms, both
native and imported, has run its course. The philosophy of Jefferson
and John Taylor, with its physiocratic bias, its antipathy to a money
economy, its love of local autonomy, has been buried in the potter’s
field.
* * * * *
Amidst all the turmoil and vague subconscious tendencies, certain ideas
slowly clarified: first, that the earlier democratic aspirations had
somehow failed, that an equalitarian philosophy adapted to frontier
conditions could not easily be carried over into a centralizing and
stratifying America and was doomed to eventual defeat; second, that
even in the supposed heyday of our democracy, we had never achieved a
democracy, but rather a careless individualism that left society at
the mercy of a rapacious middle class; third, that we must take our
bearings afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal. As these
convictions slowly rose into consciousness, a quick suspicion of our
earlier philosophies arose to trouble us. With the growing realism of
the times came a belief that our French romantic theories were mainly
at fault and we must somehow go back to the rationalistic eighteenth
century and start once more to recreate a democratic philosophy. The
crux of the matter seemed to lie in the romantic conception of human
nature. Rousseau and Godwin were the false prophets who led us astray,
and we must return to the solid realism of John Locke. In the light of
a realistic psychology, with its discovery of morons, and its study
of mob tendencies, it was no longer possible to take seriously that
attractive figment of the romantic imagination--man in the state of
nature, perfectible by following the light of reason, seeking justice.
Morons do not fit nicely into the older theory--they jar one’s faith in
human perfectibility. In the light of intelligence tests perhaps the
whole romantic theory of democracy was only a will-o’-the-wisp. With
the very foundations of our traditional philosophy turning to quicksand
under our feet, no wonder we are bedeviled by doubts and uncertainties.
Utopias no longer seem so near at hand as they did; plans and
specifications of the ideal commonwealth no longer seem simple matters
to be drawn by any competent social carpenter. Our jauntiness is gone,
speculation is less important than investigation, and in the spirit of
sober realism we are setting about the serious business of thinking.
In this thinking two major forces are at hand: economics and
psychology. In our economic realism we are returning to the spirit
of the eighteenth century, and adapting the determinism that marked
political thought from Harrington and John Adams to Webster and
Calhoun; but we are equipped with a psychological knowledge that those
earlier thinkers lacked. Wedding the new psychology to the older
economic determinism, we may hope in a spirit of sober realism to make
some progress in our thinking.
Yet not too hastily should we abandon our earlier faith: the
eighteenth-century conception of environment as a creative influence
in determining character is a vital idea not yet adequately explored.
Even morons may be traced back to adenoids or diets of salt pork
and whisky or to later machine labor, and aristocracies are still
seen to be economic. And aristocratic albinos may well breed mobs and
morons. Jefferson was not as foolish as many of his disciples have
been, and Jeffersonian democracy still offers hope. Education begins
to fail--except education to individualize and to summon forth the
potential intelligence of the younger generation.
Footnotes
[492] The Introduction, as will be readily seen by the reader, is
not complete, yet it undoubtedly contains the gist of what Professor
Parrington intended to include in it. He wrote several forms of some
parts, from which the Introduction as it stands has been pieced
together in logical order. It is probable that the last words he wrote
were the significant closing words here--“to summon forth the potential
intelligence of the younger generation.”--_Publisher._
Contents[493] [Volume Three]
Introduction: The Great Revolution xxiii
I. [A New America in the Making: Rise of capitalistic industrialism
submerging the older agrarianism, the Enlightenment,
the Jacksonian frontier]
II. [Aristocracy Dead: The principle of democracy accepted, yet
driving toward a plutocracy. A middle-class, urban
civilization]
III. [Cleavages: Western agrarianism; Eastern capitalism. The
South confused, bitter, hesitant. Expansion of the frontier
and the cities. The swift extension of the psychology of
the city]
IV. [Changing Patterns of Thought: (1) From the frontier came
the doctrine of preëmption, exploitation, progress; (2)
From the impact of science came the dissipation of the
Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; (3) From European
proletarian philosophies came a new social theory]
V. [Certain Drifts: to unity, to realism, to criticism]
Book I: Changing America
Changes in traditional economies after the Civil War. The rise of
American industrialism and the conquest of nature by science.
The age of the middle class. The last flare-up of the spirit of the
frontier 3
Part I
The Gilded Age
I. The American Scene 7
I. Free America: Half a continent awaiting preëmption; new
raw materials--oil, steel, copper, coal. A new technique
of exploitation--capital, transportation, machinery. Philosophy
embraced in three ideals: preëmption, exploitation,
progress 7
II. Figures of Earth: The flowering of Jacksonian frontier
spirit, simplified to the acquisitive instinct; a crude, dynamic
energy 10
III. Politics and the Fairy Godmother: The struggle within
the Republican Party; the gospel of Whiggery and the
triumph of the American System, Henry Clay 17
IV. The Great Barbecue: How capitalism and agrarianism
fared--the Homestead Act and railway grants. The shift
from governmental to private control 23
V. Folk Heroes 26
1. General Grant 27
2. Jay Cooke 31
3. Charles A. Dana 43
II. The Culture of the Seventies: With the decay of aristocratic
controls, a loss of unity. Three strands: aristocratic,
romantic, frontier 48
I. New England in Decay: The Genteel Tradition and the
drift away 50
1. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel 54
2. The New England Scene: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps;
Harriet Beecher Stowe; Sarah Orne Jewett; Mary
Wilkins Freeman 60
II. The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman 69
III. The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain 86
III. Changing Theory: An agricultural people changing to an
urbanized people. The railways hasten economic development 102
I. Winds of Economic Theory: The conscription of economics:
The business man comes to the front 103
1. Henry C. Carey 105
2. Francis A. Walker 111
II. The Conscription of Political Theory: The democratic
and plutocratic trends. Development of the democratic
principle vs. the cult of the Constitution. New conception
of the political state 117
1. Theodore Woolsey 120
2. [John W. Burgess] 124
III. [The New Ally: The courts: the police power and the fourteenth
amendment; the injunction]
IV. [Buttressing the Democratic Theory]
1. A Democratic Economics--Henry George 125
2. [Supplementing the Democratic Political Theory--Henry
D. Lloyd]
IV. The Beginnings of Criticism: The pessimists skeptical of
democracy, the optimists calling for reform of the spoils
system. No competent critics of industrialism 137
I. The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell
Phillips 140
II. Morality and Politics--George William Curtis 147
III. English Liberalism and Politics--Edwin Lawrence Godkin
and the _Nation_ 154
IV. Fiction Considers the State of the Country 168
1. The Political Novel: _The Gilded Age_; _Democracy_; _An
American Politician_ 169
2. [The Economic Novel: _The Bread-winners_] 173
3. The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel: H. H. Boyesen 179
Part II
New Patterns of Thought
I. Disintegration and Reintegration: Two forces creating
a new ideology, science and the machine. The decay of
the older theological, political mind, and the emergence
of an urban mind 189
I. The Victorian Mood--A genial optimism 193
1. Sociology and the Enlightenment: Condorcet,
Comte, and the gospel of progress 194
2. Biology and the Enlightenment: Spencer and the
philosophy of anarchism 197
3. The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment 202
II. The School of Spencer--John Fiske 203
II. The Skepticism of the House of Adams: The flower of the
sturdy New England character. They fail to adjust to
the Gilded Age 212
I. Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure 213
II. Henry Adams--Intellectual 214
III. Brooks Adams--Rebel 227
III. Victorian Realism: In the eighties realism begins to excite
interest and the movement gets under way, though the
American taste is still romantic. The psychology of the
dispersion marking America 237
I. [William James and Pragmatism]
II. Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture 239
III. William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace 241
Book Two: The Old and the New: Storm Clouds
Part I
The Middle Border Rises
I. The Plight of the Farmer 259
I. Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy: The Middle Border
suffers. Two moods: Buoyancy, depression--the farmer
deflated. The economic problem 259
II. The Farmer Considers Politics: His intellectual
equipment--homespun theories derided by the schools. The
movement of organization: The Grange, The Alliance,
Populism. The flare-up of the nineties--the doctrine of
more corn and less hell 263
III. The Greenback Movement: The _laissez-faire_ theory
abandoned by English economists. American spokesmen: John
Sherman, David A. Wells, Eleazar Lord. Diverse theories
of money--the intrinsic-value theory and the quantitative
theory. The money question a heritage of the Civil War--a
debtor class and an appreciating standard of value 266
IV. Greenbackism and Peter Cooper 276
V. [Bi-metallism: A heritage of Jacksonian democracy: Ignatius
Donnelly, “Coin” Harvey]
II. The Democracy of the Age of Innocence 283
I. Capitalistic Encroachments: Due to inadequate democratic
machinery. The movement to democratize government.
Plutocracy content with the machine which it controlled;
hence radical proposals must issue from the
discontented. After 1870, with few exceptions, popular
democratic thinking done west of the Allegheny Mountains 283
II. Third-party Movements. A summary of democratic proposals
of previous movements 285
III. [The Populistic Program: Income tax; the initiative and
referendum; the recall; direct primary; Australian ballot;
popular election of Senators; sub-treasuries; proportional
representation]
IV. [William Jennings Bryan and the Last Battle]
III. Literature and the Middle Border 288
I. [Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism]
II. [Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance]
III. Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border. Joseph Kirkland,
Harold Frederic 288
Part II
Proletarian Hopes
I. [Plutocracy and the Workingman: Disruption of industry--strikes
and lockouts in the Gilded Age. Bitterness of
conflict. The discovery of the injunction]
I. [Industrialism and the American theory of freedom: Rise of
labor unions. Passing of the frontier. Incoming of German
Socialists and the recovery of the doctrine of class war
lost since the eighteenth century]
II. [The first solution--Syndicalism: T. V. Powderly and the
Knights of Labor]
III. [The second solution--craft unionism: Gompers and the
A. F. of L. A middle-class solution]
II. [The Rise of the Left]
I. [The Menace of Socialism: The Haymarket riot; Governor
Altgeld]
II. [Leaders of the Left: Daniel De Leon; Eugene Debs; Victor
Berger]
III. The Quest of Utopia 301
I. Edward Bellamy and _Looking Backward_ 302
II. [After Bellamy: “Nationalism”; Tourgée’s _Murvale Eastman_]
IV. [The Darkening Skies of Letters: The clouds gathering
on the “gay” horizon of American optimism. Changes in
the temper of scientific thought point to determinism.
A gloomier realism on the way, coming first from the
West] 316
I. [Edwin Markham and “The Man with a Hoe”]
II. [The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris[494]]
III. [Fiction Discovers the City]
Part III
The Hesitant South
I. [Two Worlds: The aristocratic clinging to the romance of
the past; the plebeian agrarian joining with the Middle
Border in its protest against plutocracy. Tom A. Watson.
The beginnings of industrialism that proposed to exploit
the cotton and iron of the South]
II. [The Romance of the Past: Thomas Nelson Page and the
plantation tradition; Joel Chandler Harris and the romance
of the negro; Mary Murfree and the romance of
the mountaineer; George Washington Cable and the
romance of the creole]
III. [Sidney Lanier--the poet of the South[495]]
IV. [Henry W. Grady and the Surrender to the Middle
Class]
V. [The Southern Intellectual: James Branch Cabell;[496]
Ellen Glasgow; W. W. Woodward]
Book Three: The New America
Part I
The Rise of Liberalism[497]
1. [Movements of Liberalism: Three periods: 1790-1912;
1820-1860; 1903-1917. Since 1870 three attitudes towards
democracy: (1) It has been achieved but the machine
needs closer attention--civil service reform; (2) It has
not been achieved because of the Constitution, but it must
be achieved through remodeling political machinery; (3)
No intelligent person desires it to be achieved. The movement
of liberalism (1903-1917) a great stock-taking
venture]
I. [Discoveries]
1. [That the democratic program has not been fulfilled]
2. [That the Constitution is not a democratic instrument,
and was not intended to be--the clash between
the Declaration and the Constitution]
3. [That while professing to create a democracy we have
been erecting a plutocracy]
II. [Conclusions]
1. [The rediscovery of the relations between economics
and politics]
2. [The necessity of subjecting property to the collective
will]
3. [To that end the need of democratizing the machinery
of government--political Progressivism. The application
of the Hamiltonian state to the Jeffersonian
program]
II. [Liberalism and the Journalists: The Muckraking Movement[498]]
I. [The Origins in the Nineties--Henry D. Lloyd’s _Wealth
vs. Commonwealth_]
II. [The Gathering Clan: Lawson’s _Frenzied Finance_; Ida
Tarbell; Ray Stannard Baker; _McClure’s_, _The American_,
_Hampton’s_]
III. [The Left Wing]
1. [Lincoln Steffens, _The Shame of the Cities_]
2. [Charles Edward Russell, _The Stories of Great Railroads_]
3. [Gustavus Myers, _Great American Fortunes_]
4. [A. M. Simons, _Social Forces in American History_]
III. [Liberalism and Politics: The Movement of Progressivism]
I. [Robert La Follette--The State and Industry]
II. [Theodore Roosevelt--Middle-Class Liberal]
III. [Woodrow Wilson]
Part II
Liberalism and Letters
I. [Liberalism and the Intellectuals: The movement becomes
critical]
I. [Walter E. Weyl--Radical]
II. [Thorstein Veblen--Social Economist]
III. [Charles A. Beard--Political Scientist[498]]
IV. [Herbert Croly--Political Critic]
V. [The Younger Intellectuals: Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck
Brooks, Waldo Frank]
II. [Liberalism and Fiction: A shift from liberalism to
radicalism--from politics to economics]
I. [Winston Churchill: From romance to syndicalism[499]]
II. [Robert Herrick: Academic radical[499]]
III. [Jack London: Revolutionist[500]]
IV. [Upton Sinclair: Social detective[500]]
III. [Liberalism and Realism]
I. [The Poets and Realism: Masters, Sandburg, Frost, Robinson]
II. [The Essay--Huneker]
III. [Theodore Dreiser--A Modern[501]]
Part III
Reaction
I. [The War and Liberalism: The reaction developed a many-sided
attack on the liberalisms of the preceding period.
The older intellectuals had abandoned French equalitarian
democracy, but set as their goal economic democracy;
the younger intellectuals attacked the principle of democracy,
the ideal of industrialism, the culture of the
middle class]
II. [The Attack on Democracy: A return to the eighteenth
century spirit of aristocracy. Purveyors of current disgusts]
I. [Philosophical: H. L. Mencken--a Nietzschean critic. A
cynic who grows witty over American failure]
II. [Biological: The falsity of the perfectionist philosophy derived
from Locke. Not environment but heredity--the
isolated germ existence before birth]
III. [Psychological: The discovery of morons. Primitive drives--sex,
hunger--keep men children. Nevertheless behaviorism
a denial of the aristocracy of the biological argument,
holding with Locke that environment is determining]
III. [The Attack on Industrialism: A comprehensive movement
that enlists first-class minds--intellectuals, poets,
novelists, dramatists]
IV. [The Attack on the Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis;[502] Zona
Gale;[503] Evelyn Scott]
V. [New Philosophies]
I. [Economics: Denial of the finality of economic law: A pragmatic
view--Mitchell]
II. [Political Theory: A decline of the program of industrial
democracy]
III. [Science: A rejection of the law of causality and a weakening
of the authority of science]
VI. [New Literary Fashions]
I. [In fiction, impressionism and expressionism--Sherwood
Anderson[503]]
II. [In biography: The impressionism of psychography]
III. [In war fiction:[503] A brutal realism and frank pacifism]
Addenda 323
Naturalism in American Fiction 323
1. Stephen Crane 328
2. Frank Norris 329
“McTeague” 330
“Vandover and the Brute” 332
“The Octopus” 332
Sidney Lanier 334
The Incomparable Mr. Cabell 335
The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism 346
Jack London: The Novelist of the Proletariat 352
Upton Sinclair 353
Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists 354
Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes 360
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist 372
A New Romance 372
1917-1924 373
I. The Small Town in Fiction 373
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border 374
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters 375
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher) 375
II. The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism 376
Zona Gale--The Transition from Romance to Realism 377
Donn Byrne 377
Robert Nathan 378
Joseph Hergesheimer: A Sophisticated Romantic 379
III. Certain Other Writers 381
Edith Wharton--The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy 381
Willa Cather: Epics of Women 382
IV. Some War Books 384
John Dos Passos 384
E. E. Cummings 385
Thomas Boyd 385
Laurence Stallings 385
V. Youth in Revolt--Certain Purveyors of the Hectic 385
F. Scott Fitzgerald 386
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell 386
Ben Hecht 386
Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_ 387
The Short Story 397
A Chapter in American Liberalism 401
Bibliography 415
Index 421
Footnotes
[493] This is given in full, as Professor Parrington left it, with
those parts not completed by him in brackets. Some revision has been
made for the parts he completed, but notes have been added to the text
to show his original intention. For some of the bracketed headings
after Part II of Book II some material is given in the Addenda from
other work of Parrington’s.--_Publisher._
[494] See “Naturalism in American Fiction,” in the Addenda--lecture
notes including Crane and Norris.
[495] See Addenda for lecture notes on Lanier.
[496] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[497] See “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” the last of the Addenda.
[498] See _Ibid._
[499] See Addenda, “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from
Naturalism.”
[500] See Addenda for brief notes.
[501] See Addenda for notes of lecture on Dreiser.
[502] See Addenda for reprint of pamphlet on Lewis.
[503] See Addenda for brief notes.
Book One • Changing America
When America laid aside its arms after Appomattox and turned back
to the pursuits of peace it was well advanced toward the goal set
by Alexander Hamilton three-quarters of a century before. The great
obstacle that had withheld its feet hitherto had been swept from its
path. A slave economy could never again thwart the ambitions of the
capitalistic economy. The jealous particularism that for a generation
had obstructed the inevitable drift toward a coalescing national unity
had gone down in defeat. The agrarian South was no longer master in
the councils of government; the shaping of the future had fallen to
other hands and the unfolding of the new order could go forward without
southern let or hindrance.
Other obstacles were falling away of themselves. North as well as
South, the traditional domestic economy was already a thing of the
past. An easier way to wealth, and one enormously more profitable,
had been discovered. The future lay in the hands of the machine that
was already dispossessing the tool. In the hurry of the war years
the potentialities of the factory system had been explored and the
ready resources of liquid capital had been greatly augmented. From
the smoke of the great conflict an America had emerged unlike any the
earlier generations had known. An ambitious industrialism stood on the
threshold of a continental expansion that was to transfer sovereignty
in America from a landed and mercantile aristocracy to the capable
hands of a new race of captains of industry. Only the western farmers,
newly settled in the Middle Border and spreading the psychology of the
frontier through the vast prairie spaces of a greater Inland Empire,
remained as a last stumbling-block. Other battles with agrarianism must
be fought before capitalism assumed undisputed mastery of America;
but with the eventual overthrow of the agrarian hosts in their last
stronghold the path would lie broad and straight to the goal of an
encompassing industrialism, with politicians and political parties
its willing servants. There would be no more dissensions in the
household. With southern Jeffersonians and western agrarians no longer
sitting as watch dogs to the Constitution, the political state would
be refashioned to serve a new age, and the old dream of a coalescing
national economy become a reality. The American System was in the way
of complete establishment.
Other changes impended, and greater. The enthronement of the machine
was only the outward and visible sign of the revolution in thought that
came with the rise of science. As a new cosmos unfolded before the
inquisitive eyes of scientists the old metaphysical speculations became
as obsolete as the old household economy. A new spirit of realism was
abroad, probing and questioning the material world, pushing the realm
of exact knowledge into the earlier regions of faith. The conquest of
nature was the great business of the day, and as that conquest went
forward triumphantly the solid fruits of the new mastery were gathered
by industrialism. Science and the machine were the twin instruments
for creating a new civilization, of which the technologist and the
industrialist were the high priests. The transcendental theologian was
soon to be as extinct as the passenger pigeon.
With the substitution of the captain of industry for the plantation
master as the custodian of society, the age of aristocracy was at an
end and the age of the middle class was established. A new culture,
created by the machine and answering the needs of capitalism, was to
dispossess the old culture with its lingering concern for distinction
and its love of standards--a culture that should eventually suffice
the needs of a brisk city world of machine activities. But that would
take time. In the meanwhile--in the confused interregnum between
reigns--America would be little more than a welter of crude energy, a
raw unlovely society where the strife of competition with its prodigal
waste testified to the shortcomings of an age in process of transition.
The spirit of the frontier was to flare up in a huge buccaneering
orgy. Having swept across the continent to the Pacific coast like a
visitation of locusts, the frontier spirit turned back upon its course
to conquer the East, infecting the new industrialism with a crude
individualism, fouling the halls of Congress, despoiling the public
domain, and indulging in a huge national barbecue. It submerged the
arts and created a new literature. For a time it carried all things
before it, until running full tilt into science and the machine, its
triumphant progress was stopped and America, rejecting individualism,
began the work of standardization and mechanization. It is this world
in transition from an aristocratic to a middle-class order, turmoiled
by the last flare-up of the frontier spirit, shifting from a robust
individualism to a colorless standardization, which the chapters
that follow must deal with. A confused and turbulent scene, but not
without its fascination to the American who would understand his
special heritage--perhaps the most characteristically native, the most
American, in our total history.
Part One: The Gilded Age
Chapter I • the American Scene
I • Free America
The pot was boiling briskly in America in the tumultuous post-war
years. The country had definitely entered upon its freedom and was
settling its disordered household to suit its democratic taste.
Everywhere new ways were feverishly at work transforming the
countryside. In the South another order was rising uncertainly on
the ruins of the plantation system; in the East an expanding factory
economy was weaving a different pattern of industrial life; in
the Middle Border a recrudescent agriculture was arising from the
application of the machine to the rich prairie soil. All over the land
a spider web of iron rails was being spun that was to draw the remotest
outposts into the common whole and bind the nation together with steel
bands. Nevertheless two diverse worlds lay on the map of continental
America. Facing in opposite directions and holding different faiths,
they would not travel together easily or take comfort from the yoke
that joined them. Agricultural America, behind which lay two and a
half centuries of experience, was a decentralized world, democratic,
individualistic, suspicious; industrial America, behind which lay
only half a dozen decades of bustling experiment, was a centralizing
world, capitalistic, feudal, ambitious. The one was a decaying order,
the other a rising, and between them would be friction till one or the
other had become master.
Continental America was still half frontier and half settled country.
A thin line of homesteads had been thrust westward till the outposts
reached well into the Middle Border--an uncertain thread running
through eastern Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, overleaping the Indian
Territory and then running west into Texas--approximately halfway
between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Behind these outposts was still
much unoccupied land, and beyond stretched the unfenced prairies till
they merged in the sagebrush plains, gray and waste, that stretched to
the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Beyond the mountains were other
stretches of plains and deserts, vast and forbidding in their alkali
blight, to the wooded coast ranges and the Pacific Ocean. In all this
immense territory were only scattered settlements--at Denver, Salt Lake
City, Sacramento, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere--tiny
outposts in the wilderness, with scattered hamlets, mining camps, and
isolated homesteads lost in the great expanse. On the prairies from
Mexico to Canada--across which rumbled great herds of buffalo--roved
powerful tribes of hostile Indians who fretted against the forward
thrust of settlement and disputed the right of possession. The urgent
business of the times was the subduing of this wild region, wresting
it from Indians and buffalo and wilderness; and the forty years that
lay between the California Gold Rush of ’49 and the Oklahoma Land Rush
of ’89 saw the greatest wave of pioneer expansion--the swiftest and
most reckless--in all our pioneer experience. Expansion on so vast a
scale necessitated building, and the seventies became the railway age,
bonding the future to break down present barriers of isolation, and
opening new territories for later exploitation. The reflux of the great
movement swept back upon the Atlantic coast and gave to life there
a fresh note of spontaneous vigor, of which the Gilded Age was the
inevitable expression.
It was this energetic East, with its accumulations of liquid capital
awaiting investment and its factories turning out the materials needed
to push the settlements westward, that profited most from the conquest
of the far West. The impulsion from the frontier did much to drive
forward the industrial revolution. The war that brought devastation to
the South had been more friendly to northern interests. In gathering
the scattered rills of capital into central reservoirs at Philadelphia
and New York, and in expanding the factory system to supply the needs
of the armies, it had opened to capitalism its first clear view of
the Promised Land. The bankers had come into control of the liquid
wealth of the nation, and the industrialists had learned to use the
machine for production; the time was ripe for exploitation on a scale
undreamed-of a generation before. Up till then the potential resources
of the continent had not even been surveyed. Earlier pioneers had only
scratched the surface--felling trees, making crops, building pygmy
watermills, smelting a little iron. Mineral wealth had been scarcely
touched. Tools had been lacking to develop it, capital had been
lacking, transportation lacking, technical methods lacking, markets
lacking.
In the years following the war, exploitation for the first time was
provided with adequate resources and a competent technique, and busy
prospectors were daily uncovering new sources of wealth. The coal
and oil of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the copper and iron ore of upper
Michigan, the gold and silver, lumber and fisheries, of the Pacific
Coast, provided limitless raw materials for the rising industrialism.
The Bessemer process quickly turned an age of iron into an age of steel
and created the great rolling mills of Pittsburgh from which issued the
rails for expanding railways. The reaper and binder, the sulky plow and
the threshing machine, created a large-scale agriculture on the fertile
prairies. Wild grass-lands provided grazing for immense herds of cattle
and sheep; the development of the corn-belt enormously increased the
supply of hogs; and with railways at hand the Middle Border poured into
Omaha and Kansas City and Chicago an endless stream of produce. As the
line of the frontier pushed westward new towns were built, thousands
of homesteads were filed on, and the speculator and promoter hovered
over the prairies like buzzards seeking their carrion. With rising
land-values money was to be made out of unearned increment, and the
creation of booms was a profitable industry. The times were stirring
and it was a shiftless fellow who did not make his pile. If he had been
too late to file on desirable acres he had only to find a careless
homesteader who had failed in some legal technicality and “jump his
claim.” Good bottom land could be had even by latecomers if they were
sharp at the game.
This bustling America of 1870 accounted itself a democratic world. A
free people had put away all aristocratic privileges and conscious
of its power went forth to possess the last frontier. Its social
philosophy, which it found adequate to its needs, was summed up
in three words--preëmption, exploitation, progress. Its immediate
and pressing business was to dispossess the government of its rich
holdings. Lands in the possession of the government were so much
idle waste, untaxed and profitless; in private hands they would be
developed. They would provide work, pay taxes, support schools,
enrich the community. Preemption meant exploitation and exploitation
meant progress. It was a simple philosophy and it suited the simple
individualism of the times. The Gilded Age knew nothing of the
Enlightenment; it recognized only the acquisitive instinct. That much
at least the frontier had taught the great American democracy; and in
applying to the resources of a continent the lesson it had been so well
taught the Gilded Age wrote a profoundly characteristic chapter of
American history.
II • Figures of Earth
In a moment of special irritation Edwin Lawrence Godkin called the
civilization of the seventies a chromo civilization. Mark Twain, with
his slack western standards, was equally severe. As he contemplated
the slovenly reality beneath the gaudy exterior he dubbed it the
Gilded Age. Other critics with a gift for pungent phrase have flung
their gibes at the ways of a picturesque and uncouth generation. There
is reason in plenty for such caustic comment. Heedless, irreverent,
unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots--the last
refinement of the farmer’s cowhides--wearing linen dickeys over hickory
shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice, erupting in shoddy and
grotesque architecture, cluttering its homes with ungainly walnut
chairs and marble-topped tables and heavy lambrequins, the decade of
the seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of
bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its
like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its
manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good
sense.
Yet just as such comments are, they do not reach quite to the heart of
the age. They emphasize rather the excrescences, the casual lapses, of
a generation that underneath its crudities and vulgarities was boldly
adventurous and creative--a generation in which the democratic freedoms
of America, as those freedoms had taken shape during a drab frontier
experience, came at last to spontaneous and vivid expression. If its
cultural wealth was less than it thought, if in its exuberance it was
engaged somewhat too boisterously in stamping its own plebeian image on
the work of its hands, it was only natural to a society that for the
first time found its opportunities equal to its desires, a youthful
society that accounted the world its oyster and wanted no restrictions
laid on its will. It was the ripe fruit of Jacksonian leveling, and
if it ran to a grotesque individualism--if in its self-confidence it
was heedless of the smiles of older societies--it was nevertheless
by reason of its uncouthness the most picturesque generation in our
history; and for those who love to watch human nature disporting itself
with naïve abandon, running amuck through all the conventions, no other
age provides so fascinating a spectacle.
When the cannon at last had ceased their destruction it was a strange
new America that looked out confidently on the scene. Something had
been released by the upheavals of half a century, something strong and
assertive that was prepared to take possession of the continent. It did
not issue from the loins of war. Its origins must be sought elsewhere,
further back in time. It had been cradled in the vast changes that
since 1815 had been reshaping America: in the break-up of the old
domestic economy that kept life mean and drab, in the noisy enthusiasms
of the new coonskin democracy, in the romanticisms of the California
gold rush, in the boisterous freedoms discovered by the forties and
fifties. It had come to manhood in the battles of a tremendous war,
and as it now surveyed the continent, discovering potential wealth
before unknown, it demanded only freedom and opportunity--a fair race
and no favors. Everywhere was a welling-up of primitive pagan desires
after long repressions--to grow rich, to grasp power, to be strong and
masterful and lay the world at its feet. It was a violent reaction
from the narrow poverty of frontier life and the narrow inhibitions
of backwoods religion. It had had enough of skimpy, meager ways, of
scrubbing along hoping for something to turn up. It would go out and
turn it up. It was consumed with a great hunger for abundance, for the
good things of life, for wealth. It was frankly materialistic and if
material goods could be wrested from society it would lay its hands
heartily to the work. Freedom and opportunity, to acquire, to possess,
to enjoy--for that it would sell its soul.
Society of a sudden was become fluid. With the sweeping-away of the
last aristocratic restraints the potentialities of the common man
found release for self-assertion. Strange figures, sprung from obscure
origins, thrust themselves everywhere upon the scene. In the reaction
from the mean and skimpy, a passionate will to power was issuing from
unexpected sources, undisciplined, confused in ethical values, but
endowed with immense vitality. Individualism was being simplified to
the acquisitive instinct. These new Americans were primitive souls,
ruthless, predatory, capable; single-minded men; rogues and rascals
often, but never feeble, never hindered by petty scruple, never given
to puling or whining--the raw materials of a race of capitalistic
buccaneers. Out of the drab mass of common plebeian life had come
this vital energy that erupted in amazing abundance and in strange
forms. The new freedoms meant diverse things to different men and each
like Jurgen followed after his own wishes and his own desires. Pirate
and priest issued from the common source and played their parts with
the same picturesqueness. The romantic age of Captain Kidd was come
again, and the black flag and the gospel banner were both in lockers
to be flown as the needs of the cruise determined. With all coercive
restrictions put away the democratic genius of America was setting out
on the road of manifest destiny.
Analyze the most talked-of men of the age and one is likely to find
a splendid audacity coupled with an immense wastefulness. A note of
tough-mindedness marks them. They had stout nippers. They fought
their way encased in rhinoceros hides. There was the Wall Street
crowd--Daniel Drew, Commodore Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Russell
Sage--blackguards for the most part, railway wreckers, cheaters and
swindlers, but picturesque in their rascality. There was the numerous
tribe of politicians--Boss Tweed, Fernando Wood, G. Oakey Hall, Senator
Pomeroy, Senator Cameron, Roscoe Conkling, James G. Blaine--blackguards
also for the most part, looting city treasuries, buying and
selling legislative votes like railway stock, but picturesque in
their audacity. There were the professional keepers of the public
morals--Anthony Comstock, John B. Gough, Dwight L. Moody, Henry Ward
Beecher, T. De Witt Talmage--ardent proselytizers, unintellectual,
men of one idea, but fiery in zeal and eloquent in description of the
particular heaven each wanted to people with his fellow Americans.
And springing up like mushrooms after a rain was the goodly company
of cranks--Virginia Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, “Citizen” George
Francis Train, Henry Bergh, Ben Butler, Ignatius Donnelly, Bob
Ingersoll, Henry George--picturesque figures with a flair for publicity
who tilled their special fields with splendid gestures. And finally
there was Barnum the Showman, growing rich on the profession of
humbuggery, a vulgar greasy genius, pure brass without any gilding, yet
in picturesque and capable effrontery the very embodiment of the age. A
marvelous company, vital with the untamed energy of a new land. In the
presence of such men one begins to understand what Walt Whitman meant
by his talk of the elemental.
Created by a primitive world that knew not the machine, they were
marked by the rough homeliness of their origins. Whether wizened or
fat they were never insignificant or commonplace. On the whole one
prefers them fat, and for solid bulk what generation has outdone them?
There was Revivalist Moody, bearded and neckless, with his two hundred
and eighty pounds of Adam’s flesh, every ounce of which “belonged
to God.” There was the lyric Sankey, afflicted with two hundred and
twenty-five pounds of human frailty, yet looking as smug as a banker
and singing “There were ninety and nine” divinely through mutton-chop
whiskers. There was Boss Tweed, phlegmatic and mighty, overawing
rebellious gangsters at the City Hall with his two hundred and forty
pounds of pugnacious rascality. There was John Fiske, a philosophic
hippopotamus, warming the chill waters of Spencerian science with his
prodigious bulk. There was Ben Butler, oily and puffy and wheezy,
like Falstaff larding the lean earth as he walked along, who yearly
added more flesh to the scant ninety-seven pounds he carried away from
Waterville College. And there was Jim Fisk, dressed like a bartender,
huge in nerve as in bulk, driving with the dashing Josie Mansfield down
Broadway--prince of vulgarians, who jovially proclaimed, “I worship in
the Synagogue of the Libertines,” and who on the failure of the Erie
coup announced cheerfully, “Nothing is lost save honor!”
Impressive as are the fat kine of Egypt, the lean kine scarcely
suffer by contrast. There were giants of puny physique in those days.
There was Uncle Dan’l Drew, thin as a dried herring, yet a builder of
churches and founder of Drew Theological Seminary, who pilfered and
cheated his way to wealth with tobacco juice drooling from his mouth.
There was Jay Gould, a lone-hand gambler, a dynamo in a tubercular
body, who openly invested in the devil’s tenements as likely to
pay better dividends, and went home to potter lovingly amongst his
exotic flowers. And there was Oakey Hall, clubman and playwright,
small, elegant, and unscrupulous; and Victoria Woodhull who stirred
up the Beecher case, a wisp of a woman who enraged all the frumpy
blue-stockings by the smartness of her toilet and the perfection of her
manners; and little Libby Tilton with her tiny wistful face and great
eyes that looked out wonderingly at the world--eyes that were to go
blind with weeping before the candle of her life went out. It was such
men and women, individual and colorful, that Whitman and Mark Twain
mingled with, and that Herman Melville--colossal and dynamic beyond
them all--looked out upon sardonically from his tomb in the Custom
House where he was consuming his own heart.
They were thrown up as it were casually out of the huge caldron of
energy that was America. All over the land were thousands like them,
self-made men quick to lay hands on opportunity if it knocked at the
door, ready to seek it out if it were slow in knocking, recognizing no
limitations to their powers, discouraged by no shortcomings in their
training. When Moody set out to bring the world to his Protestant God
he was an illiterate shoe salesman who stumbled over the hard words
of his King James Bible. Anthony Comstock, the roundsman of the Lord,
was a salesman in a dry-goods shop, and as careless of his spelling
as he was careful of his neighbors’ morals. Commodore Vanderbilt, who
built up the greatest fortune of the time, was a Brooklyn ferryman,
hard-fisted and tough as a burr-oak, who in a lifetime of over eighty
years read only one book, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and that after he was
seventy. Daniel Drew was a shyster cattle-drover, whose arid emotions
found outlet in periodic conversions and backslidings, and who got on
in this vale of tears by salting his cattle and increasing his--and
the Lord’s--wealth with every pound of water in their bellies--from
which cleverness is said to have come the Wall Street phrase,
“stock-watering.” Jim Fisk was the son of a Yankee peddler, who,
disdaining the unambitious ways of his father, set up for himself in a
cart gilded like a circus-wagon and drove about the countryside with
jingling bells. After he had made his pile in Wall Street he set up his
own opera house and proposed to rival the Medici as a patron of the
arts--and especially of the artists if they were of the right sex. A
surprising number of them--Moody, Beecher, Barnum, Fisk, Comstock, Ben
Butler--came from New England; Jay Gould was of Connecticut ancestry;
but Oakey Hall was a southern gentleman; Fernando Wood, with the face
of an Apollo and the wit of an Irishman, was the son of a Philadelphia
cigar-maker and much of his early income was drawn from sailors’
groggeries along the waterfront; Tweed was a stolid New Yorker, and
Drew was a York State country boy.
What was happening in New York was symptomatic of the nation. If
the temple of Plutus was building in Wall Street, his devotees were
everywhere. In Chicago, rising higgledy-piggledy from the ashes of the
great fire, Phil Armour and Nelson Morris were laying out stockyards
and drawing the cattle and sheep and hogs from remote prairie farms
to their slaughter-houses. In Cleveland, Mark Hanna was erecting his
smelters and turning the iron ore of Michigan into dollars, while
John D. Rockefeller was squeezing the small fry out of the petroleum
business and creating the Standard Oil monopoly. In Pittsburgh, Andrew
Carnegie was applying the Bessemer process to steel-making and laying
the foundations of the later steel trust. In Minneapolis, C. C.
Washburn and Charles A. Pillsbury were applying new methods to milling
and turning the northern wheat into flour to ship to the ends of the
earth. In San Francisco, Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington were
amassing huge fortunes out of the Southern Pacific Railway and bringing
the commonwealth of California to their feet. Everywhere were boom-town
and real-estate promoters, the lust of speculation, the hankering after
quick and easy wealth.
In the great spaces from Kansas City to Sacramento the frontier
spirit was in the gaudiest bloom. The experiences of three centuries
of expansion were being crowded into as many decades. In the fifties
the highway of the frontier had run up and down the Mississippi River
and the golden age of steamboating had brought a motley life to Saint
Louis; in the seventies the frontier had passed far beyond and was
pushing through the Rocky Mountains, repeating as it went the old
frontier story of swagger and slovenliness, of boundless hope and
heroic endurance--a story deeply marked with violence and crime and
heart-breaking failure. Thousands of veterans from the disbanded
armies, northern and southern alike, flocked to the West to seek their
fortunes, and daily life there soon took on a drab note from the alkali
of the plains; yet through the drabness ran a boisterous humor that
exalted lying to a fine art--a humor that goes back to Davy Crockett
and the Ohio flatboatmen. Mark Twain’s _Roughing It_ is the epic of
this frontier of the Pony Express, as _Life on the Mississippi_ is the
epic of the preceding generation.
The huge wastefulness of the frontier was everywhere, East and West.
The Gilded Age heeded somewhat too literally the Biblical injunction to
take no thought for the morrow, but was busily intent on squandering
the resources of the continent. All things were held cheap, and
human life cheapest of all. Wild Bill Hickok with forty notches on
his gun and a row of graves to his credit in Boot Hill Cemetery, and
Jesse James, most picturesque of desperadoes, levying toll with his
six-shooter on the bankers who were desecrating the free spirit of the
plains with their two per cent. a month, are familiar heroes in Wild
West tales; but the real plainsman of the Gilded Age, the picturesque
embodiment of the last frontier, was Captain Carver, the faultless
horseman and faultless shot, engaged in his celebrated buffalo hunt
for the championship of the prairies. Wagering that he could kill
more buffalo in a day than any rival hero of the chase, he rode forth
with his Indian marker and dropping the miles behind him he left an
endless trail of dead beasts properly tagged, winning handsomely when
his rival’s horse fell dead from exhaustion. It was magnificent. Davy
Crockett’s hundred and five bears in a season was but ’prentice work
compared with Captain Carver’s professional skill. It is small wonder
that he became a hero of the day and his rifle, turned now to the
circus business of breaking glass balls thrown from his running horse,
achieved a fame far greater than Davy’s Betsy. With his bold mustaches,
his long black hair flying in the wind, his sombrero and chaps and
top-boots, he was a figure matched only by Buffalo Bill, the last of
the great plainsmen.
Captain Carver was picturesque, but what shall be said of the thousands
of lesser Carvers engaged in the same slaughter, market-hunters who
discovered a new industry in buffalo-killing? At the close of the
Civil War the number on the western plains was estimated at fifteen
millions. With the building of the Union Pacific Railroad they were
cut asunder into two vast herds, and upon these herds fell the hunters
with the new breech-loading rifles, shooting for the hide market that
paid sixty-five cents for a bull’s hide and a dollar and fifteen cents
for a cow’s. During the four years from 1871 to 1874 nearly a million
head a year were slain from the southern herd alone, their skins ripped
off and the carcasses left for the coyotes and buzzards. By the end
of the hunting-season of 1875 the vast southern herd had been wiped
out, and with the building of the Northern Pacific in 1880 the smaller
northern herd soon suffered the same fate. The buffalo were gone with
the hostile Indians--Sioux and Blackfeet and Cheyennes and a dozen
other tribes.[504] It was the last dramatic episode of the American
frontier, and it wrote a fitting climax to three centuries of wasteful
conquest. But the prairies were tamed, and Wild Bill Hickok and Captain
Carver and Buffalo Bill Cody had become romantic figures to enthrall
the imagination of later generations.[505]
It was an abundant harvest of those freedoms that America had long
been struggling to achieve, and it was making ready the ground for
later harvests that would be less to its liking. Freedom had become
individualism, and individualism had become the inalienable right
to preëmpt, to exploit, to squander. Gone were the old ideals along
with the old restraints. The idealism of the forties, the romanticism
of the fifties--all the heritage of Jeffersonianism and the French
Enlightenment--were put thoughtlessly away, and with no social
conscience, no concern for civilization, no heed for the future of the
democracy it talked so much about, the Gilded Age threw itself into the
business of money-getting. From the sober restraints of aristocracy,
the old inhibitions of Puritanism, the niggardliness of an exacting
domestic economy, it swung far back in reaction, and with the discovery
of limitless opportunities for exploitation it allowed itself to get
drunk. Figures of earth, they followed after their own dreams. Some
were builders with grandiose plans in their pockets; others were
wreckers with no plans at all. It was an anarchistic world of strong,
capable men, selfish, unenlightened, amoral--an excellent example of
what human nature will do with undisciplined freedom. In the Gilded Age
freedom was the freedom of buccaneers preying on the argosies of Spain.
III • Politics and the Fairy Godmother
Certainly the Gilded Age would have resented such an interpretation
of its brisk activities. In the welter of change that resulted from
the application of the machine to the raw materials of a continent,
it chose rather to see the spirit of progress to which the temper of
the American people was so responsive. Freedom, it was convinced,
was justifying itself by its works. The eighteenth century had been
static, the nineteenth century was progressive. It was adaptable,
quick to change its ways and its tools, ready to accept whatever
proved advantageous--pragmatic, opportunist. It was not stifled by
the dead hand of custom but was free to adapt means to ends. It
accepted progress as it accepted democracy, without questioning the
sufficiency of either. The conception accorded naturally with a
frontier psychology. Complete opportunism is possible only amongst a
people that is shallow-rooted, that lives in a fluid society, scantily
institutionalized, with few vested interests. In a young society it is
easy, in a maturing society it becomes increasingly difficult.
Dazzled by the results of the new technique of exploitation applied on
a grand scale to unpreëmpted opportunities, it is no wonder the Gilded
Age thought well of its labors and confused the pattern of life it
was weaving with the pattern of a rational civilization. It had drunk
in the idea of progress with its mother’s milk. It was an inevitable
frontier interpretation of the swift changes resulting from a fluid
economics and a fluid society in process of settling into static ways.
It served conveniently to describe the changes from the simplicities
of social beginnings to the complexities of a later order. It was made
use of following the War of 1812 to explain the stir resulting from
the westward expansion and the great increase in immigration; but it
was given vastly greater significance by the social unsettlements
that came with the industrial revolution. With the realization of the
dramatic changes in manner of living--the added conveniences of life,
release from the laborious round of the domestic economy, ease of
transportation--that resulted from the machine order, it was inevitable
that the idea of progress should have been on every man’s tongue. The
increase of wealth visible to all was in itself a sufficient sign of
progress, and as the novelty of the industrial change wore off and the
economy of America was more completely industrialized, it was this
augmenting wealth that symbolized it.
In such fashion the excellent ideal of progress that issued from
the social enthusiasms of the Enlightenment was taken in charge by
the Gilded Age and transformed into a handmaid of capitalism. Its
duties were narrowed to the single end of serving profits and its
accomplishments came to be exactly measured by bank clearings. It
was unfortunate but inevitable. The idea was too seductive to the
American mentality not to be seized upon and made to serve a rising
order. Exploitation was the business of the times and how better could
exploitation throw about its activities the sanction of idealism than
by wedding them to progress? It is a misfortune that America has never
subjected the abstract idea of progress to critical examination.
Content with the frontier and capitalistic interpretations it has
confused change with betterment, and when a great idealist of the
Gilded Age demonstrated to America that it was misled and pointed out
that the path of progress it was following was the highway to poverty,
he was hooted from the market-place.
Having thus thrown the mantle of progress about the Gold Dust twins,
the Gilded Age was ready to bring the political forces of America
into harmony with the program of preëmption and exploitation. The
situation could hardly have been more to its liking. Post-war America
was wholly lacking in political philosophies, wholly opportunist. The
old party cleavage between agriculture and industry had been obscured
and the logic of party alignment destroyed by the struggle over
slavery. Democrat and Whig no longer faced each other conscious of the
different ends they sought. The great party of Jefferson and Jackson
was prostrate, borne down by the odium of slavery and secession. In
the North elements of both had been drawn into a motley war party,
momentarily fused by the bitterness of conflict, but lacking any common
program, certain indeed to split on fundamental economic issues. The
Whig Republican was still Hamiltonian paternalistic, and the Democrat
Republican was still Jeffersonian _laissez faire_, and until it was
determined which wing should control the party councils there would be
only confusion. The politicians were fertile in compromises, but in
nominating Lincoln and Johnson the party ventured to get astride two
horses that would not run together. To attempt to make yoke-fellows of
democratic leveling and capitalistic paternalism was prophetic of rifts
and schisms that only the passions of Reconstruction days could hold in
check.
In 1865 the Republican party was no other than a war machine that had
accomplished its purpose. It was a political mongrel, without logical
cohesion, and it seemed doomed to break up as the Whig party had broken
up and the Federalist party had broken up. But fate was now on the side
of the Whigs as it had not been earlier. The democratic forces had lost
strength from the war, and democratic principles were in ill repute.
The drift to centralization, the enormous development of capitalism,
the spirit of exploitation, were prophetic of a changing temper that
was preparing to exalt the doctrine of manifest destiny which the Whig
party stood sponsor for. The middle class was in the saddle and it was
time to bring the political state under its control. The practical
problem of the moment was to transform the mongrel Republican party
into a strong cohesive instrument, and to accomplish that it was
necessary to hold the loyalty of its Democratic voters amongst the
farmers and working-classes whilst putting into effect its Whig program.
Under normal conditions the thing would have been impossible, but
the times were wrought up and blindly passionate and the politicians
skillful. The revolt of Andrew Johnson came near to bringing the party
on the rocks; but the undisciplined Jacksonians were overthrown by
the appeal to the Bloody Flag and put to flight by the nomination of
General Grant for the presidency. The rebellion of the Independent
Republicans under Horace Greeley in 1872 was brought to nothing by
the skillful use of Grant’s military prestige, and the party passed
definitely under the control of capitalism, and became such an
instrument for exploitation as Henry Clay dreamed of but could not
perfect. Under the nominal leadership of the easy-going Grant a loose
rein was given to Whiggish ambitions and the Republican party became a
political instrument worthy of the Gilded Age.
The triumph of Whiggery was possible because the spirit of the Gilded
Age was Whiggish. The picturesque embodiment of the multitude of
voters who hurrahed for Grant and the Grand Old Party was a figure
who had grown his first beard in the ebullient days before Secession.
Colonel Beriah Sellers, with his genial optimism and easy political
ethics, was an epitome of the political hopes of the Gilded Age. With
a Micawber-like faith in his country and his government, eager to
realize on his expansive dreams and looking to the national treasury to
scatter its fructifying millions in the neighborhood of his speculative
holdings, he was no other than Uncle Sam in the boisterous days
following Appomattox. The hopes that floated up out of his dreams were
the hopes of millions who cast their votes for Republican Congressmen
who in return were expected to cast their votes for huge governmental
appropriations that would insure prosperity’s reaching certain
post-office addresses. Citizens had saved the government in the
trying days that were past; it was only fair in return that government
should aid the patriotic citizen in the necessary work of developing
national resources. It was paternalism as understood by speculators and
subsidy-hunters, but was it not a part of the great American System
that was to make the country rich and self-sufficient? The American
System had been talked of for forty years; it had slowly got on its
feet in pre-war days despite the stubborn planter opposition; now
at last it had fairly come into its own. The time was ripe for the
Republican party to become a fairy godmother to the millions of Beriah
Sellerses throughout the North and West.
It is plain as a pikestaff why the spirit of Whiggery should have taken
riotous possession of the Gilded Age. With its booming industrial
cities America in 1870 was fast becoming capitalistic, and in every
capitalistic society Whiggery springs up as naturally as pigweed
in a garden. However attractive the disguises it may assume, it is
in essence the logical creed of the profit philosophy. It is the
expression in politics of the acquisitive instinct and it assumes as
the greatest good the shaping of public policy to promote private
interests. It asserts that it is a duty of the state to help its
citizens to make money, and it conceives of the political state as
a useful instrument for effective exploitation. How otherwise? The
public good cannot be served apart from business interests, for
business interests are the public good and in serving business the
state is serving society. Everybody’s eggs are in the basket and they
must not be broken. For a capitalistic society Whiggery is the only
rational politics, for it exalts the profit-motive as the sole object
of parliamentary concern. Government has only to wave its wand and
fairy gifts descend upon business like the golden sands of Pactolus.
It graciously bestows its tariffs and subsidies, and streams of wealth
flow into private wells.
But unhappily there is a fly in the Whiggish honey. In a competitive
order, government is forced to make its choices. It cannot serve
both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it must take away
with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalism in the
common interest degenerates in practice into legalized favoritism.
Governmental gifts go to the largest investments. Lesser interests are
sacrificed to greater interests and Whiggery comes finally to serve the
lords of the earth without whose good will the wheels of business will
not turn. To him that hath shall be given. If the few do not prosper
the many will starve, and if the many have bread who would begrudge the
few their abundance? In Whiggery is the fulfillment of the Scriptures.
Henry Clay had been a prophetic figure pointing the way America was to
travel; but he came a generation too soon. A son of the Gilded Age, he
was doomed to live in a world of Jacksonian democracy. But the spirit
of Henry Clay survived his death and his followers were everywhere in
the land. The plain citizen who wanted a slice of the rich prairie
land of Iowa or Kansas, with a railway convenient to his homestead,
had learned to look to the government for a gift, and if he got his
quarter-section and his transportation he was careless about what the
other fellow got. A little more or less could make no difference to a
country inexhaustible in resources. America belonged to the American
people and not to the government, and resources in private hands paid
taxes and increased the national wealth. In his favorite newspaper,
the _New York Tribune_, he read daily appeals for the adoption of a
patriotic national economy, by means of which an infant industrialism,
made prosperous by a protective tariff, would provide a home market for
the produce of the farmer and render the country self-sufficient. Money
would thus be put in everybody’s pocket. Protection was not robbing
Peter to pay Paul, but paying both Peter and Paul out of the augmented
wealth of the whole.
The seductive arguments that Horace Greeley disseminated amongst the
plain people, Henry Carey purveyed to more intelligent ears. The most
distinguished American economist of the time, Carey had abandoned
his earlier _laissez-faire_ position, and having convinced himself
that only through a close-knit national economy could the country
develop a well-rounded economic program, he had become the most ardent
of protectionists. During the fifties and later he was tireless in
popularizing the doctrine of a natural harmony of interests between
agriculture and manufacturing, and to a generation expanding rapidly
in both fields his able presentation made great appeal. It was but a
step from protectionism to governmental subsidies. Beriah Sellers and
Henry Clay had come to be justified by the political economists. (Note
that amongst Carey’s converts were such different idealists as Wendell
Phillips and Peter Cooper.)
IV • The Great Barbecue
Horace Greeley and Henry Carey were only straws in the wind that
during the Gilded Age was blowing the doctrine of paternalism about
the land. A Colonel Sellers was to be found at every fireside talking
the same blowsy doctrine. Infectious in their optimism, naïve in their
faith that something would be turned up for them by the government if
they made known their wants, they were hoping for dollars to be put
in their pockets by a generous administration at Washington. Congress
had rich gifts to bestow--in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all
sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the
reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn
the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be.
A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not
quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home
on the farm or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a
good many indeed out of the total number of the American people. But
all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business
men, received invitations. There wasn’t room for everybody and these
were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast. If the
waiters saw to it that the choicest portions were served to favored
guests, they were not unmindful of their numerous homespun constituency
and they loudly proclaimed the fine democratic principle that what
belongs to the people should be enjoyed by the people--not with petty
bureaucratic restrictions, not as a social body, but as individuals,
each free citizen using what came to hand for his own private ends,
with no questions asked.
It was sound Gilded Age doctrine. To a frontier people what was more
democratic than a barbecue, and to a paternalistic age what was more
fitting than that the state should provide the beeves for roasting.
Let all come and help themselves. As a result the feast was Gargantuan
in its rough plenty. The abundance was what was to be expected of a
generous people. More food, to be sure, was spoiled than was eaten, and
the revelry was a bit unseemly; but it was a fine spree in the name of
the people, and the invitations had been written years before by Henry
Clay. But unfortunately what was intended to be jovially democratic was
marred by displays of plebeian temper. Suspicious commoners with better
eyes than manners discovered the favoritism of the waiters and drew
attention to the difference between their own meager helpings and the
heaped-up plates of more favored guests. It appeared indeed that there
was gross discrimination in the service; that the farmers’ pickings
from the Homestead Act were scanty in comparison with the speculators’
pickings from the railway land-grants. The _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal
and the Whisky Ring scandal and divers other scandals came near to
breaking up the feast, and the genial host--who was no other than the
hero of Appomattox--came in for some sharp criticism. But after the
more careless ones who were caught with their fingers where they didn’t
belong, had been thrust from the table, the eating and drinking went
on again till only the great carcasses were left. Then at last came
the reckoning. When the bill was sent in to the American people the
farmers discovered that they had been put off with the giblets while
the capitalists were consuming the turkey. They learned that they were
no match at a barbecue for more voracious guests, and as they went home
unsatisfied, a sullen anger burned in their hearts that was to express
itself later in fierce agrarian revolts.
What reason there was for such anger, how differently rich and poor
fared at the democratic feast, is suggested by the contrast between
the Homestead Act and the Union Pacific land-grant. Both were war-time
measures and both had emerged from the agitations of earlier decades.
By the terms of the former the homesteader got his hundred and sixty
acres at the price of $1.25 an acre; by the terms of the latter the
promoters got a vast empire for nothing. It was absurd, of course, but
what would you have? The people wanted the railway built and Collis P.
Huntington was willing to build it on his own terms. The government was
too generous to haggle with public-spirited citizens, and too Whiggish
to want to discourage individual enterprise. Ever since the cession of
California there had been much talk of a continental railway to tie the
country together. In the first years the talk in Congress had all been
of a great national venture; the road must be built by the nation to
serve the common interests of the American people. But unfortunately
sectional jealousies prevented any agreement as to the route the survey
lines were to run, and the rising capitalism was becoming powerful
enough to bring into disfavor any engagement of the government in a
work that promised great rewards. Under its guidance political opinion
was skillfully turned into the channel of private enterprise. The
public domain backed by the public credit, it was agreed, must pay for
the road, but the government must not seek to control the enterprise
or look to profit from it directly; the national reward would come
indirectly from the opening-up of vast new territories.
The definite shift in policy came about the year 1855. In 1837 Stephen
A. Douglas had been the driving force behind the state enterprise of
building the Illinois Central Railway. In 1853 he proposed that the
Pacific Railroad should be built by private enterprise. With the change
promptly came a request for a patriotic land-grant. The government was
expected to provide the road, it appeared, but private enterprise was
to own it and manage it in the interest of speculators rather than
the public. For old-fashioned souls like Thomas A. Benton, who still
remembered the Jeffersonian concern for the common well-being, it was a
bitter mess to swallow.
I would have preferred [he said] that Congress should have made the
road, as a national work, on a scale commensurate with its grandeur
and let out the use of it to companies, who would fetch and carry
on the best terms for the people and the government. But that hope
has vanished ... a private company has become the resource and
the preference. I embrace it as such, utterly scouting all plans
for making private roads at national expense, of paying for the
use of roads built with our land and money, of bargaining with
corporations or individuals for the use of what we give them.[506]
With this speech the old Jeffersonianism pulled down its flag and the
new Whiggery ran up its black banner. The Gilded Age had begun and Old
Bullion Benton had outlived his time. In the tumultuous decades that
followed there was to be no bargaining with corporations for the use
of what the public gave; they took what they wanted and no impertinent
questions were asked. The hungriest will get the most at the barbecue.
A careless wastefulness when the supply is unlimited is perhaps natural
enough. There were hard-headed men in the world of Beriah Sellers who
knew how easy it was to overreach the simple, and it was they who got
most from the common pot. We may call them buccaneers if we choose, and
speak of the great barbecue as a democratic debauch. But why single
out a few, when all were drunk? Whisky was plentiful at barbecues,
and if too liberal potations brought the Gilded Age to the grossest
extravagancies, if when it cast up accounts it found its patrimony
gone, it was only repeating the experience of a certain man who went
down to Jericho. To create a social civilization requires sober heads,
and in this carousal of economic romanticism sober heads were few--the
good Samaritan was busy elsewhere.
The doctrine of preëmption and exploitation was reaping its harvest.
The frontier spirit was having its splurge, and progress was already
turning its face in another direction. Within the next half-century
this picturesque America with its heritage of crude energy--greedy,
lawless, capable--was to be transformed into a vast uniform
middle-class land, dedicated to capitalism and creating the greatest
machine-order known to history. A scattered agricultural people,
steeped in particularistic jealousies and suspicious of centralization,
was to be transformed into an urbanized factory people, rootless,
migratory, drawn to the job as by a magnet. It was to come about the
more easily because the American farmer had never been a land-loving
peasant, rooted to the soil and thriving only in daily contact with
familiar acres. He had long been half middle-class, accounting unearned
increment the most profitable crop, and buying and selling land as
if it were calico. And in consequence the vigorous individualism
that had sprung from frontier conditions decayed with the passing of
the frontier, and those who had lost in the gamble of preëmption and
exploitation were added to the growing multitude of the proletariat. It
was from such materials, supplemented by a vast influx of immigrants,
that was fashioned the America we know today with its standardized
life, its machine culture, its mass psychology--an America to which
Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln would be strangers.
V • Folk Heroes
Perhaps one cannot penetrate more directly to the heart of the Gilded
Age than in taking account of certain of its heroes, figures of earth
whom it accounted great in its generation, and to whom its admiration
flowed out in unstinted measure. It is our own secret desires we
attribute to our gods, and if from the muck of the times a queer lot of
heroes was singled out, if an undisciplined generation rioting in its
new freedoms chose to honor men who had scrambled upward in uncouth
ways, it only suggests that such figures were a composite picture of
the secret desires of an age vastly concerned with getting on. From a
host of striking personalities two must suffice to suggest the spirit
of the times, authentic folk-heroes of the Gilded Age, fashioned out
of the commonest stuff and realizing such greatness as multitudes
of Americans were then dreaming of; and over against them a third
figure, a mordant intellectual, who sardonically swam with the stream
of tendency and in serving all the gods of the Gilded Age gained for
himself a brilliant career.
1 • General Grant
Greatest of all the heroes of the age was the victor of Appomattox.
His fame was in all men’s mouths, and his reputation was substantial
enough to withstand the attacks of enemies and the gross shortcomings
of his own character. It was not for any singular or remarkable
qualities of mind or personality that General Grant was taken to the
heart of his generation, but rather because he was so completely a
product of the times, so strikingly an embodiment of its virtues and
weaknesses. In his spectacular career were the sharp contrasts that
appealed to a plebeian people wanting in fine and discriminating
standards of appraisal. He had come up from the people and the marks
of his origins--the slovenly manners and uncritical force of frontier
folk-ways--were stamped on him as indelibly as they were stamped on his
fellow soldiers who proclaimed his greatness. To a later generation he
seems an odd and unaccountable figure for the high rôle of national
hero, yet he was as native and homespun as Lincoln, like him sprung
from the common stock and learning his lessons from harsh experience,
a figure blown to huge dimensions by the passions of civil war. A
generation that discovered something praiseworthy in the “smartness”
of Jim Fisk, in the burly acquisitiveness of Commodore Vanderbilt, or
in the clever humbuggery of Barnum the Showman, certainly would judge
with no very critical eyes the claims to greatness of a grim leader of
armies who succeeded where so many before had failed.
General Grant was no conventional military hero. It was not the gold
stars on his epaulets that dazzled his generation. The people of
the North had seen too many gold stars rise and set on the military
horizon, they had been stricken too sorely by the bitter struggle,
to be caught by military popinjays. They had gone through the fire
and any hero of theirs must himself have passed through the fire. It
was something veracious in the man, something solid and unyielding
in the soldier, something plain as an old shoe in the field marshal
of bloody battles, that caught the imagination of the North and made
Grant a hero--this together with a certain gift of pungent phrase,
befitting the leader of democratic hosts, that served to spread his
fame amongst the common people. Vicksburg did much for his reputation,
but the demand for “unconditional surrender,” sent to a Confederate
leader, did far more. The words fixed his character in the popular
mind. Here at last was a fighting man who instead of planning how to
fall back, as other generals did, thought only of going ahead; so the
popular judgment shut its eyes to his dull plebeian character and set
a wreath on his brows. It rested there somewhat grotesquely. In spite
of a deep unconscious integrity and a stubborn will that drove him
forward along whatever path his feet were set on, he was the least
imposing of military heroes. Short, stooped, lumpish in mind and body,
unintellectual and unimaginative, devoid of ideas and with no tongue
to express the incoherent emotions that surged dully in his heart, he
was a commonplace fellow that no gold braid could set off. He hated war
and disliked soldiering, yet accepting life with a stolid fatalism he
fought his bloody way to ultimate victory.
Graduated from West Point after four sterile years of drill, quite
uneducated and unread even in his profession, he served for a time at
different army posts, went through the Mexican War--which he looked
upon as a stupid imperialistic debauch--as quartermaster without
gaining distinction, and eventually, oppressed by the eventless routine
of garrison life, he fell into the habit of solitary drinking and was
dismissed from the service. Misfortune that it seemed, it was his
making. Only as a volunteer could he have risen so quickly to high
command; as a captain or major in the regular army he would have been
detailed as drill-master to the raw troops and have had no chance.
Nevertheless hard times came with his dismissal. Indolent by nature and
inclined to drift, he was as incompetent a man in practical affairs as
one could find in a frontier township. But with a wife and children to
support he must turn his hand to something, so he tried his luck at
farming, selling real estate, and various odd jobs, yet all the time
growing poorer and seedier, till the war came and picking him up flung
him to mountain heights of popularity and reputation. Thereafter till
his death he was accounted the greatest American of his generation. No
accumulating evidence of his well-meaning but witless incapacity in
civic and political affairs could pluck from his brows the wreath that
had been thrust upon him.
In his spectacular career Grant was an embodiment of the dreams of all
the Beriah Sellerses of the Gilded Age. He was a materialistic hero
of a materialistic generation. He was dazzled by wealth and power,
and after years of bitter poverty he sat down in the lap of luxury
with huge content. He took what the gods sent, and if houses and fast
horses and wines and cigars were showered upon him he accepted them as
a child would accept gifts from a fairy godmother. He had had enough
of skimping meanness; with his generation he wanted to slough off the
drabness of the frontier; he wanted the good things of life that had
so long been denied him, and he was not scrupulous about looking a
gift horse in the mouth. He sought out the company of rich men. He was
never happier than when enjoying the luxury of Jay Cooke’s mansion in
Philadelphia or riding with A. T. Stewart in Central Park. As he grew
fat and stodgy the vulgar side of his plebeian nature was thrown into
sharper relief. He accepted gifts with both hands, and he seems never
to have suspected the price that would be exacted of the President
for the presents to the General. He never realized how great a bill
was sent to the American people for the wine he drank or the cigars
he smoked with his wealthy hosts; yet if the wine had been molten
gold and the cigars platinum they would have been far cheaper. In
return for a few boxes of choice Havanas, Jay Cooke laid his hands on
millions of western lands for the Northern Pacific Railway. It was the
way of the Gilded Age, and Grant was only doing what all his friends
and associates were doing. If he accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar
house in Philadelphia, his comrade General Sherman accepted a
hundred-thousand-dollar house at Washington. Such gifts were not
bribes; they were open and aboveboard; it was the free and easy way of
the times. What the age was careless about is the fact that it is hard
to refuse a reasonable request from one’s fairy godmother, and what the
General never understood is that if one is President such a godmother
is certain to be a very dangerous member of the family.
There was far too much of that sort of thing all about him for Grant to
serve as President with credit to himself or profit to the country.
Honest himself, he was the source of more dishonesty in others than
any other American President. His eight years in the White House
marked the lowest depths--in domestic affairs at least--to which any
American administration has fallen. They were little better than a
national disgrace. All the festering evils of post-war times came to a
head and pock-marked the body politic from head to foot. Scandal and
corruption whispered all about him, the hands of his closest advisers
were dirty; yet he stubbornly refused to hear the whispers or see the
dirt. In judging men and policies he was no more than a child. He could
never distinguish between an honest man and a rascal. He was loyal to
his friends and open-handedness he regarded as a mark of friendship.
In the end it turned out that like the thieves of Jericho his blatant
followers despoiled him of pretty nearly everything.
In what must pass for his political views Grant was as naïvely
uninformed as a Wyoming cowboy. Utterly wanting in knowledge of
political principles, he was a fit leader for the organized mob
that called itself the Republican party, whose chief objective was
the raiding of the treasure-box of which it was the responsible
guardian. He had been nominally a Democrat and the first vote he cast
for President he cast for Buchanan. After Lincoln’s death he turned
naturally to President Johnson and was one of his supporters till the
wily Radical group got his ear and carried him over to the rival camp.
They wanted his reputation to hide under, and they took possession of
it with no great credit to the General’s reputation. Thereafter he
was a Republican of the Whig wing. It was where he belonged. He was
swayed politically by his emotional reactions and it was natural for
him to drift into the opulent camp of money and power. His frontier
democracy sloughed away and with his generation he went over easily
to a buccaneer capitalism. No social conscience obtruded itself to
give him trouble. His millionaire friends were Whig Republicans and
with his respect for rich men, his admiration for material success,
he found himself in congenial company amongst the Whig group. About
the only political policy he ever interested himself in was the policy
of a protective tariff, and his Whig associates took care that his
interest did not wane. Yet so completely did the naïve General reflect
the spirit of the Gilded Age that his noisy followers, conspiring to
confuse in the public mind southern reconstruction and capitalistic
expansion, and hiding a precious set of rascals in the folds of the
bloody flag, came near to making him President for a third term. The
General was bitterly disappointed at their failure, and the General’s
wife, who liked to live in the White House, was even more disappointed.
To millions of Americans Grant was an authentic hero, to Mark Twain he
was a very great man, and to Jay Cooke he was a pawn to be used in the
noble strategy of fortune-seeking. What a comedy it all seems now--yet
one that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
Yet to dismiss the stolid General thus is scarcely to do justice to
the substantial core of the man. There remains the work written in
pain during his last days, the two volumes of _Memoirs_ that in their
plain directness--as uninspired, says a late biographer, as “a bale
of hay”--laid bare his honest simplicity and rugged meagerness. No
blackguard and no charlatan could have written such pages. If General
Grant was not the great man so many thought, he was a native growth
from American soil, endowed like his age with a dogged will and a
plodding energy, and he gave his country what he had. Though the
branches of the tree were ungainly and offered too hospitable shelter
to unseemly birds of the night, the gnarly trunk was sound at the heart.
2 • Jay Cooke
Another hero of the times likewise was flung up as it were casually out
of obscurity and reaped an amazing harvest from the gigantic struggle.
In those difficult years the name of Jay Cooke--“the financier of the
Civil War,” as his biographer calls him--became as familiar to the
people of the North as the names of Grant and Lincoln, and was often
joined with theirs as that of one of the saviors of the Union. He was
the first great American banker, and good fortune sent him into the
world at a moment when his skill in brokerage found opportunity for
free play. The war was as great a godsend to Jay Cooke as it was to
Grant, for alone amongst our money-lenders he realized the problems
and foresaw the profits in a popular system of war financing. He was
a pioneer in exploring all the potentialities of the banker’s trade,
and in his dramatic exploitation of salesmanship and his skillful
manipulation of money and credit he marked out the highway our later
financiers have traveled. Jay Cooke occupies too significant a place in
the history of American capitalism to be overlooked in casting up the
accounts of the Gilded Age.
Of Yankee-Puritan stock, he was born in the frontier hamlet of
Sandusky, Ohio, when the Western Reserve was at the beginning of
its development. His father was a country lawyer of Federalist-Whig
affinities, proficient in high-flown western oratory, who liked to
be much in the neighborhood eye. He was a pushing, self-confident
fellow, highly patriotic, soberly moral, fearing God and loving
his country, who felt that the government he supported so heartily
should serve him and his town with equal heartiness. His readiness
in florid speech won him a single term in Congress, and he used his
position as a heaven-sent opportunity to promote a government road
from Sandusky--which it seems was not prospering as its inhabitants
had expected it would--deep into the Indian country. It was a good
Clay-Whig scheme of internal improvement; it would open up a rich
timber country, and be highly profitable to the real-estate promoters
of Sandusky. Cradled thus in speculation and faith in a benevolent
government, his three sons grew up native Whigs, with vigorous
Puritan-Yankee minds, who found no difficulty in reconciling the
interests of God and Mammon. Eager to get on “the right side of
fortune,” they went into the three professions of banking, journalism,
and the law. The eldest, Pitt, found the law little to his liking;
the youngest, Henry, labored diligently at journalism, at Sandusky
and later at Columbus, where he was part owner of the _Ohio State
Journal_ and “boss” of young William Dean Howells, who was likewise
seeking to rise through the medium of journalism. It was the family
itch for politics that took him to Columbus, and although the venture
was financially unsuccessful it brought him influential connections.
He was useful to Governor Salmon P. Chase, afterwards to be Lincoln’s
Secretary of the Treasury, and to John Sherman, who was later to become
a great influence on financial policies at Washington. His reward came
in the shape of an appointment to do the government binding, reputed to
be worth $25,000--a commission that allowed him to unload his paper on
some investors who speedily lost the $20,000 they put into it.
Henry Cooke’s Whiggery was justifying itself, yet to both Pitt and
Henry it soon became clear that Jay had hit upon the true road
to wealth. At twelve years of age he had begun his career in his
father’s store at Sandusky, and with characteristic enterprise he
put in some side lines and became “quite a capitalist.” At fourteen
he ventured so far as St. Louis to help in a general store, and at
the age of seventeen he went to Philadelphia and took a place in a
broker-banker’s office. That was in 1839, a golden time for brokers,
when every business man must keep a sharp eye on the table of banknote
discounts and see to it that bad paper was worked off. Into this world
of discounts and premiums the young clerk plunged with immense zest.
“The business I am engaged in is of the most respectable kind and the
house is the first in the city,”[507] he wrote to Pitt Cooke. “He
was ambitious, industrious, and faithful to each day’s duties,” his
biographer reports of him. His quick mind ran to calculations and his
slender sensitive fingers seemed made for telling money. He was soon
the admiration of the office, an expert in detecting counterfeits,
a walking table of “wild-cat” currency, with a genius for smelling
out possible commissions. Every art of extracting profits from
note-shaving, gold-juggling, delayed payments, and other devices known
to the world of brokerage, he speedily made himself master of. When he
reached his majority he was entered a member of the firm, and before
he was thirty he aided his partners--“noble” fellows he called them,
of honest Puritan extraction--in squeezing huge commissions out of the
financing of the Mexican War. “It was a grand time for brokers and
private banking,” he remarked; and late in life he wrote glowingly of
his cleverness in twice overreaching the Secretary of the Treasury. It
was quite legal and the patriotic banker was vastly pleased to report,
“So we victimized him again.”[508] He was the brains of the company
and under his guidance the business piled up profits at an astonishing
rate. During the panic of 1854 he wrote: “We use our money at 1½ to 3
per cent. per month from day to day and frequently it pays ⅛ to ¼ a
day. We have done a noble business since 1st of January; profits up
to 1st July $135,000.”[509] On the reorganization of the firm in 1858
he withdrew, and three years later, on January 1, 1861, he opened the
doors of what was soon to become the greatest banking-house in America,
Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia.
He was then in his fortieth year and his private fortune he reckoned at
$150,000. But with the breaking-out of the war, opportunity knocked at
the door of the new bank. Ardently patriotic, Jay Cooke was anxious to
do his bit for the cause, but he seems never to have thought of going
to the front. He came of fighting Revolutionary stock, but love of the
battlefield had died out of the family. His father had been drafted
for the War of 1812, but hired a substitute who was unfortunate enough
to be killed, and none of the three sons got nearer the front than the
Treasury Department at Washington. It was there that the battles of the
Cooke brothers were fought. Henry Cooke went to Washington to attend
the inauguration of the new administration, and twenty-one days later
Jay Cooke modestly proposed a plan for mobilizing the resources of the
firm in defense of the country. On March 25, he wrote to his brother:
What we wish to do with the Treasury is to have the Department
allow us to make the frequent transfers that are made from point
to point instead of giving the business to Adams and Company
[Express]. We can make those transfers and the Department when
flush can give us 30, 60, 90 or 120 days time, as it is no loss to
them, and the interest in the meantime would be clear profit and to
be divided.[510]
When the magnitude of the task in which the country was engaged became
clear to him he was no longer content with a single banking-house at
Philadelphia. A branch at Washington under the shadow of the Treasury
was highly desirable, and Henry Cooke was the man for the business.
A born lobbyist, a close friend of John Sherman--who was looking out
for a profitable opening in some war business for a brother--and of
Secretary of the Treasury Chase, he let no grass grow under his feet.
The war loans had not been taken freely and in July, Jay Cooke wrote
to Chase suggesting a close alliance between the Treasury and two
Philadelphia firms, Jay Cooke and Company and Drexel and Company.
We would wish to make our business mostly out of the Treasury
operations and we feel sure that we could by having a proper
understanding with yourself greatly help you in the management of
your vast negotiations.... We could not be expected to leave our
comfortable homes and positions here without some great inducement
and we state frankly that we would, if we succeeded, expect a
fair commission from the Treasury in some shape for our labor and
talent. If you feel disposed to say to us ... that you will give us
the management of the loans to be issued by the government during
the war, allowing us a fair commission on them, ... we are ready to
throw ourselves into the matter heartily....[511]
It was quite an amazing proposal and one that Secretary Chase dared
not accept. Bankers and brokers in New York and Boston would scarcely
approve a monopoly of loan-commissions granted to two Philadelphia
houses. But Jay Cooke would not acknowledge defeat. He cultivated the
acquaintance of the Secretary, lent him money, entertained his family,
presented him with gifts, and gave him sound advice. He took the
harassed servant of the people to his warm and generous heart and was
vigilant in keeping him out of the clutches of Copperhead profiteers.
His opportunity came in October, 1861, when in competition with other
brokers he undertook the sale of a new bond-series. His success was
so great that he won the complete confidence of Secretary Chase,
and it was only a matter of time when he should secure his coveted
monopoly. In February, 1862, he opened the branch house at Washington,
immediately opposite the Treasury building, and Henry Cooke soon made
its offices an indispensable club for Congressmen and government
employees. He was charmingly cordial and during the next ten years he
knew everybody and every political move at the Capital. With the same
bland and deacon-like appearance as his brother, he was master of the
art of ingratiating himself into the confidence of influential men,
and successive Secretaries of the Treasury--Chase and Fessenden and
McCulloch--were easily induced to look with partial eye upon the firm
of Jay Cooke and Company. When Grant returned to Washington after the
war he was soon like a brother to Henry Cooke, and when the General
had tasted the quality of cigars kept for his use at Jay Cooke’s
Philadelphia home, his heart warmed to the kindly banker.
Meanwhile the firm was discovering innumerable ways to help win the
war; amongst others Henry Cooke put through a congressional franchise
for a street railway at Washington, and the new cars were soon carrying
citizens and soldiers to and fro, to their great content and the
company’s great profit. He was hourly in and out of the Treasury and
he knew as much about the government business as the Secretary. The
interests of the firm extended with amazing rapidity; other banks
came under their control and their agents were everywhere. Their
later successes in selling bonds were a revelation to older-fashioned
brokers. On the day that Richmond fell the “financier of the Civil
War” marked out the lines of a pretentious country house that was to
cost a million dollars and to become a show place of America, where
Secretaries of the Treasury, Presidents, and great men from every walk
of life were to find a welcome release from their cares. “As rich as
Jay Cooke” had become a common saying from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The gigantic war had been no ill wind to the money-teller of 1861.
In certain aspects Jay Cooke may be reckoned the first modern American.
He was the first to understand the psychology of mass salesmanship.
It was his fertile brain that created the syndicate and conceived and
executed the modern American “drive.” Under his bland deacon-like
exterior was the mind of a realist. He assumed that every man has his
price, but he knew that few men like to acknowledge the fact even
to themselves; so he was at immense pains to cover our poor human
nakedness with generous professions. If he were to lure dollars from
old stockings in remote chimney-corners he must “sell” patriotism to
his fellow Americans; and to do that successfully he must manufacture
a militant public opinion. The soldier at the front, he announced
in a flood of advertisements, must be supported at the rear. It
was every loyal American’s war, and patriotism demanded that idle
dollars--in greenbacks--should be lent to the boys in blue, and a
grateful government would return them, both principal and interest, in
gold. To induce slacker dollars to become fighting dollars he placed
his agents in every neighborhood, in newspaper offices, in banks, in
pulpits--patriotic forerunners of the “one-minute men” of later drives.
They also served their country, he pointed out, who sold government
bonds on commission. He subsidized the press with a lavish hand, not
only the metropolitan dailies but the obscurest country weeklies. He
employed an army of hack-writers to prepare syndicated matter and he
scattered paying copy broadcast. His “hired friends” were everywhere.
In a hundred delicate ways he showed his appreciation of patriotic
coöperation in the bond-sales--gifts of trout caught with his own
hand, baskets of fruit from his own garden. He bought the pressings
of whole vineyards and cases of wine flowed in an endless stream to
strategic publicity-points. Rival brokers hinted that he was debauching
the press, but the army of greenbacks marching to the front was his
reply. It all cost a pretty penny, but the government was liberal with
commissions and when all expenses were deducted perhaps two millions
of profits remained in the vaults of the firm, to be added to the many
other millions which the prestige of the government agency with its
free advertising brought in its train.
With such prestige and with the greatest fluid resources as yet
accumulated by any American, it was inevitable that the Rothschild of
the North should play a bold part in the speculations of the Gilded
Age. Jay Cooke vastly enjoyed the game and it was idle to expect him
to sit back quietly when others were playing for high stakes. In those
halcyon days promoters were as thick as flies about a dead carcass;
wild-cat railroads had succeeded wild-cat banks as short-cuts to
wealth; and in an unlucky moment Jay Cooke was tempted. He had expected
to be made Secretary of the Treasury by President Grant, but failing
of appointment in spite of countless boxes of twenty-five-cent cigars
provided for the General’s pleasure, he determined to back the Northern
Pacific Railway enterprise. The company had been chartered in July,
1864, receiving a congressional grant of 12,800 acres of public land
for every mile of track laid in the states, and double that amount in
the territories. As the proposed line would run almost entirely through
territories the grand total was reckoned at 47,360,000 acres.[512]
Early land-sales were at the rate of $6 an acre. At such valuation the
prospective value of the grant through the territories was $153,600 for
every mile of track, yet in portions of an earlier line absorbed by the
company the road had been built for $8,225 a mile, and a stretch of 112
miles at the rate of $9,500.[513] To be sure there were great stretches
of unsalable land, but in compensation the company was free to run
its surveys so as to embrace choice mineral deposits, virgin timber,
water-power, and town sites.
As Jay Cooke contemplated the possibilities his buoyant temperament
took fire, and he dreamed of empire-building. He quickly rationalized
the project into a great patriotic undertaking that would carry the
blessings of civilization to the farthest Northwest. He would lay open
to the poor man the rich wheat lands of the Dakotas, the mineral wealth
of the Rockies, the vast timber resources of the Puget Sound territory.
He would annex western Canada by benevolent absorption. It was a dream
worthy of the Gilded Age and Jay Cooke was chief amongst the Beriah
Sellerses of the day. He threw himself into the project with boundless
optimism, and proved again his right to be called a great financier.
He proposed to sell the Northern Pacific as he had sold government
bonds. He had learned that to catch the little fish he must first
catch the big fish, for the shilling is timid till the pound shows the
way. He must create confidence, cost what it would, and to that end
he opened a huge pool and created a special syndicate. Stocks, jobs,
cash, influence, were distributed judiciously where they would do good.
In the language of stock-jobbing much “sweetening” was used.[514] And
there was need of much “sweetening,” for the times were inauspicious.
Jay Cooke drove the publicity work with his old vigor, but sales were
slow, and as the great patriotic venture showed signs of lagging he
turned for help to a sympathetic government.
His engineer had made a careful estimate of the prospective cost of
the road, which including rolling-stock, terminals, a branch line
to Portland, and interest on bonds during the construction, came to
$42,638 a mile for the entire line.[515] But the financier was not
satisfied “with the magnificent property the government has given us,”
and made ready to buy from Congress a revision of the terms of the
charter, which amongst other things would widen the land-grant belt
through the territories to 120 miles, convey a second right-of-way
zone from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and permit the company
to hypothecate the whole before the terms of the contract were
fulfilled. It was an audacious proposal even to a generation used to
audacious proposals. There was bitter opposition, for the rumblings
of the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal were already disturbing the halls of
Congress; but his lobbyists used “the company’s money freely” to bring
in the common breed of Congressmen, and the Cooke brothers employed
their well-practiced skill to take care of such important persons as
Speaker Blaine of the House, Vice-President Colfax of the Senate, and
President Grant. The matter was handled with great delicacy in the case
of the latter--“the glorious honest man,” the banker called him. “He
sent a fishing-rod and creel to the President’s little son Jesse, for
which he was duly thanked in a childish hand.” He invited the General
to a day’s fishing-trip, and together the heroes whipped the trout
stream in the most charming comradeship. “It may be thought,” remarks
his biographer, “that such machinations were unbecoming in a man of
Mr. Cooke’s moral dimensions.”[516] But surely delicate “machinations”
were not unbecoming to such “moral dimensions.” “We let the other
side do most of the talking,” wrote the deacon-like Henry Cooke, who
kept the Sabbath as strictly as his brother, “and we do the voting.”
The President’s cabinet was bitterly divided on the issue, but wheels
turn on well-greased axles and delicate attentions have their reward.
The bill was signed and the building of the Northwest empire could go
forward.
Unfortunately, however, black days were pressing hard on the great
success. The money of the company ran in fructifying streams
through Europe and America but the expected crop was short. Thirty
papers were subsidized in Germany; agents lived in ducal palaces;
commissions, stocks, bonuses, were plowed in for manure; but the crop
of bond-sales was still scanty. Ugly rumors were abroad. There was talk
of a congressional investigation, and when General Banks offered a
resolution of inquiry Jay Cooke was hurt to the quick. An investigation
he regarded as no other than persecution of legitimate business, and he
wrote to his brother: “He ought to be expelled from Congress for such
outrageous attacks upon the great interests of the country.... If I
get at him I will give him a piece of my mind, and no mistake, for his
impertinence and foolishness.”[517] Then the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal
broke and in a panic he wrote to Henry Cooke denouncing the proposal to
stop payment on the interest-coupons of the Union Pacific.
Now I want you to go to the Attorney General at once and tell him
how wrong this whole procedure is. This whole persecution of the
Union Pacific is nonsense, and is damaging our credit abroad.
If the government sets the example of enjoining the payment of
interest coupons, who will buy a bond abroad? The whole thing
is wrong, ill advised and scandalous.... Williams ought to make
a public apology for such an attack and instruct the lawyers to
desist from anything of the kind. The bonds are long since in the
hands of innocent holders, and, if they were not, they could never
reach them in this way. Some wily speculators have put the idea
into the heads of the government lawyers and they, without knowing
anything of its effect upon business, have made this attack. It
will damage us hundreds of millions unless withdrawn at once. No
man of sense would buy a railroad bond or anything else in this
country if such legal proceedings are to be permitted under the
sanction of the highest officer of the government.[518]
Jay Cooke’s ethics were simple. Whatever helped bond-sales was
patriotic and right; whatever hurt them was wicked and immoral. Let
government take care of business and business will take care of the
country. That the newspapers could not see this great truth, but often
indulged in wild demagoguery, was painful to one who had been generous
to them. “It is too bad,” he wrote of a certain attack, “that these
newspapers are permitted by the law thus to interfere with great public
works.”[519] But the black days were at hand. The _Crédit Mobilier_
scandal was a whirlwind reaped from the sowings of the Gilded Age. With
the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war bond-sales stopped short in
Europe and the firm of Jay Cooke and Company was broken. September 18,
1873, the New York house suspended payment; the house of cards tumbled
to pieces; and a panic swept the country. The crash was as spectacular
as the rise; it had been built on credit and when credit was shaken it
fell.
Because he had amassed a great fortune Jay Cooke was regarded by his
fellow Americans as an intelligent man whose opinions were entitled
to heedful consideration. A national figure in finance must become a
national figure in the public councils; and this added function he
assumed with the utmost seriousness. As the power behind the United
States Treasury he regarded himself as responsible for the program
of the Treasury; and he made use of his immense publicity-machine to
shape public opinion in regard to taxation, funding, and the currency.
His “views” of those questions were as simple as a child’s primer. In
brief they were: no taxes for the extinction of the debt; consolidate
the debt and fund it in a form attractive to capital; retire the
greenbacks and return at once to specie payments. Like others who
had made money out of the war he did not take kindly to the idea of
returning a part of it in taxes to pay off a debt that was highly
profitable to him as a broker and banker. The men of ’65 had fought and
suffered to secure the blessings of liberty to their posterity, and it
was only fair that posterity should help pay the bills. To popularize
this pregnant thought he subsidized a pamphlet contributed by one of
his hack-writers, entitled _Our National Debt a National Blessing_;
but the Hamiltonian argument overshot the mark and aroused bitter
opposition. In this as in his attitude towards currency-contraction
and funding he was thinking exclusively in terms of the money-lender.
Very likely he was probably not so much self-seeking as ignorant.
Intellectually he was poverty-stricken and outside the narrow realm of
brokerage and banking he was only a child. He read nothing, thought
little and was unconcerned with social or economic principles. His
business life was regulated by a set of ready-made formulas, in which
ideas played no part. William Cullen Bryant rightly judged him in the
following comment:
We counsel Mr. Jay Cooke in all good will, not to abandon his
proper vocation of dealing in stocks and government securities, for
the sake of giving lectures on political economy--a subject which
he does not understand. We do not say that he might not understand
it if he had given it his attention, but that he has evidently
never done, and knows no more of the matter than Red Jacket knew of
Greek. We advise all who have any money to invest to take Mr. Jay
Cooke’s seven-thirty bonds, and eschew his political economy. His
seven-thirties are first rate, his political economy is a tissue of
mistakes.[520]
Any program that lay outside the bounds of his formulas he regarded
as dangerous radicalism, and any policy that threatened to reduce his
commissions he regarded as unchristian. He bitterly disliked Secretary
Boutwell of the Treasury, who rejected his guidance, and he wrote to
his brother:
I observe ... that Boutwell is to leave the Treasury. I think that
if he does not propose to do any better than he has in the past it
will be a grand move for Grant to put some more practical person in
his place. A man who has no more breadth of thought ... and no more
spunk than to let the country drift along without even an attempt
at funding the debt, and who insists upon keeping up an enormous
taxation for the foolish object of paying off rapidly a debt that
no one wants paid off, excepting gradually, it will be a great
benefit to have replaced by some one who will take an opposite
course.[521]
A month later one of the causes of the hostility was suggested by a
member of the firm:
All of our transactions with Boutwell have shown conclusively that
he will never permit one dollar to be made out of the business of
the Treasury, if he can possibly prevent it. With all his friendly
feelings I cannot remember a single dollar that we have made
directly or indirectly out of his administration of the Treasury,
...[522]
Against the Greenback movement his hostility was bitter. He regarded
it as an attempt to repudiate the “plighted faith” of the nation, and
in 1867 he issued a pamphlet, written to order, aimed at combating
the movement. In the opinion of a subsidized admirer it was “able,
unanswerable and timely,” calculated to do immense good in a country
where universal suffrage encourages the “attempts of demagogues to
excite the poor against the rich, labor against capital, and all
who haven’t money against the banks who have it.”[523] How deeply
the members of the firm felt in presence of any threat to the money
interests is suggested in a letter from Henry Cooke of October 12, 1867.
You know how I have felt for a long time past in regard to the
course of the ultra infidelic radicals like Wade, Sumner, Stevens,
_et id omne genus_. They were dragging the Republican party into
all sorts of isms and extremes. Their policy was one of bitterness,
hate, and wild agrarianism without a single Christian principle to
give it consistency, except the sole idea of universal suffrage....
These reckless demagogues have had their day and the time has come
for wiser counsels. With Wade uttering agrarian doctrines in Kansas
and fanning the flame of vulgar prejudices, trying to array labor
against capital and pandering to the basest passions; with Butler
urging wholesale conscription throughout the South and wholesale
repudiation throughout the North so far as the national debt is
concerned; with Stevens joining hands with the traitor Vallandigham
and advocating the idea of a flood of irredeemable paper money
sufficient in volume to drown the whole country; with Pomeroy and
Wade and Sprague and a host of others clamoring for the unsexing of
woman and putting the ballot in her hand ... what wonder it is that
the accumulated load was too heavy for any party to carry and that
it broke down under it?[524]
There can be little doubt that the spectacular career of Jay Cooke
quite dazzled his contemporary fellow citizens. Nothing like it
had before appeared in America. The greatest salesman that the
rising middle class had yet produced, a financier who understood
the psychology of mass appeal, a propagandist of truly heroic
proportions, he was reckoned no other than a magician by all the lesser
money-grabbers of the Gilded Age. From nothing he built up a vast
fortune. Scrupulous in all religious duties, a kind husband, a generous
friend, benevolent in all worthy charities, simple and democratic
in his tastes, ardently patriotic, uncreative and unintellectual,
he exemplified all the substantial middle-class virtues of a people
newly given to the worship of a sterile money economy. To call him
a vulgarian and the chronicle of his life nauseous would scarcely be
charitable. The record of his days has been laid before us, naked and
mean, by his biographer, who has done his best to construct a hero
from the poor materials. No doubt he was a hero of his generation--and
perhaps of ours also.
3 • Charles A. Dana
If General Grant and Jay Cooke were naïve heroes, ignorant as the
generation that delighted to honor them, Charles A. Dana, the
journalist of the Gilded Age, was a disillusioned intellectual who
after immersing himself in the golden dreams of the forties, put
away all Utopian hopes and made use of his brains to serve himself.
Disappointed with idealism, he turned materialist and dedicated to
capitalistic exploitation the abilities that before had been given to
a venture in coöperative living. A brilliant fellow, playing the new
game in Gilded Age fashion and winning a brilliant success, he was a
conspicuous victim of the bankruptcy of idealism that is the price of
all wars, and his later triumph as editor of the _New York Sun_ only
served to measure the greatness of his fall. The career of Dana is a
cynical commentary on the changing spirit of America from the days of
Brook Farm to the days of Mark Hanna.
A child of the Puritan frontier, Dana early crossed over into New
York State and became a shop-boy in the backwoods village of Buffalo
at a time when the Indian trade was important enough to justify him
in learning Algonquin. In these early manhood days he was living in
the midst of the coonskin democracy, and falling in with the frontier
spirit he became an ardent Jacksonian. He was eager for an education
and quitting Buffalo he went to Harvard, but his eyes failing him after
two years, he joined the Brook Farm community where he speedily became
one of the chief counselors, and was deeply concerned for the success
of the experiment. In those generous years he was a militant idealist,
widely read in socialist literature and warmly espousing associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition. Upon quitting Brook Farm after
the burning of the Phalanstery he joined Greeley and for fifteen years
was one of the directing minds on the _Tribune_. In 1848 he went abroad
as foreign correspondent, saw much of the revolutions of that great
year, studied the temper of the French and German people, analyzed
the popular leaders and programs with singular acuteness, and found
his sympathies warmly enlisted in the cause of the lower classes. He
was then thirty-nine, and his active mind had gathered up all the
diverse radicalisms--Jacksonian, Utopian, European proletarian--of
his revolutionary generation. Shrewdly observant and with a sensitive
social conscience, he was amply equipped to become such another critic
of the Industrial Revolution as England had bred from its bitter
experience.
But the war intervened, and after the war a dun twilight gathered about
the hopes of the forties. Few generous enthusiasms survived those
years of struggle and Dana in his editorial rooms underwent successive
changes of heart. The realist slowly dispossessed the idealist and
then the cynic swallowed up the realist. The last forty years of his
life were spent undoing the work of his earlier years. His political
philosophy went to pieces and the policy of the _Sun_ became a mere
hodge-podge of jingo programs, an irrational bundle of personal
prejudices and private interests. His reaction from associationism
carried him over to a stark and ruthless individualism. He saw all
about him the strong and capable as the masters of the earth, with
social justice an outcast and mendicant begging from house to house.
The millennium to which belongs the ideal of social democracy which
he had earlier served, he could no longer make out from any present
bend in the road, and putting away his faith he went with the masters.
The reaction began during the _Tribune_ days with his espousal of the
American System--the first outcropping of the middle-class qualities
of his mind--and thereafter he drifted steadily to the right and the
Dismal Swamp of exploitation. With augmenting wealth and the sense
of power that came from the great success of the _Sun_ he became the
apologist and defender of capitalism, phrasing with clever vivacity all
the sophistries of Gilded Age argument. Professing to be a Democrat, he
made much of states rights and governmental _laissez faire_. He would
countenance no interference with the principle of free competition,
but would reduce the government to the rôle of policeman to keep the
peace. He professed to believe that the dry bones of Manchesterism were
a living democratic faith. He ridiculed the proposal for pure-food
legislation, civil service reform, the control of monopolies,
professing to see in every such move the insidious beginnings of an
un-American bureaucracy. No social pretext justified in his eyes the
regulation of business enterprise. Centralization of economic power he
accepted as in the nature of things, and the popular denunciation of
trusts he called “the greatest humbug of the hour.” His argument was
simple and to the Gilded Age wholly satisfactory.
The objects of trade being to buy as cheap as possible, to sell
as dear as possible, and to get control of the market as far as
possible, the formation for these purposes of these gigantic and
widely extended partnerships is just as natural and regular as the
partnership of two shoemakers or of two blacksmiths.[525]
Thus far Dana must be reckoned a belated disciple of the Manchester
school. The days of transcendental and Utopian idealism were past and
he knew it. The Gilded Age had traveled far from such naïve enthusiasms
and it was time to face reality. But his realism was only a gesture
to cover his surrender to capitalism. It was not honest. When his
principle of individualism trod on his own toes he threw it aside with
no compunctions. He was a _laissez-faire_ Democrat only when a free
field favored business, but when business desired government assistance
he made no scruple to turn Whig. Accepting the principle of private
exploitation under the drive of the acquisitive instinct, and content
with the social ethics of Captain Kidd, he would weaken government or
strengthen government as business profits dictated. In these later
years he became cynically class-conscious, while professing to deny
the existence of classes. He would disarm the government as against
the capitalist, but he would triple-arm it against the farmer and
workingman. He was shrill in his demands for a high protective tariff
for the manufacturers, huge grants of public lands for speculative
railway companies, and a monetary system in the control of the bankers.
But for the economic demands of the western farmers he had only
contempt--the agrarians were flying in the face of economic law as
economic law was understood by the high priests of capitalism. When
he talked about “honest money” he laid his brains on the shelf. He
would have no other money than the gold standard, and to achieve that
object he never suffered candor to weaken his plea. He bitterly opposed
the income tax and when the Democratic platform of 1896 suggested the
reorganization of the Supreme Court to reverse the decision on its
constitutionality, he turned demagogue and indulged in talk about
“the destruction of the independence of the judiciary.” When it was
proposed that the railways be nationalized he protested that he could
not “imagine anything more absurd, unpatriotic, and dangerous”--on
the assumption no doubt that railways existed to pay dividends on
their stock. “Still more alarming” to him was the “clearly implied
approval of lawless violence contained in the denunciation of what is
denominated in the [Democratic] platform ‘government by injunction.’
Veiled in the language of moderation, the wild light of anarchy shines
through.”[526] He urged upon government the necessity of holding the
labor unions in strict control, he was eloquent in defense of the
individual laborer’s sacred right of “free contract,” and he was loud
in applause of President Cleveland’s lawless suppression of the Pullman
strike. When it came to Bryan and Populism he lost his head and became
quite maudlin.
Dana was no fool to be deceived by his own insincerity. On the
contrary he was highly intelligent and knew perfectly well what he
was about. Having gone over to capitalism, he would fight its battles
with whatever weapons came to hand, and like a son of New England
he would cover his breast with a shield of morality. He became the
chief journalistic exponent of the “lawless violence” he was fond of
attributing to other social classes. He turned into a flaming jingo
imperialist, talked patriotically about “adequate” coast defenses,
demanded a great navy, and was the loudest spokesman of the blowsy
doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He was always peering through his
glasses to discover some fresh territory to annex--Haiti, Cuba,
Mexico--and so late as 1887 he was still calling for the annexation
of Canada. Naturally he approved President Cleveland’s Venezuelan
proclamation and he probably would have enjoyed a tussle with the
British lion. In his morality he was quite as truculent as in his
patriotism and in his advocacy of capitalism. Perhaps it was a salve
to a conscience that could not have been easy. He hated political
corruption and he attacked the sordid looting that marked President
Grant’s administration with gusto. He took sardonic delight in giving
the widest publicity to the classic corruptionist phrase of the
day--“He understands addition, division, and silence.” He erected into
a fetish the cry “Turn the rascals out!” yet while helping to pry
loose one set of rascals from their spoils he was busily providing
another set with his demand for subsidies and tariffs. It was a
situation that must have amused the cynical Dana. He had long since
left off worrying about the damned human race. It was more sensible to
pile up one’s plate at the barbecue and send the bill to the American
people. He had made a huge success and what mattered it if his old
Brook Farm associates, Ripley and Curtis, no longer spoke to him when
they met?
Footnotes
[504] See Allan Nevins, “The Taming of the West,” in _The Emergence of
Modern America_.
[505] It is the same story in the matter of the passenger pigeon. In
early days the flights of these birds ran to untold millions. The last
great nesting was at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, covering a strip
forty miles long and from three to ten miles wide. Upon the nests fell
the market-hunters and a million and a half squabs were shipped to New
York by rail, besides the thousands wasted. Within a generation the
passenger pigeon had become extinct. See W. B. Mershon, _Outdoor Life
and Recreation_, February, 1929, p. 26 ff.
[506] Quoted in J. P. Davis, _The Union Pacific Railway_, pp. 67-68.
[507] E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War_, Vol.
I, p. 52.
[508] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 81 and 83.
[509] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 85.
[510] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 132-133.
[511] See _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 143-144.
[512] See _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 97-98.
[513] C. E. Russell, _Stories of Great Railroads_, p. 19.
[514] The list of his “beneficiaries,” some of whom were drawn
in delicately and some realistically, included, according to his
biographer, Vice-President Colfax, Speaker Blaine and James A. Garfield
of the House, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Governor Geary
of Pennsylvania, General Horace Porter, President Grant’s private
secretary, Senators John Sherman, William Windom, and Ben Wade,
Delegate Garfielde of Washington Territory, Bayard Taylor. Amongst
the papers were Henry Ward Beecher’s _Christian Union_, Greeley’s
_Tribune_, the _Philadelphia Press_, the _Washington Chronicle_, the
_London Times_.
[515] See Oberholtzer, Vol. II, p. 154.
[516] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 176.
[517] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 322.
[518] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 409.
[519] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 411.
[520] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 643-644.
[521] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 267-268.
[522] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 269.
[523] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 56 note.
[524] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 28.
[525] See James Harrison Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 479.
[526] See _Ibid._, p. 491.
Chapter II • The Culture of the Seventies
It was in the seventies that good taste reached its lowest ebb. Not
only in America, but in England as well, where rebels like William
Morris were contemptuously rejecting a machine civilization. A
veritable _débâcle_ of the arts was in process, the lesser as well
as the greater, in New York and Boston as well as in Chicago and San
Francisco, from which literature could not wholly escape; and that
_débâcle_ was an expression of profound changes taking place at the
bases of society. The dignified culture of the eighteenth century,
that hitherto had been a conserving and creative influence throughout
the Jeffersonian revolution, was at last breaking up. The disruptive
forces that swept out of the great West, bringing the frontier spirit
to every threshold, and the factory economy that displaced the wares of
the craftsman with the products of the machine, were destroying that
earlier culture and providing no adequate substitute. Distinction of
manners and dress was gone, dignity and repose were gone, traditional
standards were gone; and in their stead a bumptious restlessness, a
straining for originality and individuality that exuded in a shoddy and
meaningless grotesque. It was not without justification that Godkin
contemptuously applied the phrase, “a chromo civilization,” to the
works of that singular generation dwelling between worlds, the one
dead, the other seeming powerless to be born.
How much was lost in the break-up of the excellent culture of the
eighteenth century the children of the seventies neither knew nor
cared. Generations of growth had gone to its shaping. It had been
formed by the needs of men and women conscious of the ties that linked
them with the past. It was bound back upon the rich cultural life of
medieval times, and in the aristocratic eighteenth century it had come
to flower in forms of fine distinction and dignity. Touch that century
on any side--dress, architecture, furniture, manners, letters--and
the same note of refinement, of grace, of balanced harmonious form,
is everywhere evident. The culture of the times of the Coffee House
Wits was all of a piece, held together by an inner pervasive unity.
The formality of the wig and the heroic couplet was symbolic of a
generation that loved dignity, and the refinement of the Chippendale
sideboard, wrought in slender Honduras mahogany, was the expression of
a society that cultivated the graces of life. But when the tie-wig and
smallclothes disappeared before the social revolutions of the end of
the century, when the gentleman was pushed from his place by the banker
and manufacturer, and broadcloth gave way to tweeds, the culture of the
eighteenth century was doomed; and until another culture should impose
its standards upon society and reëstablish an inner spiritual unity,
there would be only the welter of an unlovely transition.
In no other field is the sprawling formlessness of the seventies
more grotesquely suggested than in its architecture and in interior
decoration, which is a lesser form of architecture. Upon the buildings
of the times the hallmark of the Gilded Age is stamped in gaudy
colors. By the end of the thirties the fine traditions of colonial
craftsmanship were gone and the builders set forth on a foolish quest
for historical styles. Revivals followed on each other’s heels. The
Greek revival and the Gothic revival marked the successive decline of
the noble art of building, until at last, turning away from the past,
architecture erupted in what it conceived to be a new American style,
the expression of a free democratic people, but which later generations
reckon a sign and proof of cultural bankruptcy. It was the golden
age of the jig saw, of the brownstone front, of the veranda that ran
about the house like a spider web, of the mansard roof, the cupola,
the house of stilts. Flamboyant lines and meaningless detail destroyed
the structural unity of the whole; tawdry decoration supplanted beauty
of materials and a fine balance of masses. A stuffy and fussy riot of
fancy, restrained by no feeling for structural lines, supplied the lack
of creative imagination, and architecture sank to the level of the
jerry-builder. Bad taste could go no further.
With this decay of aristocratic culture and the attendant
disintegration of the earlier cultural unity, three diverse strands
of cultural impulse remained, each of an individual fabric that
could not easily be woven into a harmonious pattern: a decadent
Federalistic culture that occupied the seats of authority in New
England and wherever New England opinion was respected; the body of
social aspiration that had come from the French Enlightenment, from
which individual dreamers still drew nourishment; and the vigorous
individualism of the frontier that bit so deeply into the psychology
of the age. Behind these diverse impulses lay still another that would
eventually shoulder them aside and provide the pattern for the America
that was rising--the culture of an urbanized and mechanized society
that in its vast warrens of business was creating the psychology and
manners of a standardized, middle-class world of salesmanship.
