C o n s e rv a t i s m a n d Southern Intellectuals 1789–1861
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C o n s e rv a t i s m a n d Southern Intellectuals 1789–1861
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C o n s e rvat i s m a n d Southern I n t e l l e c t ua l s 1789–1861
8 iberty, radition, and the ood ociety
Adam L. Tate
U n i v e r s i t y o f M i s s o u r i P re s s C o lu m b i a a n d L o n d o n
Copyright © by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tate, Adam L., – Conservatism and southern intellectuals, – : liberty, tradition, and the good society / Adam L. Tate. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ---X (alk. paper) . Conservatism—Southern States—History—th century. . Conservatism—Southern States—History—th century. . Southern States—Intellectual life—th century. . Southern States—Intellectual life—th century. I. Title. F.T .''—dc This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z., . Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Adobe Garamond
To m y pa re n ts Lloyd A. Tate, Jr., and Janelle Schexnaildre Tate
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C o n t e n ts
8 Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
I n t ro d u c t i o n Understanding Southern Conservatism
One Th e O l d R e p u b l i c a n s John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke
wo S e pa r at i n g S tat e a n d S o c i e t y The Political Principles of the Old Republicans
hree Jo h n Tay lo r, Jo h n R a n d o l ph , a n d t h e G o o d S o c i e t y
our A n t e b e l lu m P ro s l ave ry I n t e l l e c t ua l s Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms
ive Th e Po l i t i c a l P r i n c i p l e s o f Tu c k e r a n d S i m m s
ix I m ag i n i n g t h e C o n s e rvat i v e S l ave S o c i e t y The Social Thought of Tucker and Simms
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C o n t e n ts
even Wh i g H u m o r i s ts Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper
ight Th e Wh i g Po l i t i c a l Th o u g h t o f Ba l dw i n a n d H o o pe r
ine Th e Wh i g S o c i a l Th o u g h t o f Ba l dw i n a n d H o o pe r
C o n c lu s i o n A p pe n d i x Wo r k s C i t e d Index
Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
8 In writing a book, one incurs many personal debts that would take a lifetime to repay. Many friends and colleagues have helped to make this book a reality. This project began as my dissertation at the University of Alabama under the direction of Forrest McDonald. Professor McDonald has been a model mentor and scholar for me. He and his wife, Ellen Shapiro McDonald, have given me much guidance in this project, and I am thankful for their expertise and critical readings of my work. I appreciate the financial assistance during my time in graduate school offered by the University of Alabama and the Earhart Foundation. I would like to thank other scholars who have assisted me in my research and writing. The late Professor Garry Mills, Professor Lawrence Kohl, and Professor George Rable of the University of Alabama offered excellent criticisms of the work. I profited from their views. I thank too Robert Jackson and Kevin Schmiesing who read parts of the book and made helpful suggestions. Steve Klugewicz has encouraged me to sharpen my thinking about southern intellectuals during our many discussions. I thank Professor Benjamin Alexander of the Franciscan University of Steubenville for inspiring my interest in southern intellectual history during a course in southern literature more than a decade ago. Friends and family have encouraged my scholarly pursuits. James Lenneman and the late William Bilton read earlier versions of the book. I appreciate their attention to detail. I thank too Charles Rumore, who has engaged me regularly on the subject of southern political and economic thought over the past ten years. He has been a great friend. Abbot Cletus Meagher, O.S.B., and Rev. Joel Martin, O.S.B., of St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, often provided me with a quiet place to read and write. My parents, Lloyd A. Tate, Jr., and Janelle Schexnaildre Tate, nourished my interest in history and taught me the value of hard work and discipline. Finally, I thank my wife, Eugenie, and my children, Nathan, Andrew, and Clare, for great companionship and support, making my hours away from research and writing most enjoyable. ix
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C o n s e rvat i s m a n d Southern I n t e l l e c t ua l s 1789–1861
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Introduction Understanding Southern Conservatism
8 In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville tried to explain to Europeans the novelty of American civilization. For Tocqueville the difference between America and Europe came down to social equality of condition. Many Europeans suspected that a democratic country like the United States would endure frequent political revolution and social turmoil, but Tocqueville pointed out that American society was quite conservative and resistant to radical change. He wrote: “Not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of revolutions, but they are afraid of them. All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property; not only are they possessed of property, but they live in the condition where men set the greatest store upon their property.” Widespread property ownership diffused radicalism. Scholars of American history have repeated Tocqueville’s insight. Many historians, pointing to the institution of slavery and the means by which antebellum southerners defended it, have argued that the southern experience was predominantly conservative. But the characterization of the South as conservative suffers from vagueness that often afflicts convenient labels. The major difficulty arises from the meaning of “conservative.” As Frank S. Meyer, a twentieth-century American author, wrote: “Conservatism, after all, is a relative term. The question is: what do you want to conserve?” He recognized that conservative ideologies can vary according to the ends they seek. Meyer defined American conservatism as devotion “to the preservation, maintenance, and extension” of the “tradition of the West and the tradition of the American republic.” His definition is useful as long as one understands that the phrases “tradition of the West” and the . Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, –. . Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, , , .
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“tradition of the American republic” are, and were, open to different interpretations. Meyer understood that conservatism was primarily an intellectual response and that American conservatism differed significantly from European conservatism. Southern conservatives sought different ends than did European conservatives. Southern conservatism derived its peculiar characteristics from its acceptance of aspects of John Locke’s political theory articulated during the American Revolution. The radicalism of Locke’s theory of constitutionalism can be appreciated against the backdrop of seventeenth-century English political thought that treated political elites and social elites as one and the same. The state supported the social order through coercive laws and practices. With order maintained through force and custom, state and society appeared inseparable. In striking contrast, Locke argued that the state was an artificial institution separated from society. If the state was distinct from society, then it was artificial and could be manipulated and reformed by men. English republicans, Locke, and Enlightenment philosophes such as Montesquieu all explored this idea. For Americans of , their ideas coalesced in the opening lines of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. . . . Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” Constructing governments according to good principles became very important. After the Revolution, Americans constructed state and federal constitutions to protect liberty and promote political happiness. Constitutions drew boundaries around government power and set limits to how government could act upon society. Eighteenth-century libertarian theory, especially as espoused by the Lockean-influenced Cato’s Letters of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, emphasized insulating society as much as possible from state interference to preserve life, liberty, and property. Many . Thomas Paine, Common Sense, . Lockean and republican language coexisted and overlapped at times. See Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” ; Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, –. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Peter S. Onuf, “Reflections on the Founding: Constitutional Historiography in Bicentennial Perspective,” –. Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke.
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Americans agreed. But Lockean thought created a major dilemma. If the state and society were theoretically separate and the state’s role was limited to a negative, protective function in relation to society, then what should a newly free society look like? Liberty, by definition, provided a range of choices. American society could develop in a variety of ways. In a world of many possibilities, the problem of imagining, creating, and improving the good society challenged Americans after the Revolution. The problem can be stated in another fashion: if American patriots viewed state and society as necessarily separate and that separation as vital for the preservation of liberty and happiness, then how could social order among free men be maintained without the state’s coercive oversight? What exactly constituted a free society? The answers to these troublesome questions reveal the great diversity and excitement of the American experiment. Americans selected different means to create and protect the good society, ranging from religion to secular reform to slavery to a voluntary social order to a modified traditionalism. Southern conservatism can be best understood within the context of the separation of the state from society. When southern conservatives accepted the libertarian separation of state and society, they acknowledged a novus ordo seclorum. Even those who rejected the libertarian insistence that the state should play no positive role in society accepted intellectually that society and government were two different entities. Southern conservatives could be classical liberals in their politics, but could desire a more traditional society. This was not schizophrenic thinking, but instead an intellectual possibility built into the American experiment. The United States could be both conservative and radical, in an eighteenth-century sense, at the same time. Therefore, the South was not, as Louis Hartz wrote in his monumental The Liberal Tradition in America, “an alien child in a liberal family, tortured and confused, driven to a fantasy life.” Antebellum southern conservatives simply tried to preserve a measure of tradition within a liberal state. Trying to understand and carry out their conservative . Forrest McDonald, in his masterpiece on the Constitution, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, writes: “In the truest sense of the terms, the reformation of the Constitution was simultaneously a conservative and a radical act. The word conservative derives from the Latin conservare, meaning ‘to guard, defend, preserve.’ Radical derives from the Latin radix, meaning ‘root, base, foundation’; to be radical is to get at the root of a matter. No abstract speculative doctrines could inform such an undertaking, and both for that reason and because of the incompatibilities amongst the doctrines themselves, the political theories and ideologies at the command of the Framers were . . . of
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visions in a society deeply affected by a modern political revolution was no small task. Southern conservatives, moreover, were not a monolithic group; rather, they approached this task in various ways. There are a few possible ways in which to revisit the intellectual history of antebellum southern conservatism. One could examine in brief detail a great number of conservatives in the antebellum South and establish their similarities through brief quotations from their writings and speeches. A corollary to this approach would be to take several important ideas or themes of antebellum conservatism and line up quotations from antebellum southerners that supported and explained them. Another approach would be to choose a few important thinkers and examine their lives and writings in detail, hoping that they represented broader trends. The first method and its corollary risk missing the intricacies of southern conservative thought by taking both the individuals and their texts out of context and thus glossing over real differences among conservatives. By seeking a broader sample, the method chances inaccuracy. The second method can give a deeper treatment of southern conservatism while respecting the context of its subjects. It too, however, hazards distorting southern conservatism because of the small number of thinkers examined. While recognizing the risk involved, this study uses the second method because it offers the possibility of an in-depth historical study of important thinkers and their works. As Robert Brugger has pointed out, historians need to move away temporarily from overarching interpretations of the Old South and examine individual thinkers in order to demonstrate how southern thought developed and to discover the intentions of antebellum intellectuals. Focusing on the period between the ratification of the Constitution limited practical use. Those theories and ideologies helped to shape the political perspectives of the Framers and helped them to define their goals, to be sure; but as Dickinson said, experience, both their own and that of the mother country, provided the surer guide” (). McDonald states well the interesting position of Americans at the end of the eighteenth century. They read deeply in Enlightenment sources that helped to shape their goals—a free state and free society—but they also realized that experience, that is, their inherited culture, played a key role in the ways they tried to shape their world. Thus this inherent tension in the American experience between tradition and liberty arose. For the Hartz quote see The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, . . Leslie Wharton, Polity and the Public Good. Robert Brugger, “The Mind of the Old South: New Views,” –. Another interesting idea, one that I briefly mention, is that of David Moltke-Hansen concerning a generational approach to southern history. See “Be-
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and the secession crisis of –, this book examines six important individuals and pays close attention to how they dealt with some of the important political and social issues of the period: states’ rights, republicanism, slavery, sectionalism, religion, and western expansion and migration. There was widespread agreement among antebellum southern conservatives on political and constitutional principles, giving the illusion that they were all of one mind. But southern conservatives differed in their ideas of the good society and what was needed to “preserve, maintain, and extend” it. Southern intellectuals, therefore, faced the same problem that other Americans faced: building free societies while maintaining a free political order. The existence of the inherently authoritarian and coercive institution of slavery made their task even more challenging. The book is divided into three sections. Section one analyzes the development of southern conservatism after by treating the political and social thought of Jeffersonian purists John Randolph and John Taylor. The dominant southern political conservatism of the antebellum period, with its rallying cry of states’ rights, originated with the Jeffersonian Republican opposition of the s. The Jeffersonians perceived the financial program of Alexander Hamilton as a return to the mercantilism of the colonial era and feared that his political nationalism would consolidate government in the United States and subvert the confederate nature of the Union. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions expressed Jeffersonian constitutionalism in succinct fashion. These “Principles of ’98” became rallying cries for southern conservatives. During Jefferson’s presidency, some of his southern supporters, called the “Old Republicans” or Tertium Quid, began to view him as a hypocrite and a threat to the pure republican tradition. These opponents, led by John Randolph of Roanoke and, later, John Taylor of Caroline, self-consciously sought to conserve the “old” principles of the s, the principles of their “tradition.” Although allied politically, Taylor and Randolph possessed contrary visions of the good society, revealing tween Plantation and Frontier: The South of William Gilmore Simms,” in John C. Guilds and Caroline Collins, eds., William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, –. . The historiographical debates over the antebellum South have been vicious at times. My study tries to address the major historiographical positions. For the major schools of thought and a few important works supporting each position, consult the appendix. . Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson. Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina should not be discounted as a central figure in the Old Republican movement. I did not have the space for him here.
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the diversity within the Old Republican movement. Randolph wanted a traditional society whereas Taylor was comfortable with a modern social order. Sections two and three discuss southern conservatism during the antebellum period. Section two examines the lives and thought of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms. Tucker was the half brother of John Randolph and the son of the famous Virginia jurist St. George Tucker. William Gilmore Simms, the foremost man of letters in the Old South, lived in South Carolina and examined conservative themes in his many writings. Tucker and Simms repeated many of the states’ rights doctrines outlined by the Old Republicans. In terms of their social thought, they relied on slavery as the guarantor of a conservative southern society. Section three considers the Whig humorists Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper. The southern Whigs unfortunately have received short shrift from historians of southern conservatism, but more recent scholarship on the Whigs has revealed a strong modern conservative element within the party. Baldwin and Hooper inverted the ideas of Edmund Burke. Whereas Burke emphasized the preservation of traditional institutions, manners, and mores to blunt the force of the Enlightenment politics, philosophy, and culture, Baldwin and Hooper advocated the creation of traditional institutions to strengthen frontier society. Social order had to be created from chaos before it could be conserved. Baldwin and Hooper appreciated freedom and loathed a return to a traditional society ordered through coercion. Both men concerned themselves with sectional themes, defending slavery and, in Hooper’s case, agitating for an independent southern nation. The three groupings of conservatives—Old Republicans, proslavery intellectuals, and Whig humorists—are not rigid divisions. Beverley Tucker was a Whig, while his friend Simms was a lifelong Democrat. J. J. Hooper moved from Democrat to Whig to southern nationalist. Baldwin left the South in the s to seek his fortune in California. The six conservatives surveyed here had family and personal connections. Randolph and Taylor were friends and allies. Tucker and Randolph were half brothers. Baldwin . On the Whigs, see Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs. John Ashworth, ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1–. William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery. Major Wilson, “The Concept of Time and the Political Dialogue in the United States, –,” .
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and Hooper knew each other, and Simms had read their works. Baldwin wrote an interesting life of Randolph and was clearly fascinated with his conduct and thought. Tucker was familiar with Taylor’s writings and had met many of the original Old Republicans through Randolph. It should also be noted that the six conservatives were of similar economic status. They were either planters or middle-class professionals. Thus their intellectual differences cannot be explained by their economic status alone. Though they lived in different parts of the South and in different generations, most of the southern conservatives examined in this book desired a unified southern intellectual movement and homogenous southern culture. Their disagreements, however, prevented them from creating a common southern social vision to accompany their states’ rights political tradition. Southern conservatism tells much about the complexity and intellectual challenge of the American experience. In order to comprehend antebellum southern conservatism, one must understand the different views of society southern conservatives espoused.
ne THE OLD REPUBLICANS John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke
8 The debate over the ratification of the Constitution formally ended in when George Washington became the first president of the United States. As with many ideological battles, however, the vanquished never completely disappeared. In the South, especially in Virginia, many former anti-Federalists, who had presented vigorous defenses of republican society and the principles of the Revolution, continued to oppose the Constitution. New political battles formed in the s over Alexander Hamilton’s financial system. The Jeffersonian movement attracted many anti-Federalists and formulated its localist, decentralized view of politics in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions penned by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively, in . The election of Jefferson to the presidency in placed the opposition in power and produced a self-conscious southern conservatism based on strict Jeffersonian and anti-Federalist principles. During Jefferson’s second term in office, southern conservatism took political form in the Tertium Quid, or Old Republican, movement, which opposed Jefferson’s centralizing policies in office. Led by John Randolph of Roanoke and the ideas of John Taylor of Caroline, the Old Republicans blended anti-Federalism, Virginia’s legal culture, the “Principles of ’98” taken from the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and the thought of British conservative Edmund Burke to create a constellation of ideas that has been classified as southern conservatism. A few historical accounts of the Old Republicans have been essayed. Norman K. Risjord’s The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatives in the Age of Jefferson () portrayed the Old Republicans as agrarian liberal cranks who were out of touch with their age. They could not adapt to quickly changing American society and thus condemned it. Risjord characterized the Quids in terms of Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America. The 8
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Old Republicans celebrated Lockean liberalism and its premises of “liberty from government” and “freedom of the individual.” Philosophically, the Old Republicans were not conservatives. Rather their conservatism was psychological—a “resistance to change” and “a reluctance to adopt political programs to the felt needs of the times.” Thus the Old Republicans “broke with Jefferson, not because he was a Liberal, but because he was not Liberal enough.” Risjord’s Old Republicans were conservative liberals whose ideological confusion and psychological backwardness produced an impotent political movement. Risjord’s work offers excellent analysis of Old Republican politics but conceptually the book falters on two counts: a reliance on Hartz’s categories and a failure to examine in detail the Old Republican distinction between state and society. Perhaps the difficulty in interpretation arises from the word “liberal.” In a strict Lockean sense, it would mean that autonomous individuals contract together to form a government to protect their lives, liberty, and property. If that government broke the contract, the contracting parties could overthrow the government and form a new one. Risjord correctly saw striking parallels between the Lockean prescription for politics and the Old Republican calls for strict construction and secession. Adding to this resemblance Hartz’s contention that because America lacked a feudal past with set social orders it lacked true conservatism, Risjord classified the Old Republicans as liberals. The Old Republicans, however, did not adopt Locke wholesale. Their understanding of the social contract differed in an important way. They believed that political communities, the states, rather than autonomous individuals created the United States. The Old Republicans usually disagreed with liberalism’s view of man as a rational individual who could reconstruct his world through reason alone. Some Old Republicans, such as John Randolph, celebrated a traditional, localist American social order, while others, such as John Taylor, felt more comfortable with a modern social order that left men alone to pursue their private interests. Calling the Old Republicans “liberals” is vague and does not explain their different social views. Risjord missed the significance of the Old Republicans’ distinction between the state and society, which they adopted from Locke and English republican thought. Briefly put, the Old Republicans believed that the . Risjord, The Old Republicans, , . Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America.
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state should be kept separate from society in order to preserve freedom. They thought that the tendency of the state in the modern world was to chip away at the independence of society through intrusive legislation that sapped individual responsibility and self-government in the name of reform. Many Old Republicans opposed the expansion of government power because it destroyed traditional societies based on the family and other institutions such as churches, schools, and farms. They shared with Burke the concern that the revolutionary state would centralize power by destroying society. In their attempts to protect and bolster local bases of social power, the Old Republicans were conservatives. In their attempts to restrict the size and scope of government, they shared in the English libertarian tradition, particularly in its manifestation in Cato’s Letters. Southern conservatism has been hard to grasp fully because of these disparate intellectual influences. In R. Kent Newmyer published an important article on the Old Republicans entitled “John Marshall and the Southern Constitutional Tradition.” He argued that the nationalism of the Jeffersonian Republicans conditioned the response of the Old Republicans to their most potent enemy, John Marshall. Although the Old Republican movement coalesced in opposition to Jeffersonian nationalism, the movement did not gain many adherents until Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee () and McCulloch v. Maryland (). By the primary enemy of the Old Republicans shifted to the Marshall Court. Newmyer maintained that the McCulloch decision generated “a powerful states’ rights, anti-Court movement that dominated American constitutional and political history for thirty years.” The Old Republican positions gained in popularity in the South after because southern states, needing an intellectual system to justify their attempts to reclaim the authority to interpret the Constitution, seized what was at hand, the ideology of the Old Republicans. Later in the s, southern states’ rights theorists realized that the Constitution itself was the problem. Marshall had revealed to them that the Constitution “was a Trojan horse of radical social and economic transformation.” Newmyer rightly indicated the great significance of the Old Republican movement for antebellum southern thought. . R. Kent Newmyer, “John Marshall and the Southern Constitutional Tradition,” in Kermit Hall and James W. Ely, eds., An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South, , .
