Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
erect a political platform in accordance with middle-class ideals,
and its failure was due to the fact that the time was not ripe for
undisputed middle-class control. The merchant aristocracy of the North
was overthrown, but the planter aristocracy of the South was still to
be reckoned with; and its particularistic ambitions in the end wrecked
the Whig coalition of the West and East. By 1820 a revolutionary change
had taken place in the political philosophy of the plantation school.
From an ardent nationalism Calhoun was leading his followers back to
the earlier doctrine of states rights; and New England industrialism
found itself confronted with the doctrine which the Hartford junto
had played with, but now with far more drive behind it. The slave
economy was entertaining imperialistic dreams, and to effect its ends
was building up a new constitutional philosophy. Southern writers
had long been at work, and the weight of their authority was behind
the new particularism. _Rawle on the Constitution_, a states-rights
exposition, was the official textbook on civics at the United States
Military Academy, and from it, while a student at West Point, Jefferson
Davis declared that he first imbibed states-rights principles. Other
authoritative southern works that were widely read were John Taylor’s
two studies: _Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_
(1820), and _New Views of the Constitution of the United States_
(1823); some years later came Henry St. George Tucker’s _Lectures
on Constitutional Law_ (1843); and these were only preliminary to
Calhoun’s searching exposition in his _Disquisition on Government_ and
_An Inquiry into the Nature of the Constitution of the United States_.
To meet this theory of particularism there was need of a resurgent
Federalism, with a new nationalistic interpretation of the
Constitution. The compact theory of the Federal state must be refuted
by the organic theory; the conception of federated commonwealths must
yield to the conception of a coalescing sovereignty. The old battle
must be fought over again with fresh arguments. The sanctity of the
Constitution must be asserted, but that sanctity must be thrown over
a nationalistic rather than a particularistic interpretation. It must
be shown that despite the vehement protestations of southern loyalty,
a particularistic Constitution was a denial of loyalty and must end
in the destruction of the national union. For this difficult business
New England was as yet unprepared. The old Federalist arguments were
obsolete, and many of those Federalists had been deep in the Hartford
Convention. The new industrialism must provide its own theory, and
it was fortunate in discovering two men whose combined learning and
eloquence proved equal to the task.
II
The name of Webster has been so closely associated with the movement
of constitutional nationalism as to overshadow the just fame of one
who has many claims to be regarded as the intellectual leader of the
school. Joseph Story was a Salem lawyer whose reputation, considerable
as it is, is scarcely commensurate with his influence on our later
constitutional development. Of the same Harvard class with William
Ellery Channing, he dabbled in polite letters as a young man, but
went into the law, entered politics, became Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court, and for a time was Dane professor of law at Harvard.
He came of radical stock. His father, a physician at Boston till he
removed to Marblehead, was a militant Revolutionary Whig, one of
the score or so of Indians who made up the Boston Tea Party, and a
leader amongst the group of Sons of Liberty who seized and gagged the
sentinels and carried off two brass fieldpieces from the Common where
the British commander had posted them to overawe the town. The son grew
up an ardent republican. As a very young man he became an outstanding
leader of the unfashionable party, then in the minority, and suffered
certain humiliations on account of his political opinions; on one
occasion, according to Theodore Parker, being “knocked down in the
street, beaten, and forced to take shelter in the house of a friend,
whither he fled, bleeding, and covered with the mud of the street”
(_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 178). Of these youthful heresies
few indications appeared in his later life. Republican though he might
be, he was utterly devoid of any radical tendencies, and when he took
his seat on the Supreme Court bench he was speedily drawn into the
powerful orbit of John Marshall, shared the latter’s views on all major
constitutional questions, and turned Whig. He became a close friend
of Webster and from 1816 to 1842 he was his chief adviser on knotty
legal, constitutional, and international questions. “From that deep and
copious well of legal knowledge,” Parker asserts, Webster drew freely
“whenever his own bucket was dry” (_ibid._, p. 170).
This shift from Republican to Whig came about quite naturally. New
England liberalism, it must be remembered, produced no intellectual
leaders till late, and no clear-cut political philosophy. Though it
nominally accepted the leadership of Jefferson it never was won over to
the Physiocratic economics or states-rights principles of the Virginia
school. Story was at no time a Jeffersonian, but rather an eager and
avowed disciple of Washington, “little infected with Virginia notions,
as to men or measures.” In his _Autobiography_ he wrote:
The republican party then and at all other times embraced men of
very different views on many subjects. Nay, a Virginia republican
of that day, was very different from a Massachusetts republican,
and the anti-federal doctrines of the former state then had and
still have very little support or influence in the latter state,
notwithstanding a concurrence in political action upon general
subjects. I was at all times a firm believer in the doctrines of
General Washington, and an admirer of his conduct, measures and
principles.... I read and examined his principles, and have made
them in a great measure the rule and guide of my life. I was and
always have been a lover, devoted lover, of the constitution of the
United States, and a friend to the union of the states. I never
wished to bring the government to a mere confederacy of states; but
to preserve the power of the general government given by all the
states, in full exercise and sovereignty for the protection and
preservation of all the states. (Story, _Life and Letters of Joseph
Story_, Vol. I, p. 128.)