I • New England in Decay
In one spot in America, at least, the disruption of the fine old
aristocratic culture would not be suffered without a protest. Brahmin
New England would cling to its traditional standards though all the
rest of America should go whoring after strange gods. The welter of the
seventies it looked upon with undisguised contempt. It would not follow
the way that other portions of the country were hastening. It would
have nothing to do with a bumptious frontier spirit that recognized no
obligations to the past--for the excellent reason that it had no past.
It had had its fill of the visionary Enlightenment that had come to
logical fruit in the vagaries of Thoreau and the grotesque vaporings
of Alcott. It had had more than its fill of the strident causes that
spawned like mushrooms in the rank soil of French romanticism. Emerson
it could forgive, for Emerson was a Brahmin, but it quietly ignored
his philosophic anarchism and chose to dwell on pleasanter aspects of
his teaching. Wendell Phillips it regarded as a common nuisance, but
Edmund Quincy it forgave, for after a season of vagrant wanderings he
returned to the placid ways of his ancestral Brahminism. Of all these
things, whether frontier or Utopian or what not, it had had enough,
and so it turned back lovingly to the culture of earlier times and
drew comfort from a dignified Federalism--enriched now by a mellow
Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer
and Cervantes and Shakespeare--a Federalism that fitted the dignified
Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.
It was an excellent heritage--that old culture. Never richly creative,
never endowed with a fleshly paganism, it possessed nevertheless a
solidity got from long wrestling with the eternities, a pleasantly
acrid flavor got from crotchety old books, and a sober morality got
from much contemplation of the sinfulness of the children of Adam. It
was as native to New England as Boston brown bread, and it issued in
self-respecting and dignified character. Underneath all transcendental
and other eruptions it had lain unmoved like the granite foundations
of the New England fields; and now after those eruptions had subsided
it provided the solid footing on which the later culture might rear
its chaste temples. But unhappily the building days of New England
were over. Matters were going ill there. Emigration to the West was
draining the vitality from farm and village, and in Boston disastrous
changes were under way. The familiar places where Sam Adams and Josiah
Quincy had dwelt with their fellows were being invaded by immigrants
who brought with them another faith and discordant manners. The Roman
Catholic church grew strong as the Old North declined; the Irish brogue
displaced the Yankee on Boston Common; Faneuil Hall was given over to
alien fishmongers. The Brahmin remnant was absorbed in banking and
brokerage and railway investments. It still held the Boston purse but
it was fast losing the Boston vote. The capital of the Puritan fathers
was being destroyed by the Industrial Revolution that their descendants
had set on foot. New England was visibly falling into decay and the
years of its intellectual leadership in America were numbered.
The days of high thinking were over and the familiar home of
humanitarian causes was inhabited by other tenants. All that remained
of the golden forties was the quiet atmosphere of good breeding.
Unitarianism, that Theodore Parker had kept open-minded and militant,
settled into a staid and respectable orthodoxy, its pale negations
sufficing to soothe its placid congregations. Transcendentalism, that
had thrown a lovely mist about the lean New England character, was
evaporating in the rising sun of science; and the ardor of reform, that
had burned fiercely in the Puritan heart, subsided into a well-bred
interest in negro schools and foreign missions. The Abolition leaders
laid aside their pens, convinced that the last injustice had been
removed from American society. Their work was done and they turned
unwilling ears to calls for new crusades. The New England conscience
was tired. It had borne the burden and heat of a long day and was glad
to be released from its cares to set up monuments to its sacred dead
and to write the chronicles of its past. New England lost interest in
ideas and turned away from creative intellectual life to catalogue
its libraries and revere the men who had written those libraries. The
Enlightenment was over in Boston and the stir of reform passed to New
York and the West, where Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
carried forward the great crusades for temperance and women’s rights,
and Henry George was preaching the gospel of a new social economics.
Whatever militants existed in New England were not likely to be
Brahmins and their labors did not roil the quiet waters. Clamorous
distractions no longer disturbed the calm of Federalistic culture, and
Cambridge and the Back Bay quietly appropriated the literary earnings
of Concord and lived pleasantly on its revenues.
The inevitable fruit of such thin soil was the genteel tradition, the
excellence of which in the seventies New England maintained in the
face of all frontier leveling and romantic liberalisms--a timid and
uncreative culture that lays its inhibitions on every generation that
is content to live upon the past. It was a penalty for backsliding.
The men of the preceding generation had got their cheeses made--and
excellent cheeses they were, with a fine native flavor. But the
transcendental cow had gone dry and with no fresh cows coming in the
Brahmins of the seventies were hard put to it to live an adequate
intellectual life. Translations and medieval scholarship were no better
than remainder biscuit after voyage. Ever since Lowell put away his
youthful radicalisms and turned bookman, Brahmin culture had been
undernourished. The story of intellectual New England after 1870 is
little more than a repetition of the story of New England after 1790--a
resurgence of the traditional Toryism that assumed an unquestioned
custodianship of all matters intellectual.
That was her own business, of course, and it would have been of no
great concern to the rest of the country if New England had not set
up a cultural dictatorship over American letters. It was not content
to follow its own path to sterility, but was bent on dragging the
country with it. Boston taste determined American literary standards,
and Boston taste rejected most of the new movements then getting
under way. Stoddard and Stedman in New York, Boker in Philadelphia,
and Aldrich in Boston, stoutly upheld the genteel tradition, of which
the _Atlantic Monthly_ was the authoritative spokesman. Great figures
from the past--Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Motley,
Parkman--still walked the streets of Boston, and their extraordinary
reputations were little less than tyrannous in the inhibitions they
laid on younger men. It is incomprehensible today, the authority of
these great reputations. Young William Winter walking twenty miles
to stand in the moonlight at Craigie House gate and view reverently
the silent walls within which the great Longfellow was sleeping; Mark
Twain in the fullness of his powers abashed and put out of countenance
at his temerity in speaking humorously of Emerson and Longfellow and
Holmes at the _Atlantic_ dinner--one understands such things with
difficulty now that those reputations have so much bated and dwindled.
Yet to the generation of the seventies the inhibitions of the genteel
tradition were all-powerful, and the little Boston group set themselves
up as a court of final jurisdiction over American letters. New England
parochialism had become a nation-wide nuisance.
The genteel tradition, as Professor Santayana has pointed out, had
long been a disease in New England. Some of the finest minds of the
Renaissance--Emerson and Hawthorne in particular--had suffered from
it; their mental processes “had all a certain starved and abstract
quality,” a lack of the rich paganism that endows life and art with
sensuous beauty.
They could not retail the genteel tradition [he goes on]; they were
too keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life
offered them little digestible material, nor were they naturally
voracious. They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they
were starved.... Therefore the genius of ... Hawthorne, and even
of Emerson, was employed in a sort of inner play, or digestion of
vacancy. It was a refined labor, but was in danger of being morbid,
or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender
echoes and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal
genius sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies
in comparison with what a real observer would have said in the
premises. Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own
persons they escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but
they supplied nothing to supplant it in other minds.[527]
If the thin pale atmosphere in which the genteel tradition throve
starved the minds of greater men in a more vigorous age, it would play
havoc with smaller men in an imitative age. After Emerson and Hawthorne
came Stedman and Stoddard and Aldrich, upon whose studiously correct
pages the genteel tradition laid a hand of death. In the seventies it
had become the refuge of a stale mentality, emptied of all ideals save
beauty, and that beauty become cold and anemic. Its taboos were no more
than cushions for tired or lazy minds. The idea of morality--with its
corollary of reticence--and the idea of excellence were well enough in
the abstract, but become empty conventions, cut off from reality, they
were little more than a refuge for respectability, a barricade against
the intrusion of the unpleasant. In compressing literature within
the rigid bounds of a genteel morality and a genteel excellence, New
England was in a way of falsifying it. Highways are easy traveling,
but the artist who will not venture from them misses much. In the
seventies and eighties the incurious Boston mentality missed pretty
much everything vital and significant in American life, and the more
daring children of Boston--men like Henry Adams and, shall we add,
Henry James--sought congenial atmosphere elsewhere.
1 • Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel
In the expansive days of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain the official
custodian of the genteel in letters was Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who
as editor of the _Atlantic_ from 1881 to 1890 sturdily combated all
literary leveling. Sitting in the high seat of Boston authority he
would countenance none of the “Josh Billingsgate” corruptions of
the English language that he professed to believe were sullying the
purity of American literary taste. A Portsmouth, New Hampshire, boy,
early transplanted to New York City, he lisped in numbers before he
learned to think. At the age of nineteen he published a volume of
poems entitled _The Bells, A Collection of Chimes_, the tintillations
of which were little more than faint echoes of Keats, Chatterton,
Tennyson, Poe, Bryant, Willis, and Longfellow; and to the end of his
life his state of ideal felicity was to be “loaded to the muzzle with
lyrics and sonnets” wherewith to do execution on all purveyors of
realism with its “miasmatic breath blown from the slums.” Transplanted
to Boston from the Bohemian world of Pfaff’s restaurant where Willis
held court, he settled down into the staid atmosphere of the Back
Bay with immense content. Though he was fond of calling himself only
Boston-plated he was soon as completely Bostonian as the Autocrat
himself. Intellectually and esthetically he had been Cambridge bred,
and the influence of Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes determined his
every literary endeavor. Like the returned prodigal he wandered no
more but was satisfied to feast on the dainties of Back Bay culture.
He immersed himself in the genteel. His one ambition as editor of the
_Atlantic_ was to keep it as Lowell wished it kept. To the end of his
life he remained completely insulated against the creative forces of
the times, and in the year that Stephen Crane was writing _Maggie_
he published _The Sisters’ Tragedy_. He would have been shocked by
_Maggie_, if he had read it, as a later generation wonders at _The
Sisters’ Tragedy_.
It is easy to see why Aldrich should have been taken to Boston’s
heart. His refined and delicate technique more than compensated for
an intellectual sterility that seems never to have been apparent to
his ardent admirers. Witty, charming in manners, in love with art
and devoted to a painstaking craftsmanship, he was a hollow reed
through which blew into flawless form the refinements of his world and
group. Good taste found nothing to offend in his scanty pages. If he
worshiped at the altar of beauty, beauty to him was always a chaste
goddess, severe and pale and slight. A blowsy goddess like Whitman’s,
or a slattern like Mark Twain’s, he would have none of. As a youthful
poet, to be sure, he sometimes hinted that she had red cheeks and
plump breasts and rounded limbs, but on his removal to Boston he
discovered that she was quite Beacon Street with her slender form and
modest reserve--no Greek but a lovely Puritan maiden; and the mature
Aldrich came to prefer her chaste reticence to the freer ways the
younger generation liked. They were destroying beauty--this younger
generation--with their vulgar realism, besmirching the goddess with
their vulgarities. In an interlude entitled “Realism” he gave voice to
the following pastoral lament:
Romance beside his unstrung lute
Lies stricken mute.
The old-time fire, the antique grace,
You will not find them anywhere.
To-day we breathe a commonplace,
Polemic, scientific air:
We strip Illusion of her veil;
We vivisect the nightingale
To probe the secret of his note.
The Muse in alien ways remote
Goes wandering.[528]
And in a dramatic monologue, quite evidently suggested by _The
Grammarian’s Funeral_, he voiced the following protest against an age
enslaved to realism:
A twilight poet, groping quite alone,
Belated, in a sphere where every nest
Is emptied of its music and its wings.
Not great his gift; yet we can poorly spare
Even his slight perfection in an age
Of limping triolets and tame rondeaux.
He had at least ideals, though unreached,
And heard, far off, immortal harmonies,
Such as fall coldly on our ear to-day.
The mighty Zolaistic Movement now
Engrosses us--a miasmatic breath
Blown from the slums. We paint life as it is,
The hideous side of it, with careful pains,
Making a god of the dull Commonplace.
For have we not the old gods overthrown
And set up strangest idols? We would clip
Imagination’s wing and kill delight,
Our sole art being to leave nothing out
That renders art offensive. Not for us
Madonnas leaning from their starry thrones
Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream
Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer
Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains
Take form and substance, thoughts that taint the air
And make all life unlovely. Will it last?
Beauty alone endures from age to age,
From age to age endures, handmaid of God.[529]
It was not the realists alone, he thought, who were fouling their own
nests, but all who turned aside from the narrow path of Victorianism
to explore new ways. Whitman he regarded as a charlatan whose
mannerisms were a “hollow affectation” representing “neither the
man nor the time.” Riley’s formal verse he preferred to his dialect
poems--“The English language is too rich and sacred a thing to be
mutilated and vulgarized,” he wrote, overlooking the _Biglow Papers_.
He held Kipling’s cockneyisms in contempt and said he would not have
opened the pages of the _Atlantic_ even to the “Recessional.” Lanier
he thought a less significant figure than Fitz-Greene Halleck, and
of Poe he remarked that if he “had been an exemplary, conventional,
tax-oppressed citizen, like Longfellow, his few poems, as striking as
they are, would not have made so great a stir.”[530] In such literary
judgments the arch-conservative is engaged in defending the genteel
tradition against every assault, convinced that the portals of creative
literature open into the past and that in following in the footsteps of
the dead we shall come upon a living world. The sterility of his own
refined craftsmanship is perhaps sufficient commentary upon his faith.
When in later years he turned to prose his work revealed the same
negative qualities. His prose style is finished, clean, and thin,
wanting in homely idiom and a rich suggestiveness. The water trickled
gently from the spring of his invention, cool and unroiled, but never
abundant. The dignity that results from a strong nature held in
restraint, he never achieved. There were no depths in him. He waited
patiently for his vessel to fill and measured it out carefully. As a
short-story writer he gained a surprising repute, and admirers like
Sarah Orne Jewett were never tired of praising the sprightliness of his
humor. Nevertheless his most celebrated story scarcely explains today
the immense stir it made. _Marjorie Daw_ is a clever _jeu d’esprit_ but
a bit thin and artificial, too consciously written backwards from its
surprise ending. Other distillings of his wit and wisdom, done in the
sententious manner and gathered up in _Ponkapog Papers_, are slight in
content, and the effervescence is long since gone out of them. _The
Story of a Bad Boy_, with its pleasant recollections of his Portsmouth
youth, remains his most important work in prose and deserves much
of the praise that has been lavished upon it; but set over against
_Huckleberry Finn_ its shortcomings are evident.
It is absurd, of course, to expect an aesthete to concern himself with
ideas, or to care greatly about what goes on outside his ivory tower.
The rumblings of the vulgar world beat ineffectually against the gate
behind which he sits and dreams. For years the editor of the _Atlantic_
was scarcely conscious of his complete aloofness from the world of
reality, and he wrote in some surprise to Hamilton Wright Mabie, in
1897:
I like to have you say that I have always cared more for the
integrity of my work than for any chance popularity. And what
you say of my “aloofness” as being “due in part to a lack of
quick sympathies with contemporary experience” (though I had
never before thought of it) shows true insight. To be sure,
such verse as “Elmwood,” “Wendell Phillips,” “Unguarded Gates”
and the “Shaw Memorial Ode” would seem somewhat to condition
the statement; but the mood of these poems is not habitual with
me, not characteristic. They did, however, grow out of strong
conviction.[531]
Yet though he spoke rarely on social themes, during the long years
in Boston most of the Back Bay prejudices seemed to have seeped into
his mind and when the “strong convictions,” to which he refers, found
utterance they proved to be Brahmin convictions. In the vigorous poem
“Unguarded Gates”--a poem tense, outspoken, almost unique in its
deliberate declamation--he sallied forth from his ivory tower to speak
to the American people on the dangers of uncontrolled immigration, a
subject that Boston Brahmins had been talking about since the days of
Harrison Gray Otis.
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng--
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures from the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.[532]
What emotions lay back of the measured words of the poem, and how
deeply they were colored by the social passions of the times, he tells
in a letter to George E. Woodberry, written May 14, 1892:
I went home and wrote a misanthropic poem called “Unguarded
Gates” ... in which I mildly protest against America becoming the
cesspool of Europe. I’m much too late, however. I looked in on an
anarchist meeting the other night ... and heard such things spoken
by our “feller citizens” as made my cheek burn. These brutes are
the spawn and natural result of the French Revolution; they don’t
want any government at all, they “want the earth” ... and chaos.
My Americanism goes clean beyond yours. I believe in America for
the Americans; I believe in the widest freedom and the narrowest
license, and I hold that jail-birds, professional murderers,
amateur lepers ... and human gorillas generally should be closely
questioned at our Gates. Or the “sifting” that was done of old will
have to be done over again.... A certain Arabian writer, called
Rudyard Kipling, described exactly the government of every city and
town in the ... United States when he described that of New York
as being “a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien,
tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk!”[533]
Two years later he again gave private expression to one of his rare
judgments on matters political and social:
When not otherwise engaged I sit and smoke, and smile at the
present administration [President Cleveland’s].... The best kind
of Democracy (as per sample) is no better than the worst kind
of Republicanism. The Income Tax is the deformed child of Coxey
and his brother scalawags. I vote for McKinley. We shall have
bloody work in this country some of these days, when the lazy
_canaille_ get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and
Fouquier-Tinville. In about twenty years we shall bring out an
American edition (illustrated with cuts) of the beautiful French
Revolution.[534]
And again in 1899:
Personally I must confess that I have never been very deeply
impressed by the administrative abilities of what we call the lower
classes. The Reign of Terror in France is a fair illustration of
the kind of government which the masses give us when they get the
happy opportunity.[535]
The literary conservative, it appears, was no better than a social
and political Tory. He has traveled back a hundred years and speaks
again the very language of Robert Treat Paine. _Canaille_ is not a
nice word to apply to American workingmen, and the French Revolution
has never been well thought of by the children of the _ancien régime_.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a cultivated gentleman, on the pleasantest
terms with the Muse of Beacon Street. Twice he traveled around the
world; innumerable summers he spent in Europe; yet of many things that
concern men greatly he was very, very ignorant. Of the American people
beyond the Hudson River, he knew nothing. Of social economics he knew
nothing. Fearful lest his art should get a smutch from the streets, he
withdrew within his tower, where perhaps it is well to leave him. Yet
it is odd to recall that he was once regarded as a significant literary
figure and that intelligent people listened to him seriously.
2 • The New England Scene
In fields less distinguished than poetry and the essay the sway of
the genteel was neither so magisterial nor so repressive. As fiction
somewhat tardily encroached upon the older literary preserves of New
England it brought with it a fresher and more realistic spirit that
was eventually to deny the validity of the traditional standards. The
group of fiction writers that arose in the seventies and eighties to
chronicle the life of New England, was greatly concerned with the decay
of the old New England world, and with the causes of that decay. As it
set down with loving fidelity the characteristics of an earlier order
it could not fail to consider the unloveliness of the new world that
was rising on the decay of the old--the alien industrial towns with
their polyglot workers that were flourishing as the native villages
and quiet countryside declined. New England fiction, therefore, came
to embody two main features, chronicle and criticism. It gathered up
such picturesque bits of the past as time and change had left, and it
questioned with some anxiety the ways of an industrialism that was
destroying what it loved. It was not Boston fiction, but up-country
fiction, given to exploring quiet villages and decaying towns; and in
both its chronicles and its criticisms the spirit of realism became
more searching as the years passed.
In its own fashion such fiction would finally be brought into service
to the social conscience and issue as sociological studies. As the
evils of sweated labor under the factory system were brought home to
the common knowledge, one would suppose that New England would have
been the first to conscript the novel to arouse the public conscience.
There had been anxious discussion amongst the Concord intellectuals
on the evils of industrialism, and in the early forties the talk had
turned upon associationism as the likeliest cure; but though from such
discussions came Brook Farm and other Utopian ventures, no fiction
resulted. It was elsewhere, in the Pennsylvania iron district where
exploitation was harsher and more brutal than in the textile mills,
that fiction first turned to consider the ways of industrialism. In
1861 Rebecca Harding contributed to the _Atlantic_ a story entitled
“Life in the Iron Mills,” that was stark and fierce in its drab
realism.[536] Nevertheless ten years were to pass before Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps published _The Silent Partner_ (1871), a dithyrambic plea
for justice for the mill-hands.
If this was not the first New England novel of industrialism it was
certainly one of the earliest. In conception, temper, and technique it
belongs to the emotional fifties, and is almost primitive in comparison
with Rebecca Harding’s work. Underlain with religion, it is sticky
with sentiment. Although Miss Phelps professed to base her work on
the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, to
which she says she was “deeply in debt for the ribs” of her story,
the result is more a tract than a study. There is no realistic grasp
of the materials. She was grieved that the mill-masters should reveal
so little Christian understanding of the hard lot of the hands and
so little sympathy with their poverty. “I believe,” she said, “that
a wide-spread ignorance exists among us regarding the abuses of our
factory system, more especially, but not exclusively, as exhibited in
many of the country mills.” “Had Christian ingenuity been generally
synonymous with the conduct of manufacturing corporations, I should
have found no occasion for the writing of this book.”[537] It was to
lessen such ignorance and encourage Christian sympathy between the
classes that she offered her study.
The book is a closet study done with more unction than skill. It is the
work of an emotional woman who lived in a world of sentiment rather
than reality. Miss Phelps was an Andover Brahmin, highly sensitive,
whose deeply religious nature was ruffled by every vagrant wind. She
was tremulous in her eager desire to lessen the injustice of men. _The
Silent Partner_ is a story of a young woman brought up in luxury,
daughter of a manufacturer, who on her father’s death wishes to join in
the management of the factory, but on being politely rejected by her
partners she engages in personnel work amongst her employees. There she
comes upon poverty as a sordid fact, and that discovery works a moral
change in her life. She is overwhelmed by it and cannot understand why
the conscience of the world is not overwhelmed. “Sometimes I do not
see,” she exclaimed, “what else there can _be_ to talk about in such a
world as this! I’ve stepped into it, as we have stepped out into this
storm. It has wrapped me in....”[538] Of the complexity of the problem
she is wholly ignorant. Surely there must be some road that leads to
justice--justice based on understanding and Christian kindliness; and
the working girl whom she singles out for heroine becomes in the end
a street preacher to the textile workers, after refusing to marry and
bring children into a world of factory toil. _The Silent Partner_ is an
emotional Puritan document that was out of date when it came from the
press.
While Miss Phelps was thus summoning the New England conscience to
cleanse the textile mills, her Brahmin sisters were little inclined
to engage in such thankless labors, but preferred to gather up and
preserve such fragments of the homely traditional New England as
had not been swept away in the engulfing stream of industrialism.
Female writers, from the days of Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Morton, had
long been busy in New England but never had they written so well or
so understandingly as in the days of the New England decline. Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford,
Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown were not
great writers, but they essayed to be faithful recorders of what came
under their eyes. It was the earlier New England that quickened their
imaginations, the rugged Yankee character that had taken form under
a homely domestic economy. They had no liking for the New England
that was rising in the shadow of the mills; the cleavages of race and
religion that were sundering the old homogeneous society were bitterly
distasteful to them. The Irish, the French-Canadians, the masses of
raw immigrants that were swept into the hoppers of the mills, were
unwelcome gobbets to the Brahmin stomach. And so these recorders of the
New England decline turned away from the sordid industrial scene, and
it was not till thirty years later that Mary Wilkins Freeman, in _The
Portion of Labor_ (1901), essayed to do more adequately what Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps had first sketched.
From Catherine Sedgwick to Mrs. Freeman the note shifted from the
moralistic to the sentimental, then to the idyllic, then to the
realistic; and the successive changes are sufficiently marked by three
writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins
Freeman. Seeking their materials remote from Boston, amidst the old
native stock pottering through the traditional round of life, they
discovered a world of angular figures that had grown knotty and gnarly
from a harsh climate and a meager soil. The stoic repressions that were
a heritage from Puritan ancestors had bred a hard race that any twist
of circumstance was likely to turn into grotesques. Calvinists have
always at hand a providential justification of any freakish outcome to
men’s struggles, and in piously denying freedom of the will they often
put the seal of God’s approval on their own willfulness. Mrs. Freeman’s
_Pembroke_ is not unlike _Winesburg, Ohio_, as a record of abortive
lives; and Sarah Orne Jewett, in spite of a Brahmin temperament that
chose to see the idyllic rather than the grotesque, could not overlook
what New England provided so abundantly. In _A Country Doctor_ a
visitor in the village of Oldsfield thus analyzed the New England
character:
... for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity,
New England cannot be matched the world over. It’s like the regions
in Iceland that are full of geysers. I don’t know whether it is
the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old
countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances
of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and
uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own
conservation and accumulation of force. By and by you will all be
blown up,--you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, and
have let off your superfluous wickedness like blizzards; and when
the blizzards of each family have spent themselves you will grow
dull and sober, and all on a level, and be free from the troubles
of a transition state. Now, you’re neither a new country nor an
old one. You ought to see something of the older civilizations
to understand what peace of mind is. Unless some importation of
explosive material from the westward stirs them up, one century is
made the pattern for the next.[539]
They deal wholly with the past--these chronicles of a decaying New
England--concerning themselves with a “primitive and Biblical people”
who dwelt in quiet inland towns or about the lonely shores of the Maine
coast; yet always under the shadow of the meeting-house, with few
defenses betwixt them and the eternities. The age had traveled far
beyond them and they were left pottering about in their narrow Hebraic
world, unaware that science and industrialism were undermining the
foundations on which village and meeting-house rested. “In that handful
of houses,” said old Captain Littlepage in _The Country of the Pointed
Firs_, “they fancy that they comprehend the universe.” But if they
understood God’s plan of redemption they knew nothing of the ways of
capitalism. A certain romantic quaintness colors the realism of these
country tales and imparts a note of the idyllic. Harriet Beecher Stowe
first discovered the literary possibilities of decaying New England,
and in _Old-Town Folks_, _Poganuc People_, and _The Minister’s Wooing_,
she turned back to the days of its prime and sketched the scene with
a loving hand. But it was rather in _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_,
especially the first part before the heavy moralism that was always
entrapping her art had closed upon the tale, that she revealed its
possibilities to later writers. In a letter of July 5, 1889, Sarah Orne
Jewett suggests the source of her own more finished work:
I have been reading the beginning of _The Pearl of Orr’s Island_
and finding it just as clear and perfectly original and strong as
it seemed to me in my thirteenth or fourteenth year, when I read it
first. I never shall forget the exquisite flavor and reality that
it gave me.... It is classical--historical--anything you like to
say, if you can give it high praise enough.[540]
But Miss Jewett desired a more adequate realism and so she turned
curiously to consider the technique of the great continental realists
of the eighties. She read Zola and Flaubert, Tolstoi and Turgenev, and
oddly enough was persuaded that she had long been trying to do what
Tolstoi was doing. In a letter of 1888 she wrote:
That story of Tolstoi’s was such an excitement that I did not sleep
until almost morning. What a wonderful thing it is!... It startled
me because I was dimly feeling the same kind of motive (not the
same plan) in writing the “Gray Man.”... I have felt something of
what Tolstoi has been doing all the way along. I can tell you half
a dozen stories where I tried to say it, “Lady Terry,” “Beyond the
Toll-Gate,” and this “Gray Man.” Now and then it came clearer to
me. I never felt the soul of Tolstoi’s work until last night ...
but now I know what he means, and I know that I can dare to keep at
the work I sometimes have despaired about....[541]
Yet to later readers the tie that drew her to Tolstoi seems the
thinnest of gossamers. The roots of her character--and of her art--went
down too deep into Brahmin soil, she was too completely under the
critical sway of Lowell and Fields and Aldrich, for her to turn
naturalist. Her realism--if one may use the word--was as dainty and
refined as her own manners--bleached out to a fine maidenly purity.
In _The Country of the Pointed Firs_--a story that Willa Cather would
destine for immortality in the select company of _Huckleberry Finn_
and _The Scarlet Letter_--she discovers an innate gentility, or at
least gentleness, in the simple fisherfolk of the Maine village, and
she suggests as its source a primitive environment supplemented by
an encompassing religion. Nowhere does she paint in the smutch of
vulgarity, for in these eddies of New England life she discovers no
vulgarity either of mind or manners. But in the cities it is different.
There she found evidence in plenty of what she called the “cheap side
of life,” and she attributed it to the increasing material well-being
of the country. Of the new middle class she held a low opinion--
Their grandparents or even their own parents went hungry and ill
clothed, and it will take some time for these people to have their
fling, to eat all they want and to wear fine raiment, and flaunt
authority. They must get to a state, and by slow stages too, where
there is going to be something fit for education.... The trouble is
to us old-fashioned New Englanders that “the cheap streak” so often
spoils what there is of good inheritance, and the wrong side of our
great material prosperity is seen almost everywhere.[542]
There spoke the Brahmin. That this “cheap streak” should have spread
so far through American life, that the vulgar middle class should have
taken over the rule of the country, gave her concern. To one brought
up on Carlyle and Lowell and Arnold the ways of the plutocracy were
abhorrent, and she clung the more tenaciously to the land of her
memories, where the gentry ruled, where the plain people respected
themselves and their betters, and where vulgar display was unknown. “I
think as Mr. Arnold does,” she wrote in 1884, “and as Mr. Lowell did,
that the mistake of our time is in being governed by the ignorant mass
of opinion, instead of by thinkers and men who know something.”[543]
Though she disliked and distrusted the America that was submerging
the old landmarks, she was as ignorant as her Maine fisherfolk of the
social forces that were blotting out the world of her fathers, and
she clung with pathetic futility to such fragments of the old order
as remained. Like Lowell in his later years her heart was given to a
Brahmin democracy where gentlemen ruled and where “the best traditions
of culture and manners, from some divine inborn instinct toward what is
simplest and purest,” were held in universal respect.
What Miss Jewett with her love of the idyllic did not see--the grim and
stark ugliness that resulted from the long Puritan repression--Mary
Wilkins Freeman was to make the very warp of her work. She did not come
of Brahmin stock. Bred up in the narrow village world of New England,
she was a part of that world and she knew it as Miss Jewett could not.
The decay of a social order was all about her in her youth. The more
ambitious were drifting to the cities or to the new West, and those
who remained were deeply marked by the constricting round of duties.
Catastrophe seems always to be lying in wait for the characters that
fill her meager pages. They are either timid and querulous, or fiercely
“sot,” yet in either case happiness has a way of slipping through their
fingers. There was too little of the wine of paganism in their veins
for them to enjoy what life offers. They held themselves in with too
tight a rein. The New England conventions were always building higher
the dams of their emotions until they broke and the roily waters
rushed out in a wasting flood. Potential disaster peeps out of every
page of her stories. _Pembroke_ is an extraordinary collection of
mean and petty and tragic lives, besotted with stubborn willfulness,
without grace or comeliness, extracting no pleasant flavors from the
crushed grapes of life. In that narrow world daily existence demands an
unending struggle and the pinching meanness breeds miserly instincts
and dour ways. _A Humble Romance_ is a stark bit of sordid futility,
and in many another of her short stories Mrs. Freeman etched in the
familiar scene with a mordant pen. Drawn with realistic strokes the
picture of New England in decay is not so lovely as Miss Jewett found
it to be.
Realizing poignantly what was happening in the home of Puritanism, Mrs.
Freeman turned eventually to deal with the problem of industrialism
that was subduing New England to its will. _The Portion of Labor_
picks up the theme where it had been dropped a generation before by
Miss Phelps, and attempts in realistic manner to portray the life of
the New England villager in the shoe factory. It is a tract rather
than a story, and it finds no difficulty in reconciling industrialism
with morality. It revives the old Puritan ethics of work--preached by
Richard Baxter to his Kidderminster weavers two hundred and fifty years
before; it discovers in discipline of character the great end of life;
and it accepts the factory as a necessary instrument of civilization.
It is the Cinderella story of a village girl who, refusing a chance to
be sent to Vassar, enters a shoe factory, becomes a proletarian leader,
engineers a strike, gains a wider vision of the function of labor,
accepts the principle of exploitation, and is rewarded by marriage into
the exploiting class. In her girlhood she was a radical in an untaught
way, and from her valedictory essay at the High School Commencement to
her organization of the factory workers she boldly attacked the factory
owners. With the machine itself she had no quarrel. This is how she
felt when she took her place for the first time in the mill:
Scared she was not; she was fairly exultant. All at once she
entered a vast room in which eager men were already at the machines
with frantic zeal, as if they were driving labor herself. When she
felt the vibration of the floor under her feet, when she saw people
spring to their stations of toil, as if springing to guns in a
battle, she realized the might and grandeur of it all. Suddenly it
seemed to her that the greatest thing in the whole world was work
and that this was one of the greatest forms of work--to cover the
feet of progress of the travellers of the earth from the cradle to
the grave. She saw that these great factories, and the strength
of this army of the sons and daughters of toil, made possible the
advance of civilization itself, which cannot go barefoot. She
realized all at once and forever the dignity of labor, this girl of
the people, with a brain which enabled her to overlook the heads
of the rank and file of which she herself formed a part. She never
again, whatever her regret might have been for another life for
which she was better fitted, which her taste preferred, had any
sense of ignominy in this. She never again felt that she was too
good for her labor, for labor had revealed itself to her like a
goddess behind a sordid veil.[544]
Nevertheless she is ready to fight for control of the machine--for a
return to the workers of a larger share of their earnings; but when the
strike fails and she contemplates the misery that it has spread amongst
the workers, she recants:
Her youthful enthusiasm carried her like a leaping-pole to
conclusions beyond her years. “I wonder,” she said to herself,
“if, after all, this inequality of possessions is not a part of
the system of creation, if the righting of them is not beyond the
flaming sword of the Garden of Eden? I wonder if the one who tries
to right them forcibly is not meddling, and usurping the part of
the Creator, and bringing down wrath and confusion not only upon
his own head, but upon the heads of others? I wonder if it is wise,
in order to establish a principle, to make those who have no voice
in the matter suffer for it--the helpless women and children?”...
She reflected, as she had so many times before, that the world was
very old--thousands of years old--and inequality was as old as
the world. Might it not even be a condition of its existence, the
shifting of weights which kept it to its path in the scheme of the
universe?[545]
Mrs. Freeman wisely chose a girl in her teens as the leader in a fierce
labor battle, for Mrs. Freeman’s own thinking on social questions was
still in its teens. She had the warmest sympathy for the exploited
poor; her conscience was as tender as Miss Phelps’s; but her inadequate
knowledge of economics served her ill. If economic inequality is
necessary to keep the world from flying from its orbit, it serves the
purpose likewise of character development. When an old factory-hand
looks back upon a long life of futile labor he thus philosophizes:
Andrew quoted again from the old King of Wisdom--“I withheld not
my heart from any joy, for my heart rejoices in all my labor, and
that was my portion of labor.” Then Andrew thought ... of all the
toilsome lives of those beside him, of all the work which they had
done with their poor, knotted hands, of the tracks which they had
worn on the earth towards their graves, with their weary feet, and
suddenly he seemed to grasp a new and further meaning for that
verse of Ecclesiastes.
He seemed to see that labor is not alone for itself, nor for what
it accomplishes of the tasks of the world, not for its equivalent
in silver and gold, not even for the end of human happiness and
love, but for the growth in character of the laborer.
“That is the portion of labor,” he said.[546]
So the book ends on a Hebraic note. In 1901 when Mrs. Freeman wrote
_The Portion of Labor_ the psychology of work had been pretty well
explored. For years William Morris had been preaching a very different
doctrine, pagan rather than Hebraic, yet Mrs. Freeman seems to have
been acquainted with Morris no more than was Ellen Brewster, her
girlish heroine. Even the starkest New England realism was not very
critical of the industrialism that was destroying the traditional New
England. A cynical reader might perhaps suggest that the explanation
is to be found in the fact that the Yankee was profiting enormously
from this fouling of the Puritan nest.
II • The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman
If the philosophy of the Enlightenment was fast disintegrating in the
America of 1870, it still numbered its picturesque followers who sought
to leaven the age with the social spirit of an earlier generation. It
was a noble bequest--this gift of the French thinkers--with its passion
for liberty, its faith in man, its democratic program. From that great
reservoir had come pretty much all that was generously idealistic
and humanitarian in the life of the two preceding generations. Its
persuasive idealism had woven itself so closely into the fabric of
national thought that our fathers had come to believe that America
was dedicated in a very special sense to the principles of a free
society. The democratic movement returned to it constantly to refresh
its strength and take new bearings. At every great crisis the familiar
pronouncement of the Declaration of Independence had been confidently
appealed to in furtherance of social justice. And now in the days
of an acquisitive individualism, when idealism was begging alms in
the market-place, it still threw flashes of romantic splendor on
the crude American scene. Old Peter Cooper still dreamed his dreams
of social justice after eighty years had passed over his head; and
Thaddeus Stevens, grown crabbed and surly from bitter struggles, mutely
testified to his passionate equalitarianism on the day of his burial.
But it was Walt Whitman in his den at Camden--culturally and in the
things of the spirit countless leagues removed from Boston--who was the
completest embodiment of the Enlightenment--the poet and prophet of a
democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying.
In his somewhat truculent pose of democratic undress Whitman was a
singular figure for a poet, and especially an American poet. The
amplitude and frankness and sincerity of his rich nature were an
affront to every polite convention of the day. Endowed with abundant
sensuousness and catholic sympathies, he took impressions as sharply as
wax from the etcher’s hand; and those impressions he transcribed with
the careful impartiality of the modern expressionist. His sensitive
reactions to experience were emotional rather than intellectual. A
pagan, a romantic, a transcendentalist, a mystic--a child of the
Enlightenment yet heeding the lessons of science and regarding
himself as a realist who honored the physical as the repository of
the spiritual--to an amazing degree he was an unconscious embodiment
of American aspiration in the days when the romantic revolution was
at flood tide. His buoyant nature floated easily on the turbulent
stream of national being, and his songs were defiant chants in praise
of life--strong, abundant, procreative--flowing through the veins of
America.
Oracular and discursive, Whitman lived and moved in a world of sensuous
imagery. His imagination was Gothic in its vast reaches. Thronging
troops of pictures passed before him, vivid, vital, transcripts
of reality, the sharp impress of some experience or fleeting
observation--his own and no one’s else, and therefore authentic.
Delighting in the cosmos he saw reflecting its myriad phases in
the mirror of his own ego, he sank into experience joyously like a
strong swimmer idling in the salt waves. Borne up by the caressing
waters, repressing nothing, rejecting nothing, he found life good in
all its manifestations. As an Emersonian he was content to receive
his sanctions from within, and as he yielded to the stimulus of the
environing present his imagination expanded, his spirits rose to
earth’s jubilee, his speech fell into lyric cadences, and from the
exalted abandon of egoistic experience there issued a strong rich note
of the universal. His like had not before appeared in our literature
for the reason that the childlike pagan had not before appeared.
Emerson with his serene intelligence almost disencumbered of the flesh,
and Hawthorne with his dessicating skepticisms that left him afraid
of sex, were the fruits of a Hebraized culture that Puritan America
understood; but Walt Whitman the caresser of life, the lover who found
no sweeter fat than stuck to his own bones, was incomprehensible, and
not being understood, it was inevitable that he should be inexorably
damned. The most deeply religious soul that American literature knows,
the friend and lover of all the world, the poet of the democratic ideal
to which, presumably, America was dedicated, Whitman was flung into
outer darkness by the moral custodians of an age that knew morality
only from the precepts of the fathers.
The early stages of Whitman’s intellectual development are obscure,
but that in his twenties he caught most of the infections of the
times, literary, political, and social, is clear enough. The young
printer-editor in frock coat and tall hat, with cane and boutonnière,
who often joined the Bohemian society at Pfaff’s restaurant, was a
callow romantic, practicing the conventional literary arts of the time,
writing formal verse, spinning romantic tales,[547] and seeking to
approve himself a reputable littérateur. But the passion of reform was
already stirring within him and a succession of causes--temperance,
anti-capital-punishment, abolitionism--recruited his pen. As a child
of Manhattan and of the Jacksonian revolution it was inevitable that
his first great passion should have been political, and when in the
late forties he found a suitable vehicle of expression in the _Brooklyn
Eagle_, his native Jeffersonianism took stock of current political
programs. His political master was the radical equalitarian William
Leggett--whose praises in after life he never stinted--and from Leggett
and the _Evening Post_, supplemented by Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and
other disreputable influences, he seems to have got the first clear
expression of the sweeping democratic postulates on which later he
was to erect his philosophy. The times were stirring everywhere with
revolution and on Manhattan Island Locofocoism, with the newfangled
matches, ten years before had started its little local bonfire by way
of preparation for a general conflagration that should consume the
accumulated mass of wrong and injustice. The ardent young Whitman was
deeply infected with Locofoco enthusiasm and his editorials for the
_Eagle_ were the pronouncements of an extreme left-wing Democrat, as
became a disciple of Leggett.
In this early phase of his democracy he fixed his hopes on the
great West where, he believed, a freer and more democratic America
was taking shape. He was an expansionist, full of ardent hopes, an
apostle of “manifest destiny.” In such lesser matters as finance and
governmental subsidies he was a good Jacksonian, following Old Bullion
Benton in his preference for hard money and dislike of shin-plasters.
He was opposed to the bankers and monopolists. He called himself a
“free-trader by instinct,” and so late as 1888 he said, “I object to
the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian--because it is a
damnable imposition upon the masses.”[548] But these lesser things were
inconsequential in comparison with the great objective towards which
America was moving--the ever-widening freedom of men in society. “There
must be,” he wrote in those early years, “continual additions to our
great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.”[549] On that
grand theme he was never tired of speaking. With Tom Paine he believed
that just government was a simple thing, fitted to the capacity of many
heads; it is made complex to hide its dishonesty. After commenting on
the “once derided, but now widely worshipped doctrines which Jefferson
and the glorious Leggett promulgated,” he went on:
... this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is
enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in
government: _to make no more laws than those useful for preventing
a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men_.
And again:
There is not a greater fallacy on earth than the doctrine of
_force_, as applied in government.... Sensible men have long seen
that the best government is that which governs least.[550]
Such comments, of course, are only familiar echoes of the
Enlightenment--echoes that run through all the thinking of the
naturistic school, from Godwin and Paine to Channing and Emerson and
Thoreau. In the minds of the children of the Enlightenment the creative
ideal of individualism was always pointing toward the ultimate end
of philosophic anarchism, and Whitman with his assured faith in the
average man accepted the Godwinian political theory as naturally as
did Thoreau. What other politics, indeed, was possible for those who
built upon the postulates of the innate excellence of human nature
and the measureless potentialities of men when vicious social codes
have been swept away and the plastic clay is molded by a kindly
environment? The perfectibility of man was no romantic dream to the
disciples of the French school, but a sober statement of sociological
fact, based on a rationalistic psychology; and Whitman was convinced
that he was a competent realist in thus envisaging the social problem.
If man’s instincts are trustworthy, what justification is there for
narrow repressions laid on his freedom? Hitherto those repressions
have only maimed and distorted him, encouraging his baser rather than
his better impulses; and before he can realize his potentialities he
must put away all external compulsions and learn to rely solely upon
himself. Hence the immediate objective of the democratic revolution was
individual freedom, the breaking of all chains, to the end that free
men may create a society worthy of them.
So it was as a revolutionary that Whitman began his work; and a
revolutionary he remained to the end, although in his last years he
chose to call himself an evolutionist. A born rebel, he was always
preaching the gospel of rebellion. “I am a radical of radicals,” he
said late in life, “but I don’t belong to any school.”[551] It was this
revolutionary spirit that made him the friend of all rebellious souls
past and present. “My heart is with all you rebels--all of you, today,
always, wherever: your flag is my flag,”[552] he said to a Russian
anarchist; and it was this sympathy that enabled him to understand
Fanny Wright and Tom Paine and Priestley, who “have never had justice
done them.”[553] “The future belongs to the radical,” and so _Leaves of
Grass_--he says in “Starting from Paumanok”--“beat the gong of revolt.”
Conventional law and order he frankly despised and those individuals
who sought their own law and followed it awoke his admiration.
Thoreau’s “lawlessness” delighted him--“his going his own absolute
road let hell blaze all it chooses.” It is a coward and a poltroon who
accepts his law from others--as true of communities as it is true of
individuals. He was a good Jeffersonian in his fear of Federalistic
consolidation that must put an end to local rights and freedoms.
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States,
_Resist much, obey little_,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
... no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes
its liberty.[554]
I am for those that have never been master’d,
For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,
For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.[555]
This is the spirit of the radical forties when men were prone to
repudiate their allegiance to the political state; when left-wing
Abolitionists were dissolving the Union by resolutions; and
transcendentalists were proclaiming the doctrine of nullification of
unrighteous law. It had come out of the Jacksonian upheaval, but it
was daily discovering fresh sanctions as the anarchistic premises of
the Enlightenment were more adequately explored and the revolutionary
spirit of Europe broke in upon America. During these turbulent years
Whitman’s great plan was in gestation, but before _Leaves of Grass_
came to print in the first slender edition of 1855 other influences had
been at work, confirming his earlier views, endowing them with lyric
passion and expanding them into a grandiose whole. Those influences
would seem to have been the fervid emotionalism of the fifties, the
monistic idealism of the transcendental school, and the emerging
scientific movement. On the whole perhaps it was the first, with its
vague and expansive Utopianism, that bit most deeply, stimulating his
rich pagan nature to unconventional frankness and encouraging him to
throw off the inhibitions of a Puritan ethicism that held American
thought in narrow bondage. The rude and ample liberalisms that so
shocked his early readers were in no sense peculiar to Whitman, despite
common opinion, but the expression of the surging emotionalism of the
times, and _Leaves of Grass_, can best be understood by setting its
frank paganism against the background of the lush fifties.
* * * * *
With its Calvinistic antecedents--Scotch-Irish and Huguenot as well
as New England Puritan--America had always been unfriendly to a
pagan evaluation of man’s duties and destiny, and the revolutionary
movement of the forties had been kept within sober ethical bounds.
John Humphrey Noyes was probably the most radical American of the
times, yet the Perfectionism of his earlier years, with its ascetic
religiosity, bore little resemblance to the later communism of the
Oneida Community. But the liberalism of the fifties was casting off all
Hebraic restraints and running wild, proclaiming a new heaven about to
appear on the free continent of America, and bidding the youth of the
land live joyously as children of the earth. Paganism for the first
time lifted up its head and surveyed the American scene--a youthful
paganism, lusty and vigorous, that suggested amazing applications of
the respectable doctrines of freedom and individuality, to the scandal
of older-fashioned folk. From the free spaces of the West, carried on
the tide of the Gold Rush, had come a spontaneous reaction from the
earlier repressions. Liberalism was passing from the political to the
social--a free welling-up of repressed desires, a vast expansiveness.
Too long had the natural human emotions been under the ban of
asceticism; too long had a God of wrath dispossessed a God of love.
Life is good in the measure that it is lived fully, and to live fully
is to live in the flesh as well as the spirit. Emerson the prophet of
the earlier decade had suffered from an extreme unfleshliness; Whitman
the prophet of the fifties would recover the balance. As the current of
emotionalism gathered force a frank _joie de vivre_ submerged the old
reticences; candor, frankness, a very lust of self-expression, was the
new law for free men and women--a glorification of the physical that
put to rout the traditional Hebraisms. A riotous sentimentalism ran
about the land until it seemed to timid souls as if liberty were quite
running away with decency. Freedom for black slaves was one thing,
but freedom for women--the loosening of social convention--suggested
terrifying eventualities like free love and the disruption of the
family. They would countenance no such immoral freedom and under the
leadership of young Anthony Comstock the forces of reticence and
respectability made ready to do battle with the new liberalisms.
It was not alone Walt Whitman who threw down the gage to the
Comstockian watchmen in the gates. The apostle of the new freedom,
the high priest of emotional liberalism, was Henry Ward Beecher,
lately come out of the West, who from the pulpit of Plymouth Church
swept his thousands of idolizing followers along the path of Utopian
emotionalism. With a rich amplitude and golden vagueness of metaphor
he preached the new gospel. From his lips flowed a lyric chant, a vast
paean, a very shout in praise of liberty and love, of godlike man and
a manlike God. “Life--affirmative, immediate, in a highly ornamented
Mayday world--he acknowledged and commemorated life!”[556] He bathed
in a “perpetual tropical luxuriance of blessed love.” “I never knew
how to worship until I knew how to love,” he cried; “and to love I
must have something ... that touching my heart, shall not leave the
chill of ice but the warmth of summer.” Like a good Emersonian he
discarded reason--the discipline of the ancestral Calvinism--to follow
the “secret chords of feeling,” the “heart’s instincts, whose channels
you may appoint but whose flowing is beyond control.” A “magnificent
pagan”--so Thoreau called him--he reveled in sensuous beauty. His
emotions mounted as he contemplated this new land, this new people,
the golden future that beckoned--with all shackles broken, dedicated
to freedom, warm and palpitating from abundant life--a radiant world
of lovely women and manly men. He dwelt on Pisgah and from the heights
looked out on a divine democracy. “The life of the common people is the
best part of the world’s life,” he exclaimed; “the life of the common
people is the life of God.” And to his congregation intoxicated with
his rhetoric he shouted, “Ye are gods! You are crystalline, your faces
are radiant!”[557] And the end and outcome envisaged by this prophet of
the American Idea was a vaguely grandiose fellowship, not of the Saints
alone, but of all the thronging children of men, for of such is God’s
kingdom of this world.
As such lyric chants fell on Whitman’s ears, they must have quickened
the ferment of thought that was eventually to clarify for him the
ideal of democracy, exalting it by making it warm and human and
social. The old Jacksonian leveling had been negative; its freedoms
had been individual, its anarchism selfish and unsocial. The great
ideal of the fellowship had been lost in the scramble for rights. Even
transcendental democracy had narrowed its contacts. The hermit Thoreau
in his cabin at Walden Pond was no symbol of a generous democratic
future. In the struggle for liberty and equality the conception of
fraternity had been denied and the golden trinity of the Enlightenment
dismembered. It was this idea of fraternity, made human and hearty by
his warm love of men and women, that Whitman got from the expansive
fifties and built into his thinking. The conception of solidarity,
then entering the realm of proletarian thought through the labors of
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, was his response to the new times--a
response that infused his democratic faith with a glowing humanism.
Democracy spiritualized by Channing and Emerson and Parker had suffered
limitations from their lingering Hebraisms--the Puritan passion for
righteousness had imposed strict ethical bounds on the democratic
will. In Thoreau it had been subjected to caustic skepticisms--the
transcendental individualist quizzically asked, “What _is_ your
people?” and refused to subject himself to the mass. But in Whitman
all limitations and skepticisms were swept away by the feeling of
comradeship. Flesh is kin to flesh, and out of the great reserves
of life is born the average man “with his excellent good manliness.”
Not in distinction but in oneness with the whole is found the good
life, for in fellowship is love and in the whole is freedom; and love
and freedom are the law and the prophets. The disintegrations of the
earlier individualism must be succeeded by a new integration; fear and
hate and jealousy and pride have held men apart hitherto, but love
will draw them together. After all solidarity--the children of America
merging in the fellowship, sympathetic, responsive, manlike yet divine,
of which the poet should be the prophet and literature provide the
sermons.
It was a noble conception--washing away all the meanness that befouled
Jacksonian individualism--and it somewhat slowly found its way to
parity with his first master conception, the universal ego, and settled
into place in those later opening lines of _Leaves of Grass_:
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.[558]
Then came the war to strengthen his faith in the common man. As he
watched the soldiers marching, fighting, suffering, he was deeply
impressed with their courage, patience, kindness, manliness, and came
to reverence the deep wellspring of national being from which issued
such inexhaustible waters. It was not the few but the many that gave
him hope. “I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the
American people _en masse_,” he wrote of some regiments returning
from the front. “It fell upon me like a great awe.”[559] And as he
contemplated this fecund people, with its sons and daughters issuing
strong and wholesome from every part of the land, there came to him
a new conception of unity--the Union that Lincoln loved--the drawing
together into an indissoluble whole of the far-flung commonwealths--a
realization of the perfect State where reign liberty, equality,
fraternity. Solidarity had taken on a political complexion but its
life-blood was in the veins of a free people.
But pagan though he was in his deeper nature, a child of the emotional
fifties, he was a transcendentalist also and his democratic philosophy,
as it took shape, bears unmistakable marks of the New England school,
supplemented perhaps by Quakerism. His well-known comment, “I was
simmering and simmering; it was Emerson brought me to boil,” suggests
much, and in particular that the Enlightenment as it had come to him
through the Jeffersonian heritage was supplemented and spiritualized
by the Enlightenment as it had taken special form in passing through
the transcendental mind. To this latter source must be traced the
philosophic monism that served to draw his speculations together--a
mystic sense of the divine oneness of life that took his major
postulates in golden hands and fused them into a single spiritual
whole. Thus instructed the “great Idea, the idea of perfect and free
individuals,” became curiously Emersonian in all its amplifications.
There is the same glorification of consciousness and will, the same
exaltation of the soul, the same trust in the buried life that men call
instinct, the same imperious call to heed the voice of innate Godhood;
and round and about this “perfect and free individual” is a mystical
egocentric universe wherein the children of men may luxuriate in
their divinity. The body is excellent as the soul is excellent; away,
therefore, with all shamefacedness--the mean secretiveness, the putting
of fingers to the lips in presence of the naked, the lies in presence
of open palpable fact! For if this be indeed God’s universe, and He is
in and through it all, the children of Adam may stand in His presence
unafraid--nay, rather with pride in their own excellence. “I exist as I
am, that is enough,” for “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy
whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
Whitman not only accepted Emerson with ungrudging loyalty but he dwelt
much with Hegel and the German idealists, and with their help he
penetrated curiously to the core of things, discovering there an inner
spiritual reality that is the abiding substance behind the external
manifestation. He had come upon food to sustain his faith in presence
of the mean and base that compassed him about, and the puzzling
contradictions of life no longer troubled him. If man be perfectible,
if he be indeed a child of God though still in his infancy, how
glorious must be the future toward which he is pressing! The evil will
pass and the good remain.
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good
steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge
itself and become lost and dead.[560]
When he turned from the oracular utterance of _Leaves of Grass_ to
sober exposition, he phrased it thus:
There is, apart from mere intellect ... a wondrous something that
realises without argument ... an intuition of the absolute balance,
in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of
fraud, frivolity, hoggishness--this revel of fools, and incredible
make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the _world_; a
soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the
whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events
however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hands
of the hunter.[561]
To discover this divine clue and be drawn by the unseen thread
into the orbit of things, to suffer the Me--the “human identity of
understanding, emotions, spirit”--to fuse with the Not Me--“the whole
of the material, objective universe and laws, with what is behind them
in time and space”--became therefore for Whitman the grand objective
of man’s life and effort. This for him was the sum and substance of
religion, which was no other than the binding of the individual back
upon the whole. “A vast similitude interlocks all.” And so from his
conception of social solidarity he went forward to the conception of
spiritual solidarity, and discovered religion to be the crown and
glory of the “American Idea.” Walt Whitman and America were to be the
prophets of religion. “Easily at home in a natural world of prodigious
brightness and scale, he ... saw ‘the most splendid race the sun ever
shone upon,’ and was urging the life of instinct and impulse. Love
was the key--taking form and in ‘Starting from Paumanok’ he asserted
his Love, Democracy, Religion--a new religion.”[562] His message was
purpose.
The soul,
Forever and forever--longer than soil is brown and solid--longer than
water ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the
most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and
of immortality.
I will make a song for these States that no one State may under any
circumstances be subjected to another State,
* * * * *
I will sing the song of companionship,
* * * * *
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
* * * * *
I am the credulous man of qualities, ages, races,
I advance from the people in their own spirit,
* * * * *
I, too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a
religion, ...
* * * * *
Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s
sake.
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship’d half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the
future is.
* * * * *
I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be
their religion,
Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur;
* * * * *
My comrade!
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising
inclusive and more resplendent,
The greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of
Religion.[563]
But this new religion of the mystical Whitman, in harmony with
post-transcendental thought, was deeply impregnated with the spirit of
science. He was in the very fullness of his powers when the conception
of evolution came to him and he greeted it gladly, weaving it into all
his thinking and discovering in it a confirmation of his idealistic
philosophy. It was the evolution of Herbert Spencer, it must be
remembered, that Whitman accepted--teleological, buoyantly optimistic,
dominated by the conception of progress, shot through with the spirit
of the Enlightenment; and such an evolution was a confirmation and not
a denial of his transcendental premises. It supplemented rather than
contradicted the tenets of his faith. Like Emerson as he saw the bounds
of the material universe slowly pushed back by science he discovered
amidst the constant change the presence of growth, development, the
natural passage from the simple to the complex; and like Theodore
Parker he felt that this slow unfolding was no other than the unfolding
of God, making Himself evident and unmistakable to man. Evolution was
God’s great plan. “The law over all, the law of laws, is the law of
successions,” he was persuaded; “for what is the present after all but
a growth out of the past?” But noble as is the evidence of God’s work
discoverable by science, the soul is not content to rest with such
evidence; it must seek out the reality behind the manifestation; and
for this work the poet alone is fitted. The poet must complete the work
of the scientist. The noble “Passage to India” is a lovely chant of
human progress, the adventurous soul conquering the earth; but it must
not pause there; it must seek God through the universe until it finds
Him, and “Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more,” and
“All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d.”
Bathe me O God in thee, mounting to thee,
I and my soul to range in range of thee.[564]
It was in this profoundly religious spirit that Whitman accepted
science, built it into his poetry, rested confidently upon it; and
it is this spirit that explains his formal statement in the “Song of
Myself.”
I accept Reality and dare not question it,
Materialism first and last imbuing.
Hurrah for positive science! long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixt with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this made a grammar
of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is
the mathematician.
Gentlemen, to you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, and yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling.[565]
Equipped with such a philosophy and supported by such a faith Whitman
accepted the twin duties laid upon him: to make clear to America her
present failure in the great adventure--how far she had fallen short
hitherto of any adequate democratic reality; and to mark out afresh
the path to the Canaan of democratic hopes--reviving the early hopes of
the Enlightenment and drawing in lovelier colors the democratic Utopia
dreamed of for a hundred years. To be both critic and prophet--that
he conceived to be his mission, a mission that he was faithful to for
upwards of forty years. For the first duty he was admirably equipped.
No other knew this America so intimately or so broadly--had penetrated
so lovingly to the common heart and read so clearly its secret
hopes and fears. That America was not yet a democracy--was very far
indeed from a democracy--that it was a somewhat shoddy _bourgeois_
capitalistic society shot through with cant and hypocrisy and every
meanness, he saw with calm, searching eyes. No contemporary critic, not
Godkin, not Emerson, saw more clearly the unlovely reality or dealt
with it more scathingly, not only in _Leaves of Grass_ but especially
in his prose writings and in casual talk. Amongst scores of such
passages a single one must serve for illustration.
I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in
uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive
superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete
failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious,
moral, literary, and esthetic results.... Shift and turn the
combinations of the statement as we may, the problem of the future
of America is in certain respects as dark as it is vast. Pride,
competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond
example, brood already upon us. Unwieldy and immense, who shall
hold in behemoth? who bridle leviathan? Flaunt it as we choose,
athwart and over the roads of our progress loom huge uncertainty,
and dreadful threatening gloom. It is useless to deny it: Democracy
grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and
fruits of all--brings worse and worse invaders--needs newer,
larger, stronger, keener compensations and compellers. Our lands
embracing so much ... hold in the breast that flame also, capable
of consuming themselves, consuming us all.... Even today, amid
these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of parties,
infidelity, entire lack of first-rate captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses--that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like
a yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year--what prospect have
we? We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices,--all so dark and untried.[566]
As a realist Whitman granted the worst charges of the critics of
democracy, but he probed deeper and brought other facts to light
that modified the equation. It was the difficult question the old
Federalists had posed and that Carlyle had lately revived--the
question, is not this meanness inseparable from democracy? is not
your people in fact a great beast, requiring the lash and the curb?
It was the crux of the long debate over democracy and to it Whitman
gave anxious and frequent consideration. In fighting the battle of
1790 over again, like Jefferson he rested his case on the native
integrity and measureless potentiality of the “bulk-people”--they are
the deep soil from which spring the abundant fruits and flowers of
civilization. Gentle-nurtured folk do not understand this--they do
not like the rank qualities of vital being. Matthew Arnold “always
gives you the notion that he hates to touch the dirt--the dirt is so
dirty! But everything comes out of the dirt--everything: everything
comes out of the people ... not university people, not F.F.V. people:
people, people, just people!” In the rude, vital, natural man is the
inexhaustible wellspring of good and evil; “He’s got it all ... not
only the cruel, beastly, hoggish, cheating, bedbug qualities, but
also the spiritual--the noble--the high-born”;[567] in “some ways” he
is a “devil of a fellow,” but he is not “all devil or even chiefly
devil.”[568] And because he is not chiefly devil such love and beauty
and justice and comradeship as there is in the world, such progress
in civilization as has been made hitherto, have been possible--how
otherwise? If he has journeyed thus far out of the primeval slime, what
bounds shall be set to his eventual journeyings? Why put out one’s eyes
with a mere handful of years?
So Whitman projected his democratic commonwealth far into the future;
he would not have us believe that it had been realized here in America.
Political democracy, the struggle for political rights that had engaged
America hitherto, was only negative, a necessary preliminary to the
ultimate reality. “I submit,” he said, “that the fruition of democracy,
on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” and its
realization depends upon the use to which the people put their freedom.
If from it emerges a proud and self-conscious individualism--“the
quality of Being, in the object’s self, according to its own central
idea and purpose, and of growing therefrom and thereto--not criticism
by other standards, and adjustments thereto”--then democracy on a grand
scale will be possible and the self-reliant citizen will take his
place in a free creative society. The ideal of the growing man, and
the ideal of the perfect State--broadly social rather than narrowly
political--these were his twin ideals; and the tie that is to bind
men together in spontaneous solidarity is love. How characteristic
is his sketch of the perfect city, and how deeply saturated with the
Enlightenment! There is wanting only a physiocratic economics to make
it perfect.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
* * * * *
Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in
return and understands them.
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place,
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of
elected persons,
* * * * *
Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside
authority.
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, Mayor,
Governor and what not, are agents for pay,
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on
themselves.
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs,
* * * * *
Where the city of faithfulest friends stands,
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands,
* * * * *
There the great city stands.[569]
Individualism, solidarity--on such strong bases he erected his ideal
democracy, and the heaven-reaching temple will be overlaid with the
rich arts and graces of a civilization worthy at last of the name. Such
was the Enlightenment as it came to flower in the passionate idealism
of Walt Whitman--a dream that was mocked and flouted and nullified
by the Drews and Fisks and Goulds--the “hoggish, cheating, bedbug
qualities” of a generation that scorned him for a beast. Even his stout
faith was shaken at times by the infidelities of the Gilded Age. He
was troubled by the gap that opened between the free individual and
the perfect State. “I seem to be reaching for a new politics--for a
new economy,” he confessed in 1888; “I don’t quite know what, but for
something.”[570] Although he protested, “The older I grow ... the more
I am confirmed in my optimism, my democracy,” he projected his hopes
farther into the future. He sympathized with the socialists but he
was not one of them. His revolutionary ardor abated and he preferred
in later years to call himself an evolutionist.[571] “Be radical--be
radical,” he said to Traubel, “be not too damned radical.”[572] With
his catholic sympathies that refused all bitterness he could not be a
partisan--“after the best the partisan will say something better will
be said by the man.”[573]
So in the twilight of the romantic revolution Whitman quietly
slipped away. The great hopes on which he fed have been belied by
after events--so his critics say;[574] as the great hopes of the
Enlightenment have been belied. Certainly in this welter of today, with
science become the drab and slut of war and industrialism, with sterile
money-slaves instead of men, Whitman’s expansive hopes seem grotesque
enough. Democracy may indeed be only a euphemism for the rulership of
fools. Yet in a time of huge infidelities, in the dun breakdown and
disintegration of all faiths, it is not wholly useless to recall the
large proportions of Walt Whitman, his tenderness, his heartiness, his
faith, his hope. There was in him no weak evasion, no sniveling over
the shards of the goodly vessel broken at the well, but even when “old,
alone, sick, weak-down, melted-worn with sweat,” a free and joyous
acceptance of life.
Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere life,
* * * * *
For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands.
For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation,
* * * * *
For beings, groups, love, deeds, words, books--for colors, forms,
For all the brave strong men--devoted, hardy, men--who’ve forward
sprung in freedom’s help, all years, all lands,
For braver, stronger, more devoted men--(a special laurel ere I go,
to life’s war’s chosen ones,
The cannoneers of song and thought--the great artillerists--the
foremost leaders, captains of the soul:)
As soldier from an ended war return’d--As traveler out of myriads,
to the long procession retrospective.
Thanks--joyful thanks!--a soldier’s, traveler’s thanks.[575]
A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature--yet perhaps
only a great child--summing up and transmitting into poetry all
the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through
the romantic revolution, the poet of selfhood and the prophet of
brotherhood, the virile man and the catholic lover--how shall Walt
Whitman become dumb or cease to speak to men unless the children of
those who are now half-devil and half-God shall prove to be wholly
devil--or wholly moron?
III • The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain
As Whitman contemplated the feeble literature purveyed by the
worshipers of the genteel he asked with some irritation: “What
is the reason in our time, our lands, that we see no fresh local
courage, sanity, of our own--the Mississippi, stalwart Western men,
real mental and physical facts, Southerners, etc., in the body of
our literature?” That was in 1870 and the answer was at hand in the
person of Mark Twain. Here at last was an authentic American--a native
writer thinking his own thoughts, using his own eyes, speaking his own
dialect--everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal
culture gone, local and western yet continental. A strange and uncouth
figure in the eyes of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, yet the very embodiment of
the turbulent frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology,
and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize the Atlantic
seaboard. Yet in spite of a rare vein of humor, the outcropping of
a rich and whimsical imagination, he made his way slowly to polite
recognition. For years he was regarded by authoritative critics as
little more than a buffoon, an extravagant fun-maker with a broad
streak of western coarseness; and it was not till near the end, when
he had long been an international figure, that the culture of the
East accepted him. It was Howells then who pronounced him “the sole,
the incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature ... the very marrow of
Americanism.”
Just as that judgment was at the time, it needs qualification
now. The marrow of Americanism is not the same substance from
generation to generation. The outer environing life of a people
works itself slowly into the bones and brings about subtle changes.
Mark Twain was indubitably an embodiment of three centuries of
American experience--frontier centuries, decentralized, leveling,
individualistic; but the Americanism that issued from them came to
its flower and was quickly succeeded by another kind as the fields of
experience were re-plowed by industrialism and sowed to a different
grain. Mark Twain was the child of a frontier past--as Lincoln was, as
the Gilded Age was--and the America of today could no more breed him
than it could breed Lincoln, or Greeley, or Whitman; his Americanism
was the reflection of an environment that is no longer ours, in the
slack folk-ways of the frontier that we have outgrown. Child of the
Southwest in its early boom days, he was cradled in profitless schemes
and nourished on dreams of vast potential wealth. The frontier spirit
was an effervescence in his blood and golden expectations flung their
mirage over the drab reality. As a boy he took impress from a kindly,
ignorant, slave-holding, Calvinistic village world, and he quitted the
slattern village life to plunge into the picturesque traffic of the
Mississippi in the boom days when every river pilot drove his boat
full steam ahead. Then the Far West of silver mines and the Golden
Gate took him in hand--a gambling, romantic, optimistic frontier,
feverish with flush times, “a beggar’s revel of potential millionaires
without the price of a square meal.”[576] And finally this buoyant,
irreverent adolescent was taken in hand by the Far East: by New England
respectability in the persons of Olivia Langdon of Elmira, William Dean
Howells of Cambridge, Twitchell and Warner of Hartford; and by New York
in the persons of Carnegie and Gilder and Whitelaw Reid and Henry H.
Rogers, to be made over into a man of the world.
Such were his origins and his schooling. All his life he remained a
boy, with the imitativeness of youth, and yet with something deep
within him that cherished its own integrity. Quick to take color from
his environment and at home in crowds, he lived nevertheless in the
solitude of his own heart. Acutely conscious of his rough western
ways, he admired the culture of the Langdons and the refined art of
Howells, and he wanted to be approved by them. A kinsman of Beriah
Sellers, he delighted in the great barbecue and wanted to carve great
portions for himself, to heap up his plate as others were doing. His
reactions to experience were always emotional. He was not a Walt
Whitman to penetrate curiously to the core of his own being and grow
thence outwardly, content to wait till the world came round to him.
He loved to make a splurge, to be talked of, to be in the public eye,
to live on an ample scale; he accepted the world’s standards and
wished to be measured by them. It was characteristic of the frontier.
Wanting other standards, the frontier measured success by obvious
material standards. Its aggressive individualism was never spiritual or
intellectual or cultural. So with all his heritage of generations of
frontier individualism he never achieved an intellectual or spiritual
unity, an untroubled conscious integrity, as Emerson did and Whitman
did. He never was at home in the world of catholic thought, but all
his life he suffered from the petty inhibitions of his origins. He
could not throw off the frontier--its psychology and its morality were
too deeply intertwined with his primitive self; and the result was a
harassing inner conflict that left him maimed.
Yet with all his shortcomings--because of them indeed--Mark Twain is
an immensely significant American document. He is a mirror reflecting
the muddy cross-currents of American life as the frontier spirit washed
in, submerging the old aristocratic landmarks. To know Mark Twain is to
know the strange and puzzling contradictions of the Gilded Age. With
unconscious fidelity he reveals its crudity, its want of knowledge,
discipline, historical perspective; its intellectual incapacity to deal
with the complexities of a world passing through the twin revolutions
of industrialism and science. And he reflects with equal fidelity
certain other qualities that go far to redeem the meanness: a great
creative power; an eager idealism, somewhat vague but still fine; a
generous sympathy; a manly independence that strove to think honestly;
a passionate hatred of wrong and injustice and an honest democratic
respect for men as men. A significant if not an unsoiled or heroic
document!
That in his later years an impassable gulf opened between Mark Twain
and his generation, that the buoyant humorist of the seventies ripened
into the bitter satirist of the nineties, is a matter that has been
much remarked upon. The fact is clear enough but the explanation
is not so clear. In part no doubt--as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed
out--the change resulted from a thwarting of the creative artist by a
disastrous surrender to the ideals of the Gilded Age; in part, also,
it was the inevitable toll exacted by the passing years. A humane and
generous spirit cannot long watch with indifference the motley human
caravan hastening to eternity--cannot find food for laughter alone
in the incredible meanness and folly of men cheating and quarreling
in a wilderness of graves. Tenderness, chivalry, love of justice,
are poor bucklers to withstand the blows of fate, and Mark Twain had
little skill in defense. The humorist like the poet is sensitively
responsive to life and the scars multiply fast. Endowed with a nature
not unlike Swift’s in its fierce rage at inhumanity, not unlike Sir
Philip Sidney’s in its romantic chivalry, he was not a stoic to endure
with equanimity. He was foredoomed to suffer vicariously. The comment
he wrote Howells in 1899 throws a white light on the man. “I have been
reading the morning paper,” he said. “I do it every morning--well
knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses
and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me
to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human
race.”
Yet granting so much, and granting also a morbid conscience that
harassed him with self-condemnation--“What a man sees in the human race
is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart”--it
still remains true that the bleakness of his later years was due in
part, at least, to the insubstantial dwelling he chose to live in. The
architects of the Gilded Age were jerry-builders, and Mark Twain found
his jerry-built house a poor protection against the winter winds. It
was perhaps not greatly his fault that he built so flimsily. He was
too willing to be caught in the web of material things. He could not
reach out for companionship with the great earth. Hamlin Garland in a
bleak Dakota shack found help and comfort in the philosophy of Taine,
but Mark Twain could not get outside his own skin. He could not break a
path through the provincialism of his environment. He was held prisoner
to his own thoughts and his only release was through the window of
imagination. When harassed beyond endurance he sought release in
writing that hid the evidence of his rebellion. What would Livy say,
what would the American public say, if they knew he had come to deny
all the tribal gods!
There is no more pathetic figure in American literature than Mark
Twain, alone and solitary amid the blatant American crowd, living in
a dreary wash of speeches and banquets, spinning the threads of a
rebellious philosophy out of his own bowels, unaware of what others
were spinning, regarding himself as a dangerous fellow and stowing away
in his strong-box intellectual bombs that he thought too explosive for
the Gilded Age to play with. In his intellectual isolation he could
not take the measure of his speculations and he did not realize how
common were such conclusions--that his own generation indeed, under
the tutelage of the physical sciences, was fast drifting in the same
direction, and that the clouds of pessimism were obscuring for many
the brighter horizons of an earlier day. If he had known Henry Adams
as intimately as he knew Henry H. Rogers, very likely his eyes would
have been opened to many things that would have done him good. As it
was he knew only that his speculations ran counter to the formal creed
of his middle-class neighbors and friends. To deny the dogmas of the
conventional orthodoxy and in the face of a smug optimism to assert a
mechanistic pessimism, was an unpleasant business that he would have
avoided if he could.
But he couldn’t avoid it wholly, and in that fact is to be found the
thread that runs through his later life, giving to it such unity and
coherence as it possessed. It is this: here was a thoroughly honest
mind, that hated all sham and quackery and humbug, and a singularly
warm heart, that hated all wrong and cruelty and injustice; and this
honest mind and chivalrous heart, deceived and led astray by the mass
_mores_, espoused and defended such fragments of ideals, such bits
of truth, as he came upon in his solitary brooding, until driven
from one stronghold after another he came to doubt the adequacy
of all strongholds and took refuge in a black pessimism--God is a
malignant being, the universe is a machine, and man is a creature of
determinism. It was a fierce and stark reaction from the emotionalism
of the fifties--from Beecher’s God of love and Whitman’s religion of
democracy. His earlier loyalty to half-gods had brought him at last to
deny all the gods. And so a maimed giant, stumbling and uncertain, he
made such way as he could; and his journeyings wrung from him many a
fierce comment that his generation did not understand.
When the milk of western humor curdled in his veins, a Mark Twain
emerged who was a puzzle to the Gilded Age. A humorist who was a good
Republican and business man, the Gilded Age could understand; but a
satirist who launched his shafts at sacred things--at evangelical
religion, the Republican party, the government at Washington, the
damned human race itself--it could not understand. The professional
fun-maker had outgrown his audience. Expecting the familiar
exaggeration, they accounted his bitterest sally a characteristic
whimsy, and laughed when he commented bitterly on “this plodding sad
pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities,” or when he
exclaimed, “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor is
not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” But the significant
thing is that in the end the tyrannizing _mores_ did not conquer, they
did not destroy him wholly; but such convictions as he had hewn from
puzzling experience, however bleak or repellent they might be, he clung
to firmly, desperately, and at last flung them in the face of the
Gilded Age that had kept him prisoner.
The slow drift of Mark Twain’s thought from humor to satire--it smacks
of Philistinism to call it progress with its many false alarums and
excursions and its huge frontier wastefulness--is plain enough to
anyone who will take the trouble to chart his course. Roughly it
falls into definite stages: the swaggering gayety of western youth
in _Innocents Abroad_ and _Roughing It_--the mood of flush times,
down-grade with the brakes off; then a gay plunge into satire in _The
Gilded Age_; then the West recalled in middle life--_Tom Sawyer_, _Life
on the Mississippi_, _Huckleberry Finn_--living over again a youth
that is gone; then an excursion into the Middle Ages--_The Prince
and the Pauper_ and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a
romantic flare-up of the democratic passions of the Enlightenment; then
the search for the ideal in _Joan of Arc_--the dream of the perfect
woman, the Domnei of James Branch Cabell; and finally _The Mysterious
Stranger_ and _What is Man?_--a fierce satire of disillusion, the cry
of an idealist who realizes at last how greatly he has been cheated by
his dreams.
That he should have begun by burlesquing life was itself a broad
sign of his frontier origins. Since the first crossing of the
Allegheny Mountains a swaggering extravagance of speech had been a
hallmark of the Westerner. In part this swagger was an unconscious
defense-mechanism against the drabness of frontier life; and in part
it was the spontaneous expression of new experiences in an untrammeled
world, the spirit of wilderness-leveling. Its procreative source would
seem to have been the Ohio River where the rough flatboatmen bequeathed
the Mike Fink legend to literature; and it expanded in the huge
Davy Crockett hoax--a hoax that would have tickled the ribs of Mark
Twain had he traced its genesis and progress, as a colossal example
of how the damned human race loves to be humbugged. It developed
further in Gus Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_ with its grotesque Ransy
Sniffle--sorriest of backwoods heroes, too mean-spirited to ruffle like
Canebrake Davy; and in Joseph Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and
Mississippi_, with its greasy frontier blackguard, Colonel Simon Suggs.
This earliest backwoods humor had been done in realistic colors and
bears the impress of authenticity. But the school that succeeded--John
Phoenix, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby--quickly conventionalized
its technique, relying on burlesque, tall lying, distorted spelling,
genial philosophy. The picaresque strain was softened and perverted by
deliberate human-interest touches--a better case must be made out for
the untutored children of nature. It was this humor that Mark Twain
inherited, and he enriched it with a wealth dug from his own large and
generous nature. An incorrigible idealist, as all great humorists must
be, he recreated some of the earlier types, translating Colonel Simon
Suggs into Colonel Sellers, and Ransy Sniffle into Huck Finn. It was a
glorious transformation, but the result lacked something of the soiled
reality of the earlier blackguards. Yet underneath his idealism was a
generous deposit of the common mud of life. The spirit of Mike Fink was
never far from Mark Twain. It haunted him like an evil genius, refusing
to be exorcised by Olivia Clemens, and it found vent in sly literary
sprees that begot offspring to be handed about furtively and chuckled
over by the sons of Adam; but for the most part it was kept in strict
subjection to the proprieties of Elmira and Hartford.
_Roughing It_ and _The Gilded Age_ are brilliant complementary pictures
of the gaudy frontier spirit that was washing in upon the staid realm
of the genteel, to the vast concern of such genteelists as Thomas
Bailey Aldrich. The former is a buoyant chronicle of the West of
Captain Carver and Wild Bill Hickok, the West of the Pony Express,
the Comstock lode, the bad man and the lynch law, a land of young
men in red flannel shirts, heavy boots, and six-shooters, who feared
neither God nor the devil. Bret Harte in San Francisco first realized
the literary possibilities of this picturesque world, and his tales
of life in the mining-camps were received with a shout of approval.
But Bret Harte had never been a miner. He was not realist enough, nor
honest enough, to portray the West in its stark, grotesque reality. He
was only a literary middleman who skillfully purveyed such wares as
his eastern readers wanted. In consequence he coated his tales with a
sentimental picaresque--pandered to the common taste by discovering
nuggets of pure gold in the dregs and outcasts of the mining-camps.
But Mark Twain was too honest for that. He had been a part of the
flush times and had seen the economic process work itself out. He had
seen the grub-stake prospector succeeded by the wild-cat speculator,
and him in turn followed by the eastern capitalist. He had seen
the mining frontier become a thing of the past in a single decade,
with the Comstock lode in the hands of competent exploiters and the
pick-and-shovel miners plunging deeper into the mountains to pursue
their feverish hopes. From that experience he had learned a lesson he
was to carry East with him. “Because we judged that we had learned,” he
said, “the real secret of success in silver mining, which was, not to
mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of
our hands, but to _sell_ the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let
them do the mining.”[577]
It was the great lesson of his generation, and thus instructed he
proposed to sell his brains in the best market. Exploitation was the
royal road to wealth and he was eager to exploit both himself and
his fellows. Yet not all of Mark Twain was thus eager. Deep in his
heart was another Mark Twain, the artist, the chivalrous lover of
justice, the simple child puzzled at life--and this Mark Twain was
already plotting treason against the exploiting Mark Twain. For the
first time this deeper self got out of hand in _The Gilded Age_. As he
contemplated the common scoundrelism at Washington and elsewhere, his
anger exuded in scathing satire. He hated the dirty thing, yet he seems
never to have realized that such scoundrelism was only the backwash of
the spirit of exploitation and that he himself was riding on its waves.
With the soap-bubble dreams of Colonel Sellers he dealt lovingly, for
he was sketching his own origins; the Colonel and the Hawkinses were
his own flesh and blood and the Tennessee lands were an old investment
about which the family dreams of wealth had been woven for years. He
delighted in the Colonel’s childlike faith that prosperity only awaited
a vote of Congress--with adequate appropriations, of course. He asked
no questions about unearned increment; to question that would have been
treason to the frontier philosophy. So into Colonel Sellers he put all
that was naïve and lovable in the Gilded Age. But Senator Dillworthy
was another matter. Hypocrite and corruptionist, he was laying obscene
hands on sacred things, betraying his high trust for sordid ends. Mark
Twain hated graft--the word had not been coined but the ugly thing was
there--and with the innocence of his generation he damned the agent
and overlooked the principal. It was not his fault. The economics of
history was a closed book to Americans of the seventies, and even
Henry Adams in his analysis of the current corruption in his novel
_Democracy_ was no better than a mole nosing blindly underground.
He had opened another door to his genius and discovered the satirist.
There lay the real Mark Twain. But the wares of the satirist were not
in demand at the barbecue, so he closed the door and fell to purveying
what the public wanted. _Tom Sawyer_ was in part a malicious thrust
at the Sunday School tale, and in part a whimsical pronouncement
of the natural rights of the small boy. But it is in _Huckleberry
Finn_--the one great picaresque tale of the frontier--that the western
philosophy of Mark Twain, a philosophy that derives straight from the
old naturistic school, crops out most sharply. It is a drama of the
struggle between the individual and the village _mores_, set in a loose
picturesque framework, and exemplifying the familiar thesis that the
stuff of life springs strong and wholesome from the great common stock.
Huck Finn is a child of nature who has lived close to the simple facts
of life, unperverted by the tyrannies of the village that would make
a good boy of him. He had got his schooling from the unfenced woods,
from the great river that swept past him as he idly fished, from the
folk-tales of negroes and poor whites, from queer adventures with Tom
Sawyer; and from such experiences he had got a code of natural ethics.
Then he found himself on the raft with Jim the runaway nigger, and
his little pagan soul felt the stirrings of the problem of right and
wrong. The village code and the natural code clashed and the conflict
was terrifying. The village code warned him that hell yawned for one
who helped a slave escape, and the human code warned him that betrayal
was a blackguardly thing. With the fear of hell upon him he wrote to
Miss Watson, and then his sense of the kindliness of Jim, the honest
humanity under the black skin, rose up in fierce protest.
It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my
hands. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever,
betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied for a minute, sort
of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll _go_ to hell”--and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let
them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.[578]
It was a triumph over the sacred tribal law of conformity--the
assertion of the individual will in opposition to society--and it
reveals the heart of Mark Twain’s philosophy. The rebel Huck is no
other than the rebel Mark Twain whose wrath was quick to flame up
against the unrighteous customs and laws of caste. If men were only
honest realists--that is, if they were men and not credulous fools--how
quickly the stables might be cleansed and life become decent and
humane. If only the good brains could be segregated and trained in a
real “man-factory,” the history of civilization might become something
the angels need not weep over as they read it. It all comes back to an
honest realism that in accepting fact will clear away the superstitious
fogs in which men have floundered and suffered hitherto. The one sacred
duty laid on every rational being is the duty of rebellion against
sham--to deny the divinity of clothes, to thrust out quack kings and
priests and lords, to refuse a witless loyalty to things. This creed of
the rebel is written all through Mark Twain’s later work, edging his
satire and lending an Emersonian note to his individualism. In such a
passage as this it emerges sharply:
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to
its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real
thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing
to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are
extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear
out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the
body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to shout
for rags, to worship rags--that is a loyalty to unreason, it is
pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy;
let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution
declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and
all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted
for their benefit; and that they have _at all times_ an undeniable
and indefeasible right to _alter their form of government_ in such
manner as they may think expedient.”
Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his
peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a
traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay,
does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is
the duty of others to vote him down if they do not see the matter
as he does.[579]
In the Middle Ages clothes-worship had been exalted to a religion,
he believed, and he turned with gusto to reply to the aristocratic
romanticism of Sir Walter, who, delighting in the picturesque company
gathered in the great hall, forgot to penetrate to the _oubliettes_--is
not the word commentary enough on the ways of the seigneur?--where
nameless wretches were rotting under the walls of the castle. He had
small patience with the cult of medievalism that was turning such
men as Henry Adams and William Morris back to the Middle Ages as to
their lost home. He had the frontier contempt for medieval ways, and
for the _ancien régime_ that was the last rags of the Middle Ages.
The French Revolution had thrust the abomination away forever, and he
thanked God for that “ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which
swept a thousand years of ... villainy away in one swift tidal wave of
blood.” He had no tears for Marie Antoinette. What was the Terror but
“a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of
blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures
out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and
shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell ...
that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been
taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”[580] The past
that had been consumed in that fierce conflagration had been a brutal,
tyrannical, superstitious past, and not till king and priest had been
flung out on the dung-heap did the people walk their native soil as
free men. The whole king business was preposterous to him; with Freneau
he cried, “Kings are the choicest curse that man e’er knew.” The battle
against medievalism had been fought and won and why go maundering back
over past battlefields, when other battles await?[581]
Mark Twain’s passionate republicanism was a product of the
Enlightenment as it had passed into the psychology of western
Americans, and it retained the militant idealism of Jeffersonian times.
It is shot through with the nature philosophy. In _The Prince and the
Pauper_, the heir of Offal Court and the heir of the Tudors are both
children of nature, endowed with warm hearts, generous sympathies,
and clever wits. Put rags on the prince and robes on the pauper and
their own kin cannot tell them apart. The latter, indeed, promises to
make the better king, for he has suffered the lot of the subject, and
not till the prince has put on rags does he come to know his people.
It is caste that breeds cruelty and wrong; the brutalities of the
English criminal code were deviltries devised by king and nobles to
safeguard their stealings. Only when the laws spring from the people
are they just. “The world is made wrong,” cried the young king when
he was brought out of prison to watch the burning at the stake of two
women who had befriended him--women whose only crime was that of being
Baptists--“the world is made wrong, kings should go to school to their
own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.” And this great lesson of mercy
is exemplified in the acts of the pauper king, who during his brief
reign tempers the harshness of the law with a sense of justice learned,
like Huck Finn’s, from sharp contact with reality.
It is in _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court_--a curious
medley, half philippic and half farce--that Mark Twain’s passion for
justice rises to white heat. The book has been grossly misunderstood.
It is not an attack on chivalry--at least not primarily; it is rather
an attack on thirteen centuries of reputed Christian civilization
that under pretense of serving God has enslaved and despoiled the
children of God. The keen satire is given point and edge by the long
tragic perspective. Thirteen centuries heavy with sorrow and misery
and frustrated hopes--a meaningless succession of foolish and futile
generations, wandering in fogs of their own brewing, hagridden by
superstitions, deceived and exploited by priest and noble, with no will
to be free--here is a perspective to correct our callow enthusiasms,
our revolutionary hopes! Why indeed should we expect men to possess
the will to freedom, seeing that each generation is molded after the
likeness of the past and none has been free? There is change, advance
and recession, but the story of the generations is no more than a “sad
drift between the eternities,” without purpose or meaning. In the
brain of the Connecticut Yankee are secrets hidden from the children of
King Arthur’s time--a curious ability to use the forces of nature, some
glimmerings of social justice. But to what purpose have Hartford and
the nineteenth century used their knowledge? It is a world of slaves
still as it was in King Arthur’s day. The human animal cannot lift
himself to heaven by his own bootstraps, and heaven will not stoop to
lift him. For a “clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference,”
it has substituted smartness, vulgarity, irreverence.
As one slips back and forth between the two worlds the satire takes
on vaster perspectives; it cuts deep into all civilizations, for all
alike are sham, all have issued from the conquest of man’s native
intelligence by his superstitions that are too useful to his masters
to be dissipated. Clearly in Mark Twain’s philosophy of history the
hopes of the Enlightenment are fading. Passionately dedicated to the
program of the Enlightenment--freedom, individuality, humanitarianism,
democracy--his faith in reason, free will, progress, was burning low,
in presence of the historical record. The determinism that lurked
at the bottom of John Locke’s psychology, unperceived by the French
idealists, was revealing itself to Mark Twain and he was already
trimming his sails to the chill winds blowing from the outer spaces of
a mechanistic cosmos.
More immediately of course _A Connecticut Yankee_ is an attack on the
aristocratic romanticism of Sir Walter. There is little loitering in
the great hall--except to comment on the coarseness of the knights
and ladies--and much poking about in unlovely secret places where
one comes upon a rare collection of human animals thrust away in the
_oubliettes_ or pigging together in mean huts. Few chapters in American
literature are so noble in their _saeva indignatio_, so beautiful in
their stern simplicity, as certain sketches of the king’s progress
through his realm--not a royal progress but a peasant’s. There are no
tears in them, they go far beyond that. The scene in the smallpox hut
where the wife is glad her husband and daughters are dead--they are
either in heaven or hell, it makes little difference, for they are no
longer in Britain and so are happy; and the scene of the young mother
hanged for stealing a piece of cloth of an ell’s length or so, hanged
that property in Britain might be safe--such pictures reveal how far
he had traveled from the days of _Roughing It_. He was no longer a
good Federalist-Whig concerned about exploitation and the safeguards
of property. Although he voted the Republican ticket he made merry
over the tariff[582] and he frankly hated the dominant Republican
property-consciousness. Like Lincoln he was for the man rather than the
dollar when the rights of the two clashed. In these later years he was
steadily drifting to the left, on the side of the social underling,
sympathetic with those who do the work of the world. “He never went so
far in socialism, as I have gone,” said Howells, “if he went that way
at all ... but from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
labor as the only present help for workingmen.... There was a time when
I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in
the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that
this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever.”[583]
It is good for an American to read _A Connecticut Yankee_--and _Joan
of Arc_ as well; for in them is a flame that sears and shrivels the
mean property-consciousness which lays a blight on every civilization.
In the peasant girl of Domrémy, the rapt mystic led by her Voices,
Mark Twain found his ideal, the lily that bloomed out of the muck of
medieval times; and as he contemplated her life and work he was lifted
to the plane of worship. She had waged heroic warfare against the
embattled lies and shams and treacheries of a sordid age, and that she
should have died at the stake was inevitable. What other reward was to
be expected from bishops and kings and suchlike spawn of the devil? Not
till the people grow to manhood can any savior help them, and in that
day they will need no savior but themselves. The Sieur Louis de Conte
struggles with the idea confusedly.
I believe that some day it will be found out that peasants are
people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And
I believe that some day _they_ will find this out, too--and then!
Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to be regarded as
a part of the race, and that by consequence there will be trouble.
Whenever one sees in a book or in a king’s proclamation those words
‘the nation,’ they bring before us the upper classes; only those;
we know no other ‘nation;’ for us and the kings no other ‘nation’
exists. But from the day I saw old D’Arc the peasant acting and
feeling just as I should have acted and felt myself, I have carried
the conviction in my heart that our peasants are not merely
animals, beasts of burden put here by the good God to produce food
and comfort for the ‘nation,’ but something more and better. You
look incredulous. Well, that is your training; it is the training
of everybody; but as for me, I thank that incident for giving me a
better light, and I have never forgotten it.[584]
No Bayard ever did his devoir more knightly to his lady than Mark Twain
to Joan, finding in the noble drama of her life the romance he had
not found at Arthur’s court. The knights of the Round Table were “but
ghosts fighting in the fog,” but Jeanne D’Arc was human and lovable
and divine. And then the outlet through which his idealism had found
release slowly closed in, and he was left alone with his comfortless
speculations. What profits it to rail at the damned human race when man
has about as much chance for happiness as a blind puppy in a sack? The
bitter lot of humanity is due not to institutions alone or chiefly,
it is a part of the mad plan of a bleak mechanical universe. For Mark
Twain the solid earth was dissolving, leaving only a rack behind. It
is futile to lament. A sympathetic heart, indeed, is the last and
bitterest irony--for why weep over an evil exhalation! “_Life itself is
only a vision, a dream ... Nothing exists save empty space--and you._”
In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander
its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever--for you
will remain a _thought_, the only existent thought, and by your
nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant,
have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams,
and better. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected
that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions,
fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically
insane--like all dreams ... the silly creations of an imagination
that is not conscious of its freaks--in a word that they are a
dream, and you the maker of it....[585]
So, like Cabell, Mark Twain asserts that man must build within and
by letting his dreams flow out create for himself such shelter as he
can against the chill of the eternal void. A flea on the epidermis of
earth, nevertheless he is thought and thought is deathless. To such a
conclusion did the buoyant youth of _Roughing It_ arrive in the dun
twilight years. _The Mysterious Stranger_ is only _Tom Sawyer_ retold
in the midnight of his disillusion.
What an ending for a child of the Gilded Age! In his youth a complete
frontiersman, with vast potential wealth within him, he hewed and
hacked at his genius, working the easiest veins, exploiting the most
accessible resources, wasting much to cash in on a little. And when in
the end the fool’s gold turned to ashes in his mouth, as a frontiersman
still he pursued his way alone, a solitary pioneer exploring the
universe, seeking a homestead in an ironical cosmos, until overwhelmed
by the intolerable solitude he made mock at all the gods. What a
commentary on the Gilded Age!
Footnotes
[527] _The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, University of
California Chronicle_, Vol. XIII, Number 4.
[528] _Poetical Works_, Vol. I, p. 45.
[529] “At the Funeral of a Minor Poet,” _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 94.
[530] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, p. 215.
[531] _Ibid._, p. 200.
[532] _Poetical Works_, Vol. II, p. 72.
[533] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, pp. 168-169.
[534] _Ibid._, p. 176.
[535] _Ibid._, p. 205.
[536] Fred Lewis Pattee, _The Development of the American Short Story_,
pp. 171-172. See the entire chapter for a discussion of early realism
in the _Atlantic_.
[537] Preface, p. 5.
[538] Chapter VIII, p. 183.
[539] Chapter IX, p. 100.
[540] _Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_, pp. 46-47.
[541] _Ibid._, pp. 38-39.
[542] _Ibid._, pp. 186-187.
[543] _Ibid._, p. 23.
[544] Chapter XXXV, p. 350.
[545] Chapter LVII, pp. 519-520.
[546] _Ibid._, p. 563.
[547] See Mabbott, _Short Stories by Walt Whitman_, Columbia University
Press, 1927.
[548] For his late views see Horace Traubel, _With Walt Whitman in
Camden_, Vol. I, p. 99, and elsewhere.
[549] Cleveland Rogers and John Black, _The Gathering of the Forces_,
Vol. I, p. 12.
[550] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 53, 54, 57.
[551] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 215.
[552] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 65.
[553] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 79-80.
[554] _Leaves of Grass_, inclusive edition ed. by Emory Halloway,
Garden City, N. Y., 1927. Hereafter called _Leaves_. “To the States,”
p. 8.
[555] _Ibid._, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” p. 297, ll. 21-23.
[556] Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p 171.
[557] _Ibid._, p. 172.
[558] _Leaves_, “One’s-Self I Sing,” p. 1, ll. 1-2.
[559] _Autobiographia_, p. 73. See also _Democratic Vistas_, p. 74.
[560] _Leaves_, “Roaming in Thought,” p. 233.
[561] “Carlyle from the American Point of View,” in _Specimen Days,
Prose Works_, pp. 174-175.
[562] Rourke, _op. cit._, p. 173.
[563] _Leaves_, “Starting from Paumanok,” p. 14, ll. 22-26; p. 15, ll.
1, 13, 19, 22-23; p. 16, ll. 2, 5-11; p. 17, ll. 7-10.
[564] _Leaves_, p. 349, ll. 18-19.
[565] _Leaves_, p. 43, ll. 9-17.
[566] _Democratic Vistas, Prose Works_, pp. 254-255.
[567] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 174.
[568] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 285.
[569] _Leaves_, “Song of the Broad Axe,” p. 160, ll. 7, 14-20, 21-22;
p. 161, ll. 1-2, 6-7, 10.
[570] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 101.
[571] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 193, 215.
[572] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 223.
[573] _Ibid._ Vol. I, p. 363.
[574] See Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_, pp. 211-222; Lucy
Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, pp. 170-177.
[575] _Leaves_, “Thanks in Old Age,” p. 435.
[576] Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, p.
223.
[577] Vol. I, Chapter XXXIII, p. 237.
[578] Chapter 31.
[579] _The Connecticut Yankee_, N. Y., 1917, p. 107.
[580] _Ibid._, Chapter XIII, pp. 105-106.
[581] Cf. Whitman’s view, _The Gathering of the Forces_, Vol. II, pp.
284-286.
[582] See Chapter 33.
[583] W. D. Howells, _My Mark Twain_, p. 43.
[584] _Joan of Arc_, Chapter 37, p. 290.
[585] _The Mysterious Stranger_, p. 151.
Chapter III • Changing Theory
Unlike as were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain,
they belonged equally to an America that was passing. In consequence
of the silent drift towards consolidation new philosophies were
preparing that were to rephrase the familiar American ideals and adapt
current political and economic theory to the needs of the new order.
For a decade or more the significance of that drift was obscured by
the last great wave of decentralization that swept across the prairie
commonwealths; but when the frontier had been pushed to the Pacific
Northwest and the free lands had passed into private ownership, the
movement of consolidation gathered momentum swiftly. Primarily economic
in its origins, it went forward on even foot with the industrial
revolution. The vast increase in population, the unprofitable expansion
of agriculture, the augmenting resources of liquid capital, the new
potentialities revealed by industrialism, were all engaged in the work
of transforming a scattered agricultural people into an urbanized
industrial people.
And then came the railways to hasten a movement that was implicit in
the nature of things. Effective nationality in America issued more
immediately from fluid communication than perhaps any other cause.
A depressing spirit of isolation--of provincial aloofness--had lain
like a heavy weight on the colonial mind. The barriers of distance
were made formidable by a rugged untamed country, and to open up free
communication was an arduous undertaking. Yet easy communication must
be provided if economic development were to go forward. In the early
years of the nineteenth century vast plans and great outlays of money
went into the work of linking the sundered portions of the country
by a system of waterways. The Erie canal, the great lakes, the Ohio
and the Mississippi, were creating their own America, picturesque and
individual, when the process of differentiation was rudely broken
across by the iron rails that ran East and West, disregarding natural
barriers and breaking down traditional frontiers. It was the railways
that tied the continent effectively together, providing the needed
transportation to make possible a national economic system. With the
laying of the Union Pacific rails in the late sixties the destiny of
America as a self-sufficient economic unity was fixed. Henceforth
for an indeterminate period the drift of tendency would be from the
outlying frontiers to industrial centers, and with that drift would
come far-reaching changes in the daily routine of life. The machine
would reach into the remotest villages to disrupt the traditional
domestic economy, and the division of labor would substitute for the
versatile frontiersman the specialized factory-hand. A new urban
psychology would displace the older agrarian, and with the new
psychology would come other philosophies in response to the changing
realities.
I • Winds of Economic Theory
So profound a revolution could not fail to dislocate the foundations
of all traditional schools of thought. Economic and political theory
were both thrown out of their earlier beds to flow in new channels.
By force of gravitation the main stream of economic theory--like the
main stream of political theory--poured into the broadening channels
of capitalism, and only the lesser vagrant currents followed the
old channels of agrarianism or the new channels of proletarianism.
There was much speculation on the disturbing phenomena of the great
change, and current economic theory was slow to settle into the
conformities of a school. It divided sharply, not only between the
advocates of capitalism and agrarianism, but between those who
accepted the classical English theory and those who believed that
economic conditions in America warranted an independent American
school. The first group of professional economists--Henry C. Carey,
Francis A. Walker, David A. Wells--made its appearance, and a very
considerable group of amateurs--free-lance economists and fireside
theorists--contributed to the speculation of the times in the measure
of their intelligence. These latter have received scant attention,
since the battle went against them; nevertheless they do not deserve
to be forgotten, for most often they were an expression of the social
conscience of the times--a homely protest against the exploitation
of farmer and workingman by the rising capitalism. But because they
essayed to turn the course of “manifest destiny” they were ignored
or roughly ridden down, and only one of them--Henry George--is still
widely influential.
In the primitive early days of America economic theory had been a
simple homespun product, woven on fireside looms, and following simple
domestic patterns. With the rise of industrialism it passed into the
keeping of stockbrokers and textile manufacturers and retail merchants
who were looked upon as authoritative expounders of the new science
of wealth. In his _Elements of Political Economy_, first published in
1837 and for forty years a standard textbook in American colleges,
Francis Wayland accepted this view and offered an apology for treating
of the subject at all. “It may possibly be urged,” he said, “that the
Author, having had no experience in mercantile business, should have
left this subject to be treated of by practical men.” In the days of
Henry Clay this view established itself in the halls of Congress, where
politicians who had never heard of Ricardo were on profitably intimate
terms with Nick Biddle, and respected the interests of influential
constituents far more than the principles of Manchesterism. With the
appearance of professional economists the breach between economic
theory and legislative votes widened to a chasm. Ignored by the
politicians except in so far as their views fell in with the current
paternalism, the economists retreated to the quiet of the schools and
there spun their webs quite harmlessly. Youthful undergraduates were
fed on a modified English classical theory in which the pessimism
of Ricardo and Malthus, bred of the bitter dislocations of English
industrial life, was diluted with an optimism more suited to the temper
of the new world.
The academic economists, it must be confessed, were in an unhappy
position, not unlike that of the earlier Calvinists. They lived as
remote from the realities of life as did those old ministers. Trained
in the orthodox English school they felt bound to defend _laissez
faire_; yet as members of universities dependent on wealthy patrons
they could not well offend powerful interests that wanted none of
their free-trade theory. On the whole they stuck pretty manfully
to their guns, and from Wayland to Sumner they upheld the abstract
principle of free competition; but what they could do in other ways
to appease the wrath of the protectionists they did heartily, and
the steady rapprochement of academic economic theory and capitalism
was foreordained in the nature of things academic. Agrarian and
proletarian economics were granted no hearing in the colleges. Other
schools than the English classical were not countenanced, Henry George
was ridiculed and the left-wing European economists--great thinkers
like Sismondi, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon, Engels,
and Karl Marx--were pretty much ignored by professors of economics in
the America of the Gilded Age. Something of the intellectual sterility
of the genteel tradition descended upon our academic economists;
yet amongst them were vigorous and capable minds that must not be
overlooked.
1 • Henry C. Carey
Henry C. Carey, son of the vigorous Irish Republican, Matthew
Carey, who made _The American Museum_ one of the ablest of the
eighteenth-century American magazines, may perhaps be justly called
our first professional economist. The eighty-six years of his life
were filled with enormous labors in the twin fields of economics and
sociology. He did his own thinking from a basis of facts that he was
at great pains to gather and tabulate, and his intellectual unfolding
followed naturally the current material development of the mid-century.
His statistics, of which he was excessively fond, no doubt were as
unreliable as most statistics that economists love to dabble in, and
like other purveyors of columned figures and impressive charts he
certainly leaned too heavily on his knotty staff; but unlike academic
economists such as Francis Wayland he tried to keep his thinking in
contact with reality and in consequence his studies possess a solidity
that is still impressive.
Although his father had early been interested in Hamilton’s national
system and for a time was president of a Philadelphia society
concerned in furthering a protective tariff--for which the great
German protectionist List published a number of letters in 1827--Carey
began as a follower of the classical school, and in the thirties he
published a treatise on political economy that expounded the Manchester
doctrine of free-trade. But under the stirring leadership of Henry
Clay the American System was making headway fast, and the facts of
American expansion impressed him as earlier they had impressed the
young List on his visit here. Turning statistician, he soon discovered,
as he believed, certain fallacies in the English classical school,
and he proceeded to examine afresh the Ricardian theory of rent.
(The change came in 1848.) According to this most celebrated of all
economic doctrines rent is measured by the difference in productivity
between the best land, which is settled first, and the poorest, which
social need later brings under cultivation; and hence in every growing
community the increment of rent constantly increases at the expense of
both labor and capital. But in the America which Carey was acquainted
with, and where the story of social development was being swiftly
recapitulated, the facts seemed to him to prove quite otherwise. Here
the poorer lands were settled first, because their physical condition
made them more easily available, and only later, when social pressure
increased and larger means were available, were the rich bottom-lands
cleared and the marshes drained.
