Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
spirit of the great Virginian to fashion a new philosophy to suit
the new times, more like him in free speculation than any other
northern thinker of the day. It needed years for him to throw off
the Federalist-Whig prepossessions of his youth, and work back to
Jeffersonian fundamentals; but in the end he did work back, and in the
end--always excepting this one matter of protection with its corollary
of state paternalism--he came by his own path to the major conclusions
Jefferson had reached a half century before. He was a spokesman of the
older America seeking a way out of the confusions the middle class
was bringing on the later America. In his social-mindedness that
set justice above exploitation; in his readiness to change existing
institutions in order to achieve justice; in his strong preference for
an agrarian order as more wholesome than an industrial; in his trust in
the good will of the plain people and faith in the local democracies;
in his acceptance of the principle of states rights that during the
struggle over slavery led him to advocate that the South be suffered
to depart in peace:--in such conceptions he was a Neo-Jeffersonian,
seeking to adapt the old principles to the needs of a different order.
Greeley had never read the works of the French Physiocrats; he was
unacquainted with their doctrine of the _produit net_; very likely he
would not have accepted their teachings to the extent that Jefferson
did. Nevertheless from his own experience he had come to agree with
them in the exaltation of agriculture over other forms of labor, as he
had come to agree with them in their social-mindedness. Greeley may be
accounted a stepson, at least, of the old French school.
That for so long a time he should have turned aside from the path
of Jeffersonianism to immerse himself in Utopian speculations and
adventures may appear strange; and yet for so eager and hopeful a
temperament it was the most natural thing in the world. It marked a
step in the speculations through which he passed in pursuit of that
remedy for domestic competition which the political economists had
not provided. He was twenty-nine when Albert Brisbane’s _The Social
Destiny of Mankind_ appeared in 1840, and on October 21, 1841, the
first comment on Fourier socialism was printed in _The Tribune_,
then only six months old. Thereafter for years _The Tribune_ was the
chief organ for the spread of collectivistic principles in the United
States, Brisbane expounding Fourierism in the fifties, and Karl Marx
contributing a weekly letter on European movements in the sixties,
while lesser men contributed freely according to their special Utopian
lights. With all this Greeley was in profound sympathy. Much of the
theory he did not agree with; many of the plans and specifications
seemed to him ill conceived; but convinced of the gross evils of
civilization he welcomed free speculation as promising the only hope
for their cure. Like Jefferson and William Ellery Channing, he put
his trust in the unshackled mind, for like them he believed in the
essential excellence of human nature when unperverted by vicious
institutions.
It was this romantic faith that induced him to invest heavily in time,
thought and money, in the Fourieristic foundations of the forties,
the North American Phalanx in particular offering an opportunity for
experiment on a considerable scale. In his deep concern over the
selfishness of the competitive struggle, he was willing to turn from
the bankrupt political economists to consider the plans of the “social
architects.” From Plato down those architects had been engaged on plans
of ideal commonwealths, wherein the principle of brotherhood should
supersede the principle of competition, and he believed the time had
come when the great experiment might be tried with some reasonable hope
of success. If the principle of collectivism could be successfully
substituted for a chaotic individualism, the solution of the ancient
problem of social injustice might be in a way to be achieved. This in
itself, he believed, “would do for domestic competition what protection
would do for foreign competition” (John R. Commons, _Horace Greeley,
etc._). When associationism failed, Greeley turned his thoughts eagerly
to coöperation as a promising means of eliminating the waste of the
middleman and destroying the wage system.[428] Somehow the middleman
must be got rid of, he believed, if labor were to reap an adequate
reward from its work. If one method did not achieve the result, another
must be tried. To leave off seeking a solution was to acknowledge that
society must remain a pigsty, with the strongest hogs appropriating the
swill.
Such persistent venturing into Utopian experiment made Greeley the
laughing-stock of more practical men who accepted the acquisitive
instinct as the voice of God and were busily engaged in exploitation
for their individual advantage; more important, it reveals how tenuous
were the ties that held him to the Whiggery he still professed.
Stalwart Whigs of the Webster school, middle-class bankers and
industrialists, grew impatient with such pestilent heresies as exuded
from _The Tribune_, and denied that Greeley was a Whig. In 1847 _The
Courier and Enquirer_ angrily protested:
There can be no peace in the Whig ranks while the old New York
Tribune is continued to be called Whig.... The _principles_ of the
Whig party are well defined; they are _conservative_ and inculcate
a regard for the laws and support of all established institutions
of the country. They eschew _radicalism_ in every form; they
sustain the constitution and the laws; they foster a spirit of
_patriotism_.... The better way for the Tribune would be at once
to admit that it is only Whig on the subject of the Tariff ...
and then devote itself to the advocacy of Anti-Rent, Abolition,
Fourierite, and Vote Yourself a Farm doctrines. (_The Weekly
Tribune_, August 21, 1847; quoted in Commons, _Horace Greeley,
etc._, p. 473.)
