Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

James P. Young

logic of Jeffersonian republicanism, though Jefferson himself would surely

not have agreed, since in an 1807 letter to his Secretary of the Treasury

Albert Gallatin, he ﬁrmly announced his opposition to the appointment of

women to ofﬁce, and, one supposes, to their voting as well (Jefferson 1999,

p. 545). But the goal of suffrage went beyond the achievement of political

leverage and looked forward to a transformation of women’s consciousness.

As Stanton put it, ‘Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition

of one’s self-sovereignty’ (quoted in DuBois 1987,pp.132–3;cf.pp.127–38

passim).

Unfortunately the story does not have a happy ending. When the Thir-

teenth Amendment was passed women and former slaves were left in

the same anomalous position. They were citizens without political rights

(DuBois 1999,p.62). For decades reformers had debated the question of

how broad the movement should be, whether limited to anti-slavery or

expanded to include other goals such as women’s suffrage and temperance.

The dominant position after the war was stated by Wendell Phillips: ‘This

hour belongs to the Negro’ (DuBois 1999,pp.59). The suffrage movement

split and some of the leader s, including Stanton and her close colleague

Susan B. Anthony, made seriously racist remarks about the former slaves

on whose behalf they had struggled (Davis 2001,p.370; DuBois 1999,

pp. 53–78; Shklar 1991,pp.57–61; cf. Stauffer 2001,p.211). Not until 1920

was the vote extended to women.

The emphasis on natural rights is also clear in the anti-slavery writings and

speeches of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Neither was

a particularly political writer, but both were deeply engaged by the slavery

issue. Each believed in the Jeffersonian maxim that the best government

governs least and Thoreau went on to add, ‘That government is best that

governs not at all’ (Thoreau 1996,p.1; Emerson 1983,p.567). Thoreau

puts their position well when he says, ‘I ask for, not at once no government,

but at once a better government’ (Thoreau 1996,p.2). And clearly a better

government required an end to slavery. But the constitution was a problem;

it was, in fact, as Garrison also thought, an evil (Thoreau 1996,p.9). But

while Thoreau accepted, perhaps even admired, representative government,

he dismissed voting as merely a form of ‘gaming’ and believed that it might

simply be necessary to wash one’s hands of evil. This may appear to lead to

a prescription for passive civil disobedience and Thoreau’s great inﬂuence

has been as a defender of that position. But it is important to note that the

much quoted essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ was originally more edgily titled

‘Resistance to Civil Government’. And since Thoreau was a supporter of

394

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

the violent campaign of the martyred abolitionist militant John Brown, it is

clear that for Thoreau resistance might justiﬁably take violent form because

of the evil of slavery and the constitution that accepted it (Hyde 2002;Kateb

1992,p.103; Thoreau 1996,pp.137–69).

Emerson’s writings were more complex and much more extensive than

Thoreau’s. Like his younger friend, Emerson was a determined individ-

ualist who urged American thinkers to break free from the inﬂuence of

old thoughts and practices, particularly those of European origin, so as to

become independent, self-reliant thinkers and actors (Cavell 2003; Emerson

1983,pp.53–71, 259–82;Kateb1995). Emer son was an essayist rather than

a systematic thinker. In this he, like Jefferson, was prototypically Ameri-

can though his range was international, his inﬂuence extending even to

Friedrich Nietzsche (Solomon and Higgins 2000,pp.142–3;cf.pp.45,

181). His intense individualism and admiration for great men arguably could

underlie a reg ime of competitive capitalism, yet he detested the results of

that system and his intense moral commitments make him a ‘real prophet of

the progressive tradition’ (Aaron 1951,pp.3–20). Politics was necessary and

could not be ignored, but he saw it as in many ways a second-rate activity

and Emerson was also sceptical about the importance of law, leading him to

the edge of anarchism. ‘The law’, he tells us, ‘is only a memorandum’, and

‘Good men must not obey the law too well’ (Emerson 1983,pp.559, 563).

