Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
produced no more Washingtons or Marshalls, but turned whole-heartedly
to the school of Jefferson, providing the leaders of states-rights
agrarianism. She broke off all intellectual alliances with the
mercantile and industrial North, and withdrew within her own plantation
world.
Purged thus of its Federalist remnant Virginia became increasingly
libertarian in its social and political philosophy. Its mind had
taken form at the time when French humanitarianism was in the air,
and it discovered much in the new philosophy that appealed to its
romantic spirit. A quick and jealous concern for personal liberty
and the rights of man was a common passion. The gentlemen of the Old
Dominion were bound together by caste solidarity, but they remained
strikingly individual, never amenable to group coercion, expressing
their convictions freely and ready to uphold their views by the code of
the duel. “No people ever lived,” said Alexander H. Stephens in 1867,
“more devoted to the principles of liberty, secured by free democratic
institutions, than the people of the South” (_Constitutional View_,
etc., Vol. I, p. 539). The right of dissent from majority opinion was
the imprescriptible right of every gentleman. In no other part of
America could the career of John Randolph be paralleled--a free-lance
critic of politicians and political measures, who turned his caustic
wit against whom he would, an arch individualist in opinions as other
Americans were in acquisitiveness. Politics was an absorbing game in
Virginia. Debarred from commercial pursuits, ambitious young Virginians
went in for law and politics, with an eye upon a congenial career at
Washington. This serves to explain the long predominance of southern
leadership in the national government. For two generations the South
provided a surprising number of first-class men whose influence was
commanding. Until the problem of slavery became acute, and leadership
passed from moderate Virginians to Fire Eaters from further south,
the influence of Virginia at Washington was thrown on the side of
republican simplicity, low taxes and the decentralization of power. The
armed clash over slavery very probably might have been averted if the
spirit of the Old Dominion had prevailed.
Footnotes
[397] For these and other facts, see Wertenbaker’s book (mentioned
above), pp. 95-99.
Chapter II • The Heritage of Jeffersonianism
I
To the young Virginia Republicans of the year 1800, Jeffersonianism
seemed to be a comprehensive social philosophy peculiarly adapted to
their needs. It offered a practical and humane program of national
development in harmony with existing fact and native genius. It had
not yet been distorted by the caprice of circumstance into a somewhat
nebulous idealism, nor confined within the narrower limits of political
equalitarianism and states-rights theory. By later generations
Jefferson has been interpreted too exclusively in terms of the
Declaration of Independence, the glowing idealism of which has proved
curiously elastic and has been stretched by later libertarian movements
to meet their special and particular ends: by the Jacksonian democracy
in their struggle for manhood suffrage; by the Abolitionists in their
attack upon a slave-sanctioning Constitution; by other idealists in
their various crusades. The great name of Jefferson, in consequence,
has come to be commonly associated with the conception of democracy and
the ideal of social justice. But to his young Virginia followers in the
morning of the Republican movement, the perennial suggestiveness of
their leader lay in the fact that he embodied for them the many-sided
liberalism of French revolutionary thought, its economic and social
idealisms equally with political. They interpreted him more adequately,
for they understood, as later interpreters frequently have not, how
deeply the roots of his natural-rights philosophy went down into
current economics. Of the different French writers who gave shape
and substance to his thinking, the strongest creative influence on
the mature Jefferson came from the Physiocratic group, from Quesnay,
Condorcet, Mirabeau, Du Pont de Nemours, the brilliant founders of an
economy that was primarily social rather than narrowly industrial or
financial. Historically the Physiocratic school is as sharply aligned
with idealistic agrarianism as the Manchester school is aligned with
capitalistic industrialism. The conception that agriculture is the
single productive form of labor, that from it alone comes the _produit
net_ or ultimate net labor increment, and that bankers, manufacturers
and middlemen belong to the class of sterile workers, profoundly
impressed the Virginia mind, bred up in a plantation economy and
concerned for the welfare and dignity of agriculture.
Franklin had first given currency to the Physiocratic theory in America
a generation earlier, but it was Jefferson who spread it widely among
the Virginia planters. He did more; he provided the new agrarianism
with a politics and a sociology. From the wealth of French writers
he formulated a complete libertarian philosophy. His receptive mind
was saturated with romantic idealism which assumed native, congenial
form in precipitation. From Rousseau, Godwin and Paine, as well as
from Quesnay and Condorcet, came the idea of political justice and the
conception of a minimized political state, assuming slightly different
forms from filtering through different minds. The early doctrine of
_laissez faire, laissez passer_--a phrase given currency by Gournay,
the godfather of the Physiocratic school--proved to be curiously
fruitful in the field of political speculation, as in economic. From
it issued a sanction for natural rights, the theory of progress, the
law of justice, and the principle of freedom. The right of coercion was
restricted by it to the narrowest limits, and the political state was
shorn of all arbitrary power. “Authority,” the Physiocratic thinkers
concluded, “should only employ the force of the community to compel
madmen and depraved men to make their conduct conform to the principles
of justice.”
