Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
pp. 334-335, third edition). “Liberty stands in need of character,” and
this character is received from social institutions. He then proceeds:
... An institution is a system or body of usages, laws, or
regulations of extensive and recurring operation, containing within
itself an organism by which it effects its own independent action,
continuance, and generally its own farther development. Its object
is to generate, effect, regulate, or sanction a succession of
acts, transactions, or productions of a peculiar class or kind.
The idea of an institution implies a degree of self-government.
Laws act through human agents, and these are, in the case of
institutions, their officers or members. (_Ibid._, p. 300.)
It was the deep-rooted _civisme anglais_, he believed, that had
developed the orderly liberty of the English race; and it is this same
institutional spirit that provides the surest check upon the augmenting
power of the political state. There can be no tyranny where society is
trained and disciplined in liberty.
The creative source and origin of this excellent _civisme anglais_
Lieber discovered in the principle of local self-government; in
the exercise of local control of local interests; the enjoyment of
innumerable lesser sovereignties within the larger national organism.
These lesser sovereignties are both civil and social, and the amount
of liberty enjoyed in a given society is measured by the independent
vigor with which they function. The exercise of definite rights by the
several states is clearly one of the important institutional functions
of self-government, but it is only one. The New England town-meeting,
county and city governments, are even more important, while outside
these civil organisms are innumerable social organisms, exercising
their common right of establishing by-laws for their own governance,
and spreading the spirit of liberty through all the practices of
society.
According to the Anglican view, institutional self-government
consists in the fact that all the elementary parts of the
government, as well as the highest and most powerful branches,
consist in real institutions ... [but it] consists, farther,
in the unstinted freedom and fair protection which are granted
to institutions of all sorts, commercial, religious, cultural,
scientific, charitable, and industrial, to germinate and to
grow--provided they are moral and do not invade the equal rights
of others. It receives its aliment from a pervading spirit of
self-reliance and self-respect--the real afflatus of liberty.
(_Ibid._, p. 320.)
This, quite evidently, is the spirit of _laissez faire_ applied
to political philosophy. A people thus used to order their social
affairs, as the English people have long done, will prove competent
to manage their political affairs; and the widespread spirit of
individual independence will prevent the drift towards unregulated
centralism with its corollary of tyrannical power. The conception of
institutional liberty embodies much of the spirit of Jeffersonianism,
and it goes back in its origins as far as Roger Williams. The
states-rights advocates, Lieber implies, were mistaken in seeking
the principle of liberty through particularism. In magnifying the
individual commonwealth they overlooked the more vital units of
self-government. To erect the state above the nation was no lasting
solution of the most difficult problem in political philosophy, namely,
the coördination of sovereign power with individual liberty; it was
only to substitute one sovereignty for another, whereas to encourage
the spread of self-governing bodies through society was to provide the
necessary countercheck to centralizing power and coördinate liberty and
sovereignty under the reign of law.
A stimulating thinker was this German liberal with his historical
method and his conception of an evolutionary freedom rooted in the
institutions of the English people. He gave a new turn to speculation
on the origin and nature of the political state, the immediate
consequence of which was the repudiation of the compact theory and
natural-rights philosophy by our academic political scientists. The
organic conception of the political state fell in with the centralizing
movement that followed the Civil War, a movement which the forces of
institutional self-government have been powerless to prevent. On the
whole the influence of Lieber has been rather against than for that
liberty which was so dear to him, and the explanation is to be found
in the tragic divorce, in his thinking, of politics and economics. His
inveterate legalism and his failure to investigate the economics of
politics proved in the end the undoing of his liberalism.
Footnotes
[402] See Merriam, _American Political Theories_, p. 231; Gaillard
Hunt, _John C. Calhoun_, p. 64.
[403] See “A Disquisition on Government” in Calhoun’s _Works_, Vol. I,
pp. 41-42.
[404] See Pendleton, _Alexander H. Stephens_, p. 231, note.
[405] See _A Constitutional View, etc._, Vol. I, pp. 406-408.
Chapter III • The Dream of a Greek Democracy
I
The pronounced drift of southern thought, in the years immediately
preceding the Civil War, towards the ideal of the Greek democracy, has
been too carelessly forgotten by later times. It was no vagrant eddy
but a broadening current of tendency. In its blend of romanticism and
realism it fitted exactly the temper of the plantation mind, imparting
a fine idealism to shiftless realities and setting a generous goal to
be achieved by somewhat inadequate agencies. A humane and cultivated
democracy, set free from the narrow exactions of economics to engage
in the higher work of civilization, was a conception worthy of the
generous southern mind, a conception that does not suffer by contrast
with the northern dream of an exploitative industrialism. That it was
an impossible dream does not lessen its significance as an expression
of the best southern aspiration in the days when slavery was on the
defensive.