But in the face of great outrages men may be required to act. This condition

was reached in the 1850s as a consequence of the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise of 1820 which had banned slavery from the northern territo-

ries as the United States expanded westward. For years Emerson opposed

slavery and he had delivered annual addresses to celebrate emancipation in

the West Indies, but for him the last straws were the passage of the Fugitive

Slave Act in 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

Emerson saw the Fugitive Slave Act as a violation of the ‘Higher Law’,

a law endorsed by jurists from Cicero to Coke to Jefferson, according to

which immoral laws were void (Emerson 1995,p.59). From the Declara-

tion of Independence on, he claimed, the mind of America was possessed

by the idea of liberty (Emerson 1995,p.104). But the constitution was

ﬂawed because of its ‘monstrous’ concessions to slavery which had ‘blocked

the civilization and humanity of the times up to this day’ (Emerson 1995,

p. 127). The consequence was that political action became necessary. With-

out rejecting his belief in the ‘independence and the inspiration of the

individual’, but faced with the horror of slavery, he felt the need for a collec-

tive response; he could but ‘exalt the social action’ (Emerson 1995,p.103).

395

James P. Young

As Len Gougeon suggests, the slavery issue became a ‘central issue of Emer-

son’s intellectual life’ (Emerson 1995, p. xlii). Very critical of subsequent

American history, he felt the need to go back to the Revolution of 1775

to ﬁnd grounds for praise (Emerson 1995,p.143). Like Garrison, who

welcomed southern secession because ‘the covenant with death is annulled,

and the agreement with hell broken’, Emerson also celebrated the breakup

of the Union (Emerson 1995, p. xlviii). And like his friend Thoreau, he

also came to the defence of John Brown. For Emerson, ‘The end of all

political struggle, is, to establish morality as the basis of all legislation.’ This

and not freedom, republicanism or democracy is the end; the more imme-

diate political considerations are but means towards ‘a state of things which

allows every man the largest possible liberty compatible with the liberty

of every other man’ (Emer son 1995,p.153). Emerson and Thoreau are

exemplars of what George Kateb calls ‘episodic citizenship’, deﬁned as the

citizenship of ‘loosely and temporarily associated individuals who seek to

protest and end great atrocities’ (Kateb 1992,p.103).

Slavery was such

an atrocity and only with its end could a more normal course of action be

resumed.

5 The pro-slavery arguments

The pro-slavery arguments are the antithesis of the anti-slavery position,

a veritable ‘reactionary enlightenment’, as Hartz called it (Hartz 1955,pp.

145–77). They entail a total rejection of the Jeffersonian theory of natural

rights. In much southern argument, such as Senator John C. Calhoun’s,

slavery was defended as a positive good. In this view, the slaves had been

rescued from barbarism, converted to Christianity, provided with good

homes, and in exchange they provided the material base for a great new

civilisation (Dumond 1961,p.44; Hofstadter 1973,p.78). Beyond this

Calhoun masked his support of slavery in the guise of a defence of minority

rights. But Calhoun’s theory rapidly became incoherent. Like John Locke,

24 For an exploration of the philosophical substructure of Emerson’s view of slavery see Cavell 2003,

pp. 192–214. This paper, a meditation on the essay ‘Fate’, raises issues which go far beyond what

can be considered here. See Emerson 1983,pp.943–68. For Cavell on Kateb see Cavell 2003,pp.

183–91. See also Cavell 2004 for a deep Emersonian exploration of many political and other issues.

This important study appeared too late for me to give it careful consideration. Emerson, and Lincoln

too, in their emphasis on the Declaration of Independence, seem outstanding examples of Walzerian

connected critics. Consider this from Cavell: ‘When Emerson speaks of seeking our unattained

but attainable self, I cannot but hear him speaking of America as our unattained but attainable

commonwealth’ (Cavell 2004,p.69).

396

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

though much less successfully, Calhoun tried, in two posthumously pub-

lished works, to argue from ﬁrst principles. He rejected Locke and the

Declaration of Independence and, in fact, heaped heavy-handed ridicule

on Jefferson’s view that all men are created equal (Diggins 2000,p.29).