As a result of his narrow interpretation of Ricardo’s doctrine of
social fertility, Carey lost faith in the Ricardian theory and turned
frankly to the American scene to discover, if possible, a more adequate
explanation. Soon the seeds of his intense nationalism were bearing
their fruit. An inherited dislike of England led him to fear its
industrial preëminence, and he abandoned the ideal of an international
division of labor for the ideal of independent nationality, with
America developing its individuality through the exploitation of its
own resources. Free-trade, he came to believe, is international,
it results in establishing a “single factory for the whole world,
whither all the raw produce has to be sent whatever be the cost of
transport”; whereas any society waxes individual and strong in the
measure that it develops variety of employment with its demand for
mutual help and service. Only through such associations can man develop
his capacities and further his mastery of nature. His patriotism thus
became involved in his economics and for years he waged a relentless
warfare against Manchesterism. Not only were the English doctrines
false to American fact, he pointed out, but they were vicious Tory
doctrines which if followed here would keep America poor for the
benefit of England. The great idea which came finally to dominate his
thinking is suggested by the title of a pamphlet, written in 1852, _The
Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial_--a
work that suggests Frédéric Bastiat’s _Les harmonies économiques_,
published in 1850, and influenced by Carey’s earlier speculations.[586]
It was an age much given to discovering harmonies and Carey was not
behindhand in the business. In the introduction he traced the ills
of contemporary economic life to the Manchester theories of rent and
population--theories which had thrown their black shadows over English
Parliamentary programs of relief and perverted the normal unfolding
of western civilization. In consequence the “tendency of the whole
British system of political economy is the production of discord among
nations.”[587]
In the background of Carey’s mind was a Physiocratic dislike of the
sterile middleman which sharpened his antagonism to an international
division of labor, and a sensitive social conscience that was concerned
at the ruthless exploitation of English mill-hands. An ardent believer
in natural liberty and convinced of its beneficence, he restricted
economic freedom within national boundaries. The harmony of interests
is local and not international--the tying together of the several parts
of the whole. Beyond the national boundaries it ceases. The pessimism
of the English school with its iron law of wages and its Malthusian law
of population was harshly repugnant to his buoyant optimism. From these
vicious roots, he was convinced, sprang the principle of isolation and
differentiation--that producer and consumer must live apart, with the
corollary that the poor must seek new lands in far countries to supply
the places of those from which they have been thrust, there to produce
agricultural staples to exchange for the manufactured goods produced
in thickly settled countries--a principle that taxes both producer and
consumer in the exact measure of transportation tolls, and benefits
exclusively the sterile middleman. Applied to America the policy of
free-trade must keep this country dependent upon England--keep it
agricultural for the benefit of British merchants; and the program that
Carey outlined, the complete sufficiency of which he never doubted,
was a return to the policy of Adam Smith, to that “general harmony of
interests” that must result from bringing the farmer and artisan into
neighborhood communities, fashioning the raw materials where they are
produced and consuming the farmer’s produce where it is grown. Adam
Smith “saw well,” says Carey, “that when men came thus together, there
arose a general harmony of interests, each profiting his neighbor,
and profiting by that neighbor’s success, whereas the tendency of
commercial centralization was toward poverty and discord, abroad and at
home.”[588]
To his death in 1879 Carey was the most distinguished as he had been
the most tireless advocate of a system of protection for American
manufactures. He was one of the most pugnacious pamphleteers of a
pugnacious generation.[589] He was a co-worker with Horace Greeley in
the labor of convincing a suspicious people of the common benefits
to be got from a subsidy to a class; and their joint influence gave
respectability and popularity to the appeals of business men and
politicians. Between 1849 and 1857 he “was the virtual editor of the
_New York Tribune_” in all matters regarding protection. His chief
antagonist in the long struggle was William Cullen Bryant and the
_Evening Post_; and he made frequent appeal to Bryant to meet him in
a pamphlet debate that should bring before the public both sides of
the great question of protectionism. Bryant’s refusal did not lessen
his ardor, and in successive pamphlets he laid before the American
people a well-rounded argument for tariff subsidies that ranks him in
the history of economic thought with Friedrich List, the great German
apostle of a nationalist economic system. American manufacturers owe a
heavy debt to Henry Carey.
In these early years of industrialism the manufacturer was still
dependent on the banker, and industrial development was held back,
Carey came to believe, by a false financial policy imposed on the
county by the bankers. From his boundless enthusiasm for the ideal of
a national economy sprang likewise his unorthodox views on money that
so greatly annoyed his fellow economists. Individual in his thinking
on this as on other subjects, he espoused theories that to dogmatic
bullionists like David A. Wells seemed incendiary at a time (during
the post-war years) when so many Americans were bitten with “money
heresies.” On this theme his patriotism and his democratic sympathies
ran together. He was opposed to the bullion system because it struck
at nationalism. An English system, devised by Lombard Street, did not
answer the needs of America. The price of gold is established in a
world market and the flow of bullion is always toward the great centers
already glutted with money. To throw the money of the world into a
common pool was to subject the money of poorer and remoter countries
to the control of the great financial capitals. Free-trade and the
gold standard were the twin weapons forged by England for world-wide
economic conquest, and for America to adopt a financial policy that
held her subject to Lombard Street, seemed to Carey the height of
folly. Gold follows the balance of trade, and until America had built
up an adequate domestic economy her specie would continue to drain off,
leaving too scanty a supply to do the necessary work of society.
The solution, he believed, lay in the creation of an independent
national currency; and an efficient national currency, he held with
Bishop Berkeley, was one that was non-exportable, that remained at
home to do the day’s work instead of gadding about. To provide such
a medium of exchange he proposed a currency founded on the national
credit--a “national system,” he argued, “based entirely on the credit
of the government with the people, and not liable to interference
from abroad.”[590] It was on such grounds that Carey supported the
greenback issues and favored the remonetization of silver. The ideal of
“societary circulation,” he pointed out, was credit--“that great step
towards civilization which consists in substituting _letters of credit_
for material money”; and because “the steady and regular use of the
_letter of credit_ known to the world as the ‘greenback,’ or that other
known as the ‘national bank note,’”[591] tended to wean the minds of
men from dependence on specie, he was warm in their favor.
With a sound national system, let foreigners take our gold for
whatever balance of trade they can impose upon us, having no use
among ourselves for any coin money except what we can retain under
a wholesome foreign commerce.
What we most need today is the establishment of that monetary
independence which results from maintaining absolute command over
the machinery of exchange used within our borders, leaving to
the gold dollar the performance of its duty of arranging for the
settlement of balances throughout the world.[592]
Carey’s insistence on a plentiful supply of money laid him under the
charge of being an advocate of “cheap money,” and therefore one of
those wicked persons known as “inflationists.” The charge in the main
was true. He was pungent in his contrast between the prosperity of
war times when an abundant currency released all the energies of the
American people, and the stagnation that followed upon contraction.
“Cheap money--low interest--enabled our working men to prosper,”
whereas dear money--high interest--was bringing distress and hardship.
Every reduction in the amount of currency decreases the purchasing
power of the people, and slows down the circulatory system. The attempt
to retire the greenbacks he regarded as a class attack on the common
welfare of the country. “To that end the greenback, everywhere claimed
as the people’s money, has by those in high places been denounced,
small as is the quantity, when compared with the real need for
it.”[593] Paper money is “democratic in its tendencies,” passing from
hand to hand and never seeking a bank vault to hide in.
A war upon what is called “paper money” is ... a war upon the
poor in favor of the rich; and that the war being made upon it
has precisely that effect is proved by the fact, that the western
farmer is now being so impoverished by reason of such a reduction
in the price of corn and oats that the former is being used as
fuel, while the latter sold at 8 cents a bushel, [while] houses and
lots in the neighborhood of Wall Street [are] commanding ... prices
such as had never before been heard of.[594]
Considering Carey’s reputation as an economist and his wide influence,
such doctrine, in the eyes of all “sound-money men,” was distinctly
pernicious. He was giving aid and comfort to the apostles of inflation
and repudiation, and he suffered many a sharp attack. But that would
not deter a warrior grown gray in battle, and in the very last year
of his life he fell upon the bullion theory with the ardor of a young
man. He would not suffer the bankers to go unrebuked in their mad
attack on the prosperity of the country; he would not be silent while a
policy of contraction, that so early as 1866 had reduced the per capita
circulation to $12.50--according to his statistics--was still in full
swing after the disastrous lesson of 1873. He had much in common with
Peter Cooper, who in 1876 took up the battle against Wall Street for a
“democratic” monetary system. The blood of the two old men, both born
in the last decade of the eighteenth century, had not grown cold or
sluggish with long years, but responded ardently to the great cause of
democracy that had inspired their youth. That Carey’s national system
was a house divided against itself--that industry and finance were
engaged in a mortal combat for supremacy--he probably never quite
realized. He was concerned that America should be free to create and
enjoy the wealth that lay in the potentialities of the continent, and
to that end he would have money serve industry, and not industry money.
2 • Francis A. Walker
The social conscience of Carey was colored with an optimism that was
the spontaneous expression of a generation that set no limits to the
beneficent development of American industrialism. No storm-clouds
had yet gathered on the horizon; no hostile systems challenged the
sufficiency of capitalism. But a change was at hand. By the end of
the seventies the complacency of the Gilded Age was disturbed by the
rise of pestilent heresies in the shape of new economic dogmas. The
surplus-value theory of Marx and the unearned-increment theory of Henry
George were spreading widely through America, to the unsettlement of
susceptible minds; and the Knights of Labor were preparing to launch a
general attack against the whole system of capitalistic exploitation.
Carey had sufficed the wants of his simpler day, but there was need of
a new champion to wield the sword of pure Ricardian doctrine against
these later heresies.
Francis A. Walker, son of the economist Amasa Walker, Brigadier General
in the Civil War, Professor at Sheffield Scientific School and later
President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was to be the
self-appointed champion of industrialism, the official economist of
the Gilded Age, and forerunner of a long line of academic purveyors of
economic dogma. As the author of a college textbook that superseded
Francis Wayland’s naïve _Elements of Political Economy_--a work that
had served innumerable college generations as a quarry of economic
doctrine--he elaborated a complete system of economics with a geniality
that went far to popularize the “dismal science” with vast numbers of
undergraduates; and as an authoritative apologist for entrepreneur
profits he rendered a service to capitalism that quite erased his
little Ricardian peccadillo of free-trade prejudice. There runs
through his solid pages the confident optimism of his generation--an
optimism that discovers in the heresies of socialism and single-tax
the only storm-clouds on the fair American horizons. He saw no
reason to question the ultimate good of industrialism, or to fear any
deep-seated clash between labor and capital. He carried water easily
on both shoulders, for he was so fortunate as to have worked out to
his complete satisfaction, a magic economic formula that should return
both to master and workman their just shares of the total production.
In the light of his exegesis there could be no Marxian struggle of the
classes. The captain of industry must no longer be regarded with sour
aspect as a parasite upon labor, but as a fellow worker, the creator of
those profits which are not subtracted for his benefit from the portion
of labor. From Ricardo to Marx the economists had been barking up the
wrong tree in their analysis of the rewards of the entrepreneur.
The classical school of the Gilded Age was in like position with the
eighteenth-century Calvinists; they must either abandon their dogmas
or reinterpret them to meet current needs. Walker was too good a
Ricardian to abandon them, so he proposed to reinterpret them. The
urgent problems to which he addressed himself were the sources of
profits and of wages; and the examination of those problems led him
to his theory of the function of the entrepreneur and to a rejection
of the classical wage-fund theory. He refused to discard his suit of
Ricardian clothes as Carey had done. They could never go out of style,
he believed, so long as honest thinking was respected. He accepted
most of the Ricardian dogmas without question. “Capital,” he asserted
soberly, “arises solely from saving. It stands always for self-denial
and abstinence,” and interest is the “reward of abstinence.” But
one important dogma, the classical wage-fund theory, he insisted on
stripping away. He was too genial an optimist to rest content with
the bleak conception that the margin of subsistence circumscribes the
rewards of labor, and too enlightened an apologist of industrialism
to assert that “profits are the leavings of wages.” He could not
hope to erect a theory suitable to the Gilded Age on such skimpy
hypotheses, and he scourged them from the temple of economic law.
Wages, to be sure, are the leavings after rent, interest, and profits
have been deducted from the total production; but vast and dangerous
misconceptions have arisen in regard to the portions that accrue to
these several partners, and in particular mischievous perversions
touching the share of profits. This was the crux of the problem of
distribution and until the nature of profits should be determined the
question of wages would remain to befuddle weak heads.
The heart of Walker’s doctrine, therefore, is his theory of profits.
He proposed to show that according to the true law of profits this
flexible increment is never a moiety wrested from labor, but an
additional earning of management that justly accrues to him who creates
it. The doctrine from which he deduced his theory of the entrepreneur
was the Ricardian theory of rent. On this point Walker was the most
loyal of Ricardians, and he violently attacked Carey for repudiating
the classical dogma. In a word “Ricardo’s doctrine can no more be
impugned than the sun in the heaven,” he asserted, “and those who
mouth at it simply show that they do not know what it was Ricardo
taught.”[595] What was needed was to understand its wide implications
rather than to seek to destroy it--to trace in all its reaches the
doctrine of fertility and discover how in other spheres than land the
difference between fertile and unfertile measures the return upon
economic endeavor. For the great doctrine of fertility, Walker pointed
out, following Mill, is capable of expansion to cover wider fields
than rent; it applies equally to management and labor; it broadens out
into a comprehensive principle that exactly measures the most bitterly
disputed of the several increments, the increment of profits.
This theory of fertility, introduced into the law of distribution,
is Walker’s most interesting contribution to economic speculation.
By it he supplemented the trinity of land, capital, and labor--or
in terms of distribution, of rent, interest, and wages--with a new
entity--management and the earnings of management. The argument is
highly ingenious. Assuming a no-profits employer at the lowest scale of
the entrepreneur system, by analogy from the Ricardian no-rent grade
of land, he asserted that similarly “profits are measured upwards from
the level of the no-profits class of employers,” and hence “it appears
that the gains of the employer are not taken from the earnings of the
laboring class, but measure the difference in production between the
commonplace or bad, and the able, and shrewd, and strong management of
business.”[596] Profits, then, are an added increment of management,
secured by foresight and business skill, the fruit of managerial
fertility; and since they flow solely from the entrepreneur they belong
to him alone and no portion may be justly claimed for rent, interest,
or wages. The complete theory he states thus:
Under free and full competition, the successful employers of labour
would earn a remuneration which would be exactly measured, in the
case of each man, by the amount of wealth which he could produce,
with a given application of labour and capital, over and above
what would be produced by employers of the lowest industrial,
or no-profits, grade, making use of the same amounts of labour
and capital, just as rent measures the surplus of the produce of
the better lands over and above what would be produced by the
same application of labour and capital to the least productive
lands which contribute to the supply of the market, lands which
themselves bear no rent.[597]
It is a persuasive argument of which Walker was vastly proud. The germ
of it later historians of economic thought have traced to Senior and
John Stuart Mill, who had suggested the idea of “differential rent,” or
“rent of ability,” which is the reward of “all peculiar advantages of
extraordinary qualities of body and mind.”[598] From whatever source
it issued, the usefulness of such doctrine in the days of an expanding
industrialism, and the ends it might serve in counteracting proletarian
philosophies, are too evident to need comment. The Marxian dogma of
surplus value--that profits are stealings from wages--was certainly
calculated to breed dissatisfaction in weak proletarian heads. Marx was
a good Ricardian in his major postulates and the Ricardians had failed
to analyze adequately the true sources of profits; because of such
failure the classical school had underestimated the social beneficence
of the capitalistic system. Chained to the iron law of wages the school
had been forced to envisage a bleak future with labor kept always at
the margin of subsistence. From this pessimism Walker proposed to rid
economic theory, by showing that entrepreneur profits augment the wage
fund and hence that the entrepreneur is the benefactor rather than the
exploiter of labor. With his business skill the captain of industry,
like the inventor of a new machine, lays open new sources of wealth for
all, and if he gains much for himself he gives more to society; for
every improvement in business methods accrues in the end to society as
a whole, for the new technique soon becomes a common possession.
The validity of Walker’s theory of profits does not concern us here; it
is a matter for economists to determine. To one who is under the spell
of no doctrinaire system the theory seems somewhat too neat with its
assumption of “free and full competition”;[599] and in its conscious
purpose to glorify the captain of industry it is freighted rather
too heavily with the spirit of the Gilded Age. It not only throws
the door wide to exploitation but it invites everybody to the feast.
Yet the work of the apologist was only half done. Having established
to his satisfaction the law of profits, Walker was prepared to take
equally high ground in determining the increment that falls to labor.
To glorify profits and at the same time defend the pessimism of the
wage-fund theory, would have been foolish tactics in presence of the
Marxian surplus-value theory; proletarian discontent must be dealt with
and Walker was prepared to deal with it. Having ascertained exactly
the several increments due to rent, interest, and profits--which in
his system are rigidly determined by economic law--he confidently
assigned all the residual increment to wages. Labor not only gets all
it earns, he argued, but far more, since what does not fall to the
just shares of the other partners falls to it--that is the “whole
remaining body of wealth.” If it be recalled that the total social fund
of inventions, machinery, trade processes, systems of transportation,
business methods, are alike in the service of all employers--the
no-profit entrepreneur equally with the high-profit--it follows that
the individual employer can derive from such social wealth no modicum
of profit above and beyond what his individual fertility has produced.
Where then can the income from such social fund flow except to wages?
“Every invention in mechanics, every discovery in the chemical art, no
matter by whom made, inures directly and immediately” to the benefit
of labor.[600] This, to be sure, on the hypothesis of “full and free
competition,” which may be interfered with by various means but which
in the long run prevails. How else shall one explain the constant rise
in the wage-scale that has marked the Industrial Revolution and that
has gone hand in hand with vast profits to the entrepreneur class?
It was a robust optimism that could lay down the theory that labor
is “the residual claimant to the product of industry.” Although
Walker prided himself on his discovery, it seems to have made slight
impression on later economic thought. Like too many members of the
classical school the apologist of the Gilded Age failed to keep his
feet on the plebeian earth; and his conclusions suggest how great
mischief _a priori_ reasoning may work in the speculations of academic
gentlemen. A moderate dash of realism might have lessened his buoyant
optimism; but Walker was too warm an admirer of capitalism, too eager
to assert the beneficence of industrialism, to inquire curiously into
the everyday facts of current exploitation. As a realistic statistician
he was far inferior to Carey. But why demand a plodding realism of the
economist when all America was romantic? If the economic theory of
General Walker was a pleasant blend of Ricardo and Colonel Sellers,
would it not hit the taste of the age to a nicety? Its sturdy optimism
was a soothing antidote to the Jeremiads of the Marxians and the shrill
demands of the single-taxers. The Gold Coast of America looked to its
official economists for a confutation of all economic heresies, and who
was so well equipped for that business as a doughty Colonel Sellers
armed with a sharp Ricardian sword?
In this brisk work Walker engaged with gusto. In his onslaught upon
Marx and Henry George he was untroubled by doubt. He first demolished
the structure of their theory and then impugned their honesty. His
condemnation of single-tax is bold and sweeping. There is a bitter
asperity in his denunciation of the economic heresies of _Progress
and Poverty_, and he dismisses the proposal to tax unearned increment
with the comment, “Every honest man will resent such a proposition
as an insult.”[601] His discussion of the economics of the question
is only casual and he hastens back to the safe haven of Ricardian
doctrine.[602] In his commentary on the Knights of Labor he is somewhat
vindictive for a well-bred gentleman. He charges the syndicalistic
attack on the profits system to immigrant foreigners, asserts that the
law of profit fertility is an insuperable obstacle to any proletarian
control of industry, and finally damns it as un-American. The honest,
native American “knows that for himself and his children the way is
open clear to the top”; his “spirit is that of civility, reciprocity
and fair play”; and he concludes:
Had it been left to our native population alone, not one of those
violent and reckless attacks upon production and transportation,
which have, within the past two or three years, shocked the whole
industrial system and have come near to produce a general crisis of
trade, would ever have taken place.[603]
Yet in spite of his genial optimism he discovered specks on the fair
picture of society. To the Ricardian logic the stupidity of men is a
constant irritant; if only men were rational the path of progress would
be so much easier! After economic law has been demonstrated with the
finality of a Euclidian theorem, it is disconcerting to see how the
multitude will not be reasoned with, but persist in following after the
last false prophet who cries in the market-place. The clamor raised
by single-tax was especially annoying. “That such an argument,” he
remarked a bit testily, “should for a moment have imposed upon anybody,
is enough to give one a new conception of the intellectual capabilities
of mankind.”[604] Fortunate it is for society, he concludes, that while
man proposes, economic law disposes. False prophets will have their
little day, but from their secure watch-tower the Ricardians calmly
look out upon a world of which they alone hold the key.[605]
II • The Conscription of Political Theory
When the social fabric is being torn rudely across by a changing
economics, political theory and practice will suffer from the attendant
confusions. The America of the Gilded Age accounted itself a democracy
and was outwardly content to make use of the familiar democratic
machinery; but until it was determined whether majority or minority
rule should prevail, whether the well-being of the many or the property
of the few should be the chief object of government, there would be
no serious effort to create a political state for adequate social
control. In the meantime the old individualisms would range the land
seeking what they might devour, and the common attitude toward the
political state would remain one of good-natured contempt. A shambling
government, corrupt and incompetent, awakened no man’s hope or
pride, and amidst the slovenly anarchisms of the times, with a crude
exploitation in the saddle, the state would be pretty much ignored
except when its services might prove useful to such exploitation. The
plutocracy would oppose the erection of a vigorous state until such
time as it felt strong enough to control its activities. The principle
of the majority-will held grave potentialities that might threaten the
eventual mastership of wealth, and until the plutocracy had created its
strongholds within the framework of the democracy it would bitterly
oppose any extension of democratic control.
Broadly two great movements were going forward side by side in the
unconscious drift of political tendency--the democratic and the
plutocratic. The former, drawn chiefly from agrarian and labor
elements with a considerable following of the middle and professional
classes, was determined to carry forward and supplement the Jacksonian
movement. It was honestly concerned for the development of the
democratic principle. It would purify government by the application of
civil service reform, it would steadily enlarge the bounds of social
control of economic forces, and it would strengthen the political
state to enable it to cope with corporate wealth and constrain the
ambitions of the plutocracy into conformity with democratic ends. To
such a democratic program the plutocracy was necessarily opposed. It
professed the warmest loyalty to the abstract principle of democracy
while bending every energy to emasculate effective democratic control.
The problem confronting it was the familiar Federalistic problem--how
to protect the minority from the majority and set property interests
above human interests; but the problem had been immensely complicated
by the strategic advances made by democracy. The democratic principle
could not be easily thrust aside, it must be undermined. And so while
awaiting the time when it should be strong enough to set up boldly
its mastery of society, plutocracy took refuge in two principles,
the superman theory and the _laissez-faire_ theory, both of which it
asserted to be democratic, the very essence of democracy. The former
was “The public be damned” theory, which held that the economic leaders
of society must be left free to manage their properties as they saw
fit; and the latter was the familiar doctrine of individual initiative,
that looked with suspicion on any interference by the political state
with economic activity. If a bureaucracy may stick its nose into the
citizen’s private affairs what becomes of individual liberty?
But the plutocracy was building its real defenses elsewhere. Shrewdly
aware of the potentialities of a Constitution that had been designed
for the protection of property interests, it followed two main lines
of development: it furthered the popular development of a cult of
the Constitution by praising the excellence of a system of checks and
balances, and spreading the view that to tamper with any provisions
of the instrument was little short of sacrilege; and at the same time
it bent every energy to extend the range of judicial prerogative and
bring the legislative branch under control of the judiciary. It sought
extra-constitutional indulgences that were dispensed by the courts in
the name of the police power. The way had been prepared by Marbury
vs. Madison and Dred Scott vs. Sanford, and during the Gilded Age a
broad path to judicial control was opened by the elaboration of the
“due process of law” principle discovered in the fourteenth amendment.
With the development of the plutocracy the extension of the doctrine
of judicial review went forward rapidly, providing an impregnable
defense for property interests that promised ill for the principle
of democratic control in the interests of the common well-being. The
democracy was being driven from the inner keep of the castle.
While the real struggle was thus going on in the court-room, with the
outcome in the hands of the judges, political speculation was playing
havoc with certain of our oldest and most cherished doctrines. Pursuing
the path suggested by Webster and Francis Lieber, it turned away from
the particularism of Calhoun to explore the reaches of a consolidating
nationalism. The inevitable drift towards unity--whether democratic
or plutocratic--was daily gathering momentum. The destruction of the
states-rights program and party had cleared the ground for a new
conception of the dignity and powers of the political state. With the
social shift from dispersion to centralization the federal government
was destined to grow in authority; and political theory was destined to
follow the same course, seeking to justify in principle what was being
accomplished in fact. The end of the philosophy of dispersion was in
sight. The tide was running toward an exaltation of the doctrine of
sovereignty, with the consequent exaltation of the abstract political
state. As the individual coalesced in the mass, the rights and dignity
of the individual would lessen in the presence of an engulfing
sovereignty. The traditional doctrine of natural rights was in for a
slashing attack. Centralization must destroy the shambling Jacksonian
structure and erect in its place a grandiose organic theory.
During the Gilded Age a number of systematic studies of political
theory appeared, amongst which the most significant were, Woolsey’s
_Political Science, or the State_ (1877), Bryce’s _The American
Commonwealth_ (1888), Woodrow Wilson’s _The State_ (1889), and
Burgess’s _Political Science and Constitutional Law_ (1891). Of these
the formal studies of Woolsey and Burgess may serve to illustrate
the changing thought of the times. Both are academic reflections of
the current drift of tendency, and both reveal the academic sympathy
with the master movement of centralization. The work of Woolsey was a
revision of classroom notes used between 1846 and 1871 and strongly
colored by pre-war views; the work of Burgess was the first-fruits of
the influence of German speculation on the nature of the leviathan
state.
1 • Theodore Woolsey
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, professor of Greek and president of Yale,
was an heir in direct succession of Connecticut Federalism. Nephew of
Timothy Dwight, a minister, and distinguished member of the social
oligarchy that in its decadence still held Connecticut opinion in a
strong grip, he could scarcely escape a predilection for the moralistic
authoritative dogmatisms that marked the old Connecticut _régime_. The
principle of coercive authority had lain at the heart of the political
theory of Timothy Dwight, and Theodore Woolsey was true to his Puritan
antecedents in asserting the supremacy of authority over liberty.
The only important element in his thinking that sets him apart from
his uncle was the influence of Francis Lieber, whose conception of
organic growth in social custom he made his own, and whose disciple
he professed to be. Naturally he retained the old Puritan dislike of
leveling--the traditional Connecticut distrust of democracy. He would
have no weakening of authority, no Jacobean license; and for anarchism,
socialism, communism, which he reckoned the nastiest spawn of
Jacobinism, his abhorrence was what one would expect of a Connecticut
Federalist. The two ponderous volumes that he issued in 1877 are
learned studies that bear on their dun pages many a telltale mark of
earlier times. In them Theodore Woolsey was renewing the fight against
an infidel philosophy that with its doctrine of natural rights denied
the authority of the godly to police society.
In harmony with Lieber and Calhoun he rejected the romantic doctrine
of natural rights, and substituted a composite social-moralistic
conception, that from John Winthrop and Roger Williams to Channing and
Emerson had colored the Puritan thought of New England. Natural rights,
he asserted, are those which belong to man by reason of the nature God
has endowed him with; and the state is a moral agent, arising out of
custom, to secure and guarantee such rights. It is “as truly natural as
rights are, and as society is”; for established in the social nature of
man it is the natural repository and guardian of his rights in a social
order. It is an expression of the teleological purpose that underlies
all things. The manner in which Woolsey elaborated his moralistic
theory will be evident from the following passages:
The considerations that men exist together in society, that they
have an irresistible impulse towards society, that their perfection
of soul and of outward condition can be secured only in a social
life, and, on the other hand, that recognition of rights and
obligation alone make a social life a tolerable or even a possible
thing, and that wherever men reflect on their own nature they
admit the existence of certain classes of rights and shield them
by public power, show a divine purpose which none who believe in
a Creator of the world can deny. The Creator of man, having made
him such that his temporal, moral, and spiritual perfection can be
found only in society, prepared his moral feelings for the life
for which he was destined. The destination for society; the means
within human nature by which it is fulfilled; the means by which
the individual and the community, when brought into society, are
able to secure the good and avoid the evils possible in a state
of coexistence--these form a complete, harmonious whole, which
manifest comprehension of view and forethought. It is provided
in our nature, when it is not perverted--that is, when it does
not swerve from the true idea of human nature--that we shall form
societies under law. A state of society is a state of nature, and
the only true one.
When therefore _natural_ rights are spoken of, we can accept the
term, if it be used to denote such rights as grow out of our
nature, and may be inferred from the destination to which it
points us. Another and a heathenish kind of sense was attached
to the words, when they were taken to mean the rights, or rather
uncontrolled liberties, which men possessed in a state of human
nature in which there was no organized society or government....
[Such a theory] contemplates men as enjoying certain powers of
free action in this state of nature, and these powers must serve
for a foundation of their state as members of society, or so many
of them as it cannot be shown that they gave up, in order to make
a state of law and order possible. In other words, the theory of
the derivation of these rights from a state of nature may take a
hypothetical shape, and deduce rights from what a man could do in a
state of things which exists only in a jural fiction....
We find no fault with the objects which the theories had in view,
but with the want of conformity to truth. It must be pronounced,
in _the first place_, contrary to fact, that such a state of
nature ever existed. Man has always been under law; he is a ζῷον
πολιτικόν....
_Secondly_, if it could be shown that he had such an origin, it
would prove nothing.[606]
Having thus established both society and the state in the nature of
man, and dismissed the romantic interpretation of natural rights as
heathenish, Woolsey turned to examine the true sphere and function of
the political state. He rejected in the main the _laissez-faire_ view
of Mill and Spencer, but he refused to go so far as Burgess. He will
have no omnicompetent state. A just mean must be laid down between
authority and liberty, and that mean he discovered in the dictum,
“The sphere of the state ... may reach as far as the nature of man
and needs of man and of men reach”;[607] that is to say, its control
runs far beyond mere police powers, and concerns itself not only with
material ends but with the “intellectual and aesthetic wants of the
individual, and the religious and moral nature of its citizens.” A
state swollen to great powers he regarded as likely to swallow up
liberty in paternalism, and a state immediately responsive to the
popular will is certain to run into “extreme democracy.” His ideal
government he discovered in the rule of the Connecticut oligarchy,
under which a homogeneous people, with simple agrarian habits,
disciplined by religion and responsive to moral leadership, enjoyed
a stable government administered by proved executives. Unfortunately
with the nineteenth century began a decline in American government,
resulting from economic changes, the growth of cities, lower-class
immigration, and the “gradual reception of doctrines of political
rights, which belong to extreme democracy.” Such pernicious doctrines,
in his judgment, were: the short term of office, popular election of
judges to hold for a fixed period instead of for life, the debasement
of the representative system by subjecting the representative to his
constituents, and the spoils system.[608] In a later study he added two
other evils: direct legislation through the initiative, and a popular
referendum on war and peace.[609]
In spite of an imposing display of classical learning these two
stout volumes reveal a childlike ignorance of _Realpolitik_, a
naïve inability to grasp the significance of economic groupings
that underlie all political alignments. Neither as minister nor as
college president did Theodore Woolsey learn anything about the robust
materialisms which any realistic political theory must take into great
account. His knowledge of ancient Greek institutions no doubt was
adequate, but his knowledge of American constitutional development
was singularly inadequate. He accepted without question the argument
of Story and Webster that the phrase, “We the people,” proves the
original, consolidating intention of the document; he discussed the
history of party government in the United States without touching on
the economic alignment of agrarianism and capitalism; and he could
discover only one thoroughly admirable political party--“the upright
federal party.” He extols the Supreme Court as the triumph of the
American Constitution, without considering the desirability of a
judicial veto on legislative enactments, or suggesting a potential
alignment of the judiciary with the master forces of a generation. The
moralistic bias of his thought is perhaps sufficiently revealed in a
comment on the functions of the judges. “In a higher sense, they are
not representatives of the community nor of its chief magistrates, but
of justice and of God.... They are in fact more immediately servants
of God than any other men who manage the affairs of a country, because
expediency, departure from law or from the constitution, is for them in
no circumstance a thing to be conceived of.”[610] Mark Twain, it would
seem, was not the only humorist of the Gilded Age.
In his later years Woolsey was much disturbed by the spread of
collectivist doctrine, and in the thick of the economic unrest of the
times he felt it to be his duty to assist in stemming the advance of
such doctrine. In his great work on political theory, he demolished
the communist-anarchist-socialist arguments in a few pages, and then
remarked with excellent candor, “There is an extensive literature,
relating to the subject ... with much of which I am not familiar.”
Fearful that he might not have delivered a death-blow, after further
reading he returned to the attack three years later, and in 1880
published a volume entitled _Communism and Socialism_. For so difficult
a business he was even then inadequately equipped. He did not realize
the magnitude of his task. Marx’s _Capital_ could not be undermined
in ten pages, even with the help of Cairnes, Mill, and Ricardo, and
a political scientist with a theological background was scarcely
competent to untie the close-knit threads of the Marxian economics.
His exposition in consequence is incomplete and faulty; it largely
overlooks the Marxian philosophy of history and ignores the doctrine of
economic determinism. What troubles him most is the lack of religious
faith amongst socialists. The validity of a theory he is satisfied
to test by the morality of the theorist. One can easily guess that
President Woolsey’s opinions had turned into dogmatic conviction before
a page of the literature to be examined had come under his eyes. Yet
that so shallow a book should have issued from an academic pen will
surprise no one who is aware of the incredible number of shallow books
that actually have issued from academic pens. Provocative social
thinking and the American university seem never to have got on well
together.
In the fact that Woolsey’s speculations on the nature of the state
were accounted significant contributions to political science by his
generation of Americans, the historian may find added confirmation
of the shallowness of the Gilded Age. A stale Connecticut Calvinism,
molding in the corner of the cupboard, is poor food to nourish
thinking, and a man who knows nothing about the deeper springs of
political struggle is singularly unqualified to elaborate a science of
the state. Theodore Woolsey’s weighty volumes were a dignified attempt
to rehabilitate the old Connecticut Federalism and suit it to the taste
of a new age. But what measure of political intelligence can one expect
of a people fed on pious fictions by their most authoritative expounder
of the noble art of government?
2 • John W. Burgess
Woolsey has little to say about sovereignty. The speculations of Austin
had not reached his quiet study, and the need for a coercive state in
harmony with a centralizing industrialism was not likely to be realized
by a man whose eyes were turned back fondly to a simple village
life. It was left for a younger generation to examine the problem of
sovereignty, and to that business John W. Burgess turned with zest.
A thoroughgoing Austinian, a disciple of the German state-cult, a
Hegelian, he would seem to have been ill fitted to interpret the
functions of the state to America. And yet by virtue of his European
detachment he saw clearly the direction in which America[611]
IV • Buttressing the Democratic Theory
1 • A Democratic Economics--Henry George
While the academic economists were thus providing a new body of
capitalistic theory, from the ranks of the people came a group that
was bent on bringing economic principles into greater conformity to
what they considered democratic needs. The economics of bankers and
manufacturers they regarded as a selfish class economics and they
proposed to democratize the body of economic thought as Tom Paine and
Jefferson had democratized the body of political thought. Since the
days of John Taylor such amateur economists had been plentiful in
America, and in the post-war days when the country was in the throes
of the Industrial Revolution, they sprang up at every cross-roads.
George Henry Evans, Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, Parke Godwin, Wendell
Phillips, Albert Brisbane, Hinton R. Helper, “Coin” Harvey, were only
a few out of the many who in their own way were seeking in economics a
road to freedom. They were not formal economists; they were little read
in the history of economic thought; in so far as they may be accounted
a school they were mostly the unclaimed progeny of French Physiocratic
theory who did not recognize their own father. Yet they were vastly
concerned to bring economic theory into some sort of realistic contact
with the facts of American experience and the ideals of democracy;
and their immediate objective was the overthrow of current Manchester
principles and the erection in their stead of a body of theory based on
the needs of the producer and the consumer rather than the middleman.
Of this characteristic native group, largely ignored by our formal
historians, by far the ablest and most influential was Henry George,
a thinker created by the impact of frontier economics upon a mind
singularly sensitive to the appeal of social justice, singularly
self-sufficient in its logic. He remains still our most original
economist. Beyond the Ricardian theory of rent, with its corollary of
unearned increment, he owed little to Europe and nothing to academic
American economists. From the first he was a free-lance, returning
to the origins of things--as Tom Paine had advised long before--and
thinking “as if he were the first man who ever thought.” His major
doctrines he arrived at largely independently, ignorant of the fact
that his _impôt unique_ had been earlier elaborated by the Physiocratic
school, till long after he had come to identical conclusions. His
matured philosophy was the outcome of the meditations of a Jeffersonian
idealist contemplating the divergence between the crude facts of
exploitation all about him and the eighteenth-century ideal of natural
justice; and he became, in consequence, the voice of idealistic America
seeking to adjust the economics of a rapidly changing society to the
ends of democratic well-being. The passion of the reformer was in him,
but wedded to the critical mind of the analyst; and this accounts
for the wide appeal of _Progress and Poverty_ that for thousands of
Americans removed economic theory from the academic closet and set it
in the thick of political conflict. Henry George humanized the dismal
science and brought it home to the common interest. With his extreme
simplification no doubt he fell into the same error the classical
school had fallen into before him; he left too many elements out of
his equation; but he succeeded in the same way they had succeeded--he
made of economic theory a weapon to use in the struggle between the
exploiters and the exploited. After _Progress and Poverty_ the social
economist could cross swords with the Ricardians.
Henry George is readily enough explained in the light of his
environment. He was intellectually native to the West, but it was the
West of the Gilded Age with its recollections of an earlier agrarian
order. Upon the gigantic exploitation of post-war times, carried
forward in the name of progress, he threw the experience of two
hundred and fifty years of continental expansion. That experience had
undergone a subtle change as the settlements moved through the Inland
Empire, a change marked by the spirit of capitalistic expansion with
its crop of unearned increment. On the frontier, land speculation
was often the readiest means to wealth. To the west of the Allegheny
Mountains land had long been the staple commodity, with the buying and
selling of which every community was deeply concerned; and from the
dramatic repetition of that experience in California, Henry George
clarified the principle upon which he erected his social philosophy,
namely, that a fluid economics begets an equalitarian democracy and
homespun plenty, and that with the monopolization of natural resources
a static economy succeeds, with its attendant caste regimentation and
augmenting exploitation. In the days when he was meditating his social
philosophy, California was still in the frontier stage of development,
but amidst the hurrying changes a fluid economics was visibly hardening
to the static, with a swiftness dramatic enough to impress upon him
the significance of a story that had been obscured in earlier telling
by the slowness of the dénouement. The vast cupidity of business in
preëmpting the virgin resources of California, and in particular the
technique of Leland Stanford and the Central Pacific Railway group,
provided an eloquent object-lesson that set him to examining the long
history of land-jobbing in America in its remoter social bearings. From
such inquiry emerged the cardinal principles of an economic theory that
must be reckoned the ultimate expression of a school of thought that
beginning with Quesnay a hundred years before, and first interpreted
for America by John Taylor and the Jeffersonians, was finally buried in
a common grave with the kindred doctrine of natural rights.
It was no accident that his mind fastened upon land monopoly as the
deeper source of social injustice. As a child of the frontier he
thought in terms of land as naturally as the money-broker thinks in
terms of discounts. His psychology was that of the producer rather than
the middleman. Land, with all its potential wealth of field and orchard
and forest and stream, with its unmeasured resources of coal and iron
and oil and timber, was the fruitful gift of nature to man; and the
true measure of social well-being, he believed, is the measure in which
labor is free to use such natural resources for productive purposes.
Land monopoly was an ancient evil that had laid its blight on every
civilization. The expropriation of natural resources was the origin of
rent, and rent was a social tax parasitic in nature. Unearned increment
was a moiety wrested from the producer, that waxed ever greater with
the increase of production. Henry George was well aware how deeply
rooted in American psychology was the love of unearned increment.
Since the far-off days when the agent of the Transylvania Land Company
wrote in 1775 that the Ohio Valley abounded in land-mongers, the rage
for expropriative speculation had mounted steadily; and the railway
land-grants of his day were a fitting climax to a policy that in every
generation had brought forth such fruits as the Yazoo frauds. The land
question was a perennial western problem. For years Horace Greeley in
the _Tribune_, had spread amongst the farmers the “Vote Yourself a
Farm” propaganda. The protest of the small western settler against the
middleman policy of the government in alienating great blocks of the
public domain to speculative companies, had added thousands of votes to
the Republican party, and the result was the Homestead Act of 1862. But
the fruits of the Act were partly destroyed by huge grants to railway
promoters, and the time had come, George believed, when the problem
must be envisaged in all its complexities and the American people
brought to understand how great were the stakes being gambled for.
The disease had so long been endemic in America that the remedy
must be drastic. No patent nostrums would serve. The vividness of
his experience in the West had thrown into sharp relief his earlier
experiences in the East, and made him distrustful of all social
panaceas that hopeful idealists were seeking in Europe. With any form
of collectivistic theory he would have nothing to do. Marxian socialism
he looked upon as an alien philosophy, inadequate in its diagnosis and
at fault in its prescription. The ills of America--perhaps of Europe as
well--must be cured by another regimen. _Progress and Poverty_ grew out
of his experience as he watched the heedless alienation of the public
domain. It was his reply to the policy of preëmption, exploitation, and
progress of the Gilded Age. Philadelphia-born, he early suffered in his
personal fortune from the periodic hard times that ran so disastrous a
cycle in the days when America was in thoughtless transition from an
agrarian order to an industrial. His scanty schooling came to an end
before he had reached his fourteenth year, and at sixteen he saw no
better opening in life than to ship before the mast to Australia. On
his return he learned to set type, but times were bad and opportunity
declining to knock at his door, he worked his way through the Straits
of Magellan, landing in San Francisco in 1858, on his way to Salem,
Oregon, where he worked for a time in a shop. With the exhaustion of
the diggings he made his way back to San Francisco, and began a long
series of restless ventures in the newspaper field, with only his hands
for capital--none very successful, none quite a failure, but returning
him useful dividends in the form of a serviceable prose style. At
twenty-two he plunged into an improvident marriage with a girl of
eighteen, and the next dozen years brought many privations to the
little family.
Fate had not yet taken Henry George in hand to lead him into his
life work. All the economics he then knew had been learned in the
rough and tumble ways of a western print-shop. In 1869, at the age of
thirty, while on a business trip to New York City, he was confronted
by the contrast between wealth and poverty there nakedly exposed--so
unlike what he had known at San Francisco. It was a prod to his social
conscience, and as he contemplated the wretchedness of the East Side he
registered a vow to explore the hidden causes of social disease. He had
given no serious thought to economic questions, and now almost casually
he went to the Philadelphia public library to look into John Stuart
Mill’s _Political Economy_. He accepted Mill’s views on wages without
critical examination, and wrote his first important article--on the
Chinese question in California. In the meantime a group of California
railway promoters had been buying and selling legislators in their work
of building up private fortunes out of a public monopoly; and it was
the contemplation of wealth acquired by such methods, together with the
gamble of land speculation in Oakland in consequence of the proposal to
establish there the western terminal of the continental railway, that
clarified for Henry George the great principle he was to expound in
_Progress and Poverty_ ten years later.
The first drift in his intellectual development had been a drift back
to the old Jeffersonianism from which the country was swiftly moving.
As an editor he was an outspoken Democrat of the primitive school,
opposed to protectionism, subsidies, a centralizing political state,
and the corruption that follows in the train of paternalism as sickness
follows infection. In a pamphlet written in 1870, he expounded his
political faith thus:
Railroad subsidies, like protective duties, are condemned by the
economic principle that the development of industry should be
left free to take its natural direction. They are condemned by
the political principle that government should be reduced to its
minimum--that it becomes more corrupt and more tyrannical, and
less under the control of the people, with every extension of its
powers and duties.... They are condemned by the experience of the
whole country, which shows that they have invariably led to waste,
extravagance and rascality; that they inevitably become a source of
corruption and a means of plundering the people.[612]
Having thus indoctrinated himself in the Jeffersonian liberalism
with its foundations laid in natural rights and its conception of a
decentralized society, the following year, at the age of thirty-two,
he sat down to the serious elaboration of his views. _Our Land and
Land Policy, National and State_, was an explorative pamphlet that
went to the heart of the problem as he had come to understand it. The
kernel of the work is the question of the relation of land to labor,
of rent to wages; and the conclusion to which it led was the doctrine
of the social ownership of socially created values, which justice
requires shall return to society in the form of an equalized tax that
shall absorb the unearned increment. Around this fundamental doctrine
was grouped a considerable body of ideas that had been expounded by
earlier liberals. How much he borrowed and how much he arrived at
independently, cannot easily be determined; such diverse thinkers as
James Harrington, Locke, the Physiocrats, Tom Paine, Karl Marx, John
Stuart Mill, William Ellery Channing, might well have contributed to
this provocative document, if George had been acquainted with them.
Like Harrington was the assumption of economic determinism--that
ownership of the land implies the rulership of society. From the
school of Locke came the conception of natural rights, but interpreted
rather in terms of Tom Paine and of William Ellery Channing. From
Mill came the conception of unearned increment; from Marx the law of
concentration; and from the Physiocrats the conception of a natural
order and the doctrine of an _impôt unique_. And all this set in a
framework of American economic history, which reveals with shrewd
insight the disastrous tendency of the traditional policy of land
alienation in great blocks to middle-men, with the attendant rise of
rent.
How intimately he was related in his thinking to the French liberals of
the eighteenth century, may perhaps be sufficiently suggested in his
interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights--a doctrine the new
realistic school from Calhoun to Woolsey and Burgess was subjecting to
critical analysis. By uniting the individualism of Locke’s doctrine of
property with the Physiocratic doctrine of social well-being, he gave
a sharp turn to the conception that, like Jefferson’s, set it widely
apart from the exploitative interpretation preferred by the Hamiltonian
followers of Locke. The gist of his conception is thus set down:
Now the right of every human being to himself is the foundation
of the right of property. That which a man produces is rightfully
his own, to keep, to sell, to give or to bequeath, and upon this
sure title alone can ownership of anything rightfully rest. But man
has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence--the
right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be
necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he
may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else;
and to this he has a title as against all the world.[613]
Much of Henry George is compressed within these few lines, that suggest
as well the diverse liaisons of his thought. In his conception of
the right of every man to himself he is in agreement with William
Ellery Channing, who used the argument in his attack on slavery, and
with Emerson, Parker, and the Transcendental radicals generally.
It is an interpretation of natural rights that sprang easily from
the Unitarian-Transcendental conception of the sacredness of the
individual, and that was given wide currency by the anti-slavery
propaganda. From his deduction that the right to property flows
from the right to self, came his theory of tax-equity that was to
play a major rôle in the formulation of his principle of taxation.
If society may not justly take from the individual what the
individual has created, it must seek its revenues elsewhere than in a
personal-property tax; and where should it look if not to those values
which society has created? The inalienable right of the individual to
what he has produced does not extend to the appropriation of wealth
he has not produced, and a sharp line is drawn between the rights
of the individual and the rights of society, between production and
exploitation. Herein lies the justification of the single-tax--a
principle derived by crossing Locke with the New England school.
From the classical economists Henry George got little. He had a quiet
contempt for them he was never at pains to conceal. He was convinced
that they had distorted the whole science of economics. As the earlier
Tories with their sacred _arcana imperii_ had done with political
government, they had involved economics in abstract theory, removing
it from the comprehension of the common man. At the best they had
dehumanized it to the status of a dismal science, with their postulate
of an economic man and their pessimistic outlook. At the worst they had
shaped it into a potent weapon for the exploiting class, who gravely
invoked economic law--which none understood--to justify class policies
of state. In an address delivered at the University of California,
Henry George paid his respects to the classical school in these words:
The name of political economy has been constantly invoked against
every effort of the working classes to increase their wages
or decrease their hours of labour.... Take the best and most
extensively circulated textbooks. While they insist upon freedom
for capital, while they justify on the ground of utility the
selfish greed that seeks to pile fortune on fortune, and the
niggard spirit that steels the heart to the wail of distress, what
sign of substantial promise do they hold out to the working man
save that he should refrain from rearing children?...[614]
For political economy thus degraded from its high place and become
the slut of private interest, Henry George proposed to do what Tom
Paine had done for political theory a hundred years before--he would
transfer it from the closet to the market-place by exposing the
shabby _arcana imperii_ and bringing it within the comprehension
of common men. He would bring home to the popular intelligence a
realization of the dynamics of economic law and its bearing upon
social well-being, that men might plot a fairer course for society.
This was the deeper purpose of _Progress and Poverty_--to humanize
and democratize political economy, that it might serve social ends
rather than class exploitation. _The Rights of Man_ and _Progress and
Poverty_ may be reckoned complementary works, applying to related
fields the spirit released to the modern world by the great thinkers
of Revolutionary France. The foundations on which they both rest is
the eighteenth-century conception of natural law, all-comprehensive,
beneficent, free, enshrined in the common heart of humanity, and
conducting to the ultimate of social justice.
As a necessary preliminary to his purpose, Henry George was forced to
clear the ground of old growths. Before he could declare the truth he
must uproot certain of the Malthusian and Ricardian heresies. He must
substitute a sociological interpretation, based on historical reality
in western civilization, for a set of economic abstractions, based on
the political and economic accidents of England in post-Napoleonic
days. The Manchester school, it must be remembered, was an embodiment
of the aspirations of the rising middle class; it was a philosophical
attack upon the vexatious restrictions laid upon capitalism by
government in the hands of the landed aristocracy. It conceived of
economic principles as of concern only to the owning classes, and
its theory took a special and narrow form from the current struggle
between the landed and capitalistic interests. In a Parliamentary
debate over the corn laws in 1814, Alexander Baring, the banker,
assumed that the working classes had no interest at stake. To argue
that they were affected, he said, was “altogether ridiculous; whether
wheat was 130s. or 80s., the laborer could only expect dry bread in
the one case and dry bread in the other.”[615] In Francis Wayland’s
_Elements of Political Economy_, published in 1837, a similar narrow
view of the field of economics was expressed. That an adequate
political economy must be social, that it must be something very much
more than a merchant’s _vade mecum_, or handbook of profit rules, Henry
George grasped as clearly as Ruskin; and he attacked certain of the
Manchester principles with the ardor of a social prophet. Of these
the classical wage-fund theory seemed to him the most vicious, and
he was at vast pains to prove that wages are drawn from the produce
of labor and not from a preëxistent capital-fund. Having established
this to his satisfaction, he turned to consider the economic effects
of monopolistic expropriation of natural resources, and discovered the
explanation of the augmenting poverty of civilization in the shutting
out of labor from the sources of subsistence, that is in land monopoly.
The argument is based on the Ricardian theory of rent. Though
George rejected the classical wage-fund theory, he accepted without
qualification the classical rent-theory, and discovered the kernel of
his philosophy in the doctrine of social fertility. If rent is the
difference between the income-value of a given piece of land and that
of the least valuable in the neighborhood, it measures the difference
between the yields per acre on the richest and the leanest soil with
a like outlay of labor and capital. So in an urban community rent
arises from what may be called social fertility--that is, from a
monopoly-value in a given neighborhood. Such monopoly-value arises from
strategic location; the desirability of a given tract for dwelling,
factory, or shop. The number of persons daily passing will determine
the rental value for shop purposes; the the accessibility to docks,
railways, raw material, power, markets, labor-surplus, will determine
its rental value for factory purposes. In every such case, however,
it is society and not the individual that augments rent, and this
unearned increment increases with the growth of the community. From
every advance of civilization it is the landlord who profits. He is
a social parasite, the nether millstone between which and material
progress the landless laborer is ground.
In every direction, the direct tendency of advancing civilization
is to increase the power of human labour to satisfy human
desires--to extirpate poverty and to banish want and the fear
of want.... But Labour cannot reap the benefits which advancing
civilization thus brings, because they are intercepted. Land being
necessary to labour, and being reduced to private ownership, every
increase in the productive power of labour but increases rent--the
price that labour must pay for the opportunity to utilise its
power; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of progress
go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase ...[616]
Labour and capital are but different forms of the same thing--human
exertion. Capital is produced by labour; it is, in fact, but
labour impressed upon matter.... The use of capital in production
is, therefore, but a mode of labour.... Hence the principle that,
under circumstances which permit free competition, operates to
bring wages to a common standard and profits to a substantial
equality--the principle that men will seek to gratify their desires
with the least exertion--operates to establish and maintain this
equilibrium between wages and interest.... And this relation fixed,
it is evident that interest and wages must rise and fall together,
and that interest cannot be increased without increasing wages, nor
wages be lowered without depressing interest.[617]
There is no inherent antagonism between labor and capital, Henry George
was early convinced. The Marxians with their theory of a class war
were mistaken in their analysis. It is rent that is the true source of
social injustice, and the clash of interests in society lies between
the producer and the parasitic rent-collector. In every society the
appropriation of measured increment has enslaved the ownerless. In all
civilizations, from ancient Peru to modern Russia, it has subjected
the worker to exploitation. Helot, villein, serf, are only different
names for a common slavery, the profits of which go to the landlord.
In modern times the Industrial Revolution has changed the form of
serfdom, only to intensify and embitter it. The Manchester factory-hand
was in worse plight than the medieval villein after the Black Plague.
Dispossessed of his acres by the enclosure movement, he had been thrown
into the hoppers of industrialism and ground to pieces. He was helpless
in the hands of the masters, who with their monopoly of land and the
machine, in control of the common heritage of trade processes, raw
materials, transportation, credit, and the law-making and law-enforcing
machinery, were taking from labor an augmenting toll of its production.
Hence the close correlation between material progress and proletarian
poverty. Hence the logical outcome of the Industrial Revolution, when
it should have run its course, was the reduction of the worker to the
level of a slave, compared with whose material condition the status
of the southern bond-slave was enviable. The southern apologists of
slavery had been right; the negro on the plantation enjoyed advantages
denied to wage-labor under industrialism.[618]
Having thus analyzed the forces at work in modern society, and wedded
a flamboyant material progress to a slattern poverty, Henry George
proposed his sovereign remedy--the return to society of social values,
hitherto expropriated by means of the private ownership of land,
and the removal of the burden of indirect taxation from the back of
productive labor. The Ricardian theory of rent, interpreted in the
light of eighteenth-century _laissez faire_--of free competition, of
a beneficent natural law, of social justice--conducted to unforeseen
social issues. If labor and capital are individual, the fruits of both
should return to their producers. Society has no just claim on what
society has not produced, and the individual has no just claim to that
which his labor or capital has not produced. Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to the individual citizen the things that
are his--such to Henry George was the sum of the law of distribution.
Land monopoly was a refined denial of natural rights. “The equal right
of all men to the use of the land is as clear as their equal right
to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their
existence.”[619] Unearned increment was the shackles wherewith labor
was bound. In the name of social justice strike those shackles from the
limbs of men and progress would never again have its ears filled with
the wailings of poverty. The workman would once again sing at his work,
and the sunshine of well-being fall pleasantly on the land.
A brilliant thinker, with a passionate sympathy for the exploited of
earth, this knight-errant from out the newest West ardently believed
in the sufficiency of his social philosophy to all needs. In him the
French Revolutionary doctrine came to its most original expression
in America. No doubt, like his progenitors, he oversimplified the
problem. Society is more complex than he esteemed it; individual
motives are more complex. It is perilous to subordinate psychology
to abstract theory; the ideal of justice is always running afoul of
immediate and narrow interest. Later academic economists have dealt
sharply with Henry George, but what have they done to justify their
magisterial tone? The science of economics is still cousin-german to
philosophy in its fondness for spinning tenuous subtleties; it is still
system-ridden, still too much the apologist for things as they are.
From its servitude to a class Henry George essayed to deliver it. In
fastening upon monopoly as the prime source of social injustice, he
directed attention to the origins of exploitative capitalism. He did
more than any other man to spread through America a knowledge of the
law of economic determinism. He opened a rich vein and one that needs
further exploring. The suggestive principle of unearned increment calls
for further expansion to embrace other forms than rent, to fit it to
the needs of a complex society. What he seems not to have seen was the
wider range of economic determinism--that changes come only when the
existing order has become intolerable to great classes, and the grip of
use and wont is loosened by the rebellions born of exigent need. “For
ever the fat of the whole foundation hangeth to the priest’s beard,”
asserted a quaint Beggars’ Petition in appeal to Henry VIII against the
monasteries, and in that comment were the seeds of the Reformation.
When the beards are few to which the fat hangs, the time is ripe for
an upheaval. An arch-idealist, Henry George would hasten the change by
appeal to reason. Like Godwin and Tom Paine he believed that reason
will make its own way, forgetting that reason waits upon interest, and
the day of its freedom is long delayed. Yet if he was oversanguine, why
account that to his discredit?[620]
Footnotes
[586] See Gide and Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrines_, pp.
282-284, 327-331.
[587] _Miscellaneous Works_, Preface to _Harmony of Interests_.
[588] _Ibid._
[589] All told he published at his own print-shop some 3000 pages of
pamphlet material of his own writing.
[590] _Contraction or Expansion? Repudiation or Resumption? Letters
to the Hon. Hugh M’Culloch, Secretary of the Treasury_, Philadelphia,
1866, p. 20.
[591] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[592] Quoted in W. Elder, _Memoir of Henry C. Carey_, p. 13
(Philadelphia, 1880. With bibliography).
[593] _Shall We have Peace? Letters to President-elect Grant_, p. 39.
[594] _Contraction or Expansion? etc._, p. 20.
[595] _Land and its Rent_, p. 108.
[596] _Political Economy_, pp. 242, 348.
[597] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, April, 1887. Quoted in Gide and
Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrine_, p. 551.
[598] _Ibid._, p. 549.
[599] For a critical examination see Gide and Rist, _A History of
Economic Doctrine_, pp. 551-558.
[600] _Political Economy_, pp. 251-258.
[601] _Land and its Rent_, Preface, p. vi.
[602] _Ibid._, pp. 181-182.
[603] _Political Economy_, p. 394.
[604] _Ibid._, p. 433.
[605] In his original plan Professor Parrington included a third
subsection on W. G. Sumner, but evidently decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[606] _Political Science_, Vol. I, pp. 23-25.
[607] _Ibid._ p. 216.
[608] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 141.
[609] _Communism and Socialism_, p. 232.
[610] _Political Science_, Vol. II, pp. 330-331.
[611] The discussion of Burgess was not completed by Professor
Parrington. At this point he planned a third section, “The New Ally:
the courts: the police power and the fourteenth amendment; the
injunction.” None of this section was written, but he has dealt with
these subjects _passim_.--_Publisher._
[612] George, _Life of Henry George_, pp. 216-217.
[613] _Ibid._, p. 223.
[614] _Ibid._, p. 277.
[615] Quoted by Wesley Clair Mitchell in _The Trend of Economics_,
edited by R. G. Tugwell, p. 5.
[616] _Progress and Poverty_, Book IV, Chapter 4.
[617] _Ibid._, Book III, Chapter 5.
[618] See _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter 2.
[619] _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter I.
[620] The discussion of Henry D. Lloyd, planned as the second
subsection, was not written.--_Publisher._
Chapter IV • The Beginnings of Criticism
For many thoughtful Americans the welter of frontier individualism was
a severe trial to their faith in American institutions. An ambitious
industrialism colliding with a shambling Jacksonian democracy was
forecasting consequences to government and to society that intelligent
men could not shut their eyes to. The America of Fisk and Gould, of
Boss Tweed and the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal, was far from satisfying
the requirements of any rational civilization. After a hundred years
to have come to such heroes, to have bogged down in such filth, was an
outcome to the great experiment that one could not contemplate with
pride. It was no time to be silent. No people was ever saved by dumb
preachers. The present generation was answerable for the new evils that
were springing from the graves of the old, and intelligent Americans
must not lose their heads in the thick of the common hurly-burly. So
amidst the ruck and clamor of the times a tiny note of criticism was
lifted up, timid and uncertain at first, but growing more confident and
more strident as the decade grew older. It was not searching criticism.
Sooner or later it was pretty certain to run into a blind alley of
moral indignation, overlooking the major issues and leaving the vital
factors of the problem unconsidered. Yet such as it was--shallow and
feeble enough often to excite wonder in a later generation--it marks
the rise of a spirit of skepticism towards the blowsy doctrine of
manifest destiny that since the fifties had been blowing about the land.
The determining factors in the situation confronting criticism were
political and economic, and the immediate problem that pressed for
solution was the problem whether an undisciplined people, wedded to
an old-fashioned agrarian democracy, could cope with an ambitious
industrialism that was quite cynically buying and selling the political
state. To deal with that problem most of the critics were singularly
ill equipped. Two generations of constitutional debate, seasoned with
a dash of equalitarian dogma, had left them intellectually lean and
impoverished. They had forgotten the sober realism of the eighteenth
century that never overlooked the intimate ties between economics
and politics, and with no anchors down in the plebeian mud they were
likely to drift helplessly in the moral squalls they were always
blowing up. The more distinguished critics--those who commanded the
most serious attention--were in a particularly unfortunate situation,
for not only were they uninstructed idealists with no understanding
of _Realpolitik_, but they had been reared in the classical tradition
and their minds were saturated with a decadent aristocratic culture.
To many of them the present evils of America served only to quicken an
inherited skepticism of democracy. How can society expect to function
adequately, they asked, without capable and honest leadership; and
how can such leadership be hoped for in a rough and tumble democracy
that loves the noisiest demagogue? Of this very considerable group of
belated Federalists James Russell Lowell was the most distinguished
representative. In the middle seventies he had come to believe that
America was suffering from too much democracy, and that competent
government could be had only by working back to the responsible
Federalism of earlier times, with leadership reclaimed by the better
elements of society. To the economics of the problem--the antagonistic
interests of capitalist, proletarian, and farmer, with their struggles
to control the political state--he gave no serious thought, but he
viewed with instinctive suspicion the mounting ambitions of labor and
he foresaw only evil from the bitter unrest of the farmers.
A second very considerable group, of which George William Curtis may
be taken as spokesman, rejected all such antiquated Federalistic hopes
as the foolish dreams of defeatists. They held fast to their faith
in democracy, but they were convinced that more adequate democratic
machinery must be provided. The root of the evil, they had come to
believe, was political and must be sought in the vicious Jacksonian
spoils system. With every change of administration to turn over the
country to hungry partisans to devour, was not democracy but the
negation of democracy? Government would not function satisfactorily
until a trained civil service was provided, and the need of the hour,
they pointed out, was an honest civil service reform. A third group,
very much smaller than the others, of which Edwin Lawrence Godkin was
the spokesman, was inclined to trace the plentiful evils of the times
to an unwise paternalism, asserting that the real source of the common
political scoundrelism was the lauded American System devised by Henry
Clay, as a result of which government was seduced from its proper
business of keeping the peace and was turned into a fairy godmother to
shower gifts on favored interests. The only cure for the evil was to
divorce business and politics and reëstablish in practice the police
theory of government.
In the thinking of all three groups little consideration was given
to the social consequences of the venture on which America had
entered with the vigor of thoughtless youth. Concerning the ultimate
consequences of the collision between a shambling democracy and an
ambitious industrialism, few troubled themselves greatly. To find
those who confronted the problem frankly and realistically, one must
search out obscure men, labor leaders for the most part, or _déclassé_
radicals like Wendell Phillips. The middle-class mind refused to
see what its feet were stumbling over. In consequence the Gilded
Age produced no critics of industrialism comparable to the great
English critics--Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney; no social
philosophers like the great continental expounders of proletarian
ideals--Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Sorel; no left-wing economists like
the great French school--Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon. The genteel
culture of America was no better than bankrupt in presence of brutal
reality, quite unequipped to interpret the sprawling America that was
transforming itself before its eyes into something it hated but did
not understand. The time for searching criticism had not come, and
would not come until the Industrial Revolution had created in America
a proletariat such as swarmed in the English black country and amongst
the hovels of continental cities. Nevertheless such criticism as there
was must be taken into consideration, and for our present purpose it
will suffice to single out three spokesmen--a grizzled warrior of the
earlier renaissance who had the courage to face unpleasant fact, and
two critics who brought to bear on political themes the best culture of
the time. With these may be conveniently grouped certain novelists who
more or less casually suffered their pens to deal with social problems.
I • The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell Phillips
Social criticism was by no means a new thing in America. For half a
century it had filled all ears with its strident clamors, and from it
had issued the motley group of reform movements that had been cheered
or mocked at by thousands. From Channing and Cooper down to Parke
Godwin and Horace Greeley it had been mustering its forces, vivid and
picturesque figures for the most part--men and women like Fanny Wright,
George Henry Evans, and Hinton R. Helper; ardent souls who beyond the
dun horizon discovered a golden morrow that only awaited the rising
of a new sun, and who lectured and wrote and argued till pretty much
all America had caught something of their contagious enthusiasm. In
this work New England came eventually to take the lead, and the golden
forties were a time when in many an obscure Yankee head programs of
reform were fermenting like a vat of malt. But unfortunately an excess
of eagerness wore out the first enthusiasm, and when the shackles had
been loosened from the negro bondmen the militancy of the New England
leadership subsided and the tired New England conscience went on
vacation.
But in these slothful times the conscience of one great New Englander
was not tired, though he gave it no rest while life lasted. Wendell
Phillips was a soldier of Puritan soul who did not lay down his arms
in ’65, but for nearly a score of years warred upon the injustices of
the Gilded Age as he had warred before upon the obscenities of negro
slavery. No sooner was the cause of abolitionism won--a cause to which
he had sacrificed much in ease and the good opinion of Beacon Street,
but from which he had gained more in self-respect and the decent
opinion of mankind--than he turned to whatever new work offered. The
lovers of justice, he knew very well, can indulge themselves in no
vacations, for the devil is on the job day and night, and while the
assailants sleep he is at work repairing any breaches in the walls of
his citadel. When conscience is tired he counts on gaining his greatest
victories.
The love of freedom has always been a dangerous possession in
Massachusetts, given to exploding in unforeseen moments and unexpected
places. No one could have foretold--certainly not he himself--that
Wendell Phillips would put away all his Brahmin loyalties and devote
forty-seven years to an unresting attack on the diverse Toryisms from
which he and his class had hitherto prospered. Son of the first mayor
of the city and a distinguished member of the Boston gentry, he was a
patrician in the fullest Boston sense. All the loyalties of his caste
summoned him to uphold the Brahmin authorities, but something deep
within him, a loyalty to other and higher ideals, held him back. When a
frock-coated mob laid its hands on Garrison to lynch him for abolition
propaganda, he drew back; he refused to follow the Mayor and the
Colonel of his regiment and other gentlemen if they betrayed the Boston
for which their grandfathers had fought. An instinctive love of justice
held him back. A fierce indignation flamed up within him at the wrong
done a citizen of Massachusetts for exercising his natural right of
free speech, and in that wild hour he discovered that he was a child of
’76 with the mentality of a revolutionist. His conscience was aroused
and he proceeded to put it in the safe keeping of Ann Terry Greene,
a brilliant young woman of radical mind, who quickened his sense of
social justice as Maria White was to quicken Lowell’s. There was to
be no backsliding in his case. From the December day in 1837 when he
replied to Attorney-General Austin’s slanders of the Revolutionary
fathers in Faneuil Hall, to the end of a life filled with enormous
labors--a life daily stabbed by Tory hornets, and that at the last is
said to have inspired the remark of Judge Hoar that he did not attend
the funeral of Wendell Phillips but he approved of it[621]--he followed
his conscience into many an unpopular cause and spoke for those for
whom few were willing to speak.
The story of his anti-slavery labors belongs to an earlier time and
need not be recounted here. His devotion to abolitionism equaled
Garrison’s and his services were as great. It is rather the nineteen
years that remained to him after Appomattox that are of present
concern--what later battles he fought and how he bore himself in those
battles. It was a difficult time for Puritan liberalism, face to face
with a new age that had forgotten the old liberalisms. The Grand Army
of Abolitionism had disbanded and new armies of other causes had
not yet been recruited. Garrison and Edmund Quincy and Whittier had
laid aside their arms, and Lowell had long since settled back into a
comfortable Brahminism; the long struggle had left them drained of
their energy. But for Wendell Phillips the battle was not over; it was
unending and he was enlisted for life. At a vast meeting that marked
the formal close of the abolition movement he took leave of his old
associates with these words: “We will not say ‘Farewell,’ but ‘all
hail.’ Welcome, new duties! We sheathe no sword. We only turn the front
of the army upon a new foe.”[622] He had long spoken for prohibition,
woman’s rights, the abolition of capital punishment, and he now joined
heartily with the courageous women engaged in such reform work. But
more provocative business was at hand, and more dangerous--causes
that touched the northern pocketbook as abolitionism had touched the
southern. The banker’s exploitation of the national currency, and the
manufacturer’s exploitation of factory labor--these were issues that a
cautious man who was careful of his good name would not meddle with.
But Wendell Phillips was never cautious and his good name had long
since been flung to the wolves. And so in the evening of his days,
with a courage that took little counsel of expediency, he embarked on
a campaign that had for its ultimate objective the impregnable citadel
of State Street. He would destroy capitalistic exploitation in all its
works. It was as hopeless a battle as King Arthur’s “last, dim, weird
battle of the west,” and entered upon as courageously.
How he came to hold the heretical views on money and labor that he
expounded from the lecture platform cannot easily be traced. Perhaps
they came from the radical fringe that envelops every great social
movement; perhaps they were the inevitable expression of his left-wing
temper. A man who had fought all Tory programs for thirty years must
eventually come to hate the ways of capitalism, and so confirmed a
democrat as Wendell Phillips would be certain to espouse the doctrine
of thorough. One who had passed through the fires of abolition
nullification, who had spoken of the Union as “built i’ the eclipse
and rigged with curses dark,” who had repudiated his citizenship and
equaled Garrison in contempt for a slave-protecting Constitution,
would have pretty well cleared his mind of conventional respect for
capitalistic law and order. He was not impressed by political cant. He
had taken the measure of existing law and order and was casting about
for a juster law and a more generous order.
In these later years, as a program of social reconstruction took shape
in his mind, he was coming to essential agreement with the program of
socialism. With the Marxians he based his thinking upon economics, and
his final objective came to be the substitution of coöperation for the
profit-motive. As ardently as Horace Greeley he asserted the rights
of labor. As early as 1860-1861 he had come to recognize a similarity
in the economic status of the wage-slave and the bond-slave, and in
1865, in a speech on the eight-hour movement, he accepted as true the
southern thesis that in western civilization all labor, whether bond or
wage, was unfree, held in the grip of a master, bought and sold in the
market;[623] and now that the shackles had been struck from the negro,
it remained to strike them from the wage-earner. To turn the negro from
a bond-slave to a wage-slave would be a sorry ending of abolitionism;
but such must be the inevitable outcome, he believed, unless all labor
should win freedom. The question of the hour for Wendell Phillips had
become the question of the relation of labor and capital.
In his thinking on the currency question--a question that became acute
in the seventies--he was soon caught up by the Greenback movement. It
may have been that his contact with Thaddeus Stevens helped to mold
his views on the money question; yet that he should have become a
Greenbacker was foreordained. He had no amiable illusions in regard to
State Street. As a tribune of the people he had long been intimately
acquainted with its ambitions, and he would not turn over the country
to its custodianship. He would have no bankers’ control of the national
currency, to augment or deflate as banking profits dictated. His
democratic sympathies recoiled from a class control of the common
medium of exchange, and in 1875 he offered a drastic solution of the
vexing question that brought down on his head all the wrath of State
Street. His plan provided for three things: the rejection of the
national banknote system; the issue of honest greenbacks, secured by
the wealth of the country, and receivable in payment for all debts
public and private--not dishonest greenbacks like the old, which the
government had repudiated at issue by refusing to accept them in
payment of custom dues; and finally the retirement of interest-bearing
bonds and the return to a cash basis for government business. How
deeply he felt in the notorious matter of credit manipulation is
suggested in the following passage with its echoes of an older America
that looked with suspicion on a consolidating capitalism.
Three times within a dozen years, [he said] capitalists with their
knives on the throat of the Government, have compelled it to
cheat its largest creditor, the people; whose claim, Burke said,
was the most sacred. First, the pledge that greenbacks should be
exchangeable with bonds was broken. Secondly, debts originally
payable in paper ... were made payable in gold. Thirdly, silver was
demonetized, and gold made the only tender. A thousand millions
were thus stolen from the people.[624]
At other times he went further. Speaking on the labor question in 1872,
he said:
I say, let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and
let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who
is now borrowing money at ten per cent., money on the half-value
of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million
acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national
effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money,
at three per cent., to rebuild it.[625]
When we get into power, there is one thing we mean to do. If a
man owns a single house, we will tax him one hundred dollars. If
he owns ten houses of like value, we won’t tax him one thousand
dollars, but two thousand dollars.... We’ll double and treble and
quintuple and sextuple and increase tenfold the taxes.... We’ll
crumple up wealth by making it unprofitable to be rich.... You will
say, “Is that just?” My friends, it is safe. Man is more valuable
than money. You say, “Then capital will go to Europe.” Good
heavens, let it go! If other States wish to make themselves vassals
of wealth, so will not we. We will save a country equal from end
to end. Land, private property, all sorts of property, shall be so
dearly taxed that it shall be impossible to be rich; for it is in
wealth, in incorporated, combining, perpetuated wealth, that the
danger of labor lies.[626]
The mad wicked ravings of a demagogue, such talk was accounted by
sober financiers of Boston. But it was rather the talk of an honest
equalitarian who understood how incompatible was property rule and
the ideal of equality. The arch-enemy of a worthy civilization,
Wendell Phillips had become convinced, was private capitalism with its
dehumanizing profit-motive. There could be no adequate civilization,
no Christianity, until coöperation had displaced competition, and men
were become equal in economic rights as they were in franchise rights.
At a Labor-Reform Convention held at Worcester on September 4, 1871,
resolutions drafted by him were adopted--resolutions that reveal “just
where Mr. Phillips stood for the last thirteen years of his life.” In
this “full body of faith,” and in two later speeches--_The Foundation
of the Labor Movement_, and _The Labor Question_--the man who called
himself “a Jeffersonian democrat in the darkest hour,” wrote down as
the great objective of the labor party the principle that has long been
accepted as the cardinal plank of the Socialist platform.
We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that labor, the creator of
wealth, is entitled to all it creates.
Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to accept the final
results of the operation of a principle so radical,--such as the
overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of
all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, universal
education and fraternity, perfect freedom of exchange, and ... the
final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so-called Christian
civilization--the poverty of the masses.... _Resolved_,--That we
declare war with the wages system, which demoralizes alike the
hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the workingman; war
with the present system of finance, which robs labor, and gorges
capital, ... war with these lavish grants of the public lands to
speculating companies, and whenever in power, we pledge ourselves
to use every just and legal means to resume all such grants
heretofore made; war with the system of enriching capitalists by
the creation and increase of public interest-bearing debts. We
demand that every facility, and all encouragement, shall be given
by law to co-operation in all branches of industry and trade,
and that the same aid be given to co-operative efforts that has
heretofore been given to railroads and other enterprises....[627]
When he was about to take the platform on another occasion his wife is
reported to have said to him, “Wendell, don’t shilly-shally!” Certainly
in this pronouncement, and in the speeches supporting it, there is no
shilly-shallying. He will have no halfway measures, but goes straight
to the economic core of the problem. Pretty much all of Marxianism is
there, even to the class war. The capitalists had whetted their swords
and he would have labor put its sword likewise to the grindstone. If
the war were cruel, where did labor learn it--“learned it of capital,
learned it of our enemies.” In a world of economic concentration where
caste follows property accumulation he had come to rest his hopes
on the international solidarity of labor. The cause of democratic
justice was committed to the keeping of the workingman, and if he
were defeated in his hopes the future was black indeed. The American
Revolution and the French Revolution had prepared the way gloriously
for a greater event, the revolution of labor. He was not afraid
of revolution. In America he hoped the battle would be fought with
ballots, but if it must come to bullets, so be it. The Paris Commune
met with his heartiest approval: “I have not a word to utter--far be
it from me!--against the grandest declaration of popular indignation
which Paris wrote on the pages of history in fire and blood. I honor
Paris as the vanguard of the Internationals of the world.”[628] And in
the Phi Beta Kappa address, delivered in 1881 before all the assembled
conservatisms of Boston, the old warrior with seventy years upon his
head, went so far as to defend Russian Nihilism.
Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of a people
crushed under an iron rule. Nihilism is evidence of life ...
the last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond all other
resistance.... I honor Nihilism, since it redeems human nature from
the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up only of heartless
oppressors and contented slaves.... This is the only view an
American, the child of 1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any
other unsettles and perplexes the ethics of our civilization. Born
within sight of Bunker Hill, in a commonwealth which adopts the
motto of Algernon Sydney, _sub libertate quietem_ (“accept no peace
without liberty”); son of Harvard, whose first pledge was “Truth”;
citizen of a republic based on the claim that no government is
rightful unless resting on the consent of the people, and which
assumes to lead in asserting the rights of humanity,--I at least
can say nothing else and nothing less; no, not if every tile on
Cambridge roofs were a devil hooting my words![629]
“It was a delightful discourse,” said one gentleman, “but preposterous
from beginning to end.” The doctrine was strange to Harvard
ears--wicked and perverse. And strange and disconcerting also was his
roll-call of great and noble deeds done in America in which Harvard
scholarship had had no part. To an audience of Brahmin scholars it
was not kind to say, “The greatest things have not been done for the
world by its bookmen”; nor this, “It is not the masses who have most
disgraced our political annals. I have seen many mobs ... I never saw
or heard of any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, if
not always led in person, by respectability and what called itself
education.”[630] It was a curious scene--that gathering in a Harvard
hall listening to a son of Harvard who had gone to school to other
teachers than those brought up on Brahmin culture. The liberalism of
the forties was speaking to a generation that was concerned about
other things than a just and humane civilization. Wendell Phillips
was hopelessly old-fashioned in America of the Gilded Age--a lone
Puritan in a land of Yankees. He used to speak of himself grimly as
“that Ishmael”; his home, he said, was the sleeping-car and his only
friends the brakeman and the porter. He spent his strength and his
earnings with generous prodigality, and when he died the only treasures
he had laid up were in heaven. He was the last survivor of the great
age of Puritan conscience, and the words he spoke of Theodore Parker
may well stand for his epitaph: “The child of Puritanism is not mere
Calvinism--it is the loyalty to justice which tramples under foot the
wicked laws of its own epoch.”
II • Morality and Politics--George William Curtis
A child of Puritan conscience also was George William Curtis, like
Wendell Phillips sprung from the Puritan gentry, but unlike him wanting
in a passionate Hebraism that sought justice in all the byways and
would not turn aside from pursuing it. A reformer but never a radical,
he was a gentleman who was a lifelong friend of civilization. An
idealist, he refused to serve the gross materialisms that swept so
many of his fellows from the old moorings, but throughout a long and
honorable career he preserved unshaken his early faith in republican
ideals and the way of liberty. As an abolitionist he faced hostile
audiences with admirable poise, and as a civil service reformer he
fought off the attacks of greasy politicians with quiet contempt. A
cultivated gentleman, high-bred if not heroic, was George William
Curtis.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, of excellent stock, living most of
his life in New York City whither his father had removed to engage in
the banking business, he was brought up in affluence and spent his days
amidst dignified surroundings. Broad-minded and generous, with wide
sympathies and urbane manners, he followed his conscience and weighed
life in the scales of Puritan morality. He was no friend to compromise
or expediency, yet he was content to serve God in the station whereunto
he had been called, declining to turn rebel and become an outcast
and pariah. Endowed with excellent parts, his training was unusually
fortunate. At eighteen with his brother Burrill he went to Brook
Farm, where he spent two profitable years in an atmosphere he found
stimulating. After quitting Brook Farm he passed the better part of
two years at Concord with his brother, living at farmhouses, helping
with the crops, and for a time indulging in an experiment not unlike
Thoreau’s at Walden Pond. Then followed four years overseas--from
1846 to 1850--rambling about the continent, sloughing off the
provincial asceticism of New England, and practicing his pen by means
of letters and diaries. On his return he drifted into journalism,
wrote several volumes of travel essays and social satire, caught the
Lyceum infection, then at its malignant stage, lectured voluminously
to pay off an unfortunate debt, wrote for _Putnam’s Magazine_, became
connected with _Harper’s Weekly_, finally settling into the Easy Chair
of _Harper’s Magazine_, from which comfortable seat for years he sent
forth gracefully pointed comments on manners, society, politics, life,
yet more and more turning to politics as his particular field and
serving as volunteer political mentor and critic to the Gilded Age.
Of his several early ventures into the field of polite letters little
need be said. The work of a high-spirited young man, they were a cross
between Nathaniel Parker Willis and Thackeray with a suggestion of
Disraeli. He took his place naturally as a member of the New York
group of litterateurs who were gaily exploiting the conventional
sentimentalism of the fifties. With its pose of clever sophistication
the New York school could do no good to a serious young writer, and
the pretensions of the new-rich society of the town were a cordial
invitation to go wrong. _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ (1851), written
before the young traveler had caught the current note of social
satire, was a conscious correction of the ascetic Puritanism imbibed
at Concord, and with its frank delight in the sensuousness of the East
it gave offense to the professional bluestockings of the time. But in
_The Potiphar Papers_ (1853) he turned to satirize New York society,
then hastening to transform itself from a staid Knickerbocker world
into a Gold Coast of social climbers. That his treatment of the theme
should have been a slighter edition of Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_--less
searching and more sentimental--might be guessed even if we did not
know how greatly Curtis loved and admired the English satirist. “He
seems to be the one of all authors who takes life precisely as he finds
it,” he wrote of him. “If he finds it sad, he makes it sad: if gay,
gay. You discover in him the flexible adaptability of Horace, but with
a deep and consuming sadness which the Roman never knew, and which in
the Englishman seems to be almost sentimentality.”[631]
But in spite of their excellent model these sketches do not now seem
so sprightly as they seemed to his fellows on the staff of _Putnam’s
Magazine_. Moralism scented with patchouli is no longer the vogue,
and they have long since been laid away with the hoops and crinoline
of the fifties. His most important venture in polite literature--if
indeed even that deserves the name important--was _Prue and I_ (1856),
written in a golden summer when his pen was dipped into the inkwell of
love and he foresaw the years of his life lengthening out in the most
intimate of companionships. They are charming essays in contentment
that teach the familiar lesson that the only abiding riches are the
riches of mind and character. The old bookkeeper in black coat and
white tie who voyages to the realms of romance while watching from
the Battery outgoing ships, has discovered the vicarious pleasure of
the imagination, and the Aurelia of his dreams is Prue as she was in
her youth, and both are Anna Shaw to whom soon after he was married.
The first three sketches--“Dinner Time,” “My Chateaux,” and “Sea from
the Shore”--are humorous and tender fancies in the graceful Victorian
manner; but “Titbottom’s Spectacles” is Hawthorne-like in the tenuous
play of a grotesquely moralistic fancy, and the succeeding sketches
reveal the exhaustion of the vein. Later he tried his hand at a
novel--_Trumps_--but it refused to turn into anything but a tract and
in the early sixties he settled down in the Easy Chair which he had
first occupied as early as 1853.
Thereafter to his death in 1892 his work followed three diverse lines.
For thirty years he was essayist, orator, and political critic, to a
generation sorely in need of wise and urbane counsel. His audience was
wide and his influence great, and to his work he brought the weight
of his sane and just character. Not a great scholar and not an acute
critic, he was an enlightened and sensitive conscience, and to the bar
of his conscience he summoned the parties and policies of a heedless
and selfish generation. From the Easy Chair he sent forth his genial
comment on matters of current interest, satisfying his love of creative
writing by the grace of his talk, and recognizing his kinship with
the age of Queen Ann by adopting the words of _The Tatler_, “I shall
from time to time Report and Consider all Matters of what Kind soever
that shall occur to me.” But such work at the best is ephemeral, and
ephemeral likewise were the polished pronouncements of the occasional
orator on which far too much time and labor were expended. But New York
City must have its spokesman for formal occasions, and after Bryant’s
death George William Curtis was summoned with increasing frequency.
The rich context of his speeches, elaborated with formal dignity and
embellished with literary allusions, hit to a nicety the taste of a
generation that still delighted in oratory and preferred dignity to
informality. His addresses on Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Bryant,
and Lowell, are excellent examples of a style that is no longer the
fashion. In their polished sentences eulogy is tempered with criticism,
but the criticism is sympathetic and refuses to render judgments that
may strike his hearers as severe. It would be ungracious to intrude
unpleasant facts on dignified occasions.
But his most significant work during these busy years lay in the field
of political criticism, and it was as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_, from
1863 to his death, and as a leader in the movement of civil service
reform, that he made the deepest impress on the age. The _Weekly_,
with Nast as cartoonist, was then at the height of its popularity
and influence, and by means of its editorial page Curtis was able to
marshal a very considerable following for whatever cause or party he
espoused. He had long taken part in practical politics, was active in
caucuses and conventions, was much on the stump and kept his fingers on
party wires. Yet influential as he was--the scholar in politics, as his
own generation loved to say--he was never a serious student of politics
in the broader meaning. He was essentially an English gentleman
politician, with a fine scorn of mean and sordid policies, a warm
love of country but an equally warm love of civilization, devoted to
the cause of liberty, a friend of justice, yet with all his excellent
traits an inadequate political philosopher. Like Lowell’s his horizon
was curiously limited. Abstract political theory did not interest him
and he never critically examined diverse systems of government. Of
economics he was as ignorant as his generation. Again like Lowell the
single standard by which he judged politics was the moral standard, and
in his anxious concern for “good government” he failed to probe deeply
the sources of “bad government.” In presence of the vast corruptions of
the Gilded Age he was as helpless in diagnosing the evil as Lowell or
Norton.
Such helplessness is the more surprising considering what rare
opportunities he had enjoyed for intelligent understanding. During
the impressionable years of youth he daily associated with the most
militant group of intellectual radicals in America and heard the ideas
of Saint-Simon and Fourier and Owen eagerly canvassed. Associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition was the cardinal doctrine of
the Brook Farmists; yet his individualism passed unaffected through
all such discussions. He seems to have sympathized with the skepticism
of Hawthorne rather than the faith of Ripley and Dana. Writing to his
father from Brook Farm he fell into the genial transcendental vein and
gaily poked fun at those who would make the world over.
No wise man is long a reformer, [he wrote] for Wisdom sees plainly
that growth is steady, sure, and neither condemns nor rejects what
is, or has been. Reform is organized distrust. It says to the
universe fresh from God’s hand, “You are a miserable business; lo!
I will make you fairer!” and so deputes some Fourier or Robert Owen
to improve the bungling work of the Creator.[632]
It was as a transcendental optimist that he set out on his travels in
1846. The Europe he visited at the age of twenty was seething with
discontent that was to flame up in the revolutionary year of ’48, yet
though he wandered leisurely through Italy, Hungary, Germany, France,
and was at Paris during the great overturn, the evidence that his
biographer has gathered indicates that he was not deeply affected by
the experience. Unlike his friend Margaret Fuller, who was a passionate
volunteer in the struggle of Mazzini at Rome, or like Dana, who
followed the movement closely as foreign correspondent, he felt none
of the promptings of a revolutionist. A romantic sympathy for Kossuth
is clearly indicated, but his feelings carried him little further
than that. Even in England, seething as it was with the proletarian
unrest that culminated in the great Chartist movement, he came upon
little to quicken his transcendental pulse. It was not till he got
back home and found himself in presence of negro slavery that his
reforming ardor took fire and he proposed to engage in the business of
“organized distrust.” He threw himself into the cause with enthusiasm
and spoke from many an abolition platform. Then came the war and during
those passionate years he was swept unconsciously along the path of
consolidation, emerging from the fire a confirmed Hamiltonian with
transcendental democratic leanings.
Have you thought [he wrote Charles Eliot Norton in 1864] what a
vindication this war is of Alexander Hamilton? I wish somebody
would write his life as it ought to be written, for surely he was
one of the greatest of our great men, as Jefferson was the least of
the truly great; or am I wrong? Hamilton was generous and sincere.
Was Jefferson either?[633]
Such Hamiltonian sympathies suffice to explain some of his votes in the
New York Constitutional Convention of 1867, of which he was a member.
He advocated the appointment of the attorney-general and certain
other state officers, opposed the principle of municipal home rule,
and approved the extension of the authority of the state over local
police systems. With Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed before his eyes it was
perhaps natural that he should have sought in the power of the up-state
voter some external control over the city machine. But in spite of
such obvious leanings towards the Whig branch of the Republican party
Curtis was never a Whig. The transcendentalism he had imbibed at Brook
Farm remained with him to color much of his thinking and restrain him
from an uncritical advocacy of capitalism. He never went over body
and soul to the new gospel of exploitation. He never lent a willing
ear to the seductive appeals of the American System. He early became
a free-trader and throughout his life was opposed to all tariffs and
grants and subsidies. Discovering in the principle of liberty the
cardinal principles of American democracy, he was disposed to accept
a wide application of _laissez faire_; yet when it opened the door to
extortion he was willing to curb an anti-social individualism. When in
the seventies it was proposed by the western farmers that a national
railroad should be built from Chicago to the Atlantic seaboard, Curtis
looked upon the proposal with sympathy as likely to rescue the farmer
from extortionate tolls.[634] Unlike Dana and Godkin, he declined
to grow bitter and lose his head over the economic proposals of the
western agrarians. In the sharp alignment between agrarianism and
capitalism he stood in the main outside both parties, and although
opposed to greenbackism he discussed the question with moderation and
good sense--a rare thing in those blatant times.
But it was political decency rather than capitalistic or agrarian
programs that he was chiefly concerned about. He looked to his
conscience as guide and as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_ he used his
influence to cleanse America of the corruption he abhorred. Week after
week he appealed to the American voter to turn rascals out of office
and put honest men in. The corrupt political machine was the source of
the evil, and the machine had grown powerful through its control of
patronage. There would be vicious government so long as politicians
could create a machine by means of the spoils system. Two remedies, he
believed, were necessary to cure the evil--independent voting and civil
service reform; and to the spread of these two ideas he devoted the
last twenty years of his life, thereby bringing on his head much abuse
and incurring eventually a break with the Republican party.
His troubles began with his proposal of independent voting. To that
party-ridden generation on whom the passions of war had fastened a
tyrannical machine, the scratching of the party ticket seemed no better
than treason. It was a Copperhead device to undo the results of the war
and reëstablish the rebel leaders at Washington, and it needed courage
to advocate it publicly. Curtis put the matter fairly in a speech to
Independent Republicans at New York in 1880:
The first powerful and conclusive remedy for the tyranny of the
machine ... is scratching. The word has become a sneer, a taunt,
a bitter reproach, but the test of the power and effectiveness of
the remedy is the fury with which it is assailed.... The machine
denounces scratchers as lustily as Laud denounced the Puritans,
or George III the rebellious Yankees, or slave-driving Democrats
Republican woolly heads.... The scratcher is the minute-man of
politics. He is always in light marching order. He has only to
consult his own knowledge and conscience, and with one stroke
his work is done. Fortunately, also, his stroke may be as secret
as his ballot. Those who do not choose to publish the fact need
not be known, and may smile serenely at the blind fury of those
whose plots are quietly foiled. This is the reason of the impotent
anger with which scratching is assailed. It cannot be reached....
Scratching is denounced as dishonorable. Oh, no! the secret ballot
is not dishonorable. The shot of the Middlesex farmer from behind a
tree was no more dishonorable than the immortal volley from behind
the breastworks of Bunker Hill.[635]
He then proceeded to lay open what seemed to him the core of the
problem:
But useful as scratching is as a corrective, it does not strike at
the heart of the machine, and it is therefore _only_ a corrective
and not a radical remedy. That remedy can be found only by finding
the source of the power of the machine, and that source is official
patronage. It is the command of millions of the public money spent
in public administration; the control of the vast labyrinth of
place, with its enormous emoluments; the system which makes the
whole Civil Service, to the least detail and most significant
position, the spoils of party victory; which perverts necessary
party organization into intolerable party despotism. It is upon
this that the hierarchy of the machine is erected. Strike at this
system strongly, steadily, persistently, and you shiver the machine
to pieces.[636]
Seeing his duty clearly, Curtis did not spare himself, but while most
of his fellows were seeking fame or wealth for themselves he gave
his time and strength without stint to the cause, and it was due to
his efforts more than to those of any other man that a reform in
the civil service was eventually brought about. He had to fight his
way against bitter opposition. It was charged that he was seeking
to create in America an undemocratic bureaucracy. His old friend
Charles A. Dana--from whom he had become estranged--was quite frank.
“Above all I do not believe,” he said, “in the establishment in this
country of the German bureaucratic system, with its permanent staff of
office-holders who are not responsible to the people, and whose tenure
of place knows no variation and no end except the end of life.”[637]
But it was the politicians who fought most bitterly, and when to civil
service reform he added the sin of bolting the party, throwing over
Blaine and supporting Cleveland, he was subjected to plentiful insults.
Nevertheless as the leader of the Mugwumps, preaching to a party-ridden
generation the gospel of independency, he did his country a real
service. He could not foresee, of course, how easily the menace of the
independent voter was to be met; how through the control of both party
machines and both nominees by the political bosses the independent
would have only the choice betwixt tweedledum and tweedledee, and in
disgust would largely refrain from voting. But the open and crying
political evils of the Gilded Age he saw clearly, and in seeking to
lessen them he proved himself a useful citizen as well as a cultivated
American.
III • English Liberalism and Politics--Godkin and “The Nation”
The severest critic of the Gilded Age was Edwin Lawrence Godkin,
founder of the _Nation_. More caustic than George William Curtis,
equipped with a complete social philosophy, and armed with perfect
self-assurance, he devoted thirty-five years to the task of instructing
America in the principles of government as those principles were
understood by John Stuart Mill. He was at once an idealist and a
realist, and the intellectual history of the critic is revealed in the
shift from the one to the other. To Godkin the English liberal--who
had studied the American experiment from overseas--as to Karl Schurz
the German liberal, America was the torchbearer of the democratic
faith; and any defection from the cause, any betrayal of that faith,
was a desecration of the temple of liberalism by its own priesthood.
Liberalism, he was persuaded, was the handmaid of civilization; the
hope of any rational progress, rested on the principle of free inquiry
and free endeavor. To Godkin, therefore, and to Schurz and the hundreds
of European liberals who sought refuge here following the _débâcle_ of
the revolutionary hopes of 1848, it was a matter of deep import that
America should remain true to its liberal tradition, trusting freedom,
refusing to repeat the unhappy experience of a Tory Europe. He would
say to America what John Wise had said nearly two centuries before:
“Ye have been called unto liberty, therefore hold your hold, brethren!
Pull up well upon the oars, you have a rich cargo, and I hope ...
day-light and good piloting will secure all.” But he would do more than
that; he would pull an oar himself; and with high hopes, at the age
of twenty-five, he cast in his lot with America to serve the cause in
whatever ways might offer.
Godkin came of an English Protestant strain that for seven centuries
had lived in County Wexford, at the extreme southeastern point of
Ireland. He was neither Scotch like the men of Ulster, nor Irish like
his neighbors of Kilkenny and Wicklow, but as English in blood and
temperament as Jonathan Swift. Educated at Queen’s College, Belfast, he
studied law for a time at Lincoln’s Inn, went through the revolutionary
years of 1848-1851 with their great hopes, and entered the field of
journalism as correspondent for the London _Daily News_ during the
Crimean War. In 1856 he came to America with the intention of entering
the law, but returned to journalism. During the Civil War he was
correspondent for the _Daily News_ of London, laboring to counteract
British Tory opinion that ran strongly pro-South, and marshal the
forces of English liberalism on the side of the North. Three months
after Appomattox he founded the _Nation_ as an organ of criticism,
through the columns of which he proposed to appeal to the intelligence
and the conscience of America in support of the principles of
Victorian liberalism.
For this excellent work of criticism Godkin was provided with a sound
equipment. Endowed with a vigorous intellect, he kept his mind free
from shifting fogs and rarely mistook immediate for ultimate ends.
His training had been in a distinguished tradition. His father was a
Presbyterian minister and journalist, and the strain of robust dissent
that contributed so richly to Victorian liberalism came to him as a
birthright. He was “brought up,” he said, “in the Mill-Grote school of
radicals.” “When I was in college,” he wrote in later years, “I and
the young men of my acquaintance were Liberals, in the English sense.
John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily
food.”[638] Already his heart was overseas; America as it had been
described by de Tocqueville was his “promised land,” the home of a free
democracy on which his hopes for civilization were fixed. His first
book, written at the early age of twenty-two, was a history of the
land Kossuth was striving to set free, and he there defined the word
democrat as he had come to interpret it--the democrats, he said, are
“all those whose hopes and sympathies are not bound up in a party or
class, but look for the welfare and progress of humanity as the goal of
their striving.”[639]
Thus he wrote in the aftermath of the revolutionary years of
1848-1851. But the glowing idealism of the young radical was to suffer
discouragements and setbacks from the experience of later years. One
suspects that his liberalism never possessed the whole of him, never
grew from within out, but was overlaid on a nature fundamentally
aristocratic that at heart preferred Tory to liberal ends. Though as
a young man he spread his canvas to the winds of liberalism, he was
always a little distrustful of the bellying sails and he never quite
liked the crew. There is a curious suggestiveness in his changing
attitude towards England and English society. He had quitted the old
world out of dislike for it, and a dozen years later he declined to go
back except as a “last extremity.” “It would be going back,” he said,
“into an atmosphere that I detest and a social system that I have hated
since I was fourteen years old.”[640] At the bottom of this repugnance
was an obstinate pride. He was ambitious, capable, and sensitive, and
a caste society that refused to open its doors to him he looked upon
as pernicious. To assert that his espousal of democracy was due to
his brusque rejection by a more distinguished mistress, is a severe
judgment, yet it is a judgment that his friend Henry Holt quite frankly
implied.[641]
He had come to America in the hope of getting on in the world. He had
a strong regard for social position. His standards were severe and
his sympathies so narrow as to lay him open to the frequent charge of
snobbery. He would mingle in none but good society, and it was easier
in America than in England to gain entrance to good society. Until he
had made his mark he would not go back; but when as a distinguished
editor he ventured to return, and found himself accepted by the best
people, his hatred for the English social system oozed away, and the
eager delight he experienced in upper-class society was an unconscious
testimony to the value he had set upon a system from which as a young
man he had been excluded. Godkin was too English to make himself
over into an American, too natively aristocratic to be a democrat.
A disciple of John Stuart Mill, he lacked the complete intellectual
integrity of Mill that brushed aside all caste prejudices and personal
ambitions, as he lacked his vast intellectual accumulation. Godkin’s
liberalism was founded on Mill, but it was never quite Mill.
The philosophy to which, as a disciple of the Bentham-Mill-Grote
school, the young Godkin gave his allegiance, was a Utilitarian
adaptation of _laissez faire_--the doctrine that the greatest happiness
of the greatest number is the ultimate social objective, and that such
objective can be attained only through the completest liberty under
the sway of reason and justice. As presented by John Stuart Mill it
was a singularly persuasive philosophy that awakened a response in
every generous mind. Liberty, he insisted, is the thing chiefly to be
desired, for where men are free they will shape social organisms to
their needs. Man is both an economic and a political animal, and the
difficult problem of the political philosopher is to keep the one from
trespassing upon the rights of the other. The economic man, under the
drive of the acquisitive instinct, regards the political state as an
ally in the present business of acquisition; and the political man
looks upon business as subject to strict regulation and control in
the interests of the state. To prevent this meddlesome interference
of each with the other, Mill laid down the principle of liberty in
terms as uncompromising as those of the Physiocrats. The “sole
end,” he asserted, “for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their
number, is self-protection,” and “the only purpose for which power
can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”[642]
From this excellent school the young Godkin emerged a political
theorist of no mean ability; somewhat too dogmatic, perhaps, a
bit overconfident of the finality of his logic, but with a shrewd
dialectic, quick to separate reality from pretense, severe upon all
flummery and buncombe. That his philosophy was sharply opposed to
the current tendencies of American political life he saw clearly: to
Whiggery with its ambitious paternalisms; to centralization with its
glorification of a Bismarckian state. His thought was erected on a
foundation of _laissez faire_, and he sharply differentiated economics
and politics. As a realist he recognized differences in individual
capacity, but he was keenly suspicious of any attempt on the part
of government to compensate for such differences. Any interference
with natural law, he was convinced, entailed greater evils than
benefits. Economic competition is a struggle between individuals,
and government must content itself with its proper rôle of policeman
to keep the peace. With Mill he refused to recognize the state as a
separate entity. He never confused the personnel of government with
“what is called ‘the state’”; and as he contemplated the honesty and
capacity of the several members who administered government in a given
commonwealth, he was disinclined to entrust them with regulative
powers. Disinterested honesty and capacity, it seemed, too rarely
got into office, governments were too little acquainted with common
morality, to justify hopes of equalizing the inequality of nature by
political means.
To the sound philosophical equipment brought from England Godkin added
a very considerable understanding of American political history. The
ten years spent here before the founding of the _Nation_, had been
employed in getting at home upon the new scene. He had carefully
checked the findings of de Tocqueville and was convinced that the
French critic had gone far astray in his interpretation of the great
American experiment. In his analysis of democratic tendencies he had
fallen into the fallacy of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, with the
result that he had got the cart before the horse; and in an article
published in the _North American Review_ of January, 1865, Godkin
entered the lists in defense of America against the criticisms of
English Tories founded on such fallacies. In its emphasis on historical
realism “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy” is a surprisingly modern
study that might almost have been written by one of our younger
historians. It is an interpretation of our political development in
terms of environment, and it traces the rise of democracy to the
leveling influence of decentralization. For a hundred and fifty
years, he pointed out, old-world habits and customs, the spirit of
aristocracy, prevailed in the closely grouped settlements along the
Atlantic seaboard, where physical conditions restrained the tendency
to social disruption; but with the breaking through of the Appalachian
barrier, and the influx of new waves of immigration, the conditions
were prepared for a vast movement of decentralization. It was the
Inland Empire that made possible the democratic revolution in America.
“How was it,” he asks, “that that democratic tide, which within the
last fifty years, has overwhelmed everything, during the previous
hundred and fifty years gave so few signs of rising?” And his reply to
the question antedates Professor Turner’s theory of the frontier by
thirty years:
If we inquire what are those phenomena of American society which it
is generally agreed distinguish it from that of older countries,
we shall find ... that by far the larger number of them may be
attributed in a great measure to what, for want of a better name,
we shall call “the frontier life” led by a large proportion of the
inhabitants, and to the influence of this portion on manners and
legislation, rather than to political institutions, or even to the
equality of conditions. In fact, we think that these phenomena,
and particularly those of them which excite most odium in Europe,
instead of being the effect of democracy, are partly its cause, and
that it has been to their agency more than aught else, that the
democratic tide in America has owed most of its force and violence.
The agency which, in our opinion, gave democracy its first great
impulse in the United States, which has promoted its spread ever
since, and has contributed most powerfully to the production of
those phenomena in American society which hostile critics set down
as peculiarly democratic, was neither the origin of the Colonists,
nor the circumstances under which they came to the country, nor
their religious belief; but the great change in the distribution of
the population, which began soon after the Revolution, and which
continues its operation up to the present time.[643]
Godkin was thirty-four when he entered upon his life work of pouring
a stream of fresh and free thought upon the ways of the Gilded Age.
It was somewhat in the spirit of Matthew Arnold that he interpreted
the function of criticism. “The highest allegiance of every man,” he
wrote Norton in 1865, “is due to liberty and civilization, or rather
civilization and liberty”;[644] and the creed of the _Nation_, which
Godkin unconsciously modified as culture dispossessed liberty in his
affections, may be summed up in the words democracy, individualism,
morality, culture, to the end of a free life in a humane and
well-ordered society. Throughout the Gilded Age this transplanted
English liberal was the high priest of criticism in America. His
caustic intelligence played ironically about the current shibboleths
and fetishes, reducing them to shreds and patches. He could discover
little that was good in the Gilded Age, in its tariffs and land grants,
its _Crédit Mobilier_ and other scandals, its buccaneer plutocracy,
its undisciplined proletarianism, its bitter agrarianism; and he was
prompted to a severity of judgment that easier-going natures thought
harsh. Enemies sprang up in his every footprint; but too much was at
stake, he believed, to temper his criticism to flabby minds, and he
laid about him with what he considered a fine impartiality.
It was a cold plunge into a dirty pool, and a nature less robust would
have scrambled out quickly. His realism was a profound discouragement
to his idealism, and his native aristocracy of temperament closed
his mind to the virtues of certain homely American liberalisms. As
an intellectual he distrusted all Jacksonian frontier freedoms.
The doctrine of liberty did not appear to advantage in the garb of
agrarians and proletarians; Thaddeus Stevens and Terence V. Powderly
were an ungainlier breed of libertarians than Gladstone and Mill; with
such leadership it seemed to Godkin that liberty was running away
with civilization and a smash-up was likely. It was the duty of the
_Nation_, therefore, to arouse the culture of America to its political
obligations, to the end that the custodianship of liberty should be
taken over by the intelligence of America. It proved a discouraging
job, and slowly on the horizon of his mind rose the shadow of the doubt
that had troubled de Tocqueville and Cooper and Fisher Ames--must a
democracy prove a leveling influence that destroys a fine individuality
and a generous social culture? Careless of his trusteeship, was not
the American democrat throwing his heritage to the demagogue and the
spoilsman?
