Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of Sedgwicks, one of whom, Catherine M. Sedgwick, was just beginning
her modest career as a “lady novelist;” another, Henry M. Sedgwick,
was at the head of the New York bar, wealthy and liberal-minded; and
a third, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., was a trusted adviser on legal and
economic matters, on whose pen Bryant came to rely in a difficult
situation. Theodore Sedgwick seems to have been a liberal of the
English school of Bright and Cobden, a confirmed free trader, and he
induced Bryant to undertake a course of reading in political economy.
During the years 1822 to 1824 the young man turned away from poetry and
law to study Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, together with a number
of pamphlets that issued from the Parliamentary debates over free trade
in 1820. The adventure proved stimulating and definitely determined
his attitude towards men and measures at a moment when American ideas
were in a state of flux. It was therefore as an English liberal that he
judged Jackson and Clay and Webster, and as an English liberal that he
weighed the Utopian programs of Greeley and Brisbane and Ripley. There
is no evidence that he read the works of the French romantics, although
the major ideas of Rousseau came to him in the guise of Unitarianism;
and this aloofness from the social enthusiasm of French thought, this
failure to sympathize with the idealism of the new sociology, may
perhaps be accounted his greatest intellectual shortcoming. Rousseau
and Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft could have taught him much that
he needed to know, could have warmed his cool blood and awakened his
Puritan sense of justice to the wrongs of an exploitative order. A dash
of Utopian enthusiasm would have made him a better poet and a better
editor; but lacking that he found himself sometimes out of sympathy
with men and women whom he should have understood better. A liberal
might smile at the measureless zeal of Fanny Wright and Robert D. Owen;
might dislike the militancy of the Abolitionists; he might well counsel
moderation; but he should not add his shaft to the flight sent against
them. But unfortunately Bryant too often distrusted those who outran
him, and would rather attack than restrain them.[426]
As an English liberal it was inevitable that Bryant should turn
Democrat and support Jackson against Clay and Adams; and an ardent
Democrat he remained till the re-alignment over the slavery question
turned him into a free-soiler. He early supported Lincoln for the
Republican nomination--the more easily because members of his family
had removed to Illinois and there followed the career of Lincoln
sympathetically--and he accepted the Republican faith till the open
alliance of the party with post-war capitalism aroused his opposition
and weakened his allegiance. Democrat though he was in conviction
and sympathy, Bryant was never a Jeffersonian, perhaps not even a
Jacksonian, but rather an anti-Whig, who measured the new America of
the industrial revolution and capitalistic finance by the yardstick of
eighteenth-century liberalism. As a disciple of Adam Smith, believing
in the sufficiency of _laissez faire_, he looked askance at an
engrossing political state that enlisted its sovereign powers on the
side of the longest purses, and he viewed with scorn the mercenaries
of the bench and Senate who defended the new citadels of capitalism.
In spite of his augmenting wealth he remained a simple countryman
at heart, never a city man, never liking the ways of Wall Street,
concerned with other things than money-making. If he had supplemented
Adam Smith with Du Pont de Nemours he might easily have followed
Jefferson into a Physiocratic agrarianism; if he had been bred in the
frontier West he might have discovered more sympathy for a coonskin
equalitarianism with its engrossing majority will. As it was, he
occupied a middle ground between Jefferson and Jackson, an economic
individualist who refused to conceive of the political state as a fat
cow to be milked by whoever could lay hands on her. He wanted no share
of the milk for himself and he saw no reason why others should have
any. He turned his back on all middle-class temptations, refusing to
speculate, not grasping at unearned increment, believing that America
had a nobler destiny in store than could be measured by exploitation.
An old-fashioned liberal, he set himself resolutely against the
exploitative spirit that was clamoring for internal improvements, a
protective tariff, speculative profits. The bitter struggle over the
Bank and the American System, in which he was drawn to Jackson by
principle as well as by admiration for his courage, laid the emphasis
in his mind on financial and industrial problems and made him the
outstanding journalistic opponent of Henry Clay. From first to last
Bryant was anti-Whig.