So far Jefferson went gladly with the Physiocrats, but in their
acceptance of a benevolent despotism he discovered a denial of their
first principles, and turned to the more congenial democratic group.
With the political principles of Godwin and Paine he was in hearty
accord. With them he accepted as an historical fact the principle that
government is everywhere and always at war with natural freedom, and
from this he deduced the characteristic doctrine that the lover of
freedom will be jealous of delegated power, and will seek to hold the
political state to strict account. From this same principle, following
Paine, he deduced the doctrine of the terminable nature of compact,
which he set over against the legal doctrine of inviolability. In this
matter French liberalism and English legalism were at opposite poles.
Replying to Burke’s doctrine of irrevocable compact, Paine had written
_The Rights of Man_, which Jefferson did much to popularize in America,
and with the broad principles of which he was in complete accord.
“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” Paine had argued, and
the dead possess no rights over it. Government from the grave is a
negation of the inalienable rights of the newborn; hence social justice
demands that a time limit should automatically revoke all compacts.
Since no generation can rightly deed away the heritage of the unborn,
the natural limit of every compact is the lifetime of the generation
ratifying it. “No society,” Jefferson said, “can make a perpetual
Constitution, or even a perpetual law.”
In this suggestive theory of the terminable nature of compact is to be
found the philosophical origin of the later doctrine of states rights.
However deeply it might be covered over by constitutional lawyers and
historians who defended the right of secession, the doctrine was there
implicitly, and the southern cause would have been more effectively
served if legal refinements had been subordinated to philosophical
justification of this fundamental doctrine. With a frank contempt for
all legalists Jefferson believed that social well-being was not to be
bounded by constitutional limitations or statutory enactments; that
political action should be governed by reason rather than by historical
precedent. He had discovered that the political state does not remain
static, but gathers power by the law of physical attraction; with
increasing power it becomes increasingly dangerous to natural freedom;
hence a long-established and venerable constitution may become, by
reason of its hold upon the popular affection, the most useful of
agencies to cloak aggressions on the rights of the people. The love
of profits is always seeking to overthrow the rule of justice. Human
selfishness persistently distorts civic conduct, warping it from ideal
ends. But the shortcomings of existing political states cannot abrogate
the law of justice or destroy the love of freedom. To safeguard freedom
from encroachment by the political state, and to establish the rule of
justice, were always the great and difficult ends that Jefferson aimed
at, and as a follower of the Physiocratic school and a Virginia planter
he turned naturally to a _laissez faire_ agrarianism in opposition to a
centralizing capitalism.
But he was much too sound a political thinker and too sagacious a
party leader to rest his case upon abstract theory. In all his later
writings and counsels he kept his mind close to economic fact, and
the Jeffersonian movement was a long and effective training school in
the economic basis of politics. It habituated the motley rank and file
of the electorate to think in economic terms and to regard political
parties as the instruments of economic groups. This was in keeping
with the soundest eighteenth-century tradition, before romantic dogma
had divorced politics and realism; and in so far Jefferson agreed
with his Federalist opponents, Hamilton and John Adams. A decade of
acrimonious debate had made it plain to the common voter that the real
struggle in America lay between the rival capitalist and agrarian
interests, of which the Federalist and Republican parties were the
political instruments. The Congressional enactments of the first twelve
years had further clarified the issue. The funding plan had visibly
increased the number and wealth of the rising capitalist group. The
first banks were being erected and the complex machinery of modern
credit--the hated “paper system” that had driven out the traditional
metallic currency--was being rapidly built up. A small financial group
in the northern cities was growing powerful from discounting and
money-brokerage. The truth was slowly coming home to the farmers and
small men that war is profitable to the few at the cost of the many;
that from the egg of war-financing was hatched a brood of middlemen
who exploited the post-war hardships and grew rich from the debts that
impoverished the producing farmers. This ambitious class, hitherto
negligible in America, was provided with the means to make a vigorous
fight; it invoked the political state as an ally, and under Hamilton’s
leadership used the administration to serve its financial interests.
It looked with open hostility upon every agrarian program, was cynical
towards French romantic theories, and was restrained by no scruples. To
loose the hands of this capable class from the helm of government, to
keep America agricultural, and the Federal state secondary in all but
necessary police powers to the several commonwealths, was the avowed
and logical purpose of the Jeffersonian Republicans.[398]
The leaders of the movement were men who in capacity and training were