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Another important work on the Old Republicans is F. Thornton Miller’s Juries and Judges versus the Law: Virginia’s Provincial Legal Culture (). Miller argued that southern conservatism, as expressed by the Virginia Doctrine of states’ rights theory, had its basis not in defending slavery but in the anti-Federalist reaction to the Constitution and the proposed reform of the colonial legal order in Virginia. He discussed the state political fight between reformers, who wanted to concentrate power in the state government in Richmond, and the conservatives, who wanted to keep power on a local level in the country court system run by the gentry. Reformers such as St. George Tucker, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison succeeded in pushing through structural reforms, but the realities of Virginia life negated their impact. Miller showed that Virginia conservatives, many of whom were Old Republicans on the national political scene, fought centralized government on not only the federal level but also the state level. Men such as John Randolph and Spencer Roane defended local bastions of power, the Virginia common law, and the rights of juries as a power of self-government. The conservatives laid the groundwork for the Virginia Doctrine. They believed that there was “no sanction for using the law to build a nation or an empire, to reform government and society, or to compromise property rights to develop the economy.” Their ideology was “provincial, conservative, elitist, and libertarian.” They found “security in diversity, pluralism, and decentralization.” After Virginians united to fight federal attempts to seize the state’s power to interpret the Constitution. John Taylor of Caroline articulated fully the Virginia Doctrine and brought together a powerful antebellum political movement. Miller concluded that the ideas of Virginia’s Old Republicans became a model for defending local power in the states’ rights movement in the South. The Old Republicans, therefore, formed the basis of southern political conservatism in the early Republic. Southern conservatives after the s repeated their arguments concerning state sovereignty, states’ rights, the Constitution, sectionalism, and economic policy. The first part of this book will discuss Old Republican thought and its legacy by examining two Old Republicans: John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke.
R . F. Thornton Miller, Juries and Judges versus the Law: Virginia’s Provincial Legal Perspective, –, x, xii, .
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John Taylor, who in the s became the chief pamphleteer of the burgeoning Jeffersonian Republican movement, was born on December , , into a Virginia gentry family. His father died when the boy was three years old, and his uncle, the renowned Virginia lawyer and statesman Edmund Pendleton, reared him. Pendleton was a judge on the county court in Caroline County and provided Taylor with an education typical for the Tidewater gentry of the time. The young Taylor was educated by tutors and briefly attended a private school run by a Scotsman named Donald Robertson, where James Madison was his classmate. The curriculum focused on learning languages, particularly Latin, Greek, and French. In he attended William and Mary College and was listed as an alumnus for that year. After leaving William and Mary, Taylor read law under his uncle Pendleton and was admitted to the bar in , on the eve of the Revolution. The American Revolution had a profound influence on the young Taylor, teaching him political lessons he would remember for the rest of his life. Initially he served in Virginia in and , but he traveled north in to fight the British. He became acutely aware of the corruption in the Continental army. Writing to Edmund Pendleton in , he charged that soldiers were “sacrificed for the private emolument of commissaries, quartermasters, surgeons, physicians, barrack masters, and captains.” He also remarked on the poor character of northern troops, “The armies of the northern states are really mercenaries, and being foreigners, have no attachment to the country, except what accrues from the emoluments of the service.” The defense of America had to “revert to its original safeguard . . . the yeomanry.” He told Pendleton, “Hope for the best, but at the same time fear the worst; I wish, I wish from my soul we had more Virginias than one, but as we have not, the honor of preserving America must be acquired by one alone.” Taylor believed that the South had protected the nation’s honor and had borne the brunt of the war effort. After failing to . Henry H. Simms, Life of John Taylor: The Story of a Brilliant Leader in the Early Virginia State Rights School, –. Scholars have long appreciated the significance of John Taylor of Caroline to the Jeffersonian Republican Party. For a discussion of the historiography on Taylor see the appendix. . See Taylor’s Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, chap. , in which he argued that freedom both of religion and of property were the important lessons taught by the American Revolution. Simms, Life of John Taylor, –.
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be promoted despite his good performance in battle, Taylor resigned in and returned to Virginia. Taylor was elected to the Virginia legislature and served almost continuously from to . After taking his seat, Taylor became involved with the Enlightenment project of establishing religious freedom in Virginia. Over the protests of his uncle, he voted for the disestablishment of the Church of England in and throughout the s continued to support legislation that chipped away at its influence in the state. In Taylor presented a bill to establish a land office in Virginia. The purpose of the bill was to raise state revenue by selling western lands of poor quality to foreigners at a cheap price. The money raised would be applied to paying off the state debt, which Taylor detested as a source of political corruption. His devotion to Oppositionist principles and republicanism would persist. Once the Revolution ended, Taylor devoted himself more diligently to law and politics. In he married Lucy Penn, his cousin and the daughter of John Penn, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Lucy bore him six sons and two daughters. John Penn willed him fifteen slaves, and by the mid s Taylor began to establish himself as a planter and slaveowner. In he owned twenty-seven slaves, but as he made money as a lawyer, he purchased more slaves and land, paying only in cash in order to avoid the credit trap that had ensnared so many Virginia planters. Taylor was largely a self-made man who had created his planter status through hard work. During his years of active legal practice, Taylor earned ten thousand dollars a year, a large sum at the time. Taylor had a mind for the particularities of the law and chose to interpret it narrowly and strictly in most cases. Some of Taylor’s legal arguments, particularly his opinion on the constitutionality of a federal carriage tax, became popular among southern conservatives. . Simms, Life of John Taylor, –, –. In Taylor presented his arguments against the carriage tax levied by Congress before the Circuit Court of the United States in Virginia. His argument was published in pamphlet form despite the fact that he lost the case. He presented an anti-Federalist interpretation of the Constitution and warned that direct federal taxation on Virginia carriages would allow a sectional majority to take over Congress and tax its rival section out of existence. Taylor warned that the same logic of the government on the issue of the carriage tax could be used against slavery later. He thought that the government wanted a precedent established through the carriage tax so that it could grab more taxation power later. John Taylor, An Argument Respecting the Constitu-
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Taylor had been an anti-Federalist in , like many Virginians, but the Virginia legislature elected him to the United States Senate in . In the Senate he was viciously anti-Hamiltonian, and his writings and speeches during his time of service laid the ideological groundwork for the Jeffersonian opposition to the Hamiltonian financial system. As soon as he took his seat in Congress, Taylor attacked the national bank, the cornerstone of Hamilton’s financial system. In he published two influential pamphlets attacking Hamilton, An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures and Definition of Parties, or Political Effects of the Party System Considered. Both pamphlets strongly expressed Taylor’s libertarian republicanism. The first line of the Enquiry laid out its purpose: “No free government or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” According to Taylor, the fundamental principles were the republican ideology of the Revolution. Americans, after emerging free and victorious from their fight for independence, had become lazy, and a secret aristocracy based on “paper and patronage” was plotting to take away their freedom. “National watchfulness is the only preservative of liberty,” he charged. The Constitution was not the place for appealing to political principles because it had been misconstrued by political “heretics” who interpreted the document out of their own self-interest rather than out of concern for the public good. These “heretics” would not listen to any argument based solely on the Constitution, and, therefore, he had to appeal to the political principles of republicanism for support. Political power, he speculated in Definition of Parties, had been “transferred from the nation to a paper fabrick, erected, neither by the people, nor by the constitution, but by the government.” In the Enquiry he wrote that the national bank, “the master key of that system, which governs the administration,” promoted the new money aristocracy that gained more power through increased wealth and would ultimately subvert the American Republic. In Definition of Parties, he warned, “Usurpations upon constitutional principles, if suffered to acquire maturity, will only yield to the dreadful remedy of a civil war; but if faced in their infancy, an amputation may be adventured without danger to the body politick.” The solution was simple: “a constitutional expulsion of a stock-jobbing paper interest, in every shape, tionality of the Carriage Tax, . Robert E. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican, –.
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out of the national legislature.” The destruction of the paper system could begin and the “phalanx of privileged orders” would in turn collapse. Taylor resigned from the Senate in , disgusted by the lack of true men of principle in Congress, and returned home. In he served as a presidential elector for Thomas Jefferson and was reelected to the Virginia legislature, where he remained until . Taylor sat on all the important committees in the legislature, but his greatest contribution to the history of Virginia was his sponsorship and defense of Madison’s Virginia Resolutions. Taylor despaired during John Adams’s administration, even contemplating secession in and as a means of opposing the suppression of republicanism by Federalist policies. In Taylor rose to defend the Virginia Resolutions in the legislature. In his opening remarks on December , he argued that a constitution, which he defined as “a deed of trust made by the people to the government,” was supposed to protect republican liberties. He affirmed the principle of strict construction and drew upon examples from the seventeenth-century struggles with the Stuart kings of England to illustrate the danger of ruling without a constitution. Because the Alien and Sedition Acts violated the Constitution, they had to be opposed. If unconstitutional laws were left standing, power would be consolidated in a national government, the political rights of states would be destroyed, and such oppression would lead to civil war. Later in the debates, Taylor expounded upon his own states’ rights theory of union. The people of the states had ratified the Constitution and thus created the government of the United States, making the government responsible to them in their capacity as citizens of the several states. The states, therefore, had the right to construe the Constitution and correct the government. The states ultimately reserved the right to revolution and could invoke this right in grave situations in order to preserve liberty. Taylor’s arguments resembled those made on behalf of state sovereignty during the tumultuous s. His defense and explication of the Virginia Resolutions formed the basis of the Principles of ’98, the battle cry of the first southern conservatives in the new nation, the Old Republicans. . John Taylor, An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures, –. John Taylor, Definition of Parties, or Political Effects of the Party System Considered, , , , , . See also Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, –. C. William Hill, Jr., The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, –. . The Virginia Report of –, Touching the Alien and Sedition Laws, Together with the Virginia Resolutions of December , , Including the Debate and Proceedings Thereon
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Taylor was a staunch partisan of Thomas Jefferson during his first presidential administration. Taylor was elated when Jefferson won the presidency in , but warned that the government did not depend upon an individual president but upon the principles of the Constitution. In October of the Virginia legislature appointed Taylor to fill the remainder of the late Stevens T. Mason’s term in the U.S. Senate. Taylor briefly served in the Eighth Congress, where he defended the Louisiana Purchase on constitutional grounds and helped push through the Senate the Twelfth Amendment, revising the process of presidential elections. He supported Jefferson’s measures of retrenchment, especially cuts in military spending and taxes. He even published A Defense of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson in as a campaign piece for Jefferson’s reelection bid. Taylor served as a presidential elector for Jefferson in . Yet despite his satisfaction with Jefferson’s first term, Taylor grew increasingly worried over the drift of the Republican Party away from the principles of republicanism. During Jefferson’s second administration, Taylor began to think that the president had abandoned his principles. In , he warned Jefferson that a “new sect of republicans” was emerging. Taylor was unable to classify the group in , but by he identified them as those corrupted by the moneyed interest in Congress and the lure of political patronage. The new Jeffersonian Republicans joined with the Federalists to advance the capitalist cause. He believed that Jefferson could arrest the corruption and urged him to institute reforms such as rotation in office and shortening congressional terms of service. As Jefferson declined to act, Taylor became increasingly identified with the Quid Schism led by John Randolph. He was never a radical Quid and, although he was sympathetic to some of Randolph’s political opinions, he thought him to be “blinded by something, supposed to be passion or prejudice.” As tensions with Great Britain increased, Taylor feared that a war would break out. Such a war would be a “metaphysical war,” a “war for honour, like that of the Greeks against in the House of Delegates of Virginia and Other Documents Illustrative of the Report and Resolutions, , –. See also Risjord, The Old Republicans, chaps. –. See Peter S. Onuf, “The First Federal Constitution: The Articles of Confederation,” in Leonard W. Levy and Dennis J. Mahoney, eds., The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution, –. Onuf discusses many of the arguments for state sovereignty used during the s by defenders of the Articles of Confederation.
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Troy,” and could “terminate in the destruction of the last experiment in favour of free government.” He initially supported Jefferson’s Embargo Act as a means to prevent war, though he later opposed it as dangerous to republican principles. Taylor feared the “demon of division” more than the “demon of war,” thinking that a divided Republican Party would hurt the nation. But he, like other Quids, backed James Monroe for the presidency in , even serving as a Monroe elector. Taylor believed that Madison was a consolidator who would harm the principles of constitutional federalism. He also correctly suspected that Madison would go to war with Great Britain. By Taylor was disillusioned with the Jeffersonian Republicans and thought that the moneyed interest had almost thoroughly corrupted American politics. Given Taylor’s pessimism about the possibility of republican ideas renewing the Republican Party, it is surprising that he devoted such a great amount of time and effort to writing ideological works designed to persuade voters and politicians. In he wrote to James Monroe, “It is extreme folly to suppose that the bulk of the people are influenced by abstract political principles; such was never the case with any nation.” Taylor relied mainly upon the federal structure of the government to maintain liberty, but he did think that ideas were important. Writing to Monroe again in , he remarked, “I believe, that if half a dozen tolerable writers would assiduously bring publick measures to the best of these sound old republican principles, they would force a respect from the government highly beneficial to the nation; and stand as good a chance to acquire public respect as by any selfish, submissive or penitential oblation to executive influence.” The intellectual belonged in the political arena. Ideas were important for the impact they had on politics. Taylor devoted the last years of his life to writing about agriculture and politics, two subjects upon which he admitted “there is a fanaticism in my nature.” After Taylor wrote five important works: Arator, Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (), Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (), Tyranny Unmasked (), . Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, , . John Taylor to James Mercer Garnett, December , , reprinted in “Letters of John Taylor of Caroline,” –. . John Taylor to James Monroe, January , , and October , , reprinted in “John Taylor Correspondence,” , . The last quotation appears in Loren Baritz, City on a Hill: A History of Ideas and Myths in America, .
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and New Views of the Constitution (). Arator, a collection of sixty-four essays on agriculture and politics, went through six printings in Taylor’s lifetime. In the work he maintained that “the prosperity of our country depended upon a competent share of agricultural and political knowledge, and that an ignorance of either, would defeat the benefits naturally flowing from a proficiency in both.” For Taylor, agriculture and politics were inextricably linked and were the “primary causes of our wealth and liberty.” His Inquiry, an attack on John Adams’s idea of American government as a balance of social orders, summarized the Jeffersonian refutation of the Federalists’ ideology. More than five hundred pages long, the Inquiry was so repetitive at times that John Randolph once remarked, “For heaven’s sake, get some worthy person to do the second edition into English.” The court decisions of John Marshall and the Missouri debates prompted Taylor to his next three works. In Construction Construed Taylor defended the confederation theory of Union he had espoused during the debates over the Virginia Resolutions. He attacked the decisions of John Marshall as examples of the consolidation of power into a national form of government. The Supreme Court was not, asserted Taylor, sovereign over the states and could not enforce its opinions on them. The false construction of the Constitution, he insisted, had served exclusive interests in the United States and had transformed the American principles of republican liberty into European practices of tyranny. In Tyranny Unmasked he condemned the protective tariff and discussed means by which states could check federal power. “I believe that a loss of independent internal power by our confederated States, and an acquisition of supreme power by the Federal department, or by any branch of it, will substantially establish a consolidated republic over all the territories of the United States,” Taylor warned. A monarchy would result and produce a complete tyranny. His final book, New Views of the Constitution, contended that there was no middle ground between a consolidated national government and a confederated, constitutional republic. Taylor railed against factions of nationalists who had plotted the demise of the Republic since the Constitutional Convention of . The people of the states, urged Taylor, must return to first principles and restore through states’ rights the crumbling system of . John Taylor, Arator, Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political, –. Risjord, The Old Republicans, . John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, xxvii.
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federalism based on state equality and the sovereignty of the people of the several states. In addition to his writings on agriculture and politics, Taylor spent the final ten years of his life pressing for reforms in his own county. During the War of , he had become worried about the slave population of Virginia. He had supported stepped-up slave patrols to check any possible rebellions. In December of he joined the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States and served as one of its vice presidents. Along with other prominent Virginians such as John Randolph, Taylor believed that free blacks in Virginia society would only cause unrest for the enslaved population. He worked hard improving his farms and bought plantations for his sons. By the end of his life his profits ranged around five thousand dollars annually. He lectured, wrote about, and demonstrated to all of his visitors the agricultural techniques he had described in the pages of Arator. He served as president of the Agricultural Society of Virginia until , when bad health forced him to step down. He insisted that he would “rather be president of that Society than of the United States.” While Caroline County was declining economically after , Taylor prospered. Though Taylor worked hard to stem agricultural decline, his efforts were of little success. He blamed political consolidation and neomercantilist policies of the government for sapping the strength of Virginia agriculture and causing decline. In Taylor, by this time a frail old man near death, returned to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in . The Virginia legislature elected him to succeed James Pleasants, Jr., who had become the governor of the state. Upon taking his seat, Taylor argued that a moneyed aristocracy had gained a hold on the legislative branch. As a result, capitalists had a direct interest in influencing government to aid them further. Taylor used his seat in the Senate to rail against two programs of Henry Clay’s American System, internal improvements and the tariff. In he opposed a federal internal improvement plan on the Cumberland Road on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and would “inflame geographical interests” that would compete for government largesse. He complained that the tariff was sectional in its benefits and thus destroyed the equality . Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, . John Taylor to James Mercer Garnett, January , , reprinted in “Letters of John Taylor of Caroline,” .
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of states, a necessary principle of federalism. Taylor seems to have supported John Quincy Adams for the presidency in , though he did not get the chance to vote in the election. He died at his plantation Hazelwood on August , , unable to complete his term as senator. His old adversary and newfound friend Thomas Ritchie wrote in the Richmond Enquirer, “Let Virginia weep over the ashes of the illustrious patriot.” He died a Virginia icon.
R John Randolph of Roanoke had a tremendous impact on southern intellectual history. Through his many speeches and letters and his long political career, Randolph transformed the republicanism of the Revolutionary generation and the anti-Federalists into a modern conservative ideology that was distinctly southern in nature. He was born in Virginia at his family’s home at Cawsons on the eve of the Revolution in . His father died soon afterward, and his mother married the eminent Virginia jurist St. George Tucker. One of John Randolph’s earliest memories, one to which he frequently referred, was his family’s flight in January from the traitorous Benedict Arnold and his British troops. Randolph used the memory of this incident to carve for himself a place in the history of the American Revolution. At the age of nine Randolph was, as he put it, “exiled from my mother’s house and sent to school in Blue Run, in Orange County.” But he disliked his formal schooling, claiming he was “tyrannized over and tortured by the most peevish and ill-tempered of pedagogues, Walter Maury.” In he went to Princeton College, where he learned “a contempt for college honors.” But his mother’s death drew him back to Virginia. In he attended King’s College in New York and stayed for a year, but he continued to dislike formal education. He learned his most valuable lessons from his mother: his catechism, dancing, manners, and above all love for his land and name. He later recalled that before his widowed mother remarried, he shared her bed. Every night, he remembered, “I knelt before her and with hands uplifted between hers, repeated . Simms, Life of John Taylor, –, , . He wrote to James Monroe, “The assumption of state debts, the creation of a bank, bounties to factory owners, and the pension law, whether they were usurpations or not, united with other causes, have had the effect of transferring from a vast majority, many millions annually, to a capitalist and geographical minority, but little interested in the soil” (–).
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the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed.” He believed that his mother had sown “the germ of piety” in his heart. His mother taught him to be a gentleman. Randolph especially remembered his mother’s advice to retain the land he inherited from his father. “Keep your land and your land will keep you,” she told him. Randolph’s enculturation into the Virginia gentry’s society laid the groundwork for the traditional conservatism of his adult political life. John Randolph, like many in Tidewater Virginia, was staunchly antiFederalist. In he saw George Washington “take the oath to support the Federal Constitution” in New York. Randolph claimed, “I saw what Washington did not see; but two other men in Virginia saw it—George Mason and Patrick Henry—the poison under its [the Constitution’s] wings.” He later commented that the federal Constitution “was repugnant to our judgment, and fraught, as we feared, with danger to our liberties.” In Randolph traveled to Philadelphia to read law under his kinsman Edmund Randolph, the attorney general of the United States. In Philadelphia, the young Randolph absorbed the spirit that would lead to a lifelong love of politics as he witnessed the struggles of the new nation. His politicization grew while he lived in Philadelphia. He did not think much of his legal training under Edmund Randolph and returned to Virginia in . In the summer of he contracted some severe sickness, perhaps scarlet fever, that left him impotent, beardless, boyish in appearance, and with a high-pitched voice. This illness began a life of severe health problems for him. It scarred him both physically and emotionally and contributed to his eccentric personality. In the s, the French Revolution radicalized Randolph, and he became a part of the emerging Republican Party. In his letters during the s, he frequently addressed others as “citizen” and used the Revolutionary calendar to date his missives. Later in his life, Randolph told his friend Dr. John Brockenbrough that he had been “bred up in the school of . Randolph to F. W. Gilmer, July , , quoted in Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Quoted in William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, – , vol. , . John Randolph to St. George Tucker, February , , Bryan Family Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Letter to a New England Senator, December , , reprinted in Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study of American Politics, . Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , .
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Hobbes and Bayle, and Shaftsbury and Bolingbroke, and Hume and Voltaire and Gibbon.” Consequently, Randolph said that their “skeptical philosophy” continued to influence his thinking despite his efforts to resist it. Revolutionary republicanism coupled with the ideas of Enlightenment philosophes excited the young Randolph, pushing him to desire a reform of the government. His personal life was marred by the decline of his brother Richard, who had been accused of adultery with his sister-inlaw. Though cleared of the charges, Richard Randolph had his reputation sullied, and John Randolph felt the shame and embarrassment. But he turned his shame and anger toward politics and the Federalist administration of John Adams. The Alien and Sedition Acts energized Randolph, who advocated the establishment of an armory in Virginia “for the purpose of opposing Mr. Adams’ administration.” Randolph became a part of the Jeffersonian Republican movement and began building a reputation for himself in Tidewater Virginia. Randolph entered his first political campaign in , kicking off his political career in a debate with an aging Patrick Henry on the Virginia Resolutions. Randolph had been sponsored for the congressional race by the respected judge Creed Taylor, giving the young Randolph an aura of respect. In March Randolph met Henry at Charlotte County Courthouse. Henry, who had become a Federalist, spoke first and urged Virginians to take a moderate course. Randolph followed with his first public speech, defending the Virginia Resolutions and attacking the Adams administration. The young Randolph apparently impressed both Henry and the voters. In April the legislature elected Henry to the Senate (he died be. Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . In order to illustrate Randolph’s early Revolutionary radicalism, William Cabell Bruce quotes a letter Randolph wrote to his friend Henry Rutledge that reads: “It is needless for me to urge the necessity which always exists in a Republic for her citizens to assist her with their wisdom and integrity. Let me hope to see you then amongst the foremost of our youth in the cause of liberty and man.” Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Daniel Jordan, in his book Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia, chap. , argues that Randolph succeeded in politics for a few different reasons. First of all, Randolph had an important patron, the Virginia judge Creed Taylor. But Randolph’s family name and famous sponsor were not enough. Randolph’s neighbors viewed him as a capable young man, a good orator, and one who took good care of his plantation business. Randolph’s reputation served him throughout his political career. For an entertaining presentation of the Richard Randolph scandal see Alan Pell Crawford, Unwise Passions.
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fore he could fill the seat), and the freeholders elected Randolph to the House of Representatives. Randolph began his political career defending states’ rights, a principle he would devote his life to preserving. As John Randolph took his place in the Sixth Congress in December , change was in the air. The Revolution of brought Jefferson and the Republican Party to power, poised for reforming the government. Randolph’s talents and devotion to the Principles of ’98 impressed Jefferson. Randolph became the House majority leader in and sat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He supported the Louisiana Purchase in , a decision he would later regret, and he supported as well other Jeffersonian measures of retrenchment and reform. He joined several other Republicans, including Jefferson, in perceiving a need to reform the judiciary by extracting militant Federalists from their positions in the courts. Randolph proposed “to give the death-blow to the pretension of rendering the judiciary an hospital for decayed politicians; to prevent the state courts from being engulfed by those of the Union; to destroy the monstrous ambition of arrogating to this House the right of evading all the prohibitions of the Constitution and holding the nation at bay.” The federal judiciary, especially in the hands of Federalists, was a threat to states’ rights and republican principles. The House put Randolph in charge of prosecuting the impeachment trial of Samuel Chase in . In the trial, Randolph’s eloquence was no match for the scrupulous legal logic of Chase’s attorney Luther Martin. Jefferson, supportive of the impeachment until that point, seemed to abandon Randolph to failure. Randolph resented Jefferson’s failure to support him and became embittered toward the administration. Randolph’s opposition to Jefferson increased with the Yazoo Compromise and the attempts of Jefferson to obtain West Florida. The Yazoo fraud had begun in when the Georgia legislature, bribed by speculators, transferred thirty-five million acres of western lands to four land companies for a low price. The land companies sold the land soon afterward to third parties who knew nothing of the bribery involved. In Georgians discovered the scam and elected a new legislature, which negated . Quoted in Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . David A. Carson, “That Ground Called Quiddism: John Randolph’s War with the Jefferson Administration,” – . See also Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic.
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the sale. A compromise was worked out in which Georgia agreed to cede all but five million acres of its public lands to the U.S. government. The five million acres would be used “to satisfy the other claimants.” The compromise came before Congress in , and Randolph attacked it viciously. Randolph argued that any compromise in the Yazoo case was a sign of corruption because the Congress was rewarding fraudulent speculators by giving away the five million acres. He feared that “official influence is to become the hand maid of private interest.” Not only that, but Congress would be interfering with the legislature of Georgia, which had voided the sale in . Randolph said that Georgians were “made of the sternest stuff of republicanism” and could “neither be coaxed, or intimidated out of their principles.” To Randolph, the Yazoo compromise destroyed both states’ rights and self-government. Republicans who compromised their principles and voted for the Yazoo fraud were dooming the Republic. Randolph stood on principle, as he would do in opposing Jefferson’s secret dealings to obtain West Florida. Randolph rightly warned that the funds from any purchase of Florida territory would go straight into the war chest of Napoleon. He discerned the presence of Madison behind the scenes and, fearing a conspiracy, he wrote, “I consider this matter as fairly at issue, whether this nation is to be governed by a secret Machiavellian, invisible, irresponsible Cabinet, or the principles of the Constitution.” Standing firm on his principles of honesty and independence in government, Randolph successfully blocked the purchase of West Florida at the time, but he expended his political capital in the process. By Randolph’s political career as a Republican Party leader had ended, and he became the leader of the Old Republican opposition. That year he declared that the old “Republican Party is already ruined past redemption.” “New men & new Maxims,” he added, “are the order of the day.” Instead of virtuous, independent republicans, the Republican Party now included sycophants holding out their hands for executive patronage. Randolph opposed the Embargo Act as “the most fatal measure that ever happened in this country.” As Jefferson’s second term ended, Randolph re. Carson, “That Ground Called Quiddism,” . “Debate on the Yazoo Claims,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , –. See also Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, chaps. –. . Quoted in Carson, “That Ground Called Quiddism,” .
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marked that “never has there been any administration which went out of office and left the country in a state so deplorable and calamitous as the last.” Randolph supported James Monroe for the presidency in and was disappointed when his enemy James Madison became the fourth president of the United States. Randolph continued his opposition during Madison’s first administration. But Randolph changed intellectually during his first few years of opposition. Though he still repeated his republican arguments, Randolph had begun reading Burke heavily and his rhetoric began to reflect Burke’s anti-Enlightenment stance. Randolph opposed the approaching war with the British because, according to his republican principles, war could be fought only for the defense of the liberties of the people. War with Britain would be folly. Randolph perceived that Napoleon, “the destroyer of mankind,” was a threat to not only European liberty but also “the liberties of the human race.” The British navy was the sole obstacle to Napoleon’s domination of Europe and perhaps even the Western Hemisphere. Peace with Britain was, for Randolph, imperative. Instead he found the Republicans, reinforced by the new War Hawks, set on a “war of conquest, a war for the acquisition of territory and subjects.” Talk of fighting Britain to obtain Canada for the United States enraged Randolph. War with England comported “neither with the interest nor the honor of the American people.” War would be “an idolatrous sacrifice of both [interest and honor], on the altar of French rapacity, perfidy, and ambition.” But Randolph was a voice crying out in the wilderness. Even his Virginia constituents disagreed with him, and they elected John W. Eppes, Jefferson’s son-in-law, to Randolph’s seat in . A despondent Randolph remarked to his nephew that his enemies had triumphed over him, “A triumph which, for my country’s sake, I deeply regret.” . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, , , and Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . See also Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., “Who Were the Quids?” –. Cunningham argues that Randolph and his opposition should not be called “Tertium Quids” because the term was used at the time to denote factions in state politics. . “To the Freeholders of Charlotte, Prince Edward, Buckingham, and Cumberland,” May , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . “Debate on Mr. Gregg’s Motion,” March , , reprinted in ibid., . “Speech against War with England,” December , , reprinted in ibid., . John Randolph, Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative: Embracing a Series of Years, from Early Youth, to Mature Manhood, . For a discussion of Randolph’s reading of Burke see Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, –.
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Randolph’s first electoral defeat provoked a personal crisis between and that was exacerbated by familial and economic problems. Randolph retired, lamenting, “My relish for public life is gone.” He condemned the American government as being “a mere engine worked by numbers, against property and talents and is to the weaker party the most hateful of all tyrannies.” Randolph claimed that the Republican rule was worse than British tyranny: “The oppression of Lord North’s administration was lenity and compassion to the regime of the last six years.” After his defeat, Randolph’s health worsened, and his letters were filled with complaints of physical ailments. His plantation Bizarre burned down in , taking with it a good part of his library. In a flood destroyed three quarters of “the largest & finest crop I ever had.” A drought finished off the rest, and Randolph struggled to support his “family of more than two hundred mouths looking up to me for food.” He complained to his friend Harmanus Bleeker that he had no “society” and that his best friends were “a few faithful slaves, who attend to my domestic concerns.” In Randolph’s nephew Tudor Randolph began to lose his sanity. Tudor died a year later in London. Randolph, who had provided for Tudor’s education, was devastated. Tudor, the last surviving son of his brother Richard, was the “pride, the sole hope of our family.” His sister-in-law Judith Randolph, Richard’s widow, died in . Randolph suffered from bouts of madness while trying to cope with the destruction of his career, his family, his plantation’s economy, and his own health. He retreated into his books: “Except Burke and Lord Byron’s poems I have read nothing for a long time past.” In the midst of his personal crisis, Randolph experienced a profound religious conversion to the faith of his childhood, Anglicanism. Reading Burke and finding God during his time of crisis shaped his conservatism in the following years. The John Randolph who was reelected to Congress in was, in many ways, a new man. His eccentricities and republican rhetoric were the same, but his personal crisis and conversion seemed only to isolate him further from the political mainstream. He told Brockenbrough, “I might acquire a . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, , . Randolph to Harmanus Bleeker, July , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, August , , reprinted in Kenneth Shorey, ed., Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, . Randolph to Francis Scott Key, July , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , .
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certain degree of influence in the House, chiefly confined, however, to the small minority of old-fashioned Republicans.” His deepening insights into the nature of America focused upon the great changes in society and politics: the market revolution, nationalism, the American system of Henry Clay, democracy, and the cult of progress. Randolph attacked modernity. He became more aware of the growing influence of sectionalism in American politics and, as Henry Adams noted, tied states’ rights theory to the defense of slavery in hope of rallying southerners to the conservative cause. Randolph’s popularity increased after the Missouri Compromise, an agreement Randolph regarded as the sacrifice of the slaveholding interest “by southern and western men from slaveholding states.” He adamantly opposed John Quincy Adams, calling the Adams clan the “American House of Stuart,” permanently opposed to republican principles. Randolph believed that John Quincy Adams was a neo-Federalist who “was determined to be the President of the human race.” He opposed the Corrupt Bargain of , and his stream of insults directed at Adams and Henry Clay led to his famous duel with Clay in . In Randolph, disillusioned with emerging modern America, declared, “Governments have poisoned every thing.” He doubted free government could exist anywhere because purveyors of modernity had destroyed the traditional social underpinnings of freedom. As the s progressed, Randolph repeatedly mourned the decline of traditional society and the loss of gentility, manners, and morals in his country—Virginia. He believed that Americans, and Virginians in particular, who embraced the forces of modernity represented by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay “deserve to be slaves, with no other music to soothe them but the clank of the chains which they have put on themselves and given to their offspring.” His final, most eloquent, and most passionate defense of old Virginia came during the Virginia constitutional convention of – in which Randolph attacked the reformers as foolish agents of destruction. He hoped, however, that President Andrew Jackson might restore republican principles to the country. . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, December , , and December , , reprinted in Shorey, ed., Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, , . Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . “Speech on Executive Powers,” March , , reprinted in ibid., –. . “Speech on Executive Powers,” March , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., suggests that conservatives at the Virginia constitu-
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While Randolph supported Jackson for the presidency in , he revived the oppositionist, republican rhetoric of his early career. Jackson’s war on the Bank delighted and energized Randolph for a time. Despite his constant, all-consuming theme of declension, Randolph hoped that Jackson might achieve the task Jefferson refused to perform—to purge the government of unrepublican elements. But Jackson’s presidency clearly marked a new era in American politics. Randolph soon became disillusioned. In Bolingbrokean fashion he warned Jackson that “evil counsellors” surrounded him in his cabinet. Randolph described the cabinet, writing, “I say evil because one is ultra Federal, ultra Tariff, ultra Bank, as an old sedition law federalist might be expected to be.” Another member of the cabinet was “a republican convert to the Tariff, Internal improvements and Bank questions: of itself enough to damn him politically with all real republicans.” The events of Jefferson’s presidency seemed to repeat themselves in Jackson’s administration. The engine of party had corrupted Jefferson’s administration, along with the secret, unrepublican advice of Madison. Now, new evil counselors worked behind the scenes to corrupt the well-meaning Jackson. Even though Jackson appointed Randolph as minister to Russia in , an office which Randolph held only for a short time on account of his poor health, it was clear that Jackson’s presidency concerned Randolph greatly. Just as Jefferson had disappointed true republicans by the Yazoo Compromise, Jackson would fail them during the Nullification Crisis. Randolph opposed nullification in South Carolina, but vehemently decried the Force Bill as a federal encroachment on state sovereignty. He declared, “I am no Nullifier,” and asserted that the “doctrine of nullification is sheer nonsense.” But Jackson had been “swayed and ruled” by interest and the bad advice of his evil counselors. The Force Bill moved against the tional convention used Burke frequently. For the Virginia conservatives, Burke’s condemnation of the French Revolution went well with their own attacks against individualism, radicalism, and reform. Burke stressed social ties and custom above reason, a point frequently mentioned by the conservatives. Thus while the Virginia conservatives defended a republican form of government, they also defended tradition in a Burkean sense. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of – and the Conservative Tradition in the South, chap. . . Randolph to Andrew Jackson, December , , in John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , . For a comparison of Jackson’s administration and the principles of the Old Republicans, see Risjord, The Old Republicans, –.
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rights of the states, which for “good and sufficient cause” were free “to secede from the confederacy” whenever they “shall find the benefits of union exceeded by its evils.” Randolph thereby ended his political career as he had begun, by defending states’ rights and the anti-Federalist view of the Constitution. In Randolph took ill in Philadelphia and died on May . On his deathbed he freed his slaves and made provisions for their freedom by giving them land in Ohio. But Randolph’s act of emancipation was thwarted, like much else in his career. The people of Ohio, not wanting free blacks in their “country,” drove Randolph’s freedmen away. Randolph died as he had lived, in opposition to the forces of modern America.
R Old Republican doctrines did not perish with John Taylor or John Randolph. Others transmitted the Principles of ’98 to the generation of southern secessionists. The Old Republican movement reveals much about the “southern tradition” that was forming in the Early National period. The next chapter will examine the political principles of Taylor and Randolph. The chapter will stress the agreement between the two on political principles and their emphasis upon the separation of the state from society. Chapter will then examine the social visions of Taylor and Randolph. That chapter will reveal that although the men agreed on political principles, they did not share the same vision for the ideal southern society. The disagreement between Taylor and Randolph on social principles indicates that the “southern tradition” was not monolithic and contained competing ideas of the good society.
. Powhatan Bouldin, Home Reminiscences of John Randolph of Roanoke, , .
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8 Alexander Hamilton once wrote that “government, when skillfully applied, could and should redirect man’s habits toward self-improvement and thus for the improvement of the society as a whole.” Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures,” as well as other aspects of his economic plan, justified limited government intervention in society and the economy in order to transform the United States into a prosperous and powerful nation. Politically, then, Hamilton believed that the state should interfere with social institutions, a common point of view throughout the colonial period. The Old Republicans, however, saw the interference of the state in society as dangerous and something to be avoided. The heart of Old Republican political economy was the idea that the state should be separated from social affairs so that societies could develop independently. This point allowed Old Republicans to conceive of society in different ways while advocating similar political courses of action. Of course, this doctrine had sectional applications such as protecting the “peculiar institution”—which Old Republicans defined as a social, not political, institution—but it was more broadly aimed at protecting the Old Republican idea of liberty. On issues such as sovereignty and states’ rights, the republican debate over public virtue, the Hamiltonian system, the War of , and the Missouri Compromise, John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke rather consistently applied the idea of the separation of state and society. The Question of Sovereignty A crucial question in the American Republic between and was the location of sovereignty, which Taylor defined as “the highest degree of political power.” The Old Republicans argued that the people of 30
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the states, not the state or general governments nor the American people as an aggregate mass, were sovereign. John Taylor regarded this point as critical to understanding the genius of America. In America, Taylor insisted, the people, not governments, were sovereign, meaning that the people inherently possessed the right of self-government. The people exercised this right as citizens of the several states, or as Taylor called them, “statenations.” The Old Republicans’ approach to sovereignty influenced their perspectives on other issues such as slavery, the Hamiltonian system, and the relationship of state and society. Taylor and Randolph, through their writings, speeches, and political action, popularized the southern states’ rights tradition during the Early National period. John Taylor interpreted the Declaration of Independence as revealing the locus of sovereignty in the country. He considered the Declaration “the basis of our form of government” and “the true expositor of the principles and terms we have adopted.” He indicated that the wording of the Declaration, which read “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states,” made it clear that a compatibility existed “between the sovereignty and the union of the several states.” At the beginning of the American union in , the Declaration of Independence affirmed that the people of the several states had declared their independence as individual state-nations. Taylor noted that the Articles of Confederation merely recognized the reality described by the Declaration. Furthermore, it was the people of the states, not the aggregate mass of Americans, who ratified the Constitution of in state conventions. The Union, therefore, possessed “no innate sovereignty” but was “conventional” and “subordinate to the sovereignties by which it was formed.” Taylor and Randolph believed that the Union was a federal—implying “a league between sovereign nations”—structure. The Old Republicans, like their anti-Federalist predecessors, derived their federalism or confederation theory from Montesquieu. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued, “It is in the nature of a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it can scarcely continue to exist.” Large republics, Montesquieu . John Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, –, . For a great treatment of the states’ rights ideology in the Early Republic, see Forrest McDonald, States Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio. See also Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights and the Nullification Crisis, –. . Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, , .
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continued, were too complex to “put in the hands of a citizen.” In a large republic the common good became “sacrificed to a thousand considerations,” but in a small one it was “better felt, better known,” and “lies nearer to each citizen.” Government close to the people would make political abuses less extensive. But small republics, added Montesquieu, were vulnerable to conquest by foreign armies. The solution was not to make the republic large, and thus subject to being “destroyed by an internal vice,” but to confederate with other small republics for common protection. Montesquieu’s ideal of modern republicanism was the confederated republican system. Anti-Federalists, thinking in terms of Montesquieu, noted that in America the states represented small republics while the Articles of Confederation acted as the confederation government protecting them from conquest and maintaining their equality. The states, not the Confederation Congress, were the primary units of government, carrying out the normal, everyday business of government. John Randolph agreed with the antiFederalists’ understanding of republicanism, often calling the United States a “Confederated Republic” during his speeches in Congress. He regarded his country not as the United States of America but as “the Commonwealth of Virginia,” underscoring Montesquieu’s theory of confederation. Randolph defended Montesquieu’s theory throughout his national political career by his defense of states’ rights. Taylor’s conception of federalism stood at the heart of his constitutional thought. He maintained that there were two contrary principles regarding government: the division of power and the concentration of power. “Every government must be of one or the other description,” he added. There . Ibid., , –. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, , . On the anti-Federalists, see Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, –. Christopher M. Duncan, The Anti-Federalists and Early American Political Thought. On the use of Montesquieu by the anti-Federalists see Abraham Kupersmith, “Montesquieu and the Ideological Strain in Antifederalist Thought,” in Wilson Carey McWilliams and Michael T. Gibbons, eds., The Federalists, the Antifederalists, and the American Political Tradition, –. The Randolph quotation comes from “Speech on Executive Powers,” March , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . See also Herbert J. Storing, What the Antifederalists Were For: The Political Thought of the Opponents of the Constitution, –. Storing discusses the anti-Federalists’ support for a small republic. Of course, Hamilton tried to correct the anti-Federalist interpretation of Montesquieu in Federalist #, where he expounded on Montesquieu’s conception of the “Confederate Republic.” . Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, . See James P. McClellan, introduction to New Views of the Constitution. Randolph also believed in the division of powers. He wrote,
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was no middle ground, nor was there a way to blend the two principles. If power was divided and placed in the hands of the many, no one person or interest could use government power for his own benefit. Because government power in the United States was divided, it was easier to watch, guard against, and use for the public good. According to Taylor, the federal Constitution of firmly rejected a consolidated, national government and instead divided power among the states and the general government. The people of the several states never relinquished their sovereignty. Thus the states were “state-nations.” State-nations composed the United States and retained all the rights of nations not expressly delegated to the federal government. The strong state governments acted as “tribunes of the people.” They were “intrusted with rights bestowed for the preservation of [the people’s] liberty” and could not surrender the protection of these rights or liberty. The people of the states needed protection from the general government and those who wished to consolidate power in a national government. Federalism then preserved self-government. Taylor referred to the United States as a confederacy because it perpetuated the decentralized system of power created by the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. Both Taylor and Randolph maintained that states’ rights fundamentally opposed nationalism. Taylor’s influential New Views of the Constitution maintained that a fight had ensued in the Constitutional Convention of between those who wanted a national system that consolidated power in the general government and those who insisted on preserving the federal “The powers of Government are divided, in our system, between the General and State Governments, except some powers, which the people have very wisely retained to themselves.” “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, . See Andrew C. Lenner, “John Taylor and the Origins of American Federalism,” –. Lenner connected Taylor’s states’ rights, confederation view of the United States to eighteenth-century conceptions of the law of nations. But both Taylor and Randolph explicitly rejected the law of nations as a guide to American federalism. Taylor did so in when defending the Virginia Resolutions and in Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, charging that the law of nations recognized sovereignty in government rather than in the people. Randolph said in : “Our government is not like the consolidated monarchies of the Old World—it is a solar system, an imperium in imperio: and, when the question is about one or the other, what belongs to the imperium and what to the imperio, we gain nothing by referring to Vattel. He treats of an integral government.” “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –.
