Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
accepted the Industrial Revolution with its division of labor as a
necessary agency of social amelioration. “It is evidently in the order
of nature, and we must take it with all its good and all its evils
together.” In forecasting the effect of that revolution he was troubled
by no fears.
Sir, it is a favorite phrase of those who boast of what is called
“the march of intellect,” that things are thus changed because
the “schoolmaster is abroad.” But I tell you that something far
more effective than the schoolmaster, a mightier than Solomon, is
abroad. It is the +STEAM-ENGINE+--in its twofold capacity of a
means of production and a means of transport--the most powerful
instrument by far of pacification and commerce, and therefore of
improvement and happiness that the world has ever seen; which,
while it increases capital, and multiplies beyond all imagination
the products of industry, brings the most distant people into
contact with one another ... effaces all peculiarities of national
character, and promises, at no distant period, to make the whole
Christian world, at least, one great family....
A people well clad and well housed will be sure to provide
themselves with all the other comforts of life; and it is the
diffusion of these comforts, and the growing taste for them, among
all classes of society in Europe--it is the desire of riches as
it is commonly called, that is gradually putting an end to the
destructive and bloody game of war, and reserving all the resources
hitherto wasted by it, for enterprises of industry and commerce,
prosecuted with the fiery spirit which once vented itself in scenes
of peril and carnage. (_Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 285-286.)
Remembering how dependent were southern cotton interests on English
industrialism and commerce, one can understand Legaré’s acceptance
of _laissez faire_ economics. His idealism, his local pride, his
romanticism, were all enlisted in its behalf, and he painted in glowing
colors. But his frank advocacy of capitalism is harder to understand,
except perhaps on the ground that Charleston was a considerable
shipping port and his clients were engaged in commerce. In the bitter
dispute with Jackson over the Bank, Legaré adopted northern views on
national finance. Although nominally a Democrat, he had never been an
agrarian, and he went with Webster and Clay against the subtreasury
scheme and a metallic currency. His thoughtful speech on _The Spirit of
the Sub-Treasury_, delivered in 1837, was thoroughgoing Whig doctrine,
asserting the excellence of the modern banking system and extolling the
economic fruitfulness of credit. He repudiated every principle of John
Taylor; denied every dogma of agrarian economics; and eulogized the
English financial system as the germinal source of English greatness.
Applying the principle of credit to American conditions, he discovered
the secret of American expansion in the principle of speculative
borrowing, and expanded his doctrine of economic freedom by asserting
that freedom to borrow was a necessary preliminary to freedom to work.
“A people have been enriched by debt,” he argued, overlooking the
possible fallacy of a _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, “and ‘by owing,
owe not.’” As he contemplated the amazing progress of the nation, his
lyric enthusiasm becomes prologue to a somewhat lame conclusion that
enthrones the banker as the fairy godmother of the hardy pioneer.
There is a grandeur and a majesty in this irresistible onward
march of a race, created, as I believe, and elected to possess and
people a continent.... We may become so much accustomed to such
things that they shall make as little impression upon our minds as
the glories of the Heavens above us; but, looking on them, lately,
as with the eyes of the stranger, I felt, what a recent English
traveller is said to have remarked, that far from being without
poetry, as some have vainly alleged, our whole country is one
great poem. Sir, it is so; and if there be a man that can think of
what is doing, in all parts of this most blessed of all lands, to
embellish and advance it, who can contemplate that living mass of
intelligence, activity and improvement as it rolls on, in its sure
and steady progress, to the uttermost extremities of the west; who
can see scenes of savage desolation transformed, almost with the
suddenness of enchantment, into those of fruitfulness and beauty;
crowned with flourishing cities, filled with the noblest of all
populations; if there be a man, I say, that can witness all this
passing under his very eyes, without feeling his heart beat high,
and his imagination warmed and transported by it, be sure, sir,
that the raptures of song exist not for him....
But of this rational, diffusive liberty, among a people so
intelligent as ours, the credit system is the natural fruit, the
inseparable companion, the necessary means and instrument. It is
part and parcel of our existence. Who ever heard of +CREDIT+ in
a despotism, or an anarchy? It implies _confidence_--confidence
in yourself, confidence in your neighbor, confidence in your
government, confidence in the administration of the laws,
confidence, in a word, in your destiny, and your fortune, in the
destinies and the fortunes of the country to which you belong;
as, for instance, in the case of a great national debt. It is the
fruit, I say, of all that is most precious in civilized life, and
to quarrel with it is to be ungrateful to God for some of the
greatest blessings he has vouchsafed to man. (_Writings_, Vol. I,
pp. 306-307.)
