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