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character of the union. According to Taylor, the federal side won in , but during the s consolidationists, Alexander Hamilton in particular, had read nationalism into the new constitution. The consolidationists wanted to get rid of popular sovereignty and transfer sovereignty to the general government. Nationalists, noted the Old Republicans, viewed the Union as an end in itself and not as a means to secure liberty. Randolph wrote to his friend Josiah Quincy in that it was “always my opinion that Union was the means of securing the safety, liberty, and welfare of the confederacy, and not in itself an end to which these should be sacrificed.” Randolph said that the general government was “the breath of the nostrils of the states” and that the “Constitution of the United States was a grant of limited powers for general objects which Congress had no right to exceed.” Taylor added that the Constitution existed to protect the federal system of government, which was not a “national government” but a “league between nations.” Nationalists, therefore, endangered liberty by trying to impose their will on the sovereign people of the several states through coercion by the general government. Whereas some historians have read the Old Republican states’ rights argument as a cover for slavery, Randolph and Taylor primarily used states’ rights to oppose political centralization. Randolph, for example, professed in that the greatest danger threatening the confederacy was the usurpation of state powers by the general government. Unlike Taylor, Randolph mistrusted the Declaration of Independence and looked instead to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which had nothing to do with slavery, as clear expressions of states’ rights principles, the true principles . Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, –, –. Taylor consistently rejected the idea that any government in the United States, federal, state, or local, possessed sovereignty. Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Quoted in Henry Adams, John Randolph: A Biography, . John Taylor, Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated, . . See, for example, Duncan MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution, . “Randolph emphasized state rights because of the existence of slavery and the need to protect it.” For a corrective, see Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America, –. Matson and Onuf note the strong emphasis on state sovereignty and states’ rights during the s that continued into the s. Taylor’s states’ rights thinking originated in republican theory and the socalled critical period, not in the s as a response to attacks on slavery. See also Peter S. Onuf, “State Sovereignty and the Making of the Constitution,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, –. Onuf, “The First Federal Constitution,” –.
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of the Republic. Speaking of the Virginia Resolutions, Randolph insisted, “For me to attempt to add any thing to the arguments of that paper, would be to attempt to gild refined gold—to paint the lily—to throw a perfume on the violet . . . in every aspect of it, wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Randolph restated frequently the compact theory of the union found in the Resolutions and the point Jefferson made in the Kentucky Resolutions that “the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself.” The events of convinced Randolph that the federal Constitution was oppressive and could easily be used to destroy republicanism. The Revolution of legitimized, in Randolph’s mind, the central principle of the Resolutions, namely, states’ rights. The Old Republicans believed that states’ rights best protected local diversity, a task vital to federalism. Taylor believed that the original thirteen states had diverse cultures and thus ruled themselves differently. The Framers of the Constitution appreciated this. “The incapacity of one mind,” he wrote, “for securing the liberty and happiness of an extensive country, dictates the wisdom of dividing power; and the same natural incapacity in the representatives of one state to provide for the local good government of another, more forcibly dictated the internal independency of each.” Driving his point home, he concluded, “It would have been more preposterous to expect that the representatives of Massachusetts could provide for the prosperity of Louisiana, than that we might get to the moon in a balloon.” The purpose of federalism, then, was to keep people apart. Federalism, by preserving the independence of the state-nations, prevented dangerous concentrations of power that would destroy the diverse cultures of America. Republicanism, he insisted, “includes a right in the people of each state to form their own government; and reserves whatever other rights may be necessary to the exercise of this cardinal right.” He concluded, “When the right of self government is superseded, no republican right will remain, because all proceed from it, and the guarantee . “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , . Randolph admits that the state governments can be instruments of oppression as well. S. E. Forman, ed., The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson, . See Ellis, The Union at Risk, ; F. Thornton Miller, Judges and Juries versus the Law, chap. ; Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, –.
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would have no republican form of government to secure.” Like Randolph, Taylor thought that the original intentions of the Constitution of — federalism and free government—had to be preserved in order to ensure that the people of the states held onto the right of self-government. Concentrations of power either in the general government or in sectional alliances among states threatened liberty. States’ rights kept political consolidation at bay. This, in turn, would prevent the state from interfering in American societies. Taylor and Randolph believed that secession was the ultimate political protection against the usurpations of the nationalists. Taylor put it succinctly, “The states created the federal government, therefore they may destroy it.” Randolph concurred, “[I]t is in the power of the States to extinguish this Government at a blow.” Randolph wrote that “the question of resistance to any established government is always a question of expediency; and the resort ought never to be had to this last appeal, except in cases where the grievance does not admit of palliative or temporizing remedies.” Secession for Randolph was a means of self-defense or selfpreservation. It protected the homogeneous state community and its interests from tyranny of general government. Taylor concurred. He wrote that the states had a “moral right of self-defence against every species of aggression.” Government oppression, argued Taylor in , was “the road to civil war.” Because the states were “clearly parties to the Constitution, as political bodies,” rights, including the right of self-preservation, “were reserved to them.” The legislature of the offended state was obliged both as “servants of the people” and as the “guardian” of the people’s rights to sovereignty to challenge false construction and unconstitutional federal laws. Taylor believed that “this duty was the only possible mode of sustaining the fabric of American policy, according to the principles prescribed by the American Constitution.” Randolph and Taylor believed that secession had to be approached cautiously. Taylor even proposed a number of political methods, such as a mutual veto power for states and the general government over the legislation of the other, to prevent secession. Both men . Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, –, –. On the point about federalism keeping people apart, I am indebted to Professor Carey Roberts of Arkansas Tech. For Taylor’s fear of political sectionalism see John Taylor, Disunion Sentiment in Congress in : A Confidential Memorandum Hitherto Unpublished Written by John Taylor of Caroline, Senator from Virginia, for James Madison.
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thought that the Union was worth preserving as long as it protected the people of the states from the rapacious interests of others. If the Union became tyrannical and constitutional means failed to solve the crisis, it had to be destroyed. As Randolph and Taylor addressed other political issues of their day, they kept the principle of separating state and society at the center of their concerns. Republican Theory and Self-Government Many historians agree that the ideology of republicanism, imported to America from England and stressing self-government and popular virtue, played a significant role in the American Revolution and the political discourse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States. The Old Republicans participated in the American republican discourse and focused on issues that concerned the interference by government in society. Historian Robert Kelley argued that there were four different brands of republicanism in Revolutionary America, and the South had been dominated by “libertarian republicanism.” The southern elite, Kelley noted, demanded personal liberty from all restraints. They detested a government that directly intervened in society to regulate social values. Kelley maintained that southern republicans worried that an activist government would destroy slavery. Southerners feared any distant power, either political or economic, that exercised control over their interests. In other words, southern republicanism possessed a strong dose of John Locke. The Old Republicans shared a larger southern concern over the preservation of liberty in the new Republic. In Randolph declared the true republican principles the Old Republicans espoused: “love of peace, hatred of offensive war, jealousy of the state governments toward the general government; a dread of standing armies; a loathing of public debts, taxes, and excises; tenderness for the liberty of the citizen; jealousy, Argus-eyed jealousy of . Taylor, New Views, . “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –, . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, . The Virginia Report of –, , . For a discussion of possible secession see Randolph’s speech at the Virginia Convention of – on the proposal to change the three-fifths clause. Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of –, . For Taylor’s proposal of a mutual veto power, see Tyranny Unmasked, –.
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the patronage of the President.” These were the Principles of ’98, and the Old Republicans defended them continuously. American historians have identified the country ideology as a prevalent component of Revolutionary republicanism. Historians of England have pointed out that as the seventeenth century progressed, the old terms of “court” and “country” acquired a more precise ideological meaning. The “court” referred to those associated with the king’s court, particularly royal ministers, who lived on royal patronage. The “country” faction opposed the court. The country was a “conservative opposition” to the centralizing policies of the court. The country ideology stressed the primacy of local communities and county government in the preservation of English liberties. The country was not a class, for it differed little in a “social-structural standpoint” from the governing class of the court. The country lacked formal organization, but was “united by conviction” and “linked through family and friendship.” By the late seventeenth century, the meanings of the terms “court” and “country” solidified further into “the categories and vocabulary of civic republicanism.” J. G. A. Pocock notes that later country ideology “stressed the independence of the organs of mixed government (Kings, Lords, and Commons; executive, judiciary, and legislative) from one another.” Independence was maintained “against the supposed attempts of patronage manipulators to bring the second and third branches into dependence on the first; and it stressed the role of the independent proprietors (ideally the landowner, although merchants were not excluded) as against the rentier, officer, placeman, pensioner, and . . . stock-jobber or speculator in public funds.” The role of the country politician, therefore, was to oppose corruption. Country thinkers also objected to new kinds of power and influence brought by the financial revolution. Country ideology extolled “cheap, simple, and honest government.” . Robert Kelley, “Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon,” –. Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution, , . J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, . The lengthy quotation from Pocock appears in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . For Randolph as a country thinker see Dawidoff ’s comments in chapter . Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, –, –. The literature on the country ideology is extensive. See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison
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The Country ideology influenced Taylor and Randolph in their understanding of history as a constant struggle between liberty and power. The forces of liberty, the independent, landed property owners, fought the corruption of power found in the “court,” those who sought to concentrate power to further their private interests. Both Taylor and Randolph consistently defended the role of the property-owning farmer as a force of virtue. Debt threatened the independence of the gentry, and the financial and manufacturing interests sought to use government influence and the credit system to give victory to the court party. The government, once in the control of the court party, could corrupt the country by encouraging vice and undermining independence and its foundation, landed property. The decay could be ended only by a return to first principles and corresponding “retrenchment and reform” in government to prevent concentrations of court power. Taylor remarked in , “No free government or the blessings of liberty can be preserved to any people but by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” Expressing the country ideology well, Randolph wrote his friend Brockenbrough in that “we are the meanest people in the world, I speak of this ‘court’ and its retainers and followers.” Because of the hold of the court in America, the “country is ruined past redemption.” For “it is ruined in the spirit and character of the people.” Randolph charged: “The standard of merit and morals has been lowered far below `proof.’ There is an abjectness of spirit that appalls and disgusts me. Where now could we find leaders of a revolution?” Like Taylor, Randolph as a country thinker hoped the country could return to first principles, but he doubted the possibility. Taylor and Randolph defended the republican ideal of a homogeneous community united by a common end. The anti-Federalists, Country thinkers who influenced Taylor and Randolph, held that in a republic, of the Revolution Settlements in England (–) and America (–),” in J. G. A. Pocock, Three British Revolutions: , , . . Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . See also Randolph to Andrew Jackson, June , , Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , . See Murrin, “The Great Inversion,” on the South as dominated by the country ideology. See Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology, on the Jeffersonian Republicans as a country party. The Taylor quotation comes from An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures, . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, January , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, .
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“the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar” in order to prevent the rise of factionalism between those competing in the republic for different interests. A homogeneous population could preserve liberty. Randolph, who maintained that government existed simply to protect property, ensure freedom, provide for happiness, and bring the security of law to society, believed that strong local self-government would best preserve the homogeneous republic. Therefore, he opposed firmly the dream of a consolidated American empire spanning the continent and under the direction of a centralized national government. Randolph remarked in that “no government extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific can be fit to govern me or those whom I represent.” Such a government could not exist, he said, because it lacked “the common feeling and the common interest with the governed which is indispensable to its existence.” The United States of America was not a homogeneous community. The union of states was not the locus of community but only “the means of liberty and safety . . . not as an end, to which these are to be sacrificed.” Virginians, however, were “an unmixed people,” a homogeneous community fit for republicanism. Traditional culture, with its familial bonds, customs, manners, and gentry, provided society with a common interest and goal. Government’s role in life was minimal. It was society, the collection of traditional institutions and customs, which influenced life and culture most directly. John Taylor agreed with Randolph but tied homogeneity closer to economic interest. He wrote that society consisted of two interests, one “subsisting by industry,” or the natural interest, and one subsisting by law, or the artificial interest. He professed that the “natural interest of every country, ought exclusively to legislate.” He listed the natural interests as agri. See the essay by “Brutus” in The Complete Antifederalist, vol. , –. See also Storing, What the Antifederalists Were For, –. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., in The Rhetoric of Conservatism, chap. , insists that the Virginia conservatives wanted homogeneous communities because it would be easier for those who governed to discuss politics with others who possessed similar notions and minds. Homogeneity would make it easier for citizens to talk to each other without fear of deceit or corruption. “To the Freeholders of Charlotte, Prince Edward, Buckingham, and Cumberland,” May , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Annals of Congress (th Cong., st sess.), , quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . “To a New England Senator,” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –.
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culture, commerce, manufactures, and the arts. Artificial interests included public debt, public officers, and banks. Whereas natural interests thrived on individual choice, talent, and industry, artificial interests lived upon the natural interests of a country through fraud. “Wealth accumulated without industry” would more likely become an aid to “vice and monarchy, than of virtue and republicanism.” While government was “instituted for the happiness” of natural interests, it belonged to the class of artificial interests and was “perpetually drawn towards that [interest] by the strongest cords.” Government often acted in ways to deceive the natural interests through taxes, especially tariffs and other bounties for manufactures, and robbed labor. Such taxes transferred the value and wealth created by honest, productive labor to the government or some social order that was artificial and essentially unproductive. “Into this net, woven of intricate frauds and ideal credit,” Taylor wrote, “the majority of the nation, the interest of labour, the agriculturalists and mechanics have run after the baits held out by protecting duties, bounties and prohibitions.” The result was enslavement to the “monied aristocracy,” the minority, artificial interest. Taylor insisted that the agricultural interest was the chief natural interest and thus served as the basis for the homogenous republic. Farmers had similar political and economic interests and, if protected from the “monied aristocracy,” could prosper in a peaceful country. The homogeneity of agricultural society strengthened self-government, Taylor thought. He believed that a consensus of political and agricultural knowledge would bind the republic together and prevent government’s tyrannical measures from overwhelming the people. Such a consensus would produce better laws “which by rendering the products of labour more secure, would tend to its encouragement, and greatly advance the comfort, virtue, and happiness of the community.” Farmers would be free to prosper. “Success,” Taylor wrote repeatedly, “must depend upon the interest, economy and industry of individuals.” A communitarian consensus of principles therefore protected the success of both individuals and society. Taylor and Randolph opposed standing armies as threats to republican government. Their critiques of standing armies and defenses of the militia came from “neo-Harringtonian” Whig sources, such as Cato’s Letters, of the . Taylor, Arator, , . Taylor, Enquiry, –. Taylor, Definition of Parties, . . Taylor, Arator, , –.
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early eighteenth century. Both men understood that a republic needed peace in order to flourish. Therefore, war, particularly an offensive war, was antithetical to republican principles. In Randolph said, “The Government of the United States was not calculated to wage offensive foreign war—it was instituted for the common defence and general welfare; and whosoever should embark it in a war of offence, would put it to a test which it was by no means calculated to endure.” European governments, they believed, used standing armies to spread tyranny and to extend control over the lives of their citizens. Taylor and Randolph opposed an American standing army for these reasons. They viewed standing armies as agents of tyranny. Taylor argued that “an army is the strongest of all factions, and completely the instrument of a leader, skillful enough to enlist its sympathies, and inflame its passions.” Leaders of nations, including, he thought, the president of the United States, would use the army to gain more power and oppress the people. Military power was “at least as able to enslave a nation as civil power,” and the “banner of usurpation and tyranny is usually hoisted by a legal army” that gives “permanency to the evil political principles, force and fraud.” Randolph concurred. Standing armies, he warned, had “wrought the downfall of every free state and riveted the fetters of despotism.” Taylor told Thomas Ritchie in , “The officers and soldiers who carry on modern wars, are led into the field by money, not honor.” The fact that the government paid a standing army meant that the soldiers’ loyalty was to the general government, in particular to the president, not to the people. The “pernicious little army” and navy were “ineffectual” and characterized only by “decay, imbecility and expense.” Randolph insisted that the standing army destroyed the “military spirit of the citizen, by cultivating it only in the soldier by profession.” It made the citizenry lackadaisical. Randolph characterized the standing army as “ragamuffins” and “loungers who live upon the public.” . “Speech Against War with England,” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Taylor, Inquiry on the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, –. Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters Written by Colonel John Taylor of Caroline, to Thomas Ritchie, Editor of the ‘Enquirer’ in Consequence of an Unwarrantable Attack Made by that Editor upon Colonel Taylor, . Taylor, Arator, –. Adams, John Randolph, . Some anti-Federalists expressed a fear of standing armies too. See Anti-federalists versus Federalists, .
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Both Taylor and Randolph believed that a citizens’ militia preserved republican self-government. By Taylor had accepted the existence of a standing army in the United States, but hoped it could be controlled by state militias. “Arms can only be controlled by arms,” he insisted. State militias were the perfect protections against the tyrannical use of a standing army. If the states did not have militias, then “the general government would inevitably become the judge and jury of the state governments.” Randolph repeated the same theme in . He remarked that the rights and liberties of the people were safe not with the national government but with the state legislatures and “in the bosom of the free yeomanry of the country, asserted by their muskets and their rifles, and never yielded unless cautiously and warily attacked” by secret approaches of agents of corruption. The vigilance of an armed citizenry, in other words, was essential to republicanism. Randolph held that a citizen militia created a vigilant populace with a proper martial spirit, that of vigorous defense of liberty. The militia, therefore, was an instrument of self-government and opposed the corruption a standing army threatened to bring. Taylor even warned that the general government had encroached on the rights of state militias under “the pretext of diminishing its [the militia’s] duty.” In other words, the government claimed to be making the lives of its citizens easier while robbing them of their liberty. The situation was ripe for the usurpation of liberty by “some ambitious president” through the use of the army. The fear of factions and competing interests, which informed their defenses of homogeneous republics and militias, also played a role in Taylor’s and Randolph’s condemnations of political parties. Randolph feared that political parties would provoke political corruption. During Jefferson’s first term, when opposition to Federalism had been necessary, Randolph did not mind playing the party leader. But he couched his partisanship in terms of the court-country dichotomy, arguing that the rise of the country party had been necessary to defeat Adams and the Federalists. Randolph clearly showed discomfort at the notion of a permanent political party because he thought it violated republicanism. Parties brought corruption and resembled the court. After his break with Jefferson, Randolph called Republican Party members “insects that bask in the sunshine of court . Taylor, Inquiry, . Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Taylor, Arator, .
