Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
strong states-rights sympathies he contemptuously rejected Calhoun’s
theory of nullification. But he had no love for an omnicompetent
state. More and more he drifted back to the Jeffersonian position in
his conception of the powers and duties of the federal government.
Replying to the vote of censure of 1834, he stated his ideal of
government in words that would have become Jefferson’s first inaugural
speech. He had been charged with being ambitious, to which he replied:
The ambition which leads me on, is an anxious desire and a fixed
determination, to return to the people, unimpaired, the sacred
trust they have confided to my charge--to heal the wounds of the
constitution and preserve it from further violation; to persuade
my countrymen, so far as I may, that it is not in a splendid
government, supported by powerful monopolies and aristocratical
establishments, that they will find happiness, or their liberties
protected, but in a plain system, void of pomp--protecting all, and
granting favors to none--dispensing its blessings like the dews of
heaven, unseen and unfelt, save in the freshness and beauty they
contribute to produce. It is such a government that the genius of
our people requires--such a one only under which our States may
remain for ages to come, united, prosperous, and free. (Benton,
_Thirty Years’ View_, Vol. I, p. 427.)
The evils entailed on America by the Jacksonian revolution were many,
but they cannot properly be charged against Andrew Jackson. They
came in spite of him, and they came as a result of the great object
lesson in the manipulation of the majority will that his popularity
had laid bare. His instincts and the main outline of his policy were
Jeffersonian; but neither he nor any other man was strong enough
to stop the current of middle-class individualism then running.
The American people were wanting in an adequate democratic program
suited to the changing times, as they were wanting in desire for a
social democracy. And when his capable hands fell from the machine
he had created, it was seized by the politicians and used for narrow
partisan ends. Yet one far-reaching result survived the movement, the
popularization of the name of democracy and the naïve acceptance of the
belief that the genius of America was democratic. In choosing a party
name the Jacksonians were shrewder politicians and better prophets than
the Whigs. For better or worse the American masses, and in particular
the nationalistic West, had espoused the principle of democracy, and
interpreted it in terms of political equalitarianism--a principle that
had inspired a fanatical hatred in the breasts of old Federalists.
To gentlemen of that earlier school democracy had meant the right of
the propertyless majority to plunder the minority in the name of the
law. The later Whigs did not make so blundering a mistake. Instead of
proclaiming democracy the mother of all mischiefs, they welcomed it as
an effective aid in vote-getting. Learning their lesson from Jackson,
the Whig politicians outdid him in democratic professions. They had
discovered that business has little to fear from a skillfully guided
electorate; that quite the safest way, indeed, to reach into the public
purse is to do it in the sacred name of the majority will. Perhaps the
rarest bit of irony in American history is the later custodianship
of democracy by the middle class, who while perfecting their tariffs
and subsidies, legislating from the bench, exploiting the state and
outlawing all political theories but their own, denounce all class
consciousness as unpatriotic and all agrarian or proletarian programs
as undemocratic. But it was no fault of Andrew Jackson if the final
outcome of the great movement of Jacksonian democracy was so untoward;
it was rather the fault of the times that were not ripe for democracy.
II • Lincoln • Free-Soil Liberal
The equalitarian West that bred Andrew Jackson bred Lincoln also,
a man with the same homespun mind, the same sterling integrity of
nature, the same instinctive democracy, but shaped by an environment
in which the new philosophy of progress had displaced the older
agrarianism. The road of middle-class ideals he traveled further
than Jackson, but in the end he also turned back to pick up once
more the democratic faith then being repudiated by the proponents
of slavery, north as well as south. Long an ardent Whig of the Clay
school, and thoroughly indoctrinated in a paternalistic nationalism,
he was brought, as every thoughtful American of the times was brought,
to weigh the program of slave imperialism in the scales with the
Declaration of Independence. The doctrines of that great document lay
before every man’s feet in those uncertain days, to get over as one
could. They could not easily be evaded or got round; they must be
dealt with. Rufus Choate, representing Boston Toryism, had come upon
them and dismissed them as “glittering and sounding generalities.”
