Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
To those who follow the main-traveled road of American experience, as
we know it today, the mind of the old South seems curiously remote.
It is so archaic, so wholly apart from all present-day ambitions, as
to appear singular. Yet the continental highways we now travel so
familiarly, it must be remembered, were not the highways of an earlier
America. It is the North that has changed, and not the South, and the
nationality that sits so easily upon us would have seemed ominous to
the simpler world that determined the ideals of the Old Dominion. The
southern mind has grown old-fashioned, but it is native and of long
and honorable descent. It derived its singularity from the eighteenth
century in which it took shape; and it retained the clear impress of
its origins long after the eighteenth century had become an anachronism
in America. It was primarily political, of the French rather than
the English school; but it was economic also, out of Quesnay and Du
Pont de Nemours rather than Adam Smith, with a frank bias towards the
Physiocratic agrarianism that was so congenial to the needs and temper
of a plantation society; and this political agrarianism, parochial in
its outlook rather than national, suffices to explain the singularity
of the southern mind in the eyes of a later industrialized America.
Simple and homogeneous in the early years of the nineteenth century,
it nevertheless carried the seeds of disruption within it. Beneath the
surface of this common political agrarianism disintegrating forces
were at work, that were to produce broad cleavages of thought and lead
to sharp differences of outlook and polity. An old South and a new
South dwelt side by side, and to the West lay a frontier that took
particular form as it came under the determining influence of one
or the other. Virginia and South Carolina were the germinal centers
of southern culture, from which issued the creative ideas that gave
special forms to the brood of frontier states. Kentucky and Tennessee
were the intellectual heirs of Virginia; Alabama and Mississippi were
the intellectual heirs of South Carolina. Of these two schools of
thought that looked in different directions and sought different ends,
Jefferson and Calhoun were the intellectual leaders; and the contrasts
in their philosophies--the rejection by the latter of equalitarian
idealism, and the substitution of economic realism--mark the diverse
tendencies which in the end disrupted the South. Jackson and Lincoln
were followers of the Jeffersonian school; Jefferson Davis finally
went with Calhoun; and Henry Clay, lacking an adequate philosophy,
wavered between them. The differences between these men were open
and patent, and any analysis of the mind of the South, any attempt
to understand the conflict of tendencies that marked the development
of southern thought between 1800 and 1860, must give due weight to
such differences. The problem, therefore, instead of being single is
threefold, and involves an examination of the mind of Virginia, the
mind of South Carolina, and the mind of the new West from the Ohio
River to the Gulf.
Part One: The Virginia Renaissance
Chapter I • The Old Dominion
The history of the Old Dominion is an easy chapter in the textbook of
economic determinism. It is a modern instance that exemplifies the
law of land distribution and political control as laid down by James
Harrington; it is another Oceana seated by the James River, that
would not suffer a king to rule because gentlemen held the land and
acknowledged no feudal dues or royal prerogatives. On the surface its
history seems little more than a bundle of paradoxes. From the raw
materials of English middle-class stock it created a distinguished
and capable aristocracy, that was restrained from feudal tyranny by
a vigorous yeomanry that held its land in fee simple and stoutly
maintained its rights. Established on a slave economy, it adopted an
agrarian economy, espoused a republic, and accepted the doctrine of
democratic equalitarianism. It was generous, humanitarian, independent;
parochial in its jealousies, yet farsighted in outlook; tenacious of
its authority and quick to defend it, yet never mean or grasping.
During the noonday of its power its influence was always on the side
of local democratic freedom and the common well-being. It opposed the
encroachments of the centralizing state and the spirit of capitalistic
exploitation; yet its domestic economy rested on the most primitive of
all exploitation.
But these paradoxes disappear when the history of Virginia is
interpreted in the light of its land economy. By force of circumstances
the Old Dominion became broadly American in its social philosophy, the
interpreter of America to herself. Native conditions created there a
native psychology, and this native psychology spread widely through
the frontier states where a like economics provided suitable breeding
places. Virginia was the mother of the agrarian West, as New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston were the progenitors of the mercantile and
industrial East; and in the frequent clashes between country and
town, between agrarianism and capitalism, the ideas of Virginia have
commonly opposed the ideas of the northern cities. Between the older
colonial America and later industrial America, stand the ideals of
the Old Dominion, more humane and generous than either, disseminating
the principles of French romantic philosophy, and instilling into the
provincial American mind, static and stagnant in the grip of English
colonialism, the ideal of democratic equalitarianism and the hope of
humane progress. The nineteenth century first entered America by way of
the James River.