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patronage.” Political parties became engines of patronage through which party leaders controlled policy by bribing party members. Randolph lamented the fact that the politician now existed who, while campaigning, “smiles in your face, holds out his hand, and declares himself the advocate of those political principles to which you are also attached” but when elected acts “with your adversaries upon other principles.” Representatives were obliged to represent the interests of their constituents. But party organization allowed for the coordination of representatives to vote against the interests of their constituents. Randolph thought such a scenario had occurred in the Republican Party. When the Republican Party had risen to power, it had included men zealous for republicanism and the Principles of ’98. But the Jeffersonians in power, according to Randolph, had become Federalists, that monster “generated by fraud” and “nursed in corruption.” Party spirit now ensured the corruption of both government and society through patronage and deception. Taylor had tackled the question of parties in the s during the formation of the First Party system in America, predictably blaming them on Hamilton. In Definition of Parties, he warned that the Constitution had been established for the public good, but had been subverted by people using government to grant exclusive interests. The Federalists were a party, really a cabal set against the public good. Good republicans like himself were not a party but vigilant defenders of republicanism. If parties created by the Hamiltonian system were allowed to prevail, then “real representation and responsibility” had ended, and tyranny had commenced. The solution was simple. “A constitutional expulsion of a stock-jobbing paper interest, in every shape, out of the national legislature, can alone recover the lost principles of a representative government, and save the nation from being owned—bought—and sold.” The destruction of the Hamiltonian system should then begin. . For the oppositionist view of parties see Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, –. “To a New England Senator (James Lloyd),” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Quoted in Adams, John Randolph, . See Randolph’s “Speech on the Georgia Claims” on January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. In reference to the Yazoo Compromise, he attacked the Jeffersonians for being a court party. . Taylor, Definition of Parties, –, –. See Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, –. Hill, Jr., The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, –.
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Since the American Revolution, devout republicans feared the return of monarchy. Thus, Randolph and Taylor displayed a great fear and suspicion of executive power, the locus of monarchical characteristics in American government. Taylor feared that the tendency toward monarchy had been written into the Constitution. The strength of the executive branch and the resemblance between the president and the British king worried Taylor. The president, he argued, possessed too many powers that remained outside the control of the people. He declared that the president had too much discretion in appointing judges, and, like kings, would appoint only people who agreed with him. Thus the president would have the capacity to dictate the law of the land, whereas according to the Constitution his only relation to law was to enforce it. In the rhetoric of the Country party, Taylor charged that the president would employ patronage, an action thus corrupting individuals, introducing factions, orders, and aristocracy in America, and destroying the Constitution. Through patronage granted to members of both the legislative and the judicial branch, the president would corrupt all government. For “when one man dispenses the rewards to merit,” merit will consist in the government’s “attachment to the interest of one man,” and monarchy will result. Taylor continued, “A president, by the legislative instrument, may provoke war, introduce funding and banking, raise armies, increase taxes, multiply offices, and commit the freedom of the press to the custody of penal laws, with as much certainty and system as a British king.” The exercise of executive authority in several respects displayed dangerous tendencies toward usurping liberty and introducing evil principles into government. Therefore, Taylor affirmed that the division of powers and independence of the separate branches of government, two of the cornerstones of American government, were violated in the executive branch. Randolph repeated Taylor’s fears that the executive would corrupt the legislative branch through personal influence and the promise of patronage. He believed that Jefferson had become dangerously corrupt by . Soon after Jefferson’s second presidential victory, Randolph remarked to his friend Joseph Nicholson that Jefferson was “again seated in the saddle . . . with a prospect of reelection for life.” Randolph feared that many Republicans had “a spirit of personal attachment” to Jefferson that was . Taylor, Inquiry, , , , , , .
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monarchical in principle. These republicans believed that “our salvation depends on an individual.” But executive corruption went beyond personal influence. Presidents also controlled patronage. Randolph remarked to James Monroe in that “the only question which the major part of [the House of Representatives] inquires into is ‘what is the wish of the Executive?’ and an intimation of the pleasure of that branch of the government is of equal force with law.” The reason for such groveling before Jefferson by the legislature was patronage: “There is a proneness to seek office and favors among us which is truly mortifying and distressing to the true republicans, the number of whom, it is to be feared, diminishes every day.” Fear of corruption and decline played a large role in republican thought. Constitutional Mechanics or a Virtuous People? Scholars have noted two basic approaches of modern republicans to political problems: the construction of a proper constitutional machinery to preserve the republic, and reliance on a virtuous people to keep republicanism viable. The two approaches were not mutually exclusive, but usually a republican would express a preference for one of the approaches. Whereas no republican would encourage either vice in the people or a poorly constructed constitution, clearly some republicans regarded virtue as more important than machinery. The balance of machinery and virtue bothered republicans. Some relied on virtue and believed that the government and law could promote virtue in the people. Constitutional mechanics were secondary and could be manipulated to produce the desired end, a virtuous people. Other American republicans argued that the mechanical apparatus of government was the primary preserver of the republic. These republicans feared zealous virtue-type re. Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Quoted in Risjord, The Old Republicans, –, . . In the late s, several historians challenged the idea that republican ideology was monolithic. Quentin Skinner maintained that within republicanism there had always existed a fundamental disagreement about whether virtue or institutions were the key to preserving republics. Scholars of American republicanism validated Skinner’s claim. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vols.; Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England; Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America; McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum.
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publicans for their willingness to use government power to produce a virtuous society. More libertarian in their approach, republicans endorsing the primacy of the machinery in government tended to guard carefully the laws of government in an effort to preserve republicanism. In the end they chose liberty over virtue. Both Taylor and Randolph believed that liberty was necessary for a good society. They also agreed that a good form of government could aid liberty. As Taylor wrote, “That forms of government mould manners, will not be denied.” Both men were republicans who had cut their political teeth defending the Jeffersonian Republican contention that the Federalists were secret monarchists looking to take over the government. “Liberty and tyranny,” Taylor wrote, “are neither of them inevitable consequences of any form of government, as both depend, to a great extent, upon its operations, whatever may be its form.” But, he added, men should “adopt a form, most likely to produce liberty, and containing the best precautions against the introduction of tyranny.” An absolute monarch could occasionally grant liberty, while a representative government could occasionally produce tyranny, as was the case during the French Revolution. But history was on the side of the republics in the preservation of liberty. Both realized that government, whether monarchical or republican in form, could corrupt the people and destroy liberty. Thus they dealt with the tension between constitutional mechanics and popular virtue to discover how best to preserve liberty. On paper they presented different tactical approaches to the question, but in reality, their conclusions were similar. John Taylor took the constitutional mechanics approach but qualified it significantly. He contended that because governments were founded on moral bases, good moral principles had to be included in government and evil ones excluded. Taylor thought that the United States had to battle to keep its forms of government and laws endowed with good principles lest tyranny should arise. His checklist of good principles included truth, freedom of religion, knowledge, limitation of power, equal rights, honesty, . Taylor, Inquiry, . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, –. Also in New Views of the Constitution, Taylor stresses continuously the need to maintain the structure of American federalism. Taylor wrote to Jefferson in , “If a good form of government too often fails in making bad men good, a bad form of government will too often succeed in making good men bad.” Again, he placed form over popular virtue. John Taylor to Thomas Jefferson, June , , reprinted in “John Taylor Correspondence,” .
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self-government, and justice. Throughout his writings he defended such moral principles and demanded their incorporation in government, and he judged all governments against those standards, which he considered objective and universal. Taylor listed as bad principles fraud, force, ignorance, despotism, exclusive privileges, ambition, avarice, and superstition. He insisted repeatedly that if a government was founded on good principles, good would result; and if government was founded on evil principles, evil would result. Ostensibly, he thought principles were more important than either the form of government or the virtue of private individuals. For Taylor reasoned that virtuous men ruling a government founded on bad principles could not produce good. A government founded on good principles respected self-government and protected man from evil propensities caused by ambition and avarice and prevented the degeneration of society into “ignorance, savageness and depravity of manners.” Taylor, however, did not end his discussion with principles. He realized that “paper guarantees” were insufficient to procure a just republican government. The real problem was construction of the Constitution according to the good principles, a topic about which Taylor spent his life writing vigorously. In the s he argued that “national watchfulness is the only preservative of liberty.” Americans had to revert back to “fundamental principles.” They could not appeal to the Constitution because it had been misconstrued by politicians who interpreted the document out of their own self-interest rather than out of concern for the public good. Randolph too understood that construction of the Constitution ultimately meant more to the preservation of liberty than how the actual text of the Constitution read. He noted that a mere constitution on paper did not guarantee republican self-government because a “quibbling lawyer, or quibbling planter, or merchant, or artisan” could make the paper constitution “speak in order to curry favor with People in power.” “I have no faith in parchment,” Randolph declared. He called for a “common sense construction” of the Constitution, one that recognized the American arrangement of states’ rights. In a congressional speech on April , , Randolph . Taylor, Inquiry, –, , . The quotation is from Arator, . . Taylor, Enquiry, , . See Hill, Jr., The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, –. McConnell, “John Taylor and the Democratic Tradition,” –, links Taylor to Harrington. John Ashworth, “The Jeffersonians: Classical Republicans or Liberal Capitalists?” –. Ashworth thinks that Taylor transcended the virtue-mechanics debate.
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exclaimed that he was “for the doctrine of doing nothing—for a wise and masterly inactivity about the Constitution.” He said he would “put up no fences against usurpation, made up of paper or parchment” because constitutional guarantees were not enough. “Power is the only thing that limits power,” he remarked, and he added that there were so many “articles of the Constitution” that “nobody now knows what the Constitution is.” He concluded, “I am no worshipper of this Constitution.” Writing to Andrew Jackson in , Randolph discussed those politicians who condemned the protective tariff as unconstitutional, “while at the same time they defend the constitutionality of the Bank of the U.S.” Such politicians “confound Tyranny with Usurpation, as if that made any difference to the victim.” Randolph argued that “it is not perhaps so much by the Assumption of unlawful powers, as by the unwise, or unwarrantable use of those which are most legal, that Governments oppose their true end and object.” Driving home his point with an example from Britain, Randolph asked: “Who doubts the constitutionality of the Corn Laws, that are starving the English labourers? Are they therefore more bound to submit to starvation?” By this time Randolph perceived clearly that an ideology based solely on strict construction would not preserve republican society, particularly in the South. In a speech on the tariff, he exclaimed: “A fig for the Constitution! When the scorpion’s sting is probing us to the quick shall we stop to chop logic?” As with Taylor’s stress on good principles, Randolph clearly regarded the essence of republicanism as being beyond the mechanics of the Constitution. Though both men agreed that constitutional mechanics alone could . Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , . Adams, John Randolph, , –. “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . “Speech on the Amendment of the Constitution,” April , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. M. M. Goldsmith in his article “Liberty, Virtue, and the Rule of Law, –” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, –, argues that republicans believed that liberty meant participation in political activity while liberals understood liberty as that which the citizen was legally allowed to do. Goldsmith notes that some thinkers, including Locke, tried to mix the republican and liberal elements of liberty. It seems that Randolph mixed these ideas too. On the one hand, Randolph saw liberty as a protection of his person and property, and on the other hand, he conceived of a constitution and society in which the citizen actively participated. On liberty in southern thought, see Genovese, The Southern Tradition, . . Randolph to Andrew Jackson, January , , Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, .
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not preserve liberty, Taylor, at least in theory, was less trusting of popular virtue than Randolph. Taylor rejected the notion that a virtuous citizenry was necessary in order to have a good republic. He refuted the idea that “the members of society cannot form equal and just laws for self government, unless these members are virtuous.” Taylor did so for two reasons. First, he wrote, the “more a nation depends for its liberty on the qualities of individuals, the less likely it is to retain it.” That rejection of reliance on individuals extended to the opposite view, associated with David Hume and, as Taylor saw him, Alexander Hamilton, that public good could be derived from harnessing private vice. According to Taylor, that opened the door to destruction from public evil produced by private vices. He wanted to insulate the state from all manipulation by individuals. Taylor disliked monarchy precisely because one man’s will ruled the nation, inspiring the rise of factions and unbridled self-interest that would bring privileges and corruption into government. A republic based on private virtue would be “founded in the self same principle with monarchies, namely, the evanescent qualities of individuals.” Secondly, Taylor pointed to the historical record, which showed that despite the continued rule of “vicious men,” by which he meant “nobles, priests, merchants, stockjobbers and robbers,” some societies had preserved “individual social rights” by means of laws that were “free, just and virtuous respecting themselves.” Taylor argued that it “is in the governing principles, and not in the subject to be governed that the virtue or vice resides, which causes the freedom or oppression.” Here, however, Taylor’s stress on the primacy of principles falters in light of his insistence on proper construction of constitutions. Good principles may be more important than good men, but because people construe constitutions, the success of Taylor’s system ultimately relies on well-principled individuals who possess the virtue, that is, public spiritedness, to interpret the constitution according to good principles. Taylor’s desire for a government immune from the influences of individuals does not match with his earlier contentions about the importance of the construction of constitutions. John Randolph believed that popular virtue was necessary for a . Taylor, Inquiry, , , , . In A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, he wrote, “An adherence to men is often disloyalty to principles” (). It can easily be seen that a foundation in good principles is more important to Taylor than the private virtue of the citizens.
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republic. He did not place any more trust in human nature, however, than Taylor did. He simply could not see how government forms could ultimately protect liberty. He believed that without a virtuous citizenry, the republican system would degenerate into tyranny in an attempt to keep social order. He wrote to his nephew Theodore Dudley that “virtue is essential to great excellence in laudable pursuits.” For Randolph, virtue meant acting according to objective moral principles with social imperatives in mind. Thus virtue required self-denial. Randolph believed that one could choose and achieve a virtuous independence. He repeatedly told his nephew “your destiny is in your own hands” and reminded him to form good habits. Randolph told Dudley: “Keep this eternal truth always in mind. Do right, and you cannot fail to be as happy as our defective nature will permit the sons of men to be.” Virtue meant standing on principle and honesty even when times were tough. Randolph remarked that “the people of this country, if ever they lose their liberties, will do it by sacrificing some great principle of free government to temporary passion.” Vice meant trading good principles of honesty and independence for dependence, indolence, dissolute behavior, and unrestrained passion. A passing desire, a temptation for private gain, if succumbed to, could end virtue. Once the people became vicious, Randolph said that “it is perfectly immaterial what is his [the sovereign’s] character—we shall be slaves—it is not an elective government which will preserve us.” Because manipulating constitutional machinery would not save a vicious people, Randolph’s greatest battles were to ensure that the people remained virtuous. Randolph did not want to use the government to instill virtue in individuals. Because he believed virtue was the result of free moral choice, Randolph eschewed government coercion as a path to producing a virtuous people. Neither did he leave the cultivation of virtue, as liberals would, solely to the reason of the individual. Rather, like Burke, Randolph believed that only the traditional institutions of society—families, churches, schools—could shape character in people and make it easier for people to be virtuous. Randolph wrote to Brockenbrough, “Of all the follies man is . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , , . Virtue for the Jeffersonians “meant not so much a renunciation of self-interest as an awareness that that interest was best pursued in accordance with social imperatives—in other words not on an individual calculus.” John Ashworth, “The Jeffersonians: Classical Republicans or Liberal Capitalists?” . Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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prone to, that of thinking that he can regulate the conduct of others, is the most inveterate and preposterous.” Government, however, could destroy virtue in the people by promoting the easy path of vice. Randolph charged that the “very highest degree of moral courage is required for the duties of government.” But he saw little moral courage in the government leaders of his day. In his famous speech on “King Numbers” at the Virginia constitutional convention, he presented an image of the government’s corruption of the virtuous people. Randolph began by saying many people now had the notion that “all things must be done for them by the Government, and that they are to do nothing for themselves.” The government encouraged this idea of dependence. The people wanted the government both to handle its constitutional concerns and to “step in and ease individuals of their natural and moral obligations.” Randolph said, “A more pernicious notion cannot prevail.” The result of such thinking and of government compliance is the following example: “Look at that ragged fellow staggering from the whiskey shop, and see that slattern who has gone there to reclaim him, where are their children? Running about, rugged, idle, ignorant, fit candidates for the penitentiary. Why is all this so? Ask the man and he will tell you, ‘Oh, the Government has undertaken to educate our children for us. It has given us a premium for idleness, and I now spend in liquor what I should otherwise be obliged to save to pay for their schooling.’” Randolph did not blame the environment and institutions alone for social vices. The individual in his example clearly chose vice and dependency because he wanted to and because the government made it possible for him to do so and to get away with it. Both Taylor and Randolph reach a similar conclusion: liberty demands a republic of virtuous individuals who govern themselves according to good principles. Economic Thought Republicans saw the creation of the Hamiltonian system as a replay of English history during the “rule” of Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole’s finan. Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, December , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, . . “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Here Randolph reveals his anti-Federalist roots. “The Antifederalists emphasized repeatedly that the character of a people is affected by government
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cial revolution in the s sparked vigorous oppositionist republican tracts that complained of the corruption, dependence, and greed brought by paper money and a national bank. Some historians have noted that the Jeffersonian Republican opposition in the s arose in direct opposition to Hamilton’s plans. Although later events of the s like Jay’s Treaty, the XYZ Affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts would crystallize the Jeffersonians into a party, fear of an American Walpole lurking behind the persona of Hamilton sparked a flood of republican arguments and writings. John Taylor waged a vigorous pamphlet war in the s against the funding system and Hamilton’s national bank. Randolph spent his early political career in Congress trying to dismantle Hamilton’s complex system. Economic thought, therefore, was part of the Old Republican creed. After the War of and the collapse of the Federalist party, Jeffersonian Republicans began reviving parts of Hamilton’s system under the aegis of postwar nationalism. In Congress chartered the second Bank of the United States and imposed a protective tariff. Congress debated whether or not to use federal money to fund internal improvements, but President Madison vetoed the internal improvement bill, calling it unconstitutional. As Republicans voted in a new direction, Taylor and Randolph restated their economic ideas and attacked the American System, which they equated with Hamilton’s plan, as an engine of corruption. The Old Republicans admired the political economy of Adam Smith, especially his attack on mercantilism and advocacy of laissez faire. Smith argued that a natural order underlay economic affairs and was superior to any artificial order created by men. He condemned the “mercantile system” of his day—the attempts of governments to regulate the economy in order to secure a favorable balance of trade—as destructive of the natural order and of liberty. The proper approach to economics was laissez-faire. As long as government kept out of the market, economic matters would resolve for the good of most parties. Once government interfered in the market, it interfered with the freedom of all. Both Taylor and Randolph read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. They viewed the Hamiltonian system as neomercantilism that established privileged orders in society through and laws,” wrote Herbert Storing. What the Antifederalists Were For, . “On King Numbers,” reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, chap. .
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the actions of government. Taylor affirmed, as Smith did, that wealth should be divided in accordance with the industry and talents of individuals rather than by the artificial means of government patronage. Thus Taylor remarked, “Individuals are better judges I think of their pecuniary interest, than governments.” He noted that government was instituted primarily to protect private property, the “acquisitions of private people, which no law can transfer to other private people.” Government, then, protected property both through law and by ensuring the freedom necessary for the individual to “judge of his own employment and interest.” Taylor was certain that by allowing individual talent to acquire wealth, social harmony would be ensured. Such a division of wealth never enslaved any nation, he explained, but always worked alongside political liberty. Ultimately, the Old Republicans believed that economic policy must protect society, not subvert it. The Old Republicans believed that the natural order in the United States was agriculture. Randolph and Taylor defended agriculture and envisioned a free, prosperous farming society left alone by government. Taylor noted that agriculture was the mother of all subsistence because it produced food necessary for the survival of all, and that it constituted the wealth of a nation because land was the most permanent source of profit. “In the United States, agriculture covers the interest of a vast majority,” he noted. The agricultural interest was “the mother which suckles all other interests.” Agriculture also promoted freedom and independence. Taylor wrote that agriculture “both from its nature, and also as being generally the employment of a great portion of a nation, cannot be united with power, considered as an exclusive interest.” While agriculture could be abused by a tyrannical government, under a free government “where power is not an exclusive, but a general interest, agriculture can employ its own energies for the attainment of its own happiness.” Therefore, Taylor concluded, “Under a free government it [agriculture] has before it the inexhaustible sources of human pleasure, of fitting ideas to substances, and substances to ideas; and of a constant rotation of hope and fruition.” He even called agricultural society a “paradise” and asserted that it promoted . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, , . Inquiry, , . Tyranny Unmasked, . See John F. Devanny, Jr., “ ‘A Loathing of Public Debt, Taxes and Excises’: The Political Economy of John Randolph of Roanoke,” –. On Taylor and laissezfaire, see William T. Grampp, “John Taylor: Economist of Southern Agrarianism,” –.