As he watched the scrambling heedlessness of the times his liberalism
oozed away, his democratic faith lost its sanctions, and he slowly
drifted to the right and the dead-sea of pessimism. The mass was too
powerful in America, and the mass was shot through with the spirit of
selfish leveling. The democracy had been distorted by the frontier,
and the sense of responsibility, of individual duty, was well-nigh
atrophied. The vulgar West threw its crudity upon all America. “I do
not like the western type of man,” Godkin confessed to Norton; and to
another friend who praised California, he wrote, “No scenery or climate
I had to share with western people would charm me.” He never spared
his mordant adjectives in commenting privately on all America west of
the Hudson River. In his gloomy later years he found consolation in
Brahmin culture. For years he lived in Cambridge, and in the company
of Lowell and Norton he felt at home. Here were democratic gentlemen
worthy of his ideal. If all America were only like Cambridge his faith
in a cultivated liberalism would be justified. In those years he called
himself “an American of the _vieille roche_,” which being interpreted,
meant a liberal of the Brahmin school.
The immediate problems on which Godkin was called to pass judgment
brought him into the thick of the struggles of the Gilded Age. As
an editor he confronted the bitter antagonisms that sprang from
the rivalries of the farmer, the wage-earner, and the industrial
capitalist. Each group was seeking to enlist government on its side
and use the political state for special and narrow ends. To a disciple
of Mill all such attempts were no better than treason to democracy,
and when such treason was justified by what he considered specious
economic theory Godkin’s hostility was edged with acerbity. All the
trenchant dogmas of his philosophy--his police theory of the state, his
Ricardian _laissez faire_, his individualism--rushed to the attack of
such impudent impostors. With no organized forces at his back he made
war on every major group in America. He essayed to rally the scattered
minority of the intellectuals and overthrow the citadel of economic
power by appeal to reason. It was magnificent but it was scarcely war.
The culture of the Gilded Age was undisciplined, lacking faith and
unnurtured in philosophy, fastidious rather than vigorous--the poorest
of material for shock troops. It applauded every clever thrust of its
captain, but preferred to keep its own hands unsoiled. In consequence,
to the end of his life Godkin was a leader without a following, little
more than a voice crying in the wilderness.
For the rising plutocracy Godkin felt the scorn of a gentleman for the
vulgar new-rich. Its hands were dirty, and it was soiling all American
life. Its gospel of Whiggery, that under pretense of furthering
prosperity had turned Congress into an auction room, was an insult to
his Manchester liberalism. Just as surely as government meddles with
subsidies and tariffs and grants, he pointed out, will it be defiled.
Men are but indifferent honest, and if statesmen are not to become
mere political hucksters they must stand apart from the temptations of
business. The plea for a national economy had brought Congress to the
_Crédit Mobilier_ scandals, and it would breed other scandals so long
as it was heeded. The only cure for Whiggery was to destroy it. In a
scathing leader he early paid his respects to the Whiggish system of
governmental subsidies:
The remedy is simple. The Government must get out of the
“protective” business and the “subsidy” business and the
“improvement” and the “development” business. It must let trade,
and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and
telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.
We care nothing about the wonderful stories we hear about what can
be achieved in the way of “promoting industry” by all these canal
and steamboat and railroad schemes. Were the material prospect
twice as tempting, the state could not profitably meddle with
them, because neither it nor any other government in the world
_can command the virtue necessary to carry them on_. This is not
a matter of speculation; we know it as a matter of experience. It
is almost as much as this Government can do to maintain order and
administer justice. It may one day be able to do a great deal more,
but not until a great change has occurred in the social condition
of the country. We have gone far enough, heaven knows, on the road
of “protection” and “promotion,” and have found at every step that
it leads straight to the bottomless pit; that for every hundred
dollars voted by these poor men to whom we pay scanty wages for
passing bills at Washington, we lessen, and perceptibly lessen, the
stock of individual honor, of self-respect, and of public spirit,
of a loyalty to ideals, to which far more than to any triumphs of
material industry, we must look for continued national greatness.
We are making money fast enough in all conscience; what needs
fostering just now is honesty.[645]
Godkin found it exceedingly difficult to foster the austere honesty
that he desired in the body politic, and in his fury at the common
political scoundrelism he came to ascribe much of the virus that was
poisoning America to the party of western agrarians. He was rapidly
drifting to the right and the defense of capitalism, and as the
agrarian platform was slowly built up of successive planks--greenbacks,
free silver, subtreasuries, railway regulation, the income tax--he
turned upon it all the batteries of his wrath. Godkin never understood
the American farmer, but he professed to understand economics and
political science, and the agrarian platform aroused his implacable
hostility. In his frequent discussions of the currency question, a
question that for thirty years was a subject of passionate debate,
he was at some disadvantage. Intellectually he was ill equipped to
deal with it. Although a Ricardian he failed to grasp Ricardo’s
quantitative principle of money or the function of paper currency. As
a gold-standard advocate he accepted the English monetary system as
it was given form by the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, and he would
have no tampering with it. To Godkin money was a measure of value,
and a fluctuating standard, implied in the quantitative theory, was
as immoral as a fluctuating yardstick. The use of greenbacks--“rag
money”--he reckoned a scheme by which dishonest debtors might cheat
their creditors.[646] He was forced to regard gold and silver as
commodities, fluctuating in price with supply and demand; but he looked
upon them as possessing a stable natural value that placed them beyond
political manipulation. Any attempt to disturb this natural value by
artificial means he called dishonest.[647] He was almost indecent
in the vehemence of his adjectives applied to the “dishonest money
men.” He called the Greenbackers “communists,”[648] and speaking of
the Grangers, he said, “There is nothing unnatural or deplorable in a
Granger turning from one form of swindle to another.”[649]
By the middle nineties it was hard to distinguish Godkin’s views on
the agrarian program from those of a Wall Street banker. In discussing
free silver he abandoned economic principles and fell to mouthing
like any newspaper writer. The currency question he regarded as a
simple question of public morality. There was only one issue, the
issue between honest and dishonest money. “The demand for free-silver
coinage is a demand for a division of property,”[650] he said in the
early days of the campaign of 1896, and a fortnight later he took
extreme ground:
... the bold and wicked scheme of repudiation ... is presented
without a blush in the platform. Upon this question the campaign
must be fought. If the party of repudiators cannot be put down, the
republic cannot be preserved and is not worth preserving.[651]
Such pronouncements bear none of the earmarks of dispassionate
criticism. It may seem severe to suggest that they are the comments of
a very ignorant or shallow critic, blinded by his prejudices; yet it is
true. The equipment of Manchester economics with which he had outfitted
himself in the late forties, was no longer adequate in the nineties;
yet he seems not to have been aware of the fact. The mid-Victorian
still regarded himself as an authority on all economic questions,
although he seems to have done no serious reading in economic theory
for half a century, and was scarcely conscious how far he had drifted
towards the right. The old liberal was fighting the battles of
capitalism with weapons as antiquated as the old cap-and-ball musket.
“The great trouble with all silverites and currency lunatics, North
and South,” he said, “is that, when monetary crises arise, they cannot
be got to go to the right quarter for information”--a comment that one
might retort upon Godkin himself. The intellectual knew far less about
money than “Coin” Harvey, whom he would have laughed at.
The same drift to the right is evident in the pronouncements on the
Populist movement of the times. Writing on “The Kansas Situation,” when
the farmers’ unrest was becoming militant, he remarked:
Such an unexpected outbreak as this of the last two or three
years shows at least that it is not only in the cities, where the
foreign-born swarm, that demagogues may thrive and the doctrine of
revolution be preached.[652]
The “ravings of the Farmers’ movement” he regarded as no more than a
“vague and visionary discontent,” that was seeking political cures for
its economic ills. The hard times from which the West was suffering
were the result of economic law. It was not the currency or excessive
railway rates that were the cause. The vast extension of railway
systems had brought under cultivation too many acres, and the reduction
of transportation costs would serve only to bring additional acres
under cultivation, thereby increasing competition and forcing prices
still lower. High railway rates were the surest safeguard against
further extension of an industry much overdeveloped; and for state
legislatures to attempt to fix railway tariffs by law--to attempt to
control economic forces by statutes--was sheer folly. In discussing the
celebrated Illinois railway legislation Godkin spoke in defense of the
roads:
The locomotive is coming in contact with the framework of our
institutions. In this country of simple government, the most
powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced
has within the next score years, yet to assume its relation to
that political machinery which is to control and regulate it....
The corporations of course contested the validity of the law. If
the legislature could establish one rate at which they should do
the work of transportation, it could establish another. They were
fighting for their lives and property; it was against taxation
without representation.... An arbitrary power is claimed in the
supreme legislative body to decide on the reasonable rates of the
cost of private services. Just as three hundred years ago the price
of bread and labor was regulated by act of Parliament, so now the
cost of transportation is to be fixed by a jury of twelve men....
Thus far, therefore, the results of the Illinois railroad war must
be regarded as rather portentous than satisfactory.[653]
The “watered-stock hallucination,” that had taken possession of the
agrarian mind and aroused such bitterness, he dismissed with a curious
comment that did no great credit to his intelligence.
There is ... one difficulty in the way, which is the difficulty
common to many of the proposed reforms in railroad management--the
practice alleged has absolutely no existence except in the heated
brain of the agitators who have imagined it. There are no roads in
the United States on which any attempt has been made to increase
the freight earnings in proportion to the watered stock or
debt.[654]
The passions aroused by the campaign of ’96 swept Godkin from his
moorings and left him adrift. He quickly convinced himself that the
real issue at stake was the moral integrity of the nation. As he
studied the platforms and leaders he found little comfort in either.
For McKinley he had the contempt of the intellectual for a purveyor
of heavy platitudes, and he flayed him in a two-column leader with
his old skill.[655] But for Bryan, the “boy orator of the Platte,” his
dislike passed the bounds of decency; and for the Chicago convention
that put him in nomination--“the roaring mob” with its “Populistic,
anarchistic platform”--his contempt outran his command of invective.
No such collection of inflammatory and reckless men ever put
themselves on exhibition in a national convention. Beside them
the Populists are lamb-like, and the socialists sucking doves.
The country has watched their mad proceedings with disgust and
shuddering, only impatient for the coming of November to stamp out
them and their incendiary doctrines.[656]
To what lengths his overheated brain carried him in those political
dogdays, how starkly reactionary he had become, is suggested by his
comment on the plank in the Democratic platform attacking the scandal
of injunctions:
This blow at the courts shows how true are the instincts of the
revolutionaries. They know their most formidable enemies. Judicial
decisions have again and again drawn the fangs of confiscatory and
revolutionary legislation, and the courts have come more and more
to stand as the great bulwarks of property and personal rights.[657]
Godkin’s last years were not happy. The wave of imperialism that swept
over England and America, with its Boer War and Spanish War, brought
him acute concern. The world that he knew was slipping from its
moorings, and he was fearful of the seas into which it was plunging.
The conquest of the Philippines seemed to him a badge of national
degradation. Writing in November, 1899, he said:
We are dragging wearily in the old way, killing half a dozen
Filipinos every week, and continually “near the end.” The folly of
ignorance and rascality we are displaying in the attempt to conquer
and have “subjects” would disgrace a trades union.[658]
As he watched the tedious process of subjugation he inclined to
attribute to Kipling a large share of the current imperialism. “I think
most of the current jingoism on both sides of the water is due to him,”
he wrote a few weeks later. “He is the poet of the barrack-room cads,”
a “most pernicious, vulgar person”; and his “White Man’s Burden,”
cabled to America and printed on the front pages of the newspapers as
a message to imperialist America, must have rubbed across Godkin’s raw
nerves. The pious cant of Kipling’s imperialism was a bitter cup for a
disillusioned liberal. The Jubilee with its fulsome laudation of “fat,
useless royalty,” was fittingly commemorated by this noisy poet of
imperialism, and Godkin turned away from it all in disgust.
But turn where he might he found no comfort. His old dreams of a free
and enlightened democracy rising in America, were dead. Victorian
liberalism had been laid away in the grave of John Stuart Mill, and
only its ghost was walking in these latter times. Godkin’s last days
were bitter, and the gloom that was settling upon him crept into his
letters. It is a malady common amongst liberals, and how deeply it had
struck in is revealed in such passages as these:
I am not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall
have a long period of decline ... and then a recrudescence under
some other form of society.[659]
I do not know what the future of our modern civilization is to be.
But I stumble where I firmly trod.[660]
Things look very black. I think that while money-making will long
continue on a great scale, the government will shortly undergo
great changes which will be presided over not by men of light and
learning, but by capitalists and adroit politicians.[661]
I came here fifty years ago with high and fond ideals about
America.... They are now all shattered, and I have apparently to
look elsewhere to keep even moderate hopes about the human race
alive.[662]
The idealist is prone to be exigent in his demands upon civilization.
He marks out a straight path to the goal of his hopes, and takes it
greatly to heart when society chooses to follow other ways to other
ends. Godkin’s mind was keenly critical, but his sympathies were narrow
and his prejudices great. It is well to be a friend to civilization,
but it is foolish to set up as a custodian; for civilization, like
Topsy, will shift for itself. A just and liberal government is an
excellent ideal, but it is one for which few amongst the mass of men
greatly care; and because America chose to follow its own nose, because
it would not become like the America of his dreams, Godkin allowed his
heart to fill with bitterness. It is true that his recompense for long
years of labor was scanty; the Gilded Age was not to be frightened
from its fleshpots by his warnings. But long ago it was said, “Wisdom
crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her,” and why should Godkin
have become discouraged with civilization because certain blackguard
years clove to their blackguardry, instead of mounting to the somewhat
arid heights he pointed out? One must choose at the last between
tolerance and pessimism, and Godkin chose pessimism.
It is difficult today to understand his great influence with cultivated
readers of his generation. In part perhaps it was due to his crisp
assurance. He put things so plumply, he wrote so brilliantly, that his
readers were persuaded he must think as neatly. Yet his trenchant prose
style cannot hide a certain slightness of matter. His later comments
tended to become ever thinner and shriller--not criticism at all, but
the sharp expression of aging prejudice. When he talked about the
tariff he had Mill at his elbow; but when he talked about the agrarian
or the proletarian movements he was little more than a blue-jay
scolding at a world he disliked. Unlike his great master he did not go
forward to meet new times; he did not reinterpret Victorian liberalism
in the light of the lessons taught by the Industrial Revolution; but by
standing still he did liberalism a real disservice.
IV • Fiction Considers the State of the Country
It was only a question of time before the novel would throw off the
inhibitions of the genteel and turn to consider the state of the
country. A changing social order would not fail of reflection in
the pages of fiction, and as the novelists fell to scrutinizing the
familiar scene, comparing the reality with the patriotic professions,
it was certain that the workings of democracy would come in for sharp
criticism. In the last decades of the century the problem novel spread
swiftly, expanding the field of its inquiry, and seeking to understand
the new ways. Making its first essays in the familiar field of the
political, it soon turned to consider the economic problems arising out
of the new industrialism, espousing either capitalism or labor as the
social sympathies of the author might determine. The class passions
of the times found a reflection in its pages, and in consequence the
sociological novel became increasingly a repository of the social ideas
of a perplexed and troubled generation.
1 • The Political Novel
Of the early political novels three are of sufficient interest to
reward attention: _The Gilded Age_ (1873), _Democracy_ (1881), and
_An American Politician_ (1884). The first, written by Mark Twain
in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, is a satire of Gilded
Age ways with particular attention to the political corruption of
General Grant’s administration. The fictional disguise is slight.
The actual Washington is presented vividly and familiar figures--Ben
Butler, Oakes Ames, President Grant, Secretary Boutwell--move through
the scene. The central figure, Senator Dillworthy, was modeled upon
Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, who had recently lost a reëlection through
an unlucky exposure of an attempt to bribe the Kansas legislature.
The heroine, Laura Hawkins, is a western lobbyist who in order to put
through a congressional steal under pretense of providing an industrial
school for the freedmen, twists Congressmen about her fingers, turns
adventuress and ends in tragedy. Out of the West comes the spirit of
corruption that the respectable East is unable to withstand, until the
itch of speculation infects the whole country. It is Colonel Sellers
who embodies the slackness of frontier political morals, that in turn
vitiates his political principles. The genial Colonel is quite frankly
a Greenbacker.
The country is getting along very well, [he said] but our public
men are too timid. What we want is more money. I’ve told Boutwell
so. Talk of basing the currency on gold; you might as well base it
on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything! You’ve
got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops? We
must have improvements. Grant’s got the idea. We want a canal from
the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build
it.[663]
The analysis is not penetrating. The real sources of political
corruption--the rapacious railway lobbyists that camped in brigades
about the capitol building--are passed over, and attention is
fastened on small steals--the Knobs University bill and the Columbus
River Navigation scheme--that do not touch the real rascals of the
day. The implication is unmistakable that the source of corruption
is the Jacksonian West with its heritage of the spoils spirit. The
Federalistic East is victimized by the rapacities of mid-western
politicians with their religious cant, their talk of the rights of the
people and the greatness of the plain democracy. Senator Dillworthy is
fairly unctuous in his oily Christian spirit, and Brother Balaam is his
fellow. The portraits, one suspects, need not be taken seriously as
pictures of the chief apostles of preëmption and exploitation. To have
sketched the real leaders of the great barbecue might have involved too
many unpleasantries.
_Democracy_, written seven years later, is an inferior book in
every way, less penetrating, less amusing, less creative. To essay
to penetrate the dark places of political jobbery through the eyes
of a society woman, too high-bred to turn lobbyist and inveigle
secrets out of ambitious politicians, is sufficiently absurd, yet not
uncharacteristic of the Henry Adams whose home was a distinguished
salon and who in pottering about the political world of Washington
deceived himself in thinking he had his finger on the web of intrigue.
It is an amazing book for such a man to write. The attitude is that of
the kid-gloved reformer who goes in for civil service reform, and who
views the uncultivated West as the source of all political corruption.
The hero, Senator Silas Ratcliffe of Peoria, Illinois, like Senator
Dillworthy, is a past master in political organization who covers his
dishonesty with religious cant. The economic sources of political
corruption are ignored, and the evil is traced to the principle of
democracy. Whatever political convictions are in the book are expressed
by Representative Gore, a civil service reformer from Massachusetts,
and quite evidently Henry Adams himself; and the conclusion is thus set
forth:
“Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal
suffrage a success?”
Mr. Gore saw himself pinned to the wall, and he turned at bay with
almost the energy of despair:
“These are matters about which I rarely talk in society.... But
since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only
condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated
or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will
faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears
to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.
Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a
higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at
this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to
see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only
direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only
conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the
only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other step
is backward, and I do not want to repeat the past. I am glad to
see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be
neutral.”
“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lee; “suppose
society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and
communism.”
“... I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new
ones.... faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.
Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten,
let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first
to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.
There! have I repeated my catechism correctly? You would have it!
Now oblige me by forgetting it. I should lose my character at home
if it got out.”[664]
And the conclusion of the matter is thus summed up:
“I want to go to Egypt,” said Madelaine, still smiling faintly;
“democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces. Oh, what rest it would
be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out forever at the polar
star!”
Not a hint of the Industrial Revolution; not a hint of the sordid
Whiggery that was fouling American politics; not a suggestion of any
creative social philosophy on which to establish an adequate theory of
democracy. A dreary place at best, with no faith in human nature and no
trust in democratic machinery, but only a gentlemanly belief that an
antiquated Federalism may somehow pull this venture in republicanism
out of the bog in which Jacksonianism had mired it. No wonder Henry
Adams would not set his name on the title-page, but left it an orphan
to make its own way in the world. In his life of John Hay, William
Roscoe Thayer has explained the situation thus:
The Adamses, the Hays, and Clarence King formed an inner circle,
which somebody named “The Five of Hearts,” and out of this came,
in 1882, a novel entitled _Democracy_, a strikingly clever satire
on Washington society. Its authorship was at once attributed to
them, but one after another denied it. If it was a joint product
no individual could monopolize the credit; and as it seems to have
been read chapter by chapter to the group, and discussed by them
all, it might be said, technically, to be a composite. Clarence
King is still commonly regarded as its author; and there are many
supporters of Hay; but I believe that only Mr. Adams possessed the
substance, and style, and the gift of Voltairean raillery which
distinguish it.[665]
Mr. Thayer is generous in his praise.
_An American Politician_ is even less consequential as a political
study than _Democracy_. Marion Crawford was a professional romancer
and in this naïve venture into a field little known to him he carried
his complete romantic kit. The political theme is tied about with so
many love strands as almost to strangle it. The hero, John Harrington,
we are assured is a very remarkable man, a Bostonian with a Mayflower
teapot in his family treasures, an idealist of primitive Puritan
intensity. But we must take him upon hearsay. Nothing that he does
or says suggests his greatness. Politically the book is reduced to a
little glimpse of the methods of selecting a United States senator--an
Irish ward boss with twenty votes in his belt, a gentlemanly railway
attorney who handles offal skillfully with a handkerchief at his
nose--set in between two set speeches by the hero. The rest is Newport
and the Back Bay, not quite stupid yet with no distinction. The
romancer does not move easily in an unfamiliar field, and he sends
his hero forth to battle for righteousness with small intellectual
equipment. His speeches are heavily oratorical and his political
philosophy is naïve; it is pretty much George William Curtis, the
sufficiency of civil service reform and the virtues of non-partisanship.
The unreality of the book is furthered by a conception worthy of
Poe--a mysterious council of three that meets in London and directs
political movements in America. We are dimly aware that the council
is both ancient and honorable; that it goes back historically to
post-Revolutionary days and is self-perpetuating; and its uncanny
power has resulted from supreme intelligence supplemented by exact
information gathered during many years. In its secret archives every
public man in America is tagged and docketed; his political and
financial affiliations are set down in detail; and on the basis of this
knowledge the cryptic three send forth instructions that are faithfully
carried out. The danger to America lies in sectionalism--North, South,
and West struggling for supremacy in the national councils; and upon
the three rests the self-imposed responsibility of saving America
from itself. The idea is sufficiently absurd, as the book is absurd.
Crawford was a cosmopolitan who knew little about American political
conditions, and the crisis of the novel is the Hayes-Tilden _impasse_
of 1876. The influence of the novel, one may safely assume, was
negligible.[666]
2 • The Economic Novel
The theme of these earlier novels was politics as revealed by the
Gilded Age; on the other hand _The Bread-winners_ was one of the early
economic novels. Like _Democracy_ it was an outcome of the discussions
of the vivacious trio, John Hay, Clarence King, and Henry Adams.
Written in 1882 by Hay, it was published anonymously in the _Century
Magazine_ from August, 1883, to January, 1884. Hay never publicly
acknowledged the authorship, and it was not until the edition of 1915
appeared with an introductory note by his son, that his name appeared
on the title-page. It achieved a notable success--far beyond that of
_Democracy_; was warmly praised and sharply criticized; was replied to
in other novels; all of which goes to show that it fanned the coals
that were smoldering in the industrial life of the day, threatening
a general conflagration. It was the first recognition on the part of
literature that a class struggle impended in America--a first girding
of the loins of polite letters to put down the menace that looked
out from the underworld of the proletariat; and as such it assumes
importance as an historical document quite beyond its significance as a
work of art.
The motive of _The Bread-winners_ is the defense of property against
the “dangerous classes”; its immediate theme is a satire of labor
unions. In an introductory note to the later edition, Clarence Leonard
Hay explicitly denies this. “_The Bread-winners_,” he says, “is not
directed against organized labor. It is rather a protest against the
disorganization and demoralization of labor by unscrupulous leaders
and politicians who, in the guise of helping the workingman, use his
earnings to enrich themselves.” He then states the theme thus:
It is a defense of the right of an individual to hold property, and
a plea for the better protection of that property by law and order.
Civilization rests upon law, order, and obedience. The agitator
who preaches that obedience to lawful authority is a sin, and
patriotism an illusion, is more dangerous to society than the thief
who breaks in at night and robs the householder.
The editor thinks well of the American workingmen. At heart they are
sound; their motives are honest; but their ignorance of fundamental
economic principles too easily suffers them to fall victim to
unscrupulous demagogues whose only object is their exploitation. To
prevent such “disorganization and demoralization of labor,” which
can bring only suffering and failure upon men ill prepared to endure
them, is therefore the patriotic duty of the educated classes. The
proletariat is groping blindly for leadership; it is stirring uneasily;
if the educated classes do not offer an enlightened leadership, the
laborer will follow low cunning to immoral ends and blind leaders of
the blind will bring irretrievable disaster upon civilization. Selfish
appeal will kindle envy and hate; the rich and prosperous will go down
before brute force; the rights of property will be destroyed; law,
order, and obedience will give place to anarchy.
Such, briefly developed, is Clarence Hay’s exposition of _The
Bread-winners_; and the exposition seems to suggest the social views of
John Hay. He probably had no antipathy to labor unions which are guided
in their policy by “sound economic principles” and right “morality”--as
the capitalist understands such things. But labor unions which follow
their own leaders, which persist in thinking out a proletarian economy,
which are bent on substituting a social morality for a property
morality, which refuse to be led by the “educated classes,” he was
bitterly hostile to. It is the unrest furthered by rebellious labor
unions that he fears, and it is this that gives point and animus to
his satire. That _The Bread-winners_ was conceived in a spirit of
beneficent paternalism towards the proletariat, the present-day reader
will have difficulty in discovering. It is too frank in defense of
vested interests, it looks with too stern a disfavor upon all labor
leaders who refuse to accept the finality of the present industrial
order, it exudes too strong an odor of property-morality, to deceive
an intelligent reader. Read today it is clearly a partisan defense
of economic individualism, an attack upon the rising labor movement,
a grotesque satire smeared with an unctuous morality--and because of
this, a perfect expression of the spirit of upper-class America in
those uneasy eighties with their strikes and lockouts and Haymarket
riots.
The plot of the book is slight--it is the story of the oily
machinations of Ananias Offitt, a professional agitator who lives off
simple honest workmen whom he seduces, organizes a secret Brotherhood
of the Breadwinners, urges on riot and robbery at the time of a great
strike, is checkmated by the hero--a cultivated and elegant clubman by
the name of Captain Arthur Farnham--betrays his tool, and in the end
is murdered by him. Fortunately for the welfare of property interests
there are “honest” workmen, men like Leopold Grosshammer, who rally
to the support of law and order and eventually break the strike. The
love-story is provided with two heroines, and the contrast between them
emphasizes the class line which property draws. The upper-class heroine
is as correct and colorless as Cooper’s Eve Effingham: the lower-class
heroine is as vulgarly handsome and as brazen as “such people” are
supposed to be. A high-school education has spoilt her for the factory
or domestic service, filling her empty head with foolish ambitions, but
it could not make a lady of her.
Hay was in Cleveland at the time of the great strike in 1877, and
he was profoundly disturbed by the experience. Writing to his
father-in-law, he said:
The prospects of labor and capital both seem gloomy enough.
The very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of
workingmen, and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them
to all lengths.... I am thankful you did not _see_ and _hear_
what took place during the strikes. You were saved a very painful
experience of human folly and weakness, as well as crime.[667]
The crying evils of a buccaneer industrialism which lay behind the
strikes, Hay ignored completely. To provide his idyllic background of
contented labor before it is seduced by demagogues, he goes back to
a decadent domestic economy. His “honest and contented workman” is a
carpenter who works for another carpenter--not a factory-hand tending
a machine; and when the demagogue comes with his specious appeal he is
triumphantly refuted.
“What are we, anyhow?” continued the greasy apostle of labor. “We
are slaves; we are Roossian scurfs. We work as many hours as our
owners like; we take what pay they choose to give us; we ask their
permission to live and breathe.”
“Oh, that’s a lie,” Sleeny interrupted, with unbroken calmness.
“Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay,
and both of us was suited. Ef he’s got his heel onto me, I don’t
feel it.”[668]
John Hay was convinced that an “educated leadership” alone could save
American democracy. But unfortunately--despite his great reputation
in diplomacy and statesmanship--his own education seems to have been
faulty. He had lately risen into the exploiting class, and he accepted
the ready-made opinions of that class. His biographer has admirably
stated his position during the days of the strike riots when he was
clarifying his views:
Those riots of 1877 burnt deep into Colonel Hay’s heart. Like
the rest of the world, he had theorized on the likelihood of war
between Capital and Labor; but he had reassured himself by the
comfortable assumption that under American conditions--equal
opportunity for all, high wages, equal laws, and the ballot-box--no
angry laboring class could grow up. The riots blew such vaporing
away: for they proved that the angry class already existed, that
the ballot-box instead of weakening strengthened it, and that not
only the politicians of both parties but also the constituted
authorities would avoid, as long as possible, grappling with it.
The event was too large to be dismissed as an outburst of temper:
it must be accepted as a symptom, a portent. Did it mean that
a cancer had attacked the body politic and would spread to the
vital organs? Was Democracy a failure,--Democracy--for more than
a century the dream of the down-trodden, the ideal of those who
loved mankind and believed in its perfectibility, the Utopia which
good men predicted should somehow turn out to be a reality? Hay
had sung his paean to liberty; Hay had throbbed at the efforts of
patriots in Spain and in France to overthrow their despots; he had
even exulted over the signs of democratization in England. Had he
been the victim of mirage? Was Democracy not the final goal of
human society, but only a half-way stage between the despotism of
Autocracy and the despotism of Socialism?
These questions he could not evade.... But he held, as did many of
his contemporaries, that the assaults on Property were inspired
by demagogues who used as their tools the loafers, the criminals,
the vicious,--Society’s dregs who have been ready at all times to
rise against laws and government. That you have property is proof
of industry and foresight on your part or your father’s; that you
have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your
improvidence. The world is a moral world; which it would not be if
virtue and vice received the same rewards.[669]
John Hay, it must be recalled, had enjoyed a college education through
the aid of relatives, he had been taken under the wing of Lincoln and
become his private secretary, he had been thrust forward by influential
politicians, and finally he had married wealth--were these things
proofs of virtue in a moral world that rewards foresight and punishes
improvidence? Or were they rather the marks of a skillful climber? John
Hay was a charming and cultivated gentleman, but he was also a child of
the Gilded Age, with the materialisms of his generation in his blood.
The young man had been an Abolitionist and a political radical; the old
man was a McKinley conservative whose chief claim to reputation lay
in the “open-door” policy in China. The beginnings of this shift to
conservatism seem to have coincided with his marriage to Miss Stone,
daughter of a Cleveland capitalist whose interests were threatened by
the great strike. He was temperamentally one of John Adams’s “natural
aristocrats,” and having gained entrée into aristocratic circles he
took the coloring of his new environment. A son of the frontier, he
became a man of the world. Prosperity was necessary to him.
Professing a deep attachment to democratic institutions and hatred of
all monarchical principles--in Spain and France--John Hay ceased to
be a Lincoln democrat, and took his place amongst the ruling class,
accepting the principles of the rising plutocracy. _The Bread-winners_
is a dramatization of the Federalistic principle that government
exists for the protection of property. “Remembering the date when _The
Bread-winners_ was written,” says his biographer, “we must regard
it as the first important polemic in American fiction in defense of
Property.”[670] John Hay had become a thoroughgoing Hamiltonian. In
his younger days his sympathies had gone out to radical republicans
everywhere, and he watched the rising tide of liberalism with great
satisfaction. In his first visits to Europe he followed closely the
liberal movements. He was a warm admirer of Castelar, eulogizing him
as one of the heroic figures of modern times. In a lecture in 1869 on
“The Progress of Democracy in Europe” he spoke with the zeal of an
advanced liberal. But soon thereafter the ardor of his zeal lessened.
On later trips to Europe he did not display a like sympathy with
the program of the Social Democrats. As economic unrest crept into
politics, as strikes and boycotts began to disturb his father-in-law’s
business, he discovered less sympathy for revolutionary movements.
Political revolutions sponsored by respectable middle-class leaders,
were one thing; economic revolutions sponsored by the proletariat were
quite another thing. A democracy that breeds more democracy is clearly
dangerous. So much as has already been accomplished is excellent, of
course; but nothing further must be attempted.
There is sound strategy in offensive epithets. And so, taking counsel
of fear, he applied to the current economic unrest the words most
offensive to polite American ears, and called it socialism, anarchism.
Without pausing to weigh the demands of the farmer and the workingman,
with no understanding of the meaning of the great proletarian movement
then going forward in Europe, he appealed in defense of property to the
specter of economic leveling before which every good American of the
eighties recoiled in horror. As early as 1869, speaking of Castelar, he
said: “He has too much sense and integrity to follow the lead of the
Socialist fanatics.”[671] Commenting on the unsettled state of things
in Paris in 1883, he wrote: “The laborers have had the mischief put
into their heads by trade-unions.”[672] As he contemplated the agrarian
unrest of the seventies and later, he discovered in Greenbackism and
Populism only another form of this hateful socialism. It was the work
of agitators who were plain rascals.
He was greatly disturbed in 1875 at the state of politics, “with
half the Republicans and all the Democrats inflationists at heart,
and carrying on a campaign on the bald issue whether the nation
shall be a liar and a thief or not.”[673] And so late as 1900 he
exclaimed petulantly: “This last month of Bryan, roaring out his
desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having its effect on the
dangerous classes. Nothing so monstrous has as yet been seen in
our history.”[674] Unhappily even in free America with its equal
opportunity, and equal laws, there had come to be “dangerous
classes”--rather a good many of them, taking the populistic farmers and
discontented wage-earners into the account--so many, indeed, that John
Hay grew gloomy over the outlook. And the outlook was all the gloomier
because of our form of government; for is not the ultimate test of
our democratic institutions the test of whether they are adequate to
protect the property and “civilization” of the few against the “hate
and envy” of the discontented many?
That _The Bread-winners_ was a dishonest book Hay certainly
could not have been brought to believe; nevertheless a Tory who
covers his Tory purpose with a mantle of democracy can scarcely
be reckoned intellectually sincere. The men of the seventies and
eighties--cultivated and intelligent gentlemen like Godkin and Aldrich
and Hay--were little more than demagogues in their fustian attacks
on agrarian Greenbackers and militant labor unions; they feared and
hated them too much to understand them, and they took advantage of
their social position to cry them down. The “educated leadership” of
the Gilded Age was a somewhat sorry thing; it was ethically bankrupt
while appealing to high moral standards. The best of such leaders were
second-rate men--mediocre minds cramped by a selfish environment,
imbued with no more than a property-consciousness. Of such a world
John Hay in his _Bread-winners_ was a distinguished spokesman and
representative.[675]
3 • The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel
It was in the nineties that the sociological novel expanded into
a great movement that in the next decade and a half was to engulf
pretty much all American fiction and bring it into service to the
social conscience. Such a development was in the nature of things. The
artist would not sit forever in his ivory tower, content to carve his
statuettes while the country without was turmoiled with revolution.
Sooner or later he would venture forth and once he had been caught up
in the swirl his art would take new forms and serve other purposes than
the traditional genteel. Realism was in the air, the realism of Zola
and the Russians, and from such a realism would come in America a more
critical attitude towards the social revolution at work in the land.
It was the city that played havoc with our older fictional methods,
as it played havoc with our traditional social philosophy. America
was late in discovering the import of the huge Babbitt warrens it had
been building with such fierce energy; but slowly the realities of the
economic city rose to challenge the respectability of the romantic
city. It was the discovery of this new lair of business that created
the school of sociological fiction. The older city of literature had
been a polite world wherein ladies and gentlemen drank tea and made
love and talked proper scandal--a pleasant background of clubs and
drawing-rooms, against which moved well-dressed figures. It was an echo
of Thackeray--the world of the West End and Beacon Street and Fifth
Avenue, too well-bred and prosperous to recognize slums or stockyards
or stock-gambling. But with the nineties the old complacency was
disturbed. A note of unrest crept into the current fiction. As the
_protégés_ of Mr. Howells looked out upon their world in search of
reality, they discovered that polite society was being undermined.
Too many social climbers were thrusting themselves forward; too much
vulgarity was displayed by the new-rich. The social primacy of the old
families was being challenged by western pork-packers. Here was a rich
field to harvest. _Le document humain_ was the latest cry of realism,
and so under the inspiration of M. Paul Bourget a new crop of realism
came to fruit--clever studies in feminine psychology--the last word
in contemporary reality. The social climber was analyzed mercilessly,
her shallow and silly ambitions revealed to the least petty maneuver;
her blighting influence upon an idealistic husband or her stimulus
to a money-grabbing mate, is traced shrewdly. Such are Boyesen’s
_Mammon of Unrighteousness_, Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, and
Edith Wharton’s _House of Mirth_--studies that were symptomatic of a
generation disturbed by the consciousness of a vulgar plutocracy rising
in its midst, and yet ignorant of the nature of the disease.
Nevertheless their vogue was brief. As economic unrest rose more
menacingly upon the horizon of the new century, realism quickly
tired of its Kate Van Schaaks and Selma Whites and Lily Barts, and
turned away to prospect for a richer vein. Psychology was losing its
fascination and social analysis was supplying a new inspiration; M.
Bourget was yielding authority to Émile Zola. Even so whole-hearted a
romantic as Mary Johnston was to turn from tales like _To Have and to
Hold_ to write _Hagar_, a novel of suffrage propaganda. There was to
be not less realism but more. The change may be summarized in the word
_background_. The old individualism had unconsciously insulated its
hero from economic contacts; he moved in a polite environment detached
from the larger play of social forces. An individualism so wanting
in sociological verity could make scant appeal to the new spirit of
sociology. That old world is dead. With the rise of the philosophy
of determinism came another mood. To the realism of environment that
conceived of the individual as a pawn on the chessboard of society,
M. Zola had given the name _naturalism_. It was realism wedded to a
deterministic sociology--the first reaction of a generation awakening
to the subjugating power of the mass, and bent on studying the
resultant phenomena in the clear light of science. The change was no
less than revolutionary. The new school thought in terms of group and
class and movement, rather than in terms of individuals each nursing
his petty hopes and fears. The individual counts for so little in the
enveloping stream of social tendency. Let us have no more shoddy
heroes, foolish little egoisms in an unreal world; but figures of
men and women, encompassed by the great stream, carried along on a
resistless current. If they prove to be little better than puppets the
novelist is not to blame, but society that reduces them to impotency.
So the emerging school abandoned Howells and James and followed Frank
Norris into the camp of the naturalists. Their work might be bad
art--as the critics love to reiterate--but it was the honest voice of a
generation bewildered and adrift.
The discovery of environment led imperceptibly to another
discovery--the economic basis of society; and this in turn led to the
rejection of the polite city of older literature. Once the eyes of the
novelist opened to the significance of the economic, the world of the
spenders became less significant than the world of the makers, the
drones became less interesting than the workers. If a novel were to be
true to American life, it must adjust its perspectives to the facts of
the great American game of money-chasing; it must shift its habitat
from Fifth Avenue to Wall Street, from the club to the factory. So the
business man entered the portals of fiction, no longer the stock figure
in broadcloth and top-hat who discarded business with his dirty collar
in order to shift into respectability; but bringing with him his talk
of deals and squeeze-outs, playing the great game of exploitation at
his mahogany desk--the central, dominating figure in a capitalistic
world. He was subjected to acute analysis--his philosophy, his ethics,
the machine of industrialism he was creating, the intricate system
of exploitation that he had elaborated, the jungle city that was his
lair where he fought his battles. The more acutely he was analyzed
the clearer it became that here was a figure greater than kings or
presidents--a figure that had taken our traditional American life in
his hands and was reshaping it to his ends; and that if realism were
to be true to its ideal it must paint him as he was without detraction
and without glorification. So of necessity the younger novelists turned
from polite society to economics, and fell to dramatizing the life of
the city jungle where business men fought their fierce battles.
The forerunner of the new school was a Norwegian-American, Hjalmar
Hjorth Boyesen. An essayist and philologist, for a number of years
professor of German at Columbia University, Boyesen began publishing
as early as 1874, and thereafter contributed freely to the several
fields of the essay, poetry, and fiction; but it was not until 1891
that he opened the new vein of realism which he worked industriously
the remaining four years of his life, the life brought to a premature
close in 1895. Three novels belong to this last phase of his work: _The
Mammon of Unrighteousness_ (1891), _The Golden Calf_ (1892), and _The
Social Strugglers_ (1893). The books made considerable stir upon their
publication, for they were the nearest approach to the Tolstoian type
of realism which till then had appeared in America. They contain in
germ many of the ideas which the later city realists were to amplify
and develop; but these ideas were still entangled in the mesh of the
current psychological realism and their sociological bearings obscured.
In consequence they largely failed of their purpose, and within a
decade they had fallen into oblivion. They are of interest today
chiefly as historical documents of the early nineties.
In the preface to _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ Boyesen sets forth
his purpose thus:
My one endeavor in this book has been to depict persons and
conditions which are profoundly and typically American. I have
disregarded all romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in
every instance, not whether it was amusing but whether it was true
to the logic of reality--true in color and tone to the American
sky, the American soil, the American character.
This, very evidently, is the realism of _milieu_--an endeavor to catch
the reality of atmosphere; and as such it is of no great significance.
In his choice of “types,” moreover, he reflected the current taste.
The crude self-made millionaire who dimly conscious of failure founds
a university; the young idealist who fails because he is conscientious
and the young realist who succeeds because he has no scruples against
playing the game; and the aristocratic climber who marries to further
her social ambitions--these are the stock figures of the realism that
was to culminate in Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, nine years
later. But in the delineation of the character of Horace Larkin--the
hero of a book that does not realize its promise--the note of the
new realism is heard distinctly for the first time. The business
man frankly breaks with the old ethics and erects a new ethics in
conformity with his ambition; and it is the elaboration of the ethics
of the Will to Power that justifies one in regarding _The Mammon of
Unrighteousness_ as a first study in the new city realism.
Horace Larkin, like Herrick’s Van Harrington, is a Nietzschean who
learned his ethics not from the German philosopher, but from the world
of cut-throat business. It is the flower of the competitive system. The
old pretense that business is an uplifting and civilizing agency--that
trade breaks down barriers and carries in its shipments the gospel of
fraternity and good will--is flung out on the scrap heap. Horace Larkin
is no smug hypocrite. He faces the facts frankly; he will not deceive
others any more than himself.
He was a beast of prey, asserting his right of survival; nothing
more. If he succumbed to sentiment (and it is far easier to succumb
to it than to resist it) he would merely be eliminating himself
from the battle of existence as a potent and considerable force,
and consigning himself to the rear ranks. And he felt in every
fibre of his being that he was born for leadership.[676]
... nobody has a right to sacrifice himself to anybody else. If he
does he simply eliminates himself from the struggle for existence,
proves his unfitness to survive. It is natural for every strong man
to try to make every other life tributary to his own; but the man
who consents to make his life tributary to somebody else’s is from
Nature’s point of view a weak man.... She may allow him to exist
in a small way; but what is existence without predominance?...
The man who is in advance of the morality of his age is, for
practical purposes, a fool. It is no use quarreling with Fate; and
in the United States the average man is the Fate that rules us and
determines our place in the world.[677]
“The majority of our politicians are a low-lived lot, and many of
them corrupt. But they have the courage to be American--crudely and
uncompromisingly American--and that is, in my eyes, a virtue which
is not to be lightly rated.”
“And may I ask, Mr. Larkin, what do you mean by being American?”
“Being frankly, ably, enterprisingly plebeian. It is the plebeian
after all, who shall inherit the earth--”
“I beg your pardon. According to the Bible it is the meek.”
“I must differ with the Bible, then; for the meek, in my
experience, if they inherit anything, never manage to keep it.
It passes, sooner or later, into the hands of the strong, the
self-assertive, the grasping. But these, as you will admit, are
plebeian characteristics. A universally prosperous, comfortable,
impudent, and enterprising mob--that is the goal toward which
we are steering; and in my opinion it is a good and desirable
one.”[678]
This is a note that is to be heard more insistently as the new realism
went further in its probing. Armed with this conviction Horace Larkin
set forth as a conqueror, and it only adds to the dramatic fitness
of things that in his rise he came across a will to power stronger,
cleverer, than his own. Kate Van Schaak climbs upon his back to
rise with him; she buys him with her money and social position, and
having made the deal she realizes on the investment. She is mistress
henceforth, and the Nietzschean smiles at the irony of the situation.
In the third work Boyesen fails to maintain the level of _The Mammon
of Unrighteousness. Social Strugglers_ is simpler, more dramatic,
better told. It carries the reader forward more easily. But it belongs
with such novels of social analysis as Charles Dudley Warner’s _The
Golden House_--mildly critical of the vulgarizing influence of the
new-rich, mildly sympathetic with the slum workers--rather than to the
new realism. The heroine--daughter of a new-rich family that has come
to New York to climb socially--awakens to the realization of parting
ways: one the path of luxury which the four hundred travel, the other
the path of service which leads to the slums and settlement work. It is
a sentimental awakening, not an intellectual, induced by the hero, who
on the fringe of the four hundred is mildly discontented with the ways
of luxury. The vague idealism of the latter has been stirred by the
Toynbee Hall experiment in London, and the persuasiveness of the lover
rather than the conclusions of the thinker carries Maud Bulkley away
from her conventional moorings.
The movement of the book is little clogged with sociological
discussions; there is too little, indeed, to justify the conclusion.
Only once does Philip Warburton lift the curtain upon the idealism
which ostensibly is the determining factor in his life.
“I frankly confess that I am something of a red. I think the world
is out of gear, and I can perfectly well conceive of a civilization
far better than ours, without yet proposing any radical amendment
to human nature....”
There was to Maud something so wholly unexpected in this ebullition
that she scarcely knew what to say. She had never philosophized
concerning life and its problems; nay, she had never suspected that
to a person who had money enough, and the access to good society,
it could present any problems whatever. She knew that some terribly
disreputable, shaggy, and wild-faced foreigners came here from
Europe and proposed to turn our admirable civilization upside down;
but that a gentleman of Warburton’s culture and social standing
could sympathize with such criminals had never occurred to her as a
remote possibility....
After this disturbing introduction Warburton proceeds to disclose what
being “a red” means to him in the way of social revolutions:
“Have you ever heard of a London experiment known as Toynbee Hall?”
he asked....
“Yes: it’s a place in the slums, where young men of good family go
to live; isn’t that it?”
“Yes; and, do you know, that is to me the most beautiful modern
instance of a real desire to help the poor and helpless--to lift
the world to a higher level. It is what I should like to do
myself--and what I shall hope some day to do....”
“Then you really think it a misfortune to be rich?” she
ejaculated....
“Yes, if wealth entails the loss of human sympathies, as in nine
cases out of ten it seems to do, I regard it as a misfortune.
If it means, as in this country it seems to mean, the loss of
vital contact with humanity, the contraction of one’s mental and
spiritual horizon, a callous insensibility to social wrongs and
individual sorrows, a brutal induration in creature comforts and
mere animal well-being, the loss of that divine discontent and
noble aspiration which alone makes us human--if it means this
or any part of it, it is the greatest calamity which can befall
a man. And it is because Christ foresaw that these were the
natural effects of great wealth, and the security and ease which
it engenders, that he declared that it was easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.”[679]
That is all. There is no dramatic justification of Warburton’s views;
they are without motive and foundation. _Social Strugglers_ does not
advance far along the path of the new realism.
As the years drew nearer the new century, the business man usurped
an ever larger place in American fiction; the romance which had been
sought in the deeds of 1776 was now discovered in the achievements of
enterprise. It was the unconscious testimony of literature to the hold
which business had got on the imagination of Americans. In the golden
days of the “full dinner-pail,” following the great victory of ’96,
the Captain of Industry reached the apogee of his fame. The voice of
detraction had not yet been lifted against him; the muckraker had not
yet set forth on his devastating career. To young reporters on city
papers looking ambitiously towards fiction as the goal of success,
what could offer greater appeal than the unwritten romance of Wall
Street and the Stock Exchange? They had described it for the daily
news columns, they had seen it extolled on the editorial page, why not
dramatize it in fiction? Here was the real interest of America--the
only reality that signified; yet the novelists had stupidly overlooked
it, because they lacked the journalist’s sense of news values, his
_flair_.
Of the abundant crop of fiction which resulted from this discovery, no
more characteristic examples need be sought than _The Short Line War_
(1899) and _Calumet “K”_ (1901), written in collaboration by Samuel
Merwin and H. K. Webster. Their popular success was immediate and
maintained surprisingly. The former ran to six editions, the last in
1909; the latter, to twelve editions, the last so late as 1915. They
are brisk stories, all action stripped of descriptive superfluities,
with plenty of newspaper punch: dramatizations of hustle and bluff
and the tricks of a cut-throat game. Charlie Bannon, hero of _Calumet
“K”_, is the boss who does things, who is on the job, who takes long
shots and “makes good”--a “movie” hero of efficiency. He has no time
nor inclination to think, possesses no philosophy, asks no questions
and is troubled by no doubts or scruples; his fertile brain and cool
nerve make him a first-class fighting man, and he fights as the good
soldier should on orders from above. The hero of _The Short Line War_,
Jim Weeks, is another Bannon with the same fertile brain, cool nerve,
calm tenacity of purpose, quick decisiveness, and the same lack of
intellectual interests. In war it is sound strategy to strike quick and
hard; and the Captain of Industry, let it be clearly known, is a war
captain. To play the game hard, to beat the other fellow by whatever
means serve, that is the ideal of a competitive _bourgeoisie_: not to
be too nice about the law, for everybody knows that the law is the
chief weapon of the strong; not to cherish foolish idealisms, for
everybody knows that success alone pays. No more heartless, brutal,
anarchistic books could be conceived--a mad philosophy for a mad world.
The broad movement towards a realistic portrayal of the economic city
produced its eddies and minor currents, which at times brought such
a commotion of the waters as to appear like the main current. Such
was the flood of political novels which came with the new century
and lasted well upwards of a decade. These were a by-product of the
muckraking movement--a part of the propaganda of the group of young
insurgents within the Republican party who were bent on rescuing the
party from control of the old bosses, and who prepared the way for the
more significant movement of Progressivism which followed. Such studies
as Francis Churchill Williams’s _J. Devlin--Boss_ (1901), and Elliott
Flower’s _The Spoilsmen_ (1903), were early examples; and Winston
Churchill’s _Coniston_ and _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ were probably the most
notable. They were journalistic for the most part, _exposés_ of the
“Boss” and the evils of the political machine. The “Boss” is painted in
various guises, as brutal, cunning, thoroughly vicious, or as a man
who plays the game with the same unsocial conscience that marks the
capitalist. Most frequently Lincoln Steffens is followed and the human
side of the “Boss” is “played up” equally with his political cunning.
It is the characteristic journalistic touch--a bit cheap but immensely
effective. As the movement of naturalism gained headway it became
increasingly apparent that the “Boss” was only a part of the “System,”
and the political novel merged in the economic. These brisk studies
constitute, however, a suggestive episode in our history--the literary
echo of our political history between the years 1900 and 1910.
Little in the way of social analysis was to be expected from a group
of clever journalists. They were reporters of fact, transcribers of
externals. They note the social unrest, but it is little more than
an undertone of the chorus of prosperity--a snarl of inconsequential
criticism. It is the sting of a troublesome mosquito that is brushed
off by the Captain of Industry who is too busy with big projects
to bother about insects. Such is Will Payne’s _Mr. Salt_ (1903)--a
sympathetic study of a coal-baron who is caught in the panic of ’93
but pulls out and rises higher. To provide dramatic contrast there is
the ineffective idealist who is growly and surly--“The whole thing is
rotten--the whole business scheme. It’s just a gold brick game operated
by Salt and his kind. I’d like to stick a fuse to it and touch it
off.”[680] It is feeble enough--this protest. The rebel joins wildly
in the great strike, is struck down by the hand of the law, rebels and
strikes again and gets nowhere. Only a bitter, ineffective hate rankles
in his heart, while Salt goes on triumphantly to greater power and a
sort of moral regeneration through love--a regeneration that does not
interfere with his keeping the title-deeds to his loot. An earlier
study--_The Money Captain_ (1898)--seemed to give promise of honester
work than this. It is the story of a struggle between a corrupt
gas-magnate and an enterprising editor whose _exposé_ puts the magnate
afoul of the law as interpreted by the magnate’s judges, and who is
saved from disaster by the timely death of the “duke.” At the end is a
touch of prophecy, quite startling in its forecast. These money-kings
with their strong prehensile fingers are the spawn of a common
plebeian America; the world of the makers is vulgarly democratic;
but there follows the age of the spenders, and that shall be finely,
altruistically aristocratic. The death of the hero “expunged from his
fortune that color of greedy vulgarity and left its gold untarnished.”
Dexter, for all his success, was a figure in the common democratic
foreground of business; he was intimately and solely of the great
everyday warp and woof of toil. He bore all his fruit at once--when
he died. An heirship was required to give the fortune value....
In a way it was fine and beautiful--all that huge accumulation of
pillage coming to the white, firm hands of this pretty, amiable
capable, goodhearted woman. The sudden substitution of her graceful
and gracious figure for the swart and iron figure of the duke was
like an apt transformation scene, prophetic of the future.[681]
These earlier books are mere preliminary sketches--first studies
in economic backgrounds, hesitating between admiration and
censure--satisfied to exploit the “human interest” in the dour figure
of the money-grabber. The clever newspaper men did not know enough
to do better, more realistic work; they saw the daily activities of
business but they understood little of economics, less of sociology.
And the new realism was soon to yield itself captive to sociology--to
inscribe the name of Zola boldly on its pennant and go forth to
conquer. It was Frank Norris who wrote the pronunciamiento of the new
school, boldly, magnificently, with immense faith in the finality of
his own conclusions. _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ was to
become the textbook of the young naturalists.
Footnotes
[621] See Charles Edward Russell, _The Story of Wendell Phillips_, p.
53.
[622] Quoted in Martyn, _Wendell Phillips: The Agitator_, p. 372.
[623] See _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 139.
[624] Quoted in Martyn, _op. cit._, pp. 412-413.
[625] _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 176.
[626] _Ibid._, p. 167.
[627] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.
[628] _Ibid._, p. 154.
[629] See _Ibid._, pp. 356-359.
[630] See _Ibid._, p. 347.
[631] Edward Cary, _George William Curtis_, p. 78.
[632] See _Ibid._, pp. 25-26.
[633] See _Ibid._, pp. 180-181.
[634] See _Harper’s Weekly_, Sept. 20, 1873.
[635] _Orations and Addresses_, “Machine Politics and the Remedy,” Vol.
II, pp. 157-159.
[636] See _Ibid._, p. 160.
[637] J. H. Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 466.
[638] Ogden, _Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin_, Vol. I, p. 11.
[639] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 17.
[640] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 140.
[641] _Nation_, July 8, 1915, p. 47.
[642] _On Liberty_, Chapter I.
[643] “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” in _Problems of Modern
Democracy_, pp. 25-26, 30-31.
[644] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 48.
[645] _Nation_, January 30, 1873, p. 68.
[646] See “Public Opinion and the Currency,” _Ibid._, February 27,
1873; “The Political Situation in 1896,” in _Problems of Modern
Democracy_.
[647] See “On Gold and Silver,” _Ibid._, July 6, 1876.
[648] _Ibid._, May 25, 1876.
[649] _Ibid._, June 1, 1876.
[650] “The Issue of the Campaign,” _Ibid._, July 2, 1896.
[651] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.
[652] _Ibid._, January 19, 1893.
[653] _Ibid._, April 10, 1873.
[654] “The Watered Stock Hallucination,” _Ibid._, October 9, 1873.
[655] “Prosperity’s Advance Orator,” _Ibid._, June 18, 1896.
[656] “The Chicago Platform,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.
[657] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 23, 1896.
[658] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 238-239.
[659] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 199.
[660] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 217.
[661] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 243.
[662] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 237.
[663] Vol. II, Chapter 13, p. 128.
[664] Chapter 4, p. 78.
[665] Vol. II, pp. 58-59.
[666] In his original scheme Professor Parrington included Tourgée’s
_A Fool’s Errand_, but the text shows that he decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[667] William Roscoe Thayer, _Life and Letters of John Hay_, Vol. II,
pp. 5-6.
[668] Chapter V.
[669] Thayer, _op. cit._, Vol. I., pp. 6-7.
[670] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 15.
[671] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 321.
[672] _Ibid._, p. 414.
[673] _Ibid._, p. 426.
[674] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 256.
[675] In his plan Professor Parrington included here H. F.
Keenan’s _The Money-Makers_, but apparently he decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[676] Chapter XXXI.
[677] Chapter XXXVI.
[678] Chapter XXXIII.
[679] Chapter VII.
[680] Chapter IX.
[681] _The Money Captain_, Chapter 22.
Part Two: New Patterns of Thought
Chapter I • Disintegration and Reintegration
The figures of the Gilded Age, colossal yet grotesque, belonged to an
America that was passing. Another world of thought and experience was
rising above the horizon--a world in which the divinities were science
and the machine--that was to disintegrate the traditional society of
the dispersion and reshape the plastic materials in new forms. The long
tide that for two centuries and a half had been running out had come
at last to the turn. For six generations the pattern of life had been
woven by the impulse of dispersion that in scattering men along a wide
frontier had disintegrated the philosophies and rejected the social
order brought from the old world, transforming America into such a
society of free men as the Enlightenment had dreamed of--decentralized,
individualistic, democratic. Dispersion, disintegration, individualism,
anarchism--such was the inevitable drift under the compulsions of a
fluid economics and frontier ways, of which the ultimate philosophical
expression had been Thoreau at Walden Pond, discovering in his bean
patch the same anarchistic principles that Godwin had learned of the
French naturists--of which the prophet had been Walt Whitman, dreaming
amidst the formless crowds of Manhattan his generous dreams of the
democratic brotherhood--and of which Jay Gould the sordid wrecker in
Wall Street was the prosaic reality.
Then had come the Industrial Revolution that in creating great cities
and in drawing men from the plow to the machine was to undo in a few
brief years the long work of the dispersion, repudiate the ideals of
the Enlightenment, and provide a new pattern for a consolidating urban
society. Thenceforward the drift was increasingly toward concentration,
with its compulsions to reintegration and conformity--the imperious
subjection of the individual to a standardizing order, the stripping
away of the slack frontier freedoms in the routine of the factory, the
substitution of the ideal of plutocracy for the ideal of Jacksonian
democracy. And this revolutionary work of the machine was hastened
by the new spirit of science that spread silently through the land,
effecting a revolution in men’s thinking as great as the machine was
effecting in men’s lives. Provincial America had been theological-
and political-minded; but with the staying of the dispersion and the
creation of an urban psychology, the ground was prepared for the
reception of new philosophies that came from the contemplation of
the laws of the material universe. The incoming of science had two
immediate results: the application of technology to industry that was
to further the Industrial Revolution; and the impact on speculative
thought of the newly discovered laws of science that was to create
a new philosophy. In the second of these twin influences lay an
intellectual revolution that was to disintegrate the old theological
cosmos, push far back the boundaries of space and time, reorient the
mind towards all ultimate problems, and bring into question all the
traditional faiths--political and social as well as theological and
philosophical. Out of science was to come a new spirit of criticism and
realism that was to set the pattern for later thought.
The story of disintegration and reintegration is a striking chapter
in American life, a story that runs through two generations--the
generation that came to maturity in the seventies, and the generation
that came to maturity in the nineties. Between 1870 and 1900 the
broad movement of thought passed through two sharply differentiating
and contradictory phases: the extension of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, and the final rejection of the Enlightenment in
consequence of a more rigid application of the law of causality in
the light of a mechanistic universe. During the seventies biological
evolution was interpreted in the light of earlier philosophies that
had come out of the eighteenth century. It was reckoned a fulfillment
and justification of the ideals of the Enlightenment, sanctioning
the doctrine of progress that had risen from the conception of human
perfectibility by a teleological conception of cosmic progress,
glorifying the ideal of democratic individualism, and putting the seal
of scientific approval on the philosophy of anarchism that had been the
flower of two and a half centuries of the dispersion. And then in the
nineties the clouds drew over the brilliant Victorian skies. With the
substitution of physics for biology came a more somber mood that was
to put away the genial romanticism of Victorian evolution, substitute
a mechanistic conception for the earlier teleological progress, and
reshape its philosophy in harmony with a deterministic pessimism that
denied purpose or plan in the changing universe of matter. It was an
unconscious return to the dark spirit long before brought hither by
Puritanism from the complexities of English society--the spirit that
dominated Calvinistic dogma before it disintegrated in the freedoms
made possible by the great dispersion.
The great changes came swiftly because the machine had made ready
the soil. Farmers and bankers do not think alike; country and town
create different psychologies. A simple, decentralized America had
been content with theology and metaphysics, and the intellectual
history of New England for two hundred and forty years is not greatly
skimped by being compressed into three words, Calvinism, Unitarianism,
Transcendentalism. What was true of New England was true of America
generally, except for the lesser influence of metaphysics. So long
as society was mainly agricultural--and in those portions where the
frontier spirit lingered on into later days--the church would retain
its dominant influence and theology would still bound men’s thought.
But with the revolutions in economics and industry, with the rise of an
urban society, the mind of America was making ready for the reception
of science and the realism that was eventually to spring from science.
Venturesome pioneers had been at work long before, digging about under
the thick crust of theology. Even in theocratic Massachusetts Increase
and Cotton Mather had professed a zeal for scientific investigation,
and the latter was vastly proud of his membership in the Royal Society.
In the eighteenth century Franklin and Rittenhouse and William Bartram
were evidences of a new spirit, and at Yale College President Ezra
Stiles made a small beginning of scientific study that was swept away
by his successor Timothy Dwight. In the early decades of the nineteenth
century an interest in science was spreading widely, as _Silliman’s
Journal_ witnesses. Asa Gray, Le Conte, and Agassiz encouraged the
general interest in geology, and in the sixties and seventies Lewis H.
Morgan turned to anthropology and R. L. Dugdale stimulated sociology by
his significant study of the Jukes family.
Our present concern, however, is not with the contributions of America
to abstract science, but rather with the changing mental attitude that
resulted from familiarity with scientific methods--the shift from
deductive reasoning to inductive investigation, with the consequent
breakdown of theology and the slow drift from metaphysical idealism
to scientific materialism; and such a changing attitude concerns us
because of its enormous influence on the fabric of our later thinking,
the total body of our intellectual and cultural life. Considered in
this light the intellectual revolution that resulted when the mind of
America, long shaped by theological dogmas, turned away from those
dogmas to consider the new universe presented by science, cannot be
made too much of. With the pushing out of the frontiers of space and
time, the discovery of a vast impersonal cosmos that annihilated the
petty egocentric world of good and evil postulated by the theologians,
the substitution of universal energy for a beneficent providence,
the conception of a ceaseless flux and flow that took no account of
teleological ends, the assumption of universal law and universal
causality, the mind of America quitted its quiet theological retreats
and set forth on a great adventure that was to carry far and the
results of which were to unsettle what before had been sure.
In this great work we have been engaged since European science first
rose on our horizon a half-century and more ago. To speak exactly,
it is not so much science that has taken possession of the mind, as
certain postulates of science, certain philosophies presumably derived
from science and justified by science, which we have felt bound to
incorporate in our thinking as a hundred years before the conclusions
of the Enlightenment had been incorporated. In that earlier philosophy
of the Enlightenment the whole drift had been towards a dissolvent
individualism, a disintegration of the earlier integration. In the new
interpretation after 1870 the emphasis came to rest on the whole rather
than the parts: in sociology, upon the historical growth of human
societies; in biology, upon the evolution of the higher from lower
forms. The individual, thus conceived of socially and politically, is
no longer an isolated, self-determining entity, but a vehicle through
which is carried the stream of life, with a past behind and a future
before. He is a portion of the total scheme of things, tied by a
thousand invisible threads to the encompassing whole. From the parts to
the totality, from freedom to determinism--such has been the drift of
thought that science has laid upon us and from which there is no easy
escape.
With the advent of such a conception the long movement towards
philosophical anarchism was brought to a stop. The integrating
principle of unity must eventually shoulder aside the disintegrating
principle of individualism; order must supersede willfulness. In the
outcome a conception so coercive was to deny all the aspirations of
our traditional social philosophy, surrendering society to a new
regimentation and reducing the individual to an impotent victim of
things as they are. Out of it was to spring the passionate protests
of later rebels like Theodore Dreiser and Thorstein Veblen. Yet for
the moment the rigid determinism of the premise was overlooked and man
was accepted as the first-born and heir of God’s benevolent universe.
In the seventies the new postulates of science were looked upon as no
other than fresh sanctions for the Comtean principle of continuity--of
evolution from lower to higher in biology, of growth and progress in
sociology. It was this middle ground that Herbert Spencer came to
occupy in the minds of his American disciples--holding to the older
individualism with its implications of anarchism, yet creating a cosmic
philosophy that foreshadowed the eventual dwarfing of the individual.
I • The Victorian Mood
The sturdy optimism that was a genial hallmark of the Victorian,
was erected on more substantial foundations than a middle-class
prosperity arising out of the Industrial Revolution; it was founded on
a systematic philosophy, built of excellent materials and laid up with
nice mortar-work, to which many hands contributed and in the finality
of which many minds believed. Its master idea was the conception of
growth, a conception that by contrast with the ideal of the static
of earlier times, was profoundly revolutionary. Perhaps the most
stimulating suggestion that came out of the Enlightenment, it was
evolved by Turgot in France and by Price and Priestley in England,
from the psychology of John Locke. If the human mind at birth is an
empty vessel, wanting in innate ideas and waiting to be filled by sense
perceptions, or if--to accept the familiar figure--it is a clean slate
on which the finger of experience writes what it will, then it follows
from the philosophy of Locke that the shaping of the individual is
determined by the environment that cradles him. It is not an unfolding
from within but a molding from without. Hence the idea of growth, and
hence the vast preoccupation of the Enlightenment with sociology--or
the science of environment--the hand of the sculptor that models the
plastic clay. From such a conception the principle of progress was an
inevitable deduction.
1 • Sociology and the Enlightenment
It is convenient, if not quite exact, to trace the rise of the new
gospel to Condorcet, who in the midst of the Terror and whilst in
hiding from the Jacobins, wrote his stimulating _History of the
Progress of the Human Mind_[682]--a work that was early reprinted in
America and profoundly influenced Jefferson, who professed to find its
principles exemplified in the history of his native Virginia. Condorcet
was a humane and liberal spirit, a mathematician, a physicist, a
sociologist, one of those eager Revolutionary minds passionately
devoted to the creation of a more generous social order; and his
celebrated work deserves a distinguished place in the history of social
thought. He begins as a good Lockean with the psychology of sense
perception, on which he erects his entire superstructure. Here is his
opening paragraph:
Man is born with the faculty of receiving sensations; of perceiving
and distinguishing the simple sensations of which they are
composed; of retaining them, reproducing them, combining them; of
comparing these combinations; of grasping what they have in common
and what sets them apart; of fixing signs on all such objects
in order to reproduce them more clearly and to facilitate new
combinations.[683]
He then proceeds to trace the growth of the scientific attitude from
the time of Bacon, till it culminated in the rise of social science,
with the new politics of natural rights and the new conception of man
as perfectible. It is commonly believed that the philosophers of the
Enlightenment were speculative dreamers who created a fantastic natural
man that flouted the sober realism of experience. Such a notion is
grossly absurd. Condorcet was immersed in the scientific spirit of his
age; it was to science that he looked for guidance and he had acquired
a remarkable understanding of the data already gathered in western
Europe. When he set down the following passages, therefore, he was
writing not as a speculative dreamer, but as a sociologist who relied
solely on scientific inquiry to find a way out of the social mess into
which western civilization was plunged by the selfish stupidity of
rulers who were hostile to scientific truth.
After long errors, after having lost their way in incomplete or
vague theories, the publicists have finally come to recognize the
true rights of man, to deduce them from this single truth, that he
is a being endowed with sense perceptions (_un être sensible_),
capable of shaping a train of reasoning (_capable de former des
raisonnements_), and of acquiring moral ideas.[684]
Finally, we have seen a new doctrine appear.... It is that of the
indefinite perfectibility of the human species, a doctrine of which
Turgot, Price and Priestly, were the first and most distinguished
apostles; it belongs to the tenth epoch, in which we shall develop
it broadly.[685]
In such passages is contained the kernel of Condorcet’s philosophy, the
grounds of that hope for human betterment which awakened his generous
sympathies. The _Esquisse_ is a noble contribution to the work which
the heirs of the Enlightenment, from Turgot to Comte, so eagerly and
hopefully engaged in--the work of tracing scientifically the changes of
the past in order to forecast the path of the future. After dividing
the history of social evolution into nine periods, Condorcet projects
the outlines of the tenth which is still to come.
If man can predict, with almost complete assurance, the phenomena
of which he knows the laws; if, while they are still unknown in
him, from the experience of the past he can forecast, with much
probability, the events of the future; why should one regard as a
chimerical undertaking the attempt to trace with some likeness the
picture of the future destiny of the human species, in accordance
with the facts of its history (_d’après les résultats de son
histoire_)? The sole ground of faith in the natural sciences is
this idea, that the general laws, known or unknown, that rule the
phenomena of the universe, are necessary and constant; and on what
grounds would this principle be less true for the development of
the intellectual and moral faculties of man, than for the other
operations of nature? Finally, since opinions formed from the
experience of the past, in matters of the same kind, are the
sole rule of conduct for the wisest men, why should one deny the
philosopher the right to rest his conjectures on the same base,
provided he does not attribute to them a certainty beyond that
which springs from the number, the constancy and the exactness of
his observations?
Our hopes for the future state of the human species may be
reduced to these three important points: the destruction of
inequality between nations; the progress of equality amongst a
common people; finally, the growth of man towards perfection
(_le perfectionnement réel de l’homme_). May not all nations one
day approach the state of civilization to which have arrived the
most enlightened peoples, the freest, the most emancipated from
prejudice, such as the French and the Anglo-Americans? The vast
distance that divides these peoples from the servitude of nations
subject to kings, from the barbarism of African tribes, from the
ignorance of savages, must it not gradually disappear?[686]
Condorcet was an idealist, and the grand object towards which he was
working was an adequate social philosophy that should interpret justly
the evolution of civilization. True to the genius of the Enlightenment
he believed that in reason and in the moral sense man possessed the
keys to his own progress--that the general reason under the guidance
of humane feeling must assure a progressive amelioration of life that
will eventuate in the common well-being of men in a rational society.
The age of the Enlightenment, he believed, had “opened new paths to the
political and moral sciences,” and laid bare what to him were “the true
principles of social happiness.” The American Federalists, who were
prodigal of vituperative rhetoric in assailing all French theorists,
might have read the pages of Condorcet with profit.
The idea of progress with its corollary of a philosophy of history,
thus elaborated by Condorcet, was taken over by Saint-Simon, but
came to its most elaborate expression in the work of Auguste Comte.
The grandiose philosophy of history to which Comte gave the name
of Positivism, was an attempt to formulate the law of progress in
civilization; and his dynamic sociology, which emerged naturally
from his conception of history, was an attempt to apply that law to
society. That the principle of progress is the law of nature Comte
professed to discover in the unity of all natural processes and the
historical unfolding of all systems; there are no breaks and no fresh
beginnings, but everywhere and always, continuity. From this principle
emerged the Comtean law of historical evolution with its three phases:
the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific-industrial.
If continuity is the law of nature, such continuity presupposes an
objective--presumably benevolent; and in view of such continuity
towards a benevolent objective, it is only logical to endeavor to
dispose the forces of society in harmony with the teleological purpose,
and through the application of positive knowledge hasten the advent
of the Golden Age. Hence the grand science, hitherto neglected, is
sociology. Earlier generations had placed the Golden Age in a dim past;
Comtean philosophy, in harmony with the Enlightenment, placed it in
the future as the ultimate goal of an evolving society. To forecast
the lines along which such progress will move, to read the future as a
child of the past, became therefore a prime objective of the new school
of history. The tracing of social laws was the great business at hand,
and as the founder of a new social science Comte carried further and
systematized the work begun by the Physiocrats. Before Comte history
had been little more than chronicles, without pattern or meaning,
unconcerned with the sources of change and providing no basis for
forecast; after Comte history became an interpretation and a philosophy.
One would have supposed that Positivism would have appealed to
American intellectuals, as it appealed to liberal English thinkers
like Mill and Spencer. Not only has the American mind taken kindly
to sociology, but the history of America, as Woodbridge Riley has
pointed out, offers too pat an illustration of the Comtean law of
progress to be overlooked.[687] The three centuries of American
existence--the seventeenth with its theocracy, the eighteenth with its
abstract theories of political rights and its faith in constitutions,
and the nineteenth with its industrialism based on science--would
seem to be pages out of the Positivist philosophy of history. That
Comte made so slight an impression on the mind of New England was
due, no doubt, to the current influence of transcendentalism with its
metaphysical backgrounds. Although eager young intellectuals like John
Fiske might accept it while awaiting a more adequate evolutionary
philosophy, the country was not yet ripe for Positivism. When that
time came it was Spencer rather than Comte who became the master of
American intellectuals--Spencer and in a lesser degree John Stuart
Mill. Both Spencer and Mill had come under the influence of the French
sociological school, and it was through their writings that the new
social philosophy penetrated America.[688]
2 • Biology and the Enlightenment
The appeal of Spencer to the generation born after the Civil War was
extraordinary. Ardent young minds, for whom the candles of theology
were burnt out and who were seeking new light to their feet, were drawn
to him irresistibly. Young rebels who had thrown off the guidance of
their elders and were bent on discovering fresh paths through the
tangle of dead faiths--independent souls like Hamlin Garland and
Jack London and Theodore Dreiser who were to become leaders of the
realistic revolt against the genteel tradition in life and letters and
faith--went to school to him to prepare themselves for the great work
of freeing the American mind from the old theological inhibitions.
Young men in colleges no longer read _Butler’s Analogy_, as their
fathers had done before the war, but turned with zest to Spencer’s
_Data of Ethics_ to discover a more scientific theory of conduct.
Everywhere the influence of the great Victorian penetrated, and
wherever that influence spread the old theological prepossessions
disintegrated. It is probably no exaggeration to say that Spencer laid
out the broad highway over which American thought traveled in the later
years of the century.
If the supreme excellence of Comte, as has been suggested by Lester
F. Ward, was his insistence on the ultimate unity of all processes
of nature,[689] if before him the continuity of forces had been
inadequately understood, his intellectual kinship with Spencer
cannot fail to be remarked. The latter’s master conception, which he
arrived at independently of Darwin and which life-long he applied
systematically to the several fields of thought, was the master
creative conception of the nineteenth century--the conception of
pervasive unity and organic growth. In his well-known phrase it
was the law of continuous development from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex; and this principle he
found exemplified in the total history of nature and man. Here then
is the Comtean law of continuity, but vastly strengthened and given a
cosmic significance by deductions from the new science. Lamarck and
Darwin laid the foundations for Spencer’s philosophy, as Condorcet and
Saint-Simon had provided the backgrounds for Comte. Trained thus in
the new school of biology, Spencer erected his synthetic philosophy
upon the broadest foundations; the principle of organic evolution
sufficed to explain for him not only the history of civilization,
but the total history of life in a physical universe; and biology,
psychology, sociology, politics, ethics--all the congeries of ideals
and institutions and bodies of knowledge that shape civilization--were
but variant expressions of the development from the homogeneous to the
heterogeneous.
The final effect of the synthetic philosophy was not to overset but
to confirm the major postulates of the Enlightenment. In his social
theory are unforeseen confirmations of the glowing hopes of Turgot
and Condorcet. From his studies in biology Spencer had come to think
primarily in terms of the individual, and only secondarily in terms of
the species and the genus. Now variation is the mark of the individual,
for strictly considered, nature knows no duplication of life forms,
but always and everywhere individual differentiation; yet since
likenesses are far greater and more cohesive than unlikenesses, the
instinct of gregariousness impels individuals to associate in ever
larger groups, interacting through association and coöperation, whence
arises a human society that tends continuously to pass from the simple
to the complex. On these two major premises then--individual variation
and the instinct of association--Spencer established his social and
political theory; and when the elaborate data drawn from biology and
ethnology and psychology are stripped away, the underlying conceptions
reveal a curious likeness to the master principles of French romantic
philosophy. This likeness becomes more striking as he explores the
fields of sociology and politics; and his final deductions tally so
closely with earlier theory as to warrant a disciple of Jefferson in
becoming a disciple of Spencer.
There is no break between Condorcet and the synthetic philosophy.
The great Victorian completed the work of the Enlightenment. In
establishing his individualism on the principle of biological
variation, Spencer was only restating in scientific terms the earlier
metaphysical individualism; in establishing his psychology upon an
unbroken sequence “from the simple reflex action by which an infant
sucks, up to the elaborate reasoning of the adult man,” with its
corollary of continuously expanding powers, he was rebuilding on the
foundation of Locke a fresh argument for the doctrine of indefinite
development, or perfectibility; in establishing his sociology on
the organic principle of “natural development,” which shapes the
individual to social ends, with an accruing wealth of individuation
that is the final objective of true social life, he justified the
French enthusiasm for liberty as the great desideratum, but liberty
enriched and augmented by association in a free society; and finally,
in establishing his ethics on the principle that “increasing fullness
of life is the ‘end’ of evolution,” and the “highest conduct is that
which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of
life”--that the ultimate criterion of social ethics is justice and that
“every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not
the equal freedom of any other man”--he rephrased the earlier Godwinian
principle that rational liberty under the reign of justice is the
ultimate end of society.[690]
That Spencer’s social theory should have been shot through with
older ideals is not surprising when one considers his origins and
training. Sprung from radical nonconformist stock, a congenital rebel,
extraordinarily self-sufficient and coming to intellectual maturity in
the tempestuous forties with their Benthamism, their Chartism, their
exigent democracy, he was molded by forces that in large part were a
reëmbodiment of the aspirations nullified by the Napoleonic wars and
the Tory reaction, and now come again to birth. As a consequence his
political theory, like Mill’s, was deeply affected by the revolutionary
heritage. He accepted the social contract as a “theoretical, though
not a historical, basis of political authority and institutions”;[691]
the doctrine of natural rights, which, with Jefferson, he interpreted
in terms of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
and the theory of a constantly diminishing political state, on the
hypothesis that the ultimate form of society--as in Godwin’s _Political
Justice_--will, be anarchistic.
At least, such he conceives to be the forecast suggested by the law
of social evolution. As the coercive authority of the political
state diminishes, its place will be supplied by the cohesive force
of association, until voluntary coöperation extends to all the
necessary functions of society; and since the state tends to disappear
with the growth of a rational society, the great desideratum is an
adequate sociology rather than a political theory. The net result,
therefore, of Spencer’s wide studies was a fresh justification, based
on the findings of Victorian science, of the master principles of
eighteenth-century speculation; its individualism, its liberalism, its
passion for justice, its love of liberty and distrust of every form of
coercion. The power of the majority must be curbed equally with that
of the minority and he concluded his _The Man versus the State_ with
the well-known words, “The function of Liberalism in the past was
that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true
Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers
of Parliament.” In the scientific speculations of the great Victorian
the aspirations of romantic thought came to fresh vitality; embodied in
a comprehensive evolutionary system they were given a fresh currency.
Herbert Spencer completed the work begun by Locke a hundred and fifty
years before, and his _Synthetic Philosophy_ brought to conclusion the
greatest intellectual movement of modern times.
As the young intellectuals, trained in the school of Spencer, looked
out on the universe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
they discovered, amid all its complexities an encompassing unity, a
continuous growth, a creative purpose; and from such assumptions they
justified the theory of progress, cosmic in scope and plan, that opened
wide the doors to a vaster future. If in the backgrounds of their minds
lurked the conception of determinism, it gave them no concern, for a
benevolent determinism that shapes all things to a divine end, is no
monster to be feared. In the evolutionary science were the grounds of
a genial optimism that nothing could shake. If they had lost something
of the jauntiness of the transcendental faith that beheld God plowing
furrows at Brook Farm, they were armed with a scientific faith that
by tapping stones and comparing fishes they should find His plan in
an evolving series of life forms. Browning’s Fra Lippo was a good
Spencerian in his vigorous pronouncement:
This world’s no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
That progress was the law of the universe was held to be axiomatic
by the new evolutionary school, and the American read in the new
philosophy an added confirmation of a prepossession common to all
Americans since Franklin and Jefferson, and become the common faith
after the War of 1812. In sober minds it led to a complete reshaping
of the outlook upon life, and in unbalanced minds it ran riot in all
sorts of blowsy enthusiasms. Freedom, love, benevolence, progress
towards a millennial perfection--these were the clarion notes in a huge
symphony in praise of human perfectibility that assaulted American
ears in the Gilded Age. Not Henry Ward Beecher alone was the prophet
of the new day. In the early seventies Mrs. Victoria Woodhull, one of
the minor prophetesses, established a paper dedicated to the high end
of “the Universal Religion of the Future ... the Universal Home ...
the Universal Science, called Universology, based on the discovery and
demonstration of Universal Laws ... and an accompanying Philosophy of
Integralism”--the “organ of the most advanced thought and Purpose in
the World ... the Organ of Cardinary News ... News of the Aspiration
and Progression of Mankind toward Millennial Perfection.”[692] By
contrast with such rhythmic enthusiasms the familiar lines of Tennyson
are sober prose.
Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.
How logically to young intellectuals of the seventies it all followed
from the premises! If man is a rational being, potentially excellent
and capable of indefinite development, the idea of a humane and
rational progress in civilization is an inevitable deduction; and the
evolutionist above all men was certain to build into his philosophy
the cardinal idea of a unified progress, but given a cosmic sweep,
accepted as the master principle in all fields of the material and the
spiritual. It was the law of life, as the static was the law of death.
No thinker who had grasped the idea of organic growth, could escape
its larger implications; and no student in the seventies could think
seriously without coming upon it.
3 • The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment
Then a film of haze slowly gathered upon the face of the brilliant
sun and the light of men’s hopes grew dimmer. As physics encroached
upon the interest in biology, and leadership in speculation based
on scientific findings passed from Spencer to Ernst Haeckel, young
Americans of the next generation found the membership of the current
philosophical trinity changed for them, and instead of unity, growth,
purpose, they discovered unity, flux, chance. Purpose had disappeared
from the grim face of the material universe, and they found themselves
in the coils of a determinism that was more likely to prove malignant
than benevolent. The idea of progress slipped quietly from their
minds, and in its stead was only a meaningless and purposeless flux
of things. But unity remained to bind the individual upon the whole
and dwarf him to a pin-point in a vast macrocosm. The intellectual
history of the last quarter of the nineteenth century--in America as
well as elsewhere--in its teleological aspects is the history of the
shift from the benevolent evolutionism of Spencer to the mechanistic
materialism of Haeckel, with all the dislocations and readjustments
involved in the cataclysmic change; and _The Education of Henry Adams_,
that curiously suggestive study in disillusion, is saturated with the
pessimism that followed upon the transition--a pessimism exuding from
the contemplation of the bleak unity of a mechanistic universe. Of the
earlier period before hope was gone, he wrote thus:
For the young men whose lives were cast in the generation between
1867 and 1900, Law should be Evolution from lower to higher,
aggregation of the atom in the mass, concentration of multiplicity
in unity, compulsion of anarchy in order; and he would force
himself to follow wherever it led, though he should sacrifice five
thousand millions more in money, and a million more lives.[693]
Was there purpose in it all? To this Adams and the younger men more and
more declined to make answer. Yet this much is clear, for them the end
of the theological age had come, and the end also of the great hopes of
the Enlightenment. The idea of progress was given over henceforth to
the middle class to become the plaything of material expansion.
II • The School of Spencer--John Fiske
Of the distinguished group that labored to naturalize in America
the philosophy of evolution John Fiske was the most authoritative
spokesman. As a brilliant popularizer of the Synthetic Philosophy, and
an historian who applied the Comtean law of continuity to the American
past, he brought to the Gilded Age the revolutionary influence of
English and French thought. Deeply immersed in Victorian speculation,
he threw over his acquisitions the genial mood of his generation and
infused the doctrines of evolutionary science with the spirit of
religion. He reveled in the cosmic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, but
within the material cosmos the scientists were revealing, controlling
its eternal flux, he perceived a directing will that was shaping man’s
destiny to noble ends. New England scholarship had served God for too
many generations to put aside its teleological prepossessions, and John
Fiske was too completely New England to deny his spiritual obligations.
The duty laid upon his conscience was plain. It was not enough to lay
open to the New England mind the wealth of evolutionary science; he
must justify its conclusions by binding them back upon the old faith
and discover God revealed in biology as before he had been revealed in
the Bible. And so in the heyday of Spencerian influence, before the
bleak conception of a mechanistic universe had risen upon the horizon
of men’s thought to disperse the genial glow of optimism, this learned
son of Connecticut was the prophet in America of the new order of
thought.
John Fiske was a brilliant Yankee with a voracious appetite for ideas
and a passion for cosmic syntheses. In certain respects he was the most
richly endowed of the young students of his generation of Americans.
Intellectually curious and acquisitive, he refused to be confined
by orthodox fences but ranged far in pursuit of knowledge. The pale
negations of the current New England theology, on which he had fed in
his youth, soon lost their savor, and following his natural impulses he
sought out the strongest food available. While still in his teens he
had absorbed Emerson, Theodore Parker, and other New England radicals,
and was reaching out for an ampler diet. That was in the late fifties,
when a new cosmos was taking shape in men’s minds and old faiths were
disintegrating. The several rivulets of science--geology, zoölogy,
chemistry, physics--that hitherto had followed diverse and vagrant
courses, were slowly converging and making ready to mingle their waters
in a vast common stream. Some further dredging needed to be done first,
and on that great job Darwin had long been patiently engaged. It was
a time of high hopes and young John Fiske, about to enter Harvard
College, was not one to miss the significance of so great an awakening.
Amidst his quiet Connecticut lanes he had already been making his own
discoveries. Although he had early gone through a form of conversion
to dogmatic Calvinism he had not long been content with its arid
provender, but turned to the English disciples of Positivism--George
Henry Lewes, Buckle, Mill--and was absorbing Comte with the help
of Voltaire and Goethe. In June, 1860, two months before taking
his examinations for advanced standing at Harvard, he came upon a
prospectus of Herbert Spencer’s proposed system of philosophy, and this
boy of eighteen was one of the first dozen Americans to subscribe to
the undertaking. It was a golden day in his life, that was to determine
his whole intellectual development. He became a devoted disciple of
Spencer, dedicating his labors to the great cause of evolution. To that
end he felt called to study prodigiously. As a Harvard undergraduate
he found it difficult to treat his conventional instructors with
due respect, for while his classmates were struggling with Greek
roots he was exploring the whole field of philology and rioting in
Comtean sociology. Instead of exhausting his energies with the usual
undergraduate themes, he wrote in his junior year, at the age of
nineteen, a critical examination of _Buckle’s History of Civilization_
for the _National Quarterly Review_; and while preparing for his final
examinations he wrote a learned article on “The Evolution of Language”
that was accepted by _The North American Review_.
Such intellectual precocity, suggesting to timid souls a lack of
respect for orthodox opinions, was not without its dangers. From
his first entrance to Harvard he was marked by certain tutors as a
dangerous influence. Positivism and evolution were in ill repute in
the college circles, and he was eventually summoned before the faculty
and admonished for undermining the faith of Harvard undergraduates.
Outside the college he was becoming known as the “young atheist of
Cambridge.” The reasons for such a reputation were quite sufficient
to Unitarian dogmatists who had forgotten the cardinal principle of
Unitarianism--the principle of devout free thought--for young John
Fiske had already gathered a huge pile of combustible materials that
threatened the established orthodoxy. Before entering Harvard he had
planned to write a history of early Christianity, but his interest in
science drew him into other fields--the new sociological interpretation
of history that he discovered in Grote’s _History of Greece_, and
the broad field of scientific speculation that opened to him in
Humboldt’s _Cosmos_. To this latter field he turned greedily, reading
amongst other works Cuvier’s _Règne Animal distribué d’après son
Organisation_, Herschel’s _Outlines of Astronomy_, Laplace’s _Système
du Monde_, Agassiz’s _Zoölogy_ and his _Essay on the Classification
of the Animal Kingdom_ (1857), and with the joy of a great discovery
Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ (1859). From Agassiz’s defense of special
creation he dissented vigorously, and this dissent prepared him for an
enthusiastic reception of Darwin’s careful exposition. Certainly no
other young student in America followed so closely or so intelligently
the unfolding of the English school of evolutionary thought. In solid
acquisition and in intellectual curiosity he was far in advance of
Henry Adams, then a young diplomat in London.
Upon his graduation in 1863 he determined upon the law, read through
the two-year course of the Harvard Law School in nine months, was
admitted to the bar, waited two years for clients who never came, threw
it over, and turned to his first love, the life of the scholar. He had
his eye on a chair at Harvard, but so long as the old orthodox _régime_
lasted no opening offered there. In the first year of President Eliot’s
administration (1869) an opportunity was provided and he was invited to
give a course of lectures in Holden Chapel on the Positive Philosophy.
The opposition was still too strong to permit the offer he sought--a
chair in history--but he was eventually given a place as Assistant
Librarian, where he spent five years amongst the books of Gore Hall.
Driven to other means of support he turned to lecturing, was received
with immense applause in London, and thereafter to the end of his
life he suffered much of his vast energy to drain off into that most
fruitless of jobs for a creative mind. A certain genial egoism was to
blame for his playing willingly the rôle of lackey to women’s clubs. He
liked to talk to sympathetic audiences, and he was greatly effective
on the platform. The inevitable result was that he fell short in
accomplishment of the fine promise of his early years. His style became
diffuse, his materials picturesque rather than solid, his thinking
flabby. Pretty much all his significant work was done before he was
forty.
The greater part of Fiske’s intellectual life, despite his later
incursions into certain waste places of history, was dedicated to the
indoctrination of the American people in the principle of evolution
as that principle was outlined in Spencer’s _Synthetic Philosophy_.
He was a man of one idea, but that idea was so vast and germinal,
so comprehensive in its implications and so constructive in its
suggestions, as to set afoot the greatest intellectual revolution in
western civilization. He called himself a philosopher, but he meant by
the term not a metaphysician, but a cosmic historian whose business
was to interpret the universe in the light of the great laws that
science was revealing. By 1860 science had revealed three such general
laws: the law of gravitation, the law of biological variation and the
survival of the fittest, and the law of the conservation of energy; and
from them Spencer had deduced the principle of a unitary cosmos, with
a common force sustaining both the organic and the inorganic, working
to a single “far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves.”
An intimate friend of Fiske’s, and an ardent Spencerian, puts the
intellectual situation in these terms:
The conceptions of the Universe generally held at the time when
Fiske was in college were fragmentary and chaotic, each phenomenon
or each group of phenomena being, like language, a special
creation of an anthropomorphic God, turning out different jobs
piecemeal like a man. The conception of one power behind all had
been a dream of not a few philosophers and poets, but as a fact
comprehensible by the average mind, it was not known until the
discovery about 1860 of the Conservation of Force. About the same
time was discovered the unity of all organic life, in its descent
from protoplasm, and the identity of its forces with those of the
inorganic universe. The nebular cosmogony, the persistence of
force and the biologic genesis, united together, showed the power
evolving, sustaining and carrying on the entire universe known to
us, to be _one_, and constantly acting in one unified process;
and that every detail--from the most minute known to the chemist,
physicist and biologist, up to the greatest known to the geologist
and astronomer, and including all known to the psychologist,
economist, and historian--was caused by a previous detail. It
having been established that the same causes always produced the
same results, these uniformities were recognized as Laws, and it
was also recognized that conduct in conformity with these laws
produced good, and conduct counter to them produced evil....
These great discoveries were at once grasped by Fiske’s great
intelligence, and welcomed with enthusiasm. To their dissemination
he mainly devoted his next twenty years, and to their illustration
in the origins and foundation of our national commonwealth, the
rest of his career.[694]
While still at Harvard, as a result of the publication of his two
undergraduate essays already referred to, he was sought out by Edward
L. Youmans and urged to join with him in spreading the new evolutionary
philosophy.[695] Youmans was an ardent proselytizer who had volunteered
for the job of instructing the American people in the meaning of
science. He attached himself to Spencer as spokesman and publicity
agent, and was on the lookout for helpers. Encouraged thus by Youmans,
Fiske threw himself impetuously into the work of furthering the new
philosophy of evolution. As the task unfolded before his maturing mind
it came to involve three major problems: to dissociate in the popular
mind the potential theism of Spencer’s _First Principles_ from the
materialism of Comte’s Positivism, with which it was widely confused;
to elaborate the teleological implications of evolution and demonstrate
that the grand objective of all natural processes was “the production
of happiness, and that, despite occasional lapses, all records of them
prove that, on the whole, they tend not only to produce happiness, but
to increase it”;[696] and finally to apply the principles of the cosmic
philosophy to historical writing and reveal how the law of evolution
determines the forms of social institutions--to do more adequately in
the field of American history what Buckle had tried to do in a larger
field without the aid of evolution.
In all his intellectual interests and attitudes Fiske was a complete
New England Victorian, but scarcely a British Victorian. In his
erection of the doctrine of progress into a cosmic law, and in his
resultant optimism, he was at one with Spencer and the English group.
But he was a son of New England before he was an evolutionist, and
although he had broken with the grotesque, anthropomorphic dogmas of
Calvinism, he remained profoundly religious, and like Henry Drummond
he sought to transfuse science with spiritual qualities. He was
effectively a Unitarian, the leader of the Cambridge intellectuals who
were carrying on the work that Theodore Parker would have done had
he lived twenty years longer--the work of bridging the chasm between
science and religion. To that end his vast concern with teleology--that
God is the great wellspring out of which flows the unfolding cosmos,
and that the unfolding is guided and controlled to beneficent ends.
Natural law, working in a realm of causation, and shaping matter to
forms more and more complex, to John Fiske was no other than the
beneficent purpose known to theology as Divine Providence.
Pretty much all that he had to say on the question is contained in
the four volumes of _Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, published when
he was only thirty-two. Written with great enthusiasm and complete
confidence, it was an attempt to summarize and restate the conception
of cosmic evolution as Spencer had defined it in _First Principles_,
and partly elaborated it in his _Biology_ and _Psychology_. It
was a timely presentation, and with its lucid exposition of the
evidence drawn from the several fields of science it furthered the
spread of the evolutionary philosophy. But it sought to do more.
Not content with arraying in due order the scientific proofs of a
vast unitary cosmos--as Spencer had done--Fiske essayed the rôle of
apologist and supplemented the facts of science with ontological and
teleological speculations. Whereas Spencer had remained agnostic,
refusing to speculate on the unknowable, and clearly implying a
deterministic cosmos, Fiske took high theistic ground, asserting
that evolution implies the existence of a creative mind, vaster than
the anthropomorphic conceptions of theology and far nobler, whose
cosmic plan unfolding in the material universe compels a belief in
a benevolent God, and a belief also in the “eternal source of a
moral law which is implicated with each action of our lives, and in
obedience to which lies our only guarantee of the happiness which is
incorruptible.” And this “eternal Power, not ourselves, that makes
for righteousness”--to use Arnold’s phrase which Fiske was fond of
quoting--is making also for altruism and the spirit of love that lies
at the heart of Christianity; for is not the prolongation of infancy
with its demands on altruism--a principle that was Fiske’s contribution
to evolution, of which he was justly proud--a master biological device
for individual variation? In consequence the evolutionist becomes not
only a theist, but a Christian in the truest meaning of the term. The
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man--to which New England
Unitarianism had come to restrict its dogmas--are in reality “two great
interrelated cosmic truths--the existence of righteousness as an active
principle in the Infinite Power or Reality back of the cosmos, and its
correlative manifestation in the altruistic consciousness of man.”[697]
Such speculation concerning the unknowable exercised an increasing
fascination for Fiske as his deeply religious nature slowly colored
the acquisitions of the scientist, and in a succession of tracts--_The
Destiny of Man_ (1884), _The Idea of God_ (1885), _Through Nature to
God_ (1899), and _Life Everlasting_ (1900)--he definitely rejected
the negative attitude of agnosticism that was a common mark of the
English evolutionary school, and turned to outline the religious faith
of an evolutionist. George Eliot’s dictum that God is unknowable and
immortality is unthinkable, was too thin a diet for his robust nature;
instead he elaborated the argument that faith in God and immortality
is reasonable in the light of the evolving cosmos that science was
revealing. To John Fiske that cosmos was not bleak and impersonal,
a vast congeries of physical forces that reduced man to the status
of a flea on the epidermis of earth, but the expression rather of a
benevolent will unfolding in accordance with a divine purpose. “The
process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty Teleology,
of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest
rudiments.” To Henry Holt this recovery of teleology was Fiske’s great
contribution to evolutionary thought.
He did more just there than any modern philosopher, perhaps than
any philosopher, to show that this teleology is beneficent, and to
restore in this way the attitude of mind which it may not yet be
too late to call Faith in God and Immortality.[698]
No doubt it was due to such emphasis on the theistic implications of
evolution that the doctrine was so quickly accepted in New England
amongst the Unitarians and liberals; but for Fiske it marked the end of
his intellectual leadership. After the battle had been won he turned
away to engage in less fruitful activities, no longer followed keenly
the new discoveries of science, and finally set himself to write the
history of America. The venture on the whole was not fortunate. In
his attempt to reinterpret the American past he suffered from grave
handicaps, an inadequate knowledge and an inadequate philosophy. He was
led into the field of history by his interest in the English school
of Grote and Maine and Stubbs and Freeman, and his ultimate purpose
was to present “the drama of American civilization, of which the
political organization of the United States was the crowning feature,
as an evolutionary development from antecedent causes and of great
significance to the future civilization of the world.”[699] But for
this undertaking he was inadequately equipped and his conscious search
for a Comtean continuity in social growth did him a real disservice.
The economics of historical change he seems never to have considered,
and his analyses of social forces are never acute or penetrating.
Although he attempted to apply sociological evolution to history he
was really little more than a political and military historian with
a special fondness for wars and the details of battle strategy. In
his first venture, _American Political Ideas_--written for his London
lectures of 1880--he simplified American political development to two
germinal ideas--the town meeting and the principle of federation, and
these two conceptions he traces back to the Teutonic folkmote and the
Teutonic principle of shire representation. The theme with which he
deals is thus stated in the preface:
The government of the United States is not the result of special
creation, but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New England
are lineally descended from the village assemblies of the early
Aryans; as our huge federal union was long ago foreshadowed in the
little leagues of Greek cities and Swiss cantons; so the great
political problem which we are (thus far successfully) solving is
the very same problem upon which all civilized peoples have been
working ever since civilization began. How to insure peaceful
concerted action throughout the Whole, without infringing upon
local and individual freedom in the Parts,--this has ever been the
chief aim of civilization, viewed on its political side; and we
rate the failure or success of nations politically according to
their failure or success in attaining this supreme end. When thus
considered in the light of the comparative method our American
history acquires added dignity and interest, and a broad and
rational basis is secured for the detailed treatment of political
questions.[700]
Only a New England historian could write so naïvely as that, for only
to a New Englander does the town meeting become a germinal source of
American democracy. Not a great historian, Fiske ceased to be in his
wandering later years a great intellectual influence. The rare promise
of his young manhood he never fulfilled, but like his generation he
suffered his energies to be dissipated and he ended in a somewhat
blowsy optimism. To Henry Holt he was a very great and learned man, but
to a later generation it is difficult to make out his vast stature.
Nevertheless as a purveyor of Victorian science to the American people
he did a useful and important work.
Footnotes
[682] The French title is, _Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progrès de l’esprit humain_. See _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, Paris, 1847.
[683] _Œuvres_, Vol. VI, p. 11, Paris, 1847.
[684] _Ibid._, p. 176.
[685] _Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 194-195.
[686] _Ibid._, _Dixième Époque_, pp. 236-237.
[687] _American Thought_, p. 172, New York, 1915.
[688] Woodbridge Riley, _American Thought_, Chapter XI.
[689] _Ibid._, p. 401.
[690] For a brief exposition of Spencer’s major ideas see, William
Henry Hudson, “Herbert Spencer,” in _Philosophies Ancient and Modern_,
London, 1908.
[691] William Archibald Dunning, _A History of Political Theories from
Rousseau to Spencer_, New York, 1920, p. 400.
[692] Quoted in Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p.
201.
[693] _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 232.
[694] Henry Holt, _Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other
Essays somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical_, Boston, 1923, pp.
327-328.
[695] See John Spencer Clark, _Life and Letters of John Fiske_, Vol. 1,
pp. 273-278.
[696] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 328.
[697] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 50.
[698] Henry Holt, _op. cit._, p. 339.
[699] John Spencer Clark, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 456.
[700] John Fiske, _American Political Ideas_, Preface, pp. 4-5.
Chapter II • The Skepticism of the House of Adams
In the welter of change that resulted from the revolutionary
transitions of the Gilded Age, one man at least stood apart, skeptical
about the worth of the current revolutions, unconvinced that all the
hurly-burly meant a rational progress. To Henry Adams skepticism
early became a habit. Doubt persistently dogged his footsteps and the
more critically he examined the ways of his generation of Americans,
the more certain it seemed to him that any were unworthy the name of
civilization. He was not at home in the new world of the Gilded Age;
and as he watched the disintegrations of the older New England in which
he had been brought up, an incurable nostalgia seized upon him and he
set about seeking another home where he might live the good life he had
not lived heretofore. The America of the Gilded Age was alien to him;
its gods were not his gods, nor its ends his ends. And so began for him
a long pilgrimage of the spirit that was to carry him far and return
him at last with no solider gains than a handful of curious relics in
his pilgrim’s scrip.
The sturdy New England character, with its self-sufficing individualism
and granite integrity, never came to finer flower than in the
Braintree-Quincy house of Adams. Intellectually curious, given to
rationalism, retaining much of the eighteenth-century solidity of
intellect and honest realism, refusing to barter principle for the good
will of men, the Adams line produced no more characteristic offshoots
than came in the fourth generation. In Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams, the family virtues of independence,
intellectual integrity, and disinterested criticism, found abundant
expression. All three were children of an earlier century, endowed with
the solidest Yankee-Puritan qualities of mind and heart, unyielding
as the rock ledges of their native fields; and they found the
experience of living in the late nineteenth century, of adjusting their
eighteenth-century minds to the demands of a sordid capitalistic order,
a difficult business. Though they tried to bridge the chasm between
the two worlds, though they honestly sought some working compromise
that would suffer them to share in the work of their generation, they
met with failure. It was not possible for the House of Adams, with its
old-fashioned rectitude, to accept the ways of the Gilded Age, and in
the end they turned aside from the main-traveled road to follow their
own paths.
I • Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure
Of the three Charles Francis Adams most nearly succeeded in his
experiment of a _rapprochement_ with capitalism, with the result that
his life came nearest to shipwreck. Perhaps there was less of the Adams
granite in his character. He refused to turn rebel but consciously
sought to win the prizes offered by his generation, training himself
to serve financial interests, making overtures to business, and
achieving a very considerable financial success. Yet nothing was more
incongruous than an Adams serving as lackey to State Street, and when
after abundant experience he came finally to realize it he turned away
to pick up the scattered threads of a life largely wasted. For years
he had suffered from a long maladjustment. When he quitted the army
at the close of the war with the brevet rank of brigadier-general, he
found himself adrift. The world of his youth was gone and the future
seemed drab and unpromising. Intellectually he was caught between
tides. The traditional idealisms had burnt out in the bitter struggle,
and in the sterile post-war years his Puritan nature found no adequate
nourishment. The crusading ardor was gone, and the new world of science
had not yet risen on the horizon of young men who had given their youth
to the army. In 1865 he came upon John Stuart Mill’s essay on Auguste
Comte, which he said revolutionized his whole mental attitude--“I
emerged from the theological stage, in which I had been nurtured, and
passed into the scientific.... From reading that compact little volume
of Mill’s ... I date a changed intellectual and moral life.” Yet from
this accidental foray into Victorian rationalism he got little more
than a sense of release from a dead Puritanism. Creative intellectual
enthusiasms were not to be his portion.
Disillusioned with the law, over which he had been pottering, and
wanting to ally himself with the dominant forces of his generation, he
“fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest
field of the day.” He delved into the history of certain railways and
established a reputation as a student of transportation. For upwards of
a quarter century--from 1866 to 1890--as a member of different public
commissions and finally as president of the Union Pacific system--Jay
Gould’s road--he devoted his best energy to the work, only to be
disillusioned in the end. In 1912 he wrote this confession:
Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little
puzzled to account for the instances I have seen of business
success--money-getting. It comes from a rather low instinct.
Certainly, as far as my observation goes, it is rarely met with in
combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character.