Arguing more systematically, in the Disquisition on Government he avoided

state of nature arguments and asserted that man was by nature social. But

there was always the danger that individual feelings would override social

concerns. Thus, he feared that government might be controlled by selﬁsh

men so that there was a tendency for it to abuse its powers. The ﬁrst means

to counter this was the vote (Calhoun 1992,pp.5–13). But voting in itself

is insufﬁcient and is subject to the abuse of majority power. The answer

to this dilemma is the theory of the concurrent majority, a majority that

takes conﬂicting interests into account. Repressive policies would be pos-

sible unless the majority of each section and interest was consulted before

action could be taken (Calhoun 1992,p.35). Ultimately, in the Discourse

on the Constitution and Government of the United States, he called for a dual

executive branch with each section controlling one segment and the assent

of both required to act (Calhoun 1992,pp.275–7).Butthissystemis‘pro-

foundly disintegrated’, as Hartz wrote, since its logic required protection of

minorities within minorities, so that the eventual result is the veto power

of each individual (Hartz 1955,pp.161–2;cf.Hartz1952,pp.82–5). This

intense, deeply buried individualism says something about the power of the

American liberal tradition by showing the ‘inability of the Southerners ever

to get completely away from it’ (Hartz 1955,p.154).

Of course, such

a system would have left the nation without a usable decision rule, but

more importantly, the moral strangeness of the argument is all too obvious,

since the minority right Calhoun aimed to protect was the right to enslave

another minority. The result is to reduce politics to a Hobbesian jungle.

George Fitzhugh at least had the virtue of consistency that Calhoun

lacked. Fitzhugh was rigorous in his rejection of any form of natural rights

to which a minority could appeal. Instead of Locke, he was inﬂuenced by Sir

Robert Filmer against whom the Second Treatise was aimed. Against Jefferson

he argued that most people had an inalienable right to be slaves. The problem

with northern society was laissez-faire capitalism with its duplicitous system

of allegedly free labour, under which wage labourers were slaves without

25 Consider this from Hartz: ‘If the South was neither decently revolutionary nor decently conservative,

the North was decently both.’ Garrison was ‘jabobinical’ but appealed to the tradition of the

Declaration while forcing the South to refute it, though in denouncing the constitution he could

hardly play the ‘sober traditionalist’ (Hartz 1955,p.155).

397

James P. Young

knowing it. Though he did not explicitly propose to enslave northern

workers, that was the logic of his position and he believed that ultimately

slavery would be instituted everywhere or abolished everywhere (Fitzhugh

1960; Genovese 1988,pp.118–234;cf.Hartz1955,pp.145–200). This

proved to be an important argument which was noticed in the North,

not least by Abraham Lincoln, whose ‘House Divided’ speech took up

Fitzhugh’s theme and argued that sooner or later the United States would

cease to be divided and one system or the other would triumph (Lincoln

1989a, p. 426). Unsurprisingly then, free labour became a rallying cry in

the North, even among those who cared nothing for the travails of slaves as

such.

6 Lincoln’s synthesis

The anti-slavery argument reached its moral and rhetorical climax in the

thought and practice of Abraham Lincoln who combined his theoretical

and historical analysis with the degree of political skill needed to bring an

end to slavery and to reconceptualise the nature of the American Union.

Beyond that, he achieved a powerful synthesis of most of the major lines of

American political thought that had preceded him.

Consider ﬁrst Lincoln’s argument on behalf of free labour. In this he

embraced the slogan ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’, which energised

the anti-slavery movement in the 1850s (Foner 1970). His thinking is rooted

in Locke’s theory of property, the Protestant work ethic and the producerist

ideology of the Jacksonians. In an 1859 speech Lincoln argued that labour

was the source by which all human wants were satisﬁed. He argued further

that ‘labour is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital

is the fruit of labour...’ Therefore, ‘labour is the superior – greatly the

superior – of capital’ (Lincoln 1989b, pp. 96–7). And in an 1859 letter he

argued that in case of conﬂict between personal and property rights the

man must come before the dollar (Lincoln 1989b, p. 18).

Lincoln believed that it was constitutionally and politically impossible

simply to abolish slavery. That power had been given to the states and in

the states the votes needed to amend the constitution were not yet available.