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patriotism. He wrote, “At the aweful day of judgment, the discrimination of the good from the wicked, is not made by the criterion of sects or of dogmas, but by one which constitutes the daily employment and the great end of agriculture.” Taylor believed that God would reward eternally the farmers who fed the hungry by means of their agricultural vocation. He wrote that “the divine intelligence which selected an agricultural state as a paradise for its first favourites, has here again prescribed the agricultural virtues as the means for the admission of their posterity into heaven.” Though in other respects he specifically rejected utopianism, in his treatment of agrarianism Taylor grew positively mystical, connecting it with an immanent economic salvation, a creation of a “heavenly” society on earth. The Old Republicans fully accepted commerce as a necessary part of American society. Randolph defended free trade during the debates over Jefferson’s Embargo Acts and Madison’s attempts at nonimportation. He argued that the government’s attempt to tightly regulate commerce would backfire and bring about lawbreaking and corruption in the American people. Taylor thought that commerce played an important role in an agrarian society by relieving farmers of their excess crops. Unlike certain classical republicans, who would ban commerce from the republic out of fear that it would distract the citizenry from its public duties, Taylor heartily supported commerce and maintained that the acquisition of wealth, which commerce promoted, was healthy for society. He also believed that unrestricted commerce, free trade, and government frugality would relieve America’s economic distress and encourage economic independence. Taylor classified commerce as a species of public and private property, and thus would allow the government to tax it lightly. But, he noted, government could not interfere seriously in commerce without causing national poverty and endangering individual liberty. Randolph agreed that small . Taylor, Inquiry, . Taylor, Arator, –. Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, . For a defense of American agriculture by Randolph that echoes Jefferson’s Query XIX in Notes on the State of Virginia, see Annals of Congress (th Cong., st sess.), . . Taylor, Arator, –. Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, –. Some earlier scholars of republicanism maintained that many American republicans were hostile to commerce. Many scholars, however, have refuted that contention. See Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern. Rahe, “Antiquity Surpassed: The Repudiation of Classical Republicanism,” in Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the s. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism. Tate, “John Taylor and the Formation of an American Ideology,” –.
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duties on imports were constitutional and appropriate. Taylor, like Adam Smith, maintained that free trade would benefit everyone in the economy and would bring peace, a desired political end. The Old Republicans’ view of commerce flowed both from their libertarian view of government and from their respect for private property. In their concern for private property, Taylor and Randolph opposed economic radicalism and what they called “capitalism,” the avaricious union of political and financial interests. Taylor, for example, vehemently rejected the idea that government had a right to limit property ownership in the form of an “agrarian law.” The English republican James Harrington, who believed that the form of government a country possessed depended on the distribution of property, had proposed an Agrarian Law in his republican scheme in order to balance land ownership and thus equalize political power among the citizens. Taylor distrusted any such division of property. Such laws, he insisted, produced only injustice and misery. Taylor did not place limitations on property ownership and thus opposed “levelism” because it was unnatural and intruded on the industry and talents of individuals who had justly acquired their property. Taylor assaulted capitalists just as much as republican radicals. Because he insisted that wealth came from the profits from land and labor, Taylor suspected that capitalists, those tied to government, manufacturing interests, and the “paper system,” made their profits in a parasitical way off the laboring class. Capitalists confiscated true wealth from the farmers and workers who produced it. Both Taylor and Randolph argued that the Hamiltonian system of funding the public debt and establishing a national bank created the “paper money system” that could destroy the country. Randolph particularly hated debt. Warning his nephew Theodore Dudley of the dangers of debt, Randolph remarked that “the relation between debtor and creditor is that of a slave to his master.” Debt “begins with the subjugation of the mind, and ends with the enslavement of the body.” In the ancient world debtors had been sold into slavery, but the modern punishment was imprisonment. Randolph said that neither punishment was “too severe for . Taylor, Inquiry, , , . See McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, –. For another treatment of Taylor’s economic ideas see MacLeod, “The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline,” –.
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the wretch, who is abject enough to submit to conditions which may, ultimately, lead to so humiliating a consequence.” Dependence was antithetical to republicanism, and because Hamilton’s system encouraged dependence, it endangered republicanism. Randolph thundered that he was “the holder of no stock whatever, except live stock, and had determined never to own any.” Taylor maintained that Hamilton’s system was a species of legislative patronage that enriched individuals through the illicit exercise of government power. It created a faction at the nation’s expense, a faction that “will adhere to a government against a nation.” The paper system would bring dependence and slavery by creating two classes, creditors (“masters”) and debtors (“slaves”). For Taylor money was a sign of either liberty or tyranny. An economic system promoting liberty would have only hard money, regulated by supply and demand through the just exchange of goods among consenting people. A tyrannical economic system ran on paper money, regulated by capitalist interests and the banks, which made money without industry. Taylor’s hostility to the paper money system was so intense because he believed that once it was instituted fully it could not be undone since the Framers, who never envisioned such a system in America, had not provided any checks against it. Moreover, he was convinced that such an order would inevitably grow and would eventually control the government. The Old Republicans complained that the first and second Banks of the United States created an economic elite by centralizing economic power. Randolph charged that the Bank created “a great privileged order” intent on enslaving the people in debt. But the Bank corrupted politics too and made government a further oppressor of society. Randolph, writing to Andrew Jackson in about the bank issue, remarked that many people considered his ranting against the Bank a sign either of his madness or his abuse of opium. He promised to keep attacking the Bank of the United States because the “Leviathan Mammoth Legion is now doing what the Bank of England and the E. India Company are doing, buying votes and seats.” Randolph’s invocation of the British example showed that he was attuned to the oppositionist arguments. Randolph had read . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, . Annals of Congress (th Cong., st sess.), . Taylor, Inquiry, –, , . Taylor, Enquiry, . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, –, .
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his Whig history. He, like the Whig writers, thought that financiers and capitalists desired to capture government power to further their economic interests. Jackson’s own cabinet was in danger of corruption. Randolph feared that “Leviathan has too many friends among them [the cabinet].” The result of influence would be more government debt and the progressive dependence of the people. Randolph had the solution to the problem: “Pay as you go.” If debt could be ended, private capitalist interests could be thwarted and republicanism preserved. Taylor declared Hamilton’s national bank both unconstitutional and contrary to popular will, an intrusion of special moneyed interests into the government, and believed it would, by virtue of its monopoly status, destroy both liberty and private property. “If the monopoly of banking will rob a nation of its liberty, by corrupting or usurping the government,” he wrote, “it is almost superfluous to prove, that it will rob it of its property also; because every separate interest acquiring one, has uniformly gotten the latter.” He insisted that “banking in its best view, is only a fraud, whereby labour suffers the imposition of paying an interest on the circulating medium.” Taylor also believed that banking encouraged avarice, which in turn “breeds the treacheries of privilege against liberty.” Avarice tempted human nature to embrace illicit economic pursuits in order to gain power and prosperity. Therefore, Hamilton’s banking system produced and encouraged immorality and accordingly had to be forbidden from operating in the United States. The Old Republicans opposed the protective tariff too. Taylor’s commitment to laissez-faire economics provided his critique of the tariff. He wrote, “Protecting duties to enrich manufacturers [meaning productive workers], are like banks to enrich farmers, bishops to save souls, or feudal lords to defend nations.” Moreover, the tariff, like other government interference in the economy, never had the desired effect. In fact, the tariff, which was supposed to enrich manufactures, really enriched only capitalists in alliance with the government. Taylor argued that “one sixth of the laboring manufacturers, constantly occupy prisons or poor houses, whilst the rest may be said to die daily upon their daily wages.” In addition, the . Annals of Congress (th Cong., st sess.), . Randolph to Andrew Jackson, August , , and October , , Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , , . Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Taylor, Inquiry, , . Taylor, Enquiry, . Taylor, Inquiry, .
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tariff impoverished the nation as a whole. It raped agriculture, transferring the wealth of the farmers to the capitalists. Taylor also predicted that a protective tariff would produce retaliatory tariffs against the United States’ exported goods, thus reducing the buying and selling power of the farmer who relied on the market for trading his surpluses. The tariff, therefore, destroyed revenue and increased taxation. Taylor thought that the farmers, bled by the tariff, actually contributed the money needed to transform America’s agricultural social order into a capitalist, manufacturing society, the very opposite of their interests. This was Taylor’s worst nightmare. Randolph echoed Taylor’s claim that the protective tariff was a tax on farmers to aid a select group of manufactures in league with the government. Arguing against the protective tariff in , Randolph told his fellow southern congressmen that the issue was “whether you, as a planter, will be taxed in order to hire another man to go to work in a shoemaker’s shop, or to set up a spinning jenny.” He maintained that he would “buy where I can get manufactures cheapest.” “I will not,” he insisted, “agree to lay a duty on the cultivators of the soil to encourage exotic manufactures; because, after all, we should only get much worse things at a much higher price, and we, the cultivators of the country, would in the end pay for all.” Randolph assured Congress that he would also reject a proposal that taxed manufacturers and benefited farmers. The deeper issue was state interference in society and the market. Like Jefferson, both Taylor and Randolph distrusted manufacturers. Randolph noted that while “the agriculturist has his property, his lands, his all, his household gods to defend,” the “manufacturer is a citizen of no place or any place.” The “manufacturing interest are collected in masses, and ready to associate at a moment’s warning for any purpose of general interest to their body.” He continued: “Do but ring the fire bell, and you can assemble all the manufacturing interest of Philadelphia in fifteen minutes. Nay, for matter of that, they are always assembled.” The manufacturers would team up with government to oppress farmers. Taylor complained similarly. He believed that “factories degrade human nature,” but insisted that the greatest danger manufactures posed to the country was political . Taylor, Arator, . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, . See also Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, . . Annals of Congress (th Cong., st sess.), –.
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corruption. Because agriculture and commerce were the natural interests of the United States, manufactures could only grow through obtaining privileges from government. “Laws for creating exclusive privileges and monopolies,” Taylor commented, “corrupt governments, interests, and individuals; and substitute patronage, adulation, and favour, for industry, as the road to wealth.” Whereas “merchants and agriculturists are made rich by free industry and fair exchange,” capitalists and manufacturers need monopolies from government and seek protective tariffs in particular. Both Randolph and Taylor feared that the alliance between government and manufacturers would subvert independent free societies in the United States. The Old Republicans also opposed federally funded internal improvements. Taylor opposed internal improvements at federal expense on libertarian grounds, asserting that the federal government should not bring its influence into local matters, thereby destroying self-government. He argued that internal improvements should be conducted strictly on an individual basis. If a farmer wanted to get his crops to market, let him and his neighbors build a road. Internal improvements sponsored by the federal government hampered the natural development of the industry and talent of individuals. In order to pay for the improvements, government must raise taxes, which defeated the government’s professed intention of generating the prosperity of agriculture and manufacturing. Randolph argued that the Constitution simply did not allow for the general government to construct roads and canals throughout the country, except for post roads. He attacked congressmen who tried to interpret the post road clause too liberally in order to gain money for internal improvements. He warned that control of internal improvements by Congress would result in corruption of the worst kind. In he contended, “Figure to yourself, a committee of this House determining on some road, and giving out the contracts to the members of both Houses of Congress, or to their friends, &c.” He concluded that “the Asiatic plunder of Leadenhall Street has not been more corrupting to the British Government than the exercise of such a power as this would prove to us.” Again, Randolph made a libertarian argument to keep the government separated from social affairs. . Ibid., –. Jefferson’s dislike of domestic manufacturers can be found in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, , . . “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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The Old Republicans insisted that avarice was at the root of the desire of some to use government power to enrich themselves. In fact, they feared that avarice had been unleashed in American society and eventually would destroy the Republic. Randolph argued that avarice deadened the heart “to every feeling but the thirst for riches.” An avaricious man was immoral and unfit for republicanism. “The blind pursuit of wealth, for the sake of hoarding, is a species of insanity,” remarked Randolph. He feared that capitalists, encouraged by the Hamiltonian system and the American System of Henry Clay, celebrated avarice. They measured everything according to its cash value, leaving traditional culture and society to languish. Ultimately, according to Randolph, the capitalists placed money above humanity. “Avarice,” he wrote in , “alone could have produced the slave trade; avarice alone can drive, as it does drive, this infernal traffic, and the wretched victims of it, like so many post-horses, whipped to death in a mail coach.” Randolph added that the “trophies of avarice” were “the handcuff, the manacle, and the blood-stained cowhide.” Randolph used the occasion of the death of his good friend Joseph Clay of Philadelphia in to comment upon the avarice evident in capitalistic pursuits. He wrote to his nephew Theodore Dudley to discuss how Clay’s employers, a corporation, besmirched Clay’s memory after his death. Randolph warned Dudley of the inhumanity and brutality the capitalist ethos bred. Randolph charged that “it is not among money lenders, and especially, monied corporations, that I should look for delicacy, feeling, or liberality; much less for justice.” He continued, “There is in all combinations of nature and art, nothing so hard and callous as a trading company, of whatever description.” The trading company looked only to the “dividend” and “to the profit and loss account of the ledger.” The trading company did not care whether they made their profit “from the blood of a Hindoo [sic], or African” or “from the ruined reputation of an honest and amiable man, or the tears of his widowed companion and orphan offspring.” Capitalism, with its roots in avarice, was simply inhumane, and, therefore, immoral. Taylor thought that avarice drove the emerging factory system. In . Randolph to Dr. Brockenbrough, September , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Randolph to Theodore Dudley, December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, –.
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factories, workers were wage slaves because they were not their own masters. Besides being a slave, the laborer was paid a daily wage that supported him only for a day and left no money for savings. Thus the capitalist’s greed made the laborer a pauper. Capitalists robbed workers of independence and forced the mechanics to exert their industry and talent without much financial reward. Ultimately, avaricious men weakened society by coercing and oppressing others. That the government, according to Taylor and Randolph, was involved in unleashing avarice through its grants of special privileges in the forms of banks, protective tariffs, and internal improvements made republican reform imperative. Randolph warned in his speech against internal improvements that if such tyranny was not ended, “we must resort to the measures which we first opposed to British aggressions and usurpations—to maintain that independence which the valor of our fathers acquired, but which is every day sliding from under our feet.” Economics was serious business for the Old Republicans because it was intimately connected to liberty. Economic thought remained a crucial field for southern thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. The War of and the Missouri Compromise John Taylor and John Randolph held similar, though not identical, positions on issues facing the Republic. Randolph as the leader of the Old Republican faction in Congress forged political positions on the War of and the Missouri Compromise that expressed his concern with the coercive power of the state and its social effects. During Jefferson’s second administration, Taylor began to drift toward Randolph’s camp. Both Randolph and Taylor perceived a general erosion of republican principles between and and believed that the lack of principles could be seen in the push for war. In the case of the War of and the Missouri Compromise, the two Jeffersonians differed somewhat in their reasons for opposition, but both expressed their dissent in libertarian republican terms. Themes of states’ rights, republican self-government, popular virtue, constitutional mechanics, and opposition to the Hamiltonian system informed their criticisms. The Jeffersonian Republicans opposed war on account of its tendency to increase the size, power, and expenditures of government. During the . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, , . “Speech on the Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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s the Jeffersonians had attacked the Federalist attempts to build a strong standing army and navy. Randolph continued the opposition to war in the face of the commercial struggles with France and Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. The British practice of impressing American sailors coupled with Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan Decrees caused headaches for Jefferson and would eventually produce the War of . Taylor believed that the Jeffersonians’ drift toward war with Britain was attributable to the machinations of capitalists, while Randolph saw the move toward empire as the primary motive. By Taylor believed that a new group of Jeffersonian Republicans, tied to political patronage and the “monied aristocracy,” were derailing republican reform. Like Randolph, he became disillusioned with Jefferson’s leadership during his second presidential term. After Taylor served as an elector for James Monroe on , Thomas Ritchie, the powerful Virginia Republican and editor of the Richmond Enquirer, attacked his disloyalty to the party. Taylor defended his actions in a series of combative letters in which he defended the Principles of ’98, the same principles he had defended in the Virginia legislature, as the true foundation of the Republican Party. Taylor warned that Madison would go to war with Great Britain and allow the new Republicans to spread their corruption. In Taylor wrote two revealing letters to his friend James Monroe explaining his disenchantment with the Jeffersonian Republicans and highlighting his sense of declension. On October , he cautioned Monroe that “a number of people . . . thought . . . that Mr. Jefferson did many good things, but neglected some better things.” These critics viewed Jefferson’s policy “as very like a compromise with Mr. Hamilton’s.” He insisted that the “mixture of federal and republican policy” did not gain Federalist support and only “disgusted many republicans.” He asked, “What could reflecting republicans see in a compromise between monarchy and democracy?” Despite the fact that Jefferson’s election in had defeated Federalism, it gained “a new footing, by being taken into partnership with republicanism.” Real republican principles had been betrayed, and present Republican politicians only paid lip service to Revolutionary republicanism. Taylor told Monroe that such men and principles ought to be “opposed in all [their] pernicious consequences.” He thought that all true republicans were minority men, those who remained steadfast to principles while opposing the fallen-away Republican majority. A month later, Taylor wrote Monroe again about the state of the Jeffersonian Republicans. He
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declared, “I am destined to live and die a republican minority man.” He added, “Majority republicanism is inevitably, widely (but not thoroughly) corrupted with ministerial republicanism, and it is also tinctured with the folly of certain sympathies towards strong parties, popularity, and noise.” He maintained that his business as a “true minority man” was to “unveil ministerial republicanism, and to awaken honest majority republicanism.” He tried to fulfill his task as a minority man through intellectual means rather than by practical politics. Taylor used the War of as an example of how the actions of government contributed to social decline. As tensions with Great Britain increased, Taylor feared that Republicans would start a foolish war that could “terminate in the destruction of the last experiment in favour of free government.” He argued, “The only certain consequence of war, except when it is undertaken for the purpose of repelling invasion, is, that whichever side gains the victory, the people on both sides are vanquished.” Taylor cited examples from ancient Rome and modern France to show the destructiveness of war on the populace. “War, like dueling, is attended with mutual misery; and the sufferings of belligerent nations, like the death and remorse of the duelists, are intimations of the almighty disapprobation of it, as the arbiter of truth and justice.” He regarded those who pushed for war with Great Britain on the ground of saving the nation’s honor to be “political fanaticks,” no different than religious fanatics. He wrote, “Religious and political fanaticks despise each other as wicked and foolish, the first for fighting about religion; the second for fighting about honor, without discovering that their principles are the same.” “Both,” he asserted, “are used as dupes by designing men, to advance their designs.” Secret conspirators against liberty manipulated the political process and the passions of weak men. He asked Thomas Ritchie, “Will an honest statesman stake the solid happiness, the solid liberty, and the admirable form of government of the freest nation in the world, upon the fluctuating, glittering, vanishing meteor; the child of fancy, the slave of fashion,” national honor? Apparently, the answer was no, but in no honest statesman, he thought, could be found. . John Taylor to James Monroe, October , , and November , , reprinted in “John Taylor Correspondence,” , . . John Taylor to James Mercer Garnett, December , , reprinted in “Letters of John Taylor of Caroline,” . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, , –.
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According to Taylor, who feared the Hamiltonian system more than anything else, the capitalist interest was the power behind the War of , and with the further cooperation of government, it was able to corrupt society more fully. The capitalists had already become wealthy through currency laws and the banking system and “invested” their wealth in “legislative power.” They pushed for the War of to increase “the amount of property-transferring capital or currency.” Taylor disagreed with nationalist politicians who said that the War increased the prosperity of the whole country. “The families which flourished during the war, were the contracting and capitalist families; the latter by loans and premiums, and by selling the wares of their factories at a profit of fifty or an hundred per centum.” The ordinary people of the states “were loaded with taxes, deprived of commerce, and involved in debt” both during and after the War. Despite their gains in wealth, the capitalists were insatiably greedy. Taylor maintained that the capitalists thought that because they prospered more in war than in peace, the government, which they controlled, should make up for their postwar drop in profits by installing protective duties. “By encouraging the extravagance of governments as a basis for loans, and by protecting-duty bounties,” the capitalists, he noted, “have at length established the European system, by which employment for their redundant capital may be provided without limitation, and property may be transferred without end.” Society would suffer because government could not restrain itself from interfering in individual social matters. By interfering in society, the state destroyed the proper environment for liberty. Taylor desired a social arrangement that left the individual free to make moral decisions. The government existed to protect individuals through the law so that they could choose freely in social matters. If society was not based on free choice within the proscribed limits of the laws of nature, then liberty would be impossible to sustain. Warmongering politicians who dragged the Republic into the War of for selfish reasons threatened the existence of liberty. Since , Randolph had opposed Jefferson’s and Madison’s approaches to foreign policy. He warned that Republican policy toward Great Britain would soon produce war. Randolph read Edmund Burke’s Reflections on . John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, –. See also McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, –. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, –.