I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many “successful”
men--“big” financially--men famous during the last half-century;
and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one
that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in
this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind
with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. A set of mere
money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and
uninteresting.... In the course of my railroad experiences I made
no friends, apart from those in the Boston direction; nor among
those I met was there any man whose acquaintance I valued. They
were a coarse, realistic, bargaining crowd.[701]
Yet not till he had reached his late fifties did he finally cut the
ties that held him to the “bargaining crowd,” and turn to the business
of salvaging the remnant of his days. He gave himself over with zest to
the writing of Massachusetts history, but it was then too late to do
notable work. He had laid too many offerings on an altar he had come to
loathe. Not a lifelong student like Henry, he had been unable to gather
great stores of knowledge. Not a militant rebel like Brooks, he had
never been given to searching inquiries into the laws of civilization.
And so when he found himself free at last, he set himself to the
business of local chronicles. That was better than nothing; it was the
one thing in his life he took solid pride in; the work was honestly and
capably done; but it was small savings from a lifetime of conscientious
work. His venture into the realm of business had been a disaster.
II • Henry Adams--Intellectual
From a similar disaster Henry Adams was saved by an early
disillusionment. His efforts at _rapprochement_ were little more than a
gesture. While casting about after the war for a promising opening for
a career he hit upon finance as a likely field and published a number
of essays that drew attention to him. But it was quite impossible
for him to go forward along such lines. He was too completely the
intellectual, too aloof from his generation in spirit and will, to ally
himself with the economic masters of the Gilded Age. Sooner or later
he would go his own way, and luckily good fortune took the matter in
hand promptly. No suitable opportunity offering, he was dragooned by
family and friends into an assistant-professorship at Harvard, where
he spent seven years trying to explain to himself and his students
the meaning of the Middle Ages. Those years were his introduction to
history. The passion of the student was in his blood, and he turned
with zest to brood over the scanty records of past generations, seeking
a clue to the meaning of man’s pilgrimage on earth, trying to arrange
the meaningless fragments in some sort of rational pattern, in the hope
of discovering an underlying unity in what seemed on the face only a
meaningless welter of complexity and irrationality. A rationalist, he
followed his intellect in an eager quest for the law of historical
evolution, and he ended fifty years later in mysticism. It was a
natural outcome for a lifetime of rationalizing--a compensation for the
mordant dissatisfactions that issued from the restless play of mind.
Dissatisfied with his labors he quitted the Harvard post in 1879 and
thereafter made his home at Washington in the atmosphere of politics.
From the Middle Ages he turned to the American past and set out to
explore the period during which the first Adams had played his part.
He could not deal with narrow parochial themes; he would not fall
into the “sink of history--antiquarianism,” that satisfied Charles
Francis Adams. From the beginnings of his intellectual life he had
been concerned with the ideas and ideals that presumably lie behind
periods and civilizations; so he went back to what he regarded as the
great age of American political history, to inquire into the meaning
of the struggle between Federalism and Jeffersonianism for control of
the venture in republicanism. But finding little satisfaction there, as
he had earlier found none in Victorian England, where he had studied
closely contemporary English statesmen--Palmerston and Lord Russell and
Gladstone--only to convince himself that they were bankrupt of ideas
and morality, and had nothing to teach concerning the good life, he
abandoned the field, threw over his familiar studies, and set about the
great business of reëducating himself.
From his long studies in the American past one significant thing
had emerged--he had come to understand the source of certain of his
dissatisfactions with current American ideals that set him apart
from his fellows. He had gone back to his own origins and had traced
the rise of the defiant Adams prejudices that were as strong in the
fourth generation as they had been in the first. The Adams family was
eighteenth-century--Henry Adams had come to understand--and he himself
in mind and education and prejudices, was of that earlier time. He
was a child of Quincy rather than Boston--a simple world with simple
virtues that capitalism and industrialism were destroying in the name
of progress. From such village loyalties he could not rid himself.
Perhaps in reason he should not have preferred that earlier homespun
world; but affection does not heed logic, and as Henry Adams traced the
decline of Quincy to Hamilton’s financial policy that started the new
capitalism on its triumphant career, he was filled with bitterness.
It was a vulgar order that was rising and an evil day. Since 1865 the
bankers had ruled America, and they were coming finally to cajole
the American people into accepting their vulgar ideals and putting
their trust in a bankers’ paradise. As he watched the temples of the
new society rising everywhere in the land, his gorge rose at the
prospect. He had no wish to dwell in a bankers’ paradise. Dislike of
a capitalistic society was in his blood. From father to son all the
Adamses had distrusted capitalism and hated State Street. The “only
distinctive mark of all the Adamses,” he said late in life, “since old
Sam Adams’s father a hundred and fifty years before, had been their
inherited quarrel with State Street, which had again and again broken
out into riot, bloodshed, personal feuds, foreign and civil war,
wholesale banishments and confiscations, until the history of Florence
was hardly more turbulent than that of Boston.”[702]
And so when at the climax of the capitalistic revolution he watched
the change going on noisily all about him, when the transition to
the bankers’ paradise was called progress and capitalistic feudalism
was hailed as the advent of Utopia, he seemed to himself a somewhat
pathetic anachronism. Shades of the prison house were falling about
him. “He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic
society,” he said bitterly, “until he had become little better than a
crank.”
He had known for years that he must accept the régime, but he
had known a great many other disagreeable certainties--like age,
senility, and death--against which one made what little resistance
one could.... For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the
American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back,
between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic,
centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single
gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once for
all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary
machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers,
churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force
submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere
law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the
one he liked least, but his likes and dislikes were as antiquated
as the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had
been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by
capital and by capitalistic methods.[703]
But while he clung tenaciously to his obsolete prejudices in favor of
an earlier century, the pugnacious realism of that century was oozing
out of him. The middle years of his life, between the acceptance of the
Harvard post in 1870 and the final break with Victorianism in 1892,
were intellectually an unhappy period. He was losing his grasp on
realities and becoming narrowly and exclusively political-minded. It
was not good for him to live daily in the presence of politics. In so
“far as he had a function in life,” he said of the Henry Adams of 1877.
“it was as stable-companion to statesmen, whether they liked it or
not.”[704] The term “statesmen” was of course only a polite euphemism
for the breed of politicians who played their sordid game under his
critical eyes. He was rarely under any illusions in regard to them
except when blinded by friendship. Certainly his etchings of Grant and
Blaine and Sherman and Conkling and other servants of democracy were
done with acid.
Yet in all his penetrating comment on men and measures there is a
curious failure to take into account the economic springs of action. He
had let slip the clue old John Adams had followed so tenaciously. An
acute historian, not thus wanting, would never have traced the triumph
of the gold standard to the “mere law of mass,” would never have
substituted a physical determinism for an economic, would never have
confused the principle of mass with a minority. How far an intelligent
man and a competent historian could go astray in his criticism of
current ways is suggested by the curious novel _Democracy_, that he
wrote in 1880 while living in the daily companionship of John Hay and
Clarence King. In dealing with the phenomena of political corruption
he had none of the acuteness of old John Taylor of Carolina, who would
have put his finger unerringly on the cause, or of the first Adams. If
he had written _Democracy_ after he had studied the funding operations
of the Federalists under Hamilton’s leadership, very likely he would
have dealt with the problem more searchingly; but in 1880 Henry Adams
revealed no more critical intelligence than did Godkin or Lowell or
other critics of the Gilded Age.
The historical work done during those middle years at Washington
was abundant and excellent, marked by rigorous use of sources, a
dispassionate attitude towards partisan issues, and excellent form.
It was easy for an Adams to take middle ground between Jefferson and
Hamilton, however much his sympathies inclined to the former. In
all this work, however, in the _Life of Albert Gallatin_ (1879), in
_John Randolph_ (1882), as well as in the nine-volume _History of the
United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison_
(1889-1891), the point of view remains too narrowly political, with the
result that it fails to thrust into adequate relief the economics of
the great struggle between agrarianism and capitalism; and without that
clue the interpretation is wanting in substantial realism.
By 1891 he was convinced that he had got all he could from the curdled
milk of politics, and he became dissatisfied with his work. There can
be little doubt that it was a growing realization of the inadequacy
of his analysis of social forces that determined him to abandon the
field he had tilled so long and set about the business of reëducating
himself. If _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ and _The Education_ tell
anything about Henry Adams they reveal that his dissatisfactions
welled up from deep springs within himself--from the consciousness
of his failure to penetrate beneath the surface, to probe the hidden
forces that move the puppets on the historical stage. He had long
been seeking an adequate philosophy of history--for a unity behind
the multiplicity--and in these early years of the nineties he was
stimulated by Brooks Adams, who was then deep in his theory of the law
of civilization and decay and had come to lean heavily on the principle
of economic determinism.[705] “Brooks Adams had taught him,” he said
later, “that the relation between civilizations was that of trade,” and
stimulated by this rediscovery of the philosophy of the first Adams he
set about the business of orienting himself to the realm of science,
of substituting for a meaningless political interpretation a broader
philosophical interpretation.
Very likely it was his reading in the sociology of the Enlightenment
that first turned his thought to the philosophy of history--chiefly
Turgot and Comte. Speaking of the years 1867-1868 he said he “became
a Comteist, within the limits of evolution.”[706] He had long been
interested in such clues as science offered--in the geological theories
of Sir Charles Lyell and the biological deductions of Darwin. But the
theory of biological evolution with its implications of a benevolent
progress from the simple to the complex, failed to satisfy him; and
he turned to the physical sciences for a guide, discovering as the
ultimate reality behind all appearances--force. This physical principle
he transferred to the field of sociology. Coal-power, electrical
power, he concluded, were to civilization what the gaseous theory was
to physics. It was a creative suggestion and it revolutionized his
conception of history. It runs through all his later speculations and
provided the basis of his thinking. “Adams never knew why,” he said,
“knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic Faraday’s trick of
seeing lines of force all about him, where he had always seen lines of
will.”[707] “To evolutionists may be left the processes of evolution;
to historians the single interest is the law of reaction between
force and force--between mind and nature--the law of progress.”[708]
“The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte
first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of
progress.”[709]
Thus by the aid of the physical sciences Henry Adams came back to
the philosophy of determinism--a conception that may lead either to
pantheism or to mechanism as one’s temperament determines. In such a
choice there would be no doubt which way Henry Adams would go; he must
somehow reconcile determinism and progress, he must discover unity
in multiplicity--and that unity and progress he found in a mystical
pantheism. “Continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable
force. This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist ... and their
deity was the ultimate energy, whose thought and action were one.”[710]
How creatively this pantheistic mysticism was to determine his later
thinking is sufficiently revealed in the pages of _Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres_. With incredible labor Henry Adams had at last made his
way out of the Sahara of politics in which he had long wandered.
Phrased in less transcendental terms his philosophy of history, as he
came finally to understand it, was expressed thus:
The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical
power--steam, electric, furnace, or other--which have to be
controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity
to manage it. The work of internal government has become the task
of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen
gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell
nothing of political value if one skinned them alive. Most of them
have nothing to tell, but are forces as dumb as their dynamos,
absorbed in the development or economy of power. They are trustees
for the public, and whenever society assumes the property, it
must confer on them that title; but the power will remain as
before, whoever manages it, and will then control society without
appeal, as it controls its stokers and pit-men. Modern politics
is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become
every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central
power-houses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but
between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb
to their own motive forces. This is a moral that man strongly
objects to admit, especially in mediaeval pursuits like politics
and poetry, nor is it worth while for a teacher to insist upon
it.[711]
From a civilization thus tyrannized over by coal-power and electrical
power, he turned away to discover if possible a civilization in which
men had lived the good life that he longed for; and in his second
incursion into medieval times he found what he had long been seeking.
Two centuries, from 1050 to 1250, came to represent for him in the
evening of his days the crown and glory of all human endeavor; the
first century with its Norman Mont-Saint-Michel and its _Chanson de
Roland_, with its forthright strength and simplicity, its uncritical
acceptance of life and God, its hope encompassed by a sufficing
unity--a strong, naïve, credulous world, yet with men’s minds
buttressed like their cathedrals by a faith that held in equilibrium
the soaring arches of their aspirations, with every cranny and nook
flooded with radiant color: and the second century, that expressed
itself in the cathedral of Chartres, with its adoration of the Virgin,
its courtly love of Guillaume de Lorris and Marie de Champagne, its
passionate mysticism of Saint Louis and Saint Bernard and Saint
Francis, and its soaring scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas--a tender,
feminine age, that worshiped woman and erected its altars to Our Lady
of Love rather than to Our Lady of Sorrows, that found in Isolde the
ideal woman and expressed itself in Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche
of Castile, in Héloïse and Marie de Champagne, more adequately than
in Richard Cœur-de-Lion, till it finally went the way of mortality
“with the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things about the
year 1250”:--to such idealization of medievalism did this child of
Puritanism come in the wistful twilight of his days. He had never
evaded life, nor professed himself satisfied with mean or cheap
substitutes, but had sought persistently till he had come to believe
that the good life had been lived once, though it might not ever be
lived again. So much at least was clear gain, even though it should end
in wistfulness.
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is a beautiful book, the more
beautiful because of its wistfulness; and the theme that runs through
its pages is a denial of the values that embodied for his countrymen
the sum of all excellence. It is an account of certain happy
generations--so few amongst the countless many--who worshiped in love,
before fear had come to the western world and crept into the message
of the church; a love that elevated Mother Mary above the Christ of
the Cross, and that in her shrine at Chartres would allow no hint of
sorrow or suffering to appear, but represented her as looking out upon
the world with a gracious and regal kindliness and mercy, quick to
succor and to forgive--the spirit of love that suffices life in all its
needs. _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ is rich and tender and wise,
perhaps beyond anything else that his generation of Americans wrote,
with a mellow scholarship that walks modestly because it has learned
how little it knows. Yet in its every implication it is a sharp and
searching criticism of Boston and America of the nineteenth century. It
repudiates every ideal of a generation that had gambled away the savor
of life--that does not comprehend “and never shall,” the greatness of
that earlier time, “the appetite” for living, the “greed for novelty,”
“the fun of life.”[712] It was precisely these things, unimportant
though they might seem to the acquisitive mind, that Henry Adams had
missed in his own life and passionately resented having missed. To come
to know great men and great deeds and great ages is perhaps of doubtful
expediency for one who must live amongst small men; and Henry Adams
was forced to pay a heavy penalty for his catholic understanding and
sympathy.
The profound suggestiveness of _Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ lies in
the skill with which the brilliant threads of medieval art and thought
and aspiration are woven into a single pattern, and the splendor of its
unity traced to a mystical _élan_ that found its highest expression
in faith. It was the ideal of love that he discovered in the golden
twelfth century--love above law, above logic, above the church and the
schools: a love that explains for him the passionate worship of Mother
Mary, together with the new “_courtoisie_” that sought to shape manners
and morals to humane ends. The humanity of the Virgin set her above
the Trinity, as the humanity of Saint Francis set him above Thomas
Aquinas, for all the latter’s soaring scholasticism. To one who entered
those bygone times through the portals of Chartres cathedral, it was
natural to interpret the total age in the light of the gentle smile of
the Mother of God, and to feel her presence as a transforming spirit
amongst men. Has any other Yankee interpreted so lovingly the mission
of the Virgin, as Henry Adams analyzed it in such a passage as this?
True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the
Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason,
behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored
her with a passion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and
why we, although utter strangers to her, are not far from getting
down on our knees and praying to her still. Mary concentrated
in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole
protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as
its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating
itself against the walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized
by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She
was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning hell into an
ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction
in this world and the next. She knew that the universe was as
unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her
worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it
was any more intelligible to the Creator of it. To her, every
suppliant was a universe in himself, to be judged apart, on his
own merits, by his love for her,--by no means on his orthodoxy,
or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his
correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity. The convulsive
hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination--as
you can see at Lourdes--was due much less to her power of saving
soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under
law,--divine or human,--justly or unjustly, by accident or design,
by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw
for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her
friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the
sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of Eve.
So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste
of any respectable middle-class society, which has trouble enough
in making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to
continue the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own,
so independent that the Trinity might have perished without much
affecting her position; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could
look on and see her dethroned with almost a breath of relief....
Mary’s treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no
favours to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven
by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that
three hundred years later the Puritan reformers were not satisfied
with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether
as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans
abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to
the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve.[713]
Thus at last, in another land and a remote age, Henry Adams found
the clue that explained for him his own failure and the source of
the dissatisfactions that had tracked him doggedly through his far
wanderings. He had come to understand the reasons for the sterility of
his Massachusetts past, and the last shreds of his Puritan-Federalist
heritage were cast off. In comparison with the vision that came to
him in the choir of Chartres, how unspeakably poor and mean were
the activities he had portrayed in _Democracy_, or even those he
had dealt with in his history of the early days of the republic. He
had discovered the highest existence in emotional response to noble
appeal; the good life was the unified life, possible only on a grand
scale in those rare and great periods of social _élan_ when the
individual is fused in an encompassing unity. Of that golden age of
the Transition--so he finally cast up the account--“the sum is an
emotion--clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic whose
charm lies in its unstable balance.”
The Transition is the equilibrium between the love of God--which
is faith--and the logic of God--which is reason; between the round
arch and the pointed. One may not be sure which pleases most, but
one need not be harsh toward people who think that the moment
of balance is exquisite. The last and highest moment is seen at
Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant doubt
whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens, doubt ceases;
emotion is trained in school, Thomas Aquinas reigns.[714]
Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the
Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the
slender nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap
downwards of the flying buttress,--the visible effort to throw off
a visible strain,--never let us forget that Faith alone supports
it, and that, if Faith fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is
visibly delicate beyond the line of safety; danger lurks in every
stone. The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the
vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of
the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror,--all these
haunting nightmares of the Church are expressed as strongly by the
Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering,
and as no emotion had ever been expressed before or is likely to
find expression again. The delight of its aspiration is flung up
to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish of doubt
is buried in the earth as its last secret. You can read out of it
whatever else pleases your youth and confidence; to me, this is
all.[715]
One may enter the past, of course, through such portals as one chooses;
but one is likely to choose the portals that promise to open upon the
world of one’s desires. It was a fortunate accident, no doubt, that
led Henry Adams to Chartres to study the cathedral glass under the
guidance of John La Farge; nevertheless it finally determined for him
his total interpretation of the Middle Ages and of all history, and
that interpretation followed naturally a subtle ancestral bias. Even
in his rebellion against his past he could not get away from it, but
like Ruskin and John Henry Newman he came to affirm--whether rightly
or wrongly, who shall say?--that the singular glory of the Middle Ages
was the mystical _élan_ that came to expression in the adoration of the
Virgin. As a child of generations of Puritans he came back finally, in
the twilight of his studies, to the great ideal of faith. And yet it
is not without suggestion that William Morris, who more nearly than
any other modern expressed in his daily life the spirit of the Middle
Ages, never concerned himself much with the medieval church--neither
its cathedrals nor its scholasticism nor its miracles--never talked
about an age of faith, would scarcely have understood, indeed, what
was meant by the drive of a mystical _élan_; but discovered the secret
of that earlier civilization in the gild rather than the church, and
traced the source of the haunting beauty that clings to all its works
to the psychology of craftsmanship that found delight in shaping the
raw material to the craftsman’s dreams.
The difference between Morris and Adams is great enough, and at
bottom it is the difference between the artist and the intellectual;
yet it is a pity that Henry Adams, with his wide acquaintance in
England, should never have known the one Victorian he should most
have delighted in--the nineteenth-century craftsman who found in his
workshop the good life the historian dreamed of, and was unhappy
because it had been lost. Perhaps it would not have greatly changed the
latter’s interpretation. He was not a pagan in temperament to enter
sympathetically into the medieval world that Morris had discovered and
of which the Church was only a drapery--a drapery that never quite
covered a frank _joie de vivre_ that was an emotion far more realistic
and human than any mystical _élan_, and that persisted long after the
apogee of faith in the early twelfth century, filling all the later
Middle Ages with its abundant beauty till it was finally destroyed by
the economic revolution that came out of the Reformation. But at any
rate he might have been led by such knowledge to set the craftsman
beside the poet and the schoolman and the mystic--the nameless artist
who wrought such marvels beside the patron who took care to have his
name and his arms emblazoned on window and wall to remind posterity
of his generosity; and certainly, his interpretation of the Middle
Ages would not have suffered by such addition. Instead, an excessive
intellectualism drove him back upon the naïve.
The disillusion of Henry Adams is abundantly instructive to the student
of our flamboyant transition, so different from the golden Transition.
Here was an honest man and an able--none honester and none abler in
his generation--who devoted his life to finding a path out of the maze
of middle-class America, that should lead to a rational and humane
existence. He was never overconfident of his conclusions. All arrogant
dogmatisms he had long since left behind; they had become for him
pathetically futile and foolish. Creeds and faiths, whether in religion
or politics or economics, he no longer subscribed to; but a certain
residuum remained, from his long meditations--a sense of interfusing
unity, mystical, pantheistic, that his lurking skepticism dealt
tenderly with. “_Inter vania nihil vanius est homine_,” he asserted as
a skeptic, and as a mystic he replied, “Man is an imperceptible atom
always trying to become one with God. If ever modern science achieves
a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure: Energy is
the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.”[716] In
these later years he called himself half whimsically a “conservative
Christian Anarchist”[717] and the explanation probably is to be
found in his shift from intellectualism to emotion as the crown of
a satisfying life. “The two poles of social and political philosophy
seem necessarily to be organization or anarchy; man’s intellect or
the forces of nature.”[718] In rare and happy periods--as in the
glorious Transition--freedom finds its fullest life in a spontaneous
drawing together of the whole; but as the social _élan_ dies away,
institutions, organization, remain. Thomas Aquinas follows Saint
Francis, form remains after emotion has subsided. Nevertheless the free
man must cling to his freedom, in spite of society, in spite of the
political state.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is
restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible
only to himself. This principle is the philosophical foundation of
anarchism, and, for anything that science has yet proved, may be
the philosophical foundation of the universe; but it is fatal to
all society and is especially hostile to the State.[719]
Though he lived in the midst of a centralizing politics and found
his friends in such servants of centralization as John Hay and Henry
Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams had no faith in the dominant ideals. He was
never a friend to an acquisitive society with its engrossing political
state. In the light of his favorite dictum that “Power is poison,”
he may perhaps be regarded as an old-fashioned Jeffersonian; it is
another evidence of the persistence of his eighteenth-century mind. He
was an arch-individualist who would go his own way and reach his own
conclusions, quite unconcerned that his views were wholly at variance
with those of his generation. How could it be otherwise? How should
men who lived in the counting-house understand even the language of
this pilgrim returned from other and greater worlds? It was foolish to
talk of what he had seen. And so when he wrote _Mont-Saint-Michel and
Chartres_ he published it privately, and was incredulous when it was
proposed to republish it and give it to the world. What had he, or the
twelfth century, to say to the land of Theodore Roosevelt and Pierpont
Morgan? Was not this America of theirs peopled by the descendants of
the _bourgeoisie_ who, six hundred years before, resentful at having
been cheated--as they supposed--in their heavy investments in shrines
and churches of Our Lady, had turned away from all such unprofitable
business, and put their savings in lands and houses and ships and
railways and banks--of which things politics was the sluttish servant?
How should one who had known Saint Francis and Eleanor of Guienne take
such men or such a world seriously?
III • Brooks Adams--Rebel
The difference between Henry Adams and Brooks Adams is, perhaps,
sufficiently revealed in the distinction between the intellectual and
the rebel. The youngest of the brothers was a militant nonconformist,
a searching and outspoken critic of all the faiths of his generation.
In Brooks Adams the family skepticisms were pointed and barbed,
and the family distrust of capitalism issued in a broadside attack
upon the hateful system. Few Americans of his day were so little
pleased with the bankers’ Utopia dreamed of by the middle class,
or subjected the capitalistic mind to such critical analysis. Not
content with rejecting that Utopia, he pursued his studies in the
history of western civilization with a view to determining whether
the economic mind, instead of being the friend and ally of a human
society--as it professed to be--were not rather the foul wellspring
of a disintegrating egoism that must destroy every civilization that
yields to its siren appeal. In the theory he eventually elaborated,
the capitalistic mind proves to be a greedy spider spinning his web
to catch the simple imaginative minds--warrior and priest and artist
and craftsman--and suck them dry. The sterile middleman becomes master
of society and with the inevitable enslavement of the producer, and
the drying-up of production at its source, civilization withers and
decays, to be followed by another cycle in the long struggle between
the creative and acquisitive instincts.
None but a congenital rebel could have arrived at such conclusions from
the studies in which his youth was passed. As a son of the house of
Adams the profession of the law was the predestined path to politics
and diplomacy, and like Charles and Henry he devoted his younger
years to the ancestral study, receiving such training as the Harvard
Law School could give. He made greater progress than his brothers,
eventually getting so far as to write legal treatises; but finding such
work a bit arid he supplemented his legal studies with the writing of
Massachusetts chronicles. His dissatisfactions seem to have culminated
in the late eighties, during the lean years that preceded the crash
of 1893; and he turned away from local chronicles to speculate on
the deeper causes of social vigor and decline. The result was the
publication in 1895 of _The Law of Civilization and Decay_, a study
in social dynamics that took its point of departure from psychology,
and based its conclusions on physics and economics. Before Henry Adams
he elaborated the theory that civilization is the product of social
energy, and social energy obeys the physical law of mass, accelerating
or retarding in ratio to the density of population reduced to order.
As society draws together in great centers its activity increases
until exhaustion finally slows it down; whereupon follows a period
of disintegration that breaks up the integrated mass and disperses
its energy. The social ebb and flow, therefore, is always from
decentralization to centralization and back again to decentralization,
and as it flows it thrusts into the foreground different types of mind
that express themselves in diverse ideals.
The master types that appear and disappear in this ceaseless flux are
determined by two psychological drives that always and everywhere
shape human activity--fear and greed: the one culminating in the
social rule of the priest, the other in the social rule of the usurer.
Decentralization with its isolation breeds the imaginative mind which,
seeing more devils than vast hell can hold, turns to the priest for
succor--to one who deals in miracles and professes to be able to fend
off malignant powers, and who in consequence grows rich by his traffic
in relics and rises to economic power. But imagination produces as well
the creative mind that finds in isolation the promptings to revery,
expresses its dreams in terms of beauty, and fashions a realm of art
in which to dwell. Priest, artist, and warrior,--shrine, cathedral,
and castle--were the creation of medieval times, the naïve products
of the golden age of decentralization. Whereas centralization, with
the rubbing away of singularity by daily contact and the greater
rewards that lie open to activity, breeds automatically the economic
mind--a mind that is necessarily unimaginative, practical, competitive,
acquisitive, skeptical, preferring administration to creation, and
setting exploitation as the single object of activity. And since
centralization offers increasing rewards to greed, the economic mind
subdues the imaginative, and the money-lender with his control of
wealth rises to mastery. As he expropriates the resources of society
he inevitably dominates the political state. His wealth enables him to
maintain a hired police to safeguard his gains, until expropriation
having run its course, the police fail to hold in check the mass of the
exploited, and an unmartial class discovers that money can no longer
buy security against the strength of numbers. The usurer is overthrown,
his wealth is expropriated, and the social cycle must be run again.
This suggestive theory, which he works out with conspicuous skill in
his interpretation of the Middle Ages and the rise of capitalism,
implies a perennial conflict between fear and greed, that turns finally
upon the relative development of the arts of attack and of defense.
Centralization, it is clear, results from the superiority of the
former; when attack is superior to defense the lesser strongholds of
exploitation must fall and the defeated must become subject to the
coalescing masters. After the disruption of the Roman Empire western
Europe created its feudal system, by means of which the baron in
his stout castle flouted the centralizing ambitions of the impotent
monarchy; and it was not till the wealth of the church and of the
_bourgeoisie_ was thrown on the side of the king, and the development
of the art of attack through the use of gunpowder, that the rise of the
monarchical state was possible. But having aided the king to reduce the
power of the barons, thereby rendering trade secure on a large scale,
the _bourgeoisie_ turned against the medieval church with its vast
wealth that invited expropriation. In the primitive age of faith, under
the dominion of fear, the burgesses had spent their money prodigally
to build shrines and churches and cathedrals--in France alone between
the years 1170 and 1270, eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred
large churches had been built, that by a calculation made in 1840,
would cost a billion dollars to replace[720]--but with the development
of the economic mind such amazing expenditures seemed wasteful, and
the _bourgeoisie_ looked about for a cheaper way of salvation. The
money cost to the worshipers of saints and relics was a sharp prod to
their skepticism as to the efficacy of such worship. This explains for
Brooks Adams the origins of the Reformation; it was due to the economic
dissatisfaction of the burgess class; the church had grown rich and
grasping from its monopoly power. Speaking of the rise of English
Lollardry, he argued:
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the
miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain
return ... gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain on savings,
and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of
propitiation. The monied class, therefore, proceeded step by step,
and its first experiment was to suppress all fees to middle-men,
whether priests or saints, by becoming their own intercessors with
the deity ... [and] as the tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a
dogma was evolved by which mental anguish, which cost nothing, was
substituted for the offering which was effective in proportion
to its money value. This dogma was “Justification by Faith,” the
cornerstone of Protestantism....
But the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment
led to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of
certain clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the
sacred tradition which had not only sustained relic worship, but
which had made the Church the channel of communication between
Christians and the invisible world. That ancient channel once
closed, Protestants had to open another, and this led to the
deification of the Bible.... Thus for the innumerable costly
fetishes of the imaginative age were substituted certain writings
which could be consulted without a fee. The expedient was evidently
the device of a mercantile community, ... and made an organized
priesthood impossible. When each individual might pry into the
sacred mysteries at his pleasure, the authority of the clergy was
annihilated.[721]
With warrior and priest superseded by the tradesman as the dominant
type--the imaginative mind by the economic--came the inevitable triumph
of greed over fear. The ancient defenses of the church were razed and
it stood naked to its enemies. In presence of the skepticism of the
burgesses it could no longer sell its miracles in the open market,
could no longer persuade men that it was God’s vicegerent with powers
of binding and loosing; and with its divine sanctions gone, its
wealth-hoards lay unprotected before the cupidity of king, noble, and
commoner. The spoliation of the monasteries was the prelude to the long
movement of the Reformation in England, and made possible its success.
So long as the church retained its lands and treasure it could not
easily be overturned; so a greedy King and greedy nobles took effective
measures to disarm it, and having got their hands on the substantial
plunder they left to Genevan ministers the lesser business of disputing
over the form and doctrine of the new church. The revolution had
already been accomplished; and this revolution--the transfer from
priest to layman of a third of the wealth of England--was but prelude
to still greater revolutions that were preparing, and which began
with the pouring into England of the gold and silver from the Spanish
treasure-ships. The spoiling of Rome and the spoiling of the Spaniard
were both buccaneering adventures undertaken by zealous Protestants.
Drake and Hawkins--pirate and slaver--were “hot gospellers,” ready
to fight, plunder, or rape for the glory of God and the profit of
England; and it was such men who diverted to London the flood of
Spanish-American silver that issued from the rich mines of Potosi.
Potosi was discovered in 1545, and from that event Adams dates the
rise of the commercial activity that was to prepare the way for the
Industrial Revolution, which came to flower two centuries later.
This vast upheaval that destroyed the older feudal England, was the
immediate outcome of the plundering of India that brought to London the
vast treasure-hoards of the East. The eviction of the peasants from
their lands had already provided a plentiful supply of cheap labor,
the machinery of credit and exchange had been created, and with this
immense influx of capital the Industrial Revolution was a matter of
course. The manufacturers seized control of England and ruled till
approximately 1810, when their authority was disputed by the financiers
who gradually displaced them. The Bank Act of 1844, which yielded the
control of the currency to the bankers, marked the definite transfer
of sovereignty to Lombard Street; Samuel Lloyd, the banker, completed
the work begun in 1523 by Thomas Cromwell, burgess-adventurer--the
work of bringing England under the authoritative sway of the principle
of greed. Since 1844 western civilization has lain helpless under the
heel of the usurer, who levies his tax upon production by expanding and
contracting the currency at will, and rules society through his control
of the political state. The triumph of the economic mind is complete.
The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond
attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of
which the legions were a toy--a police so formidable that, for the
first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The
only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is
cheaper to coerce or bribe.[722]
_The Law of Civilization and Decay_ is an extraordinarily provocative
study, the main principles of which he elaborated and applied in later
historical studies, the result of which was to emphasize for him the
determining influence of economics and geography in the rise and fall
of empires.[723] Equipped thus with a comprehensive philosophy of
history, he turned in a later work to examine certain aspects of the
play of social forces in America, in the light of universal social
experience. The particular object of his inquiry in _The Theory of
Social Revolutions_ is the machinery of social control developed in
America during the movement of capitalistic centralization, and its
probable adequacy to meet the future stresses of acceleration. The
problem of security for the capitalistic order resolves itself, he
decides, into the problem of a sufficient protective police; and
since every non-military masterclass must depend upon some form of
mercenary Swiss guard, the solution in America has assumed a form not
uncommon in earlier European experience, but which every European
country has learned at bitter cost to reject. In the face of a strong
anti-militaristic public sentiment that forbids a coercive army and
navy, the financial masters have had recourse to the courts; and it is
the eventual effect of such perversion of the courts to non-judicial
ends that he considers in this frank inquiry.
Historically, he points out, the courts have at times exercised two
diverse functions, the judicial and the political; and the problem
of justice and equity before the law, it has been found by long and
bitter experience, resolves itself into the total separation of
the one from the other. The judicial function is that of impartial
arbitrament in accordance with an established _corpus juris_; it is
judgment and not will. The enactment of the law, on the other hand,
is a political function, residing in the legislature. When therefore,
the courts exercise the political function, they not only assert
that the judicial will is sovereign, but they engage in a perilous
struggle for mastership and involve themselves in all the passions
of partisan objectives. Every “dominant class, as it has arisen, has
done its best to use the machinery of justice for its own benefit.”
The temptation to such perversion is perennial; it is the particular
and besetting temptation of an unmartial monied class; and in times
of social stress it becomes acute. In revolutionary crises--as in
England under Lord Chief-Justice Jeffreys and in France under the
Revolutionary Tribunal--the political function overrides the judicial,
the last protection of the individual is swept away, and society lies
helpless before the ruling power. Thus to pervert the legitimate
functions of the courts is a dangerous game to play--most dangerous
for a non-military group for whom the courts are protectors; and yet
it is precisely this game that capitalism in America, heedless of the
teachings of experience, has long been playing. Using the courts as a
police power it has brought contempt upon them and thereby weakened the
arm upon which alone it can hope to rely in periods of acute stress. In
short, capitalism has assumed the functions of sovereignty in America,
but it has refused to assume the responsibilities of sovereignty. To
gain immediate ends it has shut its eyes to future consequences; and
what those future consequences are likely to be Brooks Adams is at
pains to point out.
The kernel of his argument, obviously, lies in the thesis that the
federal courts have assumed political functions; and into this question
he delves with the equipment of the lawyer added to that of the
philosophical historian. “Politics,” he asserts realistically, “is the
struggle for ascendancy of a class or a majority.” Under the “American
system, the Constitution ... is expounded by judges, and this function,
which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that quality
of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred
generations of our ancestors to remove.”[724] Hence, “from the outset,
the American bench, because it deals with the most fiercely contested
of political issues, has been an instrument necessary to political
success. Consequently, political parties have striven to control it,
and, therefore, the bench has always had an avowed partisan bias.”[725]
From so anomalous a situation two curious developments have resulted:
in the rôle of guardians of the Constitution the courts have assumed
sovereign powers over the legislature, and at the same time, by a
clever nonjudicial hocus-pocus they have declared themselves superior
to the Constitution, possessed of the prerogative of dispensation.
How the first came into being Adams traces in detail from the time
of Marbury vs. Madison in 1803, when Marshall asserted a supervisory
jurisdiction over Congress, to Standard Oil Company vs. United States
in 1911, when the Court amended an act of Congress that Congress
had declined to amend. How the second came into being is a curious
story. It arose, according to Adams, from the rigidity of a written
constitution, that having been interpreted narrowly must somehow be
stretched to meet public needs. In such an emergency the “Supreme Court
of New York imagined the theory of the Police Power,” saying in effect,
“in our discretion, we suspend the operation of the Constitution, in
this instance, by calling your act an exercise of a power unknown to
the framers of the Constitution.”[726]
In other words, having, by the assumption of sovereignty, nullified
the legislative power from which relief would naturally come, and
having awakened a hostile public opinion by its narrow interpretation
of contractual rights, the court was embarrassed and looked about for
a loophole of escape; and the most convenient loophole was the novel
doctrine of judicial prerogative:
No legislature could intervene, and a pressure was brought to bear
which the judges could not withstand; therefore, the Court yielded,
declaring that if impairing a contract were, on the whole, for
the public welfare, the Constitution, as Marshall interpreted it,
should be suspended in favor of the legislation which impaired it.
They called this suspension the operation of the “Police Power.”
It followed, as the “Police Power” could only come into operation
at the discretion of the Court, that, therefore, within the limits
of judicial discretion, confiscation, however arbitrary and to
whatever extent, might go on.[727]
The effect of the adoption by the Supreme Court of the United
States of the New York theory of the Police Power was to vest
in the judiciary, by the use of this catch-word, an almost
unparallelled prerogative. They assumed a supreme function which
can only be compared to the Dispensing Power claimed by the
Stuarts, or to the authority which, according to the Council
of Constance, inheres in the Church, to “grant indulgences for
reasonable causes.” I suppose nothing in modern judicial history
has ever resembled this assumption....[728]
It is this amazing principle of the judicial prerogative which sets
the Courts above the Constitution and grants them the privilege of
dispensing Indulgences, that has perverted their functions from the
judicial to the political. If Indulgences are for sale, naturally the
wealthy will buy them. And since corporate wealth is regarded by the
judiciary with a more than friendly eye, it rarely finds difficulty
in securing such Indulgences as it seeks. The Courts have become, in
consequence, not so much the Swiss Guards of capitalism, as a pliant
sovereign lord who dispenses rewards to his favorites. The capitalist
is “the most lawless” of citizens. In his attitude towards the state he
is essentially anarchistic; he evades or nullifies a law that he does
not like, while clamorous for the enforcement of a law that works in
his favor.
If the capitalist has bought some sovereign function, and wishes to
abuse it for his own behoof, he regards the law which restrains him
as a despotic invasion of his constitutional rights, because, with
his specialized mind, he cannot grasp the relation of a sovereign
function to the nation as a whole. He, therefore, looks upon the
evasion of a law devised for public protection, but inimical to
him, as innocent or even meritorious.
This attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping
the American legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards the
constitutional form of government which exists in the United
States, as a convenient method of obtaining his own way against a
majority, but the lawyer has learned to worship it as a fetish. Nor
is this astonishing, for, were written constitutions suppressed,
he would lose most of his importance and much of his income. Quite
honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come to believe that
a sheet of paper soiled with printers’ ink and interpreted by
half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in armchairs, has some
inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can arrest the march of
omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this view of American
civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually been able to
select the magistrates who decide their causes.[729]
The skepticisms of the House of Adams came to their frankest expression
in the writings of Brooks Adams. The passion for social justice
had brought him at last to a philosophy of history that made him a
trenchant critic of the American of his generation. He rejected alike
the humanitarian optimism that, from Condorcet to Herbert Spencer,
had inspired generous souls with hope for future progress--and that
even Henry Adams clung to--and the economic optimism that from the
beginnings of the westward movement had inspired acquisitive souls with
the hope of continuous gain. Nothing perhaps marked him more clearly as
a rebel than his denial of the god worshiped by his fellows. The gospel
of progress was for him no more than a fetish of the economic mind.
In the ebb and flow of civilizations under the attraction of fear and
greed, what justification was there for faith in a benevolent progress?
His lot had been cast, unfortunately, in an age of capitalism, when
the acquisitive mind was triumphing over the imaginative, the banker
over the priest and craftsman and mystic; but he could see no reason in
heaven or earth to brag of that fact, and he would have held himself
a fool to apply the term progress to the spread of greed that was
crowning the usurer as master of men. A thorough skeptic, with the
comfortable illusions of his generation dissipated, he was in worse
plight than Henry Adams, for he had created no golden twelfth century
as a refuge against the present.
But if he was under no illusions, he was under no intellectual
tyrannies; he had cleared his mind of all middle-class fetishes
and could look out calmly upon a mad world. After a century and a
quarter this youngest of the House of Adams was still true to the
sturdy intellectual honesty of his race. He refused to cry up a fool’s
paradise where his fellows were crowning the banker as king--professing
to serve high ends while seeking vulgar profits: he would not shut his
eyes to disagreeable truth or hold his tongue. In Brooks Adams one
can almost hear the voice of the first Adams elaborating his doctrine
of determinism, pointing out to a romantic generation the unpleasant
realities that confuted its optimism, expatiating on the abundant
follies of men that lay snares in their own path, yet clinging to a
faith in justice that has become old-fashioned. Possibly Brooks Adams
is not to be reckoned a great figure, but he was an honest man and
worthy of his name--no mean accomplishment, for all in all the Adams
family is the most distinguished in our history.
Footnotes
[701] _Autobiography_, pp. 190-195.
[702] _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 21.
[703] _Ibid._, pp. 343-344.
[704] _Ibid._, p. 317.
[705] _Ibid._, pp. 338-339.
[706] _Ibid._, p. 225.
[707] _Ibid._, p. 426.
[708] _Ibid._, p. 493.
[709] _Ibid._, p. 493.
[710] _Ibid._, pp. 428-429.
[711] _Ibid._, pp. 421-422.
[712] _Ibid._, p. 139.
[713] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, pp. 276-277.
[714] _Ibid._, pp. 321-322.
[715] _Ibid._, p. 383.
[716] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, p. 332.
[717] _The Education_, p. 405.
[718] _Mont-Saint-Michel_, p. 344.
[719] _Ibid._, p. 372.
[720] See Henry Adams, _Mont-Saint-Michel_, pp. 94-95.
[721] _The Law of Civilization and Decay_, pp. 150-151.
[722] _Ibid._, p. 292.
[723] See _America’s Economic Supremacy_, New York, 1900; _The New
Empire_, New York, 1902.
[724] _The Theory of Social Revolution_, p. 45.
[725] _Ibid._, pp. 47-48.
[726] _Ibid._, p. 128.
[727] _Ibid._, p. 93.
[728] _Ibid._, p. 91-92.
[729] _Ibid._, pp. 213-215.
Chapter III • Victorian Realism
It was not till the eighties that the movement of realism in fiction
began to excite wide interest, and then began a brisk and often
acrimonious discussion of the merits and shortcomings of the new
technique that filled the pages of the literary magazines. The
prejudices against it were many and robust. To most Victorians realism
meant Zola, sex, and the exploitation of the animal, and all the
pruderies of the Age of Innocence rose up in protest against defiling
letters with such themes. The judgment of Aldrich’s on realism--“A
miasmatic breath blown from the slums”--was a characteristic Yankee
echo of Tennyson’s condemnation, “wallowing in the slough of
Zolaism.” All the high priests of the genteel rallied to combat such
a desecration of literature, and when it knocked at the door of a
respectable magazine in the person of Stephen Crane’s _Maggie_ the
editor could do nothing else than turn it into the street. In the
late nineties, when _Jude the Obscure_ appeared in one of the family
magazines, even the great reputation of Hardy was reckoned a poor
excuse for such an offense to morality.
American taste was still romantic, and from his villa at Florence, F.
Marion Crawford regularly sent forth heavy romances that were regarded
as contributions to our literature. In defense of his wares he threw
into the discussion of realism a compact little volume, _The Novel;
What It Is_, in which he defined the novel as a pocket drama, the chief
interest of which lies in the plot--a retort courteous to Howells’s
contention that plot is childish and a story ends well that ends
faithfully; wedding bells at the end are of no interest to grown men
and women, but rather what life brings after the wedding bells. To the
aid of Crawford came the brilliant Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, the
literary idol of America in the nineties, whose brave tales were on
every center-table. A confirmed romantic, Stevenson could not resist
breaking a lance in the cause, and his _Humble Remonstrance_ was a
persuasive defense of the perennial appeal of romance.
But in spite of protests the spirit of realism spread quietly through
the lesser works of fiction and the high-flown romantic was laid
away in the grave of John Esten Cooke. The new realism was a native
growth, sprung from the soil, unconcerned with European technique. In
its earlier expression it inclined to a romantic or idyllic coloring,
but as it developed it came to rely more and more on the beauty of
truth. This primitive realism issued chiefly from the local color
school of the short story, but it was supplemented by the sociological
school. The influence of Lowell and the _Atlantic Monthly_ on the
development of the realistic short story had been encouraging, and in
the next decade that development was to go forward swiftly. With the
exploitation of local materials came a sharp division on sectional
lines, and as Howells pointed out, America was soon parceled out
geographically into local groups. Edward Eggleston in southern Indiana,
George Washington Cable in New Orleans, Charles Egbert Craddock in
eastern Tennessee, James Lane Allen in Kentucky, Octave Thanet in
Arkansas, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman in New England,
were representative of the new concern for local truth in fiction that
was to tell against the romantic. In fixing attention on narrow and
homely fields they were turning towards realism, for the charm of their
work lay in fidelity to the _milieu_, the exact portrayal of character
and setting. With the spread of an interest in the local the vogue
of the strange and the remote declined and a quiet sobriety of tone
displaced the romantic. The way was being prepared for a more adequate
realism. “Nothing could testify with more force,” said H. H. Boyesen in
1894, “to the fact that we have outgrown romanticism than this almost
unanimous desire, on the part of our authors, to chronicle the widely
divergent phases of our American civilization.”[730]
But that waited upon profound changes in the American outlook on
life. In the seventies and eighties conditions were not ripe for it
and the naturalism that in France, Russia, Germany, and Scandinavia,
was carrying everything before it, was still alien to the American
temper. It was not so much that it offended our innate Puritanism
as that it seemed to us belied by the open facts of American life.
The psychology of the dispersion still marked us. Although we were
feverishly building great cities we were still emotionally a country
people, far from urban-minded. We still thought in terms of the slack
earlier freedoms, uncritical of our ways, untroubled about the future.
For the American born before the Civil War, naturalism was impossible;
his mind had not been shaped by the industrial city or come under the
dominion of science. The traditional outlook on life was unchanged; he
still clung to the old moralities, the old verities, the old faith in
the goodness of life in America. The intellectual revolution must be
gone through with before naturalism should be at home in America, a
native expression of native conditions; and it would then be a vehicle
only for writers born and bred in the new city environment. In the
meanwhile--in the genial years when the earlier optimisms still veiled
the harsher realities of science and industrialism--the movement of
realism got under way in the work of two distinguished craftsmen who,
bred up in Victorian culture, interpreted life in terms of the middle
and upper classes.[731]
II • Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture
There is a suggestion of irony in the fact that one of our earliest
realists, who was independent enough to break with the romantic
tradition, should have fled from the reality that his art presumably
would gird itself up to deal with. Like his fellow spirit Whistler,
Henry James was a lifelong pilgrim to other shrines than those of his
native land, who dedicated his gifts to ends that his fellow Americans
were indifferent to. Life, with him, was largely a matter of nerves.
In this world of sprawling energy it was impossible to barricade
himself securely against the intrusion of the unpleasant. His organism
was too sensitive, his discriminations too fine, to subject them to
the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, and he fled from it all. He early
convinced himself that the American atmosphere was uncongenial to the
artist.[732] The grotesqueries of the frontier irruption, the crude
turmoil released by the new freedoms, were no materials to appeal to
one in search of subtleties, to one who was a lover of nocturnes in
gray. And so, like Whistler, he sought other lands, there to refine a
meticulous technique, and draw out ever thinner the substance of his
art.
The explanation of the curious career of Henry James, seeking a
habitation between worlds and finding a spiritual home nowhere, is
that he was never a realist. Rather he was a self-deceived romantic,
the last subtle expression of the genteel, who fell in love with
culture and never realized how poor a thing he worshiped. It was the
first mistake of Henry James that he romanticized Europe, not for its
fragments of the medieval picturesque, but for a fine and gracious
culture that he professed to discover there. With the naïveté of the
Age of Innocence he assumed that an aristocratic society--shall we
say that of Mayfair or the Quartier Saint Germain?--is a complex of
subtle imponderables that one comes to understand and embody only
through heritage; and it was an assumption even more romantic that
these imponderables were so subtly elusive as to escape any but the
subtlest art. Like Edith Wharton he erected this suppositious culture
into an abstract _tertium quid_, something apart from social convention
or physical environment, something embodied in the choicer spirits of
a class that for generations presumably had cherished them. Born of
an unconscious inferiority complex in presence of a long-established
social order to which he was alien, this romanticization of European
culture worked to his undoing, for it constrained the artist to a
lifelong pursuit of intangible realities that existed only in his
imagination. The gracious culture that James persistently attributed
to certain choice circles in Europe was only a figment of his romantic
fancy--a fact that after long rambling on the Continent and nearly
forty years’ unbroken residence in England, he came finally to
recognize. It was this failure to find the substance of his dream that
imparted to his work a note of wistfulness. He had quitted the land of
his birth to seek his spiritual home elsewhere, yet increasingly he
came to question the wisdom of his act. He suffered the common fate of
the _déraciné_; wandering between worlds, he found a home nowhere. It
is not well for the artist to turn cosmopolitan, for the flavor of the
fruit comes from the soil and sunshine of its native fields.
The spirit of Henry James marks the last refinement of the genteel
tradition, the completest embodiment of its vague cultural aspirations.
All his life he dwelt wistfully on the outside of the realm he wished
to be a free citizen of. Did any other professed realist ever remain
so persistently aloof from the homely realities of life? From the
external world of action he withdrew to the inner world of questioning
and probing; yet even in his subtle psychological inquiries he remained
shut up within his own skull-pan. His characters are only projections
of his brooding fancy, externalizations of hypothetical subtleties.
He was concerned only with _nuances_. He lived in a world of fine
gradations and imperceptible shades. Like modern scholarship he came
to deal more and more with less and less. It is this absorption in the
stream of psychical experience that justifies one in calling Henry
James a forerunner of modern expressionism. Yet how unlike he is to
Sherwood Anderson, an authentic product of the American consciousness!
III • William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace
From such nostalgia, that left a note of wistfulness in his pages,
William Dean Howells was saved by his frank and undivided loyalties.
Intellectually and emotionally he was native to the American soil, and
however widely he might range he remained always a conscious American.
He had no wish to Europeanize his mind; he felt no secret hankerings
for the ways of Mayfair or the culture of the Quartier Saint Germain.
The homely American reality satisfied the needs of his art, and he
accepted it with the finality of Walt Whitman. If he failed to depict
it in all its sprawling veracity, if much of its crude robustness never
got into his pages, the lack was due to no self-imposed alienation, but
to the temperament of the artist and the refined discretions of his
environment.
The current school of realism is inclined to deal harshly with Howells.
His quiet reticences, his obtrusive morality, his genial optimism,
his dislike of looking ugly facts in the face, are too old-fashioned
today to please the professional purveyors of our current disgusts.
They find his writings as tedious as the gossip of old ladies. To
their coarser palates his respectable commonplace is as flavorless as
biscuit and tea. Yet it must not be forgotten that for years he was
reckoned new-fashioned. Whatever may be one’s final judgment on his
work it is certain that for twenty years he was a prophet of realism to
his generation, the leader of a movement to turn American literature
from the path of romanticism and bring it face to face with the real
and actual. It was not his fault that the ways of one generation are
not those of another, and it is well to remember that if his realism
seems wanting to a generation bred up on Theodore Dreiser, it seemed
a debasement of the fine art of literature to a generation bred up on
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Realism like dress changes its modes.
The Howells we know best was not a simple child of the frontier, like
Mark Twain, whom all could laugh with and love because the sallies
of his wit awakened a native response. He did not remain completely
native to the older folk-ways. He was rather a composite of the ideals
reckoned excellent by the post-war generation--an American Victorian,
kindly, urbane, tolerant, democratic, accepting America as a land that
God’s smile rests on, and convinced that here, wedded to a generous
democracy, culture must eventually produce offspring finer than the
world has hitherto known. Bred up in the mystical Swedenborgian faith,
he shrank from all fleshliness and loved purity with the devotion
of a Galahad. A child of the Ohio frontier, he retained to the
last the western feeling of democratic equality. An adopted son of
Brahmin Cambridge, he immersed himself in culture--Italian, English,
Yankee--and served the ideal of excellence with a lifelong devotion;
a reverent pilgrim to the shrine of truth, he followed such paths as
his generation knew to lay his art at the high altar. In all these
things--in his ample culture, his kindly democracy, his high standards
of workmanship--as well as in the instinctive reverences of a clean
and sweet nature, he was an embodiment of the best in American life, a
child of Jacksonian democracy who made use of his freedoms to serve the
excellent cause of culture.
But he was much more than that, and if the critics who are wont to
damn his Victorian squeamishness would penetrate to the inner core of
Howells they would discover an intellectual, alert and sensitive to
changing currents of thought, seeing with his own eyes, pursuing his
own ends, who wrought out for himself a culture that was individual
and native. If he was not, like Henry Adams, plagued with an itch
of curiosity, he traveled widely in the realm of the mind. Culture
meant to him open-mindedness, familiarity with diverse schools of
thought, a willingness to venture upon the unorthodox and to defend
the unpopular. He was never a child of the Gilded Age. He was unsoiled
by its vulgarity, unconcerned with its sordid ambitions. Neither at
heart was he a child of Brahmin culture. He loved Lowell and Norton
and Godkin and Aldrich, and he wanted to be approved by them; but he
ranged far more widely than they, into places they thought indiscreet.
The mature Howells came to stand apart from Brahminism, dissatisfied
with a literary Toryism, convinced that a sterile genteel tradition
could not suffice the needs of American literature. His very drift
toward realism was a negation of the Brahmin influence. On the whole
it was unfortunate that he lived so long in the Cambridge atmosphere.
The New England influence may not have been a factor in shaping his
too leisurely technique, but certainly it postponed the day of his
intellectual release. If he had removed to New York a decade earlier,
before his literary method hardened into rigidity, his technique might
have changed with his more radical intellectual outlook and become the
vehicle of a more adequate realism than he ever achieved.
But the significant thing is that the mind of Howells refused to
imprison itself in Brahmin orthodoxies, but set forth on perilous
expeditions while Lowell and Norton were discreetly evading the
intellectual heresies raging outside their libraries. While Henry James
was moving towards aristocratic Mayfair, Howells was journeying towards
the proletarian East Side. The scientific revolution seems early to
have washed in upon him, undermining the theological cosmos of his
youth and turning him into a liberal freethinker. His scientific views
very likely came to him secondhand, through the medium of literature;
but with his wide reading in Continental fields--Spanish, French,
German, Scandinavian--he could not fail to become saturated with the
evolutionary view then permeating all current letters. In this he was
only following with John Fiske and Henry Holt and Henry Adams the path
of a new orthodoxy; nevertheless in applying the scientific spirit to
fiction and espousing an objective realism, he quite definitely broke
with Brahmin tradition. And when, under the guise of fiction, he turned
to social questions, and wove into the placid texture of his work the
vexing problem of social justice, he ventured on perilous ground where
his Brahmin friends would not follow. To espouse the teachings of
Herbert Spencer was one thing, to espouse the teachings of Karl Marx
was quite another.
Howells came late to an interest in sociology, held back by the strong
literary and aesthetic cast of his mind. But in the eighties, when
he had reached middle life, he was no longer able to ignore or evade
the economic maladjustments of the Gilded Age. The social unrest that
was coming to bloody issue in strikes and lockouts gave him acute
concern, and slowly under pressure of a sensitive social conscience
there began a quiet intellectual revolution that was to transform the
detached observer of the American scene into a Marxian socialist.
A democrat, a lover of his kind, a just soul endowed with a tender
conscience, an idealist who dreamed of a brotherhood of free men who
should create in America a civilization adequate to human needs, what
else could he do? He loved peace but war was all about him. And so
in the mid-afternoon of life he turned to the work of spreading the
gospel of social democracy in the America of the Gilded Age. He had no
private or personal causes to serve. He had not, like Godkin and Dana,
given hostages to fortune in the shape of a newspaper or magazine; he
had no call to be partisan to his own interests. He was free to plead
the cause of justice in his own way and at his own time. It is easy
for the later radical to sneer at him as a parlor socialist who talked
well but carefully refrained from disturbing the capitalistic machine
from which he drew his income; but that is to ignore the courage of the
artist in confronting a hostile world. He stood stoutly for the rights
of workingmen that the passions of the times swept rudely away. When
the Haymarket Riot in Chicago brought its shameful hysteria, and all
respectable America was crying for blood, Howells was one of the few
intellectuals who spoke for justice, one of the few who held aloof from
the mob spirit, thereby bringing on his head a wave of criticism. It
was a brave thing in 1886 to speak for the “Chicago anarchists.”
But it was not till his removal to New York, where he found himself
at the center of the great revolution, that he set about seriously
studying the ways of plutocracy. For the student of Cambridge society
it involved a mental upheaval. The urbanity of his literary-manner
conceals for most readers the intensity of emotion that underlies
his quiet style; yet it is clear enough that having examined the
ways of private capitalism and considered its works, he rejected it.
Thenceforth to the end of his life he hated the thing and quietly
preached against it. His affections went back fondly to the earlier
agricultural order that had shaped his youth, and in the character
of Dryfoos, in _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, he suggests the moral
degeneration that he believed followed in the train of the substitution
of a speculative capitalist economy for the wholesomer agrarian
economy. But though, remembering his frontier youth, he might prefer
the older ways, he was realist enough to understand that capitalism
was the order of his generation, and he turned eagerly to explore the
new proletarian philosophies that came out of Germany. Howells was
the first distinguished American man of letters to espouse Marxian
socialism. For a cultivated American in the Gilded Age to sympathize
with proletarian theory and to proclaim himself a socialist, was enough
to excite amazement in his fellows. In the eighties American social
thought was still naïve and provincial. Old-world theories were as
alien as old-world institutions, and in spite of the wide interest
aroused by _Looking Backward_ the intelligent American in 1890 knew as
little about Marxianism as he knows today about Bolshevism.
The doubts and hesitations that troubled Howells during these years
of changing outlook, are skillfully dramatized in _A Hazard of New
Fortunes_. The story of the removal of the Marshes from New England to
New York, told with more than usual leisureliness, is the story of the
transition from the peacefulness of his earlier literary life to the
anxieties of his later thought. Slowly into a story of the familiar
Howells commonplace comes the note of social dissension. Antagonistic
social philosophies meet and clash, and the movement draws inevitably
to the great climax of the strike that brings tragedy into the scene.
Of the mood that grew upon him as he wrote he afterwards said:
It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions; through
my quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great
psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong
emotioning in the direction of humaner economics, ... the rich
seemed not so much to despise the poor, and the poor did not
so hopelessly repine. That shedding of blood which is for the
remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of
Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt this bound up with our
rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with
griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast.
Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York,
and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger
than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.[733]
The years of unrest marked by the great agrarian revolt were years of
great intellectual activity for Howells, during which his thought
ripened and mellowed. His own liberal spirit drew to him the liberal
spirits of the younger generation, and he became the counselor and
friend of many of the young rebels of the day. His sympathy went out
to all who were concerned at the injustice of the world. He questioned
the right of none to uphold his creed, nor sought to impose his own
beliefs upon others. As he watched the great struggle of the times his
heart was always on the side of the weak and exploited. Very likely he
knew little about the economics of money and finance, over which rival
partisans were quarreling savagely, but he understood the human side of
the farmers’ problem and it was always the balance in the human ledger
that weighed with him.
He was a friend of Hamlin Garland and rejoiced when _Main-Travelled
Roads_ was given to the world, writing for it an introduction warmly
and tenderly sympathetic. As an artist he grew concerned lest under
the stimulus of B. O. Flower the zeal of the propagandist should
submerge the art of the story-teller; but he had no quarrel with the
“causes” that were fermenting in the mind of the young Populist, and
would not lessen one whit the ardor of his social faith. Throughout
the passionate campaign of 1896, that brought most of his friends to a
blind and scurrilous partisanship of the gold standard, his heart kept
his mind just and his sympathy for the unrequited producers served as
counterbalance to the shrill vituperation of his friend Godkin. He had
thought too long and too honestly to be moved by the _claque_ of the
press.
It was in the black days of the panic of ’93 that he seems to have
brooded most thoughtfully over the ways of capitalistic America, and
in the following year he published _The Traveller from Altruria_, the
first of his two Utopian romances in which he subjected the system of
capitalism to critical analysis. It is a clever book that quite disarms
the reader. Howells delivers no broadside attack on the capitalistic
system, and he suggests its mean and selfish exploitation with such
genial urbanity, such sly satire, as to arouse no sleeping lions. The
concern in his heart is belied by the twinkle in his eye. He hints that
the Altrurian critic is only the figment of a dream, and he smilingly
suggests the sources of the Altrurian commonwealth in the long line of
Utopian dreamers from Plato and Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and William
Morris. But the urbanity is only a mask. Protected by it Howells
delivers many a shrewd thrust at the ways of capitalism. American
democracy does not show to advantage under his analysis. The Altrurian
comes upon the canker of social injustice in every chink and cranny
of life--a canker that is slowly destroying democratic America; and
Howells takes a sly pleasure in contrasting our democratic professions
with our plutocratic practice. There is a delightful irony in his
attack on the professional classes--the professor, the minister, the
writer--for their quick defense of the exploiting classes. What may
we expect of the science of economics, he suggests, when our academic
economists are only apologists for the existing order?
_The Traveller from Altruria_ is a shrewd analysis of American life set
against a Marxian background, and in forecasting the future Howells
follows the Marxian law of concentration. The Age of Accumulation,
with its gigantic monopolies gathered in ever fewer hands, prepared
the way for a new order when industrialism, grown overbig, falls into
the control of the state as naturally as the harvest is gathered
into the granary. There was no need of a class war. When the times
were ripe political means sufficed, for the democracy retained the
effective weapon of the vote. Thirteen years later Howells completed
his Utopian venture with _Through the Eye of the Needle_, in which
he sketches in fuller detail the order of life in Altruria. It was
not till men learned that coöperation is a better social cement than
competition, altruism than egoism, that the new order was possible; and
in this later work he depicts the kindly, rational society that emerged
when men left off fighting each other and turned to working together
instead. On every page the influence of William Morris is revealed--not
only in the rejection of an urban society founded on the machine and a
return to a decentralized anarchistic order, but in the emphasis on the
psychology of work and the satisfactions that spring from free creative
labor. _Through the Eye of the Needle_ is curiously reminiscent of
_News from Nowhere_ and suggests how sympathetically Howells followed
English social thought in its reaction against industrialism.
It was while he was thus engaged that he put into compact form his
speculations on the theory of realism. For more than a decade he had
been the most distinguished advocate of realism in America, and for
longer still his successive novels had revealed to a critical world
what substance and form he believed the realistic novel should possess.
The immediate sources of his theory are obscure, though it is clear
enough that the work of Jane Austen was a creative influence. From
the school of French and Russian naturalism, then at the height
of its vigor, he drew back in repulsion, and it was not till after
his technique was matured that Tolstoi became an influence in his
intellectual life. It is reasonable to assume that his realism was a
native growth, the result of temperament unfolding through quiet years
of reading in the English classics. A quizzical observer with the
gift of humor is not likely to run into romanticism, and a youthful
passion for Pope and Heine is not the best preparation for it. His
intense dislike of the romantic, that led him to an inadequate and
partial conception of it, seems to have sprung from certain instinctive
feelings and convictions that strengthened with the years: a deep and
sincere love of truth, a native sympathy with the simple homely phases
of life, a quiet loyalty to American fact, and a sharp distrust of the
aristocratic spirit. Endowed with such feelings he came to ascribe
his own partisanships to literary methods; the romantic became for
him the aristocratic, and the realistic became the democratic. As an
American he was content to take the common stuff of life, as he found
it in America, and depict it in unpretentious sincerity. Plain American
life was not only worthy of literature, he was convinced, but the only
material worthy of American literature. The path to the universal runs
as directly through the commonplace American parlor as through the hall
of the medieval baron or the drawing-room of Mayfair.
In _Criticism and Fiction_ (1894), Howells ascribes the rise of modern
realism to the twin sources of science and democracy. From science it
derives its passion for truth, for “realism,” he asserts, “is nothing
more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” “We
must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?--true to
the motives, the impulses, the principles, that shape the life of
actual men and women.” The question, what is essential truth, that
has been the apple of discord amongst the realists, Howells answers
in democratic fashion by appealing to the average. The “foolish man,”
he says, “wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.” The
realist, therefore, will deal objectively with the usual and common
rather than with the unusual or strange, and in so doing he draws
closer to the common heart of humanity, and learns the respect for
simple human nature that is the source and wellspring of democracy.
In delineating truthfully the prosaic lives of common people realism
reveals the essential dignity and worth of all life. The romantic,
on the other hand, is aristocratic. “It seeks to withdraw itself,
to stand aloof; to be distinguished and not to be identified.” “The
pride of caste has become the pride of taste,” and romance is the last
refuge of the aristocratic spirit that, defeated elsewhere, has taken
refuge in culture. Not aloofness, but comradeship, is the need of the
world; not distinction, but identity. Realism is the child of democracy
because the realist is one who “feels in every nerve the equality of
things and the unity of men,” and the great artist is one with a talent
“robust enough to front the everyday world and catch the charm of its
work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face.”
To this characteristic conception that realism is democratic Howells
adds certain other dicta that to his own generation seemed as true
as to ours they seem doubtful: that art must serve morality, that
it must teach rather than amuse, and that truthfulness to American
life requires a note of cheerfulness. Art cannot flout the “eternal
amenities,” Howells asserted, for “morality penetrates all things, it
is the soul of all things.” Nor can it stand aloof, disdaining the
office of teacher, for unless it “tends to make the world better and
kinder” it is empty and futile; and it can do this only “from and
through the truth.” But the truth that will uplift society does not
dwell in the kennel and pigsty; it will not be come upon by exploring
the animal in man, or in wrapping the shroud of pessimism about life.
In America at least, realism must concern itself with the “large
cheerful average of health and success and happy life,” for after
all “the more smiling aspects of life” are “the more American.” From
such postulates Howells developed his familiar technique, which in
minimizing plot, rejecting the unusual and strange and heroic, reduced
his stories to the drab level that bores so many of his readers, and
evokes the criticism that in elaboration of the commonplace he evades
the deeper and more tragic realities that reach to the heart of life.
The criticism is just. More than any other thing this concern for
the usual weakens Howells’s work and renders it trivial. He does not
probe the depths of emotional experience. Neither the life of the
spirit nor the passions of the flesh is the stuff from which he weaves
his stories. The lack--and allowing for all his solid excellence it
remains grave--sprang in part from his own timid nature that recoiled
from the gross and the unpleasant, and in part from the environment in
which he perfected his technique. For years he lived in an atmosphere
of complacent convention, a society dominated by women, culture, and
conscience. Cambridge and Boston in the seventies and eighties were
still in the Age of Innocence greatly concerned with erecting defenses
against the intrusion of the unpleasant, reverencing the genteel
in life and letters, soberly moral and making much of the eternal
verities. In such a world of refined manners and narrow outlook what
should the realist do but report faithfully of what he saw and heard?
And so Howells, perforce, became a specialist in women’s nerves, an
analyst of the tenuous New England conscience, a master of Boston
small-talk. It was such materials that shaped his leisurely technique
until it falls about his theme with the amplitude of crinoline.
Through these chronicles of the Age of Innocence runs a persistent note
of the neurotic. There are more scruples to a page of Howells than in
any other writer except Henry James--for the most part filmy cobwebs
invisible to the coarser vision of a later generation. The action
percolates through the sand of small-talk, welling up from the tiniest
springs and stopped by the smallest obstruction. Like Franklin’s
two-headed snake his characters are in danger of dying from thirst
because of much argument over the right path to water. It is hard to
weave a substantial fabric from such gossamer threads, and when in
_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ endless pages are devoted to the ethical
subtleties of a woman’s accepting the hand of a man who the family had
believed was in love with her sister, or when in _April Hopes_ the
fantastic scruples of a neurotic girl are elaborated with a refinement
of art worthy of a Fra Angelico Madonna, the stuff is too filmy to wear
well. Commonplace men and neurotic women are poor materials from which
to fashion an adequate realism, and with the passing of the Age of
Innocence the scruples of Howells went out of fashion.
The fault, in part at least, must be traced to the artist’s deep
reverence for New England. From his youth he had cherished an exalted
notion of the sufficiency of New England culture, and had accepted its
parochialisms as ultimate standards. To a bookish lad, inclined to be
too consciously literary, such loyalty to a declining school could
only accentuate his native aloofness from life. His four years at
Venice had been given over to an ardent pursuit of culture, as culture
was understood by Lowell and Norton. It was the natural impulse of a
sensitive mind, conscious of its limitations, reveling for the first
time in the wealth that had been denied his frontier boyhood. His
poetic _Venetian Days_ was an infallible passport to Boston favor,
and when after his return he was taken up by the _Atlantic_ group he
carried with him to Boston an unconscious inferiority complex that did
his genius an evil turn. It was natural for the self-taught western
youth to be reverent in presence of the great of earth; but it is not
well for the artist to be humble in the presence of his masters. Unless
he is something of a rebel, given to questioning the dogmas of the
schools, he will never ripen into creative originality.
An inferiority complex is a common mark of the frontier mind that
finds itself diffident in presence of the old and established, and
Howells suffered from it greatly. For years his keen eyes lacked their
usual shrewdness in judging Boston ways, and to the end of his life he
overestimated the greatness of the men to whom his youthful loyalty
had gone out. Not only did he accept Lowell and Holmes and Longfellow
at the Boston rating, but he regarded the lesser group of cultivated
Boston gentlemen with partial eyes. It would have been far better
for his art if like Hamlin Garland he had never been received within
the charmed circle; if he had had to make his way alone. To justify
his acceptance Howells felt that he must prove himself as completely
Bostonian as the best, and in consequence he sloughed off his western
heritage, perverted his genius, and shaped his realism to the slender
materials discovered in Back Bay drawing-rooms. The genteel tradition
was in the way of strangling his realism.
Subjected to such refinements his realism in the end became little more
than technique--a meticulous transcription of New England conventions,
the casual action submerging itself in an endless stream of talk. No
doubt Howells was true to what he saw; certainly no one has ever fixed
more exactly the thin substance of the Age of Innocence. Nevertheless
the fidelity of his observation, the refinement of his prose style,
and the subtlety of his humor that plays lambently about the edges
of his words, do not compensate for the slightness of his materials.
The record he has left is not that of a great soul brooding over the
meaning of life, puzzled, uncertain, yet tender toward the victims that
fate has seized and crushed. He was restrained by too many inhibitions
to deal frankly with natural human passions. He felt deeply and
tenderly, but he was too diffident to let himself go. It is likely
that Howells never realized the inadequacy of his temperament and the
futility of his method to any serious realism. Even in his acutest
study _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, which comes upon brutal economic
reality, the story is entangled in a mass of minute detail and never
quite breaks through. The indecisions, the repetitions, the whimsical
descriptions, the drifting talk, are all true to life, but they are
not essential or vital truth. The real issue toward which the story
moves--the problem of social justice and the contrasting systems of
wage-slavery, bond-slavery, and social democracy--is obscured in a
welter of asides and never quite reaches the front of the stage. He is
more effective in such works as _Indian Summer_, when he deals with
characters on vacation who play whimsically with love, and in _April
Hopes_, when he dwells fondly on the infinitely eloquent trivialities
of young love-making. In such studies the minute fidelity to word and
gesture, the humorous playing with invisible scruple, is a pleasant
substitute for solider material.
Howells had real gifts, of which he made the most. Refinement, humor,
sympathy--fidelity to external manner and rare skill in catching the
changing expression of life--a passion for truth and a jealous regard
for his art: he had all these qualities, yet they were not enough
to make him a great realist. He belonged to the Age of Innocence
and with its passing his works have been laid away. He has had no
followers to keep his method alive. If one may hazard an explanation
of the lot that has befallen him, it would be this. Howells the
artist mistook his calling. He was not by temperament a novelist. He
lacked the sense of drama, a grasp of the rough fabric of life, the
power to deal imaginatively with the great and tragic realities. His
genius was rather that of a whimsical essayist, a humorous observer
of the illogical ways of men. He was an eighteenth-century spirit--a
subtler Goldsmith--set down in another age and an uncongenial world.
In his later years he must have come to realize this, for more and
more he turned to the essay form. There his quiet humor and shrewd
observation fitted his sinuous prose style to a nicety. In such sketchy
autobiography as _My Literary Passions_, and more whimsically in such
genial travel essays as _Certain Delightful English Towns_, his refined
art arrived at its most perfect expression. Not an original genius like
Mark Twain, far from a turbulent soul like Herman Melville, Howells
was the reporter of his generation--the greatest literary figure of a
drab negative age when the older literary impulse was slackening, and
the new was slowly displacing it. He marks the transition between the
earlier idealism and the later naturalism. A humane and lovable soul,
he was the embodiment of all that was kindly and generous in an America
that was not wholly given over to the ways of the Gilded Age--an
America that loved beauty and served culture even amidst the turmoil of
revolution.
Footnotes
[730] _Literary and Social Silhouettes_, p. 73.
[731] The first subsection of this chapter in the Contents is entitled
“William James and Pragmatism.” None of this appears in the manuscript,
and it seems likely that Professor Parrington planned to transfer the
subject to a later part of the book. The numbering is, however, left as
it is given in the Contents.--_Publisher._
[732] “Civilization at its highest pitch was the master passion of his
mind, and his preoccupation with the international aspects of character
and custom issued from the conviction that the rawness and rudeness
of a young country were not incapable of cure by contact with more
developed forms.” Pelham Edgar, _Henry James, Man, Author_, pp. 40-41.
[733] Quoted in “The Social Consciousness of William Dean Howells,”
_New Republic_, Vol. 26, p. 193.
Book Two • The Old and the New: Storm Clouds
The quarter-century between the panic of 1873 that rudely disturbed
the revelry of the Great Barbecue, and the campaign of 1896 that
broke the agrarian opposition to capitalism, was marked by a fierce
agrarian attempt to nullify in America the law of concentration. The
silent drift toward plutocracy was too evident to escape comment even
in the Gilded Age, and the ideal of plutocracy was too repugnant to a
people drenched in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian prejudices to escape
bitter hostility. The pursuit of wealth was an accepted democratic
right, but it was assumed to be a fair race and no favors. The use
of the political state by greater wealth to lay handicaps on lesser
wealth had not been in the reckoning, and the law of progress that
diminished the number of beneficiaries from the national policy of
preëmption and exploitation had not been so interpreted. Something was
wrong with a progress that augmented poverty as it increased wealth,
and with the alarmist cry in their ears--the rich are growing richer
and the poor poorer--the untutored democracy of the seventies and the
eighties turned to question the drift of tendency that quite evidently
was transforming a democratic people into a vast engulfing plutocracy.
An older agrarian America was confronted by a younger capitalistic
one, and the conflict of ideals and purposes was certain to bring on a
bitter debate.
In the fierce struggle that turmoiled the politics of three decades
the democracy went into battle as ill-equipped intellectually as it
had been a hundred years before in the struggle over the Constitution.
It was reaping the harvest of the long Jacksonian slackness that,
content with the vote, had given no thought to the ultimate program
of democracy but had suffered the lawyers to have their way. The
Enlightenment had long since been submerged by Whiggish ambitions, and
since the days of the Abolition Movement there had been no serious
consideration of political theory. The success of the Jacksonian
revolution had brought about its undoing. The abstract principle of
democracy having won common acceptance, it was assumed to be competent
to shift for itself. But unfortunately a supposedly democratic state
was functioning under a Constitution designed to thwart democracy,
and, interpreted by lawyers, it buttressed the rights of property far
more securely than the rights of man. Within this fundamental law
capitalism had long been entrenching itself. Its stronghold could not
be taken by frontal attack and its flanks were protected by the courts
that had assumed the high prerogative of voiding statutory enactments
by judicial decree. As a result in no other country was capitalism so
safeguarded from hostile attack; it plowed its fields and gathered its
harvests secure from disturbance.
Unfortunately the political state did not realize that it was not
in reality the democracy it professed to be. The most intelligent
liberalism of the times, failing to take into account the economic
basis of politics, was satisfied to spend its energy in Civil Service
Reform and similar tinkering with the political machinery, convinced
that it was only necessary to recover the old aristocratic sense of
responsibility in political agents to perfect a democratic government.
Not till another generation did liberalism come to understand that the
democratic program was still largely unfulfilled, and set about in all
earnestness to complete it; but that did not happen till the philosophy
of democracy had been far more adequately explored and the simple faith
of Jacksonianism had been instructed by the experience of other lands.
Popular discontent with the drift toward plutocracy was intensified
by the successive economic crises that marked the transition from
agrarianism to capitalism. The gospel of progress, it seems, had
not taken due account of the price that must be paid in social
disturbances, and the breakdowns of 1873-1879 and 1887-1896 with their
harsh dislocations aroused a spirit of revolt that issued in broad
popular movements. Those movements spun the thread of liberalism that
runs through the years from the Gilded Age to the World War--a thread
woven of the earlier liberalism that came from the frontier, and the
new collectivistic theories that came from Europe. In the eighties and
nineties it was still largely native agrarian, but in the early years
of the new century it drew heavily on the proletarian philosophies of
Europe--seeking to apply old-world experience to American problems.
Through it all runs increasingly a note of sobering realism. After a
hundred years political romanticism was slowly dying in America.
Part One: The Middle Border Rises
Chapter I • The Plight of the Farmer
I • Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy
The Middle Border was the first to recover from the heady romanticisms
of Whiggery. The malady of preëmption and exploitation quickly ran
its course there and after the first enthusiasm of settlement had
subsided--the staking of claims, the scramble over townsites, the
bidding for railway lines--the farmer settled down amidst his corn
and wheat and cattle and hogs to learn what sort of living the
prairies might provide. With his feet on the sobering earth he was no
middle-class adventurer, no buccaneer lying in wait for the golden
argosies of Spain, but a sober realist kept sane by wind and weather
and kept honest by his daily occupation of tilling and reaping.
As the first wave of settlers spread over the prairies a mood of
buoyant hopefulness colored their dreams. The earlier conquest of the
Inland Empire had entailed exhausting labor in preliminary clearings,
and the stumpage from great forests remained for years to obstruct
clean tillage; but here in the Middle Border were treeless fields
of black soil, level, uncluttered by stones, inviting the plow. For
ages the prairie grass had been growing there, tall as a horseman
in the bottoms and plentiful on the uplands; and as the unmarked
seasons passed, the potash from the decaying vegetation added a richer
fertility to the soil. In natural productiveness it was the fairest
portion of America, and as the land-hungry settlers made their pitch
there, filing on broad homesteads and building their cabins, a mood
of buoyant expectation filled the land. It was not the flamboyant
spirit of the Gilded Age, but the hopefulness of those who within a few
short years were to transform a wilderness into the world’s granary.
In his wistful account of the glamour that lay upon the prairies in
those first pioneer years--a glamour that soon passed like the morning
dews--Hamlin Garland was no frontier romantic but a sober historian.
But as the seventies gave place to the eighties a subtle change came
over the mood of the Middle Border. Disappointment and disillusion
settled upon a land that before had smiled in the spring sunshine.
The harvest was not fulfilling the expectations of the seedtime.
The changed mood came in part from the harsh toil and meager living
that were the necessary price the frontiersman must pay for his
small winnings. It is no holiday job to subdue an untamed land and
wrest abundance and comfort from a virgin soil. Only for the young
who can project their hopes into the future is it endurable; for the
middle-aged and the old it is a heart-breaking task. The history of
the western frontier is a long drab story of hardship and privation
and thwarted hopes, of men and women broken by the endless toil, the
windows of their dreams shuttered by poverty and the doors to an
abundant life closed and barred by narrow opportunity. It is true that
the prairies took no such toll as the forests had taken; the mean and
squalid poverty through which Lincoln passed was not so common in the
Middle Border as it had been along the earlier frontier. Nevertheless
a fierce climate and a depressing isolation added their discomforts
to a bleak existence. The winds were restless on the flat plains, and
the flimsy wooden houses, stark and mean, unprotected by trees and
unrelieved by shrubbery, were an ill defense against their prying
fingers. In winter the blizzards swept out of the North to overmaster
the land, and in summer the hot winds came up from the Southwest to
sear the countrysides that were rustling with great fields of corn.
Other enemies appeared, as it were, out of a void. Endless flights of
grasshoppers descended like a plague of locusts, and when they passed
the earth was bare and brown where the young wheat had stood. Armies
of chinch-bugs came from nobody knew where, and swarming up the tender
corn-stalks left them sucked dry and yellow. It is nature’s way, to
destroy with one hand what it creates with the other; and for years the
western farmers were fighting plagues that had possessed the prairies
before the settlers came.
The disillusion of the Middle Border deepened into gloom as the
widespread economic depression of the times added its discouragements.
A period of falling prices was curtailing industry and forcing down the
market values of all produce. From such depressions a debtor community
always suffers most severely, for falling produce-prices mean rising
money-values and a shifting standard of value for deferred payments.
The farms of the Middle Border were heavily encumbered to provide
tools and livestock and buildings, and the earnings were consumed by
the interest that went East to the mortgage-holders. Debt was a luxury
the farmer could ill afford, and when the debt was silently augmenting
by the rising value of the dollar he was forced to consider his
situation. The plight into which he had fallen was graphically summed
up in the phrase “ten-cent corn and ten per cent interest”--a phrase
that was to become a spark to all the tinder that was gathering from
frontier hardships and disappointments. Falling market-values were at
the bottom of his troubles. The prices of his staples were sinking
below the cost of production. With four-cent eggs, five-cent butter,
ten-cent corn, and fifty-cent wheat, with more hogs and cattle than
the stockyards would take, and with debts contracted at interest-rates
fixed by a higher scale of values, the economic position of the Middle
Border was becoming desperate, and in the later eighties a sullen
bitterness took possession of the land. As the farmer sat by the
kitchen stove and stoked the fire with great ears of corn that were
cheaper than coal, he had ample time to contemplate his lot. Ungathered
crops for which there was no market would not pay interest. There was
coming to be “too much hog in the dollar,” as one commentator remarked
quaintly. The Middle Border, all too clearly, was strangling from its
own productiveness.
It was easy for newspaper critics, armed with the wisdom of the
Board of Trade, to point out that overproduction was the trouble
with the western farmer, and that so vast a development of staple
crops resulting from sowing the prairie states to corn and wheat was
certain to bring on disastrous market slumps. It was true. Production
had outrun consumption; quantity output had brought on a glut. But
it was also true--as the armchair critics were not so careful to
point out--that other causes contributed equally to the deflation
of the western farmer, the result of which was to despoil him of
the last moiety of his earnings. He was in the grip of a complex
middleman organization that gouged him at every turn. The gap between
producer and consumer was widening to a chasm. The railways charged
twenty cents a bushel cartage for wheat from the Mississippi to
Chicago, and fifty-two and a half cents to the Atlantic seaboard.
The elevator companies fixed monopoly tolls, swindled the farmer in
their grain-gradings, and combined to force down the market price at
harvest time and raise it after the crop came under their control. The
“Livestock Ring,” managed by the railways, controlled the Union Stock
Yards at Chicago and squeezed the marginal profits from the farmer’s
cattle and hogs.[734] When on the other hand he bought implements or
groceries or household goods he was at the mercy of a non-competitive
market, protected by patent-rights and tariffs, to which were added
extortionate transportation and middleman charges.
It was his own fault, of course. Due to his own political slackness
the farmer had allowed himself to become the common drudge of society.
All the exploiting classes had their hands in his pockets. His was the
only considerable economic group that exerted no organized pressure to
control the price he sold for or the price he paid. While capitalism
had been perfecting its machinery of exploitation he had remained
indifferent to the fact that he himself was the fattest goose that
capitalism was to pluck. He had helped indeed to provide the rope
for his own hanging. He had voted away the public domain to railways
that were now fleecing him; he took pride in the county-seat towns
that lived off his earnings; he sent city lawyers to represent him
in legislatures and in Congress; he read middle-class newspapers and
listened to bankers and politicians and cast his votes for the policy
of Whiggery that could have no other outcome than his own despoiling.
And now in the middle eighties he began to feel the rope about his
neck, and realized the predicament he was in. It was not alone the
local middlemen, or even the railways--he had come to believe--that
were to blame. It was the money-power of the East, the grip of Wall
Street, that was strangling him--a power that controlled the government
at Washington, that manipulated the currency system, and that was
engaged in a scheme to augment its holdings by forcing up the value of
the dollar and automatically increasing the value of the indebtedness
it had gathered in its vaults. Clearly it was high time for the
deflated farmer to get into politics on his own account if he were to
save himself from beggary, and so during the Gilded Age began a great
agrarian revolt against capitalism that was to turmoil the next quarter
of a century--a revolt that was to mark the last effective organization
of the farmers to combat the new order, the last flare-up of an
old-fashioned agrarian America before it was submerged by the middle
class.
II • The Farmer Considers Politics
By the early seventies it was becoming clear to the Middle Border
that the policy of Whiggery took no account of the needs of the
farmer. Government was indifferent to him, whether at the capital of
his state or at Washington, and governmental programs--whether in
the matter of protective tariffs and land-grants, in its unconcern
at monopoly extortion, or in the contraction of the currency with
a view to the resumption of specie payments--ran so counter to his
interests that the dullest began to question the fairness of the
state. It had ceased to concern itself with the welfare of the whole.
The combination of paternalism and _laissez faire_ that marked the
Whiggery of the times could be interpreted by the suspicious farmer,
indeed, only as a surrender of government to capitalism. It had lost
all pretense of fairness in the distribution of governmental favors,
and withheld or granted aid with the single objective of furthering
the interests of powerful groups. It sanctioned the use of the state
by business interests for purposes of exploitation, and declined to
exercise its power in the interests of the consumer. It granted tariffs
and subsidies, yet refused to regulate the monopoly power it had
created. It was no longer a government of the people but a government
of business, concerned for the interests of exploitation, and if the
farmer were to gain a hearing he must first make himself feared.
Of necessity, therefore, the agrarian program entailed a political
struggle of great bitterness. There would be no adequate relief granted
until the farmers had wrested control of government from the class that
was exploiting them. The battle between agrarianism and capitalism,
in consequence, from the outset was a struggle for control of the
political state, that beginning in single commonwealths was eventually
carried to the federal government. Hope of effective aid from state
governments quickly proved illusory, for when the Illinois farmers
passed a law to curb the railways the federal courts set aside their
enactment and bade the farmers--to use a later phrase--go home and slop
the hogs. They must not meddle with matters beyond their comprehension.
In consequence of such slaps in the face the farmers fell to perfecting
their organizations and arousing class consciousness until there issued
from the long debates of the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance the great
movement of Populism that proposed to reach as far as Washington,
install there the representatives of the producing classes, and
refashion the political state in accordance with the democratic needs
of the plain people.
So ambitious a program needed time, not only for the farmers to
organize but to clarify their policy. They were ill equipped for a
serious struggle. With the rise of capitalism agriculture had been
steadily falling in social prestige. As a result of the decline of the
landed squirearchy in the North and the overthrow of the plantation
economy in the South, agriculture had lost its traditional leaders
who had furnished the brains and supplied the spokesmen in earlier
political struggles. In the seventies agriculture was no longer
reckoned a pursuit peculiarly suitable to gentlemen. The business
man had risen in social prestige as the farmer declined, and instead
of being recruited from the natural leaders of society agriculture
suffered a draining-off of the more energetic and capable to the
cities, leaving the farms in the hands of the less ambitious, who were
supplemented in the seventies and eighties by European peasants who
settled great portions of the Middle Border. With this loss of social
prestige came a new urban contempt for farm life that expressed itself
in “Hayseed” cartoons, and in the heedlessness of politicians who were
quick to transfer allegiance from a decaying to a rising order.
The farmers of the Middle Border, drawn from many commonwealths
and with a high percentage of aliens, were far from a homogeneous
class-conscious group like the southern planters. Race, language,
and cultural antecedents held them apart, intensifying the aloofness
that was a common characteristic of the frontier. Week-days they
stuck to their plows and Sundays, unlike the New England farmer, they
were little given to churchgoing. The landholdings were commonly a
homestead of a hundred and sixty acres, often running to an entire
section of six hundred and forty acres. Much land was held idle by
speculators, with the result that the isolation of the farmer--dwelling
convenient to his fields rather than to neighbors--deepened the
suspicious individualism that was an obsession of the agrarian mind,
and unfitted him for effective coöperative effort. No political or
social philosophy answerable to his needs was at hand, no intellectual
leaders like Jefferson or John Taylor to adapt old-world theory to
the conditions of the Middle Border, no commanding figure like Old
Hickory to marshal the scattered hosts. The Physiocratic theory with
its prestige of distinguished advocates and its elaborate social
economics had never taken root in the Middle Border; although certain
of its prejudices--that the farmer is the sole producer and the sterile
middleman must somehow be got rid of--had taken possession of the
western mind and largely influenced the ultimate program. But if the
western farmer inherited no ready-made philosophy he was daily prodded
by harsh reality. He got up and went to bed under the prick of economic
necessity, and this made of him a realist and an opportunist, eager
to apply homely remedies to homely ills. With the discipline got from
hard times he was not easily gulled by bright young city lawyers with
their handbooks of capitalistic economics. The new agrarianism of the
prairies, in consequence, was a hard-headed, homespun theory, fashioned
on the farms, intended to serve the producer rather than the middleman.
It had behind it none of the high authority of the schools, and
naturally it was mocked and scoffed at by all the spokesmen--editors,
lawyers, bankers, scholars, intellectuals--of the prosperous middle
class. The farmer had to make his way against the embattled prejudices
and contempt of the rest of America.
But before he could become a power in political councils he must
organize and use his voting strength as a unit; and as early as the
late sixties the work of organization was got under way. It began
as a social movement with the Grange that spread widely through the
South and Middle West and even gained foothold in the East, bringing
together in social groups the farmer families of the neighborhood. It
professed to stand outside politics and strove to awaken an interest
in coöperative buying and selling, but the community gatherings were
certain to find politics waiting for them at the schoolhouse door,
and after the program of coöperation had been discussed the talk ran
easily into political debate. From the Grange issued in the eighties
the Farmers’ Alliance, more consciously political in its objective,
active in arousing the farmers to political action; and with the hard
times that came with the turn of the decade the different groups merged
in the broad movement of Populism--a militant political uprising with
a definite party program and organization. The flare-up came swiftly
and in the first years of the nineties the prairies were aflame and
even the cotton-fields of the South were fired. Populism swept from
township to township, a militant agrarian movement, providing its
own leaders--Tom Watson in Georgia, General Weaver in Iowa, Ignatius
Donnelly in Minnesota, sockless Jerry Simpson in Kansas, with Hamlin
Garland, and B. O. Flower, and other intellectuals rallying to the
farmers’ standard. It set up the banner of agrarian democracy, summoned
its followers and drilled them for the battles that lay ahead. Huge
meetings gathered of the farmers of a county and day-long they listened
to speeches that came straight from the hay-fields and the corn-rows,
speeches that were an echo of the daily experience of the farmer and
the farmer’s wife.
It was Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas who struck from the common bitterness
a phrase that embodied the militant spirit of Populism. Week after week
she traveled the prairie country urging the farmers to “raise less corn
and more hell,” and at her call the sunburned faces settled into grim
purpose. The farmers had become class-conscious. They were enlisted in
a class struggle. They used the vocabulary of realism, and the unctuous
political platitudes and sophistries of county-seat politicians rolled
off their minds like water from a duck’s back. They were fighting
a great battle--they believed--against Wall Street and the eastern
money-power; they were bent on saving America from the plutocracy;
and they swept over the county-seat towns, burying the old machine
politicians under an avalanche of votes, capturing state legislatures,
electing Congressmen and Senators, and looking forward to greater
power. In 1896 Populism gained control of the Democratic party and
entered on its great campaign to establish the principle of democracy
at Washington. It was the last mortal struggle between agrarianism
and capitalism, and to understand it one must turn back to the long
agitation over the money question.
III • The Greenback Movement
If in the early nineties the currency question had come to overshadow
the questions of the tariff and railway regulation, it was because that
problem lay at the heart of the struggle between the rival agrarian and
capitalistic economies. The control of the national monetary system
by the bankers was vital to the smooth functioning of a capitalistic
order, and to assure such control it was desirable that monetary
standards and emissions of currency be removed from the sphere of
political action and lodged in the hands of business. The problem was
difficult, for the right to “coin money and to regulate the value
thereof” were functions of sovereignty specifically recognized in the
Constitution; and it was a series of moves designed to transfer such
functions to private groups that brought on a long political debate
over systems of currency.
The intellectual background against which the struggle was set may be
sketched briefly. Despite the long battle over the Bank in Jackson’s
time, little serious thinking on the principles of money and currency
had been done in America. Financiers and economists alike followed the
current English school, and since the appearance of the famous Bullion
Report of 1811 that school had adhered to the intrinsic-value theory
of money. While accepting banknotes as a useful medium of exchange,
the English classical economists held that only coin is real money,
and that the issue of notes must bear a definite ratio to the amount
of coin and bullion in the vaults. Money is not a creature of the law.
Government cannot create it. Rather it is a convenient token of labor
done, and the stamp of the mint is only a certification of weight
and fineness. There are but two ways, indeed, in which government
can acquire money--through taxation and by borrowing. The “natural
operation of the specie standard” was reckoned one of the fundamental
“laws of trade,” and for government to tamper with it--setting aside
the intrinsic-value principle by the emission of irredeemable paper
money--was to violate the sanctity of contracts, cheat creditors,
increase prices, and disorder business. The law of supply and demand
answered all the needs of money regulation.
This was no more than the application of the current theory of
_laissez faire_ to the problem of currency. But between the Bullion
Report of 1811 and the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, English theory
and practice had undergone two important modifications: the vast
development of credit had suggested a free use of banknotes based on
securities other than coin or bullion, and the bimetallic standard had
been superseded by the gold standard. By the terms of the Act of 1844
all banknotes were to be issued against securities and gold and silver
coin and bullion in the bank vaults. The margin of issue was fixed at
fourteen million pounds sterling. The total amount of banknotes thus
“issued on the Credit of such Securities, Coin and Bullion,” might not
be increased, but within the limits set the Bank was free to increase
or decrease issues at will. The Act further provided that “whereas
it is necessary to limit the Amount of Silver Bullion on which it
shall be lawful ... to issue Bank of England notes,” it should “not
be lawful for the Bank of England to retain in ... said Bank at any
time an Amount of Silver Bullion exceeding One Fourth Part of the Gold
Coin and Bullion.”...[735] That gold should eventually have thrust
silver aside was natural. In addition to its convenience as a commodity
for international shipment, it was less in quantity, not widely
dispersed or popularly held, and therefore more easily controlled
by the money-brokers. With the function of government restricted to
coining such gold as came to the mint, the whole business of currency
emissions, with the attendant power of inflation and deflation of
credit, would lie in the hands of the bankers who became the custodians
of the national monetary system.
During the bitter discussions of currency policies that followed the
dislocations of the Civil War, the two most authoritative spokesmen in
America on the subject were Senator John Sherman of Ohio, for years
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, and David A. Wells,
statistician, special Commissioner of the Revenue Bureau, and a scholar
deservedly distinguished as an economist. In their views on the
currency question both were followers of the classical English school.
In two speeches in the Senate, of January 27, 1869, and January 24,
1870, the former stated his position definitely. “Let us,” he said,
“recognize as an axiom that nothing but coin is real money before we
undertake to deal with the currency”; and in another place, narrowing
his definition in terms of the English Bank Act, he asserted, “We must
... recognize the immutable law of currency; and that is, there is but
one true standard, and that standard is gold.”[736] The weakness of
paper money, he believed, was its instability; the ratio of exchange
with gold fluctuates too greatly to make it a safe or convenient medium
of business. “Last year the fluctuation in paper money amounted to
forty-five per cent. Gold, however, remained as stable as the eternal
hills, because it was not only the product of labor, but it was labor
and value itself.”[737] One may make of such an assertion what one
will, but it is clear that John Sherman thought ill of the greenbacks,
and wanted substituted for them a system of banknotes.
It is impossible [he argued] to give a currency issued by
a Government the flexibility to meet the movement of the
exchanges.... It must have a flexibility which will enable it to be
increased in certain periods of the year, and to flow back again
into the vaults of the bank at others. I am convinced ... that in
time it will be wise to retire our United States notes and all
forms of Government circulation, and depend upon notes issued by
private corporations.[738]
Brief as these passages are, they suffice to make clear Sherman’s
position. He accepted without question the English theory and practice,
and he wished to shape American legislation in conformity with them.
The experience of the Civil War, and--shall we add--his intimate
connections with Wall Street,[739] had confirmed him in his preference
for a _laissez-faire_ policy in currency matters. He would establish
the gold standard, encourage the issue of banknotes, and turn over the
custodianship of the national currency to private interests.
The position of David A. Wells was essentially similar. Wells wrote
much and skillfully and he seems to have been the chief authority on
whom such intellectuals as Godkin and Dana relied for materials for
their editorials on the currency question. Indirectly, therefore,
through the medium of editors and newspaper writers his opinions came
to have wide influence. During the discussion of resumption of specie
payments in the seventies his pen was particularly active. Amongst
other things he then wrote _The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption_,
in which he advocated a policy of progressive contraction by the
expedient of burning annually a fixed sum in greenbacks; _Robinson
Crusoe’s Money_, an exposition of the bullion theory of money for
popular reading, illustrated by Nast and containing some witty thrusts
at such well-known expansionists as Ben Butler, Wendell Phillips, Henry
C. Carey, and Senator O. P. Morton; _Contraction_, in which he defended
the thesis, “He who is not in favor of contracting the currency is
not in favor of paying it, and he who is not in favor of paying it
is a repudiator”; and certain other papers later gathered into his
_Practical Economics_ (1885).
Wells was an uncompromising bullionist and his theory of money is as
simple as the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on which it rests. Honest
money represents labor and therefore possesses intrinsic value. The
experience of the ages has demonstrated that of all commodities gold
and silver are the most convenient for the purpose and in consequence
they have come to be accepted universally as real money. Every dollar’s
worth of gold represents a dollar’s worth of labor, always and
everywhere, measured by the test of the world’s needs. It is foolish
for politicians and theorists to worry their poor heads over the supply
of money, or attempt to predetermine the quantity best suited to the
needs of business. The amount of money in circulation will always be
regulated by the law of supply and demand. There is limitless gold
locked up in the treasure-house of nature, and just so much is unlocked
by human labor as the immediate needs of the world require. Gold can
neither be inflated nor deflated, for, “There is one and the same law
governing alike the supply of gold and of wheelbarrows. They are both
tools or commodities, and the country will have and use all of either
that it can use profitably.”[740] Let government keep its hands off
and money will regulate itself. “The value of the gold dollar is fixed
and cannot be altered. The value of the paper dollar is constantly
fluctuating.”[741] That business conditions would be seriously affected
by the withdrawal of the greenbacks, or that injustice would be done
to debtors, Wells refused to believe. When the poison is withdrawn
from the system a state of health reëstablishes itself. “I also count
as an absurdity the idea that the business of the country is likely
to be unfavorably affected by a deficiency of currency consequent
upon contraction in the manner proposed.”[742] The gold to take its
place would be provided automatically by the infallible law of supply
and demand. Thus triply armed with the logic of economic theory Wells
pronounced for deflation, immediate and drastic:
I desire the federal government to get out of and abandon forever
and as soon as possible this whole business of creating and issuing
paper money, be it redeemable or irredeemable, for I believe as
long as the federal government continues to recognize anything as
money except hard matter-of-fact “labor representing” gold and
silver, just so long the country will not have [a] stable and
unfluctuating currency....[743]
Such neat logic was out of date on the day that Wells penned it.
The needs of business had outgrown the bullion theory of money and
credit was taking the place of a metallic currency. The fiction of a
gold standard would be adhered to till another seismic dislocation
proved its utter inadequacy to a world in confusion and it would be
unofficially abandoned. Yet it was such logic that prevailed in America
in post-war days, bringing acute distress upon the country as a whole
and particular hardship to the Middle Border; and it prevailed because
the banking interests followed a selfish and narrow policy marked out
for them by the English theory and practice.
The financing of the war had been wasteful and slovenly beyond all
precedent, and it had been fiercely criticized by the agrarians. It was
a system, said the militant Greenbacker, Thaddeus Stevens, the like
of which “no human folly had ever before witnessed.”[744] When the
war was over and the reorganization of the public finances was up for
settlement, the bankers were shrewd enough to make the confusion serve
their interests. Their great objective was to get back once more the
control of the national credit that the war had taken from them. The
National Bank Act of 1863--foolishly opposed by shortsighted state-bank
advocates who were jealous of local rights--had been the first great
step. By the provisions of the act the national banks were permitted to
issue currency on the security of government bonds, in such quantities
as they chose, on highly favorable terms, and the result was to drive
out of circulation the wild-cat issues of state banks. But the crux of
the problem was the question of the greenbacks that the necessities of
the war had forced upon the government. The greenbacks were reckoned
political money, the control of issues of which lay wholly with
Congress. At any moment, responding to popular demand, Congress might
deflate the bankers by the emission of new bills. At the time of first
issue the financial interests had succeeded in vitiating the greenbacks
by writing into the bill a repudiation of the issue by the government
itself, and no sooner was the war over than they set about the business
of retiring them. Their objective was the same end that English bankers
had reached in 1844.
In the reorganization three broad policies were insisted upon by the
banking interests: the speedy retirement of the greenbacks, in order
to take government out of the credit market, the refunding of all
debts on a gold basis, and an immediate return to specie payments. The
result was a drastic policy of deflation that brought further turmoil
to the country. In ten years the money in circulation was reduced
from somewhat over $2,100,000,000 to a little over a billion, or from
fifty-eight dollars per capita in 1865 to seventeen dollars per capita
in 1876.[745] The inevitable results followed, a swift appreciation in
the value of the dollar and the automatic increase in the debt of the
country, both public and private, with the fall of commodity prices.
Within a decade, measured in commodity values, the liabilities of the
American people were nearly doubled by the simple device of changing
the standard of deferred payments. Gold might remain as stable as
the eternal hills, but somehow all other commodities were shrinking
daily. “Them steers,” Solon Chase indeed said aptly, “while they grew
well, shrank in value as fast as they grew.” This remarkable result
was brought about, it is well to remember, by the plea for honest
money and the plighted faith of the nation. Keeping the public faith,
it would seem, meant permitting the creditors to change the terms of
their payments after the contract was made. “Who are these reasoners,”
cried Thaddeus Stevens, in disgust, “who talk so learnedly of the
laws of finance and the morality of human dealings, whose consciences
are so raw and stick out so far from their excited coverings that no
pharmaceutist can heal their inward wound?”[746]
As a debtor community the Middle Border felt the pinch of deflation
acutely, and in consequence the money question was thrust sternly upon
agrarian attention. On this issue it came finally to fight its great
battle, pitting its homespun experience against the authority of the
bankers and the teaching of the schools. To the bankers’ argument that
note issues should be taken out of politics and lodged in the hands
of business men, it replied that the issue of currency was a function
of sovereignty, and to surrender it to private corporations, as was
done by the National Bank Act, was undemocratic. The monetary system
of the nation must not become the football of class interests. To the
argument of the bullionists that gold was the only fixed and stable
standard for deferred payments, it replied that the gold standard was
too narrow a base on which to erect a monetary system for an expanding
country, that it was notoriously susceptible to manipulation, and that
it had been devised by Lombard Street in the interests of capitalism.
Since the days of the great struggle over the Bank a remarkable
change had come over the agrarian mind in its thinking on monetary
affairs. In their distrust of all banks and bank-issues Jackson and
Benton had swung sharply back to the bullion theory of money. They
were militant hard-money men. But in the intervening years a new and
revolutionary conception had been slowly making its way to recognition.
In the minds of obscure economists the quantitative theory of money
had risen to challenge the bullion theory. In unorthodox pamphlets and
newspaper discussion it was being pointed out that the value of money
is dependent on the amount in circulation, that gold and silver are
commodities fluctuating in value like other commodities, and that it
is the plain duty of the state to regulate the per capita circulation
in accordance with business needs. To allow the bankers to erect a
monetary system on gold is to subject the producer to the money-broker
and measure deferred payments by a yardstick that lengthens or shortens
from year to year. The only safe and rational currency is a national
currency based on the national credit, sponsored by the state,
flexible, and controlled in the interests of the people as a whole.[747]
By far the most suggestive of these obscure pamphleteers was Eleazar
Lord, a New York banker, who for thirty-five years was a propagandist
for a new currency system and who watched the bungling of the war
finance with acute concern.[748] With the undemocratic nature of
banknotes he was not concerned. As a banker he accepted them as
desirable and wished to establish them on a sound national basis. He
was in ardent sympathy with the patriotic nationalism of Henry C.