But he also believed, rightly or wrongly, that slavery would die if it could

not expand into the territories, arguing in his constantly repeated phrase

that it would be placed ‘in the course of ultimate extinction’ if it could be

26 For a good collection of other pro-slavery arguments see Faust 1981.

398

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

contained. It must be contained, he believed, because it was morally wrong

and because it violated the fundamental principles of Jefferson’s Declaration.

In his 1854 address on the Kansas–Nebraska Act, he denounced the denial

of consent inherent in slavery, saying, ‘no man is good enough to govern

another man, without that other’s consent’. And he went on to call consent

‘the leading principle – the sheet anchor – of American republicanism’,

at which point he quoted the Declaration on the necessity to obtain the

consent of the governed (Lincoln 1989a, p. 328, italics in original). In the

rhetorical and moral climax of his speech he says, ‘Our republican robe is

soiled,andtrailedinthedust...Letusturnandwashitwhite,inthespirit,

if not the blood of the Revolution . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of

Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonise with

it’ (Lincoln 1989a, pp. 339–40).

Lincoln was not a saint. He shared, at least in public statements, many of

the racial prejudices of his time and place. His ﬁrst instinct, like that of so

many others, was to free the slaves and return them to colonies in Africa.

But he recognised the impracticality of this while at the same time he shrank

from accepting the slaves as equals. Beyond this, he recognised that the great

majority of whites would also not accept this, noting, in a passage reminis-

cent of Jefferson, that ‘A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can

not be safely disregarded’ (Lincoln 1989a, p. 316). Nevertheless, four years

later, in the ﬁrst of his great debates with Stephen Douglas, he asserted that

the Negro is entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration even

if, as Douglas argued, he was not morally or intellectually equal to whites.

Founding his argument squarely on free labour, Lincoln said, ‘But in the

right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand

earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living

man’ (Lincoln 1989a, p. 512, italics in original).

On these issues Lincoln’s moral and rhetorical strategy is crucial. He

recognised the limitations of his own racial beliefs and those of his audience

and by accepting them he put himself in a position to transcend both.

Lincoln honoured Jefferson for placing an ‘abstract truth, applicable to

all men and all times’ at the heart of the Declaration (Lincoln 1989b,

p. 19).

But he overcame Jeffer son’s hesitation by insisting on the egalitarian

implications of the Declaration, putting himself, and perhaps his audience

27 In Maier 1997 the author argues that Lincoln misconstrued Jefferson’s argument, but, even if so,

Lincoln’s reading has become the historical standard.

399

James P. Young

too, in a position where the logic of equality must be accepted because it is

implicit in the logic of the Declaration (Burt 1999,pp.692–3).

The Declaration of Independence also played a large role in Lincoln’s

theoretical reconstruction of the relations of state and nation under the

constitution. The key is the reference at the start of the Gettysburg Address

to the founding of a new nation ‘four score and seven years ago’. Thus,

Lincoln argued that the Declaration marked the beginning of the histor y

of a ‘nation’ rather than a union of essentially sovereign states. On this

point he was in opposition to Jefferson and his intellectual descendants

such as Calhoun. Pursuant to the theory of nulliﬁcation developed in the

Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, Calhoun, in what proved to be essen-

tially a trial run for the defence of slavery, had actually proposed nulliﬁ-

cation of a tariff in 1832, but in this he was ﬁrmly resisted by Andrew

Jackson, who on that issue abandoned his Jeffersonian principles and

adopted a nationalist position. However, the idea of a radically decentralised

compact between states was nevertheless advanced with renewed intensity

as the controversy over slavery deepened in the thirty years before the Civil

Wa r.

The southern position was that the constitution was essentially an agreed

institutional framework from which the parties could withdraw at will.