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the Revolution in France in –, and the book had a strong influence on him. He abandoned his Francophile attitudes of the s and perceived Napoleon to be the greatest threat to liberty in the Western Hemisphere. In Napoleon issued the Berlin and Milan Decrees, which stated that he would seize any ship that traded with Britain or her colonies. In he decided to enforce the decrees on neutral shipping. In response, the British forbade trade with France or her colonies. U.S. merchants were caught in the middle. Jefferson and Madison decided that the best course of action was commercial retaliation in the form of an embargo. Randolph opposed Jefferson’s Embargo and other nonimportation schemes as violations of liberty and foolish measures that would bring war. Consistent in his calls for the separation of state and society, he argued that Republican foreign policy favored one group of society—merchants— while destroying the liberties of others. He thought that the justification for the embargo given by some Republicans betrayed a desire for government and commerce to unite. For example, Jefferson requested bills to increase the size of the U.S. Navy so that it could protect American shipping. Many Jeffersonians agreed. Randolph, however, insisted that commerce should protect itself. “If commerce,” he said, “could not take care of itself; it was not worth caring for.” He counseled merchants to arm their ships heavily and resist the British if necessary. In this way, he noted, “merchants will become what they ought to be, the carriers of your produce, the great machinery for transporting your commodities, instead of being a kind of political caballers [sic].” If merchants protected themselves, the U.S. government would have no need for embargos, except in the case of war, and, therefore, no need to spend money on navy vessels for the sole purpose of protecting merchants. Through laissez-faire, government would protect itself from the political influence of commercial wealth and still collect duties from merchants to secure the good of all citizens. Randolph located behind the drift toward war a plot for an American empire by greedy westerners and southerners who desired to acquire . Annals of Congress (th Cong., nd sess.), –. For general information on Jefferson and the Embargo, see Walter Wilson Jennings, The American Embargo, –. Louis Martin Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo. Herbert Heaton, “Non-Importation, –,” –. Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, Second Term, –. McDonald, The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America.
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Canada for farmland and trade. “Agrarian cupidity,” he thundered, “not maritime rights, urges the war.” Jeffersonian Republicans wanted to undertake a war of conquest for their selfish interests. Such a war would not be “a war for our homes and firesides—a war that might generate or call forth manly and honorable sentiment—but, a war of rapine, of privateering, a scuffle and scramble for plunder.” His perception of nefarious motives based on self-interest led him to appeal to southern self-interest in his famous December , , antiwar speech in which he linked states’ rights to slavery. Randolph knew that his opposition to the war was not popular among southerners, and thus he attempted to explain his opposition in republican terms. He gave seven major reasons why war with England was unrepublican. First, war would involve the raising of a standing army, clearly a danger to the Republic. Republicanism also did not endorse offensive wars to satisfy ambition and to achieve conquests. Randolph warned that only speculators would profit from the war, while the people would have to support the war with their blood and taxes. Politically, war with Britain would aid Napoleon, a ruthless tyrant and enemy to republican liberty. War, added Randolph, would also be unconstitutional. Some Republicans, he noted, pushed for war because they thought it would preserve republicanism. These warmongers, however, did not understand the nature of republicanism. Finally, Randolph appealed to the people, saying they “will not submit to be taxed for this war of conquest and dominion.” After giving his many reasons, Randolph, seemingly unsure of support for his position, added a section on slavery to the speech. The very fact that he appealed to slavery showed how far out of favor Old Republicanism and the Principles of ’98 had fallen. Randolph’s appeal to slavery, therefore, appears as a hysterical last cry for support. Randolph, though, had a more subtle strategy in mind. . Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: , . “Speech against War with England,” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . “To the Freeholders of Charlotte, Prince Edward, Buckingham, and Cumberland,” May , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . On the War of and discussions on this search for empire, see Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of . George Rogers Taylor, “Agrarian Discontent in the Mississippi River Valley Preceding the War of ” –. Norman K. Risjord, “: Conservatives, War Hawks, and the Nation’s Honor,” –. . “Speech against War with England,” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , . On the speech see Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South, .
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Randolph began his discussion of slavery by stating he would touch on the subject “as tenderly as possible” and “with reluctance.” He recalled that during the Revolution when the British invaded the South, many planters entertained no fear of slave insurrections despite the fact that the British invited slaves to desert their masters. But in , the situation was different. Randolph blamed the new situation on the French Revolution, which had “polluted” the minds of slaves, northern whites, and even many slave masters. Yankee “pedlars” spread the fallacious doctrine of equality in the South, and southern masters, having been “infatuated . . . by a general contempt of order, morality, and religion,” unknowingly spread “these seeds of destruction” to their slaves. The consequence of such stupidity was a new fear of insurrection. Men nurturing the ideas of the French Revolution “had taken away from the poor slave his habits of loyalty and obedience to his master.” Abolitionist talk of equality had destroyed the moral character of slaves and “armed his [the slave’s] nature against the hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in sickness.” Randolph concluded, “God forbid . . . that the Southern States should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van!” He noted that while northerners talked of invading Canada, southerners “were shuddering for our own safety” from slave insurrections engendered by principles proponents of the war with Britain endorsed. Randolph’s rhetorical strategy was brilliant. First of all, Randolph’s appeal defined the South as a slaveholding region with distinct slaveholding interests. He also identified enemies of the South: New England abolitionists, Enlightenment idealists, and political centralizers. The New England abolitionist, in the form of the peddler, was an invader, an outsider to the homogeneous community. He not only brought antislavery talk that destroyed the morality of the slaves but also transferred northern manufacturing interests to the agricultural South. Enlightenment promises of natural equality were fallacious as well. Enlightenment idealists taught liberation through equality. By saying that slaves were equal to their masters, the idealists were “advising them [slaves] to cut their [masters’] throats.” The Enlightenment form of liberation promoted violence against the traditional order. Randolph, therefore, associated his major political enemies, . “Speech against War with England,” December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –.
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the political centralizers who pushed for the war, with abolitionists, New England manufacturers, and wild-eyed French Revolutionaries. Randolph’s hero became, by default, the good southern republican. The discussion of slavery constituted only a small part of the speech, but it appealed directly to southern interests. At the end of his speech, Randolph called for Jeffersonians to be true republicans. Speaking of Republicans he said: “We had vaunted of paying off the national debt, of retrenching useless establishments; and yet had now become as infatuated with standing armies, loans, taxes, navies, and war, as ever were the Essex Junto. What Republicanism is this?” The Republicans of were not the Republicans of , and Randolph’s appeals, including his appeals to slaveholders, fell on deaf ears. As the United States went to war in —the result of southern and western support—Randolph’s rhetorical strategy suffered defeat. But such arguments would have their day eventually.
R The Missouri Crisis severely strained the Union and laid bare the sectional tensions in the Republic. The first Missouri Crisis began in February when Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed that an amendment be attached to the bill for Missouri’s admission into the Union. The Tallmadge Amendment called for the prohibition of slavery in Missouri and for the gradual emancipation of slaves already there as a condition for statehood. The House passed the amendment by a sectional vote, but the Senate killed it. Then a bill was introduced to admit Maine into the Union, but southerners in the Senate tied it up to protest northern support for the Tallmadge Amendment. The Fifteenth Congress ended on March , , without reaching a settlement. In the Sixteenth Congress, the Tallmadge Amendment died, Maine came in as a free state, and Missouri entered without restrictions on slavery. Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois offered an amendment prohibiting slavery in the territory gained under the Louisiana Purchase, except for Missouri, north of the line thirty six degrees thirty minutes north latitude. The Thomas Amendment was the southern concession in the compromise that passed in March . . Ibid., , . . Don E. Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism, –.
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Agitation over the slavery issue increased with the attacks on slavery made by former Federalist Rufus King in February during the debate on the compromise. In his speeches, King insisted that he did not care about slavery in the South but feared for the character of the West. The expansion of slavery, he warned, violated the political interests of whites. King believed that if Missouri allowed slavery, the new western states would all allow it. Repeating New Englander complaints about the threefifths clause, King noted that if the new western states became slave states a slave power would run the country. Yankees would lose political influence in the Union because congressmen from slave states would outnumber them. The slave power would control the federal government and its patronage and would forever “remain our Masters.” In Virginia, King’s speeches sparked fears of a revived Federalist Party, a hyper-sectionalist party designed to destroy Virginia’s political influence in national affairs. Many southerners thought Yankee agitation over the morality of slavery was simply a sideshow, a diversion from their main goal of political domination. For many Virginians the Missouri Crisis concerned constitutional questions more than it did slavery. The General Assembly of Virginia passed a resolution in support of “the good people of Missouri in their just rights to admission into the Union.” The Assembly promised to cooperate with Missouri “in resisting with manly fortitude, any attempt which Congress may make to impose restraints, or restrictions, as the price of admission, not authorized by the great principles of the constitution.” Some southerners gave speeches defending slavery as a positive good, but many tried to avoid the slavery issue altogether. The Old Republicans, especially Nathaniel Macon and John Randolph, defended states’ rights during the debate. Randolph disliked the Missouri Compromise. He made a few lengthy . Randolph said that King, except for his vote on the Missouri question, “would be our man for the presidency.” He continued, “He is . . . a genuine English gentleman of the old school; just the right man for these degenerate times.” Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . . William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, –, . George Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings, –. William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, –, . Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, –, –. . Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, –, .
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speeches for Missouri’s admission into the Union without any restraints, but they were not recorded. Most importantly, however, Henry Clay and Randolph clashed over the passage of the compromise bill. Randolph tried to block the bill by moving to open discussions on it again after the initial vote, but Clay outwitted him. Clay told Randolph to wait until the day after the compromise passed the House to reopen the debate. Randolph agreed. The next day, before Randolph rose to speak, Clay smuggled the bill to the Senate. Thus Clay declared Randolph’s motions to debate out of order because the matter was already before the Senate. Randolph never forgave Clay’s trickery. He believed that power-hungry party politicians in the South and the West had betrayed the South in order to attain party patronage. He wrote Brockenbrough in February that the Missouri question “threatens a divulsion of soul from body.” He opposed the Thomas Amendment as threatening future turmoil, a point on which he agreed with Jefferson. But Randolph was particularly displeased with northern agitation over slavery, including the speeches of Rufus King. In the same letter to Brockenbrough, he wrote, “These Yankees have almost reconciled me to negro slavery.” The abolitionist speeches produced a “revulsion upon my mind, what then must the effect be on those who had no scruples on the subject.” The “cause of humanity” to the slaves had been “put back a century, certainly a generation, by the unprincipled conduct of ambitious men, availing themselves of a good as well as of a fanatical spirit in the nation.” Randolph clearly feared that the compromise would have negative social effects, including a hardening of southern attitudes toward slavery in addition to the growth of fanaticism regarding the social issue of slavery. A second Missouri crisis developed in late and early concerning the prohibitions against free black immigrants in the new Missouri constitution. After the first compromise in , a convention met in Missouri and adopted a state constitution. The constitution adhered to a republican form of government, thus meeting the requirements of the federal Constitution, but it included a clause banning free black or mulatto immigrants to the state. A Senate committee reviewed the constitution in . Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings, –. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, –, vol. , –. See Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, February , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, –.
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November and added a resolution saying that nothing in the state constitution could contradict the federal Constitution concerning the rights of U.S. citizens. It was an attack on Missouri’s prohibition of free blacks, who were considered citizens in several northern states. Simultaneously, the House reviewed the Missouri constitution. William Lowndes presented a resolution admitting Missouri into the Union, but the northern majority in the House rejected both the Lowndes resolution and the resolution from the Senate, wanting the free black clause to be expunged from the constitution before admission was granted. Southerners protested vehemently on constitutional grounds. They held that Missouri had been authorized to create a constitution and, having done so, was a sovereign state. Congress, therefore, did not have the authority to declare Missouri a sovereign state. Congress surely could not dictate to a sovereign state what laws to write. Clay worked out another compromise, which Randolph voted against, that held that Missouri promised not to enact laws against admitting free blacks if it were made a state. Some of Randolph’s most impassioned defenses of states’ rights occurred during a debate over the status of Missouri’s presidential electors, who were selected after the state constitution had been written and who had participated in the election. Northerners wanted to exclude Missouri’s electors because Missouri was not yet a state in their eyes. Randolph vehemently dissented. He insisted, “I have had as good a right to object to the votes of New Hampshire as the gentleman from New Hampshire has to object to the votes of Missouri.” He continued: “Who put Missouri into [the] custody of the honorable gentleman from New Hampshire? The electors of Missouri are as much homines probi et legales as the electors of New Hampshire.” The issue at stake was state sovereignty. If Congress had the right to dictate to sovereign states their role in the Union, then Randolph’s anti-Federalist interpretation of the Constitution was wrong. He remarked that the House of Representatives did not have “the power to decide on the votes of any State.” “Suppose,” he asked, “you strike out Missouri and insert South Carolina, which has also a provision in its Constitution repugnant to the Constitution of the United States; or Virginia, or Massachusetts . . . was there any less power to decide on their votes than on those of Missouri?” Randolph feared that such principles could be . Dangerfield, The Era of Good Feelings, –. . Quoted in Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, –, vol. , . Quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , .
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used to exclude representatives from certain states from sitting in Congress. Self-government was endangered. He thought that the Missouri Compromise would establish constitutional precedents for further encroachments on society. Later constitutional crises would confirm and increase his fears. A horrified John Taylor charged that the Compromise, especially the ° boundary separating future slave from free states, essentially created a new constitution and destroyed federalism. He dealt with the Compromise extensively in Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, insisting that it replaced constitutional federalism with a system of balance of powers. “Congress,” he wrote, “would be converted by the new federal scheme of a balance of power, between two combinations of states, into a convention, meeting annually to make new bargains for obtaining a preponderance, and local advantages over each other; or in fact to make annually a new federal constitution.” To make matters worse, the division of the country into slave and free states would increase animosity between the sections. Taylor feared that the official recognition of sectionalism by the Compromise would “train the people” of both sections “into an inveterate habit of squirting noisome provocations at each other through the press.” The social result of increasing sectional hostility, he correctly prophesied, would be war. The political effect of the Compromise would be equivalent to the European balance of power between England and France with all the warfare and unrest to go along with it. A balance between the sections would place American politics in precarious circumstances. A preoccupation with maintaining a sectional balance in the federal government would force representatives to support measures for a sectional good rather than the public good. Votes would be influenced by “ambition” and “avarice.” Sectional politicians would dole out patronage according to sectional loyalties. He worried that if one section ever gained a majority, even of one vote, it would mercilessly dominate the other and destroy the liberty of half of the United States. Thus Taylor condemned sectionalism exercised by both northerners and southerners. Taylor hoped that constitutional federalism—self-government by the separate states—would prevent political sectionalism. In his discussion of federalism and the Missouri Compromise, he linked his concept of federalism to his social vision. A restoration of federalism would ensure the protection of individual liberty and the preservation of a society directed . Taylor, Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, –, .
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by self-governing states and individuals. The reason Taylor hated the sectionalism of the Missouri Compromise was that it directly threatened his ideal, decentralized society. Unlike cultural sectionalism, the idea that New England and the South were two different cultural realms, political sectionalism possessed the means to bring about civil war. Taylor knew his republican history and believed that war would mean the destruction of the United States, the trampling of individual liberties, and the destruction of prosperity. The only way to prevent a horrible future was to return to good principles. Taylor maintained that the founding fathers foresaw sectionalism and instituted means to correct it. The Constitution respected the “boundaries of the states” as well as “the right of internal self-government reserved to them,” a right stated by the Tenth Amendment. The framers did this to “remove the temptations arising from a natural dissimilarity of circumstances, which might seduce them into the ruinous system of partial combinations.” In short, the Constitution approved of and protected local diversity, a necessary provision for the survival of liberty and the existence of self-government. In addition, Congress had been invested only with powers “reaching interests common to all the states, to prevent a possibility of geographical partialities” that would menace the “glory and happiness of the United States.” A state possessed internal self-government and could not force other states to comply with its wishes. “Missouri has no right to compel Maine to admit of slavery, nor Maine any right to compel Missouri to prohibit it, because each state has a right to think for itself,” he wrote. Just as a “southern majority in congress” had no right “to compel the northern states to permit slavery,” a “northern majority” could not “compel southern states to abolish it” because slavery was “a subject of internal state regulation prohibited to congress, and reserved to the states.” States’ rights or constitutional federalism, identical in Taylor’s thought, did not try to prevent sectional sympathies and prejudices in the minds of people (which would have violated the freedom of thought and speech), but did attempt to prevent the manifestations of sectionalism politically. The primary goal of states’ rights in Taylor’s thought was to preserve selfgovernment. Taylor did not use states’ rights as a sectional weapon, but his theory of states’ rights did protect slavery in the southern states. . Ibid., –. For early sectional uses of states’ rights, see Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority, –: A Study in Political Thought, chap. . Taylor fits well with Carpenter’s conclusions.
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As usual, Taylor’s villains were the ever-devious moneyed interest and consolidators. He thought that the Compromise was only the latest chapter in the history of the plot by the moneyed interest to destroy republican government in the United States. He gave a brief history of the United States to unveil the plot: “The great pecuniary favour granted by congress to certificate-holders, begat banking; banking begat bounties to manufacturing capitalists; bounties to manufacturing capitalists begat an oppressive pension list; these partialities united to beget the Missouri project; that project begat the idea of using slavery as an instrument for effecting a balance of power; when it is put in operation, it will beget new usurpations of internal powers over persons and property, and these will beget a dissolution of the union.” Besides the secret plot by the moneyed interest, the Hamiltonian consolidators, whom Taylor accused of desiring to establish sovereignty in Congress in imitation of the British Parliament, were using the Missouri debate to instill monarchical principles in the government. The attempts by Congress to regulate internal affairs of the states, such as slavery, mirrored the attempts by Great Britain to legislate for the thirteen colonies. In both cases a monarchical principle dominated, and self-government was destroyed because neither the British king and Parliament nor the U.S. Congress had “sufficient knowledge” of the “local circumstances” of the states to rule them “with any propriety.” “If our congress can also make local regulations, which may gratify the avarice or ambition of particular states at the expense of others, I do not discern any difference” between the United States and the British monarchy, he noted. Under the guise of a sectional balance, the consolidators sought to destroy federalism and install monarchy in the United States. War would certainly result. He ended the discussion on Missouri by restating that the states possessed “the natural right of self-defence” and that in the future the slaveholding states might be justified in exercising it. His was an ominous conclusion. The Missouri Compromise boosted the reputations of Randolph and Taylor in the South and gave new life to sectionalism in national political dialogue. The Missouri debate allowed the political ideas of the Old Republicans to influence the rest of the South, and during the s many southerners rediscovered states’ rights political ideology. But after southern conservatism differed from Randolph’s traditional republicanism. For . Taylor, Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, –.
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one thing, younger conservatives were much more focused on race and slavery than the Old Republicans had been. Randolph particularly felt the tugs of sectionalism and the gravity of the slave issue. Although he freed his slaves on his deathbed, his rhetoric during the s increasingly linked states’ rights to a defense of slavery. Both Taylor and Randolph understood that the slave question would produce future troubles for the Republic. Conclusion John Taylor and John Randolph shared common “libertarian republican” political principles that shaped antebellum southern political conservatism. Their concerns about the separation of state and society led them to pursue similar political paths. Their consensus on political principles can give the illusion that the men thought identically on matters. But behind their political agreement lay important differences in the ways in which they perceived the good society. It was one thing to keep the state out of social affairs, but it was quite another to build a free society. Taylor and Randolph differed on the best society for the South, and these differences reveal important tensions in southern intellectual history.
. For historians who saw in the Missouri Compromise the zenith of the Old Republican movement, William Shade offers a corrective. Shade notes that the Old Republicans were far from a “minority” or “eccentric faction of the Virginia Republicans” during the s. Rather, the Old Republicans included leading state politicians in Virginia, men who greatly influenced the course of the state and the ideological loyalty to the Principles of ’98 among many Virginia conservatives. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, –. Risjord, The Old Republicans, , –.
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8 In , the arch-Federalist Fisher Ames wrote to George Richards Minot to explain how the Virginian republicans differed from their northern counterparts. Ames wrote that in the South “a few gentlemen govern” under the protection of the law, which secured their slave property and prevented popular rebellion. Ames declared, “It is both government and anarchy, and in each case is better than any possible change, especially in favor of an exterior or [federal] government of any strength; for that would be losing the property, the usufruct of a government, by the State, which is light to bear and convenient to manage.” Ames understood that behind the ideology of southern republicanism lay a particular vision of society. Simply examining Old Republican political ideas does not reveal the full importance of the Old Republicans in southern intellectual history. Taylor and Randolph worried more about society than ideology because it was in society that their republican principles had to be taught and lived. Their social principles guided their responses to many of the important issues of their day, including western migration, slavery, and sectionalism. In a southern context, John Taylor favored a liberal society open to individuals of . Works of Fisher Ames, vol. , –. For a review of the historiography of republicanism see Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” –. I contend that republicanism did not die out by , but persisted long enough to significantly shape southern conservatism. See Miller, Juries and Judges versus the Law, for a discussion of Virginia republican conservatism and its survival until the late s. See Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion, for a discussion of Virginia conservatives in the mid-antebellum period that harkened back to the Principles of and early republicanism. Marxist historians of the s, especially Eugene Genovese and C. B. Macpherson, focused on social visions of intellectuals. Marxists linked ideas and social visions because Marxist ideology holds that ideas spring from social class. See Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.