Carey. The loose system of state-bank issues seemed to him chaotic
and he was earnest in espousal of a common national system. Lord was
an acute and stimulating thinker on monetary matters. He was one of
the first Americans to understand the significance of credit, and he
was realist enough to foresee that the system of the future would
be a credit system. This was the clue to his dissatisfaction with
the bullion theory of money, which he attacked with vigor, and to
his acceptance of the quantitative theory.[749] He had the scantest
respect for Sherman’s dogma that gold is as stable as the eternal hills
because it is “labor and value itself,” or for Wells’s belief that the
law of supply and demand automatically produces gold enough to meet
the needs of business. He would treat gold and silver as commodities
varying in price with supply and demand, and make no attempt to
relate the money scale to their fluctuations. For years, he said,
America accepted the English “standard of currency, their aristocratic
definition of wealth, and their distinction between capital and
credit,” to its disaster.
The so-called specie basis, whenever there is a foreign demand
for coin, proves to be a mere fiction, a practical humbug; and
whenever, by an excess of imports, this pretended basis is exported
to pay foreign debts, the bank-notes are withdrawn from circulation
or become worthless, the currency for the time is annihilated,
prices fall, business is suspended, debts remain unpaid, panic and
distress ensue, men in active business fail, bankruptcy, ruin, and
disgrace reign.[750]
To provide a safe, flexible, and convenient currency, Lord proposed a
system of national banknotes, based on the wealth of the country and
responsive to the needs of a business world founded on credit.
Necessity must teach us whether we can and must have a currency of
purely representative value, wholly disconnected from the precious
metals, as a basis and standard, or prolong the conflict between
coin and paper, commerce and exchange. The existing theory on the
subject is too firmly fixed by education, prescription, prejudice
and interest, to be overthrown.... Such words as _safe, secured,
national, uniform, economical, inalienable_, when predicated of
any thing but gold as currency, are to the specie-paying theorist
mere sounds devoid of significance.... Credit must triumph. Can any
one blame the well-meaning theorist if he manifests some degree of
doubt and alarm in view of the extent to which the actual use of
credit, and of the confidence in the use of credit, has already
attained?[751]
In the writings of these obscure economists are to be found the seeds
of the later agrarian program. Some of them were clear-headed and able
men, but they underestimated the power of the banking group. They
failed to realize that in a capitalistic society no monetary system
would be tolerated that was not to the bankers’ liking, and that if
it were to their liking they would easily convince the public that
it was the only honest and just system. It was this lesson that the
Greenbackers and Free Silver men were to learn. No sooner was the issue
joined between paper money and the gold standard than a scurrilous
hue and cry was raised by the “sound-money” men. The bitter dispute
that marked American politics for more than a score of years is a
classic example of the distortion of fact for partisan ends that seems
to be an inevitable consequence of referring a matter of policy to a
democratic electorate. Denunciation took the place of exposition, and
hysteria of argument; and in this revel of demagoguery the so-called
educated classes--lawyers and editors and business men--were perhaps
the most shameless purveyors of humbuggery. Stripped of all hypocrisy
the main issue was this: Should the control of currency issues--with
the delegated power of inflation and deflation--lie in the hands of
private citizens or with the elected representatives of the people?
It is a question on which wide disagreement may well exist, for it
involves important differences of social and political theory. But
the significant thing is that throughout the years when the subject
was debated in every newspaper and on every stump the real issue was
rarely presented for consideration. The bankers did not dare to present
it, for too much was at stake and once it was clearly understood by a
suspicious electorate their case was lost. Hence the strategy of the
money group was to obscure the issue, an end they achieved by dwelling
on the single point of inflation and charging the agrarians with a
dishonest policy of repudiation.
Certainly in the minds of many conscientious men the fear of
repudiation was very real and acute, and their fears made timid souls
panicky. The newspapers took their cue from this bogey and beat the
drums so loudly in the cause of “honest money” that all hope of
calm discussion was lost. The issue became so distorted from class
feeling that later historians find it difficult to view the question
dispassionately. So late as 1916 Joseph Gilpin Pyle in his _Life
of James J. Hill_ could still speak of the Greenback movement as a
vicious scheme of “inflation, the boon of the demagogue and the dream
of the great debtor class in this new country,” who “increased ... by
the opening up of the West on borrowed capital, welcomed any measure
that might give them a specious justification for discharging their
obligations with something worth less than what they had promised to
pay.” Describing the genesis of the free silver movement, he said:
Hence grew up a formidable coalition between mine owners, debtors
unable or unwilling to pay, ambitious politicians, honest theorists
led captive by barren and unpractical abstractions, and a host of
men too ignorant to inform themselves, too impassioned by what they
heard to wish to know the truth.[752]
Obviously it was not so simple--or so wicked--as that. To determine
the justice of the charge of repudiation certain facts must be borne
in mind. The gist of the money problem pressing so heavily on the
Middle Border was the question of stabilizing the currency with a view
to stabilizing prices. Under the prick of war-necessities a sharp
inflation of prices had taken place. With the drastic contraction of
the currency following the war, prices fell as sharply. From 1873 to
1896 a world-wide appreciation in the value of gold, aggravated by
recurrent economic crises, further depressed the market values of
commodities, rendering the question of the solvency of the Middle
Border increasingly doubtful. Falling prices are only the obverse of
rising money-values, and to stop the one it was proposed to cheapen
the other, either through the issue of greenbacks as proposed by the
Greenback party, or through the free coinage of silver as proposed in
the plank of the Democratic platform of 1896. It was not a question of
repudiation in favor of debtors, but a question of correcting an unjust
deflation that favored the creditor class.
IV • Greenbackism and Peter Cooper
The opposition to the program and methods of the rising plutocracy was
not confined to the farmers of the Middle Border. It was nourished by
a widespread distrust of banks and bank-currencies that was a heritage
of the Jacksonian struggle. Amongst the leaders of the Greenback
movement were many eastern men, some of wide industrial experience,
whose economic views and prejudices were a hold-over from the days
of John Taylor, and who discovered in the post-war finances the same
class manipulations of public credit that marked the funding operations
of Washington’s administration. Men as dissimilar as Horace Greeley,
Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, Henry C. Carey, and Peter Cooper,
made common cause with the western farmers in seeking to wrest control
of government from the bankers, and establish what they conceived
to be a just democratic economy. Picturesque militants grown old in
warfare, they were of an earlier generation, inheritors of the ideals
of simpler times before production for consumption had been superseded
by consumption for profit, ardent equalitarians who would not see their
hopes frustrated and America become a plutocracy without a struggle.
Greeley, Carey, and Phillips have been considered elsewhere; Stevens
was the last of the rugged equalitarians who followed their principles
to the bitter end; and Peter Cooper was an unregenerate Jeffersonian
who dedicated his last years to combating Wall Street, accepting in
1876, at the age of 85, nomination for the presidency by the National
Independent Party, commonly called the Greenback Party.
Like Thaddeus Stevens an ironmaster, grown wealthy by a long life
of useful and adventurous industry, builder of the first American
locomotive that made possible the success of the Baltimore and Ohio
railway, Peter Cooper was the most picturesque figure in New York City
in the seventies. With Bryant he shared the distinction of being the
patriarch of Broadway. Bred up amidst stern and harsh conditions, at a
period when, he said, within his “own recollection unmarried white men
could be sold for debt in the State of Connecticut,”[753] he was not
hardened by the struggle for subsistence. A tender social conscience
mellowed an old-fashioned probity and gave character and dignity to
a simple rugged nature. Transparently honest, with a certain innate
austerity softened by a homely courtesy, he was not a reed to sway
in every vagrant breeze, but a great oak with fibers toughened by
the storms of years. Like Horace Greeley, whom he much resembled in
honest kindliness, he carried the burdens of his country on his heart,
and in the midst of abundant prosperity still reckoned himself his
brother’s keeper. By “nature and temperament a radical reformer,” his
strongest instinct was a quick sense of justice. He was oppressed by
the poverty and misery he saw about him, and he gave so generously to
all good causes that he was known to his generation as “the greatest
philanthropist in the world.” His chief accomplishment was the founding
of Cooper Union for free instruction in “practical art and science,”
on which he expended a fortune.[754] But he was not one to salve his
conscience with a gift of superfluous wealth. His heart was as open as
his pocketbook, and he must explore to its hidden sources the infection
that was breeding social injustice in the new world. His private
interests never blinded him to his larger duties, but he gave his time
and strength as readily as his money to whatever cause he espoused.
Such a man was morally incapable of the buccaneering exploitation
that marked the Gilded Age. Between Peter Cooper and Jim Fisk was an
impassable gulf; they were products of different worlds and different
economies. The speculative middleman who thrust himself between the
producer and the consumer, with no sense of responsibility to either,
but concerned only with immediate profit, was a figure to excite the
wrath of an older-fashioned industrialist who had been taught that the
only just reward is the reward that comes from productive labor; and
in the days of the great barbecue Peter Cooper became deeply concerned
for the future of America. It was the new breed of bankers with their
control of the money system that were to blame, he came to believe, and
he would have reckoned himself false to the obligations of citizenship
if he failed to protest against their selfish manipulation of the
public credit. He had watched the callous juggling of the national
finances by the money-lenders during the Civil War, and had seen a debt
of some three billions nearly doubled in the decade after Appomattox
by the bond-holders. The new system of National Banks that issued
from the emergencies of war had come to control the financial policy
of the country, and to Peter Cooper it seemed that their purpose was
to perpetuate a debt that enabled them to tax the productive labor
of America and to squeeze wealth from a calculating expansion and
contraction of the currency. To surrender to such mercenaries the
sovereign power of issuing and regulating money seemed to him the
abdication of sovereignty, and in so far as he could he felt called in
honor to prevent it.
It needed rare courage and complete self-sacrifice to take up the gage
of battle and in his old age to renew the war that Andrew Jackson
had engaged in forty years before. His good name and his honorable
career could not save him from the gibes of politicians or the caustic
criticism of honest men. It was a losing fight at best. The struggle
had been venomous in Jackson’s day when the money-power was in its
infancy; and now that the banking interests had grown mighty it was
as hopeless as the charge of the Light Brigade. The cause had been
lost on the day when Congress wrote into the bill establishing a legal
tender for war purposes the single word “except,” thereby invalidating
the greenback for interest payments on bonds and duties on imports--an
act that “drew tears from the eyes of Thaddeus Stevens”; and the
bankers who could assert their control in war times had no intention a
dozen years later of suffering that control to pass from hands that had
grown enormously stronger.
Yet Peter Cooper refused to consider the outlook hopeless. With all
the resources he could command he threw himself into the struggle. He
scattered “more than a million of documents” broadcast--most of the
matter of which he wrote; he appealed to Congress and the President,
he challenged candidates, he cited the opinions of the Fathers, and
when he was buried under an avalanche of votes--as Horace Greeley
had been four years before--he preserved his faith in the “people’s
cause” and to the last day of his life kept up the great battle. “I
always have been, am, and ever shall be with the poor toilers and
producers; therefore I desire Congress to legislate for the poor as
well as for the rich, who can take care of themselves,”[755] he wrote
in his ninety-second year, and the spirit that stirred in his old veins
appears from such a comment as this:
I consider the persistent class legislation of Congress since
the war, a worse despotism than that of Great Britain before the
Revolution; because it reduces the laboring classes to periodic
distress and starvation, that are worse than any despotism ever
was; for monopolizing corporations, whether in the shape of banks
or railroads, have no soul.[756]
Peter Cooper’s political philosophy was simple and transparent. His
teachers were Albert Gallatin, Henry C. Carey, and George William
Curtis, and from them he drew three major ideas that had emerged from
three generations of American experience: the need for a national
monetary system based on legal tender; the necessity for a protective
tariff; and the need for an effective civil service. The first was
an adaptation of the old agrarian dislike of banknotes; the second
came out of Clay’s American System as it had been elaborated by Henry
C. Carey in the fifties; and the third issued from the Civil Service
Reform movement of the seventies. The exigencies of the political
situation, however, thrust into the foreground the money question,
and nine-tenths of his writings deal with that pregnant issue. As an
ardent Jacksonian he was deeply suspicious of the rising money-power,
with its corporations and monopolies, its land-grants and railways and
banks, for behind them he saw the specter of aristocracy. “In America,”
he said in 1882, “we have no aristocrats except those who have sprung
up in a night--as toad-stools do in a dung-hill.”[757] But class
legislation must end in creating classes, and at another time he said,
“There is fast forming in this country an aristocracy of wealth--the
worst form of aristocracy that can curse the prosperity of any
country.... Such an aristocracy is without soul and without patriotism.
Let us save our country from this, its most potent, and, as I hope, its
last enemy.”[758]
His deep interest in political measures was quickened by an anxious
concern at the hard times that resulted from the policy of drastic
currency deflation. That matters were going ill in America during the
middle seventies every fool knew, and Peter Cooper was only giving
expression to the common knowledge in describing to President Hayes, in
a letter dated August 6, 1876, the “appalling” economic situation. That
it was equally bad in England he did not point out.
More than two hundred thousand men, within the last few weeks, have
joined in “strikes” on the various railroad lines, the workshops
and the mines of the country, on account of the further reduction
in their wages, already reduced to the living point. That some of
these strikes have been attended with lawless and unjustifiable
violence, only shows the intensity of the evils complained of,
and the despair of the sufferers. For four years past, since the
“panic of 1873,” millions of men and women, in this hitherto rich
and prosperous country, have been thrown out of employment, or
living on precarious and inadequate wages, have felt embittered
with a lot, in which neither economy nor industry, nor a cheerful
willingness to work hard, can bring any alleviation. Is it to be
wondered at, that _enforced idleness_ has made tramps of so many of
our laboring population, or induced them to join the criminal and
dangerous classes?[759]
After pointing out the disastrous effects of such hard times on mining,
railways, real estate, and the western farmers, he asserted that the
bankers, although they also were embarrassed, were “very patient with
their troubles ... for they know, that _money is appreciating in value
all the time_.” He then uncovers the kernel of his thought--that it is
a sovereign duty of government to provide an adequate national currency.
This bondage has its manifold centre and its secret force in more
than two thousand banks, that are scattered through the country.
All these banks, are organized expressly to loan out their own
money and the money of all those, who will entrust them with
deposits. These loans are made to men, whose business-lives will
soon become dependent on money, borrowed from corporations, that
have a special interest of their own. Such a power of wealth,
under the control of the selfish instincts of mankind, will always
be able to control the action of our Government, unless that
Government is directed by strict principles of justice and of
the public welfare. The banks will favor a course of special and
partial legislation, in order to increase their power ... they will
never cease to ask for more, as long as there is more, that can be
wrung from the toiling masses of the American people.
Such a power should never be allowed to go out from the entire and
complete control of the people’s Government. The struggle with this
money-power, intrenched in the special privileges of banks, has
been going on from the beginning of the history of this country.
It has engaged the attention of our wisest and most patriotic
statesmen. Franklin, Jefferson, Webster, Calhoun, Jackson, have all
spoken of the danger of such a power and the necessity of guarding
against it.[760]
The solution he offered for the vexing monetary problem accorded with
that of the Greenback Party,[761] namely, refusal to recharter those
banks “_deceitfully styled national_” and the retirement of all bank
currency; the abandonment of the policy of currency contraction; the
issue of legal-tender notes to the amount last found necessary for the
functions of industry and business; the rejection of a specie basis,
the notes to be interconvertible with government bonds bearing interest
at 3.65 per cent; issued on demand in any amount in exchange for
legal-tender notes; and the establishment of a Postal Savings Bank. No
man ever believed more ardently in the sufficiency of his program than
Peter Cooper. It was a suggestive proposal, that only a knave would
call the visionary scheme of a fool. He was tireless in explanation and
argument, the quality of which may be judged from the following passage
from a letter to Hayes and Tilden written during the campaign of 1877:
The worth or exchangeable value of gold is as uncertain as other
products of human labor, such as wheat or cotton. The exchangeable
value of anything depends on its _convertibility into something
else_ that has value _at the option of the individual_. This
rule applies to paper money as to anything else. But how shall
Government give an exchangeable value to a paper currency? Can
it be done by a standard which is beyond its control and which
naturally fluctuates, while the sign of exchange indicated by the
paper remains the same?...
... we must trust our Government with this _whole function_ of
providing the standards and measures of exchange, as we trust
it with the weights and measures of trade.... We must require
the Government to make this currency, at all times, and, at the
option of the individual, _convertible_. But the currency must be
convertible into something over which the Government has entire
control, and to which it can give a definite as well as a permanent
value. This is its own _interest-bearing bonds_. These are, in
fact, a mortgage upon the embodied wealth of the whole country.
The reality of their value is as sound and as permanent as the
Government itself, and the degree of their value can be determined
exactly by the rate of interest the Government may think proper to
fix.[762]
The Jeffersonianism of Peter Cooper, like the Jeffersonianism of the
Middle Border, had taken a bias from the confident nationalism that
during the fifties so deeply colored American thought. To assure
an adequate national economy, superior in its self-sufficiency to
European--and especially English--policies, was a persuasive program
that Henry C. Carey devoted his later life to formulating, and that
men like Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper disseminated amongst their
wide agrarian following. That such a program implied a paternalistic
government did not trouble them. Peter Cooper accepted paternalism as
a necessary governmental function. He would have the state build and
own the great western railway systems; he would use the national domain
for the benefit of the settler; he would not turn over the state to
plunderers nor the resources of the nation to speculators. An honest
man with a sensitive social conscience, he would have no hand in the
great barbecue that wasted more than it consumed; but the times were
heedless of the counsels of honest men, and he was loved and laughed
at and ignored. Like Franklin in the Constitutional Convention, he had
outlived his generation and was thrust aside by the new economy that
was taking over the custodianship of America.[763]
Footnotes
[734] See Nevins, _The Emergence of Modern America_, pp. 163-164
[735] _The Statutes at Large: 7 & 8 Victoriae_, Vol. 84, pp. 188-189.
[736] _Speeches and Reports on Finance and Taxation_, pp. 188, 190.
[737] _Ibid._, p. 233.
[738] “Speech of January 24, 1870,” _ibid._, pp. 225-226.
[739] This laid him open to frequent and often bitter attack. See,
among many, Mrs. Marion Todd, _Pizzaro and John Sherman_, Chicago, 1891.
[740] _Practical Economics_, p. 54.
[741] _The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption_, p. 10.
[742] _Ibid._, p. 10.
[743] _Ibid._, p. 13.
[744] J. A. Woodburn, _The Life of Thaddeus Stevens_, p. 573.
[745] _Ibid._, p. 573.
[746] _Ibid._, pp. 573-574.
[747] See, amongst many, _Homo’s Letters on a National Currency_,
Washington, 1817; _Currency Explosions, their Cause and Cure_, New
York, 1858; _Our Currency: Some of Its Evils, and the Remedies for
them_, by a Citizen of North Carolina, Raleigh, 1861.
[748] His titles are: _Credit, Currency and Banking_, New York, 1828;
_A Letter on the National Currency_, New York, 1861; _Six Letters on
the Necessity and Practicability of a National Currency, etc._, New
York, 1862; and _National Currency: A Review of the National Banking
Law_, New York, 1863.
[749] From what source Lord, and the other amateur economists, derived
their theory is not clear. It is possible, of course, to assume that
it was from Ricardo and the English economists. For an analysis and
rejection of the quantity theory, see J. Lawrence Laughlin, _The
Principles of Money_, Chapter VIII.
[750] _A Review of the National Banking Law_, p. 8.
[751] _Ibid._, p. 34.
[752] Vol. I, p. 485.
[753] _Ideas for a Science of Good Government_, p. iii.
[754] _Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper_, p. 23.
[755] _Ideas for a Science of Good Government_, p. 272.
[756] _Ibid._, p. 271.
[757] _Ibid._, p. 261.
[758] _Ibid._, p. 123.
[759] _Ibid._, p. 117-118.
[760] _Ibid._, pp. 109-110.
[761] See _Ibid._, pp. 59-60.
[762] _The Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper_, pp. 22-23.
[763] In his original plan Professor Parrington included here a
discussion entitled “Bimetallism: A heritage of Jacksonian democracy;
Ignatius Donnelly, ‘Coin’ Harvey,” but from the references in the next
chapter it seems evident that as he worked out his plan he decided to
omit this.--_Publisher._
Chapter II • The Democracy of the Age of Innocence
I • Capitalistic Encroachments
With its heritage of Jacksonianism it was natural for the agrarian
movement to attempt to carry further the exploration of the democratic
principle, seeking to complete the program that had been left
unfulfilled by the Fathers. There were few as yet who questioned
the finality of democracy as a political system or its adequacy to
all social needs. The growing evils of American life were traced
unhesitatingly to an imperfect democratic control of the forces of
exploitation. If the plutocracy were making gains at the expense of the
plain people it was due to defective governmental machinery, and the
immediate problem was the readjustment of that machinery. There must be
an extension of democratic control over the economics of society. The
great principle of _laissez faire_, that had proved so useful in the
earlier struggle against aristocratic paternalisms, was become a shield
and buckler for the plutocracy that was rising from the freedoms of a
let-alone policy. To curb the ambitions of that plutocracy and preserve
the democratic bequest for the common benefit of all, was therefore the
immediate problem of the times.
To this end two things remained to be achieved: to wrest possession
of the government from the hands of the plutocracy that was befouling
it, and to use it for democratic rather than plutocratic ends. The
difficulties in the way were many. Entrenched behind the checks and
balances of a complex constitution the plutocracy could not easily be
dislodged from power; even if it were driven out of the legislative
and executive branches of government it would find aid and succor in
the judiciary, where a masterful corporation law was interpreted by a
bench tender toward all property rights, and jealous of its sovereign
prerogative of reviewing all legislative enactments. A surprising
change had come over the attitude of the governing class towards
democracy. Having gained control of the machinery of government the
plutocracy found no cause to quarrel with a situation wholly to its
liking. It had mastered the gentle art of guiding the majority will,
and secure--as it believed--in its control of the political state,
it counted on an indefinite continuation of the policy of preëmption
and exploitation. From such a group, whether in Wall Street or at
Washington, no new theories of government were to be expected. Business
men wanted to be let alone. They clung to the anarchism of the
Enlightenment and were stout in defense of the principle of individual
initiative. So late as 1916 a group of confirmed individualists
reissued Spencer’s _Man Versus the State_, with an introduction by
Elihu Root, to combat the rising spirit of governmental control. They
regarded the American system of government as adequate and final, and
wanted no subversive changes. The Constitution had been completed by
the post-war enactments that fixed the status of the negro, and for a
generation thereafter--except for the silent changes wrought by the
judiciary--it remained static. East of the Allegheny Mountains popular
interest in political theory had come to an end. A group of academic
thinkers like John W. Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, an occasional
intellectual like Brooks Adams, isolated radicals like Johann Most
and small Marxian groups in Chicago and New York, and leaders of the
new proletarian movement like Terence V. Powderly, were still acutely
concerned about political theory; but these men and their theories
counted for little in the stodgy mass of capitalistic America. The
political phase had passed over into the economic; politics was wholly
divorced from reality.
But throughout the Middle Border and on to the Pacific Coast the
spirit of political democracy was alive and vigorous. There the older
frontier Jacksonianism still lingered. For upwards of a half a century
creative political thinking in America was largely western agrarian,
and from this source came those democratic ideas that were to provide
the staple of a later liberalism. The conscious objective of this great
movement was to complete the work begun by Jacksonianism, and create a
political machinery that should enable the democracy to withstand the
shock of the Industrial Revolution. Many thinkers contributed to the
work--U’Ren of Oregon, Jerry Simpson of Kansas, Tom Watson of Georgia,
“Coin” Harvey of Arkansas, General Weaver of Iowa, Ignatius Donnelly
of Minnesota, Henry D. Lloyd of Chicago, to name a handful out of the
mass--homespun realists who have been forgotten by a later generation,
but whose labors were given to the necessary work of refashioning
the political machinery of America, and whose program provided the
materials for the later Progressive party. They were commoners, men of
the people, unversed in the dogmas of the schools, idealists who drew
their inspiration from the Declaration of Independence; they spoke
for an older America that feared the rising plutocracy, and they were
casting about for ways and means to cut its claws. From their labors
came the Greenback Movement, the Farmers’ Alliance, Populism; and from
them came in turn the Progressive Movement that reaped what they had
sown.
II • Third-Party Movements
It is, perhaps, not extreme to interpret the political history of
America since 1790 as largely a struggle between the spirit of the
Declaration of Independence and the spirit of the Constitution, the one
primarily concerned with the rights of man, the other more practically
concerned with the rights of property. The humanitarian idealism of the
Declaration has always echoed as a battle-cry in the hearts of those
who dream of an America dedicated to democratic ends. It cannot be long
ignored or repudiated, for sooner or later it returns to plague the
councils of practical politics. It is constantly breaking out in fresh
revolt. When the major parties have grown callous and indifferent to
the wishes of the common people, it has reformulated its principles in
third-party platforms. Without its freshening influence our political
history would have been much more sordid and materialistic. With the
exception of such sporadic outbursts as Antimasonry and Knownothingism,
the third-party movements of the nineteenth century were democratic
movements, inspired by a sense of social justice, founded on the
Declaration of Independence, and promulgated to recall the American
people to their heritage of idealism. The Locofoco party, the Freesoil
party, the early Republican party, the Greenback party, the Populist
party, the Progressive party, however they differed in immediate
programs, have had a common objective, namely, to set man above
property as the great object of governmental concern, and preserve in
America the democratic principle of equal opportunity.
Despite the fact that they failed in their immediate objectives they
served the larger purpose of reminding the major parties that America
professes to be a democratic country, and that party platforms must be
brought to square with that fact. Thus interpreted the history of party
struggle since 1790 falls into three broad phases: the Jeffersonian
movement that established the ideal of political democracy; the
Jacksonian movement that established equalitarianism crudely in
practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted, in
successive reactions, to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend
the field, and to perfect the machinery of democratic government. Since
the rise of the slavery controversy the major parties, allied with
masterful economic groups, have persistently ignored the Declaration
of Independence, and repudiated in practice the spirit of democracy.
To prevent if possible so grave a treason to our traditional ideals,
to assert the rights of the common man against the encroachments of
a class, has been therefore the common mission of the third-party
movements. The significance of their somewhat scanty success is
something the thoughtful American may interpret as he will.
Since Civil War days, discontent has been endemic in the Middle Border,
and it has broken out in three great political upheavals: the Greenback
movement of the seventies; the Populist movement of the eighties and
nineties; and the Non-Partisan League movement of the second decade
of the present century. Issuing from a profound resentment at the
exploitation from which the farmer suffered, they mark a persistent
drift away from the old Jacksonian individualism and an advance toward
a socialized conception of the political state. Disciplined by hard
times the farmers were learning a lesson from capitalistic Whiggery;
if the political state had proved serviceable to business why should
it not prove serviceable to agriculture? Why should not a democratic
state consider the producers as well as the middleman? Why should it
not provide a national currency, a national system of transportation,
a democratic banking system, a standard system of grain-grading,
public elevators, crop insurance, and the like? Why should the farmer
be squeezed at every turn by private companies who did badly what the
state could do well? By 1917, in short, the Middle Border had got far
from the simple individualism of earlier days and was well advanced
toward state socialism; and it was only the ruthless opposition of the
business interests, that had no wish to see their private preserves
thus rudely invaded, that put a stop to the movement.
Back of all these agrarian programs was the greater problem of the
popular control of the political state. How could the undisciplined
majority hold in check the disciplined minority? How could poverty meet
wealth on an equal footing? The control of politics had fallen into
the hands of the machine, and the machine served property interests.
Legislatures were bought and sold like corner lots; senatorships went
to the highest bidder; judges were more responsive to the wishes of
bankers than to those of farmers. To break the power of the machine
there must be an extension of democratic control, and to that end
new machinery must be provided. Hence the vast agrarian concern
with political machinery. From the agrarian agitation--supplemented
by proletarian and middle-class recruits--has come the Australian
ballot, the Initiative and the Referendum, the Recall, the Direct
Primary, and popular election of Senators. The only important agrarian
principle that has not been adopted is the principle of proportional
representation. If agrarianism lost its great battle over the currency,
it won the battle over the income tax. Nullified by a scandalous court
decision after it had been long accepted, the income tax was finally
established by the tedious method of constitutional amendment--an
outcome that owed much to the Middle Border. In casting up the accounts
of American democracy, the largest sums must be credited to the Middle
Border, as in earlier years they were credited to the Jacksonian
frontier. Whether the new machinery is useful or merely cumbersome,
there is much disagreement, but it is agrarian in origin and it came
from an honest attempt to democratize American politics.[764]
Footnotes
[764] The Contents here calls for a third section on the “Populistic
Program” (see p. xxxiv for details) and a fourth on “William Jennings
Bryan.”--_Publisher._
Chapter III • Literature and the Middle Border[765]
III • Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border
It was not till the end of the eighties that the bitterness of the
frontier began to creep into literature. Its slackness and drab
poverty had got into the pages of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, as its
neighborliness had got into Riley; but in these earlier studies there
was no brooding sense of social injustice, of the wrongs done the
Middle Border by unjust laws, of the hardships that are increased
by the favoritism of government. In the year 1887, however, came a
significant change of temper. Three very different writers--Harold
Frederic, Joseph Kirkland, and Hamlin Garland--turned to the theme of
farm life, and dealt with it in a mordantly realistic vein. It was the
first conscious literary reaction to the subjection of agriculture to
capitalistic exploitation and it was marked by the bitterness of a
decaying order.
_Seth’s Brother’s Wife_, by Harold Frederic, is a drab tale of farm
life in upper York State, as bitter as any tale of the western border.
It is a story of defeat, of flight from country to town. The blight
of failure is upon the farming community--a blight that embitters old
and young; and the sketches of country louts, of soured lives, of
broken men and women, do not make pleasant reading. No gentle idyllic
light rests on the landscape such as Sarah Orne Jewett discovers on
the fields and villages of New England. Sabrina Fairchild, an old maid
embittered by the family failure, yet clinging to the family pride
and hopeful that the family prestige will be restored, is a pathetic
and desolate figure, gaunt and sharp-tongued; at mortal feud with
another pathetic old woman, who with her husband had emigrated from
Massachusetts years before, and held herself proudly above the mean and
vulgar neighborhood in which they had settled. The slack servants,
gossipy and impudent, the petty lives, the grasping ways unrelieved by
any grace or beauty, and set in a world of petty machine politics, make
a drab and unattractive picture. Harold Frederic quite evidently hates
this countryside that bred him. He will not, like Hamlin Garland, take
up the battle for it against the town. He sees no hope in political
programs; he is no Populistic agrarian fighting for justice; he wants
only to escape from it to the city, where life may be lived more
generously. The “trail of the serpent is over it all,” he remarks,
“rich and poor, big and little. The nineteenth century is a century of
cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age--and
the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps
there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls
daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul,
but this isn’t the century ... get out of it as soon as you can.”[766]
Much less bitter and hopeless is _Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring
County_ (1887), by Joseph Kirkland, son of Matilda Kirkland, who a
generation before had written sketches of the Michigan frontier.
In the preface the author points out that his study is “a palpable
imitation of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’” an “attempt
to reproduce, on American soil, the unflinching realism ... of life
down in actual contact with the soil itself.” It is a tale of pioneer
days in Illinois, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and
it draws a full-length portrait of the son of a Pennsylvania immigrant
who struggles up from mean beginnings to prosperity. The niggardliness
of frontier life is drawn unsparingly--the harsh struggle for
subsistence--but there is no outcry against governmental favoritisms or
the law’s injustice. It is nature that must be fought and conquered,
and the battle needs strong men who must subdue their finer natures
and more generous impulses to the work of acquisition. Zury Prouder
is a masterful fellow who bends every energy to the business of
accumulation. He makes one hand wash the other, and by dint of saving
and squeezing and trading and foreclosing he slowly amasses wealth and
power. He is a thrifty farmer as well as a shrewd trader, but his soul
is seared by the frontier meanness--squeezed into land and stock and
mortgages, consumed with the passion for grabbing. It was a reaction
from the skimpiness of his youth. The bitterness of poverty had
entered his heart as a boy, and his life took shape from the youthful
resolve--
“Dad, I’m goin’ t’own a mortgage ’fore I die; mind what I say.”
“Hope ye will, Zury,” his father replies. “Yew’ll have a holt of
the right eend of the poker then; ’n’ t’other feller he’ll have a
holt o’ the hot part, same’s we’ve got naow.”
“You bet! An’ it’ll sizzle his hands, tew, afore I’ll ever let up
on him.”
But Kirkland will not let Zury remain a crabbed and hard-fisted son of
the frontier. As the frontier hardships grow less the soul that has
been seared by poverty is awakened to more generous impulses. Late
in life Zury is taken in hand by a Boston woman who had come out as
a schoolteacher years before, and whom Zury had given up for a bride
with a rich farm, but to whom he eventually returns. Under her care
the plates of mail are stripped from his heart, his better nature
expands, and the meanest man in Spring County ripens into a kindly and
lovable old age. What poverty and hardship had warped and twisted, love
straightens out and ennobles; the meanness of the frontier is washed
away as the rich soil yields a more abundant life. It is not a great
book, but it is vigorous and honest, and its earlier chapters contain
some admirable bits of realism. As one of the first stories of the
western farmer it is secure of a place in the history of our American
fiction.
It was this same year, 1887, that Hamlin Garland, alone and brooding
over his studies at the Boston Public Library, wrote his first sketches
of life in the Middle Border. The romance was fading from the prairies
when he took up his pen. The Golden West of Mark Twain and the bucolic
West of Whitcomb Riley had both slipped into the past and the day that
was rising was to bring its discouragements that seared men’s hopes
as the hot winds seared the fields of rustling corn. The burdens of
the western farmer were heavy on his shoulders and he could foresee
no time when they would be lighter. Depression had settled on the
Middle Border, and Hamlin Garland returning to the familiar fields
from his Boston studies felt the depression in every fiber of his
being. This was his land and his people. The blight laid upon men and
women and children by the drab pioneer life was a familiar fact to
him. The Garlands and the McClintocks had suffered from it as their
neighbors suffered, and a rebellious wrath filled his heart as he
contemplated the Middle Border--the barnyards where tired men did the
evening chores, the ungainly houses where tired women stood over hot
stoves, the fertile acres that produced more than the markets consumed.
It was a life without grace or beauty or homely charm--a treadmill
existence that got nowhere. If this were the Valley of Democracy
then the democracy was a mean thing and hopeless, and having himself
escaped from it he would do what he could to help others escape. In
the completeness of his disillusion the glamour of romance was swept
away and he proposed to set down in honest plain words the manner of
life lived by these Middle Border folk, and the sort of earnings won by
their toil. He would speak frankly out of the common bitter experience.
The way to truth was the way of realism.
To a later generation that never knew the pioneer hardships of the
Middle Border, Hamlin Garland seems strangely remote and old-fashioned;
yet his intellectual antecedents are both ancient and honorable. At
bottom he is an idealist of the old Jeffersonian breed, an earnest
soul devoid of humor, who loves beauty and is mightily concerned about
justice, and who, discovering little beauty and finding scant justice
in the world where fate first set him, turned rebel and threw in his
lot with the poor and the exploited. As a young man, consumed with a
desire to speak for his people, he espoused a somber realism, for only
by and through the truth could he hope to dislodge from men’s minds the
misconceptions that stood in the way of justice. The Middle Border had
no spokesman at the court of letters and if he could gain a hearing
there he must not betray his father’s household by glossing ungainly
reality; he must depict the life of the western farmer as it was lived
under the summer sun and the winter cold, what harvests were brought to
crib and what sort of wealth was finally gathered.
And yet in the light of his total work one hesitates to call Garland a
realist. Perhaps more justly he might be called a thwarted romantic,
and his early rebellious realism be traced to its source in a
passionate refusal to be denied the beauty that should be a portion of
any rational way of living; for when later he found himself in a land
of nobler horizons, unsoiled as yet by crude frontier exploitation,
when he looked out upon vast mountain ranges and felt the warm sun on
the gray plains, he discovered there the romance of his dreams and
fell to describing the strange splendors with the gusto of a naïve
romantic. _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_ are the protest
of one oppressed with the meanness of a world that takes such heavy
toll of human happiness; _Her Mountain Lover_ is the expression of
a frank romantic who glories in the nobility of nature’s noblemen;
and _The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop_ is a tale in which romance
is justified by ethics and the hero discovers in the protection of a
weaker race the deepest satisfactions of life. Beauty is excellent, but
beauty should walk hand in hand with service--not art for art’s sake,
but art subdued to the higher good of humanity.
Between these extremes of a stark realism and an ethical romanticism,
stand two books, separated by many years and great changes, that embody
in more finished form the theme which after all was the master passion
of Garland’s life--the Middle Border and the rebellions it bred. _Rose
of Dutcher’s Coolly_ is a full-length portrait of an idealist in revolt
against the narrowness of farm life, and _A Son of the Middle Border_
is an idyll of the past, autobiography done in mellower years when the
passions of youth have been subdued to less exigent demands. These
books, together with the sketches of _Main-Travelled Roads_ and the
militant critical theory of _Crumbling Idols_, contain pretty much the
whole of Hamlin Garland that after years have cared to remember--the
saga of the Middle Border in the days of its great rebellion when the
earlier hopes of boundless prosperity were turning to ashes in the
mouth.
The striking originality of Garland’s work, that sets it apart from
other studies of the local-color school, sprang from the sincerity of
his reaction to environment. His intellectual development followed the
needs of his ardent, inquisitive nature. After quitting the little
Academy at Osage, Iowa, he went forth in quest of an education that
should explain to him the meaning of life as he had known it. In this
search he was singularly fortunate. He was his own mentor and he took
what he needed. Boston had long been the Mecca of his dreams and when
he found himself there--having made a pious pilgrimage as Howells had
done a generation earlier--he threw himself upon his studies with
ascetic zeal. Fortunately he enrolled in the Boston Public Library
instead of at Harvard, and his formless radicalisms there found food
in plenty. Though he lived in Boston some ten years and made friends,
he never penetrated the inner literary sanctuary. A somewhat forlorn
outsider, unknown and unvouched for, he found no welcome as Howells and
Twain had found, and he never entered the pleasant circles where Holmes
and Lowell and Fields and Norton and Aldrich and Howells held sway.
Perhaps that fact unconsciously determined his scornful rejection
of the Boston genteel in literature; at any rate his denial of the
sovereignty of the New England literary rulers left him free to follow
other masters who seemed to him more significant. In his bleak little
room his ear had caught the greater voices then sounding in Europe
and America. His masters were men of intellectual horizons unbounded
by Beacon Street and Harvard Square: Taine and Ibsen and Björnson,
Turgenev and Tolstoi, Zola and Millet, Darwin and Spencer and Fiske,
Walt Whitman and Henry George, and the later Howells with his deeper
sociological concern and graver realism. His three great masters came
finally to be Whitman, Spencer, and Henry George. To these greater
names should be added that of Edward Eggleston, who had been his
boyhood idol, and that of Joseph Kirkland, who did much to stimulate
and guide his earliest sketches. He did not absorb all these men had
to give. He could not stretch his provincial mind suddenly to compass
the intellectual realm of his masters. But something he got and that
something, woven into the fabric of his thinking, was to make him
free. It was the best school of the times, and from his studies Hamlin
Garland emerged an uncompromising radical, one of a group of eager
young men who gathered about B. O. Flower, and in the sympathetic pages
of the _Arena_ published their divers radicalisms to a hostile world.
He was ready to proclaim new social and literary creeds, ready to go
forth to do battle for democratic justice and a democratic art.
The gist of Garland’s new literary creed is set forth in _Crumbling
Idols_, written in the earliest years of the nineties, when Chicago was
preparing the setting for the World’s Fair, and gathered into book form
in 1894. It is realism modified by the local-color school, by French
impressionism, and by Whitman--intensely individualistic, ardently
social, and militantly democratic. It would sweep away every fetish of
great reputations and authoritative schools, and insist that the artist
confront the life that he knows and tell of it truthfully. Following
the French example he calls this iconoclastic realism, Veritism. “The
_theory_ of the veritist,” he says, “is, after all, a statement of his
passion for truth and for individual expression,” and he then goes on:
Art, I must insist, is an individual thing,--the question of one
man facing certain facts and telling his individual relations to
them. His first care must be to present his own concept. This is,
I believe, the essence of veritism. “Write of those things of
which you know most, and for which you care most. By so doing you
will be true to yourself, true to your locality, and true to your
time.”[767]
But Veritism in the hands of a disciple of Taine, Whitman, Henry
George, and Herbert Spencer must take on ethical values and serve the
common well-being. All art, he insists, is “sociologic,” and realism is
harsh because it is hopeful.
Because the fictionist of to-day sees a more beautiful and
peaceful future social life, and, in consequence, a more beautiful
and peaceful literary life, therefore he is encouraged to deal
truthfully and at close grapple with the facts of his immediate
present. His comment virtually amounts to satire or prophesy, or
both. Because he is sustained by love and faith in the future, he
can be mercilessly true. He strikes at thistles, because he knows
the unrotted seed of loveliness and peace needs but sun and the air
of freedom to rise to flower and fragrance.
The realist or veritist is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees
life in terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it
is; but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is
to be, by contrast.... He aims to hasten the age of beauty and
peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present; but
ever the converse of his picture rises in the mind of the reader.
He sighs for a lovelier life. He is tired of warfare and diseased
sexualism, and Poverty the mother of Envy. He is haggard with
sympathetic hunger, and weary with the struggle to maintain his
standing place on this planet, which he conceives was given to all
as the abode of peace. With his hate in his heart and this ideal
in his brain the modern man writes his stories of life. They are
not always pleasant, but they are generally true, and always they
provoke thought.[768]
It is an excellent self-portrait of the young realist of that early
time when all the rebellions of his blood cried out for expression--the
troubled years between 1887 and 1893 when the Border was rising and
the son of the Border found the flames of his discontent fanned by
many winds. From such roots came the most acrid tales that had as yet
fruited in American fiction. Few as were the stories of _Main-Travelled
Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_, they constitute a landmark in our literary
history, for they were the first authentic expression and protest of an
agrarian America then being submerged by the industrial revolution. No
other man in our literature had known so intimately the Middle Border
as Hamlin Garland--its restless swarmings from the old hive, never
pausing long enough to gather the honey of the new fields, its heedless
venturings for the reputed gold that lay beyond the farthest sunsets.
He had responded to the spell that kept the pioneer moving West; the
allurement of the untamed prairie, the poetry of dawn and twilight. But
the poignant spell had been broken for him by the drab realities that
lay between the dawn and the twilight--the crushing round of toil that
took such heavy toll of men’s development and women’s happiness. He was
familiar with the blight as well as the bloom of the frontier. He had
seen his uncle David McClintock broken by the Border--the great wistful
man with the soul of a musician; he had seen his mother fail under the
burden--the cheerful, uncomplaining wife, joining with her rich voice
in the pioneer’s song of “O’er the hills in legions, Boys!” And after
the disillusion of his final defeat on the bleak Dakota plains--by
1883 woodland and meadow were pretty much alienated from the public
domains and only plains and deserts and mountain valleys and forests
remained--his eyes were opened at last. “I clearly perceived,” he said
afterwards, “that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn
of fugitives!” So he turned his face to the East to seek the land of
desire in Boston.
That chapter of his life was ended. He had learned that the old
romantic tales of the Border were lies to him, whatever they may have
been to earlier generations; but he had yet to naturalize himself in
the realm of ideas, and analyze the experiences of his youth in the
light of current social liberalisms. He had begun that work in 1883
on his raw Dakota claim where his leisure hours were given to Taine’s
theory of literary determinism, and Henry George’s new gospel of
single-tax; and he carried it rapidly forward during three years of
eager reading. During those quiet months in Boston when he was making
himself at home in the world of contemporary thought, he sketched the
first of the stories of western life which later he gathered together
in _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_. “You’re the first actual
farmer in American fiction,” said his friend Kirkland, “now tell the
truth about it.” This handful of short stories, fierce in the repressed
passion of the writer’s heart, was Garland’s reply to the old romantic
myths of the West. In these acrid pages life is not bucolic, it does
not chew the cud of contentment “knee-deep in June,” but it is stained
with dust and sweat, lacerated by raw nerves, depressed by a sense of
economic failure.
Of the lives of these labor-burdened men and women he intended to tell
the whole truth. But, as he confessed later, he could not. “Even my
youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a revelation of the lives led by
the women on the farms of the middle border. Before the tragic futility
of their suffering, my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden
chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil.” It was hard for
him to view it all with the calm detachment of the objective realist;
the Border life was too deeply and intimately personal to him, it had
marked him too harshly. And yet in the sense of conveying the spirit of
reality he succeeded greatly, and these earliest tales remain notable
work which later years have not forgotten. The subdued words of the
Prologue offer the fittest of commentaries on the spirit in which they
were done.
The Main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and
dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and
spring, and in winter the winds sweep across it; but it does
sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and
bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may
lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally
over its shallows. Mainly it is long and weariful, and has a dull
little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the
main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of
people, but the poor and the weary predominate.
_Main-Travelled Roads_, in its harsh objectivity, belonged to the
earlier eighties, to the time when the spirit of unrest was still
obscurely fermenting in the western mind, before it had clarified in
definite agrarian movements and measures. It is clouded by doubt and
harassed by uncertainty. No hope offers a way out of the weary tangle.
Its psychology is that of the first mood of dejection that came with
the failure of western agriculture with its virgin fields, its new
machinery, and its specialized crops, to adjust itself to the new
capitalistic order. The simple agrarian mind had not learned to play
the new game. The sons of the Middle Border were children of the Gilded
Age as truly as Colonel Sellers or Commodore Vanderbilt; they were
plungers and speculators in land and crops; but they were no match for
the Main Street plungers and speculators; and when bankruptcy instead
of riches rewarded their hardships, they were embittered. Out of that
very natural bitterness sprang the movement of Populism that proposed
to take government out of the hands of Main Street and make it serve
agriculture. It was the understanding of this fact that made Howells
so sympathetic a critic of Garland. But he would encourage the artist
rather than the reformer.
... these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul
and trampled slush, of the common avenues of life, the life of the
men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches
the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer.
If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the
farmers of the West which is the translation of the Peasants’ War
into modern and republican terms, let him read _Main-Travelled
Roads_, and he will begin to understand.... The stories are full of
those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our
satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind
groping for fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and
so menacing to the politicians. They feel that something is wrong,
and they know that the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr.
Garland’s book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but
it is heart-breaking in its rude despair.[769]
Too soon, however, the will to remain objective weakened and his work
took on a different note. “Obscurely forming in my mind,” he says of
the year 1889, “were two great literary concepts--that truth was a
higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice
should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely
beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness
of others a monstrous egotism.”[770] With this ethical conception of
art he returned in 1889 to the old home, after a six years’ absence,
to experience a poignant reaction to the change that had come over
the Border. “Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were
deeply disheartened,” he wrote later. “The holiday spirit of eight
years before had entirely vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion
against government and against God.”[771]
Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle
and half-hidden despair.... All the gilding of farm life melted
away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood.
Nature was as beautiful as ever. The soaring sky was filled with
shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink’s fairy bells rose from
the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous grass and waving
grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset, could conceal
the poverty of these people; on the contrary, they brought out,
with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these
homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical routine of these
lives. I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw
lovely girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of
the women I had known had withered into querulous and complaining
spinsterhood, and I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of
the farm. “Of such pain and futility are the lives of the average
man and woman of both city and country composed,” I acknowledged to
myself with candor, “Why lie about it?”[772]
In such a mood the call of social justice was too insistent to be
denied. “With William Morris and Henry George I exclaimed, ‘Nature
is not to blame. Man’s laws are to blame’!” And so the young man of
twenty-nine threw himself into the agrarian cause. He took the platform
with Mary Ellen Lease and was glad of the farmers’ approval of the
new doctrine of less corn and more hell. Under the urging of his
friend Flower he planned to put the Populist movement into fiction and
wrote _A Spoil of Office_. The familiar Iowa backgrounds are in the
story--the harsh lives and bent weary figures of men and women--but
there is also an idealized heroine who suggests what life may become
when injustice is done away with and the blighting toil is lessened--a
figure who, as Grange lecturer and Farmers’ Alliance speaker, may
have been suggested by Mary Ellen Lease. Much inferior as it is to
_Main-Travelled Roads_--a social tract rather than a work of art--we
cannot well spare it from our Middle Border literature, for it has
captured and preserves for later times the spirit of the passionate
uprising of the farmers, and it recalls the vast hopes that fermented
in that revolt--not well grounded, perhaps, but warm and human. “The
heart and center of this movement,” says Ida Wilbur, “is a demand for
justice, not for ourselves alone, but for the toiling poor wherever
found.... It is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it
is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery.”[773] There are
echoes of an older and simpler America in these pages, of discontents
that were put down but not removed--Jacksonianisms, Greenbackisms,
anti-monopolistic crusades. Yet they look forward to a time when beauty
and well-being shall be the common portion of those who do the work
of the world. The way, alas, is “long and weary, and thousands and
millions of us must die on the road, I am afraid,” says the heroine;
but go forward they must, along other paths than the path of capitalism.
Less significant is _Jason Edwards: An Average Man_ (1891), that is an
elaboration of the note, “The air is full of revolt against things as
they are.” It is a single-tax reply to the question of a young girl,
“Are there any happy people in the world--any working people, I mean?
Are they all cross and tired and worried and full of care, as we are
here?” The story is two chapters in the life of a workingman--his
struggle in Boston as a mechanic, and his struggle in Minnesota,
whither he flees for a refuge on a homestead. Defeat awaits him in
the end, and the conclusion is an illustration of Henry George’s
thesis that poverty is the entail of land rent. In this and in other
studies done under the influence of B. O. Flower, whose appetite for
reform literature was insatiable, Hamlin Garland had ceased to be an
objective realist and turned propagandist, bringing down on his head
the criticisms of conservative readers. One of his friends went so far
as to expostulate over the folly of his course. “It is a mistake for
you to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like
Whitman,” he said. “It is a mistake to be published in the _Arena_.
Your book should have been brought out by one of the old established
firms. If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse
the governing classes, you will succeed.”[774]
It is the agrarian background of Garland’s mind that makes him seem
old-fashioned to a generation that has forgotten the agrarian roots
of our past growth. He was so deeply colored by this earlier native
America that he never outgrew it; and when the Populistic revolt had
died down, when this last organized agrarian rebellion against the
exploiting middle class had become only an episode in our history,
he had outlived his day. He was too deeply stirred by Whitman’s
romantic faith in democracy, too narrowly a disciple of Henry George’s
Jeffersonian economics, to fit into an industrializing America. Despite
his discipleship to European realism he refused to go with the group
of young left-wing naturalists who were boldly venturing on new ways
of fiction. He would not follow the path of naturalism. Of Norris’s
_McTeague_ he said, “What avail is this study of sad lives? for it
does not even lead to a notion of social betterment.”[775] He could
not bring himself to accept the major criteria of naturalism as they
were exemplified in the work of Zola and Strindberg and Hauptmann.
A native Jeffersonian, inspired by Whitman and instructed by Henry
George and Herbert Spencer, would reject the somber, mechanistic
background of naturalist thought. He had learned his science of the
Victorian evolutionists, with their grandiose conception of a far-flung
beneficent progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and
the backgrounds of his mind were radiant with promise. Neither a
mechanistic science nor a regimented industrialism had risen in his
outlook to bank the fires of his hope. No impersonal determinism had
chilled his belief in man as a free-will agent in a moral universe.
The vast bleak chemical cosmos that bewildered Theodore Dreiser
did not rise before him to dwarf the individual nor overwhelm his
aspirations. Like a French romantic of a hundred years before, he
remained a confirmed optimist who believed that the future will correct
the mistakes of the past, and the peace and beauty for which the
human race longs lie immediately ahead. The art of the young man was
becoming old-fashioned in the world of Stephen Crane; his ideals were
Victorian in the days of Mark Hanna. And so after the agrarian revolt
had failed and America lay fat and contented in the lap of McKinley
prosperity, he found himself a man without a country, an alien in
an industrializing order, and he turned away to the newer West and
the romance he had always sought. While America was driving towards
regimentation he traveled backward in time to recover a vanishing world
of individualism, and the distance rapidly widened between them.
In those romantic wanderings through Colorado and California and
into the far Northwest he found a new interest in the frontiersman’s
exploitation of the Indian, and in _The Captain of the Gray-Horse
Troop_ and _The Eagle Heart_ he has wedded his social ethics to French
romanticism, and endowed man in a state of nature with exalted social
responsibilities. The old theme is dressed in new clothes and Captain
Curtis of the Gray-Horse Troop becomes an Indian agent fighting the
lawless and cruel encroachment of the frontiersmen upon the Indian
rights; but the theme remains. Garland hated the frontier as fiercely
as Cooper hated it, and like him he loved the clean free spaces; but
when after his long and somewhat futile rambles he returned to the
Middle Border, he found there a new light upon the familiar fields and
in that light he wrote his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks.
This was to be his great bequest to American letters. To have sought
the spirit of the Middle Border in its hopes and its defeat, to have
written the history of the generation that swept across the western
prairies, is to compress within covers a great movement and a great
experience--one of the significant chapters in our total American
history.
Footnotes
[765] In Professor Parrington’s plan the section given here was to be
preceded by a first section on “Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism,”
and a second on “Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance.”--_Publisher._
[766] Chapter IV, pp. 26-27.
[767] Chapter III, p. 35.
[768] Chapter IV, pp. 51-53.
[769] Introduction to _Main-Travelled Roads_.
[770] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 374.
[771] _Ibid._, Chapter XXIX.
[772] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVIII, pp. 364-365.
[773] _Ibid._, p. 245.
[774] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXXI, p. 417.
[775] _Critic_, Vol. 42, pp. 216-218.
Part Two: Proletarian Hopes[776]
Footnotes
[776] The first chapter of this section was to have been “Plutocracy
and the Workingman,” the second “The Rise of the Left.” For the
contents see p. xxxv.--_Publisher._
Chapter III • The Quest of Utopia
From the welter of unrest of the later years of the century, with
its labor struggles, its agrarian bitterness, its concern over the
exhaustion of the public lands and a pinching monetary system, its
acute distrust of monopolies and corporate power, sprang a very natural
eagerness to forecast the future and blaze new roads that might
lead to the democratic Canaan. Whither the main-traveled road would
lead, discerning idealists knew only too well. To bog down in a mire
of plutocracy would be a sorry ending to the great experiment; yet
the mud was deepening with every mile of advance and unless another
highway appeared the situation was unpromising. The crux of the problem
seemed to reside in an extension of the powers of the political state,
converting to social ends powers that hitherto had been serving private
gain. The plutocracy was pointing the way. If the political state were
fairly dedicated to democratic ends, why should not society go forward
toward a true commonwealth, founded on a social economy and dedicated
to common justice and the common well-being? There was need only to
subordinate private interests to collective interests, and substitute
coöperation for the present mad scramble of selfish individualism.
In elaboration of this pregnant thought a surprising number of social
romances appeared during the last quarter of the century, that were
native counterparts of the greater studies in collectivism by European
thinkers. A recent study lists forty-eight titles of Utopian romances
written between 1884 and 1900.[777] Of these several are communistic,
and the rest are socialistic; yet in keeping with the American temper
none openly makes use of the terms, and few apply the Marxian doctrine
of the class war. Their appeal was directed primarily to the middle
class of small business and professional men, and they were content to
rely on political means to achieve economic ends. Troubled as was the
American mind by the rise of a cutthroat exploitation, it was not yet
ready to entertain ideas of direct action or trust the proletariat to
enforce its will by mass strength. In one story, to be sure--Ignatius
Donnelly’s _Caesar’s Column_ (1890)--there is a gloomy picture of the
downfall of civilization caused by the class struggles; but the temper
of Donnelly had lost its genial optimism through his long immersion in
under-dog contests and had grown mordant and gloomy.
1 • Edward Bellamy and “Looking Backward”
When in 1888 Edward Bellamy published _Looking Backward_ he gave a huge
impetus to the Utopian romance. Third in the list of titles collected
by Mr. Forbes, it was to have a wide influence on the thought of the
times. It made instant appeal and successive editions were issued
to meet the popular demand. Not since _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ had an
American novel reached so many readers, and Bellamy became at once
a national figure, the prophet of a new industrial order. There is
abundant evidence to the effect produced upon thoughtful readers. E. C.
Stedman, the first critic of the times, spoke of it as a “remarkable
and fascinating novel”; Frances E. Willard called it “a revelation and
an evangel”; and Howells remarked on “the extraordinary effect which
Mr. Bellamy’s romance has had with the public.” More significant still,
_Looking Backward_ speedily became the source and inspiration for a
series of social organizations that beginning at Boston soon spread
over the country. _The Nationalist_ was established as the organ of
the movement and thousands of eager men and women threw themselves
into the work of reshaping American society to conform to the new
social ideal. No doubt the enthusiasm was naïve, no doubt it sprang
from a social inexperience that underestimated the complexity of the
problem, yet the sources, clearly, were a sharp distrust of private
capitalism and an idealistic faith in coöperation. In a pronouncement
of the Boston “Nationalist Club,” January 9, 1889, the cause was rested
on two fundamental truths--“The principle of competition is ... the
application of the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most
cunning”; and, “The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of
the eternal truths that govern the world’s progress on lines which
distinguish human nature from brute nature.”[778]
It is not easy to trace the origins of Bellamy’s interest in
collectivism or the sources of his thought. A journalist and lawyer,
he had studied in Germany, where presumably he had come in contact
with Marxian socialism. Writing in the _Nationalist_ for May, 1889, he
commented thus on the origins of _Looking Backward_:
I never had, previous to the publication of the work, any
affiliations with any class or sect of industrial or social
reformers nor, to make my confession complete, any particular
sympathy with undertakings of the sort. It is only just to myself
to say, however, that this should not be taken to indicate any
indifference to the miserable condition of the mass of humanity,
seeing that it resulted rather from a perception all too clear
of the depth and breadth of the social problem and a consequent
skepticism as to the effectiveness of the proposed solutions which
had come to my notice.
In undertaking to write _Looking Backward_ I had, at the outset, no
idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social
reform. The idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of
social felicity. There was no thought of contriving a house which
practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid-air, far
out of the reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a
cloud-palace for an ideal humanity.[779]
That the impulse did not come from the Marxians is sufficiently
clear from his explanation of the idea of an industrial army. “The
idea of committing the duty of maintaining the community to an
industrial army, precisely as the duty of protecting it is entrusted
to a military army,” came to him, he said, from the object-lesson
of European militarism. But however little he owed to the Marxians
it is clear that Bellamy--the literary amateur who had dabbled in
Hawthornesque fantasies--possessed a warm social conscience and a
vigorous inquiring mind; and once his attention had been drawn to the
evils of industrialism he would respond with the same direct competence
that marked the thinking of Henry George. Nine years before _Looking
Backward_ he had dealt with a sociological theme. In 1879 he wrote _The
Duke of Stockbridge, A Romance of Shay’s Rebellion_, for the _Berkshire
Courier_, which was reissued in book form in 1900. It was a hasty piece
of work that falls off greatly in the latter part; yet in its sympathy
for the agrarian rebels and its probing of the economic sources of
the post-Revolutionary unrest, it was far removed from the temper of
Federalist historians. It is an account of the tyranny of property
rule--of the exploitation of the debtor farmer by the creditor
gentleman made possible by the economic maladjustments resulting
from the war. A bitter discontent is in the hearts of the common
people. Hatred of lawyers and courts and process-servers, has taken
the place of hatred of Tories. Soldiers who had conquered Cornwallis
were returning home only to be conquered by writs and imprisoned by
sheriffs. The exactions of a brutal law fell upon helpless victims;
taxes outran incomes and there was no money to pay. Economic injustice
was daily whetting the edge of class bitterness. The animus of Shays’s
Rebellion is compressed into a few paragraphs that suggest how clearly
Bellamy had analyzed the social struggle.
“I use ter think ez there wuzn’t no sech varmint ez a tory; but
I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout lawyers and sheriffs them times. I
calc’late ye could cut five tories aout o’ one lawyer an’ make a
dozen skunks aout o’ what wuz left over.”
“I hearn as haow Squire Woodbridge says taxes is ten times what
they wuz afore the war, an’ its sartin that there ain’t one
shillin’ inter folks’ pockets ter pay ’em with where there wuz ten
on ’em in them days.... It seems darn curis, bein’ as we fit ag’in
the red coats jest ter git rid o’ taxes.”[780]
So felt the agrarian. Now for the gentleman:
“That is the trouble nowadays, ... these numskulls must needs
have matters of government explained to them, and pass their own
judgment on public affairs. And when they cannot understand them,
then, forsooth, comes a rebellion. I think none can deny seeing in
these late troubles the first fruits of those pestilent notions of
equality, whereof we heard so much from certain quarters, during
the late war of independence. I would that Mr. Jefferson and some
of the other writers of disturbing democratic rhetoric might have
been here in the State the past winter, to see the outcome of their
preaching.”[781]
Nine years after _Looking Backward_ Bellamy published _Equality_, a
critical examination of economic history with a view to creating an
adequate social economics. The earlier work had drawn the outlines
of the democratic society of the future, the later supplied a
justification and a commentary. The great theme involved a twofold
problem: an analysis of the failure of social justice under private
capitalism, and a defense of the working of social capitalism. The two
threads are closely interwoven, and the effect is heightened by the
contrasts resulting from setting the two social orders over against
each other. Innumerable questions, touching diverse phases, are
propounded and answered. The apologist of private capitalism is pursued
into every stronghold of his logic; he is assailed by a hundred vivid
analogies which seek to lay bare the folly of a social system that
breeds waste only to breed poverty, that puts a premium upon greed and
yet takes away the security of possession, that bids the workers fight
each other instead of uniting for the common welfare. But men must see
a better before they will leave a worse, and so there is drawn the
picture of another commonwealth that must arise when men shall put off
the ass’s head from their shoulders, and set intelligently to work.
America is moving towards such a commonwealth, Bellamy is persuaded,
and yet how slow it is to grasp the meaning of democracy! It holds
back from its own good, loath to probe the depths of the revolutionary
philosophy of liberty, equality, fraternity. Julian West awakes in this
new world; his eyes are opened; the ass’s head is gone; he knows for
the first time the goodness of life in a rational society. And when
in a hideous nightmare he returned to the old Boston he had lived in
before he fell asleep, he tasted for the first time the full iniquity
of the old pigsty arrangement. “I have been in Golgotha,” he cried, “I
have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!” It is knowledge of the good
that must destroy the evil.
It was as a political economist that Bellamy attacked the problems
of a democratic society, and his radicalism begins and ends with the
interpretation he puts on the phrase. He was far from being a political
economist of the schools. His contempt for the older classical dogmas
was measureless. Manchesterism with its fetish of _laissez faire_ he
reckoned no better than a pseudo-science. “‘There were no political
economists before the Revolution,’” remarks one of the scholars of
the later age.[782] Such books as the _Wealth of Nations_, properly
speaking, should be called “Examinations into the Economic and Social
Consequences of trying to get along without any Political Economy.”
Before we shall get forward we must examine our terms.
Economy ... means the wise husbanding of wealth in production
and distribution. Individual economy is the science of this
husbandry when conducted in the interest of the individual without
regard to any others. Family economy is this husbandry carried
on for the advantage of a family group without regard to other
groups. Political economy, however, can only mean the husbandry
of wealth for the greatest advantage of the political or social
body, the whole number of the citizens constituting the political
organization. This sort of husbandry necessarily implies a public
or political regulation of economic affairs for the general
interest. But before the Revolution there was no conception of
such an economy, nor any organization to carry it out. All systems
and doctrines of economy previous to that time were distinctly
and exclusively private and individual in their whole theory and
practice. While in other respects our forefathers did in various
ways and degrees recognize a social solidarity and a political
unity with proportionate rights and duties, their theory and
practice as to all matters touching the getting and sharing of
wealth were aggressively and brutally individualistic, antisocial,
and unpolitical.[783]
A social arrangement based on an individual economy must necessarily
result in such monstrosities as the system of private capitalism with
its cash nexus. It is no other than an organized system of social
warfare, with all the appalling waste of war. Habit has blinded our
eyes or we should see the utter bankruptcy of individual competition,
that prides itself on its “famous process for beggaring a nation.”
“Were these serious men I saw about me,” cried Julian West as he
watched the folly of Washington Street, with its thousand shops madly
bidding against each other, its vulgar advertising and cheating and
swindling, “or children, who did their business on such a plan? Could
they be reasoning beings, who did not see the folly which, when the
product is made and ready for use, wastes so much of it in getting it
to the user? If people eat with a spoon that leaks half its contents
between bowl and lip, are they not likely to go hungry?”[784] What is
it but such folly which prevents society from doing the thousand things
which cry aloud to be done? So long as men must fight each other for
individual subsistence how shall they be able to join forces to fight
the common enemies, cold, hunger, disease? Our individualism keeps us
poverty-stricken; we are too poor to destroy the social squalor, too
poor to save our own lives.
If competition entails irretrievable waste, he points out, the system
of competitive profit involves economic suicide. It is a pistol which
private industrialism points at its own head. The struggle for profit
is the hidden cancer that is eating out the heart of modern society,
and Bellamy examines it searchingly in the chapter, “Economic Suicide
of the Profit System.”[785] Under private industrialism profits are
the oil to the wheels of industry, which turn in response to the
market. By the market is meant those who have money to buy with; and
demand is brisk or slack according to the diffusion of economic means.
When the buyers are satisfied and abstain from further purchases, the
market becomes glutted and the wheels of production cease to turn
“though starving and naked mobs might riot in the streets.” Profits,
however, must come out of somebody’s pocket; and the greater they are
the more the pocket that pays is emptied; unless replenished by other
profits, taken from still other pockets, it ceases to be able to buy in
like proportion. In consequence the market slacks off and the wheels
of industry run slower. The manufacturer takes his profits out of his
workmen, the merchant takes his out of the public--which is another
term for the workman; he who takes most grows rich fastest and is most
successful. Obviously, however, such riches are acquired at the expense
of the public capacity to buy; and such lessening capacity is ominous
of gluts and crises to ensue, with losses which must be made good by
greater profits when the wheels turn again. It is only too clear that
society is suffering from a chronic dyspepsia of its industrial system;
it cannot digest its food. The current maxim that a fair exchange is no
robbery--so confidently urged--cannot apply to the profit system, for
if the exchange is fair there is no profit, and if there is no profit
there will be no exchange. The further maxim that demand governs supply
and supply keeps pace with demand, refers only to the profit-market,
and quite overlooks the important detail of social need.
The stupidity of such a system Bellamy never tires of pointing out.
His striking analogy of the stage-coach has become a classic; the less
known parable of the water-tank[786] is equally vivid; a hundred other
shafts are directed at the profit-theory which underlies our individual
economy. Until the sway of such anarchy is broken, until society learns
to regulate its industrialism on the principles of a wise political
economy, there can be no hope of betterment. To create and apply this
wise political economy is the urgent business of democracy if it is not
to perish. It must be such an economy as shall satisfy both our ethical
ideals and our material needs. It must embody the spirit of democratic
solidarity and it must look beyond the demands of the profit-market to
the well-being of all. It must substitute coöperation for competitive
warfare. The criminal waste which keeps the gray wolves forever
snarling at the threshold of society, must cease; the specter of
poverty which disorders the lives of men and distempers their hopes,
must be banished by the united strength of all. If democracy cannot
achieve such a democratic political economy it must flounder through
deepening bogs until finally it sinks in the morass of plutocracy.
The fatal mistake of democracy heretofore has been the insufficiency
of its program. It is incredible how limited has been its vision and
how few and how minor have been its greatest revolutions. To overthrow
monarchy was excellent, but it did not bring in democracy; rather,
the unchecked sway of plutocracy. “‘The people, indeed, nominally
were sovereigns; but as these sovereigns were individually and as a
class the economic serfs of the rich, and lived at their mercy, the
so-called popular government became the mere stalking-horse of the
capitalists.’”[787] Political revolutions have proved heretofore to be
mere flashes in the pan; not until the economic revolution has been
effected will the old tyranny be blown to pieces:
The second phase in the evolution of the democratic idea began with
the awakening of the people to the perception that the deposing of
kings, instead of being the main end and mission of democracy, was
merely preliminary to its real programme, which was the use of the
collective social machinery for the indefinite promotion of the
welfare of the people at large....
Which amounts to saying ... that there never was a democratic
government properly so called before the twentieth century.... The
so-called republics of the first phase we class as pseudo-republics
or negative democracies....
Regarded as necessary steps in the evolution of society from pure
monarchy to pure democracy, these republics of the negative phase
mark a stage of progress; but if regarded as finalities they were
a type far less admirable on the whole than decent monarchies.
In respect especially to their susceptibility to corruption and
plutocratic subversion they were the worst kind of government
possible.... How could intelligent men delude themselves with the
notion that the most portentous and revolutionary idea of all time
had exhausted its influence and fulfilled its mission in changing
the title of the executive of a nation from king to President,
and the name of the national Legislature from Parliament to
Congress?... The American people fancied that they had set up a
popular government when they separated from England, but they were
deluded. In conquering the political power formerly exercised by
the king, the people had but taken the outworks of the fortress of
tyranny. The economic system which was the citadel and commanded
every part of the social structure remained in possession of
private and irresponsible rulers, and so long as it was held, the
possession of the outworks was of no use to the people, and only
retained by the sufferance of the garrison of the citadel. The
Revolution came when the people saw that they must either take the
citadel or evacuate the outworks.[788]
The significance of the title of Bellamy’s supplementary volume
should now be clear. The problem of democracy always and everywhere
is the problem of achieving economic equality. Without that all talk
of liberty and fraternity, all equality before the law, is empty and
sinister mockery. How can a man call himself citizen who must beg a
fellow citizen to become his master? How shall the wage-taker treat
his boss as a brother? Of what worth is equality before the law to
one without a job? Democracy and servitude cannot lie down together.
Wage-slavery debases the dignity of man; it puts upon him the greatest
of indignities, servitude to things; it cheats him of his right to
life, liberty, and happiness; it is the evil thing which degrades human
society to the level of the pigsty, and puts a premium upon the hoggish
instincts of men. It sows suspicion and hate between equals, changes
the unsuccessful into cringing sycophants, sets its heel upon the weak
and the helpless. The thing were too monstrous to be conceivable were
it not the everyday fact of life--more than that, were it not the ideal
of a supposedly democratic society, apologized for by our plutocratic
culture, defended by all that accounts itself respectable, buttressed
by the formidable turrets of the law, written down as a major premise
in our treatises on political science: and all in the sacred name of
individual enterprise. It is familiarity that blinds us to its evils,
and makes its victims only callous or sullen. And it endures because
men are deceived by its half-truths, seduced by its specious freedoms,
led astray by its fatuous promises. Being taught to set the privilege
of fighting above the privilege of helping, how should they not account
their egoism more sacred than their altruism?
When men shall leave off bounding their democratic horizons by the
old political economy and the old law, Bellamy was persuaded, they
will see more clearly. The political science of private property
conceived of government as a police power to safeguard the stake
of the individual in society. Very well, democracy needs only to
redefine the terms “stake-in-society” and “police power” to arrive at
a competent philosophy. The definition of the former is ready to hand
in the familiar words of the Declaration of Independence--the stake
of every man in society is no less than his life, his liberty, and
his happiness. To secure him in this stake is the primary function
of government. The property interpretation of the stake-in-society
principle was sound in its assumption of the economic as the
determining basis; we need only to democratize the interpretation to
arrive at our end.
“The primal principle of democracy is the worth and dignity of
the individual. That dignity, consisting in the quality of human
nature, is essentially the same in all individuals, and therefore
equality is the vital principle of democracy. To this intrinsic
and equal dignity of the individual all material conditions
must be made subservient, and personal accidents and attributes
subordinated. The raising up of the human being without respect of
persons is the constant and only rational motive of the democratic
policy. Contrast with this conception that precious notion of your
contemporaries as to restricting suffrage. Recognizing the material
disparities in the circumstances of individuals, they proposed to
conform the rights and dignities of the individual to his material
circumstances instead of conforming the material circumstances to
the essential and equal dignity of man.”
“In short ... while under our system we conformed men to things,
you think it more reasonable to conform things to men?”
“That is, indeed,” replied the doctor, “the vital difference
between the old and the new orders.”[789]
As a preliminary to this necessary end of conforming things to men
there must be a reinterpretation of the functions of the state. Here
again Bellamy’s political economy gives a surprising twist to the
current police theory of government.
“In my day ... it was considered that the proper functions of
government, strictly speaking, were limited to keeping the peace
and defending the people against the public enemy, that is to the
military and police powers.”
“And in heaven’s name, who are the public enemies?” exclaimed Dr.
Leete. “Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and
nakedness?”[790]
The plutocratic interpretation of the police power signifies no other
than the protection of the individual in the enjoyment of the fruits
of his exploitation--that his right to keep and use what he has got
must be held more sacred than the welfare of society; that the law,
the military, the police, shall defend him in his right to do with his
winnings as he will. The democratic interpretation of the police power,
on the other hand, holds that the state must intervene to the end that
property shall serve a social and not a private interest; that the weak
shall not be exploited by individual enterprise; that all shall be
protected in their right to life, liberty, and happiness. It demands an
ethical basis for the social economy. The legal maxim that a man may do
as he will with his own, is open to question. The matter of ownership
ceases to be a legal question of title, and becomes a moral question
of right and justice. Land, the machinery of production, the profits
of organized industry, coal, ores, oil, lumber--are such things justly
subject to private preëmption? Shall the complex structure of society
be bottomed on the law of contract, or on the ethics of social justice?
Substitute one for the other and a revolution is accomplished.
Our ethics of wealth is ... extremely simple. It consists merely in
the law of self-preservation, asserted in the name of all against
the encroachments of any. It rests upon a principle which a child
can understand as well as a philosopher, and which no philosopher
ever attempted to refute--namely, the supreme right of all to live,
and consequently to insist that society shall be so organized as to
secure that right.[791]
Thus in the political science of democracy the old police theory of
government merges in an all-embracing trustee theory. To a paternal
state is entrusted the protection of the interests of society. That the
welfare of all shall be faithfully served, it is essential that the
common will control and direct the machinery for the production and
distribution of wealth. The anarchy of individualism must give place
to an ordered regimentation, under a centralized authority. The social
meaning of property must be probed to the bottom and the exact line
between public and private rights be marked off. This brings Bellamy to
his fundamental principle--the collectivistic organization of industry
as the _sine qua non_ of a democratic society. How effectively such a
centralized state must wage war upon poverty, how adequately it must
protect the citizen against the common enemies of cold, hunger, and
nakedness, it was the purpose of _Looking Backward_ and _Equality_ to
picture. “A horrible cockney dream,” William Morris called _Looking
Backward_; and by way of answer sketched his _News from Nowhere_,
loveliest of Utopias with its anarchistic freedom set in country
fields. Morris was an artist with an ample share of Ruskinian prejudice
against the machinery that Bellamy so greatly developed; nevertheless
Bellamy was far more modern and realistic in his understanding of the
part the machine will play in the society of the future. To socialize
the machine--to put upon it the slave-work of society, surely means
much to human freedom.
_Looking Backward_ is a brief for no particular school of socialism,
although it inclines somewhat to Fabianism. Not through strikes,
boycotts and lockouts, was the great change brought about, but in
consequence of the spread of social intelligence and social ethics.
Unionism was not the father of the Revolution, nor agrarianism its
mother. Direct action and violence in any form rather hindered than
helped. Class propaganda was too narrow and too selfish. The anarchists
with their “red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing
people up,” retarded the Revolution by frightening the timid and making
“a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend.” “The labor
parties, as such, never could have accomplished anything on a large or
permanent scale.”
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system
on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production
of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but
equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant,
old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any
prospect that it would be achieved. Then the national party arose
to carry it out by political methods.[792]
To wait for the consent of all would seem to the impatient a long
postponement of the millennium; yet the postponement, Bellamy argued,
need not be long. The overreaching greed of private capitalism was
daily hastening it. The new order must come about speedily as a
necessary consequence of two forces; the compulsion of economic
fact, and the stimulus of ideas. As the monopolistic tendencies of
private capitalism open the eyes of the dullest to the growth of a
plutocratic power beyond the control of the majority, a quick fear of
the impending tyranny must lead men to question the larger scope and
ultimate significance of the whole system. Under the lash of this fear
their minds will open to ideas which have long been knocking in vain
for admission. The sources of monopolistic power will be examined,
and the successive steps by which the few have gained control of the
machinery of production will become clear. Already the fertile idea of
the unearned increment which the land-taxers have got hold of and are
spreading widely, has prepared the way for the revolutionary doctrine
of the social fund. Let the common man once understand how small a
portion of wealth is produced by his private effort, and how large
a portion by the agency of social organization with its heritage of
experience and invention, and he will understand how unjustly private
capitalism appropriates what it has not earned. The conclusion that
wealth should belong to him who produces it, is a deduction of the
most elementary ethics; and since the production of wealth in quantity
is a consequence of the social organization and social heritage, the
conviction becomes irresistible that such wealth belongs to society
and cannot justly be appropriated by the individual.[793] Let such
an idea spread widely and the way is prepared for the taking over
by the state of the machinery of production, and the assumption by
it of the obligation of universal trusteeship. Then will come the
Revolution. Coöperation will take the place of competition; production
and distribution for the common well-being will destroy the malevolent
trinity of rent, interest, and profit, which have so long held the
world in poverty; the intelligent strength of all will stand between
the individual and cold, hunger, and nakedness. The noble words of
the Declaration of Independence will no longer be a catch-vote and
a mockery to the exploited multitude, but a reality. The democratic
ideal, with its social philosophy summarized in the phrase, “the only
wealth is life,” will destroy the last vestiges of ancient tyranny
and men will be free. Rooted in economic equality the fine flower
of individualism will expand as it cannot now in unfertile soil; a
generous and unstinted culture will spread the spirit of kindliness
through society, and a new and nobler art and religion will go hand in
hand with the new fellowship.
Only too clearly Edward Bellamy was an incorrigible idealist. He looked
into the future with more confident eyes than most of us; he saw in
the East the quickening of a new day where we see only darkness. A
child of the Enlightenment, he put his trust in the natural goodness
of men. They are not inherently base and ignoble, but the victims of
an evil system that breeds what is base and ignoble. “The folly of
men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of the world’s
poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of men, that
made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake, a colossal
world-darkening blunder.”[794] In an arid land shall we waste the
little store of water, or shall we regulate it strictly, that the
desert may be brought to bloom as a garden?
The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which
alone rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best,
and its use required to be regulated by a system which expended
every drop to the best advantage, if the world were to be supported
in abundance. But how far from any system was the actual practice!
Every man wasted the precious fluid as he wished, animated only
by the equal motives of saving his own crop and spoiling his
neighbor’s, that his might sell the better. What with greed and
what with spite, some fields were flooded while others were
parched, and half the water ran wholly to waste. In such a land,
though a few by strength or cunning might win the means of luxury,
the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of the weak and
ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.
Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had
neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the
life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and
none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical
felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would
then attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new
world, blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by
brotherly kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed,
but which might so easily be made real. But when I had expected
now surely the faces around me to light up with emotions akin
to mine, they grew ever more dark, angry, and scornful. Instead
of enthusiasm, the ladies showed only aversion and dread, while
the men interrupted me with shouts of reprobation and contempt.
“Madman!” “Pestilent fellow!” “Fanatic!” “Enemy of society!” were
some of their cries, and the one who had before taken his eyeglass
to me exclaimed, “He says we are to have no more poor. Ha! ha!”
“Put the fellow out!” exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and
at the signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon
me.[795]
Like Henry George’s noble study of social poverty, _Looking Backward_
is a suggestive document of a generation that saw its finer spirits
repelled by the vulgar individualism of the Gilded Age. In the long
run, no doubt, its influence was slight and the hopes of the Bellamy
Nationalists, like the hopes of the Single-taxers, were doomed to
disappointment. Nevertheless it remains as a testimony to the fact
that in a blatant world of preëmption, exploitation, and progress,
were some who were concerned for a juster social order than the Gilded
Age dreamed of--a true commonwealth that free men might build if they
would.[796]
Footnotes
[777] Allyn B. Forbes, _The Literary Quest for Utopia, 1880-1900_.
“Social Forces,” Vol. VI, No. 2, December, 1927.
[778] _Nationalist_, Vol. I, p. 18.
[779] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 1.
[780] _The Duke of Stockbridge_, Chapter II, pp. 22, 28.
[781] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVI, p. 349.
[782] _Equality_, Chapter XXII, p. 189.
[783] _Ibid._, p. 189.
[784] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 314.
[785] _Equality_, Chapter XXII.
[786] _Equality_, Chapter XXIII, p. 195.
[787] _Equality_, Chapter II, p. 21.
[788] _Ibid._, Chapter II, pp. 19, 20, 21, 22.
[789] _Ibid._, Chapter III, p. 26.
[790] _Looking Backward_, Chapter VI, p. 59.
[791] _Equality_, Chapter XI, p. 74.
[792] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXIV.
[793] See _Equality_, Chapter XIII--“Private Capital Stolen from the
Social Fund.”
[794] _Looking Backward_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 328.
[795] _Ibid._, pp. 328-9.
[796] At this point was to come a second section entitled “After
Bellamy; ‘Naturalism’; Tourgée’s _Murvale Eastman_.”--_Publisher._
Chapter IV • The Darkening Skies of Letters
So late as 1893, in spite of the stark ugliness of Hamlin Garland’s
pictures of the Middle Border, American realism was still unlike in
temper those somber etchings, burnt into dark patterns by the caustic
acids of European experience, that came from the hands of Russian and
German and French naturalists--sketches that in their bitter gloom
seemed tragically untrue to the homelier experience of America. In
appraising such difference in temper Howells ascribed it to the gulf
that separated American well-being from the poverty and injustice of
European societies. American realism was hopeful because American
life was hopeful. The novelist in this singularly favored land must
reflect the temper of a people made kindly by an abundant prosperity
and democratic justice, and in the sincerity of his realism he will
necessarily concern himself with the “more smiling aspects of life,
which are the more American.” Whoever should strike a “note so
profoundly tragic in American fiction” as was struck in Dostoevsky’s
_Crime and Punishment_, he asserted in 1891, “would do a false and
mistaken thing.”[797] And in a later work he spoke casually of our “gay
American horizons”--surely the most romantic phrase ever applied to a
sad and joyless people by a professed realist.
But while Howells was thus summing up the achievements of American
realism and somewhat overconfidently forecasting its future temper, he
was in fact writing the history of a past phase. Already the clouds
were gathering upon our “gay” horizons, and the current optimisms were
finding less food to feed on. The economics of this happy America were
coming to be regarded by vast numbers as a class economics, forecasting
a less democratic future. Young men born in the early seventies, when
Mr. Howells was entering upon his new realistic studies, were coming
to intellectual maturity in a very different age; a new science and
a consolidating economics were creating a somber temper that was
eventually to produce in _An American Tragedy_, a story not greatly
unlike that Russian tale which Mr. Howells, a short generation before,
had pronounced impossible to American experience. Stephen Crane and
Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser were the intellectual children of
the nineties, and their art was a reflection of that sober period of
American disillusion.
The artist, of course, in his creative work is only mediately
influenced by the current science and philosophy; yet even in his
aloofness from the specific problems of the laboratory and the study
he can scarcely escape the pervasive influence of the _Zeitgeist_.
And so, after Hamlin Garland, the realistic novel again took a new
course from the shifting winds of scientific doctrine. The generation
that succeeded the rebellious son of the Middle Border came too late
to maturity to share his faith in the benevolent universe of Herbert
Spencer, and got little comfort from a promised Utopia that only
awaited the enactment of certain statutory laws--laws that would
assure economic justice to all--to lay open its hospitable realm.
Far-reaching changes were coming over the temper of scientific
thought. The conclusions of the physical sciences were ravaging the
orderly preserves of biological evolution, with its cardinal doctrine
of organic growth and historical continuity; the hurrying march of
scientific investigation was leaving far behind the benevolent universe
conceived of by Victorian thinkers and was coming out upon higher and
bleaker tablelands of speculation. The universe that unfolded itself to
chemistry and physics was vaster and colder than biological evolution
with its doctrine of the conservation of energy, had imagined--a
vibrating mechanism shot through with energy, that revealed itself in
action and reaction, impersonal, amoral, dwarfing all the gods dreamed
of hitherto; a universe in which the generations of men have shrunk to
a pin-point in limitless space and all teleological hopes and fears
become the emptiest of futilities. It was the conception of determinism
that after long denial was at last coming to wide acceptance--a
conception that underlay the thinking of such diverse men as Comte and
Spencer and Marx, a conception implicit in the doctrine of continuity,
in the law of causality, in the Marxian law of concentration; and now
disencumbered of its teleological wrappings, disillusioned with the
doctrine of progress, it was to shape the new intellectual attitude
towards life.
In presence of such an extraordinary intellectual revolution the old
anthropomorphisms of metaphysics and ethics were doomed, and from
the revelations of physics and chemistry and psychology must come
an endeavor after a fresh evaluation of man’s duty and destiny in a
universe of immeasurable energy. An ethics that should square with the
new data of science must take its departure from the bleak fact of a
depersonalized universe, wherein man is but a single form of imprisoned
energy, localized for a brief instant and rising to momentary
consciousness in the eternal flux, about and through whom flows
the energy of an unprobed universe. As this mechanistic conception
found lodgment in minds prepared by a mechanical economics, the last
remaining vestiges of the old French romanticism were swept away; a
benevolent, egocentric universe was become unthinkable; progress was no
longer the inherent law of matter and of life; but instead, everywhere
change, disintegration and reintegration, a ceaseless and purposeless
flux to what final end the human mind could not forecast. Thus at a
stroke the benevolent cosmos of the fathers, wherein for generations
men had been providing themselves with sure refuges, was swept away;
and with its passing passed the old faiths--faith in freedom of the
will, in a purposive providence, in a universe that had been long in
travail to bring forth man, its last and dearest offspring for whom all
things work together for good. And with the decay of the traditional
faiths the younger generation was left to wander as best it might upon
the bleak tablelands of impersonal energy. Spencer’s “ultimate of
ultimates,” the Permanence of Force, that follows the law of evolution
and dissolution, had given way to Faraday’s electro-energy that is
indifferent to purpose.
The intellectual backgrounds were thus preparing for a gloomier realism
than Howells’s or Garland’s, a realism that took its departure from two
postulates: that men are physical beings who can do no other than obey
the laws of a physical universe; and that in the vast indifferentism of
nature they are inconsequential pawns in a game that to human reason
has no meaning or rules. To assume that fate which rules human destiny
is malignant, is to assume a cosmic interest in man which finds no
justification in science; Man at best is only an inconsequential atom
in a mechanical flux, or at worst, as Jurgen puts it picturesquely,
only a bubble in fermenting swill. Such a conception, of course, made
slow headway against the traditional order of thought; and if it had
not been aided by a changing economics it would have found few to
follow a line of reasoning that led to such unpleasant conclusions.
The mind of the artist is more susceptible to concrete social fact
than to abstract physical principle, and the swift centralizing of
economics in the eighties and the nineties provided the stimulus for
the extraordinary reversal of thought marked by the contrast between
Emerson and Theodore Dreiser. Emerson was the apotheosis of two
centuries of decentralization that destroyed the pessimism brought
to the new world by refugees from the old, and found its inevitable
expression in the exaltation of the individual, free and excellent, the
child of a beneficent order; whereas Dreiser was the first spokesman of
a later America once more falling within the shadow of the pessimism
that springs from every centralized society shut up within the portals
of a static economics; that dwarfs the individual and nullifies his
will, reducing him from a child of God to a serf. Oddly enough it was
in the West that the new spirit first expressed itself most adequately;
amidst a society that was taking its first steps away from the
traditional philosophy of the dispersion. Frank Norris in California,
Dreiser in Indiana, Sherwood Anderson in Ohio, Masters and Sandburg
and Vachel Lindsay in Illinois, were the spokesmen of the resentment
welling up in the American heart at the loss of the older freedom and
individual dignity.[798]
Footnotes
[797] _Criticism and Fiction_, p. 128.
[798] The manuscript ends here. The first section of this chapter
was to be “Edwin Markham and ‘The Man with the Hoe.’” The second
was to be on “The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris.”
The first item of the addenda gives material on this subject and on
the two authors. The third would have been “Fiction Discovers the
City.”--_Publisher._
Addenda
The material given here comes from various sources, as indicated
by the notes. The syllabus referred to is that for Professor
Parrington’s lectures at the University of Washington, _The
American Novel Since 1890_ (1925). The order here follows that of
the contents of this book.
Naturalism in American Fiction[799]
Naturalism originated in France. Term first used by Zola. Chief
example--Flaubert’s _Mme. Bovary_. Contrast between Zola and Flaubert
reveals two diverse tendencies of the movement--a sociological study of
background, with a multitude of characters dwarfed by the _milieu_; and
psychological study of individual character.
Naturalism a child of nineteenth-century thought--offspring of Darwin,
Marx, Comte, Taine. The scientific movement created a scientific
attitude of mind and emphasized the law of causation. From this
emerged two fruitful ideas: (1) biological determinism, (2) economic
determinism. So Zola and Flaubert. Influence of Claude Bernard--“We
take men from the hands of the physiologist solely ... to solve
scientifically the question of how men behave in society.”
The criteria of naturalism are:
1. Objectivity. Seek the truth in the spirit of the scientist. “We
naturalists, we men of science,” Zola says, accepting Bernard’s
position, “we must admit of nothing occult; men are but phenomena and
the conditions of phenomena.”
2. Frankness. A rejection of Victorian reticence. The total man and
woman must be studied--the deeper instincts, the endless impulses. The
three strongest instincts are fear, hunger, sex. In the life of the
ordinary person, the third is most critical, hence the naturalist makes
much of it.
3. An amoral attitude toward material. The naturalist is not a judge,
he holds no brief for any ethical standards. He records what happens.
He “must possess a knowledge of the mechanisms inherent in man, show
the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations, under
the influence of heredity and environment, such as physiology shall
give them to us, and then finally, to exhibit man living in social
conditions, produced by himself, which he modifies daily and in the
heart of which he is undergoing constant transformation.” (Zola.) This
is difficult to accept. Puritanism.
4. A philosophy of determinism. This is the vital principle of
naturalism, setting it off from realism. The scientist has turned
philosopher. It is the residuum of much pondering over life and its
meaning, and may result from:
a. Sociological emphasis--study of heredity and environment.
b. A broader mechanistic philosophy--Flaubert, Dreiser.
c. Fatalism: a world of malignant chance--Hardy.
5. A bias toward pessimism in selecting details. A reaction from the
romantic conception of a purposive will.
Romance springs from the longings of a baffled and thwarted will,
creating a world as we should like it wherein to find refuge. But the
naturalist will tolerate no such refuge. He will envisage the truth,
and the truth that he sees is that the individual is impotent in the
face of things. Hence it is as the victim, the individual defeated by
the world, and made a sardonic jest of, that the naturalist chooses
to portray man. Always that conception creeps in. It is seen and felt
throughout the texture of the story--a fate lurking in the background
and visible to the reader--and at some dramatic moment the conviction
comes home to the victim and is crystallized in bitter words wrenched
from his baffled will. The business of the story is to lead him up to
this crystallization.
There are two main forms--(1) Life is a trap. (2) Life is mean. So
Strindberg’s Countess Julie: “Everything is wreckage, that drifts over
the water until it sinks, sinks.” So Ray Pearson in Sherwood Anderson’s
_Winesburg, Ohio_: “Tricked, by Gad, tricked by life and made a fool
of.” So D. H. Lawrence: “We are prostituted, oh, prostituted by life.”
To Ma Westcott: “Life is duty. It is a lie.” This pressure may come
from without--_milieu_--or from within--imperious desires--but the
outcome is usually hopeless sorrow--sometimes stolid resignation,
sometimes fierce protest, but with no other end than annihilation. An
exception is Maugham’s _Of Human Bondage_.
6. A bias in selection of characters. The naturalist commonly chooses
one of three types:
a. Characters of marked physique and small intellectual
activity--persons of strong animal drives. They range all the way
from morons like Norris’s McTeague, Zola’s Nana, and Dreiser’s Jennie
Gerhardt to natures like Hardy’s Tess, and Sallie in _Of Human Bondage_.
b. Characters of excited, neurotic temperament, at the mercy of
moods, driven by forces that they do not stop to analyze. Such are
Strindberg’s Countess Julie, Sue, Emma Bovary, and the hero in _Of
Human Bondage_. Sometimes this is aggravated by some physical defect,
like a club-foot.
c. An occasional use of a strong character whose will is broken. Thus
Hardy’s Jude and the doctor in Strindberg’s _By the Open Sea_. But such
are comparatively infrequent.
Naturalism is pessimistic realism, with a philosophy that sets man
in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that
world. _Certain unconscious exaggerations of naturalism._ Since men
are victimized either by outer forces--the _milieu_--or by inner
drives--impulses and instincts--the naturalist from much brooding is
subject to certain temptations:
1. From concern over a devastating _milieu_ he may end in desiring
to change that _milieu_ to the end that men may achieve happiness.
Hence he tends to lose his objectivity and scientific detachment,
and becomes a partisan to a cause. Such was the fate of Zola. The
philosopher of naturalism, in practice he abandoned his principles and
became a reformer, attacking the church, the capitalistic order, etc.
His _J’accuse_ letter is characteristic of this. _Nana_, almost alone,
preserves the naturalistic attitude. This was the failure of the first
group of American naturalists--Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, Jack
London.
2. From much study of inner drives of low-grade characters the
naturalist is in danger of creating grotesques. Behavioristic
psychology may prove to be a further temptation, in creating a “sex
complex.” So Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_, Sherwood Anderson,
D. H. Lawrence, Frank Norris. Most common in the later American
naturalists. So Brander Matthews.
3. From much emphasis on animal impulses the naturalist may turn man
into an animal. Men are more than sex-driven creatures--the city is
more than the slums. There are sewers, but why not accept the sewer
without messing over its contents as they flow to disintegration? This
is the commonest objection to naturalism. So Meredith: “The naturalist
sees the hog in nature, and takes nature for the hog.” It is certainly
an overcorrection--a reaction against the complacent optimism of
romanticism--against too much shutting of the eyes to slums and filth
and sewers. To a mechanist like Dreiser, who traces life and conduct
back to chemistry, or to the behaviorist, who traces it to ducts
and glands, it is rational. The charge may be true of Zola, of De
Maupassant, of Anderson, of Lawrence, but it is not true of Hardy, of
Maugham.
_Naturalism and the Conception of Tragedy._ Naturalistic books are
almost inevitably tragedies, but the philosophy of naturalism that
underlies them has played havoc with the Aristotelian conception of
tragedy. As Ludwig Lewisohn says, it has “rendered the traditional
principle of tragedy wholly archaic.” According to the Aristotelian
tradition, tragedy results when an essentially noble character
of heroic proportions transgresses an immutable moral law by a
self-originating will and suffers the punishment dealt by poetic
justice. So Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Hamlet. But this assumes two
things: (1) an eternally changeless moral law; (2) the existence of a
purposive will. Both of these the naturalist refuses to accept. Compare
Hardy.
It became clear that the self-originating element in human action
is small. The individual acts in harmony with his character,
which is largely the result of complex and uncontrollable causes.
It became even clearer that among the totality of moral values
an absolute validity can be assigned to a few only. Hence the
basic conception of tragic guilt was undermined from within and
from without. The transgression of an immutable moral law by a
self-originating will was seen to be an essentially meaningless
conception, since neither eternally changeless moral law nor
an uncaused volition is to be found in the universe that we
perceive.[800]
The tragedy of naturalism lies in the disintegration and the pity or
irony with which we contemplate man and his fate in the world.
_Naturalism and the Traditional American Temper._ The two most
characteristic qualities of the American temper are Puritanism and
optimism--the belief in the supremacy of the moral law, and the
conviction that this is a good world that man shapes to his will. This
is to be explained historically: the former is traditionally English,
the latter a product of new-world economics--a decentralized society.
Pessimistic determinism results inevitably from the sense of social
pressure on the individual. Social complexity entails a feeling of
coercive regimentation by forces too strong to contend against. These
forces are both internal and external: environment or the social
machine; heredity or the physical machine. The most complete dwarfing
of the individual will and significance takes place in the most crowded
societies, producing a corresponding philosophy and psychology. So the
fatalism of the Orient and the dream of Nirvana. The first widespread
philosophy of determinism among English people was spread by Calvinism.
Predestination was an alien thought, the last expression of a world
depressed by Roman regimentation and degeneration. Augustine preached
that men are evil, and men are doomed. This old-world dogma was brought
to America, where regimentation was impossible. A free economics
created a free-will philosophy and psychology. The will to succeed.
This flowered in Emerson. Philosophical optimism. The world is good,
man is good: let him stand upon his instincts and there abide and the
whole world will come round to him. “Trust thyself.” Since Emerson’s
time a new world has been emerging. The old shadow is falling across
the American mind. Determinism is in the air.
_Complexity and American Determinism._ Complexity springs from:
1. Machine industrialism. The bigness of the economic machine dwarfs
the individual and creates a sense of impotency.
2. The great city reduces the individual to a unit. By machine methods
of transportation and quantity output individual differences are worn
away. We dress, live, think, work, play, alike. The _Saturday Evening
Post_ is fast regimenting the American mind. Standardization.
3. Centralization of wealth is creating a caste regimentation.
4. A mechanistic psychology. Behaviorism: stimulus and response; ducts
and glands. The individual conceived as a mechanism driven by instincts
and habits.
America today is the greatest, most complex machine the world has
ever known. Individualism is giving way to regimentation, caste,
standardization. Optimism is gone; pessimism is on the horizon. The
psychology of naturalism is being prepared.
Three American writers began an experiment in naturalism in the middle
nineties--Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Harold Frederic. The early
death of all three stopped the movement, which was speedily overwhelmed
by the romantic deluge and the muckraking zeal. Crane was tubercular
and died at twenty-nine; Norris was cut down in the early thirties;
Harold Frederic removed to England, where he died.
1 • Stephen Crane[801]
Stephen Crane was the genius of his generation. His work began with
_Maggie: A Girl of the Streets_ (1893). “It was the first bit of
naturalism in American letters ... an episodic bit of slum fiction
ending with the tragic quality of Greek drama.” “The first ironical
novel ever written by an American.” It was privately printed at first,
and not published until 1896. It is detached, objective, amoral,
dealing with a world without virtues but tyrannized by taboos. It is a
bit of life, beginning and ending casually. Here is the end:
In a room a woman sat at a table, eating like a fat monk in a
picture. A soiled, unshaven man pushed open the door and entered.
“Well,” said he, “Mag’s dead.”[802]
It is a world without virtue and yet one that uses the social taboo
to condemn Mag--the only pure one of the lot. The story was an attack
on everything that was respectable in American literature--a notable
achievement in a world of shoddy romanticism. It was an affront to
every instinct of the genteel tradition, and was rejected by a public
steeped in that same shoddy romanticism.
Crane’s next novel was the first great American war story--_The Red
Badge of Courage_ (1894). It was a _tour de force_, inspired by
Zola’s _Le débâcle_, but more by Tolstoi--_War and Peace_ and perhaps
_Sebastopol_. The individual is caught between the external war machine
and the inner instinct machine. There is a conflict of impulses--fear,
pride, the instinct of self-preservation, chiefly the fear of fear. The
hero is at the mercy of the crowd psychology and blind chance. Crane
follows Tolstoi in assuming that victories are accidents, the outcome
of a blind clash of unintelligent forces, rather than due to strategy
and generalship. The study is psychological--that of the fear of the
recruit, his feeling that he alone is marked as the target of the
enemy. The impression of helplessness is the same as in _Maggie_--both
are atoms among a host of other atoms.
_Short Stories._ The best are “The Blue Hotel,” “The Experiment in
Misery,” “The Open Boat.” The first is a story of social responsibility
and social guilt. The murder of the Swede is just part of the backwash
of a topsy-turvy life: the victim of things. “Every sin is the result
of a collaboration.” The second is a story of a “hobo”--down-and-outer,
who hears “the war of the city in his ear.” “The protest of the wretch
who feels the touch of the imperturbable granite wheels, and who then
cries with an impersonal eloquence, with a strength not from him,
giving voice to the wail of a whole section, a class, a people.”[803]
2 • Frank Norris[804]
The most stimulating and militant of our early naturalists--the only
one who wrote consciously with a definite creed. He had thought out a
naturalistic philosophy under the inspiration of Zola. “He was never
without a yellow paper-covered novel of Zola in his hand,” wrote his
brother of him. His two chief novels reveal the twin tendencies as
revealed in _Nana_ and _Le débâcle_: The study of the individual in
his reaction to environment, and the study of social forces and their
impact upon a group of related individuals.
_His Work._ Falls into three groups: (1) Romance--_Blix_, _Moran of the
Lady Letty_, (2) Naturalism--_McTeague_, _Vandover and the Brute_; (3)
_The Pit_ and _A Deal in Wheat_. Between the two latter groups stands
_The Octopus_. The dates of the earlier works uncertain. Commonly
believed that Norris began as a romantic and worked out of it slowly.
Another view that he wrote romances as a means of arriving, side by
side with his serious work. Thus he seems to have begun _McTeague_
about 1894--although it was not published till 1899.
_Theory._ His passion for truth more ardent--or more noisy--than
Crane’s: his objectivity less. The strong conviction of a deterministic
universe was on him, but he never quite attained the scientific
detachment. His nature large and eager. Like Zola he loved large
canvases. This induced him rather to the sociological than to the
individualistic study. _The Octopus_ more representative of his genius
than _McTeague_. Man in society, his theme: not mere men and women as
ends in themselves. This grew on him--the second phase. The novelist
must deal “with elemental forces, motives that stir whole nations.
These cannot be handled as abstractions in fiction.... The social
tendencies must be expressed by means of an analysis of the characters
of the men and women who compose that society, and the two must be
combined and manipulated to evolve the purpose--to find the value of
_x_.”[805] Above all, avoid propaganda.
Unskillfully treated, the story may dwindle down and degenerate
into mere special pleading, and the novelist becomes a polemicist,
a pamphleteer, forgetting that although his first consideration is
to prove his case, his _means_ must be living human beings, not
statistics, and that his tools are not figures, but pictures of
life as he sees it....
Consider the reverse--_Recondite_, for instance. The purpose for
which Zola wrote the book ran away with him. He really did care
more for the depopulation of France than he did for his work.
Result--sermons on the fruitfulness of women, special pleading,
a farrago of dry, dull incidents, overburdened and collapsing
under the weight of a theme that should have intruded only
indirectly.[806]
He never quite arrives at the amoral attitude. Ethical values
persist in intruding themselves, sometimes quite incidentally, as in
_McTeague_, but increasingly, as in _The Octopus_ and _The Pit_.
“McTeague”
Dedicated to Gates. The first considerable contribution to naturalism
by an American writer. His carefully written work over which he labored
five years.
_Theme._ A study in character disintegration that follows upon economic
pressure. The unmaking of a man and woman by the caprice of events.
The characters are simple. McTeague is heavy and stupid, slow in his
movements but a blind bull when aroused. Trina neat and pretty but
with unhappy potentialities in her thrift. In neither is there a
will-to-power strong enough to give strength of character.
_The Note of Determinism._ A world of chance that victimizes them.
The note struck by the lottery and the $5,000. By chance McTeague
became a dentist, met Trina, proposed. But the chance that was making
a man of him and a woman of Trina was preparing their downfall through
Marcus Schouler. The wrestling-match was the turning-point. The two
disintegrate together, each aggravating the weakness of the other. As
Trina’s neatness was pulling Mac up and making him self-respecting,
so her thrift grew into miserliness under pressure of his failure to
provide, and this embittered the essentially fair and generous nature
of Mac.
_Inner Drives._ Little sex in the book after the first complication.
Both Mac and Trina caught unexpectedly, yet handled differently. The
latter pure naturalism. “The Woman is awakened, and, starting from her
sleep, catches blindly at what first the newly awakened eyes light
upon. It is a spell, a witchery, ruled by chance alone, inexplicable--a
fairy queen enamored of a clown with ass’s ears.”[807] But in McTeague,
oddly enough, the same instinct is judged and pronounced evil. Norris
abandons the amoral attitude and argues that heritage from the lower
life is evil. It is the weeds that spring up and stifle, as in Sherwood
Anderson’s “Seeds.”
Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul
stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of
his father and his father’s father, to the third and fourth and
five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race
flowed in his veins. Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he
to blame?[808]
The entire handling of sex in Trina, from the first frightened yielding
to the later docile submission to Mac’s brutality, his sadism, is
admirably handled from the point of view of modern psychology. Norris
was not a psychologist but in this he succeeded surprisingly.
_Romantic Elements._ Yet even in this severe study Norris has yielded
to his romantic tendencies.