It is plain enough now that this drift of thought resulted from the
need of clarifying the logic of the situation, by bringing into harmony
two seemingly irreconcilable facts, the system of negro slavery and the
rising spirit of white democracy. The feudal principle, which lurks in
the background of all slave systems and which was peculiarly congenial
to the plantation temper, was confronted on every side by the stubborn
democracy of the yeomanry. A hundred miles beyond Charleston the feudal
spirit encountered the leveling individualism of the frontier; and this
passion for equality, that grew fiercer with every remove westward,
was a stumbling-block in the way of the planter aristocracy. Caught
thus between the two forces of a Jeffersonian democracy and a slave
economy, southern thought found in the Greek ideal the most natural
compromise. Since manual labor was black, a white skin was a guarantee
against serfdom, and the common race prejudice was accounted sufficient
to draw even the poor whites to the support of slavery. The sharp
cleavage between the races provided the basis for the conception of
a common white democracy of the master class, every member of which
shared in the supremacy of the race and was free to enjoy the profits
of negro exploitation. The enterprising small farmer might rise to
be a gentlemanly planter, providing his children with leisure to fit
themselves for citizenship in the commonwealth and assist in the great
work of creating a southern civilization. The Greek ideal, in short,
met the double need of southern economics and southern prejudices, and
made its appeal even to the frontier spirit of equalitarianism.
A native growth and rooted deep in southern realities, the new
conception emerged in response to the changing times. It may be
considered the plantation counterpart of northern industrialism,
marking the reaction of the southern mind to the economic revolution
in western civilization. With their diverse economics, North and South
were facing in different directions, and the Greek ideal was as natural
in Charleston as industrial feudalism was natural in Lowell. Created
in part as an ingenious measure of defense, it provided an excellent
counter offensive against alien critics by turning the light of
inquiry upon the bases of capitalism and thrusting upon the attention
of godly Puritans the dependence of culture upon exploitation. The
new industrialism was creating a new philosophy of labor, and this
philosophy the southern apologists seized upon and turned to their
special ends. They accepted certain of the capitalistic premises,
but they interpreted those premises in a spirit of drastic realism,
deducing conclusions disconcerting to the apologists of industrialism.
In defending the plantation system they attacked the factory system; in
upholding black slavery they attacked wage slavery; and in this game
of the pot and the kettle the exploitative root of both systems was
nakedly exposed.
The major premise of the new southern philosophy was identical with
that of northern capitalism, namely, that every civilization rests
on labor exploitation. However quaintly they might embroider this
fact with romantic patterns, they saw it clearly and deduced from
it the conclusion that the North was indulging in a vicious fallacy
in confusing wage labor with free labor. In every industrialized
society, they pointed out, free labor is an anachronism; where it
exists it is a hold-over from a simpler social order. The development
of industrialism tends to draw all labor into its capacious maw, and
the labor surplus that results from evicting the peasant from the
land creates a competitive labor market that speedily reduces the
laborer to the status of a wage-slave. Since slavery, then, in some
form is the inevitable counterpart of modern civilization, the question
that presses on the conscience of every enlightened and generous
observer is the question of the relative well-being of the slave under
the different systems. Upon this question the southern apologists
turned their shrewdest analysis. They examined the condition of the
proletariat in the English mill towns; they commented on the callous
exploitation of the textile workers in Massachusetts; they assessed the
waste in the labor turnover under the factory system; they considered
the seeds of class war sown by industrialism and pointed out the
insecurity of society under a system of capitalistic irresponsibility.
In their estimate of the social evils of industrialism they concurred
in the findings of Carlyle and antedated much of the criticism of
Ruskin. The huge mass of unpalatable fact which they uncovered was the
same mass that inspired George Ripley and Albert Brisbane and Horace
Greeley to seek a way out by the path of coöperative commonwealths.
But in the hands of these apologists the argument was turned to the
narrower end of proving that the southern field-hand fared better than
the northern mill-hand. They recognized both systems as capitalistic,
established in labor exploitation; but they proved to their own
satisfaction that the southern was far humaner, more truly social. In
the South, they pointed out, there was no waste in the labor turnover,
no ugly labor scrap-heap, no ruthless efficiency in using up the human
material. The master was responsible to society for the treatment and
conduct of his slaves, and the southern conscience was far tenderer
in the matter than the northern. The workers were never troubled by
uncertain means of subsistence. The young were free from care, the
old and infirm were adequately provided for. Living conditions were
commonly pleasant, and the personal relations between master and