Following the election of the anti-slavery Lincoln as President in 1860,

southern states began to act on their theory. In his First Inaugural Address

Lincoln ﬁrmly denied their right to secede on grounds of both consti-

tutional and democratic theory. The Union, he argued, was older than

the states. It was formed by the Articles of Association in 1774, matured

in the Declaration of Independence, and further matured in the Articles

of Confederation of 1778. And he pointed out that the constitution was

ordained and established ‘to form a more perfect union’. It follows that no

state can leave the union on its own motion (Lincoln 1989b, pp. 217–18;cf.

pp. 254–9). But beyond this constitutional history, he argued that there were

powerful democratic considerations. The central idea of secession, Lincoln

argued, is ‘the essence of anarchy’. A constitutionally constrained majority

is the only ‘true sovereign of a free people’. Unanimity is not possible, and

minority rule is inadmissible, so that if majority rule is rejected, the alter-

natives are anarchy or despotism (Lincoln 1989b, p. 220). The doctrine of

states’ rights waxes and wanes, and the validity of Lincoln’s constitutional

28 See Hartz 1952. See also Davis 2003,p.79.

400

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

history is debated, but on the issue of secession his position triumphed.

The doctrine of states’ rights had been ‘stretched to’ and ‘beyond its limits’

(McDonald 2000,p.191). As the war went on, Lincoln referred more and

more to the nation instead of the Union and the nature of the United States

was transformed (McPherson 1990, p. viii; Wills 1992).

Initially the problem for Lincoln had been to preserve the Union, contain

slavery, and thereby put it on the path to extinction. But note that preser-

vation of the Union, as he saw it, was a means to end slavery within the

terms of the existing constitution. However, a new war aim, the abolition of

slavery, began to replace preservation of the Union. This aim transformed

the nature of the struggle and also circumvented Lincoln’s concern that the

constitution made outright abolition impossible. He argued that opponents

of emancipation ‘cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the gov-

ernment, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt’ (quoted

in McPherson 1990,p.36). This empowered him to issue the somewhat

limited Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 which applied only to territory

not in Union control, followed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the con-

stitution which ﬁnally banned slavery, a measure which Lincoln, in spite of

earlier hesitation based on constitutional limitations, energetically backed

(Vorenberg 2001,pp.180–2, 198–9).

Lincoln achieved his synthesis of the main currents of American politi-

cal thought in language that echoes the terms of the ideolog ical consensus

described by Hofstadter and Hartz. Locke’s labour theory of property is

there, as well as the Protestant work ethic derived from the Puritans, and,

in spite of the fact that Lincoln had been a Whig, the producerist ideol-

ogy of the Jacksonian Democrats. Above all Lincoln drew on the central

egalitarian idea of Jefferson’s Lockean Declaration. As David Bromwich

suggests, the promise of the constitution could only begin to be realised ‘by

being rendered consistent with the Declaration’ (Bromwich 2001,p.24).

But if anything Lincoln went beyond Locke and Jefferson in that he hinted

at a willingness to extend equality and rights beyond white men (Diggins

2000,pp.31–2). Moreover, Lincoln subtly reinterpreted the Lockean idea.

Locke had postulated an equality in the state of nature which began to

be lost in society. But for Lincoln, society ‘is constituted by a movement

toward a condition in which the equality is actual’ (Jaffa 1959,p.321).

29 Samuel Beer sides with Lincoln, Forrest McDonald with the compact theory. See Beer 1993,

pp. 8–15; McDonald 2000,pp.7–11.

30 For a fuller statement of my understanding of the relation of Lincoln to the American political

tradition see Young 1996,pp.114–25.

401

James P. Young

There is therefore a potential radicalism in this version of natural rights

egalitarianism.

And yet the war did not lead to radical egalitarianism. The Garrisonians,

for all their anti-political limitations, turned out to be right. It took revolu-

tion, war and a repudiation of the old constitution to end slavery. But that

alone was not enough. It turned out that the eradication of slavery had to be

root and branch, that racist ideology ran deep, and that failure to eradicate

that ideology would fail to achieve a full emancipation from the trauma of

slavery (Woodward 1971,pp.143, 161;cf.Kraditor1969 and Young 1996,

pp. 122–5).

