Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
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