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