1. His patent effort to give dramatic unity to the whole through the
symbol of gold. An exaggeration that is almost Dickens-like, with its
warping singleness. The gold tooth, the $5,000, Trina’s twenty-dollar
gold pieces, the imaginary gold plate of Maria Macapa, the absurd
canary in the gilt cage, the discovery of the gold mine. The wonder is
that he didn’t give Trina gold hair instead of black.
2. The use of a minor action: Maria Macapa and old Zerkow. The same
pursuit of a phantom and the same outcome in murder. McTeague and Trina
are real; Maria and Zerkow are grotesques.
3. The use of foils: Old Grannis and Miss Baker. Justified in romantic
literature by contrast. The self-effacing, timid drawing together
contrasted with the brute directness of McTeague. They do not marry,
and preserve their dream world.
4. The use of the revenge motive: Marcus Schouler--the dramatic pursuit
into Death Valley and the end.
“Vandover and the Brute”
An unfinished work--but a huge and terrible torso.
_Theme._ Revealed in the title. The two natures of man and the
sloughing-off of the higher till the wolf is left. Done with a terrible
directness, till the naked man is on all fours, padding up and down in
his room. A grim and sordid theme but not quite achieved. The thing got
away from him. If he had chiseled it as he chiseled _McTeague_, holding
it off objective and amoral, it would have been a tremendous piece. But
it is insufficiently motivated.
_Determinism._ A study in will. Vandover set over against Charlie
Geary and Dolly Haight. The latter a victim of momentary weakness; the
former a victim of constitutional pliability. A sensuous egotism that
grows and consumes. Geary alone survives--the egoist who drives forward
ruthlessly. A study of the slow, long descent--a chain of circumstances
that finally binds him hand and foot. His props knocked away one by
one--partly by fate, partly by himself: his father, the girl whom he
loves, his concern for respectable opinion, his art, his money. The
conclusion intensely dramatic--more so than the romance of _McTeague_.
The comment of Garland on _McTeague_ applies equally to _Vandover_:
“What avail is this study of sad lives? for it does not even lead to a
notion of social betterment.” His interest is “not that of the ethical
teacher.”
“The Octopus”
_McTeague_ and _Vandover_ are of the city and its sordid evil ways.
They are studies in psychology. _The Octopus_ is of the great
California valleys and the evils that have come into the farm life
with the railroad. It is a study in economics--the first of a long
series of such studies. One can easily see how the theme caught the
imagination of Norris, how his mind felt the relief from the narrow
world and sordid wretchedness of _Vandover_. A certain magnificence
in Norris responded to the epic breadth of the valleys--they fired
his imagination--the vast sweep and power of nature: the rich soil,
the brilliant sun that lays its palpitating heat upon the land, the
quick response in flowers and fruit. The land is eager to produce;
its fruitfulness is overpowering. There is an epic sweep of life and
reproduction here; and this epic of the soil is linked with the
tragedy wrought by the Southern Pacific--the economic machinery of
man’s making. The facts were well known and they took hold of Norris’s
imagination. His sympathy is aroused and yet instead of attacking the
railroad he weaves it into his deterministic philosophy.
_Theme._ Ostensibly the wheat. Norris planned a huge trilogy of its
growing (_The Octopus_), marketing (_The Pit_), consumption (_The
Wolf_--never written). In reality, the impotence of unimportant
individuals in the struggle with things as they are. In _The Octopus_
the individual is dwarfed by the vast spaces, he is crumpled and
despoiled by the railroad. The flock of sheep destroyed by the train is
only a symbol of the men and women of the valley, under the wheels of
modern industrialism.
_Action._ A huge canvas with crowding figures and abundant action.
“The canvas swarms with actualities--plowing, planting, harvesting,
sheep-herding, merry-making, rabbit-killing, love, labor, birth,
death”--all keyed high and swept into a palpitating background. A
“strongly interwrought group of episodes,” that fall into certain
series of developments too:
1. The atrophy of Magnus Derrick, which might well be a story in itself.
2. The development of Annixter, “out of an absolute, yet not gross,
materiality,” through the love of Hilma Tree; and then their final
annihilation.
3. A host of background characters--supernumeraries--that give a sense
of epic sweep.
_The Note of Romance._ The riot of color, of life, arouse the latent
romance of his nature. He cannot remain detached but projects himself
into the story in the person of Vanamee. He returns to the use of the
symbol as in _McTeague_--the wheat. He allows his villain to perish
melodramatically. How much more convincing is the figure of Charlie
Geary setting Vandover to work than S. Behrman in the hold of the
vessel.
In the end he abandons the amoral attitude. After proclaiming the
doctrine of determinism--that the railroads are the masters--not the
puppets of men--he takes refuge in a moral order. In the large balance,
the wheat remains, rectifying wrong--saving other lives to make good
what it here destroys. “The larger view always and through all shams,
all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail,
and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for
good.”[809] Nevertheless in contemplating the injustice done by the
railroads, Norris neither demands nor expects relief.
_The Octopus_ exemplifies Norris’ theory of broad-scale work. It “draws
conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social development, race
impulses.” It “devotes itself not to the study of men but of man.”
Sidney Lanier[810]
An original nature. Rejects both the genteel tradition and the ideals
of the rising middle class. An artist to whom life means beauty.
He revivifies nature--is almost pagan in his adoration of the beauty
of the sun and water. A half-personification of the sun-myth. He is
essentially religious. To Longfellow and Tennyson nature is pretty
embroidery; to Emerson it is a dwelling-place of the oversoul; to
Lanier it is an object of adoration. See “The Marshes of Glynn.”
He attacks industrialism--the first of the poets to cry out against
it as a deadly blight on life and civilization. See “Corn,” “The
Symphony,” “The Jacquerie.”
He seeks a new religion, recognizing a quantitative element.
The Incomparable Mr. Cabell[811]
The successive volumes of James Branch Cabell have provided the
tribe of critical Jeffries with a rich vein of diversion. They have
recognized no closed season in their full-lunged pursuit of the
strange heirs of Mr. Cabell’s invention, and such Homeric absurdities
of comment have been flung at him, that he is in a fair way to become
our classic example of the fatuousness of contemporary estimates. As
whimsical as Bernard Shaw, as provocative as Chesterton, he is more
incomprehensible than either to all readers who do not choose to like
what they have not always liked. Professing to be a romancer, and
defending the glory of romance with inimitable witchery of phrase,
he writes no romance that lovers of convention can understand. The
lovely fabrics of his tales of Poictesme are all shimmer and sheen,
woven of magic and veiling mysteries, instead of the correct taffeta
and grosgrain; and the brilliant stuff of his tales of gallantry is
fashioned of wit and poetry, instead of the customary wigs and sword
play. Those to whom romance suggests _When Knighthood Was in Flower_,
will find only obscurities and coarseness in _Figures of Earth_
(1921) and _Jurgen_ (1919, _enl._ ed. 1921); and those who delight
in the stage rufflings of _Monsieur Beaucaire_, will discover only a
libertine in _The Cords of Vanity_ (1909, rev. ed. 1920). And if the
reader boggles at such tales what can he hope to make of that strange,
ironical whimsy, _The Cream of the Jest_ (1917, rev. ed. 1922)? One
needs to walk warily in dealing with Mr. Cabell, or the jest of which
he is such a master will turn sardonically upon the critic. In all
his thinking vague hinterlands lie behind the commonplace, cryptic
meanings lurk behind the obvious; and the credulous, easy-going reader
finds himself puzzled, and at last floundering quite hopelessly in a
land of bogs and marsh-lights. And yet was ever another writer born
to us Americans so insistent upon being understood? He has elaborated
his views of life and art at length, and repeated them in successive
volumes over nearly a score of years; and finally in what may have
been a mood of sheer disgust at the stupidity of those who buy books,
he reëlaborated his philosophy and wrote it out in good set terms
within the covers of a single volume. _Beyond Life_ is an essay
altogether remarkable for its haunting beauty of phrase, its honest
agnosticism, its brooding irony. It is enough to turn one cynic to
consider that so noble a book should have called forth from a reputable
gentleman, presumably of good taste and sound judgment, the comment
that it “contains cheap and shallow pessimistic observations on human
limitations.”
That _Beyond Life_ (1919), with other of Mr. Cabell’s books, contains
“observations on the limitations of human nature,” is quite obvious;
for Mr. Cabell deals in comedy, and what is to become of comedy if
it shall not observe those limitations and laugh at them? That it is
even pessimistic may likewise be argued with some plausibility; but to
assert that it is cheap and shallow is preposterous. An inquisitive
mind, deeply concerned with ultimate values, cannot be cheap and
shallow. And yet the fault of such widespread misinterpretation may lie
in part at Mr. Cabell’s own doorstep. An inveterate jester, his sallies
often carry implications far beyond the obvious; his strange whimsies
spring from depths of thought and emotion beyond the understanding of
the careless. His attitude towards life is an odd mixture of the modern
and the medieval: there is a medieval simplicity and frankness, a
naïve wonder at the mystery that underlies the common, an incorrigible
idealism; and this medieval attitude is drenched in modern agnosticism.
He passes easily from a broad Chaucerian humor that laughs frankly at
the relations of men and women, to a mystical idealization of those
relations; and the problem of reconciling the humor and the ideal
becomes a serious business with him. He hates the cant and dishonesty
of our _bourgeois_ existence, and he refuses to take seriously the
host of petty concerns that most of us are very serious about. If
he were less the artist he would join the disaffected and turn to
rend this foolish world; but the spirit of comedy saves him and he
contents himself with a jest. But the Cabellian jest uncovers depths
of meditation that reveal the philosopher and the poet. In his own
large meaning of the word Mr. Cabell is an economist. He is greatly
dissatisfied with the “futile body-wasting,” which under the “dynamic
illusion known as common sense” passes for life, and is concerned to
discover what abiding increment a man may get from his body during
its brief existence as an entity. His mind is haunted with a sense of
realities that lie beneath the surface appearances, and that insist on
trickling from his pen in strange comments. It is a careless reader
who is deceived or put off the scent by his whimsical vocabulary, who
insists on conventional meanings for words which Mr. Cabell chooses
to use otherwise than conventional persons use them. Romance and
realism--words with which he plays constantly and upon which he hangs
his philosophy--do not signify the spurious romance of childish minds,
or the shoddy realism of practical minds. If one must insist upon
translating his vocabulary into ordinary terms, let us understand that
to Mr. Cabell romance and realism mean idealism and conventionalism;
and to the profound distinction between these two attitudes towards
life, he dedicates his work.
I have called Mr. Cabell a poet, and the justification lies in his
persistent idealization of life in terms of beauty. At his birth he was
endowed by an unkind fate with imagination. Now imagination may be a
very pretty and amiable gift, highly useful for gilding one’s egoism,
putting honey in thistles, proving itself practical by arraying life in
gay robes in order that it may seem an altogether lovely and desirable
mistress; or it may prove a decidedly parlous faculty to play with.
It can summon bogies, and terrors that are vaster and more real than
bogies. A brooding imagination can work havoc with one’s complacency.
When Carlyle was in a mood to enjoy his nerves he would let his
imagination range beyond the comfortable confines of convention, to
consider the universe and the position of man therein--the black flow
of time and the terrifying immensity of background against which man
is set; and he would come back to dinner with Jane Welsh Carlyle with
a sick stomach and an ill temper. It was not very gallant, but it was
very natural to a man unnerved by what he had contemplated. Considered
with open eyes reality is too overpowering for weak man, and because
he could not relieve the tension with a jest, Carlyle’s imagination
inflicted chronic dyspepsia upon him. To conventional persons the
dyspepsia and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s sharp replies to her husband’s ill
humor, seem the important reality, and the overpowering visions of
time and space that were at the root of the family discord, seem no
other than romance. In this curious world of convention all things are
topsy-turvy, and it needs a tremendous effort of will to set them only
a little right.
To this effort Mr. Cabell’s life work has been dedicated with unruffled
urbanity. Like Carlyle he chooses to roam far in his philosophic
quests, and like Thoreau he comes home at nightfall with little
more than a handful of stardust in his wallet. He loves to sally
forth on the greatest of adventures--the pursuit of reality where it
lies broadcast, hidden from practical eyes that refuse to see. He is
impelled by the old wonder that has haunted men from the beginning
of their long upward climb; the wonder and the fear of life. Now to
anyone but a fool or a poet, only too plainly life is petty and gross
and inconsequential, from the moment when with superfluous blood and
pain we are brought into the world, to the time when we return by an
unlovely process to chemical elements. It is compounded of vanity,
as the old poet long ago observed. The practical, about which we
make so much pother and over which we chatter so foolishly, is only
an illusion which men hug because it keeps them in self-conceit. Mr.
Cabell refuses to accept any such illusions at their face value. He
will not be humbugged by foolish persons who pretend to talk wisely.
What is man? he insists on asking: A parasite on the thin rind of a
planet that swings silently through interstellar space--“an ape who
chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels while filthily he
digs for groundnuts.” If this is the reality to which the philosopher
must come finally--and like Hamlet Mr. Cabell does not shirk the
contemplation of graveyard facts--then must the thoughtful man accept
logically a frank pessimism, and on this foundation build such a hut
as may best shelter him for the few days of his unintelligible life.
Over this sorry conclusion Mr. Cabell broods much, and because he is
a human being with a will to enjoy life and think well of himself, he
uses every faculty to scramble out of the pit and find a pleasanter
refuge for the brief time of his existence. The idealist in him engages
the pessimist, and like so many other moderns he goes out in quest of
that which may keep him sane. It is true that man is an ape reft of his
tail and grown rusty at climbing, but is that the whole story? It is
evident that men in all times have refused to believe that they are not
something other than apes--their very dreams seem to belie a conclusion
so mean and ignoble. Is there not some deeper _élan vital_, some hidden
impulse that drives man forward and upward even while his mind is on
groundnuts? “Yet more clearly do I perceive,” argues the idealist,
“that this same man is a maimed god.... He is under penalty condemned
to compute eternity with false weights and to estimate infinity with a
yardstick; and he very often does it.... There lies the choice which
every man must make--or rationally to accept his own limitations? or
stupendously to play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent.”
This would seem to be a hard choice, but Mr. Cabell does not hesitate.
He patches up his agnosticism with the will to believe, on the
pragmatic grounds that it seems to work. For man “rationally to accept
his own limitations,” is to defeat everything worth while in life; it
is to yield the battle to a black pessimism. Whereas “stupendously to
play the fool and swear that he is at will omnipotent,” may end in
creating the will to omnipotence, and the fool in some preposterous
fashion may prove that he is indeed divine. Let man but accept his
logical limitations and he returns to the ape reft of more than his
tail, fallen to gibbering in the mud, refusing to take hold of that
rope of sand by which miraculously he has drawn himself forward
hitherto. For accepting his limitations means contenting himself
with material fact, and “the trouble with facts seems to be, that
if one treats them out of relation to the rest of life, they become
lies.” In the “stupefying mist of common sense” men walk blindly. The
practical, the conventional, are alien to the deeper reality which is
shadowed forth by emotions and dreams; which refuses to disclose itself
nakedly, but hides behind symbols, haunting the mind even while one
is pottering among inconsequentials. This deeper reality itself may
be but a dream, but nevertheless it possesses the power of creating
a will to believe, upon which hangs man’s destiny. Hence the tales
which we tell ourselves are significant because through some occult
process they foreshadow the thing that may be; they prod the foolish
will to omnipotence to believe that we shall outgrow the ape. For grown
rusty at climbing, the ape-man “however dimly, feels himself to be a
symbol, and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that is
not home; and so strives blunderingly, from mystery to mystery, with
pathetic makeshifts, not understanding anything, greedy in all desires,
and honeycombed with poltroonery, and yet ready to give all, and to die
fighting, for the sake of that undemonstrable idea.”
It is because he is terrified at the meanness of what practical men
call reality, that Mr. Cabell turns away from it to find the true life
in dreams. Not only are they pleasanter, they are more useful; they are
all that man has to aid him in the appalling task of getting himself
out of the slime, that he may walk in green fields. We need to turn
Prospero’s words around--our dreams are such stuff as we are made
on. They alone are real and salutary, for amid all their ramblings
they seem dimly to suggest some end; amidst their rank egoisms they
seem to foreshadow a purpose: and may not that end and purpose be
the eventual creation of a life for man that shall be worthy of his
dreams? It is illogical to assume that man can pull himself up by his
own bootstraps, but how else shall he pull himself up? Is not man the
inveterate romancer somehow blindly creating a noble romance of man?
“To what does the whole business tend?” he asks at the conclusion of
_Beyond Life_, “--why, how in heaven’s name should I know? We can but
be content to note that all goes forward, toward something.... It may
be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by rumors of a dawn which
comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we and our children
have no part whatever. It may be that when our arboreal propositus
descended from his palm tree and began to walk upright about the earth,
his progeny were forthwith committed to a journey in which today is
only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it that we are components
of an unfinished world, and that we are but as seething atoms which
ferment toward its making, if merely because man as he now exists can
hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one could very
heartily revere. We are being made into something quite unpredictable,
I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we are sustained
by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into something
better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as surely as we
know that we will have it thus. And it is this will that stirs in us to
have the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth, not as they are,
but ‘as they ought to be,’ which we call romance. But when we note how
visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are talking about God.”
From this persistent will to romance--the incorrigible propensity to
follow the dynamic illusion of dreams that is so deep an instinct of
human nature--Mr. Cabell deduces a conception of art that to careless
readers seems whimsically perverse; and from it likewise emerges the
lambent irony that plays like diffused lightning about the horizons
of his thought. The function of art in society, he insists, is to
comfort and inspire man with its divine beauty. Without the artist this
is but a grim and forbidding place where men live; and unless every
man is somewhat the artist, and seeks his compensations in the lure
of romance, it must remain grim and forbidding. It is therefore the
privilege and the duty of the artist “to prevaricate tenderly about
the universe”; to create for life a meaning that is not apparent, by
clothing it in beauty and adducing for it a noble significance. It is
his mission to lure men away from the contemplation of facts which
terrify or debase, from all ignoble and depressing realism, to pursue
the ideal and entice the imagination to enter and dwell in a world as
it ought to be. The artist, therefore, is a Moses in the wilderness,
pointing men to the Promised Land, and even enabling them to go forward
and taste its fruits while they still dwell in the wilderness.
Now of all the dreams which lure men, the one universal and potent
dream, Mr. Cabell asserts with Freudian understanding, is the woman
dream. Its roots are deep in the ape-animal; it drives men inexorably,
for upon it depends the very existence of the race. And therefore, a
shrewd mother-nature has somehow transmuted its base materials into
the very stuff of romance, commingling with it all high and generous
impulses, making of it the loveliest dream that visits man’s weak
head. In consequence of which ironic transmutation this lovely dream
“hoodwinks humanity through the dynamic illusion known as love,
in order that humanity may endure, and the groans of a lover be
perpetuated in the wails of an infant.” Considered in one light this
is the very “cream of the jest” that nature perpetrates upon man; but
considered in another light, does it not turn out to be the supreme
jest which man has perpetrated upon nature? For once he has been
taught the alphabet of romance, through the crude necessity of race
preservation, he has gone far in his studies, and turned romancer on a
great scale. From this raw material of biological sex-love he has woven
the fabrics of his religion, of his art, of his idealism; he has dipped
it in gleaming dyes, twisted it to quaint patterns, fashioned from it
lovely robes to cover what is ugly. It is the wellspring and source of
all romance.
Through this open door of woman-worship Mr. Cabell chooses to enter his
world of deeper realities. “There is in every human being that which
demands communion with something more fine and potent than itself,”
and this something more fine and potent he seeks in the woman of his
dreams. It was so when the world was young, and it will be so as long
as there is youth left in the world. In early times this object of
adoration was the witch-woman, the Circes and Calypsos of ancient
tales; later it became the lady-mistress of chivalric ideals; today
it is the dream maiden whom the young man woos but never finds in
marriage, and not finding her is impelled to turn to the ever-young
and ever-lovely Helens and Ettarres of old romance. A good half
of Mr. Cabell’s work is given over to this curious celebration of
woman-worship. It is elaborated in _Domnei_ (1920), in _Jurgen_, in
_Figures of Earth_. In the strange tales of the land of Poictesme the
drama flows from the balking and thwarting of this woman quest by the
Dame Niafers and Dame Lisas of the commonplace world, to man’s undoing.
Nevertheless “the long, high, fruitless questing does not ever end,
but, rather, is temporarily remitted for the society of Dame Niafer and
of Dame Lisa. For ... one perceives that, even in remote Poictesme,
those aging nympholepts, Dom Manuel and Jurgen--they also--were
heartened to endure the privileges of happily married persons by a sure
faith, discreetly left unvoiced, that these hard-won, fond, wearisome,
and implacable wives were, after all, just temporary makeshifts. By
and by would Freydis and Helen return, at their own season.”--For the
dream persists in the very face of present fact, and in this lies
man’s hope. “In youth all men that live have been converts if but in
transitory allegiance, to that religion of the world’s youth--to the
creed of _domnei_, or woman-worship.” Now it is “the very essence
of _domnei_, that the woman one loves is providentially set between
the lover’s apprehension and God, as the mobile and vital image and
corporeal reminder of Heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness,
of purity and perfection. In her the lover views all qualities which
can be comprehended by merely human faculties.” “If but in honor, his
heart stays bound to his first and only real love, that woman of whom
he never tires. Her coming is not yet. He can but wait, sustained by
his sure faith ... that some day her glory will be apparent, and he
will enter gladly into her secret kingdom, and will find her kisses all
that in youth he foreknew to be not impossible.... And meanwhile this
prescience, somehow, informs all art ... and makes it to him a vital
thing.... And there seems to be no beauty in the world save those stray
hints of her, whose ultimate revealment is not yet.... And it is very
often through desire to express his faith in this withheld perfection,
of which he has been conscious in broken glimpses from afar, that he
turns artist.... For every art is a confession of faith in that which
is not yet.”
But however adroitly man has turned the jest against nature, and
erected a noble palace from base materials, the jest remains,
mixed with the mortar, and the structure cannot endure for long.
It is insubstantial, and at any moment the cloud-capped towers may
disintegrate and the dream palace disappear, leaving not a rack behind.
There remains only the jest. This unhappy ending Mr. Cabell foresees,
and hence emerges the profound irony that underlies all his writing.
To such disillusionment must all things come. Life is no more than a
comedy, played by puppets; bitter, with more tears than laughter in
it; yet because tears are futile and unnerving, what remains for the
gallant gentleman but to confront life with a jest? Mr. Cabell does not
wholly forego his chivalric ideal even while he is contemplating the
vanity of all endings in the light of their beginnings. As Horvendile
the clerk, he clings to it, even though he is doomed to walk the
streets of Lichfield, Virginia, in the form of Felix Kennaston, who
passes--to his own incredulous amusement--as a personage of some
importance, with two automobiles and money in four banks. He possesses
the magic sigil of Scoteia, by the potency of which he can send forth
his soul to meet Ettarre, and recover the raptures that Felix Kennaston
no longer knows. But the sigil of Scoteia turns out to be the half-top
of a pomade glass from his wife’s dressing-table; the potency is gone;
and he remains at last no more than a respectable citizen with his
automobiles and money in four banks. _The Cream of the Jest_ reduces
the chivalric ideal to pure irony.
By a transition more natural, perhaps, to a Virginian than to another
American, Mr. Cabell turns from the contemplation of chivalry to the
study of gallantry; and shifts the theme of his romances from the
ecstatic adoration of the Woman, whom to possess is to lose, to the
gay pursuit and enjoyment of women. In “The Rivet in Grandfather’s
Neck” he chooses to set a decidedly shabby and roue gallantry over
against a somewhat futile and antiquated southern chivalry. He loves
both the gallant and the gentleman, and he spares neither; they are
equally the descendants of that Cavalier ideal which flourished so
rankly in the soil of the old planter society; nevertheless the
quaint and lovable Rudolph Musgrave with his gentle heroics comes
off distinctly better than his brilliant half-brother, the novelist
John Charteris. One might, indeed, wonder at Mr. Cabell’s treatment
of the artist Charteris, were it not so distinctly Shavian. It is
odd how similar is his conception of the artist to the definition
of Shaw--one who wriggles into the confidence of women to learn
their secrets only to betray them. Nevertheless Jack Charteris, the
brilliant thinker and talker of _Beyond Life_, mouthpiece of the
Cabellian philosophy, deserves better treatment than he gets in the
story of this sorry escapade; he comes quite too near the likeness
of the mountebank Sheridan. In _The Cords of Vanity_ gallantry
reveals itself more attractively; it is gilded with youth and wit
and poetry. It is Congreve at his best, scintillating, brilliant,
with a delightful affectation of pose and gesture; and it is Marlowe
also, with its galloping wit steeped in pure poetry. There is the
true Elizabethan rapture of fine words and lovely images and quaint
conceits. “Meantime,” says young Robert Townsend, “being in love, I
refined upon the notions of love with the ingenuity of an Elizabethan.”
There you have the spirit of the book. It is more than a pretty piece
of paganism; it is the brightest tale of gallantry in our literature,
masterly in the restrained irony of its inimitable conclusion.
It is obvious, however, that the mood which finally will receive
dramatization from Mr. Cabell cannot be summed up in the ideal of
gallantry. What that mood is one finds revealed at length by John
Charteris in _Beyond Life_. It is the quintessence of irony distilled
from long observation of human life, but it is not Congreve, much
less is it Sheridan. Those shameless and selfish roues began as
artists but they ended as mountebanks; life taught them cynicism and
not tenderness; it sharpened their wit and dulled their sympathy.
The higher irony lay quite beyond their natures. But with Mr. Cabell
tenderness, sympathy, an ardent concern for the inevitable failure
that lies in wait upon aspiration, are so strong and urgent that under
the governance of a mind less intellectual, they must inevitably run
into sentimentality. But there is in Mr. Cabell something of the
intellectual austerity of Matthew Arnold, and it conducts him to
the same ends. Consider such a passage as this: “Through a merciful
dispensation, we are one and all of us created very vain and very
dull.... Vanity it is that pricks us indefatigably to play the ape to
every dream romance induces; yet vanity is but the stirrup-cup: and
urgent need arises that human dullness retain us (as it does) securely
blinded, lest we observe the wayside horrors of our journey and go mad.
One moment of clear vision as to man’s plight in the universe would
be quite sufficient to set the most philosophic gibbering. Meanwhile
with bandaged eyes we advance: and human sanity is guided by the brave
and pitiable and tireless dullness of mankind.... Yet how varied are
the amiable activities of human dullness, which tend alike to protect
and to enliven human progress! Dullness it is, of course, that brews
and quaffs Dutch courage; ... that fosters salutary optimism as to the
destiny of mankind, in flat defiance of everything mankind can do,
and does unblushingly.... And finally dullness it is that lifts up
heart and voice alike, to view a parasite infesting the epidermis of a
midge among the planets, and cries. _Behold, this is the child of God,
All-mighty and All-worshipful, made in the likeness of his Father!_...
These and how many other wholesome miracles are daily brought about by
our dullness, by our brave and pitiable and tireless dullness, by our
really majestic dullness, in firm alliance with the demiurgic spirit
of romance.... For that to which romance conducts, in all the affairs
of life ... is plain enough--distinction and clarity, and beauty and
symmetry, and tenderness and truth and urbanity.”
Here then is the note that still awaits adequate dramatization in a
comedy greater than he has yet written--a cosmic irony suffused with
tenderness and truth and urbanity. Above all, urbanity. Mr. Cabell
has played too long with the ideal of gallantry; he has devoted too
much precious time to creating Millamants to fall in love with; he has
listened too credulously to the voice of Congreve. “I have read,” says
Charteris, out of Congreve, “that the secret of gallantry is to accept
the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug;
as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always
consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with
a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not
distrustful--being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the
genteel would regard as rational.” Surely the cosmic irony that loves
men’s dullness because it alone can preserve them from madness, and
retorts upon the cosmic terrors with a jest, is higher than gallantry
and more enduring. It arrives at tolerance for all human shortcomings;
it embraces high and low in its sympathies; it achieves urbanity as a
final goal. It is the stuff of which great literature is made. And Mr.
Cabell is creating great literature. A self-reliant intellectual, rich
in the spoils of all literatures, one of the great masters of English
prose, the supreme comic spirit thus far granted us, he stands apart
from the throng of lesser American novelists, as Mark Twain stood
apart, individual and incomparable.
Footnotes
[799] Notes for a lecture delivered at the University of California in
1922.--_Publisher._
[800] Ludwig Lewisohn, _Modern Drama_, New York, 1915, p. 3.
[801] From lecture notes and the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[802] Stephen Crane, _Works_, New York, 1926, Vol. 10, p. 216.
[803] _Ibid._, Vol. 11, p. 21.
[804] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[805] _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_, “The Novel with a
‘Purpose,’” Garden City, N. Y., 1928, Vol. 7, p. 22.
[806] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[807] Frank Norris, _Complete Works_, New York, n. d., Vol. III, p. 58.
[808] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[809] Frank Norris, _The Octopus_, New York, 1906, p. 652.
[810] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[811] Reprinted by permission from _The Pacific Review_, December,
1921.--_Publisher._
The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism[812]
No sooner was naturalism fairly under way than it was well-nigh
submerged under a wave of social speculation and inquiry. The years
1903-1917 were a distinctive period--a time of extraordinary ferment,
when America was seeking to readjust her ideals and institutions
to a revolutionary economic order that had come upon her. The
popular phase was revealed in the muckracking movement, a movement
which instructed the American middle class in certain elements of
economics--particularly the close connection between economics and
politics. But underneath, an intellectual revolution was in progress,
setting steadily towards a new social philosophy. The old America had
been intensely conservative, naïvely provincial and self-satisfied,
compassed by a complacence founded on optimism--the gospel of the
business man. The new America was eager and hopeful, impatient to
square institutions to the new conditions. The total movement was
profoundly democratic--a new Jacksonianism rising in protest against a
menacing plutocracy.
1. _The Movement of Criticism._ The work of a vigorous social idealism.
Passed through three broad phases:
a. Political. The movement of Progressivism, 1903-1912. An attempt to
democratize the machinery of government to the end that the will of
the majority shall prevail. Its impulse and much of its program came
from Populism; and it resulted in a clarification of the issue between
republicanism and democracy. An attack on the representative system
and the checks and balances of the Fathers. It gave rise to a critical
examination of the spirit and purpose of the Constitution.[813]
b. Economic. A growing conviction that talk of political democracy is
futile except in so far as it leads to economic democracy. That power
is economic in origin and that those who control the economics will
control the government. The gospel of economic determinism. Certain
conclusions emerged:
1. That capitalism is no longer competitive but monopolistic.
2. That _laissez-faire_ism no longer suffices.
3. That centralization has submerged the individual citizen; that he
is impotent before the leviathan corporation; and that henceforth the
struggle is to be between organized groups for the control of the
state.[814]
c. Literary. An examination and rejection of traditional literary and
cultural ideas. An attack upon:
1. Puritan reticence and smug respectability.
2. Middle-class optimism and sentimentality.
Led by H. L. Mencken, Ludwig Lewisohn, and the younger intellectuals.
The bias aristocratic.
2. _The Incoming of Old-World Thought._ The breaking-down of the older
provincialism and the reception of new ideas.
a. The philosophy of collectivism. Derived chiefly from Germany and
England; largely Marxian and Fabian. The conviction that the state
must absorb the trust. Later the appearance of syndicalism and guild
socialism, based on a distrust of the bureaucratic, omnicompetent
state. Anarchism has remained alien in spirit.[815]
b. The new aristocracy. A reversion from an easy-going Jacksonianism
based on the doctrine of equalitarianism. A direct denial of that
doctrine and the theory of leadership. In business the doctrine of the
expert and the rule of efficiency. In philosophy the doctrine of the
intellectual aristocrat--a suggestion of Nietzsche and the will to
power. Thus Mencken joins hands with Judge Gary in upholding the ethics
of the strong. The total result an effective denial of our traditional
ideal of democracy.
c. The problem novel. All this ferment entered into literature,
tyrannizing in its insistence. Old forms became old-fashioned
overnight. The novel was so useful that it was drafted by the new
crusading enthusiasm. Romance and naturalism alike were swept away;
the political novel and the economic novel took their place to arouse
public opinion to action. It was the glorification of propaganda.
Except for James Branch Cabell and Edith Wharton not a writer escaped.
There is something pathetic in the way the harmless bleating
romantics were dragged at the chariot wheels of social problems. Booth
Tarkington, Mary Johnston, Winston Churchill, William Allen White, were
sacrificed equally with potential naturalists like Robert Herrick,
Upton Sinclair, and Ernest Poole. Their careers may be seen from
Churchill, Poole, and Herrick.
1. Winston Churchill. [The most representative of the spirit of
Progressivism.] A conscientious middle-class romantic. Churchill was a
faithful reflector of middle-class movements. His work falls into three
phases:
[a. _Romantic historical tales._ _Richard Carvel_ (1899) the type
of Cavalier romance. A blend of Thackeray’s _Henry Esmond_ and _The
Virginians_, John Paul Jones added for extra historical flavor. A
double background: (1) the old South of the Revolution with a Loyalist
villain and a patriot hero; (2) the London of Brooks Club and a gaming
aristocracy, with Charles Fox. The heroine another edition of Beatrix
Esmond the hero another Henry Esmond. _The Crisis_ (1910) a romance
of the borderland of the Civil War: a fire-eating Southern heroine
and a sober Yankee-Puritan hero. _The Crossing_ (1904) a romance of
the settlement of the Inland Empire. A theme not yet adequately dealt
with in American fiction. The story breaks in two: the first half
Churchill’s best work in romance; the last half his worst.[816]]
b. _Political novels._ Coincided with the rise of the Progressive
movement. _Coniston_ (1906) a study of the legislative boss in New
Hampshire. A reflection of his experience in the state legislature.
How the “interests,” and in particular the railroads, manage to put
their bills through. Jethro Bass sells political control to the highest
bidder.
_Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908): the same theme a generation later.
Consolidation of the railroads has brought about absentee dictatorship
of state politics. The boss has removed to New York and manages the
legislature through his local lawyer. The philosophy of big-business
prosperity rests on property rights, held in trusteeship by the
corporations that fill the empty dinner pails, make and unmake business
confidence. The revolt of the younger generation--Austen Vane and
Victoria Flint, in whom stirs a new social conscience.
c. _Economic novels._ Began with _The Inside of the Cup_ (1913), a
venture in higher criticism and social interpretation. So compare
_Robert Elsmere_ (1888). An attack on old dogmas and an attempt to
discover the democratic springs of Christianity. The clash between
the reborn Son of God and an unregenerate society, and the need to
establish the Kingdom of God in this world. The church today controlled
by business subscriptions. The solution to be sought in a free pulpit,
supported by the common people, preaching a new social Christianity.
_A Far Country_ (1915), a study in the emptiness of the profit motive.
A background of banking--J. P. Morgan and Company. The dissatisfaction
of the prodigal son who has wasted his intellectual and moral
patrimony--the lawyer who sells his brain to rise and loses the
things that make life worth while. His conversion brings the call to
self-education.
_The Dwelling Place of Light_ (1917), a study of the blighting effect
of industrialism on the native Yankee stock that has failed to rise
into the exploiting class. The restlessness of modern life due to the
failure of normal instincts to find satisfaction in daily existence--an
emptiness due to loss of beauty, freedom, creative craftsmanship. The
search for compensation brings death and not life. A background of the
Lawrence strike and syndicalism.
2. Robert Herrick. The most promising of the potential naturalists.
An intellectual fascinated by the crude materialism of Chicago in the
late nineties. Suffered from the inhibitions of a Puritan idealism;
the problems of this raw world cried aloud for solution--the woman
question, the labor question, the problem of the professions--and
warped him away from naturalism, making him an easy victim of the new
social enthusiasm. The key to his thought--economic determinism.
_The Memoirs of an American Citizen_ (1905). His best work and the
nearest approach to naturalism. A detailed study of the American
business man--the captain of industry who rises in a competitive
society by his own will. The competitive order, he perceives, requires
an ethics different from the Christian ideal. The survival of the
fittest means the survival of the strongest, the most cunning and
unscrupulous. The realist who deals with facts discovers that he lives
in a world of pigs--little pigs of the village, larger hogs of the
city. To get in the trough a man must have fingers and toes and use
them. The world belongs to the strong. That which gives dignity is
bigness: the larger the hog, the more imposing. Little business is
dirty and petty, but big business may become poetic. To grind a mess of
sausages is messy, but to provide sausages for every breakfast table
in America is grandiose. To realize his ambition Van Harrington plays
fast and loose with conventional ethics, but unlike Frank Cowperwood
he seeks a new ethics. As a superman his work will be justified by its
creativeness, by its service to humanity.
_A Life for a Life_ (1910). In certain other of his work Herrick
betrays naturalistic tendencies, notably in _The Web of Life_ (1900),
where he considers the problem of social complexity and how it binds
the life of men and women and determines their fate. But in _A Life
for a Life_ he surrenders wholly to the problem. His theme is how the
predatory egoism of the profit-struggle may be cured, and he presents
alternative solutions: syndicalism and Christianity. The cure lies in
individual self-conquest--breaking through the web of “things as they
are” and choosing life instead of power.
Herrick was on the threshold of naturalism. He felt the complexity of
life and the determining force of that complexity; but he failed to
achieve the attitude of objectivity.
3. Ernest Poole. _The Harbor_ (1915). The culmination of the novel of
naturalistic propaganda and the most widely read. A dramatic record of
a changing industrial order, traced through three stages: (1) The old
world of small competitive business that is dead; (2) The present world
of corporation control; (3) The world of syndicalistic control that
struggles to be born.
Against this changing world stands the young idealist troubled in
his loyalties, who sets up different gods to worship: (1) The idol
of art--aloofness from the mass struggle; (2) The idol of efficiency
by the supermen who rule in trusteeship; (3) The idol of mass
solidarity and workers’ control--the conclusion that is on the dawn of
realization: “The world for all the workers.” _Conclusion._ The ferment
of social thought, shot through with Marxianism, familiarized the
American novelists with one doctrine important for the naturalist--the
doctrine of economic determinism. In none of them did it pass over
into a larger conception of philosophical determinism, and this sets
the limitation to their naturalism. The common zeal for reform or
revolution, moreover, kept them from objectivity. In none is there the
calm detachment and the amoral presentation of material without which
naturalism sinks into propaganda. Their position presupposes a large
confidence in individual initiative--a confidence in the power of men
to alter the world they live in. It is admirable, but it is not the way
of the naturalists, who do not seek to change what they regard as an
essentially unresponsive world that changes only after its own way.
Jack London: The Novelist of the Proletariat[817]
Experienced the harsh contacts of a seasonal worker and tramp. Became a
Marxian socialist and revolutionist, preaching the war of the classes
in _The Iron Heel_ (1908), _The Revolution_ (1910), and other works. A
man of strong vital energy with a philosophy shaped by Darwin, Spencer,
and Nietzsche. Emphasizes a passionate will-to-power, a superman of
swift and violent action.
_The Call of the Wild_ (1903); a study in atavism, brilliant, poetic,
set against a wild Alaska background. The resurgence of the primitive
wolf-instincts in a domesticated dog.
_The Sea Wolf_ (1904); the frankest statement in American literature
of the unbridled will-to-power, egoistic, amoral. A malignant ferocity
in a philosophical, herculean sea captain, whose body is destroyed by
paresis, but whose malignancy is unconquered.
_Martin Eden_ (1909); autobiographical. So compare _John Barleycorn_
(1913). The former deals with his struggle to educate himself, to
write, and to gain recognition. A background of his experience at the
University of California. A profound contempt for _bourgeois_ standards
of life and thought. The note of revolution and the lapsing of the
will-to-live.
London carries to the extreme the “elemental” of Norris, translating it
into the primitive and abysmal. A potential naturalist in his amoral
attitude and his underlying pessimism, but carried away by zeal of
revolution. Lacks restraint and finish.
Upton Sinclair[818]
The most insistent and outspoken of the muckrakers. Began as a
novelist, but his art submerged by propaganda--a profound suspicion of
capitalism and all its ways.
_The Jungle_ (1906); a story of the packing houses and the immigrant:
the technique of “speeding up” and the labor scrap-heap. The social
consequences of the profit principle--saving everything but the squeal
of the hog and the health of the laborer.
_King Coal_ (1917); a story of the Rockefeller coal fields in Colorado
and the miners’ union. Probably his most skillful story.
Numerous other titles, among them: _The Brass Check_, an examination
of the American newspaper--the charge that these are the tools
of plutocracy; _The Goose Step_, an examination of the American
university--the charge that these serve wealth; _The Goslings_, an
attack upon the public school as an agent of capitalism.
Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists[819]
Against this background of eager ferment and various propaganda stands
Theodore Dreiser, who is of this changing world and yet apart from
it: the most detached and keenly observant of all our writers, a huge
figure of ungainly proportions--a heavy-footed peasant with unslaked
curiosity and a boundless pity, who is determined to examine critically
“this animal called man” and portray him truthfully. He tramps across
fields straight to his objective, messing sadly the neat little beds
of American convention, peering into the secret places that are marked
“Not Open To The Public,” keeping nothing hidden, ashamed of nothing,
apologizing for nothing. Not since Walt Whitman has there been another
such frank and detached projection of reality, such insistence that the
world shall stop and consider those facts which convention has politely
agreed to ignore. Naturally a great hue and cry of the Pharisees
has been raised against him. The respectable middle class will have
none of this peasant directness and brutal truth. He has entered our
_bourgeois_ society “murmurous of morality” with an alien philosophy,
which he must defend. At every moment he feels under the necessity
of assisting the truth as he sees it, and instead of suffering his
portrayal to stand on its own feet he props it up with argument and
interminable debate. The artist suffers at the hands of the disputant.
_The Man and his Philosophy._ Marked by an immense and open-eyed
curiosity that ends in agnosticism. His anthropocentric conceptions:
I have lived now to my fortieth year and have seen a good deal of
life.... But I am one of those curious persons who cannot make up
their minds about anything. I read and read.... But I find that one
history contradicts another, one philosopher drives out another.
Essayists, in the main, point out flaws and paradoxes in the
current conception of things, novelists, dramatists and biographers
spread tales of endless disasters, or silly illusions concerning
life, duty, opportunity and the like. And I sit here and read and
read, when I have time, wondering.[820]
“Nothing is proved, all is permitted,” he says in _The Titan_. Men
will do what they think they can get away with. In briefest terms his
philosophy may be phrased thus:
1. The world is without reason or meaning to us. Why we are here and to
what end is unknowable.
2. Men are chemical compounds, existing in a world where they play
about like water-flies, skipping restlessly and unintelligently as
their legs drive them, whom the universe in its vast indifference
suffers for a time.
3. Men divide into the strong and the weak; not the good and the bad.
The will to power, the desire for pleasure, drive men on their courses.
What restrains? Moral codes and social conventions, often useful, often
harmful.
A metaphysical idealism will always tell him that it is better to
preserve a cleanly balance, and the storms of circumstance will
teach him a noble stoicism. Beyond this there is nothing which can
reasonably be imposed upon the conscience of man.[821]
4. Hence the profound need of sympathy and mercy.
Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony
universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely. From the
prowling hunger of the Hyrcan tiger to the concentric grip of
Arcturus and Canopus there is the same ruthless, sightless
disregard of the individual and the minor thing. Life moves in
an ordered hierarchy of forces of which the lesser is as nothing
to the greater ... And in the midst of the rip of desperate
things--in odd crannies and chance flaws between forces--there
spring and blossom these small flowers of sentiment. Tenderness!
Mercy! Affection! Sorrow! The Hindus worship an image of pain.
And well they may. It is a classic amid the painless, the
indifferent--Nirvana. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall
receive mercy! No, no. Blessed are the merciful, for they create
mercy. Of such is the kingdom of the ideal.[822]
_His Attitude toward his Material._ Dreiser possesses a vast and
terrifying imagination. Like James Branch Cabell he broods over the
plight of man in the universe. But he does not seek refuge in the
ideal. He will confront things as they are. The very chemistry of
decaying flesh fascinates him. It is a phenomenon of this impersonal
and relentless universe. Compared with the realities of time and space
and force--what is man and what are his puny efforts and ideals?
The damnable scheme of things which we call existence brings about
conditions whereby whole masses suffer who have no cause to suffer,
and ... whole masses joy who have no cause for joy.... We suffer
for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses
and lacks, which are no part of our willing or doing.[823]
_His Objectivity._ The larger view of life gives detachment. Only one
who has emerged from the jungle can see the whole in broad perspective.
In no other American writer, except Whitman, is such complete
detachment achieved. His life is a long process of stripping away group
illusions, of casting off group conventions. And for this the mass
cannot forgive him, for the mass live in the strait-jacket of custom,
thinking in no other terms than group or tribal terms, worshiping the
communal idols, clinging to the tribal taboos. They cannot achieve
individuality themselves and they hate Dreiser. It puts him outside the
tribe, for the first law of the tribe is tribal-mindedness. Whoever is
not of us is against us. Whoever questions the validity of the tribal
sanctions is an enemy and must be destroyed. It is in vain that Dreiser
asserts vehemently that he is telling the truth. Another version of the
truth than the tribal version is not wanted.
The significance of Dreiser lies in the fact that he is an individual
apart--one who has broken with the group and sits in judgment on the
group sanctions. He is an anarchist who will be partisan to no taboos.
This is a rare and perilous thing to do. He stands outside.
_His Amoral Attitude._ It is on this score that Dreiser stands
condemned by our _bourgeois_ censors. His amoral attitude is strangely
metamorphosed into immorality. His indifference to the common
preachments, his inability to accept Christian maxims, his refusal to
do lip service to creeds--this is set down as evidence of viciousness,
for _ipso facto_ there can be no other moral standards than the
tribal standards. What is Dreiser’s justification? This, that in the
physical universe he can discover no morality--no justice, mercy,
pity, but everywhere great and indifferent force. And in society--in
the instincts of men and in their hidden desires and secret acts--a
disregard of conventional morality. Society is steeped in hypocrisy.
He saw no morals anywhere--nothing but moods, emotions, needs,
greeds. People talked and talked, but they acted according to their
necessities and desires.[824]
But in frankly revealing the hypocrisy of men Dreiser is no cynic.
There is in him a profound morality--the morality of truth and pity
and mercy. Let us not stone men for their sins but deal generously and
kindly with them. What he protests against is superimposed codes. There
is, for him, “in Nature, no such thing as the right to do, or the right
not to do.”[825]
But is there not social expediency? To which the individual for his own
good should conform? Experience has taught men some excellent things.
_His Work._ Dreiser has given us full-length portraits of two
women--Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt--and of two men--Eugene
Witla and Frank Cowperwood. These constitute his major contribution
and on them his reputation rests.[826] In addition there is _Hey
Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, a book of essays in which his philosophy is set forth,
a naturalistic play, _The Hand of the Potter_--a study in pathology
where the hand of the potter slipped--a book of travel, and some
short stories. Of his four major characters the two women are passive
and pliable, easily made victims of circumstance. Of the two men
one--Eugene Witla--is weak, and the other--Frank Cowperwood--is the
supreme example in American literature of the will to power.
_The Financier_ and _The Titan_. A colossal study of the American
business man, in two volumes of a total of 1332 pages. Compared with
this all other studies are crude and unconvincing. Here the thing has
been done once for all.
“These crude and greedy captains of finance had to be given some kind
of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a raw epic out of
their lives.”[827]
Where did Dreiser get his intimate and detailed information concerning
high finance? Where his knowledge of such a character? Out of his own
powerful mind. Cowperwood a portrait of Charles Yerkes. Two periods:
his Philadelphia life to 1873; his Chicago life to 1898. In both he
molds circumstance to his advantage; in both he is caught by chance and
fails.
_The Man._ Driven by three impulses: love of power, love of women, love
of art. There is in him a unity of character and an inevitability of
development that are overwhelming. Dreiser does not judge, apologize,
praise, or condemn; he is content to permit the character to develop.
From first to last he is detached and objective. He presents Cowperwood
as a magnificent physical and mental machine: a born fighter and
leader, strong, alert, with a cool resourceful mind. A pronounced
hardness that goes with strength--contempt for the weakling, impatience
with the inefficient. In his sex passages there is no glamour of
romance. They are direct and brutal--but more moral than glamorous.
Nevertheless great personal charm--the magnetism of a virile mind and
indomitable will. To men he is an inspiration, to women a fascination.
And yet a frank egoist, self-centered, imperturbable.
The fate of the individualist: in pitting his will against life
Cowperwood feared chance, which undid him in Philadelphia. But his
very prevision, which carried him to triumph, brought his downfall.
The many are stronger than the superman. And in the end, failure.
Strength endures for so short a time and is so weak. Age, weakness,
social forces--these undermine the strong. A vast irony. Cowperwood is
punished not because he is evil but because he is a man.
_Cowperwood’s Philosophy._ From his youth up life was a puzzle to him.
Nothing was certain, for beyond and above all was a blind, irrational
chance. Nevertheless within reasonable limits it was plain enough that
strength and intelligence prevail. This lesson he first learned from
the squib and the lobster, and it became his guiding principle. When
chance had brought him within the shadow of the penitentiary, he summed
it up:
It is a grim, bitter world we are all born into.... Who was to
straighten out the matter of the unjust equipment with which most
people began? Who was to give them strong minds in place of feeble
ones, able bodies instead of wretched ones? Where were they to get
pure-tendencies instead of impure ones, as the world looked on
these things?... Some were sent into the world with a great lust
and great ability for wealth like himself, a mind swift to see, a
body strong to endure; and some were sent half equipped, almost
shapeless and formless.... Strength and weakness--there lay the
key, the answer.[828]
Stuart Sherman on Dreiser:
By eliminating distinctively human motives and making animal
instincts the supreme factors in human life, Mr. Dreiser reduces
the problem of the novelist to the lowest possible terms.... His
philosophy quite excludes him from the field in which the great
realist must work. He has deliberately rejected the novelist’s
supreme task--understanding and presenting the development of
character; he has chosen only to illustrate the unrestricted flow
of temperament. He has evaded the enterprise of representing human
conduct; he has confined himself to representation of animal
behavior.[829]
And the two novels he says are “like a club sandwich composed of slices
of business, alternating with erotic episodes.” It is true, but the
failure is one of art that does not merge them. What would Sherman
have? Shall these impulses be eliminated from literature, or from human
nature itself?
Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes[830]
As the row of his pudgy orange-backed volumes lengthens on the shelf,
it becomes evident that Sinclair Lewis is the bad boy of American
letters whose thoughts are on bent-pins while the deacon is laboring
in prayer. His irrepressible satire belongs to a new and irritatingly
effective school. He has studied the technique of the realists, and
under the beguiling pretense of telling the truth objectively and
dispassionately, he insists on revealing to us unaccommodated man as a
poor, bare, forked animal, who like Jurgen persists in thinking himself
a monstrous clever fellow. He is maliciously severe on all respectable
dignities. In his hands the noble _homo sapiens_ of common repute
is translated into an ignoble _homo libidinus et ventosissimus_--an
unattractive animal that runs in herds, serves its belly, and has a
taking way with the dams. The free-born American citizen, master of the
earth and its destiny, is little flattered by the portrait he draws,
and Mr. Lewis finds himself, in consequence, _persona non grata_ in any
convention of Elks or Rotarians.
The method he has chosen to adopt is a clever advance over the
technique of the eighteenth century, when pricking balloons was the
business of every wit. Those older satirists--nagging souls like Pope
and bold bad fellows like Churchill--were mainly concerned to annoy
their victims with pin-pricks. They were too completely the gentleman
to grow chummy with base fellows whom they frankly despised; and in
consequence they never discovered half the possibilities of the gentle
art of satire. Sinclair Lewis is wiser than they were. He has learned
that before one can effectively impale one’s victim, one must know all
his weaknesses and take him off his guard. So he ingratiatingly makes
up to George F. Babbitt of Zenith, drinks chummily with him, swaps
greasy jokes, learns all the hidden vanities and secret obscenities
that slip out in the confidences of the cups, beguiles him into
painting his own portrait in the manly midnight hours; and when the
last garment that covers his nakedness is stripped off, the flashlight
explodes and the camera has caught the victim in every feature of his
mean and vacuous reality.
No doubt it is an ungentlemanly thing to do--a calculating betrayal of
trusting human nature done in the sacred name of art; and it is certain
that the unhappy victim will hate the artist when he sees the developed
print next morning. Yet the picture is extraordinarily lifelike. All
the unlovely details of fat stomach and flabby muscles are sharply
revealed. It is too late to put on one’s clothes, and _homo sapiens_ in
the person of George F. Babbitt is revealed as a shambling, two-legged
animal, for the world to laugh at. The method is immensely clever;
it is the last word in the technique of despoiling one’s victim of
adventitious dignity, without which life becomes a mean, bleak affair;
but it is scarcely charitable. To think well of oneself and to wish
to impose that good opinion upon others, are common human weaknesses
that every tailor blesses. Without clothes man is only a caricature of
the godlike, and the artist who betrays our nakedness to our enemies
is very far from a gentleman. The confidences of the cups must be held
sacred, for if we cannot drink without fear of our babbling being
reported, what becomes of goodfellowship?
But the charge of betraying goodfellowship leaves Sinclair Lewis
unconcerned. His satire knows no compunctions. An irreverent soul, he
dares the wrath not only of George F. Babbitt, but of the innumerable
clubs to which Babbitt belongs. A buoyant scoffer, he does not permit
even the organized wrath of the Chamber of Commerce to disturb his
equanimity. He provokes respectable people on principle, and he has
laid a devilish plan to work systematically through our sacred American
decalogue, smashing one commandment after another. Already behind him
is strewn a sorry wreckage of established creeds and authoritative
slogans--a wreckage that delights the wicked and gives aid and comfort
to all evil-wishers in our comfortable and excellent society. Not even
a banker is sacred to him. Rotarians and Kiwanians, Billy Sundays and
Billy Bryans, voluble Congressmen and silent Presidents, even our
venerable Constitution itself, he scoffs at and makes merry over. And
to add insult to injury, he prospers in his sins. His calculating
wickedness returns him a fattening bank account. His impudent satires
sell like bargain-counter silk stockings. We pay handsomely to see
ourselves most unhandsomely depicted. If we would only take a lesson
from the strategy of the heathen Chinese, we might boycott Mr. Lewis’s
wares and reduce him to the beggary that is more becoming to wickedness
than a wanton prosperity. But a Christian people will not go to school
to the heathen, and so Mr. Lewis prospers in his wickedness and waxes
vulgarly rich.
Now what is the tremendous discovery that Sinclair Lewis makes so
much of, and that we pay so great a price to learn? It is no other
than this: that the goodly United States of America are peopled by a
mighty herd, which like those earlier herds that rumbled about the
plains, drives foolishly in whatever direction their noses point--a
herd endowed with tremendous blind power, with big bull leaders, but
with minds rarely above their bellies and their dams. In the mass and
at their own romantic rating they are distinctly imposing--big-necked,
red-blooded, lusty, with glossy coats got from rich feeding-grounds,
and with a herd power that sweeps majestically onward in a cloud of
dust of its own raising, veritable lords and masters of a continent.
But considered more critically and resolved into individual members,
they appear to the realist somewhat stupid, feeble in brain and will,
stuffed with conceit of their own excellence, esteeming themselves the
great end for which creation has been in travail, the finest handiwork
of the Most High who spread the plains for their feeding-grounds: with
a vast respect for totems and fetishes; purveyors and victims of the
mysterious thing called Bunk, who valiantly horn to death any audacious
heretic who may suggest that rumbling about the plains, filling their
bellies, bellowing sacred slogans, and cornering the lushest grass, are
scarcely adequate objectives for such immense power: a vast middleman
herd, that dominates the continent, but cannot reduce it to order or
decency.
Consider, suggests Mr. Lewis, what this rumbling herd signifies in
the light of rational and humane ideals. What sort of custodians of
civilization are these lumbering mobsters with their back-slappings and
bellowings? What becomes of the good life in a society that flowers in
Rotarian conventions? The banker has reduced America to the level of a
banker’s Utopia, and now bids us admire his handiwork. Other societies,
aristocratic and feudal, honored the priest and knight and artist above
the usurer and tradesman; other generations professed to serve truth
and beauty and godliness in their daily lives; but the great American
herd cares nothing for such things. In the name of democracy priest
and knight and artist are turned lackeys to merchants and realtors, to
men who would not recognize faith or chivalry or imagination if they
met them on the golf course, and who understand democracy as little as
they understand Christianity. In this land of material abundance the
good life is reduced to being measured in commissions and percentages;
civilization comes to flower in the broker; the mahogany desk is the
altar at which we sacrifice in a land of triumphant materialism. “God
help the country,” said Fenimore Cooper, years ago when the herd was
small, “that has only commercial towns for its capitals.” “Such a
country is past helping,” retorts Sinclair Lewis. “God cannot help
it, or the Devil. In the name of George F. Babbitt and Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh and the Reverend Elmer Gantry, what can be expected of such
a country? A people that worships the great god Bunk shall have its
reward!”
To prove his amiable thesis Mr. Lewis has been at enormous pains to
gather his materials at their sources. He has taken upon himself to
become a specialist in depicting the _genus Americanus_. He has loafed
along Main Street, played poker in back rooms with wicked young men,
drunk in respectable clubs, and exchanged hearty back-slappings with
the sons of Rotary. He has devoted days to the smoking-compartments of
Pullmans, garnering the ripest wisdom and choicest stories of traveling
salesmen. He has listened to philosophic brokers discourse on ethics,
studied political and constitutional theory with realtors, learned
all about Bolshevism from presidents of Chambers of Commerce, been
instructed in the elements of economics by Republican Congressmen,
discovered the fallacies in Darwinian evolution from clerical
fundamentalists and the superiority of Fascism over democracy from
the greatest captains of industry. No field of American experience
has escaped his minute investigation, no authority has eluded his
catechizing. In the course of his studies he has come to master the
lusty American language in its subtlest shades and manliest _nuances_,
from the comic supplement to Dunn and Bradstreet, and he talks easily
with Main Street in its own vernacular. His rich and copious vocabulary
fills a commonplace scholar with envy, and his ebullient slang, his
easy slovenliness of enunciation, inflict on the simple-minded user of
the King’s English a hopeless inferiority complex.
Thus amply equipped with all the resources of scholarship, he has
written four learned treatises in exemplification of the thesis that
the _genus Americanus_ is cousin-german to the scoffing Mr. Mencken’s
lately discovered _boobus Americanus_. The introductory study,
_Main Street_, provided a comprehensive background and setting for
the full-length portraits he was to draw later. Gopher Prairie,
situated in the heart of agricultural America--in Meredith Nicholson’s
Valley of Democracy where the old-fashioned, kindly, neighborly,
wholesome, democratic virtues are presumed to thrive in a congenial
habitat--becomes in his unsympathetic analysis a place that William
Allen White would not recognize as his home town. Here, he tells us, is
respectability made sluggish and sterile. Here is “slavery self-sought
and self-defended.” Here is “dullness made God.” Here, diluted and
spread over a vast territory, the spirit of Babbitt has erupted
in cheap and pretentious county-seats, parasites on the producing
hinterland over whose politics and credit and morals Main Street
tradesmen have set up a strict custodianship--futile and complacent and
drab, mere echoes of the greater cities that lie on the horizon and to
which the sons of Main Street turn for light and guidance.
It is these greater cities that constitute the true capitals of our
red-blooded Americans who proclaim themselves “the greatest race in
the world”--fruitful centers from which radiates the philosophy of
pep, punch, and progress for the upbuilding and enlightenment of the
world. Of these centers the hustling and mighty Zenith is the wonder
and admiration of all right-minded citizens; it is the brightest and
bloomiest sunflower of the great American garden. And in Zenith dwells
George F. Babbitt, realtor, Sinclair Lewis’s full-length portrait of
a hero sprung from the loins of America, the completest embodiment of
the triumphant American genius that is conquering the earth. Babbitt as
an upstanding he-member of the great herd is a marvel, the apotheosis
of the regnant middle class, the finished product of our snappy
civilization. Other lands, no doubt, have produced men accounted great.
Plato and Saul of Tarsus, St. Francis and Leonardo, Pascal and Galileo
and Hegel, were no doubt esteemed in their own times and by their own
cities; but Zenith does not go in for out-of-date merchandise; it is
up-to-the-minute and it specialized in George F. Babbitts. And so when
the Reverend Elmer Gantry rises to influence in Gopher Prairie, he is
called to Zenith as its spiritual counselor, and becomes the custodian
of the Zenith moralities, the apostle of Zenith Bunk, the devotee
of the Zenith Mumbo Jumbo. And through Zenith passes also Martin
Arrowsmith the rebel, the perverse outlandish scientist who refuses
to worship Mumbo Jumbo, on his solitary way to discover reality in a
world of Zenith chicanery. Babbitt, Gantry, Arrowsmith--these are the
figures that Sinclair Lewis comes upon in his exploration of the land
of the free and the home of the brave. A somewhat curious showing at
the best.
So slashing an attack upon our common creed and practice has naturally
aroused vigorous protest. Human nature does not like to have its idols
assailed; even the devotees of Mumbo Jumbo will defend their god
against the heretics; and Sinclair Lewis has become the target for
many a shaft. The critics have pressed home their counter attack with
ardor. They insist that he is suffering from an aggravated case of
astigmatism, and that in consequence he does not see eye to eye with
those of normal vision. The world is out of focus to him--askew in all
its structural lines; and this distorted vision prompts those jaundiced
opinions and malicious judgments in regard to the ideals cherished by
our best citizens. He has deliberately cultivated a spleen that makes
him dislike his neighbors because they are comfortable and contented.
Diogenes railing at mankind gained a vast reputation, but it is a nice
question if Diogenes was a useful citizen. What did he do to further
the well-being of his community? How much time and money did he give
to charity and the upbuilding of his city? For all his talking Mr.
Lewis does not seem to know what the good life is. He rails at Babbitt
for not being Plato, but does he understand the A B C of service? To
take a homely figure: the family cow, standing knee-deep in June and
chewing the cud of contentment, would excite his Diogenic scorn. As a
fault-finder and knocker, Brindle is not the equal of Diogenes; but
to criticize her mentality and manners, forgetful of the fact that
from the contented chewing of a plentiful cud will come a plentiful
supply of milk and cream and butter to sweeten the bread of life, is
a somewhat sorry business. In her modest, democratic sphere she is
devoted to service, and if there is a nobler function, Rotary humbly
confesses it had not discovered it. One must not, of course, press too
far the analogy between Brindle and Babbitt; the figure is useful only
to suggest that even in the lowliest spheres Mr. Lewis completely fails
to understand the fine ethical values that underlie and animate the
common American life at which he rails. How, then, shall he understand
them in the higher? Comfort and service are excellent things in
themselves, and if they can be merged in everyday experience, surely
the good life is in the way of achievement.
The point is of vast importance, for it is here that Diogenes Lewis,
his critics assert, has totally misread the meaning and faith of
America. Here in this prosperous land the union between comfort and
service--or to put it in more dignified phrase, the synthesis of
Hellenism and Hebraism--has been achieved in practice. A rich and
abundant life, motivated by a fine sense of ethical responsibility
and disciplined by a democratic public school, is, in sober fact, the
distinguishing characteristic of America that sets our country apart
from all other lands in western civilization. Call it a Babbitt warren
if you will, nevertheless where else has the industrial revolution been
brought so completely and happily under dominion to the democratic
ideal, or been so ennobled by ethical values? Here it has scattered
its wealth amongst the plain people with a bountiful hand, until the
poorest family enjoys its nickel-plated plumbing, its flivver, its
telephone, its radio, its movies, its funnies, and all the thousand
aids to comfort and intelligence which a few generations ago were
denied kings--the result of all which is a standard of living that our
forefathers would have envied. Our Hellenism is, happily, not Greek.
That, as every schoolboy in America knows, was established in slavery;
whereas our modern Hellenism is established in democracy and ennobled
by a sensitive social conscience. Here the master serves. The richest
and greatest amongst us--our Judge Garys and Andrew Mellons--are
servants of the nameless public, and dedicate their creative genius to
the common democratic prosperity. Our Hellenism, in short, is engrafted
on a sturdy Hebraic root and flowers in righteousness--in charity, in
education, in free clinics and hospitals, in scientific foundations, in
great public libraries, in all the vast gifts that wealth freely offers
to the cause of social amelioration. The Puritan strain is fortunately
still the American strain, and we owe much to those excellent
origins that Mr. Lewis scoffs at without understanding. Comfort and
service--Hellenism and Hebraism: if this is not the good life, where
shall one find it? In Bolshevik Russia? After all Diogenes Lewis is
no more important--or useful--than the gad-fly that Brindle brushes
from her glossy sides as she chews her cud. What gad-fly ever produced
butter?
If Sinclair Lewis is unimpressed by such arguments it is because he
is quite disillusioned with the current ideal of material progress.
His dreams do not find their satisfaction in good roads and cheap
gasoline. He would seem to be an incorrigible idealist who has been
bred up on the vigorous Utopianisms of the late nineteenth century.
In the golden days before the deluge he had gone blithely to school to
all the current idealisms that flourished in the land--to Jeffersonian
democracy and to Marxian socialism; and in the well-stocked
pharmacopoeias of hopeful young liberals he professed to discover
specifics for all our social ills. But the war destroyed his faith
in nostrums and removed his Utopia to a dim and foggy future. He has
not yet traveled so far in disillusion as Mr. Cabell, who has seen
fit to dwarf man to the compass of a flea on the epidermis of earth;
nor has he achieved the irony--or the technique--of Clarence Darrow,
who suggests casually: “Of course I know that Confucius was as great
a philosopher as Billy Sunday, and that as a thinker Buddha was the
equal of Billy Bryan. But still all orthodox people know that Confucius
and Buddha were spurious and the Billy brothers genuine.” He has not
even achieved the smug satisfaction of the psychologists who impose
their preposterous intelligence tests on simple folk and triumphantly
discover morons in respectable neighbors. Some lingering faith in our
poor human nature he still clings to. In the great American mass that
human nature is certainly foolish and unlovely enough. It is too often
blown up with flatulence, corroded with lust, on familiar terms with
chicanery and lying; it openly delights in hocus-pocus and discovers
its miracle-workers in its Comstocks and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But
for all its pitiful flabbiness human nature is not wholly bad, nor is
man so helpless a creature of circumstance as the cynics would have us
believe. There are other and greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped
in America, worthier things than hocus-pocus; and in rare moments even
Babbitt dimly perceives that the feet of his idol are clay. There are
Martin Arrowsmiths as well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it
will, can pull itself out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes
bad men. Put the banker in the scullery instead of the drawing-room;
exalt the test-tube and deflate the cash register; rid society of the
dictatorship of the middle class; and the artist and the scientist
will erect in America a civilization that may become what civilization
was in earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity
and the disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair
Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the
Enlightenment--thin and far off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.
Whether we like Mr. Lewis’s technique or not, whether we agree with
his indictment of middle-class ideals or dissent from it, his writings
are suggestive documents symptomatic of a dissatisfied generation
given over to disillusion. The optimistic dreams of middle-class
capitalism are not so golden as they seemed to us before the war; and
these pudgy novels are slashing attacks on a world that in mouthing
empty shibboleths is only whistling to keep up its courage. The faith
of America is dead. These brisk pages are filled with the doings
of automata--not living men but the simulacra of men, done with
astonishing verisimilitude, speaking an amazingly realistic language,
professing a surprising lifelikeness; yet nevertheless only shells from
which the life has departed, without faith or hope or creative energy,
not even aware that they are dead.
It is this consciousness of sketching in a morgue that differentiates
Mr. Lewis from the earlier satirists of middle-class America, who in
the hopeful years before the war were busily engaged in rebuilding the
American temple. The preceding generation--earnest souls like Robert
Herrick and Jack London and Upton Sinclair--were as well aware of the
shortcomings of our industrial order as Sinclair Lewis, and hated them
as vigorously. From the days of Emerson and George Ripley, of Carlyle
and Ruskin, capitalistic society had been persistently subjected to
sharp and devastating analysis; its drabness and regimentation, its
sterility and emptiness and joylessness, had been pointed out by
many pens. The Victorians long ago discovered that no generous or
humane civilization was to be expected from the hands of Plugson of
Undershot--that the banker conceiving of human felicity in terms of
eight per cent. is a mean and shabby fellow in comparison with St.
Francis or Michelangelo. Long before Sherwood Anderson, William Morris
had observed that the workman no longer sings in the factory as in
other days he sang over his tool, and concluded that the creation of
beauty is more important for human happiness than figuring profits from
mass production.
But those earlier analysts were dealing with causes of which they
could only forecast the ultimate consequences, whereas Sinclair Lewis
is dealing with effects. Plugson of Undershot is now the universal
dictator. Before the war there was still life and hope in western
civilization; it was not yet reduced to being a common Babbitt warren,
with its Billy Sundays and Almus Pickerbaughs, its artists and editors
and scientists, on the Plugson pay-roll. What emerges from the drab
pages of Sinclair Lewis that is suggestive is the authoritative
pronouncement that the effects forecast by the earlier critics have
become in our day the regnant order of things. Babbitt is the son of
Plugson of Undershot, and Babbitt is a walking corpse who refuses to
be put decently away to make room for living men. An empty soul, he is
the symbol of our common emptiness. Historically he marks the final
passing in America of the civilization that came from the fruitful
loins of the eighteenth century. For a hundred and fifty years western
civilization had sustained its hopes on the rich nourishment provided
by the great age of the Enlightenment. Faith in the excellence of
man, in the law of progress, in the ultimate reign of justice, in the
conquest of nature, in the finality and sufficiency of democracy,
faith in short in the excellence of life, was the great driving force
in those earlier, simpler days. It was a noble dream--that dream of
the Enlightenment--but it was slowly dissipated by an encompassing
materialism that came likewise out of the eighteenth century. Faith in
machinery came to supersede faith in man; the Industrial Revolution
submerged the hopes of the French Revolution. And now we have fallen
so low that our faith in justice, progress, the potentialities of
human nature, the excellence of democracy, is stricken with pernicious
anemia, and even faith in the machine is dying. Only science remains
to take the place of the old romantic creed, and science with its
psychology and physics is fast reducing man to a complex bundle of
glands, at the mercy of a mechanistic universe. Babbitt, to be sure,
has not yet discovered the predicament he is in, but Martin Arrowsmith
knows; and while Babbitt is whistling somewhat futilely, Arrowsmith is
hard at work in the laboratory seeking a new philosophy to take the
place of the old. The outlook is not promising, but until a new faith
emerges from the test-tube Sinclair Lewis will wander in the fogs of
disillusion.
But enough of such crape-hanging at a time when our best minds
are engaged in the great work of stabilizing prosperity. What are
test-tubes in comparison with the infallible statistics patriotically
disseminated by the National City Bank? To parade such heresies in
the face of the progressive American public is enough to damn any
man, genius or not. We want no carpers or cynics in our congenial
membership. We must all get together to put across the drive for a
bigger and richer and better America; and so, reluctantly, despite the
fact that in many ways he is a good fellow, we blackball Sinclair Lewis.
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist[831]
Unlike our earlier naturalists in handling of material and dramatic
interests. Concerned with inner life rather than outer, with hidden
drives rather than environment. Accepts the main criteria of
naturalism: determinism, distortion, pessimism. A lean and sparing
writer whose symbolisms are obscure and puzzling. A single theme:
the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create
grotesques. Due to (1) Crude, narrow environment that drives to strange
aberrations; (2) Repressed instincts that break forth in abnormal
action. The consequence a black loneliness--the hunger of fellowship
and its denial. Limited in scope to episodic crises--hence his better
stories short. Many failures: _Marching Men_; _Windy McPherson’s Son_;
_Poor White_ (1920); _Many Marriages_ (1923)--a clumsy account of a
Babbitt gone on a psychological spree; _Horses and Men_ (1923)--some
more Grotesques; see in particular “A Chicago Hamlet.”
_Winesburg, Ohio_ (1918). A prose _Spoon River Anthology_, with an
excellent collection of grotesques. Sharp vignettes; lonely, thwarted
lives, “confused and disconcerted by the facts of life.” A background
of earlier America, crude and ugly, that drives to religious fanaticism
in Steve Bentley; to passionate rebellion in Kate Swift; to bitter
irony in Ray Pearson. Note the deterministic conclusion of “The Untold
Lie”--“Tricked, by Gad, that’s what I was; tricked by life and made
a fool of”; and the pessimism: ... “he shouted a protest against his
life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.”
_The Triumph of the Egg_ (1921). A strange and difficult book with
its subtle symbolisms. The theme is the common hunger for romance and
fellowship that confuses itself with sex and is unsatisfied. Suggested
in prefatory poem: “I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to
tell it.”
1. _The Egg._ An epitome of his philosophy of grotesques. The egg
breeds life that is futile, and life reproduces the egg. A morbid
disgust that would bottle the egg, and the failure.
2. _Out of Nowhere Into Nothing._ Theme is the “white wonder of
life”--what it is and the part it plays in shaping life; a sex illusion
that in its mystic appeal to youth guarantees the perpetuation of the
race. To age there is no “white wonder,” but the life processes are
dirty, and lead to final imprisonment in a common trap. Hence the
“white wonder” is the supreme jest of nature, sardonic, beguiling,
gathering its victims who eagerly run their predetermined course.
3. _Brothers._ A suggestion of the true “white wonder of life”--the
brotherhood of man in a lonely world--“beyond words, beyond
passion--the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life.” But men
cannot break through the walls of themselves to grasp it, and the
dirt of the world destroys its beauty. “The whole story of mankind’s
loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty, tried to
get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with
loneliness.” “We have different names but we are brothers.” “Already
I have written three hundred, four hundred thousand words. Are there
no words that lead into life?” See conclusion of “The Man in the Brown
Coat.”
_A Story Teller’s Story_ (1924). An attempt to lay bare the emotional
life of one seeking to be an artist in America; to plumb his own
consciousness, to escape from a world he hates. Such escape comes from
reaching down “through all the broken surface distractions of modern
life to that old craft out of which culture springs.” He must pull
himself free from a deadening and devastating routine of an industrial
society with its empty ambitions. And having found his craft he finds a
recompense in life. “I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often
seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by
men and women who had never known me, could have no personal reasons
for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such
brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean
at such moments of service?” A stimulating and suggestive document of
modern life.
The note of determinism in Anderson expressed in two images, the wall
and escape--running to get away from what holds us fast. But in running
away from the old self to find a new, we carry the old self with us.
Anderson one of the three or four most important men now writing
fiction in America. Compare with D. H. Lawrence.
A New Romance
The new romance and the new naturalism both spring from a common
root--hatred of the meanness and ugliness of modern life; but romance
seeks to evade and forget what naturalism examines curiously. It is a
defense mechanism against things as they are and springs from:
1. Disgust at the verisimilitude of naturalism that parades the crude
ugliness of life as if it were the reality. The dream more important
than the fact, for our real existence is within the imagination,
removed from material futilities, where we may satisfy our hunger for
beauty, for far-ranging adventure, for ideal existence.
2. The impulse to free creation. Real life overshadowed and darkened by
a sense of impotence; men are flies caught in the web of circumstance.
But in romance the will is unshackled and the free imagination plays
with time and space, shaping fate to its liking in terms of beauty,
dwelling in a world as we should like it to be. Romance hence is the
ideal cosmos of the ego.
3. The spirit of youth that has brooded over life and refuses to
abandon its dreams. The inevitable outcome irony, an undertone of
sadness, a recognition of the pessimism against which it desires to be
a defense. This the final note. So compare the _Eros et mors_ of old
romance....[832]
1917-1924[833]
_Introduction_: With the entry of America into the war came a sharp
change in literary development. Regimentation due to war psychology
destroyed the movement of social criticism which dominated fiction
between 1903 and 1917. The liberal movement in economics and politics
came to an abrupt end, and the problem novel ceased to be written.
Almost overnight it became old-fashioned. The year 1918 sterile.[834]
With the year 1919 began a new literary period. Three major movements:
1. A resurgence of naturalism, inspired by psychology rather than by
economics, with a tendency to impressionism in handling: represented by
Sherwood Anderson.
2. A new romanticism, seeking ideal beauty as a defense against reality
and emerging in irony: represented by James Branch Cabell.
3. A new criticism: A revolt of the young intellectuals against
the dominant middle class--its Puritanism, its Victorianism, its
acquisitive ideals: represented by Sinclair Lewis.
I • The Small Town in Fiction
The first expression of the new literature. Chiefly a middle-western
development--and a late phase of the literature of the local. A
reaction from the “economic city,” with its centralizing economics,
which dominated the problem novel. Two antagonistic interpretations:
(1) The romantic small town, or the theory of a kindly, democratic
world; (2) The realistic small town, or the theory of a petty,
competitive world.
I. _The Romantic Interpretation of the Small Town._ A hold-over from
an earlier period. Derives from Riley; elaborated and defended by
Meredith Nicholson, _The Valley of Democracy_ (1918). According to
this theory the middle-western village is: (1) A land of economic
well-being, uncursed by poverty and unspoiled by wealth; (2) A land
of “folksiness”--the village a great family in its neighborliness,
friendliness, sympathy; (3) Primarily middle-class, and therefore
characteristically American, wholesome, and human in spite of its
prosaic shortcomings; (4) The home of American democracy, dominated
by the spirit of equality, where men are measured by their native
qualities.[835]
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border
Product of middle-class, Puritan Kansas. Dominated by sentiment,
believes in the essential fairness of men. Two major ideas: (1)
Belief in the excellence of western village life; (2) Fear lest
this life be submerged by industrialism. A romantic and political
Progressive. Formulated his political theory in _The Old Order
Changeth_ (1910)--thesis, that America is changing from representative
republicanism to democracy. The problem is to make business honest. Not
an intellectual. His plots resemble Thackeray’s--leisurely, gossipy,
confidential asides, a large canvas, many figures, a long period of
time. His attitude admirably expressed in _Emporia and New York_ (1906).
_At the Court of Boyville_ (1899). The romance of youth set against
the background of the small town. A world of dreams and loveliness:
adventures that await beyond the horizon; the glory of pigtails and
overalls. The democracy of the vacant lot: rivalry in marbles and
hand-springs--the leadership of the capable. Sincerer work than
Tarkington’s _Penrod_. Contrast with Garland’s _Son of the Middle
Border_, and Mark Twain’s _Tom Sawyer_.
_A Certain Rich Man_ (1909). His plunge into the problem novel. Theme:
fear of the economic city that draws the villager into its web. A
contrast between the two worlds and two social ideals--the friendly
democracy of the older America threatened by economic centralization.
_In the Heart of a Fool_ (1918). One of the last of the problem
novels. Theme--the invasion of the small town by industrialism and the
disintegration of village virtues. The story of an idealist who opposes
the ends of Main Street and his destruction by the herd. A suggestion
of Sinclair Lewis. The conclusion--the excellence of love and the
foolishness of selfishness. The background characters, studies in the
reaction of the older ideal to the new egoism.
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters
Possesses the virtues of cleverness, optimism, humor, respectability.
Honors all the Victorian taboos. Life is an agreeable experience--to
the successful, hence it is well to rise. His chief theme, middle-class
romance as exemplified in the “valley of democracy”: courtship of
nice young people through the agencies of parties and picnics. A
skillful writer, with a light touch, but his art destroyed by love of
popularity--a novel ends well that ends happily. A perennial sophomore,
purveyor of comfortable literature to middle-class America.[836]
_The Gentleman from Indiana_ (1899). A dramatization of the “good, dear
people” theme. The college man who goes back to his people to live and
work with them. A satisfying life results from merging individual life
in the common village life. A flabby and somewhat saccharine philosophy.
_Alice Adams_ (1921). The story of an instinctive actress and her
competitive struggle for social position and a man. A clever,
attractive, lovable girl defeated by her background--led into foolish
little deceits to keep up appearances--victim of middle-class
conventionality. Shabby parlors versus conservatories as settings for
proposals. The Adams family has fallen behind their acquaintances in
the business of rising in the world, and Alice sinks to a lower social
scale. An overrated book.
_The Midlander_ (1923). A contribution to booster literature and
an unconscious satire on the emptiness of the middle-class mind. A
real-estate venture and what came of it. The conception that “man
is a wealth-and-comfort-producing machine.” Supposed to be tragedy,
but the tragedy lies in preferring the imported to the domestic
article--choosing a New York girl instead of a local one. The suburb
thrives, the automobile business goes forward, and the gods of getting
on smile in the end.[837]
The other numerous titles of Tarkington signify nothing except to
lovers of comfortable literature. The clever Hoosier has ceased to be
an artist--the great failure in contemporary American fiction.
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher)
A clever dramatizer of the obvious: believes in the Woman Triumphant,
and discovers in the right education of children--particularly
girls--the solution of all problems. Two main themes:
1. A protest against the demands of “social life.” _The Squirrel
Cage_ (1912). A contribution to the problem novel. A William Morris
suggestion of the sufficiency of handicraft as an escape from social
demands. An arraignment of the American home where the father scarcely
knows the children and the mother is shut away from the outside world.
_The Bent Twig_ (1915). A study of university community life--the
struggle between plain living and high thinking--of social pleasure and
no thinking.
2. The defense of the village. The belief that community fellowship--a
gathering to watch a century plant bloom--breeds an artistic spirit
finer than old-world art and culture can offer. Especially a Vermont
town is ideal for the proper bringing up of children. _The Brimming
Cup_ (1920). A story of the right bringing up of children. _Rough Hewn_
(1922). The love of art and travel which leads inevitably to a Vermont
town and marriage. _Raw Material_ (1923). Sketches. The point of view
given in “Paul Meyer”--the folly of thinking that a normal girl should
prefer philology to matrimony.
II • The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism
The work of the younger intellectuals, more disciplined than the
muckrakers, with wider culture and severer standards. Concerned for
civilization, the things of the spirit, a free creative individualism,
rather than political liberalism. A searching criticism of the
triumphant middle class, its ideals and its habitat, the town and
city; the repressive tyrannies of its herd mind; the futility of
its materialism. Back of the novelists is a group of essayists,
young critics of established ways: Van Wyck Brooks, Ludwig Lewisohn,
Randolph Bourne, H. L. Mencken. They embody a reaction from: (1) The
acquisitive ideal of a machine civilization. (2) “The great illusion
of American civilization, the illusion of optimism”--the staple of
middle-class business morale. (3) The sentimentalism of “comfortable
literature,” that evades reality and weakens the intellectual fiber.
(4) The inhibitions of a Puritanism that has lost its sanctions. (5)
The White-Tarkington doctrine of the “beautiful people” and “folksy
village.”
The movement began with Masters’s _Spoon River Anthology_ (1915). An
earlier work is E. W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_ (1883):--stark,
grim, unrelieved, revealing the “smoldering discontent of an
inarticulate frontier.”
Zona Gale--The Transition from Romance to Realism
I. Friendship Village romance. _The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre_
(1907). Everyone is helpful, everyone loves, or wants to, or is unhappy
for lack of it. _Friendship Village_ (1908). A world where there is no
sorrow, or sickness, and where brotherly love rules. Of the “folksy”
school.
II. The shift to realism. _Miss Lulu Bett_ (1920). A homely village
tragedy of the repressed soul that rebels under the irritation of
domestic pin-pricks. Plebeian characters, thin, cheap, tiresome; set in
a shoddy world and rubbing each other’s nerves. Deacon Dwight a sadist;
Miss Lulu a grotesque. Treated from the outside in contrast with
Sherwood Anderson’s method. _Faint Perfume_ (1923). A glorification of
martyrdom. The conviction that life is hard, and the excellence of the
economy of pain. A partial return to the _Friendship Village_ note, but
like _Miss Lulu Bett_ in the picture of a self-worshiping family.[838]
Donn Byrne[839]
American born but Irish bred. His early work, _The Stranger’s Banquet_
(1919), half problem novel--industrialism--which offered little scope
for the Celtic wistfulness in which he conceives romance to lie.
_Messer Marco Polo_ (1921). The romance of distant times and places,
of unfamiliar backgrounds and lovely worlds: medieval Venice and its
pageantry; a far quest over burning sands; the loveliness of little
Golden Bells at the court of Kubla Khan; the ardor of love that tangles
itself in religion. A wistfulness and beauty of phrase that remind
one of Synge’s _Riders to the Sea_. The loveliest romance of recent
years.[840]
_The Wind That Bloweth_ (1922). A rich fabric--Gaelic folk; the woman
of the boulevard; the white sun-baked road to Damascus; the fire of
revolution; the crack of cordage as the ship rounds the Horn--a saga of
the unquiet heart.
_The Changeling_ (1923). Short stories of quaint places, forgotten
people; the Bible and love of Ireland. Done with excellent
craftsmanship.
_Blind Raftery_ (1924). A tale of a blind harpist in Dean Swift’s
Ireland and of his wife, Hilaria, who sings the song of the women of
the streets in Cadiz. Life teaches them a philosophy expressed by
the harpist in these words: “We sit a little while by ourselves in
an apart, dark place, and we learn truths, of how certain things one
believes to be good are but vulgar selfish things, and how certain
things the small think evil are but futile accidents. And we learn to
be kind; such wisdom comes when we are dead. And those who have never
died in life ... are pleasant shallow people, soulless as seals.”
Robert Nathan
Began like Donn Byrne with a problem study--_Peter Kindred_ (1919). A
dual personality cut asunder and embodied in two characters: David the
romantic fades out of the story, and Peter becomes a modern, absorbed
in eugenics. A background of Phillips Exeter and Harvard.
_Autumn_ (1921). An idyll of loneliness, with a commentary on
materialism, done in simple, wistful language.
1. Mr. Jeminy, a village philosopher, disciple of Boëthius and St.
Francis, half pagan and yet Christian. Troubled over the poverty of the
world that does not amass “love, peace, the quiet of the heart, the
work of one’s hand.”
2. A village background. Mr. Jeminy wished to teach the children the
secret of happiness instead of the folly of plus and minus, and was
turned out of his school. An echo of _Main Street_ in its commentary
on village narrowness, hardness, gossip. A frigid Puritanism that
disapproves Mr. Jeminy for speaking disrespectfully of God and denies
happiness to Mrs. Wicket who is under God’s sentence of unhappiness.
3. A note of determinism. A world of grotesques--all are hemmed in
and cramped, longing for fresh experience and strange adventures, all
are unhappy. So Aaron Bade with his flute and his “awkward thoughts
and clumsy feelings.” Margaret Bade with her conviction, “Life is so
much spilt milk”; Farmer Barly with his commentary, “Folks are queer
crotchets”; Anna Barly with her yearning for the “white wonder of life”
and the trap. An indictment of New England for its destruction of
natural happiness and the simple joy of life.
4. A profound irony. The end of Mr. Jeminy’s hopefulness is
disillusion. “Here within this circle of hills, is to be found faith,
virtue, passion, and good sense. In this valley youth is not without
courage, or age without wisdom.” The outcome disproves this faith. Of
his many pupils, “Not one is tidy of mind, or humble of heart. Not one
has learned to be happy in poverty, or gentle in good fortune.” Life as
a whole is futile. The dead alone can ask God the meaning of life. “But
for us, who remain, it has no meaning.” The tale is Robert Frost done
in prose--compare “Mending Wall.”
_The Puppet Master_ (1923). The most graceful fantasy in American
literature. Papa Jonas, the puppet creator and master, watches the
love of Annabelle Lee, a rag doll with shoe-button eyes, and Mr.
Aristotle, a red-nosed, philosopher-clown puppet; and of Mary Holly and
Christopher Lane, the poet. The theme is love--“Love is a man’s soul:
it does not grow like his hopes, it does not break like his heart....
But love goes by after a while.” Papa Jonas is Mr. Jeminy, converted
to the Stoic philosophy but lacking love. The note of determinism
persists, but the Stoic attitude overcomes. “Yes,” he said slowly, “one
must make the best of what one has.”
Joseph Hergesheimer: a Sophisticated Romantic
Began as a painter. After fourteen years’ apprenticeship was accepted
by the _Saturday Evening Post_, and began a career in popularity that
rivals Tarkington’s. Possesses the virtues and vices of the _Post_
school. In earlier work a colorist, painting statuesques against
artfully arranged backgrounds; a connoisseur of fabrics and poses and
nature settings--nearly as “much concerned with the stuffs as with the
stuff of life.” In _Cytherea_ the setting a sophisticated manipulation
of the theme, as the hot Cuban night in Cobra with its naked primitive
passions. A dabbler in psychology that develops into a crude
Freudianism, particularly in _Cytherea_. Always a hint of artistic
insincerity; something of a poseur yet a sensuous artist nature. His
gorgeous prose style spotty and streaked by amazing crudeness.
_The Three Black Pennys_ (1917). A study in the breaking out of
willfulness in successive generations, set against a background of
the history of iron-making in Pennsylvania. An elaboration of _Tubal
Cain_. An anticlimax arranged for dramatic significance, suggesting the
decay of romance in a hundred and fifty years of American industrial
development. The first episode is Hergesheimer at his best. Howat
Penny a study in moods that make him “angry at life”; but swept on by
the will to possess. Ludowica Winscomb embodies a favorite theme--the
suggestion of an older culture contrasted with the crude American
reality. So compare Taou Yuen.
_Linda Condon_ (1919). A study in the decay of surface beauty--an
empty form caught in the web of a shallow mother and the demands of
stronger natures, but preserved by lack of emotional concern. Handled
skillfully, with a somewhat forced unity symbolized by Linda’s straight
black bang; but the story leaves one with a sense of unconcern for
Linda and her fate. The ending melodramatic. Note Van Doren’s curious
comment--“nearly the most beautiful American novel since Hawthorne and
Henry James.”
_Java Head_ (1919). The story of an exotic that languishes in an
uncongenial habitat. A contrast in backgrounds: the romance of old
Salem in the days of the clipper ship; the romance of a far older
East that makes Salem seem raw and crude. Taou Yuen a decorative lay
figure, with aristocratic suggestions beyond anything the West knows.
The dramatic significance of opium, that hangs like a pall over the
East and brings degeneration and death to Puritan Salem. The end
with its cheap love adventure, a conscious satire on western life.
Hergesheimer’s best work. A romantic atmosphere got without archaic
trappings of speech and manners; nevertheless makes much of costume.
_Balisand_ (1924). A romance of a Virginia Federalist in the days of
the Revolution and after. A rich background of plantation life, with a
touch of somewhat cheap mysticism. Of the school of Washington rather
than Jefferson. A better work than _The Bright Shawl_ or _Cytherea_.
His other titles signify little. Yet see the _Saturday Evening Post_
for a series of furniture stories. Characteristic of his concern for
the “stuffs of life.” See in particular, “Mahogany” (Vol. 195, no. 53,
January, 1923); “Pewter” (Vol. 196, no. 23, January, 1924); “Oak” (Vol.
196, no. 3, July, 1923).[841]
IV • Certain Other Writers
Edith Wharton--The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy
A temperamental aristocrat, endowed with keen intelligence and ripe
culture. Observes the ways of a wealthy society without culture and
unconcerned with standards. A protest against the domination of
the middle class. Mrs. Wharton isolated in America by her native
aristocratic tastes. The older New York society without real
distinction, bound by convention and with middle-class concern for
respectability; the new society a vulgar plutocracy; outside both a
pushing _nouveau-riche_ class eager to climb. Hence she turns to the
authentic aristocracy of Europe for satisfaction of her genteel tastes.
In spirit she belongs to the _ancien régime_. The highest law of
society is convention, but it must be noble, not vulgar.
_The House of Mirth_ (1905). A story of New York’s gilded society,
and how it served one of its daughters. Lily Bart, trained for social
leadership in a plutocracy, a finished and costly parasite, seeking
a market for her beauty, yet restrained by instinctive refinement
from seeing the game through. Lacking money she is caught in a web of
convention and destroyed. In her world convention is the social law,
and the tragedy flows from her inability to rise above it or to keep it
wholly. The contrast between Selden and Trenor--the aristocrat and the
plutocrat--characteristic of Mrs. Wharton.
_Ethan Frome_ (1911). A dramatization of the “narrow house” theme--life
held relentlessly in the grip of poverty and duty. A bleak and joyless
existence that seeks escape and suffers lingering tragedy. Thereafter a
stern isolation and iron repression. Mrs. Wharton’s finest work.
_The Custom of the Country_ (1915). A study of the social climber. The
best of a series of novels satirizing the encroachments on New York
exclusiveness by the rising plutocracy and its daughters. The western
plutocracy of pork presumably more vulgar than the eastern plutocracy
of Wall Street, yet between them the older gentry crushed. So compare
Boyesen, _Social Strugglers_ (1893); Robert Grant, _Unleavened Bread_
(1900). Undine Spragg, like Selma White, pushing, heartless, vulgar,
showy, is set over against Ralph Marvell, a refined “dabbler with
life”; Peter Van Degen, the “plunger”; and Elmer Moffatt, the self-made
man. She embodies all that Mrs. Wharton most hates; all climbers are
vulgar, she believes, both men and women.
_The Age of Innocence_ (1920). A study of the older world of the
eighteen-seventies. A loving yet satirical picture of a Pharisaic
society, “wholly absorbed in barricading self against the unpleasant”;
that lives secluded, protected by its taboos, and fears reality.
A sterile world of clan conventions and negations; a decadent
Victorianism. The Van der Luydens of Skuytercliff are of the same stuff
as the Dagonets in _The Custom of the Country_; and the dilettante
Newland Archer is another Ralph Marvell. Into this dead world enters
Ellen Olenska with her vivid old-world experiences, who threatens to
rebel, yet finally yields to the clan taboos. The book fades out like
the lives of the Van der Luydens. An admirable work.
_Old New York_ (1924). Four carefully done tales that sketch New York
in the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. A return to her best
manner, with the finish of _The Age of Innocence_.
Her other later work not important. _Glimpses of the Moon_ (1922)
inconsequential; and _A Son at the Front_ (1923)--an attempt to
document the reactions of an artist with a son in the army--only half
successful.
Mrs. Wharton a finished artist who grasps her material firmly; an
intellectual attitude, delighting in irony. Unaffected by the problem
novel, and schools of naturalism or romanticism. Not a thinker like
Cabell, whose irony springs from an imagination that contemplates man
in his relation to cosmic forces, but an observer whose irony springs
from noting the clash between men and social convention. The last
of our literary aristocrats of the genteel tradition. Her attitude
expressed in the words, “_Je suis venue trop tard dans un monde trop
vulgaire._”
Willa Cather: Epics of Women
The Middle Border of Hamlin Garland seen through different eyes. She
looks back lovingly to a pioneer West, as the cradle of heroic lives.
An epic breadth of prairie spaces and industrious years, with a note
of regret--_Optima dies prima fugit._ Against this background she sets
her immigrant women, with their vigor and wealth of life, and considers
how the West has dealt with them. Peasant heroines, with their strong
natures hidden under queer speech and garb, set in a waste of wild
red grass, bitter winters, burning summers, virgin soil and great
loneliness. A long-ignored theme--the lot of the immigrant who has come
on a desperate adventure--the struggle of their children with the soil.
Compare _The Jungle_, for the industrial exploitation of the immigrant.
Has matured slowly. _The Troll Garden_ (1905), and _Alexander’s Bridge_
(1910), are inconsequential. Her real work done late. Belongs to no
school. Is neither naturalistic nor romantic. Is unconcerned with
problems. Except for a single attack on the ugliness of the small
western town--“The Sculptor’s Funeral” in _The Troll Garden_--she
ignores middle-class America and its Main Streets. An individual
artist, sincere, capable; an excellent craftsman.
_O Pioneers_ (1913). The story of Alexandra Bergson, a daughter of the
Middle Border; calm, tenacious, capable; loving the soil and bringing
it to abundant productiveness. The new world had brought out diverse
qualities in the Swedish peasant family; the older brothers common,
dull, vulgarized by Americanization; the younger brother suggestive
of the better side of American opportunity. Alexandra the directing
mind and controlling will. Over against her is set the Bohemian Marie
Tovesky, childlike in her spontaneous enthusiasm. The tragic ending
handled with great skill. Thrown about the whole, a harsh Nebraska
countryside through changing periods. One who had not lived through
similar experiences and loved the memory could not write so.
_The Song of the Lark_ (1915). The story of Thea Kronberg, who by
virtue of fierce energy and iron strength rises to triumph as an
artist. There are no romantic stage-effects, only the passionate
struggle of a tenacious will. Thea a peasant nature of vast solidity.
The most convincing story of artist life written by an American. A
changing background: the mean little Colorado town, the loneliness of
Chicago, Europe, the great spaces of the Southwest.
_My Ántonia_ (1918). The story of Ántonia Shimerda: an opulent peasant
nature with strong mother instinct, thwarted by meager opportunities
and vulgar environment. Her life runs a narrow round: the early
pioneer experience with its loneliness and black tragedy; the town
experience of the hired girl, who lives eagerly; the later life of a
hard-working mother on a lonely farm. Ántonia “a rich mine of life like
the founder of early races,” loving, generous, eager, yet belonging
to the soil. To vulgarize such natures by cramming them into a
conventional mold, passes for Americanization--this the implied thesis.
_One of Ours_ (1922). The story of Claude Wheeler, with strength
imprisoned by a society that opens its opportunities to Main Street
natures like Bayliss Wheeler. A suggestion of naturalism in the
handling of the theme: Claude caught by the negative character Enid
Royse because he fails to appreciate the complementary strength of
Gladys Farmer--a true Cather woman, enmeshed in Gopher Prairie. A
futile, ironical ending: better to die in battle than be destroyed by
the pettiness of Gopher Prairie. The war atmosphere seems curiously
old-fashioned.
_The Lost Lady_ (1923). A change of theme. The story of Mrs. Forester,
an embodiment of traditional feminine charm, quite superior to such
incidents as age or loyalty--a type of woman outside Miss Cather’s
experience and understanding.[842]
V • Some War Books
The late war the first in our history that has produced an aftermath
of searching criticism in fiction or drama. The romantic note dominant
in all earlier accounts, particularly of the Revolution and the
Rebellion. Such stories written by men who took no part in them. The
Civil War produced only one book of realistic criticism, that was
mutilated by the publisher to temper its cynicism, and that enjoyed no
popularity--_The Recollections of a Private_, by Warren Goss. The late
war is producing a considerable group, all realistic and critical; the
romantic note has not yet appeared.
John Dos Passos
_Three Soldiers_ (1921). A naturalistic handling of war that serves
as a commentary on _One of Ours_. The most notable American work on
the theme since Stephen Crane’s _The Red Badge of Courage_. Similar
in temper to Henri Barbusse, _Under Fire_, but dealing with the
barracks and the drill field. Compare with Andreas Latzko, _Men in
War_--impressionistic in handling. Dos Passos a young artist from the
university, an idealist who enlists and is disillusioned. A study of
the war machine and the effect of regimentation on different types of
men--the contrast between army discipline and a lax individualism,
and the disasters that may ensue from sudden change. Fuselli a
low-grade character who wants to rise; Chrisfield a solid animal who
becomes sullen; Andrews a highly nervous organism, to whom routine is
killing. Coarse episodes set in a brilliant background: the glamour of
militarism gone.
E. E. Cummings
_The Enormous Room_ (1922). A brilliant revelation of the tortures
endured by an artist unjustly imprisoned in a French military prison.
Supplements _Three Soldiers_ in destroying the appeal of military
glamour. An attack particularly on the common notion of heroic,
chivalrous France.
Thomas Boyd
_Through the Wheat_ (1923). An impressionistic handling of the
reactions of a normal American soldier, Private Hicks, to the war.
The keynote is numbness--a deadly numbness which offers the sole
defense of the normal mind against the horrors it confronts. Its
matter-of-factness, detached point of view, and the ordinariness of the
hero, set it apart from _Three Soldiers_ and _The Enormous Room_. An
excellent bit of impressionism.
Laurence Stallings
_Plumes_ (1924). A story of war by one who has suffered mutilation
from it. The theme--“If you are smashed badly ... and if you have any
intelligence you must remake a world to live in.” A study of post-war
disillusionment, naturalistically handled. So compare the play in which
he collaborated--_What Price Glory?_
VI • Youth in Revolt--Certain Purveyors of the Hectic
A group of youthful poseurs at the mercy of undigested reactions to
Nietzsche, Butler, Dadaism, Vorticism, Socialism; overbalanced by
changes in American critical and creative standards, and in love with
copious vocabularies and callow emotions. Given to satirizing the
educational methods of _alma mater_; quick to espouse new causes;
enthusiastic for revolt as a profession. A prolific movement which as
yet has accomplished nothing seriously creative.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
_This Side of Paradise_ (1921); _The Beautiful and the Damned_ (1922).
A bad boy who loves to smash things to show how naughty he is; a bright
boy who loves to say smart things to show how clever he is. Precocious,
ignorant--a short candle already burnt out.
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell
Benét: _Heavens and Earth_ (1920); _The Beginning of Wisdom_ (1921);
_Young People’s Pride_ (1923); _Jean Hugenot_ (1923). Floyd Dell: _Moon
Calf_ (1921); _Briary Bush_ (1922); _Janet March_ (1923).
Luminaries of the school which holds that the sufficient tests of
intellectual emancipation are rolled hose, midnight discussions, black
coffee, and the discarding of wedding rings. Floyd Dell the most
serious and ablest of the group.
Ben Hecht
_Eric Dorn_ (1921); _Gargoyles_ (1922). An almost naturalistic distrust
of formal education, love, and government, and an unsubstantiated
belief in the efficacy of revolt in general and the romance of city
streets in particular. A burnt-out rocket. His last books--_1001
Afternoons in Chicago_ (1923) and _Florentine Dagger_ (1924) worse than
inconsequential.
Ole Rölvaag’s “Giants in the Earth”[843]
The dramatic contrast between Per Hansa, type of the natural pioneer
who sees the golden light of promise flooding the windswept plains, and
Beret, child of an old folk civilization who hungers for the home ways
and in whose heart the terror of loneliness gathers, penetrates to the
deeper reality of life as it was lived for three hundred years on the
American frontier. It is not a late or rare phenomenon; it is only late
and rare in literature. We have been used to viewing the frontier in
broad and generous perspective and have responded most sympathetically
to the epic note that runs through the tale of the conquest of the
continent. It is the great American romance that gives life and drama
to our history. It was this epic quality that de Tocqueville felt when
he discovered the poetry of America in the silent march of a race
toward the far-off Pacific, hewing its way triumphantly through forests
and mountains to arrive at its objective. But the emotional side, the
final ledger of human values, we have too little considered--the men
and women broken by the frontier, the great army of derelicts who
failed and were laid away, like the Norse immigrant lad, in forgotten
graves. The cost of it all in human happiness--the loneliness, the
disappointments, the renunciations, the severing of old ties and
quitting of familiar places, the appalling lack of those intangible
cushions for the nerves that could not be transported on horseback or
in prairie schooners: these imponderables too often have been left out
of the reckoning in our traditional romantic interpretation. But with
the growth of a maturer realism we are beginning to understand how
great was the price exacted by the frontier; and it is because _Giants
in the Earth_, for the first time in our fiction, evaluates adequately
the settlement in terms of emotion, because it penetrates to the secret
inner life of men and women who undertook the heavy work of subduing
the wilderness, that it is--quite apart from all artistic values--a
great historical document.
If in one sense the conquest of the continent is the great American
epic, in another sense it is the great American tragedy. The vastness
of the unexplored reaches, the inhospitality of the wilderness, the
want of human aid and comfort when disaster came, these were terrifying
things to gentle souls whom fate had not roughhewn for pioneering. Fear
must have been a familiar visitor to the heart of the pioneer woman,
and for a hundred and fifty years this fear of the dark wilderness was
one reason why the settlements clung to the more hospitable seaboard.
There, at least, was an outlook toward the old home. But with the
crossing of the Allegheny Mountains, following the Revolutionary War,
the frontier spirit came into its own. A spirit of restlessness took
possession of men, and the thin line of settlements advanced swiftly,
overrunning the Inland Empire with its interminable forests and
malarial swamps, sprawling rudely from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of
Mexico. To subdue the land was no easy task. Upon the old and the weak
the wilderness laid a ruthless hand, and even of the strength of the
young it took heavy toll. Tragedy was always lurking at the door of
the backwoods cabin. In Beveridge’s _Life of Lincoln_ there is a grim
story of the hardships suffered by the Lincoln family in Indiana that
leaves no room for romance--husband, wife, two children, and later an
old couple, were forced to pig together all winter in a brush camp open
on one side to the weather, with only a fire in front for cooking and
heating--a mode of life below that of the Indian in his skin teepee.
And then a mysterious disease fell upon them, virulent and fateful,
and the old couple were taken from their cots on the ground and put
away beneath the soil to find what rest they might there. That men
should break and women go mad under such strain is no more than may be
expected of human nature. Beret, the wife of Per Hansa, brooding in her
sod-hut in Dakota, afraid of life and of her own thoughts, and turning
for comfort to a dark religion, is a type of thousands of frontier
women who--as the historian Ridpath said of his parents--“toiled and
suffered and died that their children might inherit the promise.”
