Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
worthy opponents of the capable Federalists. In surprising number
they were from the Old Dominion, gentlemen of the best Virginia
stock, who in the last decades of the eighteenth century engrafted
upon a generous plantation tradition the Physiocratic doctrines of
France. A finer race of gentlemen America has never produced, and it
was fortunate for the Jacksonian movement, which produced no notable
thinkers and contributed little to political and economic theory, that
the preceding generation had given adequate form to the philosophy of
agrarianism. That theory took definite shape between 1800 and 1820.
In the days of Hamilton’s control of the Treasury Department, the
agrarian opposition was weakened by the lack of such a theory; but the
necessities of the situation were a prod to the young Republicans,
and the philosophy of agrarianism rapidly crystallized. In its final
form it was an extraordinarily interesting and native expression of
two hundred years’ experience of a society founded on agriculture--a
reasoned defense of an older America against the ambitions of a younger
and more vigorous.
II • John Taylor • An Agrarian Economist
The intellectual leader of the young Republicans in the great attack
on the economics of Federalism was a thinker too little recognized by
later Americans. His just fame has been obscured with the cause for
which he labored, and his reputation lies buried with the old agrarian
_régime_. Nevertheless John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, “the
philosopher and statesman of agrarianism,” was the most penetrating
critic of Hamiltonian finance and the most original economist of his
generation. Unambitious, simple, honest, calm and dignified in bearing,
he embodied the heroic virtues of the great age of Virginia. In his
_Thirty Years’ View_, Thomas H. Benton describes him thus:
I can hardly figure to myself the ideal of a republican statesman
more perfect and complete than he was in reality:--plain and
solid, a wise counsellor, a ready and vigorous debater, acute and
comprehensive, ripe in all historical and political knowledge,
innately republican--modest, courteous, benevolent, hospitable,--a
skilful, practical farmer, giving his time to his farm and his
books, when not called by an emergency to the public service--and
returning to his books and his farm when the emergency was over....
He belonged to that constellation of great men which shone so
brightly in Virginia in his day, and the light of which was not
limited to Virginia, or our America, but spread through the bounds
of the civilized world. (Chapter XVIII.)
Taylor was a member of Congress at the time of the funding operations
and contributed two notable pamphlets to the public discussion: the
first, issued in 1793, entitled _An Examination of the Late Proceedings
in Congress Respecting the Official Conduct of the Secretary of the
Treasury_; the second, issued the following year, entitled _An Inquiry
into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures_. Twenty
years later, in 1814, he embodied his matured convictions in a stout
volume, printed at Fredericksburg, entitled _An Inquiry into the
Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States_. The
work is tediously prolix--dressed, according to Benton, “in a quaint
Sir Edward Coke style”--even more tediously moralistic; but in spite
of very evident stylistic shortcomings, it deserves, in the opinion
of Professor Beard, “to rank among the two or three really historic
contributions to political science which have been produced in the
United States” (_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 323).
It was the last of the eighteenth-century works, solidly reasoned,
keeping a main eye upon economics and refusing to wander off into
the bog of constitutionalism, concerned rather with the springs and
sources of political action and the objectives of political parties. It
summed up adequately the agrarian argument against capitalism, analyzed
the current tendencies, and provided a convenient handbook for the
Jacksonian movement, from which the latter drew freely in the dispute
over the Bank.
Like Jefferson’s, the agrarianism of Taylor was founded in the
Physiocratic economy. He was convinced that the tiller of the soil
was the only true economist, and that if republican America were to
retain its republican virtues it must guard against every system of
exploitation, for in exploitation lay the origin of social caste.
America had rid itself of the feudal principle of a landed aristocracy,
which in the past had provided the machinery of exploitation, by the
abolition of the law of primogeniture and entail, only to be confronted
by a graver danger, the new aristocracy of liquid wealth. His main
purpose, therefore, was an examination of the sources of power of the
capitalistic order, and the successive steps by which it had risen to
power. His analysis is acute and reveals a mind concerned with the
realities that lie beneath outward appearances. It is the economics
of history that concern him most, for as fully as John Adams he was
convinced that economics determine the form of the political state.
In his analysis of the origins of government, he discovers in every
society a master class that becomes the beneficiary of sovereign
power: the political state is first erected and thereafter used to
safeguard the past acquisitions and to further the present ambitions
of a dominant economic group which calls itself an aristocracy; and
such an aristocracy imposes its will upon the exploited mass, crudely
by the sword and purse, and subtly by the skillful use of psychology.
