Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians
and Calvinists” (_ibid._, p. 171). And when Elijah P. Lovejoy was
murdered and his press thrown into the river, Bryant replied to those
who believed that the Abolitionists had got their deserts: “Whether
they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction
of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them;
nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy that
yielded only to death” (_ibid._, pp. 171-172). From the defense of free
speech Bryant went forward to the defense of free soil, and in 1848 he
bolted Lewis Cass, the Democratic nominee, and joined the “Barnburner”
movement that nominated Martin Van Buren. The terse pronouncement of
the convention, indeed, might well be taken as an epitome and summary
of Bryant’s lifelong liberalism--“We inscribe on our banner Free Soil,
Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”
A trenchant critic of the rising capitalism, delighting in exposing
the fallacies of the new economics and in pricking the bladders of
political reputations--suggesting, for example, that it was scarcely
god-like of the great Webster to accept a purse of $65,000 from his
high tariff friends--Bryant was perhaps the most distinguished of the
liberals created by the revolutions that were enthroning the middle
class in power. The simplicity of his _laissez-faire_ philosophy, like
his admiration for “Old Bullion” Benton--whom he rated one of the
greatest statesmen of the times--may seem somewhat old-fashioned today;
but his ingrained democracy, his sturdy defense of the rights of free
men, his championship of unpopular causes, his tolerance and fairness
and keen sense of justice, ought not to seem old-fashioned. He may not
have been a great poet, but he was a great American.
II • Horace Greeley • Yankee Radical
Horace Greeley has suffered far more disastrously than Bryant the
common fate of journalists, yet his place in nineteenth-century America
was too important and his influence on current democratic ideals
too great, to be carelessly ignored. A Yankee radical transported
to New York, he was the spokesman of the common sense and practical
intelligence of the plain people of the North, seeking to understand
the revolutionary upheaval then going forward, and bring it if possible
to some issue in elementary justice. Far from being the visionary he
was so often accounted, he was the most practical of men, accepting
fact and seeking to square theory with reality; as ready to adopt
new social machinery as the mill-owner to adopt a new invention. If
there were social maladjustments, why should they not be set right?
The patent confusions of the times seemed to him a challenge to the
common intelligence. If civilization meant anything it ought to mean a
generous life for the producing mass, and with the abundant resources
of America the common well-being would never lie in jeopardy if simple
justice prevailed. America had not yet fulfilled its promise; it had
not yet become the haven for the poor and outcast its potential means
allowed; nor with its growing cities where poverty found a congenial
home, and its patrimony of raw lands flung to speculators, was it
likely to become so unless greater ingenuity were applied to the
problem. The industrial revolution was driving western civilization
into uncharted seas; clearly, it was only common sense to take bearings
and lay as fair a course as possible. To accomplish this Greeley was
ready to entertain any promising suggestion. Intellectually curious,
he had the wit to understand that the older agrarian America was being
destroyed by forces that could not be stopped; they could only be
guided. His eyes were wide open to what was taking place. He foresaw
certain consequences implicit in the industrial revolution that his
fellows were blind to. If it brought material advancement and the
multiplication of conveniences--things excellent in themselves--it
brought as well a sinister exploitation of the producers, as England
with her Manchester slums had learned to her sorrow. If America were
driving straight toward such dead-seas of wretchedness, surely only a
conscienceless fool would refuse to help trim the sails.
No more admirable Yankee than Horace Greeley ever went West to make his
fortune. With his Yankee capacity for hard work, his daring enterprise,
his vigorous independence, he embodied an extremely sensitive social
conscience, keen sympathy for those who do the work of the world,
and a transparent honesty of mind and purpose. Bred up in the narrow
poverty of the Vermont hills, remote from the culture of Boston and
Cambridge, he retained the angularities that marked his frontier
origin. His ungainly and shabby exterior was the outward, visible
sign of a niggardly youth; yet underneath the uncouth exterior was
as warm a heart as ever beat in Yankee bosom. His early life was a
bitter struggle, aggravated by the succession of economic depressions
that from 1819 to 1838 repeatedly brought hardship upon the country.
Cradled thus in the anxieties attending the transition from an agrarian
to a capitalistic order, nurtured in the harassing uncertainties that
followed the break-up of the old static economy, he longed for a more
rational social system, unsoiled by the heart-breaking wreckages that
drifted into the new slums, unembittered by the lonely tragedies that
laid a blight on the frontier. He believed that the honest worker,
whether in the factory or on the farm, deserved a better fate than
commonly fell to his lot. It was a scandal that poverty should dog his
footsteps in a land potentially so rich as America; that those who did
the necessary work of society should find themselves reduced to the
status of the slave, whether black or white; and he early determined to
explore the reasons why the workingman received so small an increment
of the augmenting wealth of the industrial revolution. His struggles
to gain a foothold in New York set him upon thinking, and before he
was thirty he began those speculations on ways and means of returning
to the producer a fair reward for his work, that were to occupy his
mind to the last. The farmer and the wage-earner he took to his heart,
and the furtherance of their well-being--despite the persistent and
vindictive opposition he encountered--became a major objective of _The
Tribune_.
