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