Calhoun, representing southern imperialism, had come upon them and
essayed to destroy them by a critical realism. Lincoln, embodying the
spontaneous liberalism of the West, came upon them and paused to take
his bearings afresh. He could neither wave them aside nor destroy
them. The deep-rooted equalitarianism of his simple social philosophy
found in them an eloquent pronouncement of its democratic faith, that
set him upon considering how such doctrine might be squared with the
reality of slavery. The agrarianism of John Taylor and the Whiggery of
Henry Clay could tell him nothing about that; he must seek elsewhere;
and the solution he found in an amalgamation of equalitarianism and
free-soilism, in an adaptation of western Whiggery to Jeffersonian
principles.
Whatever party name he might call himself by, in his love of justice
and his warm humanity Lincoln was essentially Jeffersonian. He
respected property rights, but other rights he believed more sacred.
And as he watched the emergence in the South of the ideal of a Greek
democracy, as he considered how the party of Jackson had become
the party of Calhoun and Douglas, bent solely on strengthening and
spreading the institution of slavery, his equalitarianism took alarm.
He could not sit quiet while the principles of the Declaration of
Independence were being openly flouted; he must speak out; he must
arouse the idealism of the people to deal with the iconoclasts. In an
important pronouncement written in 1859, he set the problem before them
thus:
Remembering ... that the Jefferson party was formed upon its
supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding
the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior
... it will be ... interesting to note how completely the two
[parties] have changed hands as to the principles upon which they
were originally supposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold
the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict
with another’s right of property; Republicans, on the contrary,
are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the
man before the dollar.... But, soberly, it is now no child’s play
to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this
nation.... The principles of Jefferson are the principles and
axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with
no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering
generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies!”
And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.”
These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and
effect--the supplanting the principles of free government, and
restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.... They
are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism.
We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. (Letter to H. L.
Prince and Others, April 6, 1859, in _Works_, Vol. V, pp. 125-126.)
Two conceptions were here competing in Lincoln’s mind, the older
equalitarianism that sprang from French humanitarianism and the newer
economics that came from English _laissez faire_; and the attempt to
reconcile them suggests how far he had traveled along the path of
western Whiggery. With the spirit of enterprise he had no complaint;
the ideal of progress was associated in his mind with a fluid economics
that permitted the capable to rise through skillful exploitation. He
had no love for the stable economics of the eighteenth century that
Jackson preferred; the profit motive, functioning freely, he regarded
as the legitimate driving force of society; but he was concerned that
competition should be open to all on equal terms. As he watched the
transition from an agrarian to an industrial order, he found himself
more in sympathy with the new than the old. Accepting the principle
of exploitation he came to the position of the little capitalist who
believed that in America capitalism could be democratized by the simple
method of keeping the opportunities for exploitation open to every
citizen. It was common view of western Whiggery, and in so far Lincoln
remained a Whig, content with a system which he accepted as peculiarly
suited to the genius of the American people. In a late speech he summed
it up thus:
What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is
best to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he
can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a
man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while
we don’t propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the
humblest man an equal chance to get rich with anybody else. When
one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is
such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that
there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life.... I want
every man to have a chance--and I believe a black man is entitled
to it--in which he can better his condition--when he may look
forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work
for himself afterwards, and finally to hire men to work for him.
That is the true system. (Speech at New Haven, March 6, 1860, in
_Works_, Vol. V, pp. 360-361.)
But as a western man Lincoln was far more concerned over the
application of _laissez faire_ to the problem of western lands, and as
he contemplated the practical workings of “squatter sovereignty” he
learned how the free functioning of _laissez faire_ may be interfered
with by economic imperialisms. That lesson determined his final stand.
The virgin prairies beyond the Mississippi were coveted equally by
northern and southern exploiters; and who should finally possess them,
whether the small freeholder or the slave-master, was a question that
could not be put off forever. None knew this better than the small
farmers who were already staking out homesteads there. If Congress
yielded to the pro-slavery demands their economic future would be
endangered. It was the free-soil West that sent the first anti-slavery
men to Washington and provided the backbone of the new party. Not the
respectable West, but the plain people, Whig as well as Democrat. “Much
of the plain old Democracy is with us,” said Lincoln in 1858, “while
nearly all the old exclusive silk-stocking Whiggery is against us. I
don’t mean nearly all the old Whig party, but nearly all of the nice
exclusive sort” (Letter to A. C. Henry, in _Works_, Vol. V, p. 95). It
was no humanitarian regard for the rights of the negro that welded them
into a militant party. Racially and economically the free-soiler was
hostile to the black, whether slave or free. The Topeka constitution
adopted by the Kansas free-soilers barred all negroes from the new