Once in control of the political state it intrenches itself behind
certain fictions which profess to carry moral sanction. This political
jugglery plays many tricks to catch the gullible; arrayed in the garb
of patriotism, loyalty, obedience to authority, law and order, divine
right, it carries a weighty appeal. When these moral fictions fail,
the fictions of the law step in, and such doctrines as the sacredness
of contract translate the stealings of the master class into vested
interests which the state is bound to protect. There is a fine irony
in Taylor’s implied references to Burke’s doctrine of a changeless
constitution based on a nonrevocable compact, and Hamilton’s doctrine
of the public faith, which, he argues, were clearly designed to
sacrifice the common good to the interests of a class:
Law enacted for the benefit of a nation, is repealable; but law
enacted for the benefit of individuals, though oppressive to
a nation, is a charter, and irrepealable.... Posterity, being
bound by the contracts of its ancestry, in every case which
diminishes its rights, man is daily growing less free by a
doctrine which never increases them. A government intrusted with
the administration of publick affairs for the good of a nation,
has a right to deed away that nation for the good of itself or
its partisans, by law charters for monopolies or sinecures; and
posterity is bound by these deeds. But although an existing
generation can never reassume the liberty or property held by its
ancestors, it may recompense itself by abridging, or abolishing the
right of its descendants. (Page 61.)
The two theories to which he devotes chief attention are the natural
aristocracy theory of John Adams, and the capitalistic aristocracy
theory of Hamilton. The first of these takes its bias from stressing
the inequality inherent in the nature of men; individuals are
biologically unequal; and from this fact Adams deduces that the thrifty
rise to opulence and the thriftless sink into poverty by reason of
individual qualities. Society can neither keep a strong man down nor
thrust a weak man up. Between the rich and the poor, the capable and
incapable, a state of war exists, held in check by the strong hand
in feudal and monarchical societies, but necessarily open and bitter
in a democracy. Hence the inevitable failure of democracy wherever it
is tried, and the necessity of nicely calculated checks in a republic
to prevent the equal tyranny of an aristocracy and a mob. The second
theory, the Hamiltonian, justifies itself by the same theory of
human nature. It accepts the fact of social inequality as inherent
in men, but it sees no reason to pursue Utopian dreams. Recognizing
the universal fact of economic control, it erects the state upon
exploitation as preferable to anarchy. This capitalistic state it
defends before a gullible public by eloquent appeals to the national
faith, the security of property, the fear of lawlessness.
Having thus analyzed the two theories Taylor seeks to cut the ground
from under both by arguing that social classes cannot be historically
explained by the fact of biological inequality amongst individuals, but
rather by accidental opportunity, unscrupulousness, and brute force.
All aristocracies, whether feudal, natural, or capitalistic, take their
origin and uphold their dominion, not from superior excellence or
capacity, but from exploitation, that beginning in a small way grows
by what it feeds on till it assumes the proportions of a colossus.
Exploitation breeds a continually augmenting exploitation that conducts
inevitably to caste regimentation. All aristocracies are founded in
social theft. They are not established in the morality of nature, but
exist as parasites on the social wealth; they levy upon the producer;
and the only preventive is to destroy the foundations on which they
rest by taking from them the means of exploitation.
In conjuring up phantom dangers of feudal aristocracies, Taylor pointed
out, John Adams was fighting dead issues. No feudal aristocracy could
arise in America; land was too plentiful and the quick jealousy of the
people would strike it down. The danger to republican institutions
was closer at hand; it was the poison of the new capitalism that was
spreading its virus through all the veins of the national life. And
in order that the American people might know something of the history
of this innovating force which they must reckon with, John Taylor
proceeded to open to them a page in the economics of capitalism. The
aristocracy of credit, founded on “monopoly and incorporation,” he
pointed out, had arisen first in England with the growing power of
the middle class; it had gone forward swiftly in consequence of the
Napoleonic wars, and through the agencies of the Bank of England and
the Consolidated Debt, it had secured control of the public credit. It
had arisen first in America in consequence of the financial disturbance
resulting from the Revolutionary War, and had further strengthened its
position by the War of 1812. Ambitious men had taken advantage of the
national necessities to create an artificial paper system identical
with that of England. They had profited immensely from the funding
operations and the National Bank; they were setting up their private
banks in every city and town, and through the manipulation of credit
were taking heavy toll of the national production. A money monopoly was
the most dangerous of all monopolies, and the master of all.
Taylor had grown up under the traditional domestic economy. He was
habituated to think of production in terms of consumption, and of
money as a stable measure of exchange. He could not adjust his mind
to the theory of production for profit, of middleman speculation, as
socially legitimate; and when that speculation extended to the national
currency, and exacted its profits from the medium of exchange, he took
alarm. Gold and silver are fairly stable commodities that allow of no
sudden increase or diminution, and in consequence a specie currency
does not readily lend itself to speculative juggling. But a paper