There were times, to be sure, when he went further than that;
times when his ingrained liberalism threw off its cool restraint
and flamed up in dangerously disturbant fashion. In the depths of
his Puritan nature was a quick sense of justice that might uncover
strange potentialities; and associated as he was in the intimacies
of daily work with two of the most radical spirits in New York,
William Leggett and Parke Godwin, he could not remain untouched by
their social enthusiasms. The former was a man of immense vitality
and boundless sympathies, to whom social justice was a religion. A
left-wing equalitarian democrat, Leggett hated all tariffs, subsidies,
monopolies, credit manipulation, everything that the new capitalism
represented. His sympathies were enlisted on the side of the new
proletarian movement, and with the zeal of a knight-errant he greeted
every opportunity to do battle for the cause. A home-made radical,
created out of the native economics of the industrial revolution, he
has been called by a late historical writer “one of the most sincere
and brilliant apostles of democracy that America has ever known.” His
political leaders in the _Evening Post_ aroused the admiration of such
different men as Whittier and Walt Whitman, and were “perhaps the most
potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy” held by the latter
(Allan Nevins, _The Evening Post, etc._, p. 141). His son-in-law,
Godwin, on the other hand, was a radical of the imported school,
an ardent disciple of Fourier, deeply concerned with communistic
experiments at Brook Farm and elsewhere, and an assistant editor
of _The Harbinger_, the mouthpiece of Brook Farm after it passed
from transcendental to Fourierist control. His _Democracy, Pacific
and Constructive_, was accounted by Horace Greeley the best of the
contemporary studies of collectivism. Less militant than Leggett, his
radicalism ebbed with the years and growing prosperity, but it sufficed
to instruct Bryant in the elements of the current Utopian philosophies.
With such associates the older man was led somewhat unwillingly into
the thick of social struggle and his mind shifted unconsciously to
the left. The movement of Locofocoism in particular absorbed Leggett
and drew Bryant after him. Set on foot by a combination of reforming
economists opposed to banks, paper money, and monopolies, and the
rising proletarian movement then beginning its long struggle to
unionize the city workers, Locofocoism represented the extreme left
wing of democratic equalitarianism, the avowed objective of which
was to take government out of the hands of bankers and lodge it in
the hands of the producers. It was one of the first native attempts
at conscious class alignment between capital and labor. “What
distinguishes the present from every other struggle in which the human
race has been engaged,” wrote Fanny Wright, “is that the present is
evidently, openly and acknowledgedly a war of class.... It is the
ridden people of the earth who are struggling to overthrow the ‘booted
and spurred riders’ whose legitimate title to work and starve will
no longer pass current” (quoted by Fox, _Aristocracy in the Politics
of New York_, p. 396). How the democratic radicalism of Leggett was
received by conservative New York is thus described by the historian of
the _Evening Post_:
He was charged [says Nevins] with Utopianism, agrarianism,
Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack Cade-ism. His writings were
said to set class against class, and to threaten the nation with
anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called Leggett a “knave.” The
advance of the Locofoco movement was likened to the great fire
and the great cholera plague of these years. When Chief Justice
Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett unsparingly assailed
him and Hamilton as men who had tried “to change the character of
the government from popular to monarchical,” and to destroy “the
great principle of human liberty.”... Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was
handed that editorial on the Albany steamboat by Charles King, and
dropped the journal with the vehement ejaculation, “Infamous!”
“This is absolutely a species of impiety for which I want words to
express my abhorrence,” he entered in his diary. (Allan Nevins,
_The Evening Post, etc._, p. 152.)
The enthusiasm of Leggett sometimes carried further than the more
tempered liberalism of Bryant could follow. He shared Leggett’s
distrust of Marshall and Hamilton, but he seems to have been only a
moderate supporter of Locofoco principles. The paper had been brought
close upon financial breakers by its attack on the money-interests. The
working classes read it eagerly, but their indorsement could not make
good the loss of advertising and patronage by the wealthy; yet even
in such straits Bryant remained true to his liberalism and joined his
associates in upholding the proletarian cause. The labor union movement
had aroused the wrath of the employers and the courts were appealed to
to suppress it. In May, 1836, “twenty-one journeymen tailors who had
formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious to trade and
commerce,” and after a trial the presiding judge charged the jury to
bring in a verdict of guilty. Bryant at once attacked the judge in the
_Evening Post_:
We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that
the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner
such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better.... The
idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages
are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that
the current prices of the markets, which are always the result
of understandings and combinations, are injurious. (_Ibid._, pp.
164-165.)
When the tailors were heavily fined by the court Bryant returned to
the attack. He again pointed out the fatuousness of the legal logic
by showing how the very price current was a similar evidence of
conspiracy, and then appealed to a sense of common fairness:
Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of
generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the
legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is
not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of
associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman,
and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the
soil. (_Ibid._, p. 165.)
From defending the rights of free labor to defending the rights of free
speech, was an easy step. When James G. Birney’s Abolitionist press
was suppressed by a Cincinnati mob, Bryant spoke out vigorously. “So
far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall
neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the
subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject
for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference