Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
system has no natural limitations. Expanded and contracted at the
will of speculators, it subjects the business of the country to the
exploitation of money brokers. Vast sums had thus been taken from the
people by the funding operations. Gold and silver had been driven out
of circulation, and with their disappearance a riot of speculation
had begun by which only the brokers had profited. Such was the origin
of the new money aristocracy that had already taken possession of
the state and was using it for the sole end of exploitation. America
must make choice between agrarianism and capitalism; the two were
incompatible, John Taylor was convinced, and unless the ambitions of
the paper-money aristocracy were held in check, the American producer
would come under the heel of middle-class exploitation.
So suggestive was the reasoning of Taylor, so interesting for the light
it throws on the agrarian mind of the Virginia Republicans, that it
will be well to set down his theses in compact form. As summarized
admirably by Professor Beard, his argument runs thus:
1. The masses have always been exploited by ruling classes, royal,
ecclesiastical, or feudal, which have been genuine economic castes
sustaining their power by psychological devices such as “loyalty to
the throne and altar.”
2. Within recent times a new class, capitalistic in character,
has sprung up, based on exploitation through inflated public
paper, bank stock, and a protective tariff, likewise with its
psychological devices, “public faith, national integrity, and
sacred credit.”
3. In the United States, this class was built up by Hamilton’s
fiscal system, the bank, and protective tariff, all of which
are schemes designed to filch wealth from productive labor,
particularly labor upon the land.
4. Thus was created a fundamental conflict between the capitalistic
and agrarian interests which was the origin of parties in the
United States.
5. Having no political principles, capitalism could fraternize with
any party that promised protection, and in fact after the victory
of the Republicans successfully entrenched itself in power under
the new cover.
6. The only remedy is to follow the confiscatory examples of
other classes and destroy special privilege without compensation.
(_Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy_, p. 351.)
In the great battle of ideas that followed the conflict of interests,
the Virginia agrarians armed themselves with trenchant weapons.
In intellectual equipment they were a match for the ablest of
the Federalists; in social idealism, in generous concern for the
_res publica_, or common public business, in sober and practical
humanitarianism, they were far superior. Between John Taylor of
Virginia, spokesman of planter agrarianism, and Fisher Ames of
Massachusetts, spokesman of Boston Federalism, the contrast could
scarcely be greater. It is a contrast in social culture, in humane
ideals, in interpretations of the native genius of America; and in the
comparison it is not the Virginia Republican who suffers.
Footnotes
[398] See Charles A. Beard, _The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian
Democracy_, Chapter XIII.
Chapter III • John Marshall • Last of the Virginia Federalists
Unlike John Taylor of Caroline, whose fame lies buried with his cause,
the reputation of John Marshall has taken on immense proportions with
the later triumph of his principles. There is abundant reason for the
veneration in which he has come to be held by present-day disciples of
Hamilton. More than any other man he saved the future for Federalism.
During the critical years of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian assaults
upon the outworks of nationalism, he held the inner keep of the law,
and prepared for the larger victories that came long after he was in
his grave. His strategic judicial decisions served as a causeway over
which passed the eighteenth-century doctrine of the sovereignty of the
law, to unite with the new philosophy of capitalistic exploitation. The
turbid waters of frontier leveling and states-rights democracy washed
fiercely about him, but he went on quietly with his self-appointed
work. He was one man who would not bow his neck to the majority yoke,
would not worship the democratic Baal. He profoundly distrusted the
principle of confederation. Convinced that the “continental belt”
must be buckled tightly, he gave unstinted service to the cause of
consolidation. The imperative need of a sovereign political state
to curb the disintegrating forces of America was axiomatic in his
thinking. Looking upon all democratic aspirations as calculated to
destroy federal sovereignty, and convinced that the principle of
equalitarianism was a bow strung to wield against society, he stoutly
upheld the principle of minority rule as the only practical agency of
stable and orderly government. Holding such views it was a matter of
high and patriotic duty with Marshall to use his official position
to prevent the majority will from endangering interests which were
far more sacred in his eyes than any natural rights propagated in the
hothouse of French philosophy. He was the last of the old school of
Federalists and the first of the new.
That John Marshall should have come out of Virginia is perhaps the
most ironical fact in the political history of the Old Dominion. Quite
unrepresentative of the dominant planter group that had gone over
to Jefferson, bitterly hostile to the agrarian interests that spoke
through John Taylor, he was the leader of a small remnant of Virginians
who followed Washington through the fierce extremes of party conflict.
He was the last and ablest representative of that older middle-class
Virginia, given to speculation and intent on money-making, that was
being superseded by a cavalier Virginia concerned about quite other
things than financial interests. He belonged rather to Boston than to
Richmond. His intense prejudices were primarily property prejudices.
He was the Fisher Ames of the South, embodying every principle of
the dogmatic tie-wig school of New England Federalists. Profoundly
influenced by Hamilton and Robert Morris, he seems to have found the
Boston group more congenial in temper and outlook. The explanation
of his strong property-consciousness is to be discovered both in
his material ambitions and his professional interests. He was a
business man rather than a planter. He was heavily involved in land
speculation and held stock in numerous corporations launched to exploit
the resources of the state. Robert Morris, whose daughter married
Marshall’s younger brother, was his financial adviser and advanced
money with which to purchase the Fairfax estate, an investment that
cost the buyers the very considerable sum of fourteen thousand pounds
and numerous lawsuits. He was a director in banks and a legal adviser
in important cases involving property rights. His financial interests
overran state boundaries and his political principles followed easily
in their train, washing away all local and sectional loyalties.
Like his kinsman Jefferson, Marshall was bred on the Virginia
frontier, and to the end of his life he retained the easy and careless
democracy of dress and manners that marked his early environment. In
his deportment he was far removed from the prim respectability of
the Boston Federalists. A friendly, likable man, fond of pitching
horseshoes and sitting in a game of cards, he was outwardly a genial
member of the crude little Richmond world where politics and law and
speculation engrossed the common attention. An easy-going nature, he
was wholly wanting in intellectual interests. Strangely ill-read in the
law, he was even more ignorant of history and economics and political
theory. His mind took an early set, and hardened into rigidity during
the reactionary years that lay between Shays’s Rebellion and the
rise of Napoleon. Of social and humanitarian interests he was utterly
devoid. One might as well look for the sap of idealism in a last year’s
stump as in John Marshall. French romantic philosophy he regarded as
the mother of all vicious leveling. There is no indication that he
had ever heard of the Physiocratic school of economics, or had looked
into the writings of Rousseau or Godwin or Paine. The blind sides of
his mind were many; his intellectual contacts were few; yet what he
saw and understood he grasped firmly. The narrowness of his outlook
intensified the rigidity with which he held to his fixed opinions; and
his extraordinary courage coupled with a dominant personality clothed
his strategic position as Chief Justice with fateful influence on the
later institutional development of America.
Although Marshall’s later fame is the fame of a lawyer, he was in
reality a politician whom fate in the person of John Adams placed on
the Supreme Court bench at a critical moment, where his political
opinions translated themselves into the organic law of the land, and
shaped the constitution to special and particular ends. Masterful,
tenacious, manipulating his fellow judges like putty, he was a judicial
sovereign who for thirty-five years molded the plastic constitution
to such form as pleased him, and when he died the work was so
thoroughly done that later generations have not been able to undo
it. His political opinions, therefore, become a matter of very great
importance to the historian, for they help to explain the peculiar
direction taken by our constitutional development. Materials for a
just estimate of his remarkable career were long wanting, but with the
appearance of Beveridge’s able and explicit _Life of John Marshall_
it is now possible to view him in exact historical perspective.
Carefully documented, the work is a genial and readable interpretation
that will go far to revivify the fame of the great Federalist. And
yet in spite of its abundant documentation--drawn perhaps somewhat
overmuch from Federalist sources--it is essentially a _biographie à
thèse_ that is careful to magnify the nationalism of its hero and to
minify the property consciousness. It provides a picturesque setting,
but it is a bit careless in its evaluation of the rival philosophies
then struggling for supremacy. Concerning the economics of the great
contest between Federalism and Republicanism it offers very inadequate
information, with the result that Jefferson is reduced to the status
of a master politician set over against the constructive statesman. The
intellectual limitations of the lawyer have reacted in these pages upon
his political enemy. Certain of the old Federalist prejudices have come
to life again in these entertaining pages.
The two fixed conceptions which dominated Marshall throughout his long
career on the bench were the sovereignty of the federal state and the
sanctity of private property; and these found their justification in
the virulence of his hatred of democracy. No man in America was less
democratic in his political convictions. Underneath the free and easy
exterior of the Chief Justice was as stalwart a reactionary as ever
sat on the Supreme Court bench. He was utterly indifferent to popular
views, and he calmly overturned the electoral verdicts of his fellow
Americans with the deliberateness of a born autocrat. Not only were
his important decisions political opinions, but they were Federalist
opinions. America had made definite choice between the Federalist
and Republican theories of government. It had repudiated the rule of
“gentlemen of principle and property” and set up a very different
rule. But to this mandate of the supposedly sovereign people Marshall
declined to yield. Defeated at the polls, no longer in control of the
executive and legislative branches of the government, Federalism found