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