The renaissance in Virginia began with the transition from middle-class
to plantation ideals that marked the last half of the eighteenth
century; and it was given intellectual stimulus by the libertarian
natural-rights philosophy that in England and France was undermining
the old order. There were no cities either mercantile or social, in
the Old Dominion, and no industrialism. Life everywhere centered in
the plantation. The navigable rivers of the tide-water region were
favorable to the development of a decentralized economics, and in
spite of royal commands to create adequate seaports, and heavy taxes
by the commonwealth, trading towns did not prosper. For two hundred
years Virginia refused to create a native middleman group to handle
its staples, but preferred to deal through British factors and ship
directly, preferably in Dutch bottoms. Each planter insisted on putting
his hogsheads of tobacco aboard ship at his own wharf, and receiving
his merchandise direct from London. The system was wasteful, and
Madison was active in an attempt to limit by law the ports of entry to
two, in order to build up a middleman machinery; but the plan broke on
the fixed prejudices of plantation masters who had come to share the
old English dislike of tradesmen. Virginia stubbornly refused to adopt
middle-class methods, even though refusal cost her dear. She preferred
to be exploited by British factors rather than create a domestic class
to devour her resources.
The system had grown up in earlier times when the merchant spirit was
strong in Virginia. It is often assumed that the Virginia aristocracy
was descended from emigrant Cavaliers who fled from England during the
commonwealth period; but the facts of history do not bear out such a
theory. It was descended largely from vigorous middle-class stock--from
men who had been merchants in England and in turning planters brought
to the business qualities that had been developed in mercantile
pursuits. In the seventeenth century Virginia society exhibited few of
the usual characteristics of the Cavalier. It was frankly _bourgeois_,
pushing, avaricious, keen in driving hard bargains, with no high sense
of honor, canny rather than impulsive, preferring the law to the duel,
hating war and only half-hearted in defense against the Indians--a
little world of London burgesses new seated on the banks of the James
and the Rappahannock. “Beyond doubt,” concludes a recent student,
“the most numerous section of the Virginia aristocracy was derived
from the English merchant class” (Thomas J. Wertenbaker, _Patrician
and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 28), pretty much the same class that
settled Boston and Philadelphia. For a hundred and fifty years these
merchant ideals characterized Virginia society. Speculation in land
was universal; exploitation was open and shameless; the highest
officials took advantage of their positions to loot the public domain,
resorting to divers sharp practices from tax dodging to outright theft.
One gentleman added a cipher to a grant for two thousand acres, and
although the fraud was commonly known, so great was his influence that
no one disputed his title to twenty thousand acres. While governor,
Alexander Spotswood issued patents for sixty thousand acres to
dummy holders, who deeded the land to him after he had retired from
office.[397]
In the third quarter of the eighteenth century such practices came
to an end. The merchant spirit died out among the Virginia planters,
and the Cavalier spirit took its place. A high sense of personal
and civic honor became the hall-mark of the landed aristocracy, and
for upwards of a hundred years this common code gave to Virginia an
enviable distinction. Both in national and commonwealth politics her
representatives were clean-handed and jealous to deserve the public
faith reposed in them. Among the planters were good business men, of
course, notably Washington, who under his stately manners concealed
a capable mind for speculative affairs. He engaged in various
enterprises; speculated heavily in western lands; was president of
the Potomac Company, organized to improve navigation and connect his
holdings with salt water; and at his death was one of the wealthiest
men in America. But such a career was very unusual in Virginia after
the Revolutionary War. Washington, indeed, may properly be regarded
as the last of the eighteenth-century gentlemen, who like Colonel
William Byrd was interested in accumulating vast holdings as well as
cultivating his plantation. Even more characteristic of an earlier day
was John Marshall, the last of the great Virginia Federalists, who was
nearer akin to Robert Morris, with whom he had business dealings, than
with Jefferson or John Randolph of Roanoke.
The opportunity for such careers in Virginia was passing. Population
was draining off into the West and few immigrants came to settle.
With no rapidly growing cities the incentive to speculate in unearned
increment was lacking and liquid capital was inadequate. The economics
of plantation life developed agrarian rather than capitalistic
interests. In the midst of a rapidly changing America, a world given
over to exploitation, increasingly middle class and contemptuous of
the older aristocratic order, the Old Dominion remained static and
unchanging. The plantation aristocracy was marooned by the rising tide.
It repudiated the ways of trade and industry and sharply criticised the
North for its plebeian spirit. “Commerce is certainly beneficial to
society in a secondary degree,” said Governor Tyler in 1810, addressing
the Virginia legislature, “but it produces also what is called citizens
of the world--the worst citizens in the world” (quoted in Wertenbaker,
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, p. 102). Enterprising young
men who a generation before would have been strong Federalists and
supported the new capitalism, found such an atmosphere stifling and
migrated to the new South--to Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, or
farther West still, where greater opportunity awaited them. Virginia