7 The new nation

No one has ever presided over a more fundamental transformation of the

United States than did Lincoln. In fact the transformation was greater than

perhaps he understood. Neither side in the Civil War achieved what it

hoped for. Lincoln essentially had tried to preserve Jacksonian America,

‘the world of the small shop, the independent farm, and the village artisan’,

a world that was swept away by the modernising force of the war. The South

had tried and failed to preserve slavery, but succeeded only in creating a

soon to be lost opportunity for the pre-modern classes, poor whites and ex-

slaves to band together in opposition to planter control. This, Eric Foner

writes, ‘is the trag ic irony of that conﬂict. Each side fought to defend

a vision of the good society, but each vision was destroyed by the very

struggle to preserve it’ (Foner 1980,pp.32–3). The South lost its slaves,

but Reconstruction, after a promising start, was a failure, the Fourteenth

and Fifteenth Amendments to the constitution, designed for the beneﬁt

of former slaves, fell into desuetude for that purpose, and instead became

bulwarks for the defence of corporate rights, while former slaves continued

to be degraded and sentimental myths about the southern ‘lost cause’ were

triumphant (Blight 2001;DuBois1992; Foner 1988;H.C.Richardson

2001; Woodward 1966). And there were major intellectual consequences as

well, since the horrors of the war seemed to undermine the moral certainties

that fuelled the abolitionist movement, thus opening the way for the later

emergence of pragmatism (Menand 2001, esp. pp. x–xii, 3–68).

With the destruction of the most deeply anti-liberal American social

institution, the liberalism Hartz saw as dominant from the start triumphed

in theor y, though frequently not in practice. In practice, the plight of the

slaves was rapidly forgotten while the nation was faced with the explosive

402

From Jeffersonian republicanism to progressivism

growth of industrial capitalism, rapid urbanisation, waves of immigration

and deep economic and political corruption (Adams 1958,pp.159–89,

1963,pp.268–83; Fine 1956,p.24; Hofstadter 1973,pp.162–82; Josephson

1963). A new legitimating theory was required for the new order and it

came in the form of an English import, Social Darwinism.

Among the wealthy, Herbert Spencer, Darwin’s great populariser, enjoyed

an enormous vogue in nineteenth-century America (Hofstadter 1992,

pp. 31–50). His primary Amer ican disciple was the Yale University social

scientist William Graham Sumner. The spirit of Sumner’s thought is aptly

captured by the title of his essay, ‘The Absurd Attempt to Make the World

Over’ (Sumner 1963,pp.168–80). Sumner pursued this theme by welding

together a mix of ﬁercely competitive individualism, laissez-faire economics,

and a Darwinian theory of social struggle (Hofstadter 1992,p.51). He

rejected natural rights egalitarianism in Jefferson’s sense, claiming that rights

‘do not pertain to results, but only to chances’. Thus, he embraced the

pursuit of happiness, but rejected guarantees of other rights (Sumner 1989,

p. 141). What remained was struggle. In Sumner’s world, the ﬁttest would

survive, the nation would prosper, and the accumulation of large fortunes

was not to be regretted. To set limits on accumulation ‘would be like killing

off our generals in war’ (Sumner 1989,pp.47–8). Without much con-

sistency he simultaneously worried about the development of plutocracy

which he considered to be the enemy of democracy. All civilised societies,

he believed, tend towards plutocracy but the danger was particularly acute

in the United States. He saw clearly the threat of untoward interest group

pressure: ‘The lobby’, he prophetically wrote, ‘is the army of plutocracy.’

But government can be of no help. The nature of the problem was clear.

‘How can we get bad legislators to pass a law which shall hinder bad legisla-

tors from passing a bad law?’ (Sumner 1989,p.94). Given the unlikelihood

that this could successfully be accomplished, he thought it better to do

nothing.

The greatest vice of plutocracy was ‘jobbery’ in the form of dubious ‘le-

gislative charters, watering stocks, etc., etc’, conditions which were indeed

rampant and which he saw with some clarity (Sumner 1989,p.122). The

loser from such machinations or any attempts to regulate them was likely to

be the ‘forgotten man’, a phrase to be resurrected later for quite different

purposes by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The forgotten man was the ‘honest,

sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts

and his taxes, supporting the church and the school, reading his party news-

paper, and cheering for his pet politician’ (Sumner 1989,p.126). But given

403