Such ebullient rhetoric fits the mouth of the politician rather than
the scholar, and such careless logic comes oddly from a southern
intellectual. In his ignorance of the economics of John Taylor, Legaré
was unprovided with principles to reply to his own arguments, and
unaware of the lameness of his confident conclusions. But though he
might glow with optimism as he contemplated the westward expansion, for
the future of the South and of his own beloved state he was deep in
pessimism. From the first he had dissented vigorously from the program
of Nullification. An ardent Union man, he believed with his friend
James Petigru that secession meant ruin for South Carolina. Calhoun
seemed to him a monomaniac, consumed by a single idea. He feared the
hot passion of the states-rights party and he was troubled over
slavery. His travels abroad had acquainted him with European views on
the subject; he watched the spread of English humanitarianism and he
had come to recognize the institution as an anachronism. It seemed to
him impossible for the South to withstand much longer the augmenting
pressure of civilized opinion. He could justify slavery in his own eyes
both by ancient law--_servitus est constitutio juris gentium_--and by
comparison of the condition of the negro with that of the English wage
worker. The ideal of a Greek democracy was vastly congenial to his
aristocratic temperament, but he knew that it was a romantic dream, and
he was oppressed by the shadow of impending ruin. Writing from Brussels
on April 8, 1833, he concluded an anxious letter thus:
It ends in my not knowing what to think, except that dangers are
around and above and below and within our poor little State,--which
may God preserve us from! I ask of heaven only that the little
circle I am intimate with in Charleston should be kept together
while I live,--in health, harmony and competence; and that, on my
return, I may myself be enabled to enjoy the same happiness, in my
intercourse with it, with which I have been hitherto blessed. _We_
are (I am quite sure) the _last_ of the _race_ of South-Carolina;
I see nothing before us but decay and downfall,--but on that very
account, I cherish its precious relics the more.... Yet my heart
sinks within me often when I think of what may too soon be, and I
say, in those touching words, “Why should not my countenance be
sad, when the city, the place of my fathers’ sepulchres, lieth
waste, and her gates are burnt with fire.” (_Writings_, Vol. I, p.
215.)
Thus like old John Winthrop two hundred years before, this descendant
of southern Pilgrims, this Charleston lawyer and intellectual, found
the words of the Hebrew Scriptures rising to his lips in moments of
deep emotion. In spite of travel and many books and ripe culture and
catholic sympathies, Hugh Legaré remained Puritan at heart, sorely
puzzled with life, the burden of his days heavy upon him, walking
soberly in the way of duty. North or south, the Puritan was still
Puritan, whether he were Theodore Parker, the Boston radical, or Hugh
Swinton Legaré, the Charleston conservative.
IV • William Gilmore Simms • Charleston Romancer
From the background of old Charleston emerged, about the year 1825,
the figure of Gilmore Simms, lately a drug clerk but now come to the
dignity of admission to the bar; a tall, vigorous young fellow, with
little formal schooling, no Latin or Greek, without land or slaves, but
heavily involved in Byronic odes and like unprofitable investments;
a social nobody soon to be married at the age of twenty to a girl of
no better station than his own, who offered himself as candidate for
the poet laureateship of the South. A somewhat presumptuous proceeding
on the part of a plebeian quite outside the cultivated circle of the
Petigrus and Grimkés and Hugers and Legarés, who were the accepted
custodians of Charleston culture and who did not take kindly to
ambitious newcomers. They regarded literature as a polite art that
could flourish only in polite circles, and they turned a cold shoulder
upon a young man whose ways suggested the Carolina buckra.
After all these years one may well cherish a grudge against the amiable
little city for its shabby treatment of Gilmore Simms. The most richly
endowed of any son she ever gave birth to, he was snubbed for years
by the social oligarchy and suffered keenly from the ostracism. His
extreme parochialism made him the more sensitive to the slight. An
ardent Southerner, loyal to all the Carolinian totems and taboos, he
accepted the Charleston judgment in literature and politics as the very
law and the prophets. He loved the soil of South Carolina, he loved the
people and the way of life, and he was steeped as no other Carolinian
in local history and tradition. He could perceive no shortcomings
in a society he warmly admired, and he accepted the Charleston
provincialisms as the lover accepts the mole on his mistress’ cheek.
The more Charleston snubbed him, the more admirable he professed
to believe was an aristocracy that so jealously guarded its fine
exclusiveness. His lifelong ambition was to receive recognition from
his native city, and when after the death of his first wife and his
marriage to the daughter of a prosperous planter, he gained admission
into the ranks of the lesser gentry, he eagerly made common cause
with them. He accepted the Carolinian standards and conventions; he
advocated social caste: he honored the southern gentleman as God’s best
handiwork; he unconsciously reflected an aristocratic arrogance towards
all social inferiors. He abandoned the Jeffersonian philosophy of his
youth and adopted the revised gospel of Calhoun. He became, in short,
a Carolina Fire Eater. He set up as a militant defender of slavery and
collaborated with other eminent Carolinians to develop the pro-slavery
argument.[410] He could have escaped the subtle compulsions of the
southern system only by emptying his mind of his dearest prejudices,
and this he had neither the will nor the wish to do. And so in spite
of the fact that his every instinct was democratic, and every natural