Greeley’s mind was as homespun as his clothes, and he never quite
outgrew certain Vermont parochialisms that retarded his intellectual
development. The environment in which he was bred was staunchly
Federalist-Whig, marked by the exuberantly nationalistic spirit that
sprang from the War of 1812; and the seeds of his national economy
were sown in those years when to become nationally self-sufficient
was the great ideal of America. It was natural for him to accept the
leadership of Clay, whom he idolized, and to look to the Federal
government for an adequate policy of internal improvements and national
development. “We Vermonters were all Protectionists,” he said in
his _Recollections_. In 1828 the village of Poultney, where he was
serving his apprenticeship, gave 334 votes for John Quincy Adams
and only four for Jackson. Starting with this back-country faith in
a benevolent paternalism, Greeley early began his speculations on
an ideal national economy; and the conclusion to which he came, and
which he never saw reason to question later, was that government
must impose an intelligent wardship upon economic forces, that, left
to themselves, tend always to the anarchy of individualism. He had
suffered in his own person from the inadequacy and uncertainty of the
financial and industrial machinery of the times; he was impatient of
all purposeless floundering; the more he read the more rational it
seemed that statesmanship must be judged by its intelligent concern to
lessen the social waste and reduce the social friction. _Laissez faire_
he pronounced a “suicidal” policy; it was an invitation to anarchy; it
had impoverished India, and must impoverish America. From a critical
study of the teachings of the Manchester school he came to two major
conclusions: that agriculture and manufacturing are complementary
industries, and the closer they are drawn together the better for the
nation; and that a wide national economy can result only from investing
the state with adequate regulatory powers. Hence his approval of Clay’s
American System. The judicious intervention of government by means of a
protective tariff to foster the “infant industries,” would secure them
a domestic market that would--he allowed himself to hope--be regulated
by domestic competition, would do away with the waste represented by
transportation charges, and would return to the farmer an increase in
price represented by those charges. In his opinion, however, protection
was a temporary expedient, necessary only until American industries
should get on their legs. “Protection is the shortest way to get free
trade,” he said in 1851 (_The Tribune_, January 23).
Greeley was never the tool of capitalistic interests that such an
argument might seem to imply. All his mature life he persistently
fought the aggressions of capitalism; yet in this crucial matter
of protection his influence was thrown powerfully on its side, and
the ingenious argument he expounded was at once taken over by the
industrialists and used with telling effect. What particular turn he
gave to the older Whig statement, adapting it to the prejudices of a
more democratic electorate, a present-day economist has thus summarized:
The protective tariff, favored by the Whigs, was something
different in his hands. The tariff arguments of his boyhood had
been capitalistic arguments. Protect capital, their spokesman said,
because wages are too high in this country. Eventually wages will
come towards the European level and we shall not need protection.
Greeley revised this plea; protect the wage earner, he said, in
order that he may rise from this present condition of slavery. The
only way to protect him against the foreign pauper is to protect
the price of his product. But since capital owns and sells his
product, we must needs protect capital. We know right well, he
says, that a protective tariff cannot redress all wrongs.... The
extent of its power to benefit the laborer is limited by the force
and pressure of domestic competition, for which Political Economy
has as yet devised no remedy. (John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley
and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” _Political
Science Quarterly_, Vol. XXIV, pp. 468-488.)
The argument for protection has been little improved since it came
from Greeley’s hands in the late forties and early fifties.[427]
Nor, it must be added, has political economy devised the remedy for
the evils of competition, that Greeley was concerned about, unless
monopolistic control be regarded as such. Considering his extraordinary
influence with the mass of farmers north and west, it must be accounted
a calamity to agrarian prospects that _The Tribune_--a paper that
Professor Commons characterized as “the first and only great vehicle
this country has known for the ideas and experiments of constructive
democracy”--should have thrown its influence on the side of artificial
industrial expansion. That the mind of the northern farmer became so
deeply inoculated with protectionist views, and has since persistently
remained so, was due to Horace Greeley far more than to any other man.
The irony of it becomes apparent when the deeper spirit of Greeley’s
life is probed. Though he called himself a Whig, he was in all
fundamental interests and conceptions a Jeffersonian, seeking in the