* * * * *
Very likely we should have felt the tragedy of the frontier long
ago if we had been as much concerned with inner experience as with
outward act, if we had been psychologists as well as chroniclers.
But we have been too prone to romanticize the objective reality and
disguise slatternly ways with the garb of backwoods independence. The
realistic eighteenth century made no such mistake. Such infrequent
glimpses of the first frontier as we catch in our early literature
suggest a swift descent into grossness as the settlements were left
behind. In the _Journal of Madam Sarah Knight_, which dates from the
opening years of the eighteenth century, are brief notes of what fell
under her sharp eyes on a horseback trip from Boston to New York. The
sketches she has penciled are far from bucolic. Certain of the figures
that emerge casually from her pages are no other than decivilized
grotesques--animal-like creatures for whom returning to a state of
nature meant living filthily in mean huts, traveling back centuries
toward the primitive ways of the cavemen. Of the emotional reactions of
these early children of the wilderness Madam Knight tells us nothing;
so casual an observer would have no opportunity to penetrate beneath
the unlovely surface.
A quarter century later Colonel William Byrd, the first gentleman of
Virginia, wrote his graphic _History of the Dividing Line_, an account
of a boundary survey run between the colonies of Virginia and South
Carolina. As the survey leaves the seacoast behind and approaches the
frontier, the same characteristics appear that Madam Knight noted--a
rough and surly independence, a dislike of established law and order,
and a shiftless way of life that is content to subsist off the country.
“Lubberland,” Colonel Byrd called the Carolina backwoods where a new
race of poor whites was springing up--a rude decivilized existence that
bore heavily on the women and was heedless of the common amenities of
social life. In _Letters from an American Farmer_ (1773) written by
St. John de Crèvecœur, a cultivated Norman who established himself
in the colonies after serving in the French army under Montcalm, the
same sharp judgment is passed on the frontier. Crèvecœur was of the
romantic school of Rousseau and eloquent in praise of life lived close
to nature, yet even he discovers the frontier to be a blot on colonial
civilization, the abode of rude and lawless figures who precede by a
decade the sober army of occupation.
In the eighteenth century the testimony is clear that the
frontiersmen--or “borderers,” as they were commonly called--were rough
bumptious fellows who fled the settlements partly because of a dislike
of ordered and seemly ways. The colonial gentry, men like the Rev.
Timothy Dwight, held them in deep contempt and rejoiced when they
quitted the settlements and plunged deep into the wilderness beyond
the jurisdiction of church and state. Lawlessness, shiftlessness, a
passion like Jurgen’s to follow after their own wishes and their own
desires, seem to have been the characteristics of these rude men and
slatternly women, as the aristocratic eighteenth century judged them.
That is very far from the whole story, to be sure. Our later historians
have made clear that from this same leveling frontier issued the
spirit of American democracy, and that from these rough individualists
came the great movement of Jacksonianism that swept away the class
distinctions of an earlier century. Accepting so much, and recognizing
the part played by the frontier in shaping the institutions and the
psychology of America, it remains true, nevertheless, that the lot of
the backwoodsman was hard and the price he paid in civilization for his
freedom was great. The sod house of the Dakota plains was only a late
adaptation of the primitive huts that were strung along the earlier
frontier. What loneliness filled the hearts of the drab women who made
hoecakes and dressed deer skins, what rebellions at their lot stirred
dumbly within them, no record remains to tell and no literature has
cared to concern itself about.
It was not till the nineteenth century that authentic accounts of the
frontier, written by men who had come out of it, began to appear,
yet even then in too scant volume. In Longstreet’s _Georgia Scenes_,
Joseph G. Baldwin’s _Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, and Davy
Crockett’s _Autobiography_, the frontier is painted in homely colors
that time cannot fade. Their brisk pages seem to have been dipped
in the butternut dye-pot of the backwoods cabin. By far the most
significant of them is the braggart but naïvely truthful narrative
of the life of Cane-brake Davy who in his several removals followed
the advancing frontier the length of the State of Tennessee. Davy
would seem to have been the authentic backwoodsman, and the life of
the individual may be taken as a description of the genus. Restless,
assertive, unsocial, buoyantly optimistic and obsessed with the faith
that better land lay farther west, cultivating a bumptious wit that
was a defense mechanism against the meanness of daily life, he was
only an improvident child who fled instinctively from civilization.
As a full-length portrait of the Jacksonian leveler, in the days when
the great social revolution was establishing the principles of an
equalitarian democracy, the picture is of vast significance. But it
is incomplete. Concerning the wife and daughters who were dragged at
his heels in the successive removals, the narrative is silent. It is a
man’s tale, unenriched by the emotional experiences of a woman, and as
such it tells only half the story of the frontier.
The _Autobiography_ was the last pungent note of realism before the
romantic revolution swept over American literature; and it was not till
two generations later, when the war was over and the glories of the
Gilded Age were fading, that the frontier came to realistic expression
again in the works of Hamlin Garland. _Main-Travelled Roads_, the first
chapter in the tale of the Middle Border, is a prologue to _Giants in
the Earth_, telling the story of the prairie settlement in the idiom
of the generation that undertook the great adventure. In these brief
tales is compressed the harsh temper of the eighties, when the spirit
of revolt was running like wildfire across the prairies and the Middle
Border was arming for battle. For a decade or more the farmers’ affairs
had been out of kilter, and a note of discontent had begun to appear
in fiction. Before Garland, western life had been dealt with by Edward
Eggleston in _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_ and _The Circuit Rider_, and
more searchingly by Ed Howe in _The Story of a Country Town_--a drab
commentary on life in Atchison, Kansas, in the early eighties. But
it is in Joseph Kirkland’s _Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County_
(1887), that a deep sense of the meanness of frontier life is first
adequately felt. The harsh constrictions of pioneer existence tightened
about Zury as a boy when his father was struggling with debt, turning a
naturally generous nature into a skinflint mortgage grabber. He early
learned that he must fight to survive, and as a result his life was
shut up in a narrow round of sordid accumulation. It was the poverty of
the frontier, in Kirkland’s eyes, that was the great hardship.
Hamlin Garland’s more adequate story of the Middle Border, beginning
militantly with _Main-Travelled Roads_ (1887-92) and flowering in the
idyllic saga of the Garlands and McClintocks (1914), is a chronicle
that grows more significant as the times it deals with draw further
into the past. Throughout his interpretation run two dominant notes:
the promise of future fulfillment when the prairies have been brought
under the plow--the Per Hansa note of pioneer optimism; and then
later, rising slowly into a ground swell, a note of discouragement
suggesting the utter futility of a laborious existence. Underlying
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is a mood of bitterness that springs from a deep
sense of failure--a mood that grew harsher with the economic depression
of the Middle Border in the eighties. The harvest was not fulfilling
the expectations of seed time, and the bow of promise was gone from
the prairie fields. The figures of bitter men and despondent women
fill his pages and darken the colors of his realism. It is the cost of
it all that depresses him--the toll exacted of human happiness. These
early studies of Garland’s strike the first note of the tragedy of
the frontier. Starkly objective, they are sociological sketches, the
militant expression of a rebellious mood that had been deepening since
the panic of 1873 burst the romantic bubble of frontier hopes. The
history of two decades of economic maladjustment, with their Granger
Populism, their passionate resentment at the favoritisms of government,
their blind striking out at the plutocracy that was visibly rising amid
the American democracy, is compressed within a few acrid tales that
proposed to tell the plain truth about life on the Middle Border farm.
_Main-Travelled Roads_ is as complete an expression of the mood of the
last years of the century--the outlook upon life, the economic and
political problems, the objective treatment of materials--as _Giants in
the Earth_ is an expression of the vastly different outlook and mood of
our own day.
* * * * *
For a generation before 1917, when the movement was brought to a
sudden stop, the mind of America was deeply concerned with problems of
sociology. The growing spirit of realism was absorbed in politics and
economics and concerned itself little with subjective analysis. The
intellectuals were busily examining the Constitution in the light of
its economic origins and interpreting American history in the light of
frontier experience. The novelists, reflecting the current interests,
were fascinated by the phenomena of industrialism and were studying
curiously the new race of captains of industry who were weaving a
strange pattern of life for America. The city had already come to dwarf
the country. Chicago bestrode the Middle Border like a colossus, and
the novelists found material for their realism in the cut-throat ways
of business men. Their stories--harsh and strident as the grinding
wheels on the overhead “Loop”--were set against a background of
sprawling cities hastening to grow big, where the battles of giants
were fought and where the _milieu_--a vast network of impersonal
forces--was more significant than the individual men and women who
were borne onward in the stream of tendency to submerge or rise as
chance determined. A note of stark determinism runs through much of
the work; but it was a determinism of environing forces--the objective
world of the machine--rather than of character, and in consequence the
deeper concern of fiction was sociological, the understanding of this
impersonal machine order and the subduing of it to democratic ends.
In such a world the farmer and the problems of the Middle Border were
become as old-fashioned as ox-carts.
Ten years later, when _Giants in the Earth_ was published, such
objective treatment of materials was no longer the vogue. Since the
war a revolutionary shift of interest has taken place, a shift from
the sociological to the psychological. It is no longer the world of
objective fact that obtrudes as the significant reality, but the
subtler world of emotional experience, the furtive inner life of
impulse and desire that Sherwood Anderson probes so curiously. The
change of theme was first marked, perhaps, by _Spoon River Anthology_,
with its mordant sketches of stunted and thwarted lives that Mr.
Masters professes to regard as the natural harvest of a sterile village
life. _Spoon River Anthology_ is bitter in its sardonic rebellion
against the genial optimisms of the “Valley of Democracy.” From the
epic thrust of expansion issued, as its natural progeny, a race of
abortive grotesques, starved figures which suggest to Mr. Masters the
cost in human values of severing the ties of kin and kind and throwing
aside like an old shoe the creative wealth of social experience. The
soil of the frontier village is too thin for men and women to strike
deep root and grow to generous stature.
Since the publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, concern for
psychological values has pretty much taken possession of our
literature. In the lovely pages of Willa Cather’s _O Pioneers!_ and
_My Ántonia_ there is revealed a warm sympathy with the emotional life
of pioneer women and a poignant understanding of their bleak lot.
But the analysis--as in Hamlin Garland’s work--draws back from the
threshold of final tragedy, pausing before it has penetrated to the
hidden core of futility. The waste of all finer values exacted by the
prairies is suggested by the queer figures of lonely immigrants who
fade in the uncongenial environment, but it is not thrust into the
foreground to dominate the scene. The vast stretches of the prairies
are there--stern, inhospitable, breeding a dumb homesickness in alien
hearts--where the red grass bends before the restless winds and the
forces of nature are not easily tamed; but in the end the prairie is
subdued and the scars it has laid on men’s lives are forgotten. Since
Willa Cather, others have dealt with the West--Ruth Suckow, Margaret
Wilson, and Herbert Quick, to name a few--yet in none of their work
is there the profound insight and imaginative grasp of the theme that
gives to _Giants in the Earth_ so great a sense of tragic reality.
In this creative return to the theme of the great American adventure
the causes of human failure lie deeper than politics or economics.
They are to be found in the impersonal forces of nature that are too
powerful for the human will to cope with; and in the hidden weakness
of fearful souls that cannot live when their roots have been pulled up
from the congenial home soil. For all his titanic labors, Per Hansa,
the viking, is struck down at last. There are few nobler passages in
our fiction--the more telling for its restraint--than the final scene
where, driven inexorably by circumstance, Per Hansa sets forth into the
February blizzard to fetch a minister to the bedside of his stricken
comrade. The note of determinism is there, subtle, pervasive. The Norns
of his fathers had decreed that it should be so--in the urgings of the
mystical Beret, in the dumb pleadings of the dying Hans Olsa and his
broken-hearted wife. Per Hansa the strong, the capable one who never
failed, who was cunning enough to outwit fate itself--Per Hansa would
go out into the storm and return with the minister who would point
the way to heaven to the troubled Hans Olsa. And so, driven by all
the imperatives of fate, he sets out, skis on his feet and others at
his back, to face the last great adventure. The blinding snow quickly
wraps him about, the cold grips his heart, and Per Hansa is seen no
more until on a soft May day, when the wheat is green in his fields and
the corn is ready for planting, he is found seated by a haystack, his
skis beside him and his face turned to the untrodden West. For all the
heroic labors of Per Hansa, for all the tragic loneliness of Beret, the
end is futility.
And Beret, the sick one, likewise is in the hands of the Norns. She had
sinned through love of Per Hansa, and in the long brooding hours on
the Dakota plains her mind gives way. She cannot rise to Per Hansa’s
delight in the newborn son. Peder Victorious--symbol of Per Hansa’s
buoyant faith--for her is only another evidence of sin. This dark land
of Dakota is marked by God’s displeasure, and life for her becomes
a silent struggle of renunciation and atonement. A primitive Norse
Calvinist, victimized by a brooding imagination that sees more devils
than vast hell can hold, she dwells “on the border of utter darkness”
where the forces of good and evil struggle for the human soul. Across
the gloomy Puritanism of her nature fall the shadows of an older and
darker faith, and in her nostalgia the old Northland superstitions
merge with the somber Northland religion to her undoing. The tragedy of
Beret works itself out in the tender corridors of her own heart and,
as Professor Commager has suggested, it is as universal as the tragedy
of Goethe’s Margarethe. In his portrayal of the “sick soul” of Beret
hungering for the far homeland the Norse artist has achieved a triumph.
The epic conquest of the continent must be read in the light of women’s
sufferings as well as in that of men’s endurance. In whichever light it
is read, it becomes something far more suggestive than a drab tale of
frontier poverty or a sordid tale of frontier exploitation; it becomes
vital and significant as life itself.
_Giants in the Earth_ is a great and beautiful book that suggests the
wealth of human potentialities brought to America year after year by
the peasant immigrants who pass through Ellis Island and scatter the
length and breadth of the land. Written in Norwegian, and stemming
from a rich old-world literary tradition, it is at the same time
deeply and vitally American. The very atmosphere of the Dakota plains
is in its pages, and it could have been written only by one to whom
the background was a familiar scene. The artist has lived with these
peasant folk; he is one of them, and he penetrates sympathetically to
the simple kindly hearts hidden to alien eyes by the unfamiliar folk
ways. To gather up and preserve in letters these diverse folk strains
before they are submerged and lost in the common American _mores_,
would seem to be a business that our fiction might undertake with
profit.
* * * * *
Ole Edvart Rölvaag is himself a viking of the Per Hansa strain. Born
of fisher folk, 22 April, 1876, on the island of Donna at the very
edge of the Arctic circle, he took his name, following a common
Norwegian custom, from the name of a cove on the shores of which he
was brought up. It is a land barren except for the gorse and heather,
and the long winter nights and the restless sea were certain to bring
the imagination under their somber spell. At the age of fourteen,
discouraged from further schooling by the family that contrasted him
unfavorably with a brilliant brother, he turned fisherman, and for
five years went off to the Lofoten Islands some two hundred miles away
for the winter catches. Distrustful of the future, he made his great
decision to come to America, landing in New York in 1896 with only a
railway ticket to South Dakota. In the great West, still turmoiled
by the agrarian upheaval of the nineties, he joined an uncle who had
provided him transportation money, tried his hand at farming, worked at
other jobs, and at the age of twenty-three, not having found himself,
he turned once more to the formal business of schooling. In the fall
of 1899 he entered Augustana College, a preparatory school in Canton,
South Dakota. From there he went to St. Olaf College, Northfield,
Minnesota, graduating in 1905 at the age of twenty-eight. After a year
at the University of Oslo in Norway, he joined the staff of St. Olaf
College, where he is now Professor of Norwegian Literature. In the
larger sense, however, his education has been got from life, which he
seems to have lived with a rich and daring intensity; and it is his
own venturesome experience, certainly, that finds expression in the
creative realism and brooding imagination of his work. Intellectually
and artistically he is of the excellent old-world culture. How greatly
his professional studies determined his literary technique only a
competent Norwegian critic can judge; yet it is worth while comparing
_Giants in the Earth_ with Johan Bojer’s _The Emigrants_--a work which,
when announced as being in preparation, dramatically influenced his own
novel.
The Short Story[844]
_Introduction._ With the ferment of the seventies and eighties a new
school of literature, that was effectively a denial of the genteel
tradition: it was effectively a popularization--a taking it out of the
severe realm of the _Atlantic Monthly_. It was an appeal to the middle
class. From Henry James to Hamlin Garland a steady shift from right to
left. This implied:
1. A shift from genteel to homely material.
2. A shift to realism from the earlier sentimentality. This genteel
tradition constantly cropping out anew--in Margaret Deland, in a
changed form in Zona Gale. It has been strongest in New England--from
Rose Terry Cooke through Sarah Orne Jewett to Mary Wilkins.
The short story commonly believed to be peculiarly representative of
our genius--the stripping-away of the superfluous and the love of
technical refinement. Derived from Poe and Hawthorne: both artists yet
far removed from the tendencies which have controlled the development
of the short story since.
_Theme._ The American short story has dealt largely with the two great
themes of all romance, love and adventure. The form constitutes the
great staple--is largely provided by women for women. The handling of
this love theme reveals the inevitable shift from the genteel tradition
to middle-class efficiency, and the spirit of the change is revealed
in the changing dress of the heroine. In the seventies, crinoline,
innumerable flounces of white muslin, lace parasols--no tan, no
freckles, but a gentle pallor. Such dress and such heroines will exude
sentiment. It will concern itself with atmosphere. Action brisk and
efficient will appear unladylike, almost vulgar. What a change when the
heroine clothes herself in a silk flour-sack--showing silk stockings,
bare arms and neck--cultivating tan and freckles, bobbing her hair,
going in for automobiles and golf and tennis! The older heroine dwelt
in a world of sentiment without sex; the present-day heroine lives in
a world of sex interest without sentiment. The more flounces in life
and literature, the less the animal is exposed. Hence action has
superseded sentiment--plot has superseded atmosphere. The hero becomes
a Hart, Schaffner and Marx young business man and the middle-class note
is struck loudly in the honk of the motor-car. The genteel tradition is
laid away with the flowers.
_Major Influences during the Sixties._ Through the fifties, and sixties
literature uncertain and halting. The style largely set by old-world
fashions. Three in particular:
1. Influence of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. A sort of sentimental and
mawkish passion. Stilted style, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe. This
fell in with the Irving note of the picturesque and was exploited in
_Godey’s Lady’s Book_.
2. Influence of Dickens. At its height in the fifties: an emphasis upon
the vulgar--plain and homely characters. Exploited in the _Atlantic_ by
Lowell. So Rose Terry Cooke in _Miss Lucinda_ (1861).
3. Influence of the French realistic movement: Balzac, Flaubert. Only a
faint beginning. Still a lot of romance stuff but given a local color
and garnished with humor.
_Counter Tendencies._ The inevitable development of the middle-class
city and the middle-class magazine, persistently affected by certain
throw-backs to an older American tradition. America is of the city
today, but day before yesterday it was still country, and in the
backgrounds of our minds is a country setting and love of simple
people. Three main tendencies:
1. The discovery of the local. The picturesqueness of the strange and
remote in character, manners, speech. The charm of dialect and interest
in out-of-the-way places. This a reaction from too much pavement
and the rubbing-down of individual differences from city contact.
“Characters” are bred in isolated places. This the dominant note in
the short story from 1870 to 1900: to follow it from Bret Harte on is
almost to write a history of the short story. It does not dominate the
longer story. Constance Fenimore Woolson.
2. The discovery of “human interest.” The feeling that men in the
rough--with the bark on--may prove more interesting than the products
of an artificial civilization. This had been spread by Dickens and by
certain of the _Atlantic_ writers.
3. The growing interest in realism. At first confused with the
commonplace--so Pattee in his comment on Rose Terry Cooke’s _Miss
Lucinda_. A good deal of this earlier work is only another form of
romance--little affected by the rising French movement. Realism was
to come slowly and late. All three of these made against the genteel
tradition.
_Henry James._ His position peculiar. From his youth _déraciné_--his
father hated American vulgarity, American journalism, and would not
permit his son to take root. He grew up with an aristocratic conception
of civilization--his sole interest lay in such civilization, and the
manners of the polite society of that civilization. No other American
has so hated and feared contamination from the vulgar. He was thus the
last flower of the Genteel Tradition, transplanted to an environment
more congenial. As the middle-class became more clamorous, he withdrew
to the Continent, to England, where the older ideas still lingered.
There in the spirit of the realist he wrote with refined art and
persistent detachment--even to a punctilious and princely refinement.
As Mr. Howells says, “To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence,
both in conception and expression, is a brevet of intellectual good
form.”
_His World._ Always that of the spender, of assured position. His main
interest lies in women; their refinement appeals to his refinement--no
flappers or vulgarians but elegantly gowned women who never did the
family washing. He is concerned with that which is dearest to the heart
of aristocracy--standards of excellence. And in this he was true to his
conception of civilization, for civilization begins after a competence
has been assured. Those who are struggling to acquire have not the
leisure, the inclination, for civilization. Hence _Daisy Miller_ is a
type of much of his work--the contrast between civilized Europe and
uncivilized America, the one with standards of culture and manners
and the other vulgarian. And his interest in American women results
from the fact that they alone in America care for civilization and are
painfully seeking to achieve it.
_His Realism._ The beginnings of the movement which has been called
psychological realism, concerning itself with motives and processes of
thought--the inner life. Developed by Bourget and far more fully by
Dorothy Richardson in such a book as _Pilgrimage_, the inner life of
Miriam Henderson in many volumes. Far removed from later psychological
fiction founded on Freudian theory--as in D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood
Anderson. Again the genteel tradition dealing with people who in the
main have genteel impulses only. James held in horror this later
naturalism--it was merely vulgarian.
_The Spirit of the Local._ Into this prim world with its incipient
realism came the note of the Far West: Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who
set a new style--the romantic, picturesque, human-interest story. This
is a part of the Pike County idea of literature--a native rogue-tale
but with touches of sentiment and shortened to effective form. This
followed by Eggleston’s _Hoosier Schoolmaster_ (1871) and this in turn
by the flood of local work of the eighties. The most notable the work
of Charles Egbert Craddock, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett,
and Mary Wilkins. The first discovered the hill people, the second
discovered the Negro--his primitive folk-poetry. In the work of the
last, a struggle between the genteel tradition and realism--and the
final triumph of the latter.
A Chapter in American Liberalism[845]
Liberals whose hair is growing thin and the lines of whose figures are
no longer what they were, are likely to find themselves today in the
unhappy predicament of being treated as mourners at their own funerals.
When they pluck up heart to assert that they are not yet authentic
corpses, but living men with brains in their heads, they are pretty
certain to be gently chided and led back to the comfortable armchair
that befits senility. Their counsel is smiled at as the chatter of a
belated post-Victorian generation that knew not Freud, and if they
must go abroad they are bidden take the air in the garden where other
old-fashioned plants--mostly of the family _Democratici_--are still
preserved. It is not pleasant for them. It is hard to be dispossessed
by one’s own heirs, and especially hard when those heirs, in the
cheerful ignorance of youth, forget to acknowledge any obligations
to a hard-working generation that laid by a very substantial body of
intellectual wealth, the income from which the heirs are spending
without even a “Thank you.” If therefore the middle-aged liberal
occasionally grows irritable and indulges in caustic comment on the
wisdom of talkative young men it may be set down as the prerogative of
the armchair age and lightly forgiven.
Yet in sober fact there are the solidest reasons for such irritation.
The younger liberals who love to tweak the nose of democracy are
too much enamored of what they find in their own mirrors. They are
indisputably clever, they are spouting geysers of smart and cynical
talk, they have far outrun their fathers in the free handling
of ancient tribal totems--but they are afflicted with the short
perspective of youth that finds a vanishing-point at the end of its
own nose. There is no past for them beyond yesterday. They are having
so good a time playing with ideas that it does not occur to them to
question the validity of their intellectual processes or to inquire
into the origins of the ideas they have adopted so blithely. Gaily
engaged in smashing _bourgeois_ idols, the young intellectuals are too
busy to realize that it was the older generation that provided them
with a hammer and pointed out the idols to be smashed. It is the way of
youth.
Middle-aged liberals--let it be said by way of defense--at least know
their history. They were brought up in a great age of liberalism--an
age worthy to stand beside the golden forties of last century--and
they went to school to excellent teachers. Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Karl
Marx, Haeckel, Taine, William James, Henry George, were masters of
which no school in any age need feel ashamed; nor were such tutors and
undermasters as Ruskin, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Lester Ward,
Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, to be dismissed as incompetent. To the
solution of the vexing problems entailed by industrialism--in America
as well as in Europe--was brought all the knowledge that had been
accumulating for a century. It was a time of reëvaluations when much
substantial thinking was done; when the flood of light that came with
the doctrine of biological evolution lay brilliant on the intellectual
landscape and the dullest mind caught some of the reflection. Few of
the young scholars attended the lectures of Friedrich Nietzsche, and
behavioristic psychology had not yet got into the curriculum; but Ladd
and James were inquiring curiously into the mechanism of the brain, and
animal psychology was preparing the way for the later Freudians. It was
the end of an age perhaps, the rich afterglow of the Enlightenment, but
the going down of the sun was marked by sunset skies that gave promise
of other and greater dawns.
To have spent one’s youth in such a school was a liberal education.
The mind opened of its own will. Intellectual horizons were daily
widening and the new perspectives ran out into cosmic spaces. The cold
from those outer spaces had not yet chilled the enthusiasms that were
a heritage from the Enlightenment, and the social idealism begotten by
the democratic nature school still looked confidently to the future.
They were ardent democrats--the young liberals of the nineties--and
none doubted the finality or sufficiency of the democratic principle,
any more than Mill or Spencer had doubted it. All their history and
all their biology justified it, and the business of the times was to
make it prevail in the sphere of economics as it prevailed in the
realm of the political. The cure for the evils of democracy was held
to be more democracy, and when industrialism had been brought under
its sway--when America had become an economic democracy--a just and
humane civilization would be on the threshold of possibility. To the
achievement of that great purpose the young liberals devoted themselves
and the accomplishments of the next score of years were the work of
their hands. Certain intellectuals had been democrats--Paine and
Jefferson and Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Melville--but they
were few in comparison with the skeptical Whigs who professed democracy
only to bind its hands. The Republican party had not been democratic
since former days--and as Henry Adams said in 1880, it was accounted
foolishness to believe in it in 1880. Autocracy was a toy to distract
the voting man from the business of money-getting.
It was from such a school--richer in intellectual content, one might
argue, than any the younger liberals have frequented--that the ferment
of twenty years ago issued; a school dedicated to the ideals of the
Enlightenment and bent on carrying through the unfulfilled program
of democracy. Democratic aspirations had been thwarted hitherto by
the uncontrolled play of the acquisitive instinct; the immediate
problem of democracy was the control of that instinct in the common
interest. Economics had controlled the political state to its narrow
and selfish advantage; it was for the political state to resume its
sovereignty and extend its control over economics. So in the spirit of
the Enlightenment the current liberalism dedicated itself to history
and sociology, accepting as its immediate and particular business a
reëxamination of the American past in order to forecast an ampler
democratic future. It must trace the rise of political power in America
in order to understand how that power had fallen into the unsocial
hands of economics. The problem was difficult. American political
history had been grossly distorted by partisan interpretation and
political theory had been dissipated by an arid constitutionalism. The
speculative thinker had long been dispossessed by the eulogist and
the lawyer, both of whom had subsisted on a thin gruel of patriotic
myths. Even the social historians, though dealing in materials rich in
suggestion, had been diffident in the matter of interpretation, without
which history is no more than the dry bones of chronicle. Inheriting
no adequate philosophy of historical evolution, the young school of
historians must first provide themselves with one, in the light of
which the American past should take on meaning, and the partisan
struggles, hitherto meaningless, should fall into comprehensible
patterns.
That necessary work was to engage them for years, but in the meanwhile,
as critical realists, their immediate business was with facts and the
interpretation of facts. John Fiske a few years before had essayed to
interpret the rise of democracy in America by analogy from biological
evolution, tracing the source of American democracy to the New England
town meeting, which he explained as a resurgence of ancient Teutonic
folk-ways. The theory was tenuous and it was not till Professor Turner
drew attention to the creative influence of the frontier on American
life that the historians were provided with a suggestive working
hypothesis. Before that hypothesis could be adequately explored,
however, and brought into just relations to a comprehensive philosophy
of history, the rise of liberalism was well under way, marked by a
rich ferment of thought that made the early years of the new century
singularly stimulating. That ferment resulted from pouring into the
vial of native experience the reagent of European theory--examining the
ways of American industrialism in the light of continental socialism;
and the result was an awakening of popular interest in social control
of economics, a widespread desire to bring an expanding industrialism
into subjection to a rational democratic program, that was to provide
abundant fuel to the social unrest that had burst forth in sporadic
flames for a generation. The great movement of liberalism that took
possession of the American mind after the turn of the century--a
movement not unworthy to be compared with the ferment of the eighteen
forties--was the spontaneous reaction of an America still only half
urbanized, still clinging to ideals and ways of an older simpler
America, to an industrialism that was driving its plowshare through
the length and breadth of the familiar scene, turning under the rude
furrows what before had been growing familiarly there. It was the first
reaction of America to the revolutionary change that followed upon the
exhaustion of the frontier--an attempt to secure through the political
state the freedoms that before had come from unpreëmpted opportunity.
For a quarter of a century following the great westward expansion
of the late sixties America had been drifting heedlessly towards a
different social order. The shambling frontier democracy that had
sufficed an earlier time was visibly breaking down in presence of the
imperious power of a centralizing capitalism. The railways were a
dramatic embodiment of the new machine civilization that was running
head on into a primitive social organism fashioned by the old domestic
economy, and the disruptions and confusions were a warning that the
country was in for vast changes. New masters, new ways. The rule of the
captain of industry had come. The farmers had long been in ugly mood,
but their great rebellion was put down in 1896, and never again could
they hope to wrest sovereignty from capitalism. The formal adoption
of the gold standard in 1900 served notice to the world that America
had put away its democratic agrarianism, that a shambling Jacksonian
individualism had had its day, and that henceforth the destiny of the
country lay in the hands of its business men. Capitalism was master
of the country and though for the present it was content to use the
political machinery of democracy it was driving towards an objective
that was the negation of democracy.
The immediate reaction to so broad a shift in the course of manifest
destiny was a growing uneasiness amongst the middle class--small
business and professional men--who looked with fear upon the program
of the captains of industry. Industrialization brought its jars and
upsets. The little fish did not enjoy being swallowed by the big, and
as they watched the movement of economic centralization encroaching
on the field of competition they saw the doors of opportunity closing
to them. It was to this great body of _petite bourgeoisie_ that
members of the lesser intellectuals--journalists, sociologists,
reformers--were to make appeal. The work was begun dramatically with
the spectacularly advertised _Frenzied Finance_, written by Thomas W.
Lawson, and appearing as a series in _McClure’s Magazine_ in 1903. The
immense popular success of the venture proved that the fire was ready
for the fat, and at once a host of volunteer writers fell to feeding
the flames. The new ten-cent magazines provided the necessary vehicle
of publicity, and enterprising editors were soon increasing their
circulations with every issue. As it became evident how popular was the
chord that had been struck, more competent workmen joined themselves to
the group of journalists: novelists--a growing army of them--essayists,
historians, political scientists, philosophers, a host of heavy-armed
troops that moved forward in a frontal attack on the strongholds of the
new plutocracy. Few writers in the years between 1903 and 1917 escaped
being drawn into the movement--an incorrigible romantic perhaps, like
the young James Branch Cabell, or a cool patrician like Edith Wharton;
and with such popular novelists as Winston Churchill, Robert Herrick,
Ernest Poole, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London
embellishing the rising liberalism with dramatic heroes and villains,
and dressing their salads with the wickedness of Big Business; with
such political leaders as Bob La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson beating up the remotest villages for recruits; with such
scholars as Thorstein Veblen, Charles A. Beard, and John Dewey, and
such lawyers as Louis Brandeis, Frank P. Walsh, and Samuel Untermyer,
the movement gathered such momentum and quickened such a ferment as
had not been known before in the lands since the days of the Abolition
controversy. The mind and conscience of America were stirred to their
lowest sluggish stratum, and a democratic renaissance was all aglow on
the eastern horizon.
At the core it was a critical realistic movement that spread quietly
amongst intellectuals, but the nebulous tail of the comet blazed across
the sky for all to wonder at: and it was the tail rather than the core
that aroused the greatest immediate interest. Lincoln Steffens, Charles
Edward Russell, Ida Tarbell, Gustavus Myers, and Upton Sinclair were
read eagerly because they dealt with themes that many were interested
in--the political machine, watered stock, Standard Oil, the making of
great fortunes, and the like--and they invested their exposures with
the dramatic interest of a detective story. Up to 1910 it was largely
a muckraking movement--to borrow President Roosevelt’s picturesque
phrase; a time of brisk housecleaning that searched out old cobwebs
and disturbed the dust that lay thick on the antiquated furniture.
The Gilded Age had been slovenly and such a housecleaning was long
overdue. There was a vast amount of nosing about to discover bad
smells, and to sensitive noses the bad smells seemed to be everywhere.
Evidently some hidden cesspool was fouling American life, and as the
inquisitive plumbers tested the household drains they came upon the
source of infection--not one cesspool but many, under every city hall
and beneath every state capitol--dug secretly by politicians in the pay
of respectable business men. It was these cesspools that were poisoning
the national household, and there would be no health in America till
they were filled in and no others dug.
It was a dramatic discovery and when the corruption of American
politics was laid on the threshold of business--like a bastard on the
doorsteps of the father--a tremendous disturbance resulted. There was
a great fluttering and clamor amongst the bats and owls, an ominous
creaking of the machine as the wrenches were thrown into the well-oiled
wheels, and a fierce sullen anger at the hue and cry set up. To many
honest Americans the years between 1903 and 1910 were abusive and
scurrilous beyond decency, years when no man and no business, however
honorable, was safe from the pillory; when wholesale exposure had grown
profitable to sensation-mongers, and great reputations were lynched
by vigilantes and reputable corporations laid under indictment at the
bar of public opinion. Respectable citizens did not like to have their
goodly city held up to the world as “corrupt and contented”; they did
not like to have their municipal housekeeping brought into public
disrepute no matter how sluttish it might be. It was not pleasant for
members of great families to read a cynical history of the origins of
their fortunes, or for railway presidents seeking political favors to
find on the newsstand a realistic account of the bad scandals that had
smirched their roads. It was worse than unpleasant, it was hurtful to
business. And so quietly, and as speedily as could be done decently,
the movement was brought to a stop by pressure put on the magazines
that lent themselves to such harmful disclosures. Then followed a
campaign of education. Responding to judicious instruction, conducted
in the columns of the most respectable newspapers, the American public
was soon brought to understand that it was not the muck that was
harmful, but the indiscretion of those who commented in print on the
bad smells. It was reckoned a notable triumph for sober and patriotic
good sense.
So after a few years of amazing activity the muckraking movement came
to a stop. But not before it had done its work; not before the American
middle class had been indoctrinated in the elementary principles of
political realism and had rediscovered the social conscience lost
since the days of the Civil War. Many a totem had been thrown down by
the irreverent hands of the muckrakers, and many a fetish held up to
ridicule, and plutocracy in America would not recover its peace of
mind until at great cost the totems should be set up again and the
fetishes reanointed with the oil of sanctity. The substantial result
of the movement was the instruction it afforded in the close kinship
between business and politics--a lesson greatly needed by a people long
fed on romantic unrealities. It did not crystallize for the popular
mind in the broad principle of economic determinism; that remained
for certain of the intellectuals to apply to American experience.
But with its sordid object--service--it punished the flabby optimism
of the Gilded Age, with its object-lessons in business politics; it
revealed the hidden hand that was pulling the strings of the political
puppets; it tarnished the gilding that had been carefully laid on
our callous exploitation, and it brought under common suspicion the
captain of industry who had risen as a national hero from the muck of
individualism. It was a sharp guerilla attack on the sacred American
System, but behind the thin skirmish-line lay a volunteer army that was
making ready to deploy for a general engagement with plutocracy.
With the flood of light thrown upon the fundamental law by the
historians, the movement of liberalism passed quickly through
successive phases of thought. After the first startled surprise it
set about the necessary business of acquainting the American people
with its findings in the confident belief that a democratic electorate
would speedily democratize the instrument. Of this first stage the
late Professor J. Allen Smith’s _The Spirit of American Government_
(1907) was the most adequate expression, a work that greatly influenced
the program of the rising Progressive Party. But changes came swiftly
and within half a dozen years the movement had passed from political
programs to economic, concerned not so greatly with political democracy
as with economic democracy. Of this second phase Professor Beard’s
notable study, _An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913),
was the greatest intellectual achievement. Underlying this significant
work was a philosophy of politics that set it sharply apart from
preceding studies--a philosophy that unsympathetic readers were quick
to attribute to Karl Marx, but that in reality derived from sources
far earlier and for Americans at least far more respectable. The
current conception of the political state as determined in its form
and activities by economic groups is no modern Marxian perversion of
political theory; it goes back to Aristotle, it underlay the thinking
of Harrington and Locke and the seventeenth-century English school,
it shaped the conclusions of Madison and Hamilton and John Adams, it
ran through all the discussions of the Constitutional Convention, and
it reappeared in the arguments of Webster and Calhoun. It was the
main-traveled road of political thought until a new highway was laid
out by French engineers, who, disliking the bog of economics, surveyed
another route by way of romantic equalitarianism. The logic of the
engineers was excellent, but the drift of politics is little influenced
by logic, and abstract equalitarianism proved to be poor material for
highway construction. In divorcing political theory from contact with
sobering reality it gave it over to a treacherous romanticism. In
seeking to avoid the bog of economics it ran into an arid desert.
To get back once more on the main-traveled road, to put away all
profitless romanticisms and turn realist, taking up again the method
of economic interpretation unused in America since the days of Webster
and Calhoun, became therefore the business of the second phase of
liberalism to which Professor Beard applied himself. The earlier
group of liberals were ill equipped to wage successful war against
plutocracy. Immersed in the traditional equalitarian philosophy, they
underestimated the strength of the enemies of democracy. They did
not realize what legions of Swiss Guards property can summon to its
defense. They were still romantic idealists tilting at windmills,
and it was to bring them to a sobering sense of reality that _The
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ was written. If property
is the master force in every society one cannot understand American
institutional development until one has come to understand the part
property played in shaping the fundamental law. Interpreted thus the
myths that had gathered about the Constitution fell away of themselves
and the document was revealed as English rather than French, the
judicious expression of substantial eighteenth-century realism that
accepted the property basis of political action, was skeptical of
romantic idealisms, and was more careful to protect title-deeds to
legal holdings than to claim unsurveyed principalities in Utopia. If
therefore liberalism were to accomplish any substantial results it
must approach its problems in the same realistic spirit, recognizing
the masterful ambitions of property, recruiting democratic forces to
overmaster the Swiss Guards, leveling the strongholds that property had
erected within the organic law, and taking care that no new strongholds
should rise. The problem confronting liberalism was the problem of the
subjection of property to social justice.
Yet interesting as was the muckraking tail of the comet, far more
significant was the core--the substantial body of knowledge gathered by
the scholars and flung into the scale of public opinion. The realities
of the American past had been covered deep with layers of patriotic
myths, provided in simpler days when the young Republic, suffering
from a natural inferiority complex, was building up a defense against
the acrid criticism of Tory Europe. Those myths had long since served
their purpose and had become a convenient refuge for the bats and owls
of the night; it was time to strip them away and apply to the past
objective standards of scholarship, and to interpret it in the light
of an adequate philosophy of history. To this work, so essential to
any intelligent understanding of the American experiment, a group of
historians and political scientists turned with competent skill, and
the solid results of their labor remained after the popular ferment
subsided, as a foundation for later liberals to build on.
The journalistic muckrakers had demonstrated that America was not in
fact the equalitarian democracy it professed to be, and the scholars
supplemented their work by tracing to its historical source the
weakness of the democratic principle in governmental practice. America
had never been a democracy for the sufficient reason that too many
handicaps had been imposed upon the majority will. The democratic
principle had been bound with withes like Samson and had become a
plaything for the Philistines. From the beginning--the scholars
discovered--democracy and property had been at bitter odds; the
struggle invaded the Constitutional Convention, it gave form to the
party alignment between Hamilton and Jefferson, Jackson and Clay, and
then during the slavery struggle, sinking underground like a lost
river, it nevertheless had determined party conflicts down to the
present. In this ceaseless conflict between the man and the dollar,
between democracy and property, the reasons for persistent triumph of
property were sought in the provisions of the organic law, and from
a critical study of the Constitution came a discovery that struck
home like a submarine torpedo--the discovery that the drift toward
plutocracy was not a drift away from the spirit of the Constitution,
but an inevitable unfolding from its premises; that instead of having
been conceived by the fathers as a democratic instrument, it had been
conceived in a spirit designedly hostile to democracy; that it was, in
fact, a carefully formulated expression of eighteenth-century property
consciousness, erected as a defense against the democratic spirit that
had got out of hand during the Revolution, and that the much-praised
system of checks and balances was designed and intended for no other
end than a check on the political power of the majority--a power
acutely feared by the property consciousness of the times.
It was a startling discovery that profoundly stirred the liberal
mind of the early years of the century; yet the really surprising
thing is that it should have come as a surprise. It is not easy to
understand today why since Civil War days intelligent Americans
should so strangely have confused the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, and have come to accept them as complementary
statements of the democratic purpose of America. Their unlikeness is
unmistakable: the one a classical statement of French humanitarian
democracy, the other an organic law designed to safeguard the minority
under republican rule. The confusion must be charged in part to the
lawyers who had taken over the custodianship of the Constitution, and
in part to the florid romantic temper of the middle nineteenth century.
When the fierce slavery struggle fell into the past, whatever honest
realism had risen from the passions of the times was buried with the
dead issue. The militant attacks on the Constitution so common in
Abolitionist circles after 1835, and the criticism of the Declaration
that was a part of the southern argument, were both forgotten, and with
the Union reëstablished by force of arms, the idealistic cult of the
fundamental law entered on a second youth. In the blowsy Gilded Age
the old myths walked the land again, wrapped in battle-torn flags and
appealing to the blood shed on southern battlefields. It was not till
the advent of a generation unblinded by the passions of civil war that
the Constitution again was examined critically, and the earlier charge
of the Abolitionists that it was designed to serve property rather
than men, was heard once more. But this time with far greater weight
of evidence behind it. As the historians dug amongst the contemporary
records they came upon a mass of fact the Abolitionists had been
unaware of. The evidence was written so plainly, in such explicit and
incontrovertible words--not only in _Elliott’s Debates_, but in the
minutes of the several State Conventions, in contemporary letters
and memoirs, in newspapers and pamphlets and polite literature--that
it seemed incredible that honest men could have erred so greatly in
confusing the Constitution with the Declaration.
With the clarification of its philosophy the inflowing waters of
liberalism reached flood-tide; the movement would either recede or pass
over into radicalism. On the whole it followed the latter course,
and the years immediately preceding 1917 were years when American
intellectuals were immersing themselves in European collectivistic
philosophies--in Marxianism, Fabianism, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism.
New leaders were rising, philosophical analysts like Thorstein Veblen
who were mordant critics of American economics. The influence of
socialism was fast sweeping away the last shreds of political and
social romanticism that so long had confused American thinking. The
doctrine of economic determinism was spreading widely, and in the light
of that doctrine the deep significance of the industrial revolution
was revealing itself for the first time to thoughtful Americans. In
its reaction to industrialism America had reached the point Chartist
England had reached in the eighteen-forties and Marxian Germany in the
eighteen-seventies. That was before a mechanistic science had laid its
heavy discouragements on the drafters of democratic programs. Accepting
the principle of economic determinism, liberalism still clung to its
older democratic teleology, convinced that somehow economic determinism
would turn out to be a fairy godmother to the proletariat and that
from the imperious drift of industrial expansion must eventually issue
social justice. Armed with this faith liberalism threw itself into
the work of cleaning the Augean stables, and its reward came in the
achievements of President Wilson’s first administration.
Then the war intervened and the green fields shriveled in an afternoon.
With the cynicism that came with post-war days the democratic
liberalism of 1917 was thrown away like an empty whiskey-flask. Clever
young men began to make merry over democracy. It was preposterous, they
said, to concern oneself about social justice; nobody wants social
justice. The first want of every man, as John Adams remarked a hundred
years ago, is his dinner, and the second his girl. Out of the muck of
the war had come a great discovery--so it was reported--the discovery
that psychology as well as economics has its word to say on politics.
From the army intelligence tests the moron emerged as a singular
commentary on our American democracy, and with the discovery of the
moron the democratic principle was in for a slashing attack. Almost
overnight an army of enemies was marshaled against it. The eugenist
with his isolated germ theory flouted the perfectional psychology of
John Locke, with its emphasis on environment as the determining factor
in social evolution--a psychology on which the whole idealistic
interpretation was founded; the beardless philosopher discovered
Nietzsche and in his pages found the fit master of the moron--the
biological aristocrat who is the flower that every civilization
struggles to produce; the satirist discovered the flatulent reality
that is middle-class America and was eager to thrust his jibes at the
complacent denizens of the Valley of Democracy. Only the behaviorist,
with his insistence on the plasticity of the new-born child, offers
some shreds of comfort to the democrat; but he quickly takes them away
again with his simplification of conduct to imperious drives that
stamp men as primitive animals. If the mass--the raw materials of
democracy--never rises much above sex appeals and belly needs, surely
it is poor stuff to try to work up into an excellent civilization, and
the dreams of the social idealist who forecasts a glorious democratic
future are about as substantial as moonshine. It is a discouraging
essay. Yet it is perhaps conceivable that our current philosophy--the
brilliant coruscations of our younger intelligentsia--may indeed not
prove to be the last word in social philosophy. Perhaps--is this
_lèse-majesté_--when our youngest liberals have themselves come to
the armchair age they will be smiled at in turn by sons who are still
cleverer and who will find their wisdom as foolish as the wisdom of
1917 seems to them today. But that lies on the knees of the gods.
Footnotes
[812] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[813] See J. Allen Smith, _The Spirit of American Government_; W. A.
White, _The Old Order Changeth_.
[814] Representative books are: C. A. Beard, _An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913) and _The Economic Basis of
Politics_ (1922); Walter Lippmann, _Public Opinion_ (1922).
[815] See Bertrand Russell, _Proposed Roads to Freedom_ (1919); Richard
Roberts, _The Unfinished Programme of Democracy_ (1920).
[816] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[817] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[818] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[819] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[820] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, New York, 1920, p. 1.
[821] _The Financier_, New York, c. 1912, p. 250.
[822] _Ibid._, p. 409.
[823] _Ibid._, p. 479.
[824] _The Financier_, p. 432.
[825] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, p. 87.
[826] When this was written of course _The American Tragedy_, _A Book
about Myself_, Dreiser’s poems, _Moods Cadenced and Declaimed_, and his
further books of travel had not been published.--_Publisher._
[827] Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary Radical_, p. 203.
[828] _The Financier_, p. 660.
[829] Stuart P. Sherman, _On Contemporary Literature_, New York, 1923,
p. 94. In the syllabus Professor Parrington says: “The most intelligent
estimates of Dreiser are in Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary
Radical_; H. L. Mencken, _Prefaces_; and Carl Van Doren, _Contemporary
American Novelists_. All other commentators are stupid.”
[830] Published as Number Five of _University of Washington Chapbooks_,
1927.--_Publisher._
[831] The notes that follow are from the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[832] Cabell omitted, as there is a fuller discussion of him
given.--_Publisher._
[833] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[834] For a statement of the reaction of a young intellectual to the
war, see Randolph Bourne, _Untimely Papers_, 1919.
[835] For a criticism of Nicholson, see Randolph Bourne, _The History
of a Literary Radical_, p. 128.
[836] See Mr. Cabell’s criticism in _Beyond Life_, pp. 301-307.
[837] For a review see the _Nation_, March 19, 1924.
[838] Sinclair Lewis omitted, as fuller material has been
given.--_Publisher._
[839] From the third section in the syllabus, which deals with “A New
Romance.”--_Publisher._
[840] See Cabell’s review of _Messer Marco Polo_ in _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 52-59. The writer’s full name is Brian Oswald
Donn-Byrne.
[841] For a striking characterization of Hergesheimer, see _The
Bookman_, May, 1922 For an appreciation, see Cabell, _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 195-221.
[842] See remarks on Miss Cather in the introduction to the text
edition of Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, which follows these
syllabus notes.--_Publisher._
[843] Introduction to the text edition of Rölvaag’s _Giants in the
Earth_. Copyright 1929 by Harper and Brothers, by whose permission it
is reprinted here.--_Publisher._
[844] Lecture notes. This subject was not included in the contents, but
contains some matter of interest.--_Publisher._
[845] This was apparently not intended as the introduction to Part I of
Book Three, but covers much of the ground indicated there.--_Publisher._
Bibliography
[Professor Parrington left no bibliography apart from the works
mentioned in the text. It has been possible to formulate one with
some certainty by reference to his personal library, theses written
under his supervision, and the record of the books he borrowed from
the University of Washington Library. In the two earlier volumes the
bibliography is rigidly selective. Needless to say, I have not presumed
such knowledge of his intentions. All the pertinent material which it
is known that he used is included.--E. H. Eby.]
Book I: Part I
I. The American Scene. For history of the period see Allan Nevins,
_The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878_ (in the series _A History
of American Life_, Vol. VIII, New York, 1927); E. P. Oberholtzer,
_History of the United States since the Civil War_ (3 vols., New York,
1917-1926); Frederick L. Paxson, _Recent History of the United States_
(Boston and New York, c. 1921).
For economic backgrounds see Harold Underwood Faulkner, _American
Economic History_ (New York and London, 1924); Gustavus Meyers,
_History of Great American Fortunes_ (3 vols., Chicago, 1910); Robert
Irving Warshaw, _Jay Gould: The Story of a Fortune_ (New York, 1928);
and for the part played by railroads see John P. Davis, _The Union
Pacific Railway_ (New York, 1894); C. E. Russell, _Stories of Great
Railroads_ (Chicago, 1912); and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry
Adams, _Chapters of Erie and Other Essays_ (Boston, 1871).
For political corruption see Don Carlos Seitz, _The Dreadful Decade_
(Indianapolis, 1926); and Denis Tilden Lynch, _“Boss” Tweed: The Story
of a Grim Generation_ (New York, 1927).
For journalism see Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post: A Century of
Journalism_ (New York, c. 1922); and Frank M. O’Brien, _The Story of
the Sun_ (New York, c. 1918).
General Ulysses S. Grant, _Personal Memoirs_ (2 vols., New York,
1885-1886). For biography see W. E. Woodward, _Meet General Grant_ (New
York, 1928).
Jay Cooke. See E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil
War_ (2 vols. Philadelphia, c. 1907).
Charles A. Dana, _Recollections of the Civil War_ (New York, 1902); J.
H. Wilson, _Life of Charles A. Dana_ (New York, 1907).
II. The Culture of the Seventies. For valuable sidelights on culture
in the decade see Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_
(New York, c. 1927); Paxton Hibben, _Henry Ward Beecher: An American
Portrait_ (New York, c. 1927); Horace Greeley, _Recollections of a Busy
Life_ (New York, 1868); James Parton, _The Life of Horace Greeley_
(Boston, c. 1896); Lewis Mumford, _The Golden Day: A Study in American
Experience and Culture_ (New York, 1926); and his _Sticks and Stones, A
Study of American Architecture and Civilization_ (New York, c. 1924).
For history of literature see Fred Lewis Pattee, _A History of American
Literature since 1870_ (New York, 1915); his _Sidelights on American
Literature_ (New York, 1922); his _The Development of the American
Short Story_ (New York and London, 1923); and Carl Van Doren, _The
American Novel_ (New York, 1921).
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, _Prose Works_ (7 vols., Boston, 1897); _The
Poems of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_ (2 vols., Boston, c. 1907). For his
life see Ferris Greenslet, _The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_ (Boston
and New York, 1908).
Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Ward (Phelps), _The Silent Partner_ (Boston, c.
1899); _A Singular Life_ (Boston and New York, 1899); _Chapters from a
Life_ (Boston and New York, 1896).
Sarah Orne Jewett. _A Country Doctor_ (Boston and New York, c. 1884);
_A Native of Winby and Other Tales_ (Boston and New York, c. 1893);
_Deephaven_ (Boston and New York, 1894). _Tales of New England_ (Boston
and New York, 1894); _The Life of Nancy_ (Boston and New York, 1895);
_The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories_ (Boston and New York, 1899); _The
Country of Pointed Firs_ (Boston and New York, c. 1910). For her life
see _The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_ (Boston and New York, 1911).
Mrs. Mary E. (Wilkins) Freeman, _A Humble Romance, and Other Stories_
(New York, 1887); _The New England Nun, and Other Stories_ (New
York, 1891); _The Pot of Gold, and Other Stories_ (Boston, c. 1892);
_Pembroke; a Novel_ (New York, c. 1894); _People of Our Neighborhood_
(New York, 1901); _The Portion of Labor_ (New York, c. 1901). _Young
Lucretia, and Other Stories_ (New York, 1903); _By the Light of the
Soul_ (New York and London, 1907).
Walt Whitman, _Leaves of Grass_ (Inclusive edition edited by Emory
Holloway, Garden City, New York, 1927); _The Complete Prose Works of
Walt Whitman_ (New York, 1898); _The Half-breed and Other Stories_
(New York, 1927); _Autobiographia: or, the Story of a Life_ (New York,
1892); _The Gathering of Forces_ (New York and London, 1920); and _The
Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman_ (2 vols., Garden City,
New York, 1921). For Whitman’s life see Horace Traubel, _With Walt
Whitman in Camden_ (3 vols., New York, 1908-1914); Emory Holloway,
_Whitman_ (New York, 1926); John Addington Symonds, _Walt Whitman: a
Study_ (London, 1893); Léon Bazalgette, _Walt Whitman, the Man and his
Work_ (Garden City, New York, 1920); John Burroughs, _Whitman: a Study_
(Boston and New York, c. 1924); Bliss Perry, _Walt Whitman: his Life
and Work_ (Boston and New York, 1906); and J. Johnston, M. D., and J.
W. Wallace, _Visits to Walt Whitman_ (New York, 1918).
For critical studies of his work see Norman Foerster, _American
Criticism_, pp. 157-222 (New York, 1928); Basil De Selincourt, _Walt
Whitman; a Critical Study_ (London, 1914); Horace Traubel (ed.), _In re
Walt Whitman_ (Philadelphia, 1893).
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), _The Writings of Mark Twain_ (25
vols., New York and London, c. 1910-1911); _The Mysterious Stranger,
and Other Stories_ (New York and London, 1922); _What is Man?_ (New
York, 1917).
For his life see _Mark Twain’s Autobiography_ (New York and London,
1924); Albert Bigelow Paine, _Mark Twain, a Biography_ (3 vols., New
York, c. 1912); Van Wyck Brooks, _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ (New York,
c. 1920); W. D. Howells, _My Mark Twain_ (New York, c. 1910).
III. Changing Theory. For a general history of economic theory see,
Charles Gide and Charles Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrines from
the Time of the Physiocrats to the Present Day_ (Authorized translation
from the second revised and augmented edition of 1913, Boston, New
York, Chicago, 1913); _The Trend of Economics_ (Edited by R. G.
Tugwell, New York, 1924).
For material covered in this section see Francis Wayland, _Elements of
Political Economy_ (New York, 1837); Henry Charles Carey, _Principles
of Social Science_ (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1858-1860); his _The Harmony
of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial_ (2nd ed.,
New York, 1852); and his _Miscellaneous Works_ (Philadelphia, 1875).
Francis A. Walker, _The Wages Question, a Treatise on Wages and the
Wages Class_ (New York, 1891); his _Land and Its Rent_ (Boston, 1891);
and his _Political Economy_ (New York, 1888).
For a general treatment of political theories see William A. Dunning,
_A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer_ (New York,
1920); Charles E. Merriam, _History of American Political Theories_
(New York, 1920); and his _American Political Ideas: Studies in the
Development of American Political Thought, 1865-1917_ (New York, 1920).
Theodore Dwight Woolsey, _Political Science: or, the State
Theoretically and Practically Considered_ (New York, 1900); and his
_Communism and Socialism in Their History and Theory_ (New York, 1894).
John W. Burgess. _Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law_
(2 vols., Boston and London, 1896-1898); and his _The Sanctity of the
Law; Wherein Does It Consist?_ (Boston and New York, c. 1927).
J. Allen Smith, _The Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government_
(New York, 1930) is an invaluable aid to those wishing to get
Parrington’s viewpoint in political theory.
Henry George, _The Writings of Henry George_ (Memorial edition, 10
vols., New York, 1898-1900). See particularly _Progress and Poverty_
(Vols. I and II), and Henry George, Jr., _The Life of Henry George_
(Vol. X).
Henry D. Lloyd, _Wealth Against Commonwealth_ (New York, c. 1894);
_Lords of Industry_ (New York and London, 1910); _Men the Social
Creator_ (New York, 1906); _Strike of Millionaires Against Miners,
or the Story of Spring Valley, with an Open Letter to Millionaires_
(Chicago, 1890). For his life see Caroline Augusta Lloyd, _Henry
Demarest Lloyd, 1847-1903_, (2 vols., New York and London, 1912).
(Parrington had intended to discuss Lloyd.)
IV. The Beginnings of Criticism. Wendell Phillips, _Speeches, Lectures,
and Letters_ (2 vols., Boston, 1891-1892). For his life see Carlos
Martyn, _Wendell Phillips, the Agitator_ (Revised ed., New York, 1890);
and Charles Edward Russell, _The Story of Wendell Phillips_ (Chicago,
c. 1914).
George William Curtis, _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ (New York, 1851);
_Trumps_ (New York, 1861); _Potiphar Papers_ (New York, 1854); _Prue
and I_ (New York, n. d.); _Orations and Addresses_ (3 vols., New York,
1894); _From the Easy Chair_ (3 vols., New York, 1894-1902); _Early
Letters of George William Curtis to John S. Dwight; Brook Farm and
Concord_ (New York and London, 1898). For his life see Edward Cary,
_George William Curtis_ (Boston and New York, 1894).
Edwin Lawrence Godkin, _Reflections and Comments, 1865-1895_ (New York,
1895); _Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy_ (Boston, 1893); _Problems
of Modern Democracy; Political and Economic Essays_ (Third ed., New
York, 1898). For his life see, _The Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence
Godkin_ (Ed. by Rollo Ogden, 2 vols., New York and London, 1907). See
also Gustav Pollak, _The Nation, Fifty Years of American Idealism: the
New York Nation, 1865-1915_ (New York, 1915).
The political novel: Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, _The Gilded
Age_ (2 vols., New York, 1873); Henry Adams, _Democracy_ (New York,
1880); F. Marion Crawford, _An American Politician_ (New York, 1884).
See also Albion W. Tourgée, _A Fool’s Errand_ (New York, 1880).
The economic novel: John Hay, _The Bread-Winners_ (New York, 1883); H.
F. Keenan, _The Moneymakers_ (New York, 1885).
The sociological novel: Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, _The Mammon of
Unrighteousness_ (New York, 1891); his _The Golden Calf_ (New York,
1892); and his _Social Strugglers_ (New York, 1893); Robert Grant,
_Unleavened Bread_ (New York, 1900); Samuel Merwin and H. K. Webster,
_Calumet K_ (New York, 1901); and their _Short Line War_ (New York,
1899). Francis Churchill Williams, _J. Develin-Boss_ (New York, 1901);
Elliot Flower, _The Spoilsman_ (Boston, 1903); Winston Churchill,
_Coniston_ (New York, 1907); and his _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (New York,
1908); Will Payne, _Mr. Salt_ (Boston and New York, 1903); and his _The
Money Captain_ (New York, 1898).
For general accounts see Carl Van Doren, _The American Novel_ (New
York, 1921); Fred Lewis Pattee, _A History of American Literature
since 1870_ (New York, 1915); John Curtis Underwood, _Literature
and Insurgency_ (New York, 1914); and W. D. Howells, _Criticism and
Fiction_ (New York, 1891).
For material dealing with Henry Adams and John Hay see William Roscoe
Thayer, _The Life and Letters of John Hay_ (2 vols., Boston and New
York, c. 1915). See also the bibliography on Henry Adams, Part II,
section II.
Book I: Part II
I. Disintegration and Reintegration. For a general survey of
philosophical thought during the period see W. H. Hudson, _Philosophies
Ancient and Modern_ (London, 1908); Woodbridge Riley, _American Thought
from Puritanism to Pragmatism_ (New York, 1915); William Archibald
Dunning, _A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer_
(New York, 1920).
Condorcet, Isidore, August Marie François Xavier, _Ouvres_ (Paris,
1847). See also _A General View of Positivism_ (Translated by H. J.
Bridges, London, c. 1908).
Herbert Spencer, _Works_ (18 vols., New York, 1915); see also his
_Illustrations of Universal Progress; a Series of Discussions_ (New
York, 1890).
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, _The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the
Nineteenth Century_ (New York and London, 1900); and his _History of
Creation_ (2 vols., New York, 1914).
John Fiske, _American Political Ideas, Viewed from the Standpoint of
Universal History_ (New York, 1899); _Darwinism and Other Essays_
(New ed. rev. and enl., Boston, 1892); _The Destiny of Man, Viewed
in the Light of his Origin_ (18 ed., Boston and New York, 1892);
_Essays Historical and Literary_ (2 vols., New York and London, 1902);
_Excursions of an Evolutionist_ (Boston and New York, 1892); _The Idea
of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge_ (Boston and New York, 1892);
_Life Everlasting_ (Boston and New York, 1902); _Outlines of Cosmic
Philosophy, Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms of the
Positive Philosophy_ (4 vols., Boston and New York, c. 1903); _Through
Nature to God_ (Boston and New York, 1899); _Unseen World and Other
Essays_ (11th ed., Boston, 1876). For his life see J. S. Clark, _Life
and Letters of John Fiske_ (2 vols., Boston, 1917); and Henry Holt,
_Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other Essays Somewhat
Biographical and Autobiographical_ (Boston and New York, 1923).
II. The Skepticisms of the House of Adams. Henry Adams, _The
Degradation of the Democratic Dogma_ (New York: 1920); _Democracy,
a Novel_ (New York, 1880); _The Education of Henry Adams_ (New
York, 1918); _History of the United States during the Administration
of Jefferson and Madison_ (9 vols., New York, 1890-1898); _John
Randolph_ (Boston, 1895); _Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin
of Chartres; with a Niece’s Memoirs by Mabel La Farge_ (Boston and
New York, 1920); _Life of Albert Gallatin_ (Philadelphia, 1880);
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_ (Boston and New York, 1913).
Brooks Adams, _America’s Economic Supremacy_ (New York, 1900); _Law of
Civilization and Decay: an Essay on History_ (New York, 1895); _The New
Empire_ (New York, London, 1902); _The Theory of Social Revolutions_
(New York, 1913).
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams, _Chapters of Erie and
Other Essays_ (Boston, 1871); Charles Francis Adams, Jr., _Charles
Francis Adams 1835-1915; an Autobiography_ (Boston and New York, 1916).
See also W. C. Ford, _A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865_ (2 vols.,
Boston and New York, 1920).
III. Victorian Realism. For material in Parrington’s introduction to
Chapter III see Francis Marion Crawford, _The Novel: What It Is_ (New
York, 1908); and H. H. Boyesen, _Literary and Social Silhouettes_ (New
York, 1894).
Henry James, _The Novels and Tales of Henry James_ (24 vols., New
York, 1907-1909); _Views and Reviews_ (Boston, 1908); _The Letters of
Henry James_ (2 vols., New York, 1920). For criticism and biography
see Pelham Edgar, _Henry James, Man and Author_ (Boston and New York,
1927); Rebecca West, _Henry James_ (New York, c. 1916); Van Wyck
Brooks, _The Pilgrimage of Henry James_ (New York, 1925).
William Dean Howells, _A Hazard of New Fortunes_ (New York, 1891);
_A Modern Instance_ (Boston and New York, 1881); _Through the Eye of
the Needle_ (New York and London, 1907); _A Traveler from Altruria_
(New York, 1908); _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (Boston, c. 1912);
_April Hopes_ (New York, 1888); _Certain Delightful English Towns;
with Glimpses of the Pleasant Country Between_ (New York and London,
1906); _Indian Summer_ (Boston, c. 1914); _Venetian Life_ (19th ed.,
new and enl., Boston, c. 1907); _Criticism and Fiction_ (New York,
1891); _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_ (New York and London,
1901); _Literature and Life_ (New York and London, 1902); _My Literary
Passions_ (New York, c. 1895). For his life see _Life in Letters of
William Dean Howells_ (2 vols., Garden City, N. Y., 1928); _Years of
My Youth_ (New York, c. 1916). For critical estimates see Delmar Gross
Cooke, _William Dean Howells; a Critical Study_ (New York, c. 1922);
Oscar W. Firkins, _William Dean Howells_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1924);
Alexander Harvey, _William Dean Howells; a Study of the Achievement of
a Literary Artist_ (New York, 1917).
Book II: Part I
I. The Plight of the Farmer. For general surveys of the Agrarian
movement see Solon Justus Buck, _The Granger Movement_ (In _Harvard
Historical Studies_, Vol. XIX, Cambridge, 1913); and his _The Agrarian
Crusade_ (New Haven, c. 1920); F. E. Haynes, _Third Party Movements
since the Civil War_ (Iowa City, Iowa, c. 1916); F. J. Turner, _The
Frontier in American History_ (New York, 1920).
For discussions of the currency see _Homo’s Letters on a National
Currency_ (Washington, 1817); _Currency Explosions, their Cause and
Cure_ (New York, 1858); _Our Currency: Some of Its Evils, and the
Remedies for Them_ (By a Citizen of North Carolina, Raleigh, N. C.,
1861); D. H. Robertson, _Money_ (New York, c. 1922); J. Lawrence
Laughlin, _The Principles of Money_, (New York. 1911).
David Ames Wells, _Practical Economics; a Collection of Essays
Respecting Certain of the Recent Economic Experiences of the United
States_ (New York, 1885); _Robinson Crusoe’s Money_ (New ed. New York,
1896); _The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption_ (New York, 1875);
_Contraction of Legal Tender Notes vs. Repudiation and Disloyalty_ (New
York, 1876).
Eleazar Lord, _Credit, Currency and Banking_ (New York, 1828); _A
Letter on the National Currency_ (New York, 1861); _Six Letters on the
Necessity and Practicability of the National Currency, etc._ (New York,
1862); _National Currency: A Review of the National Banking Law_ (New
York, 1863).
Peter Cooper, _Ideas for a Science of Good Government_ (New York,
1883); _The Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper_ (New
York, 1877).
William Hope Harvey, _Coin’s Financial School_ (Chicago, c. 1894); and
J. A. Woodburn, _The Life of Thaddeus Stevens_ (Indianapolis, c. 1913.)
III. Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border. For studies of the Middle
Border see D. A. Dondore, _The Prairie and the Making of Middle
America: Four Centuries of Description_ (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1926);
Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_ (New York,
1927).
For early realism of the Middle Border see Harold Frederick, _Seth’s
Brother’s Wife_ (London, 1898); and Joseph Kirkland, _Zury: The Meanest
Man in Spring County_ (Boston and New York, 1887).
Hamlin Garland, _Back-Trailers from the Middle Border_ (New York,
1928); _Boy Life on the Prairie_ (Revised ed., New York and London, c.
1899); _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop: a Novel_ (New York, c.
1902); _Crumbling Idols_ (Chicago, 1894); _A Daughter of the Middle
Border_ (New York, 1921); _The Eagle’s Heart_ (New York, 1900); _Jason
Edwards, An Average Man_ (New York, 1897); _Main-Travelled Roads_ (New
York, c. 1891); _Her Mountain Lover_ (New York, 1901); _Prairie Folk_
(New and rev. ed., New York, 1899); _Rose of Dutcher’s Cooly_ (New
York, c. 1899); _A Son of the Middle Border_ (New York, 1917); _A Spoil
of Office_ (New York, 1897); _Trailmakers of the Middle Border_ (New
York, 1926).
Book II: Part II
II. The Quest of Utopia. Edward Bellamy, _The Duke of Stockbridge; a
Romance of Shay’s Rebellion_ (New York and Boston, 1901); _Equality_
(3d ed., New York, 1897); _Looking Backward, 2000-1887_ (Boston, c.
1889); see also _The Nationalist, a Monthly Magazine_ (Vols. 1-3, May,
1889, to April, 1891. Edited by H. W. Austin).
For general material see Allyn B. Forbes, _The Literary Quest for
Utopia, 1880-1900_ (_Social Forces_, Vol. VII, 1927, pp. 179-189).
Lewis Mumford, _The Story of Utopias_ (New York, c. 1922); J. O.
Hertzler, _The History of Utopian Thought_ (New York, 1923).
Index [Volume Three]
Adams, Brooks, 212, 214, 218, 227-236, 284.
Adams, Charles Francis, 212, 213-214, 215, 227.
Adams, Henry, 54, 90, 94, 96, 170, 171, 173, 203, 206, 212, 214-227,
228, 235, 242, 243, 402, 403.
Adams, John, xxviii, 177, 217, 408, 412.
Adams, Sam, 51, 216.
Addison, Joseph, vi.
Agassiz, Louis, 191, 205.
_Age of Innocence, The_, 382.
Alcott, Louisa M., 50.
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 53, 54-60, 65, 86, 92, 102, 178, 237, 242,
243, 292.
_Alexander’s Bridge_, 383.
_Alice Adams_, 375.
Allen, James Lane, 238.
_American Commonwealth_, 120.
_American Political Ideas_, 210.
_American Politician, An_, 169, 171.
_American Tragedy, An_, 316.
Ames, Fisher, 160.
Ames, Oakes, 169.
Anderson, Sherwood, xv, 241, 319, 324, 325, 326, 331, 361, 370-371,
373, 377, 393, 399.
_April Hopes_, 250, 252.
Aquinas, Thomas, 221, 222, 223, 226.
_Arena_, 293, 299.
_Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy_, 159.
Armour, Philip, 15.
Arnold, Matthew, xxvii, 65, 83, 160, 209, 344, 402.
_At the Court of Boyville_, 374.
_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 52, 54, 57, 61, 238, 251, 397, 398.
Bakunin, Mikhail, 139.
Baldwin, Joseph G., 92, 390.
_Balisand_, 381.
Balzac, Honoré de, 398.
Banks, General Nathaniel Prentiss, 39.
Barbusse, Henri, 385.
Baring, Alexander, 133.
Barnum, P. T., 12, 14, 27.
Bartram, William, 191.
Bastiat, Frédéric, 105, 106, 139.
Baxter, Richard, 67.
Beard, Charles A., xiii, 406, 408, 409.
_Beautiful and Damned, The_, 386.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 12, 14, 75, 90, 202.
_Beginning of Wisdom, The_, 386.
Bellamy, Edward, xii, 246, 302-315.
_Bells, The_, 54.
Benét, Stephen Vincent, 386.
_Bent Twig, The_, 376.
Bentham, Jeremy, 156, 157.
Benton, Thomas A., 25, 71, 273.
Berger, Victor, xii.
Bergh, Henry, 12.
Berkeley, Bishop George, 109.
_Berkshire Courier, The_, 303.
Bernard, Claude, 323.
Beveridge, Albert J., 388.
_Beyond Life_, 336, 340, 344.
_Beyond the Toll-Gate_, 64.
Biddle, Nicholas, 104.
_Biglow Papers_, 56.
Björnson, Björnstjerne, 293.
Blaine, James G., 12, 38, 154, 217.
Blanc, Louis, 105, 139.
Blanche of Castile, 221.
_Blind Raftery_, 378.
_Blix_, 329.
Bloomer, Amelia, 52.
Bojer, Johan, 396.
Boker, George Henry, 52.
Bourget, Paul, 180, 399.
Bourne, Randolph, xiii, 376.
Boutwell, George Sewall, 41, 169.
Boyd, Thomas, 385.
Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 181, 182, 184, 238, 282.
Brandeis, Louis, 406.
_Brass Check, The_, 353.
_Breadwinners, The_, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179.
_Briary Bush, The_, 386.
_Brimming Cup, The_, 376.
Brisbane, Albert, 125.
Bronte, Charlotte, 398.
Bronte, Emily, 398.
Brook Farm, 43, 47, 60, 147, 148, 151, 152, 201.
_Brooklyn Eagle_, 71.
Brooks, Van Wyck, 89, 376.
_Brothers_, 371.
Brown, Alice, 62.
Browning, Robert, 201.
Bryan, William Jennings, xi, 46, 166, 178, 361, 367.
Bryant, William Cullen, 41, 54, 108, 150, 277.
Bryce, James, 120.
Buchanan, James, 30.
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 204, 205, 208.
“Buffalo Bill,” 16, 17.
Burgess, John W., 120, 122, 124-125, 130, 284.
Burke, Edmund, 144.
Butler, Ben, 12, 13, 14, 169, 269, 386.
_Butler’s Analogy_, 198.
_By the Open Sea_, 325.
Byrd, Col. William, 389.
Byrne, Donn, 377-378.
Cabell, James Branch, xiii, 91, 100, 335-345, 347, 355, 367, 373,
382, 405.
Cable, George Washington, xii, 238.
_Caesar’s Column_, 302.
Cairnes, John Elliott, 124.
Calhoun, John C., xxviii, 119, 120, 130, 281, 408, 409.
_Call of the Wild, The_, 352.
_Calumet K_, 186.
Cameron, Senator Simon, 12.
Canfield (Fisher), Dorothy, 376.
“Captain Kidd,” 12, 45.
_Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop, The_, 292, 300.
Carey, Henry C., 22, 23, 103, 105-111, 112, 113, 116, 269, 273, 276,
277, 279, 282.
Carey, Matthew, 105.
Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 337.
Carlyle, Thomas, 65, 83, 139, 337, 368.
Carnegie, Andrew, 15, 87.
Carver, Captain, 16, 17, 92.
Castelar, Emilio, 177, 178.
Cather, Willa, 63, 383-384, 393, 394.
Central Pacific Railway, 127.
_Century Magazine_, 173.
_Certain Delightful English Towns_, 252.
_Certain Rich Man, A_, 374.
Champagne, Marie de, 220.
_Changeling, The_, 378.
Channing, William Ellery, viii, 72, 76, 121, 130, 131, 140.
_Chanson de Roland_, 220.
Chase, Salmon P., 32, 34, 35, 272.
Chatterton, Thomas, 54.
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 335.
_Christian Union_ (Beecher), 38 n.
Churchill, Winston, xiv, 186, 348-349, 360, 406.
_Circuit Rider, The_, 391.
Claflin, Tennessee, 12.
Clay, Henry, 20, 22, 23, 104, 105, 139, 279, 410.
Clemens, Olivia, 90, 92.
Cleveland, Grover, 46, 59, 154.
Cœur-de-Lion, Richard, 221.
“Coffee House Wits,” 48.
_Coin, The_, 334.
Colfax, Schuyler, 38.
_Communism and Socialism_, 123.
Comstock, Anthony, xvi, 12, 14, 75, 367.
Comte, Auguste, 195, 196, 197, 198, 204, 208, 213, 219, 317, 323.
Condorcet, Marquis de, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 235.
Congreve, William, 344, 345.
_Coniston_, 186, 348.
Conkling, Roscoe, 12, 217.
_Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The_, 91, 97, 98, 99.
_Contraction_, 269.
Cooke, Henry, 32, 34, 35, 38, 42.
Cooke, Jay, 29, 31-43.
Cooke, John Esten, 238.
Cooke, Pitt, 32, 33.
Cooke, Rose Terry, 62, 397, 398.
Cooper, James Fenimore, 175, 300, 363.
Cooper, Peter, 22, 69, no, 125, 140, 160, 276-282.
_Cords of Vanity, The_, 335, 344.
Cornwallis, General Charles, 304.
_Cosmos_, 205.
_Country Doctor, A_, 63.
_Country of the Painted Firs_, 64, 65.
Craddock, Charles Egbert, 238, 400.
Crane, Stephen, xii, 55, 237, 300, 317, 327, 328-329, 385.
Crawford, F. Marion, 171, 172, 237.
_Cream of the Jest, The_, 335, 343.
_Crédit Mobilier_, 24, 38, 39, 40, 137, 160, 162.
_Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption, The_, 269.
Crèvecœur, St. John de, 389.
_Crime and Punishment_, 316.
_Crisis, The_, 348.
_Criticism and Fiction_, 248.
Crockett, Davy, 15, 16, 92, 390.
Cromwell, Thomas, 231.
_Crossing, The_, 348.
_Crumbling Idols_, 292, 293.
Cummings, E. E., 385.
Curtis, Burrill, 147.
Curtis, George William, 138, 147-154, 172, 279.
_Custom of the Country, The_, 382.
Cuvier, Georges, 205.
_Cytherea_, 380, 381.
_Daily News_ (London), 155.
_Daisy Miller_, 399.
Dana, Charles A., 43-47, 151, 152, 154, 244, 269.
Darrow, Clarence, 367.
Darwin, Charles, 198, 204, 205, 206, 293, 323, 352, 402.
_Data of Ethics_, 198.
_Deadlock_, 399.
_Deal in Wheat, A_, 329.
_Débâcle, Le_, 328, 329.
Debs, Eugene V., xii.
Deland, Margaret, 397.
DeLeon, Daniel, xii.
Dell, Floyd, 386.
_Democracy_, 94, 169, 170, 171, 173, 217, 218, 223.
_Destiny of Man, The_, 209.
Dewey, John, 406.
Dickens, Charles, 331, 398.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 148.
_Domnei_, 342.
Donnelly, Ignatius, 12, 266, 284, 302.
Dos Passos, John, 385.
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 316.
Douglas, Stephen A., 25.
Drake, Sir Francis, 231.
Dreiser, Theodore, xiv, 193, 198, 241, 300, 317, 319, 324, 325,
354-359.
Drew, Daniel, 12, 13, 14, 84.
Drummond, Henry, 208.
Dugdale, R. L., 191.
_Duke of Stockbridge, The_, 303.
_Dwelling Place of Light, The_, 349.
Dwight, Timothy, 120, 191, 390.
_Eagle Heart, The_, 300.
_Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An_, 408, 409.
_Education of Henry Adams, The_, 203, 218.
_Egg, The_, 370.
Eggleston, Edward, xi, 238, 293, 391, 400.
Eleanor of Guienne, 221, 227.
_Elements of Political Economy_, 104, 111, 133.
Eliot, George, 209.
_Elliott’s Debates_, 411.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, viii, 50, 52, 53, 70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82,
88, 121, 131, 204, 319, 327, 334, 368, 403.
_Emigrants, The_, 396.
_Emporia and New York_, 374.
Engels, Friedrich, 76, 105, 139.
_Enormous Room, The_, 385.
_Equality_, 304, 311.
_Erik Dorn_, 386.
_Essay on the Classification of the Animal Kingdom_, 205.
_Ethan Frome_, 382.
Evans, George Henry, 125, 140.
_Evening Post_, 71, 108.
_Evolution of Language_, 205.
_Faint Perfume_, 377.
_Far Country, A_, 349.
_Far from the Madding Crowd_, 289.
Faraday, Michael, 219.
Fessenden, William Pitt, 35.
Fields, James Thomas, 65, 292.
_Figures of Earth_, 335, 342.
_Financier, The_, 357.
Fink, Mike, 92.
_First Principles_, 208.
Fisk, Jim, 12, 13, 14, 27, 84, 137, 278.
Fiske, John, 13, 197, 203-211, 243, 293, 404.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 386.
Flaubert, Gustave, 64, 323, 324, 398.
_Florentine Dagger_, 386.
Flower, B. O., 246, 266, 293, 298, 299.
Flower, Elliott, 186.
_Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_, 92, 390.
_Foundation of the Labor Movement, The_, 145.
Fourier, François Charles Marie, 151.
_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 201.
Franklin, Benjamin, viii, 191, 201, 250, 281, 282.
Frederic, Harold, xii, 288, 289, 327.
Freeman, Edward Augustus, 210.
Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 62, 63, 66, 68, 238.
_Frenzied Finance_, 405.
Freud, Sigmund, 401.
_Friendship Village_, 377.
Frost, Robert, xiv, 379.
Fuller, Henry B., xii.
Fuller, Margaret, 151.
Gale, Zona, xv, 377, 397.
Gallatin, Albert, 279.
_Gargoyles_, 386.
Garland, Hamlin, xi, 89, 198, 246, 251, 259, 266, 288-300, 316, 317,
318, 332, 374, 383, 391, 392, 393.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 141, 142.
Gary, Judge Elbert Henry, 347, 366.
_Gentleman from Indiana, The_, 375.
George, Henry, 12, 52, 104, 105, 111, 116, 125-136, 293, 294, 295,
298, 299, 303, 314, 402.
_Georgia Scenes_, 92, 390.
_Giants in the Earth_, 387-396.
_Gilded Age, The_, 91, 92, 93, 169.
Gilder, Richard W., 87.
Gladstone, W. E., 160, 215.
Glasgow, Ellen, xiii.
_Glimpses of the Moon_, 382.
Godkin, Edwin Laurence, 10, 48, 82, 138, 152, 154-168, 178, 218, 243,
244, 246, 269.
Godwin, Parke, 125, 140.
Godwin, William, xxviii, 72, 189, 200.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 204, 395.
_Golden Calf, The_, 182.
_Golden House, The_, 184.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 252.
_Goose Step, The_, 353.
_Goslings, The_, 353.
Goss, Warren, 385.
Gough, John B., 12.
Gould, Jay, 12, 13, 14, 84, 137, 189, 214.
Grady, Henry W., xii.
_Grammarian’s Funeral, The_, 56.
Grant, General Ulysses S., 20, 27-31, 33, 37, 38, 43, 46, 169, 217.
Grant’s _Memoirs_, 31.
Grant, Robert, xii, 180, 182, 382.
Gray, Asa, 191.
_Gray Man, The_, 64.
Greeley, Horace, 20, 22, 23, 43, 87, 108, 125, 128, 140, 143, 276,
277, 279, 282.
Greene, Ann Terry, 141.
Grote, George, 156, 157, 205, 210.
Haeckel, Ernst, 202, 203, 402.
_Hagar_, 180.
Hall, G. Oakey, 12, 13, 14.
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 56.
Hamilton, Alexander, 152, 216, 218, 408, 410.
Hanna, Marcus A., 15, 43, 300.
_Hand of the Potter, The_, 357.
_Harbor, The_, 350.
Harding, Rebecca, 61.
Hardy, Thomas, 237, 289, 324, 325, 326.
_Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing and Commercial,
The_, 106.
_Harper’s Weekly_, 148, 150, 152.
Harrington, James, xxviii, 130, 408.
Harris, Joel Chandler, xii, 400.
Harte, Bret, 93, 396, 400.
Harvey, “Coin,” 125, 164, 284.
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 299.
Hawkins, Sir John, 231.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 53, 70, 151, 303, 380, 397.
Hay, Clarence Leonard, 173, 174, 175.
Hay, John, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 218, 226.
Hayes, Rutherford B., 38 n, 280, 281.
_Hazard of New Fortunes, A_, 244, 245, 252.
_Heavens and Earth_, 386.
Hecht, Ben, 386.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 78, 124, 364.
Heine, Heinrich, 248.
Helper, Hilton R., 125, 140.
_Henry Esmond_, 348.
_Her Mountain Lover_, 291.
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 379-381.
Herrick, Robert, xiv, 182, 325, 348, 349-350, 368, 406.
Herschel, Sir John Frederick, 205.
_Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, 357.
Hickok, Wild Bill, 16, 17, 92.
_Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_, vii.
_History of Greece_, 203.
_History of the Dividing Line, The_, 389.
_History of the Progress of the Human Mind_, 194.
_History of the United States During the Administration of Jefferson
and Madison_, 218.
Hoar, Ebenezer, 141.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 52, 53, 55, 251, 292.
Holt, Henry, 157, 210, 211, 243.
_Hoosier Schoolmaster, The_, 288, 391, 400.
Horace, 148.
_Horses and Men_, 370.
_House of Mirth, The_, 180, 381.
Howe, E. W., xi, 377, 391.
Howells, William Dean, 32, 87, 88, 89, 99, 179, 181, 237, 238,
241-253, 292, 293, 296, 302, 316, 317, 318, 399.
_Huckleberry Finn_, 57, 65, 91, 92, 94.
_Humble Remonstrance_, 237.
_Humble Romance, A_, 66.
Humboldt, Alexander, 205.
Huneker, James, xiv.
Huntington, Collis P., 15, 25.
Ibsen, Henrik, 293.
_Idea of God, The_, 209.
Illinois Central Railroad, 25, 165.
_In the Heart of a Fool_, 374.
_Indian Summer_, 252.
Industrial Revolution, 168, 171, 189, 193, 231.
Ingersoll, Robert, 12.
_Innocents Abroad_, 9.
_Inside of the Cup, The_, 349.
_Iron Heel, The_, 352.
Irving, Washington, 398.
Jackson, Andrew, 26, 267, 273, 278, 281, 410.
James, Henry, 54, 181, 239-241, 243, 250, 380, 397, 399.
James, Jesse, 16.
James, William, 402.
_Janet March_, 386.
_Jason Edwards: an Average Man_, 298.
_Java Head_, 380.
_J. Devlin--Boss_, 186.
_Jean Hugenot_, 386.
Jefferson, Thomas, viii, ix, x, 26, 72, 83, 125, 130, 152, 199, 200,
201, 218, 264, 281, 304, 381, 403, 410.
Jeffries, Lord Chief Justice, 232.
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 57, 63, 64, 66, 238, 288, 397, 400.
_Joan of Arc_, 91, 99.
_John Barleycorn_, 352.
_John Randolph_, 218.
Johnson, Andrew, 19, 20, 30.
Johnston, Mary, 180, 348.
_Jude the Obscure_, 237.
_Jungle, The_, 353, 383.
_Jurgen_, 335, 342.
_Kansas Situation, The_, 164.
Keats, John, 54.
King, Clarence, 171, 173, 218.
_King Coal_, 353.
Kingsley, Charles, 139.
Kipling, Rudyard, 56, 59, 166, 167.
Kirkland, Joseph, 288, 289, 290, 293, 295, 391.
Kirkland, Matilda, 289.
Knight, Madam Sarah, 389.
Kossuth, Lajos (Louis), 151, 156.
_Labor Question, The_, 45.
Ladd, George Trumbull, 402.
La Farge, John, 224.
La Follette, Robert, xiii, 406.
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 198.
Langdon, Olivia, 87, 88.
Lanier, Sidney, xiii, 56, 334.
Laplace, Pierre Simon, 205.
Latzko, Andreas, 385.
_Law of Civilization and Decay, The_, 228, 231.
Lawrence, D. H., 324, 325, 326, 371, 399.
Lawson, Thomas W., 405.
Lease, Mary Ellen, 266, 298.
_Leaves of Grass_, 73, 74, 76, 79, 82.
Le Conte, 191.
Leggett, William, 71, 72.
_Letters from an American Farmer_, 389.
Lewes, George Henry, 204.
Lewis, Sinclair, xv, xvi, 360-369, 373, 374.
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 326, 347, 376.
Lieber, Francis, 119, 120.
_Life Everlasting_, 209.
_Life for a Life, A_, 350.
_Life in the Iron Mills_, 61.
_Life of Albert Gallatin_, 218.
_Life of James J. Hill_, 275.
_Life of Lincoln_, 388.
_Life on the Mississippi_, 13, 91.
Lincoln, Abraham, 19, 26, 27, 30, 31, 87, 99, 176, 177, 260.
_Linda Condon_, 380.
Lindsay, Vachel, 319.
List, Friedrick, 105, 108.
Lloyd, Henry D., xiii, 284.
Lloyd, Samuel, 231.
Locke, John, xxviii, 98, 130, 131, 193, 199, 201, 408, 412.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 226.
London, Jack, xiv, 198, 325, 352, 368, 406.
_London Times, The_, 38 n.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 251, 334.
Longstreet, Gus, 92, 390.
_Looking Backward_, xii, 254, 302-315.
Lord, Eleazar, 273, 274.
Lorris, Guillaume de, 220.
_Lost Lady, The_, 384.
_Loves of Pelleas and Etarre_, 377.
Lowell, James Russell, 52, 55, 65, 66, 138, 141, 150, 161, 218, 238,
243, 250, 231, 292, 398.
Lyell, Sir Charles, 219.
Mabie, Hamilton W., 57.
_McClure’s Magazine_, 405.
McCulloch (Secretary of the Treasury), 35.
McKinley, William, 165, 176, 300.
McPherson, Aimee Semple, xvi, 367.
_McTeague_, 299, 329, 330-332, 333.
_Madame Bovary_, 323.
Madison, James, 233, 408.
_Maggie: A Girl of the Streets_, 55, 237, 328.
_Main Street_, 364, 378.
Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner, 210.
_Main-Travelled Roads_, 246, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 391.
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 104, 132.
_Mammon of Unrighteousness_, 180, 182, 184.
_Man versus the State_, 200, 284.
_Man with the Hoe, The_, xii.
Mansfield, Josie, 13.
_Many Marriages_, 370.
_Marching Men_, 370.
Marie Antoinette, 96.
_Marjorie Daw_, 57.
Markham, Edwin, vii.
Marlowe, Christopher, 344.
Marshall, John, 233, 234.
_Marshes of Glynn_, 334.
_Martin Eden_, 352.
Marx, Karl, 76, 105, 111, 112, 114, 116, 123, 124, 128, 130, 139,
243, 317, 323, 402, 408.
Masters, Edgar Lee, xiv, 319, 325, 377, 393.
Mather, Cotton, ix, 191.
Mather, Increase, 191.
Matthews, Brander, 325.
Maugham, Somerset, 324, 326.
Maupassant, Guy de, 326.
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 151.
Mellon, Andrew, 366.
Melville, Herman, 14, 252, 403.
_Memoirs of an American Citizen, The_, 349.
_Men in War_, 385.
Mencken, H. L., xiv, 347, 363, 376.
Meredith, George, 325.
Merwin, Samuel, 186.
_Messer Marco Polo_, 377.
_Midlander, The_, 375.
Mill, John Stuart, 113, 114, 122, 124, 129, 130, 155, 156, 157, 158,
160, 161, 167, 168, 197, 200, 204, 213, 402.
Millet, Jean François, 293.
_Minister’s Wooing, The_, 64.
_Miss Lucinda_, 398.
_Miss Lulu Bett_, 377.
_Mr. Crewe’s Career_, 186, 348.
_Mr. Salt_, 187.
_Money Captain, The_, 187.
_Monsieur Beaucaire_, 335.
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, 218, 220, 221, 222, 226.
Moody, Dwight L., 12, 13, 14.
_Moon Calf_, 386.
_Moran of the Lady Letty_, 329.
More, Sir Thomas, 246.
Morgan, J. Pierpont, 226, 349.
Morgan, Lewis H., 191.
Morris, Nelson, 15.
Morris, William, 48, 68, 96, 139, 224, 225, 246, 247, 298, 312, 368,
376, 402.
Morton, Sarah Wentworth, 62.
Morton, Senator O. P., 269.
Most, Johann, 284.
Motley, John Lothrop, 52.
Murfree, Mary, xii.
_My Ántonia_, 384, 393.
_My Literary Passions_, 252.
Myers, Gustavus, xiii, 406.
_Mysterious Stranger, The_, 91, 100.
_Nana_, 325, 329.
Nasby, Petroleum V., 92.
Nathan, Robert, 378-379.
_Nation, The_, 154-168.
_National Quarterly Review_, 205.
_Nationalist, The_, 302, 303.
Newman, John Henry, 224.
_New York Sun_, 43, 44.
_New York Tribune_, 22, 108.
_News from Nowhere_, 247, 312.
Nicholson, Meredith, xi, 364, 373.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 347, 352, 386, 402, 412.
_Nile Notes of a Howadji_, 148.
Norris, Frank, xii, 181, 188, 299, 317, 319, 324, 325, 327, 329-334,
382.
_North American Review_, 159, 205.
Northern Pacific Railway, 16, 29, 37.
Norton, Charles Eliot, 150, 152, 160, 161, 243, 250, 292.
_Novel; What It Is, The_, 237.
Noyes, John Humphrey, 74.
_Octopus, The_, 329, 330, 332-334.
_Of Human Bondage_, 324, 325.
_Ohio State Journal_, 32.
_Old New York_, 382.
_Old Order Changeth, The_, 374.
_Old-Town Folks_, 64.
_One of Ours_, 384, 385.
_1001 Afternoons in Chicago_, 386.
_O Pioneers_, 383, 393.
_Origin of Species, The_, 205.
Otis, Harrison Gray, 58.
_Our Land and Land Policy; National and State_, 130.
_Our National Debt a National Blessing_, 40.
_Out of Nowhere into Nothing_, 371.
_Outlines of Astronomy_, 205.
_Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy_, 208.
Owen, Robert, 151.
Pacific Railroad, 25, 144.
Page, Thomas Nelson, xii.
Paine, Robert Treat, 59.
Paine, Tom, viii, 71, 72, 73, 125, 126, 130, 132, 136, 401.
Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 215.
Parker, Theodore, viii, 51, 76, 81, 131, 147, 204, 208.
Parkman, Francis, 52.
_Passage to India, A_, 81.
Pattee, Fred Lewis, 398.
Payne, Will, 187.
_Pearl of Orr’s Island, The_, 64.
_Pembroke_, 63, 66.
_Penrod_, 374.
_Peter Kindred_, 378.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 61, 62, 66, 68.
Phillips, David Graham, 406.
Phillips, Wendell, 22, 50, 58, 125, 139, 140-147, 150, 269, 276, 277.
Phoenix, John, 92.
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 14.
Pillsbury, Charles A., 15.
_Pit, The_, 329, 330, 333.
Plato, 246, 364.
_Plumes_, 386.
Poe, Edgar Allan, xxi, 54, 56, 172, 397.
_Poganuc People_, 64.
_Political Economy_, 129.
_Political Justice_, 200.
_Political Science and Constitutional Law_, 120.
_Political Science, or the State_, 120.
_Ponkapog Papers_, 57.
Poole, Ernest, 348, 350-351, 406.
_Poor White_, 370.
Pope, Alexander, vi, 248, 360.
Porter, General Horace, 380.
_Portion of Labor, The_, 62, 66, 68.
_Potiphar Papers_, 148.
Powderley, Terence V., xi, 160, 284.
_Practical Economics_, 269.
_Prairie Folks_, 291, 294, 295.
Price, Richard, 193, 195.
Priestly, Joseph, 73, 193, 195.
_Prince and the Pauper, The_, 91, 97.
_Progress and Poverty_, 116, 126, 128, 129, 132.
_Progress of Democracy in Europe_, 177.
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 105, 139.
_Prue and I_, 149.
_Psychology_, 208.
_Puppet Master, The_, 379.
_Putnam’s Magazine_, 148, 149.
Quesnay, François, 127.
Quick, Herbert, 394.
Quincey, Edmund, 50, 141.
Quincey, Josiah, 51.
_Raw Material_, 376.
_Recessional_, 56.
_Recollections of a Private, The_, 385.
_Red Badge of Courage, The_, 328, 385.
_Règne Animal distribué d’après son Organisation_, 205.
Reid, Whitelaw, 87.
_Responsibilities of the Novelist, The_, 188.
_Revolution, The_, 352.
Ricardo, David, 104, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 124, 126, 132,
163, 274 n.
_Richard Carvel_, 348.
Richardson, Dorothy, 399.
_Riders to the Sea_, 378.
_Rights of Man, The_, 132.
Riley, James W., xi, 56, 288, 290, 373.
Riley, Woodbridge, 197.
Ripley, George, 151, 368.
_Rise of Silas Lapham, The_, 250.
Rittenhouse, David, 191.
_Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, The_, 343.
_Robert Elsmere_, 349.
_Robinson Crusoe’s Money_, 269.
Robinson, Edward Arlington, xiv.
Rockefeller, John D., 15.
Rogers, Henry H., 90.
Rölvaag, Ole, 387-396.
Roosevelt, Theodore, xiii, 226, 404.
Root, Elihu, 284.
_Rose of Dutcher’s Cooly_, 292.
_Rough Hewn_, 376.
_Roughing It_, 15, 91, 92, 98, 100.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, xxviii, 367, 389.
Ruskin, John, 133, 139, 224, 368, 402.
Russell, Charles Edward, xiii, 406.
Russell, Lord William, 215.
Sage, Russell, 12.
Saint-Simon, 105, 151, 196, 198.
Sandburg, Carl, xiv, 319.
Sankey, Ira David, 13.
Santayana, George, 53.
_Saturday Evening Post, The_, 327, 379, 381.
_Scarlet Letter, The_, 65.
Schurz, Karl, 155.
Scott, Evelyn, xv.
Scott, Sir Walter, 96.
_Sea Wolf, The_, 352.
_Sebastopol_, 328.
Sedgwick, Catherine, 62.
Sellers, Colonel Beriah, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 37, 88, 92, 93, 94,
116, 169, 296.
_Seth’s Brother’s Wife_, 288.
Shaw, Anna, 149.
Shaw, George Bernard, 335, 343.
“Shaw Memorial Ode,” 58.
Sheridan, Richard Brimsley, 344.
Sherman, General William Tecumseh, 29, 217.
Sherman, Senator John, 32, 34, 38 n, 268, 269.
Sherman, Stuart P., 274, 358, 359.
_Short Line War, The_, 186.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 89.
_Silent Partner, The_, 61, 62.
_Silliman’s Journal_, 191.
Simons, A. M., xiii.
Simpson, Jerry, 266, 284.
Sinclair, Upton, xiv, 348, 368, 406.
Sismondi, Jean Charles, 105.
_Sisters’ Tragedy, The_, 55.
Smith, Adam, 107.
Smith, J. Allen, vii, xvii, 408.
_Social Strugglers, The_, 182, 184, 185, 382.
_Son at the Front, A_, 382.
_Son of the Middle Border, A_, 292, 374.
_Song of Myself_, 81.
_Song of the Lark, The_, 384.
Sorel, Albert, 139.
Spencer, Herbert, 80, 122, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203,
205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 235, 253, 284, 293, 294, 299, 317,
318, 352, 402.
_Spirit of American Government, The_, 408.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 62.
_Spoil of Office, A_, 298.
_Spoilsmen, The_, 186.
_Spoon River Anthology_, 325, 370, 377, 393.
_Squirrel Cage, The_, 376.
Stallings, Laurence, 386.
Stanford, Leland, 15, 127.
_Starting from Paumanok_, 73, 79.
_State, The_, 120.
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 52, 53, 302.
Steffens, Lincoln, 187, 406.
Stevens, Thaddeus, 69, 143, 160, 271, 272, 276, 277, 279.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 237.
Stewart, A. T., 29.
Stiles, Ezra, 191.
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 52, 53.
_Story of a Bad Boy_, 57.
_Story of a Country Town, The_, 377, 391.
_Story Teller’s Story, A_, 371.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 62, 63, 64, 398.
_Stranger’s Banquet, The_, 377.
Strindberg, August, 299, 324, 325.
Stubbs, William, 210.
Suckow, Ruth, 394.
Sumner, Charles, 150.
Sunday, Billy, 361, 367, 368.
Swift, Jonathan, vi, 89, 155, 378.
Sydney, Algernon, 146.
Synge, John M., 378.
_Synthetic Philosophy_, 201, 206.
_Système du Monde_, 205.
Taine, Hippolyte, vii, 89, 293, 294, 295, 323, 402.
Talmage, T. De Witt, 12.
Tarbell, Ida, 406.
Tarkington, Booth, xi, 348, 374, 375, 377, 379.
_Tatler, The_, 149.
Taylor, Bayard, 38 n.
Taylor, John, xxvii, 125, 127, 218, 264, 276.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 54, 202, 237, 334.
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 148, 179, 348, 374.
Thanet, Octave, 238.
Thayer, William Roscoe, 171.
_Theory of Social Revolution, The_, 232.
_This Side of Paradise_, 386.
Thoreau, Henry David, viii, 50, 72, 73, 76, 148, 189, 337, 403.
_Three Black Pennys, The_, 380.
_Three Soldiers_, 385.
_Through Nature to God_, 209.
_Through the Eye of the Needle_, 247.
_Through the Wheat_, 385.
Tilden, Samuel Joves, 281.
Tilton, Libby, 13.
_Titan, The_, 355.
_To Have and to Hold_, 180.
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 156, 158, 160, 387.
Tolstoi, Leo, 64, 65, 248, 293, 328.
_Tom Sawyer_, 94, 95, 100, 374.
Train, George Francis, 12.
Traubel, Horace, 85.
_Traveller from Altruria, The_, 246, 247.
_Tribune_, 38 n, 43, 44, 128.
_Triumph of the Egg, The_, 370.
_Troll Garden, The_, 383.
_Trumps_, 149.
Turgenev, Ivan, 64, 293.
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 193, 195, 199, 219.
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 159, 404.
Twain, Mark, vi, 10, 14, 15, 31, 53, 54, 55, 86-101, 102, 123, 169,
242, 252, 290, 292, 345, 374, 400.
Tweed, Boss, 12, 13, 14, 137, 152.
Twitchell, Joe, 87.
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 302.
_Under Fire_, 385.
Union Pacific, 16, 24, 39, 103, 214.
_Unguarded Gates_, 58.
_Unleavened Bread_, 180, 182, 382.
Untermyer, Samuel, 406.
U’Ren, William S., 284.
_Valley of Democracy_, 373.
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 12, 14, 27, 296.
Van Doren, Carl, 380.
_Vandover and the Brute_, 329, 332.
_Vanity Fair_, 148.
Veblen, Thorstein, 193, 406, 412.
_Venetian Days_, 251.
_Virginians, The_, 348.
Voltaire, 204.
Wade, Ben, 38 n.
Walker, Amasa, 111.
Walker, Francis A., 103, 111-117.
Wall Street, 12, 14, 110, 163, 181, 185, 189, 262, 266, 269, 277,
284, 382.
Walsh, Frank P., 406.
Ward, Artemus, 92.
Ward, Lester F., 198, 402.
_War and Peace_, 328.
Warner, Charles Dudley, 87, 169, 184.
Washburn, C. C., 15.
_Washington Chronicle_, 38 n.
Washington, George, 381.
Watson, Tom, 266, 284.
Wayland, Francis, 104, 105, in, 133.
_Wealth of Nations_, 305.
Weaver, General James Baird, 266, 284.
_Web of Life, The_, 350.
Webster, Daniel, xxviii, 119, 281, 408, 409.
Webster, H. K., 186.
Wells, David A., 103, 108, 268, 269, 270, 274.
Wharton, Edith, xii, 180, 240, 347, 381-383, 405.
_What is Man?_, 91.
_What Price Glory?_, 386.
_When Knighthood Was in Flower_, 335.
Whistler, James McNeil, 239.
White, Maria, 141.
White, William Allen, xi, 348, 364, 374, 377.
Whitman, Walt, 13, 14, 54, 55, 36, 69-86, 87, 88, 90, 102, 189, 241,
293, 294, 299, 354, 356, 402, 403.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 52, 141.
Wilbur, Ida, 298.
Wilkins, Mary, 395, 400.
Willard, Frances E., 302.
Williams, Francis Churchill, 186.
Williams, Roger, viii, ix, 121.
Wilson, Margaret, 394.
Wilson, Woodrow, xiii, 120, 284, 406, 412.
_Wind Bloweth, The_, 378.
Windom, William, 38 n.
_Windy McPherson’s Son_, 370.
_Winesburg, Ohio_, 63, 324, 370.
Winter, William, 53.
Winthrop, John, 121.
Wise, John, 155.
_Wolf, The_, 333.
Wood, Fernando, 12, 14.
Woodberry, George E., 58.
Woodhull, Victoria, 12, 13, 202.
Woodward, W. W., xiii.
Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 119, 120-124, 130.
Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 398.
Wright, Fanny, 71, 73, 140.
Youmans, Edward L., 207.
_Young People’s Pride_, 386.
Zola, Émile, 64, 179, 180, 188, 237, 293, 299, 323, 324, 325, 326,
328, 329, 330.
_Zoölogy_, 205.
_Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County_, 289, 391.
[Transcriber’s notes:
Italic text is rendered with _underscores_, and small-cap text
(when used as emphasis) with +plus signs+.
Multi-line headings have been consolidated to one line with a bullet
character separating their components. These headings represent one
level in the book's organization: a Volume, Book, Part, Chapter, or
section. All-capitalized headings in the original have been changed to
title case and moved to the left margin. Volume information in [square
brackets] has been added to the headings of the tables of contents and
indices to clarify document structure in this large work.
"Book" headings were printed twice, first on interior title pages, then
on the next page; one of each has been removed as redundant.]
Uncharted Knowledge
Wisdom From Previous Realities
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