That he had as little sympathy with the Physiocratic economics of
Jefferson is apparent from his early activities in furthering the new
paper system. While a member of the Massachusetts legislature, as a
young man, he was active in pressing for bank franchises, and upon the
establishment of the Merchants’ Bank of Salem he became its president.
Like Washington and Marshall he espoused the new gospel of capitalism,
with none of the agrarian prejudices of the landed gentry to hold him
back. He was the political twin of the great Chief Justice, and a Whig
in spirit long before Webster. “I seem to myself,” he remarked late in
life, “simply to have stood still in my political belief, while parties
revolved about me; so that, although of the same opinions now as ever,
I find my name changed from Democrat to Whig, but I know not how or
why” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 546). Though somewhat naïve the comment is
just. Anti-federalism in Massachusetts would seem to have been largely
a capitalistic protest against the narrow tie-wig Federalism; and
while Joseph Story sat upon the Supreme Court bench, adapting legal
principles to the new needs of business, the country was moving forward
to the middle-class philosophy that he had early come to hold.
In the year 1833 he published his _Commentaries on the Constitution_,
the fruit of long labors, which was at once accepted throughout
the North as a classical authority, and which has held its ground
pretty well since. In method and temper, as well as objective, the
exposition of Story stands in sharp contrast to that of the southern
school. In its particularism the latter appealed to the history of the
Constitution in the making, and to French romantic philosophy; whereas
the former followed English constitutional theories to nationalistic
ends. Story was steeped in the Common Law and his thinking reveals the
strong influence of Blackstone. In passing through the mind of the
great Tory commentator, English constitutional theory had received a
pronounced Tory bias, and something of this remains after filtering
through the mind of Story. The ideal of a strong and efficient
political state, with its corollaries of a coercive sovereignty, of the
duties of a subject rather than the rights of a citizen, of loyalty
to government rather than concern for political justice, derives
immediately from English theory and practice. Much likewise he took
from the older Federalists: their fear of an encroaching legislative
power; their concern at faction; their faith in checks and balances
to restrain the majority will. But his chief inspiration came from
the spirit of the Common Law--that subtle influence that Jefferson so
greatly feared. His legalism was inveterate; the final, authoritative
answer to all questions he discovered in the decision of the courts.
Against such a mind, deeply read in the law and with scanty knowledge
of economics and political theory, the waves of liberal and romantic
thought broke impotently. His reasoning may be convincing to a lawyer,
but to the historian his exposition is often weak, his data inadequate,
and his conclusions not infrequently contrary to fact.
In building his argument Story drew his materials freely from _The
Federalist_, from the writings and decisions of Marshall, and from
Blackstone. The backbone of the work is Hamilton and Marshall, from
whom he quotes constantly, supplemented by a host of decisions by
Federalist judges. With its pronounced bias _The Commentaries_ must
be regarded as a partisan document, which like _The Federalist_ has
grown in authoritativeness with the triumph of its party principles.
Its surprising weakness on the historical side has come to be
overlooked since the downfall of southern particularism, but during
the debates that preceded the Civil War the work was sharply handled
by southern historians, and in his _Constitutional View of the War
between the States_ Stephens quite demolished Story’s feeble attempt
at an historical justification of the anti-compact theory. The weight
of historical evidence, to present-day students, would seem to be on
the side of the states-rights argument, although in certain aspects
both sides were innovators: Story in overleaping the period of French
ascendency when the Constitution took shape, and going back to the
older English tradition; and the compact school in reasserting the
compact theory at a time when the spirit of nationalism was undermining
it. Story seems to have been conscious of his weakness, for he
expressly repudiates the method of interpreting the work in the light
of contemporary testimony at the time of its formulation. In so doing
he not only violates the principle that a document is to be construed
in the light of the common understanding when it was drawn; but with
naïve inconsistency, he constantly appeals to _The Federalist_, pretty
much ignoring the opposition pamphlets, and interprets the Constitution
in accord with its commentary. But for the most part he clings to the
strict letter of the document. He lightly brushes aside the whole
compact argument by asserting dogmatically that the phrase, “We the
people of the United States,” must be understood in its simple literal