The real animus of the middle-class dislike of Greeley is to be sought
in his active championship of the great exploited classes, the farmer
and wage-earner. He was always sowing the seeds of discontent amongst
them. The betterment of their condition, he believed, was fundamental
to any sound social progress. He was convinced that their well-being
was interrelated; that whatever affected the one must affect the other.
If the city proletariat were prosperous, the farmer’s produce sold at
better prices; and if the farmers were prosperous, the country would
draw off the surplus labor from the towns and thereby sustain the wage
scale. The key to the situation, he came to believe, lay in the land
situation. The application of science to farm processes was a necessary
preliminary to agrarian improvement, and he put the great influence
of _The Tribune_ behind the movement for scientific instruction in
crop handling. But far more fundamental and immediate was the need of
a drastic change in the Federal laws governing land sales. Believing
that the wild lands of the West were a natural refuge for those who
fled from the exploitation of the factory, he was concerned that those
lands should be made available to the poorest settler. Greeley very
well knew that the ruthless exploitation of the English proletariat was
an inevitable consequence of the enclosure movement. Dispossessed of
their land and lacking means to emigrate, the peasant had been thrown
like sheep to the industrial wolves. Sunk in a hopeless wage-slavery,
the Manchester factory-hand was an object-lesson in the fate that
awaits the landless, too striking for a shrewd observer like Greeley to
miss; and his agrarian program was proof that he had taken Goldsmith’s
warning to heart:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
The freeholder, whatever the hardships of his lot, was still a free man
and a free citizen, no fodder to fling to a huge-bellied industrialism.
To keep him thus free and independent, Greeley put himself vigorously
into the great agrarian movement of the forties and fifties--the
movement to democratize the national land policy that eventuated in
the Homestead Act of 1862. The conception of the strategic usefulness
of the western lands as a refuge for the city proletariat he derived
from George Henry Evans, who in 1828 had established _The Working Man’s
Advocate_, was active in organization work with the mechanics of New
York City, and contributed to the cause numerous pamphlets, one of
which, issued in 1844, was entitled _Vote Yourself a Farm_. The pioneer
work had been well done when, in 1845, Greeley joined the movement,
accepted the arguments, and thenceforth was tireless in spreading the
doctrine. The principle on which he should work he laid down in _The
Tribune_:
The freedom of the public lands to actual settlers and the
limitation of future acquisitions of land to some reasonable
amount, are ... measures which seem to us vitally necessary to the
ultimate emancipation from thraldom and misery. What is mainly
wanted is that each man should have an assured chance to earn and
then an assurance of the just fruits of his labors. (Quoted in
Commons, _Horace Greeley, etc._, p. 482.)
To accomplish this result Greeley introduced into Congress the first
Homestead bill, according to the proposed terms of which any _bona
fide_ settler might file on one hundred and sixty acres of public
land, to be paid for within seven years at the rate of $1.25 an acre;
all public lands not thus filed on by actual settlers were to be
listed at $5.00 an acre.[429] Greeley’s bill was aimed directly at
the old scandal of favoring wealthy speculators at the expense of the
small man, a scandal that ran far back into the past. The traditional
argument had been that the government could not go into the retail land
business, but should sell in great blocks to responsible men who should
in turn put settlers on the land. The policy had bred huge corruption,
it had aroused bitter opposition, and had roiled the politics of
more than one state holding western lands. In the early years of the
century the province of Maine had repudiated Massachusetts Federalism
and turned to the Republican party by reason of discontent with the
old system[430] and the fierce Anti-Rent riots in New York State were
of recent occurrence. It was against this policy of favoritism that
Greeley protested, thereby bringing on his head sharp criticism from
the respectable class, who declaimed bitterly against the demagoguery
of a man who openly advocated a “vote yourself a farm” policy. To pay
a middleman’s price for public land, after that land had been wheedled
from Congress in the dark of the moon, seemed to many gentlemen the
only honest and patriotic way; but Greeley was unconvinced by such
reasoning, and his concern over the problem became acute when the
railroads began to appropriate huge tracts of the public domain. The
policy of subsidizing them thus seemed to him wasteful and vicious; it
ran directly counter to his fundamental principle of limitation of land
holdings; it was repeating on a vast scale the ominous landlordism of
the past.
Man has a _natural right_ to produce and acquire property [he
wrote], and therefore, I condemn a system of Land Monopoly, which
robs the producer of one-half to seven-eighths of the fruits of his
toil; and often dooms him to absolute starvation on the soil which
he has faithfully and effectively tilled! The right of owning land
is one thing: the right to own thousands and even millions of acres
of land is another. The problem is learning to distinguish the one
from the other. (_The Tribune_, April 24, 1849.)