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talent, while Randolph desired a traditional society based on Christianity, patriarchy, and civilized discourse. Views on Human Nature and Society John Taylor’s political vision protected his social ideal, a free society of prosperous individuals. Whereas he believed government should stay out of social affairs, he affirmed that the structure of government played a role in shaping society. Human nature, he thought, also shaped social possibilities. Taylor held that human nature was not completely depraved, but was composed of good and evil qualities contending for domination. Human beings, he thought, often succumbed to weakness. “The history of republics demonstrates,” he noted, “that human nature does not produce men, too wise and good to be intoxicated by the flattery of party, and goaded into error by the avarice of partizans.” In a similar vein, he remarked to James Monroe in that it was “unnatural to expect that men, thus exposed to temptations which have almost universally proved irresistible, should heroically resist them, and confine their endeavors to the pure object of public good.” Men too often succumbed to passion instead of following the dictates of reason. Man’s nature could progress morally, however. That is, knowledge of good and evil could cause men to reshape their social institutions according to good principles. Thus any government or society based on unchanging, fixed orders did not respect the capacity in man for improvement. In looking at history Taylor noted the great progress that had been made from states ruled by “Kings, nobles” and “priests” to the United States with its founding principles of self-government and the division of power. Moral progress was not inevitable, however. Taylor did not perceive history as a linear progression from slavery to freedom. Rather, while he acknowledged that some progress had been made, men were always tempted to substitute passion for reason and accept temporary gratification in place of the public good. In some sense, moral progress was based on “a suppression of personal appetites, for the sake of advancing the public good.” Taylor maintained that the end of man and society was happiness, . John Taylor, Inquiry, , , . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, . John Taylor to James Monroe, March , , reprinted in “John Taylor Correspondence,” . . Taylor, Inquiry, , , , .
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which he divided into categories of public and private. Public happiness derived from self-government and independence under a limited, decentralized state. Taylor maintained that a government which involved the people in making policy and divided power in order to prevent its abuse was the most desirable. Independence, which Taylor defined as “the right of self government,” was necessary for political happiness. He wrote, “Political liberty consists only in a government constituted to preserve, and not to defeat the natural capacity of providing for our own good.” Public freedom and happiness ultimately protected the private happiness of individuals. Taylor viewed private happiness as possession of family, farm, and leisure. In Tyranny Unmasked he declared that man needs “a home, independence and leisure” to have happiness. Thus, as Jefferson also noted, man was not solely a political animal who found happiness only in political pursuits, but needed to pursue private interests without which his happiness was incomplete. Taylor noted that man was happiest when he was his own master on his own farm. He placed great stock in his personal family and farm, considering them necessary to complete his public life. The republican ideal of the independent landholder retained its prominence in Taylor’s thought because it best secured private happiness. Happiness, therefore, had a material foundation. Wealth also contributed to private happiness. Taylor opposed government attempts to create wealth by interference in the market and favoritism toward certain interests, but supported the acquisition of wealth through honest labor. “A love of wealth,” he argued, “fostered by honest industry, is an ally both of moral rectitude, and national happiness, because it can only be gratified by increasing the fund for national subsistence, comfort, strength and prosperity.” The distribution of wealth was also important: “A democratick republic is endangered by an immense disproportion in wealth.” Wealth played an integral part in agricultural reforms too. Taylor realized that agricultural improvements could not be made without sufficient capital. He believed that the United States could achieve wealth and support a republican society through free trade of foodstuffs to European nations. “The products of agriculture and manufacturing, . Taylor, Inquiry, , . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, . . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, .
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unshackled by law, would seek each for themselves, the best markets through commercial channels.” Competition between domestic manufacturers and foreign manufacturers would “bestow a sound constitution” on American manufacturing. American agriculture would also be forced to improve in order to make larger profits in European markets. The lure of wealth could bring progress. Laissez-faire, not mercantilism, would bring prosperity and thus increase the private happiness of the farmer. Taylor preferred the private happiness he culled from working on his farm and writing books to politics. He told Thomas Jefferson in , after he introduced and defended the Virginia Resolutions in the state legislature, that “hereafter I mean to till a soil which promises to crown my labor with some success.” He went on: “Mother earth offers to her children subsistence and repose, of which it seems to be their great business to rob each other. It was foolish to leave the bosom which nourished me for the sake of exposing my own to the unfraternal shafts of all the wicked passions.” John Randolph wrote Taylor in September about Taylor’s retirement from public life. “Do you not now begin to face some serious qualms of conscience for having gone into a voluntary political exile, & abandoning the poor public to ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry?’ ” Randolph asked. He continued, chastening Taylor with the biblical parable of the talents, “If he, who has but one talent, stands condemned for wrapping it in a napkin & burying it, what sentence shall await him, who having many talents, does the same thing.” In case Taylor mistook his words as signs of disrespect, Randolph concluded, “You see, my dear sir, when I attempt to reproach you, I can only give you proofs of my esteem.” Randolph, who like Taylor placed primacy on society over politics, believed that Taylor needed to fight for public happiness, without which private happiness was a chimera. That Taylor would not remain a lifelong statesman puzzled Randolph. Randolph did not understand Taylor well enough. Taylor told James Monroe in : “The profession of a statesman seems to me, to be one of the worst in the world. Neither talents or virtue, nor both, can secure a reputation for both or either.” Taylor re. Taylor, Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated, . Taylor, Enquiry, . Taylor, Arator, . . John Taylor to Thomas Jefferson, February , , reprinted in Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, . John Randolph to John Taylor, September , , John Randolph Letter (#10054), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. John Taylor to James Monroe, January , , reprinted in “John Taylor Correspondence,” .
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jected Aristotle’s contention that man was a political animal. True, meaningful happiness came from private pursuits. The role of politics was to safeguard the freedom and independence needed to pursue private ends. The reason Taylor retreated from political life lay not in his republican political principles, but in his laissez-faire, individualistic view of society, which led him to accept both the benefits of the modern commercial economy and the importance of his private life of family, farm, and leisure. Perhaps Taylor’s preference for private happiness came from his affirmation that self-interest drove men and had to be tied to the public interest by the structure of government. He wrote that the “strongest moral propensity of man, was to do good to himself.” Since man inevitably would look after himself, Taylor considered him capable of self-government. The priority of private happiness was thus quite natural. But self-love also led men to do evil to others in order to promote their own interests. Selfinterest produced in man a desire for power and wealth, which could infect the entire social order with ambition and avarice unless proper measures were taken. Thus certain principles, namely responsibility and the division of power, had to be part of government to protect against the evil tendencies. Taylor saw a propensity in men to identify their interests with the interests of government. Whereas the Hamiltonian system, as Taylor saw it, applauded the connection of self-interest and government, Taylor noted that republicanism “perishes, whenever one man by any means whatever has obtained the direction of the common interest.” Self-interest could be checked in society. Through a growth in knowledge men could learn to behave rationally, but they remained naturally weak. Because “all men cannot subdue the force of passion by the strength of reason,” society had to exercise some control over volatile human nature. “Societies are instituted,” he wrote, “to control and diminish the imperfections of human nature, because without them it generates ignorance, savageness and depravity of manners.” Society was, therefore, a moral entity. Taylor held individuals morally responsible for their behavior, but he also believed that society had a role in encouraging human action, both good and evil. He proposed a society characterized by liberty and directed by the talents of individuals. Liberty, the foremost natural right, “consists in having rights, beyond the reach and independent of the will of another; slavery, in having none.” Liberty was necessary for moral . Taylor, Inquiry, , , . Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked, –.
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choices. He viewed attacks on free society by modern or traditional forces as immoral because by limiting human freedom they threatened to destroy the possibility of moral behavior in men in government and society. Free societies, because they were composed of imperfect men, would have difficulties, but regardless of imperfections, liberty remained the best moral choice. Taylor did not believe that nature, which he understood in Enlightenment terms, was a sufficient basis for society. By “nature” Enlightenment thinkers meant the “pristine condition of a thing,” or, in social terms, how society appeared before traditional institutions accrued and distorted the picture. Nature, it was believed, could be discovered through reason’s perception of the rational laws governing the world and could give insight into the essence of a thing, be it religion, politics, law, or society. Taylor noted that nature was not to be considered good by default; it consisted of both good and evil principles. Because natural society left good and evil principles free to battle each other, it was unstable. Reason, therefore, played the crucial role in stabilizing and constructing society. “No certain state of knowledge, is a natural or unavoidable quality of man,” he wrote. Rather as “an intellectual or moral quality, it may be created, destroyed and modified by human power.” Reason could improve nature. Men, he believed, could organize society in many ways, some better than others, but a simple natural state would lack the proper protections, discovered by the human intellect as a result of practical experience, to bring happiness. Whereas society did have a natural basis, Taylor thought that in practice it was largely artificial and based upon ruling ideas that would determine the moral character of the people. He pointed out that many thinkers, especially John Adams, used the concept of a natural society to justify so. Taylor, Inquiry, , , , , . Taylor, Arator, . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, . See Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, , for Taylor’s admission that freedom presents difficulties. . Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development, –. Hill, Jr., The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, . See also Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, and Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, for treatments of how Enlightenment thought merged with republicanism. Taylor, Inquiry, , . See Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture. Norton argues that southerners were obsessed with the concept of nature and tried to possess a natural society.
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cial orders. Social orders were not mysterious natural entities separate from the individuals composing society. Nor were they the results of organic processes of development. Orders were artificial creations. An appeal to nature was often wrong, he charged, because human beings improved upon the natural world according to reason and will. In other words, an appeal to nature settled for too little. In the Inquiry Taylor addressed the distinction between a natural and factitious (or artificial) society. “If society is natural,” he said, “then natural rights may exist in, and be improved and secured by a state of society.” If the society is “factitious, those who make it, can regulate rights.” Although possessing a natural basis and thus securing natural rights, society was clearly “created by individuals, without whom, it can neither exist nor act.” Thus it was largely artificial and could be altered by individuals. This was self-government, the “principle of society” in the United States and the fundamental political right. Taylor noted, “An exclusive right to form or alter a government is annexed to society, in every moment of its existence; and therefore a direct or indirect exercise of it by a government, a combination or an individual, is a badge of usurpation and a harbinger of despotism.” He maintained that the principles held by individuals in society accounted for the moral character of that society. Men could change the moral character of their society through a change in principle. Thus the ideas held by the people were of the utmost importance in a good society. He wrote to Creed Taylor in that “unless the people are instructed and combined by something that they can understand, nothing can save us from an Anglo-Monarchic-aristocraticmilitary government, but one of those unaccountable movements of the people inspired by some sudden fervor.” Society, therefore, was based on ideology, not tradition. Social unity came from agreement on the ruling social principles, on ideas. Unlike Edmund Burke and John Randolph, Taylor tended to see traditional social institutions, except the family, as corrupt and harmful to moral progress. He did not seek to destroy all traditional social institutions; rather, he desired to reform them through reason. “All political oppressors deceive, in order to succeed,” he declared. The oppressors convinced the public to accept social orders such as aristocracies and argued that the . Taylor, Inquiry, –. John Taylor to Creed Taylor, April , , quoted in Simms, Life of John Taylor, .
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“existing generation is under the tutelage of all past generations, and must rely upon the responsibility of the grave for the preservation of its liberty.” Taylor rejected this Burkean point as a justification of the oppression of the people by social orders. “Such is the doctrine,” he asserted, “which has prevented the eye of investigation from penetrating the recesses of the aristocracy of the present age.” The viewpoint of the oppressors “simply offers the consolation of softening injuries to ourselves by adding to the wretchedness of our descendants.” To Taylor, individuals, not orders, formed society and thus could “arrange their rights in such forms as they please.” Traditional institutions and an organic view of society prevented such an expression of the sovereignty of the people. An example of Taylor’s hostility to traditional institutions was his hatred of aristocracies. He thought that there had been three stages of aristocracy in Western history. The “aristocracy of the first age,” that of the classical world, had been created and supported by superstition. Progress of human knowledge had been sufficient to put to rest the superstitions that led people to view certain others as a privileged order set apart by the gods. The “aristocracy of the second age,” that of the medieval world, had been formed through warfare and the feudal system. The second aristocracy, like the first, had been hereditary and perpetuated fraudulent ideas. The rise of commerce dispersed the feudal aristocracy. The French Revolution, noted Taylor, had finished off the old order in France, while Walpole’s financial revolution had doomed the lingering British feudal aristocracy. But aristocracy had not disappeared. Instead, a new fraud, not based on religious myth or war but on “paper and patronage,” had created “the aristocracy of the third or present age.” The aristocracy of paper and patronage was, by far, the worst aristocracy in history. Unlike previous aristocracies, the aristocracy of paper and patronage corrupted whole nations by allying with governments and oppressing the people. Taylor concluded that aristocracy, an institution honored by traditionalists who claimed that it represented the most talented and virtuous individuals in society, was both fraudulent and foolish and founded upon evil moral principles. “A monopoly by a few,” he summarized, “of renown, talents or wealth, may be reproduced, by superstition, conquest or fraud,” but not by nature. His dislike of the traditional aristocracy was only one example of his distaste for the traditional worldview. . Taylor, Inquiry, , , . . Ibid., –.
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Taylor rejected the feudal order of the Middle Ages as well. He was not a reactionary who sought to restore a feudal past, nor did he take his political inspiration from feudal Europe. He saw both feudalism and medieval times as warlike and backward obstacles to moral progress. The feudal aristocracy “starved commerce” because it “tended to discourage industry, by which commerce is supplied.” The result was a general poverty and almost continuous warfare. The feudal aristocracy did exhibit the virtues of “generosity, honour and bravery,” which were useful in “softening barbarism into civilization,” but feudalism destroyed property rights, a necessary component for a free society. Taylor also characterized the medieval age as a time of “Gothic ignorance” and the tyranny of the Catholic Church. The “deep ignorance” of medieval people was a result of the “irruptions and conquests of barbarians.” It was a warlike time, not an age to be imitated. Even though a hereditary aristocracy was “preferable to a paper and patronage aristocracy” because it would be “less oppressive” in terms of taxation, Americans had to expunge traces of hereditary aristocracy from the United States. In Virginia Taylor helped to attack traditional land laws and was proud that the abolition of primogeniture and entail had “melted” the southern landed aristocracy “into a democracy.” He clearly thought that a modern laissez-faire social order was a moral improvement over feudalism. Taylor opposed static traditional legal forms, like the common law, and desired rational legal reforms. In the debates on the Virginia Resolutions, he attacked the idea of a federal common law as an innovation and usurpation of state self-government, but he also questioned the conservatism of common law reasoning in the states. “A code of laws may be good or bad,” he wrote, “and if bad, it is morally impossible that a subjection to such a code, can constitute a government founded in good moral principles.” Taylor qualified John Adams’s contention that a republic essentially . William Williams, The Contours of American History, . Williams wrote, “Though he looked back to a feudal world for his inspiration (and his utopia), his basic ideas and program offered convenient and powerful weapons for the advocates of laissez faire.” Williams must have never read the Inquiry, where Taylor consistently criticizes the medieval order and feudalism as obstacles to moral progress. See also Eugene Genovese, “The Southern Slaveholders’ View of the Middle Ages,” in Bernard Rosenthal and Paul E. Szarmach, eds., Medievalism in American Culture, –. Genovese convincingly argues that southern conservatives did not desire to return to the Middle Ages. Taylor, Inquiry, , , . Taylor, New Views of the Constitution, . Hill, Jr., The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, .
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meant the rule of law, or as Adams put it, that all “are equally subject to the laws.” Which law would rule was Taylor’s concern. Taylor was not the legal positivist that some interpreters of his strict constructionist mentality have made him out to be. In the Inquiry he argued, “An irrepealable law charter is a standing temptation to government to do evil, and an invitation to individuals to become their accessories; by its help, a predominant party may use temporary power, to enact corporate or individual emoluments for itself at the national expense.” Corrupt individuals could always bend the law for their benefit, and thus a conservative attachment to an unchanging positive legal code was folly. Taylor endorsed “a confidence that laws and charters injurious to a nation, will be repealed, whenever their pernicious tendency is discovered.” Such a confidence would “prevent the destructive evils generated” by traditionalists who were against reform, “enable honest governments to correct” fraud, and “check or even cure the malevolence of factions.” Taylor believed that education was essential to reforming society and maintaining liberty. “Ignorance is the source of slavery, and knowledge [is the source] of liberty,” he wrote. Ignorance of good moral principles had led people to embrace aristocracies. Knowledge of right principles taught liberty. Therefore, Taylor devoted much of his private efforts to education, especially of farmers. He was president of the board of trustees of Rappahannock Academy in Virginia. He helped set the curriculum of the school, which emphasized languages, mathematics, and philosophy. He was also consulted on the course of studies for the Port Royal Female Academy. Like Jefferson, Taylor wanted Virginia counties to be divided into wards, each of which would have a primary school. He saw education as greatly beneficial for a free society. In his most impassioned work, Arator, he insisted that an increase in agricultural knowledge among farmers would support their happiness by teaching them how to prosper and live well. Farmers must also have political knowledge. “Without it,” he wrote, “the lords of the soil in the United States, must gradually become the slaves of some legal aristocracy; and exposed by political ignorance to the rapine of an endless catalogue of exclusive factitious interests, would soon resemble monkies [sic] stript by the superior intelligence of man, of diamonds they . Taylor, Inquiry, –, , . See Miller, Juries and Judges versus the Law. Miller noted that the question of what law should rule Virginians was the major political and legal question of the state during the Early National period.
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had dug out of the earth.” Thus Taylor hoped that his individualistic society could be perpetuated through rational discourse and reform.
R The English Augustan Age of literature, spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, greatly influenced John Randolph’s social views. The Augustan writers included Bolingbroke and his circle, some of the neo-Harringtonian Commonwealthmen such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Charles Davenant, and later Edmund Burke, who revived much of Augustan thought. Randolph’s favorite Augustan writers were Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Burke. Historians and literary critics have identified the Augustan writers as reactionaries who believed their age to be “totally corrupt and involved in a complete social, political, and moral decline.” Paul Fussell noted that the Augustan humanists constituted “an intensely anachronistic and reactionary response to the eighteenth century.” Deriving their political and social thought from the humanist and Christian traditions, they defended traditional English society by satirizing the emerging modern order. Isaac Kramnick described the Augustans as nostalgic. They looked back to a happier, more peaceful England as their model for society. Their nostalgia, said Kramnick, was understandable, considering that the traditional world they loved was disappearing with the progress of individualistic theories of society and the financial revolution. The Augustans believed that man was by nature a social animal, whose nature was flawed because of sin. Man’s chief duty was to act as a moral agent in the world, knowing all along that because of his flawed nature virtue remained difficult to attain. Society was fragile, due to human wickedness, and therefore had to be treated with reverence and respect. Society was not a rationalist construct, but should remain naturally structured and hierarchical. Thus the Augustans respected traditional institutions, especially English country society, as repositories of accumulated wisdom. The Augustan vision was primarily a moral and traditionally Western view of man and society. . Simms, Life of John Taylor, –. Taylor, Arator, . . Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, , , –. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke, . . Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, .
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Like the Augustans, Randolph predicated his view of society on his conception of human nature. Man’s nature was “defective,” warped by sin and a propensity for vice. Because of man’s fallen condition, vice endangered human relationships. Randolph warned his nephew Dudley that “vice puts on . . . alluring shapes,” tempting one to revel for “a few hours’ temporary pleasure” at the cost of a virtuous life. Self-denial, the resistance to temptations, contributed to one’s “future and permanent benefit.” The individual must be vigilant in his attempts to choose virtue over vice. Virtue, maintained Randolph, “is essential to great excellence in laudable pursuits.” Virtue was within the grasp of fallen men, but it had to be fortified by habit. Bad habits could also form, bringing lifelong attachment to vice. Randolph presumed that sin or vice was an act of the will. Therefore, in his view of human nature, men were morally responsible creatures. He told Dudley, “Whether you prove a useful or creditable member of society or not, depends altogether upon yourself.” Randolph reminded Dudley repeatedly that “your destiny is in your own hands.” Randolph was not a radical individualist; rather, he noted that man was by nature a social animal who had certain duties in life concerning larger society. He noted that “along with our rights there must coexist correlative duties.” People must do their duties “in that station in life, ‘to which it has pleased God to call us.’” One could reject or accept one’s duty and the demands of morality, but one remained responsible for the consequences of one’s choices. Social harmony resulted when people acted morally. Randolph asserted that reason alone was an insufficient check on behavior. “A man may possess great theoretic knowledge on any subject, and yet be a poor practitioner,” he maintained. One theme of his letters to Dudley was that fallen human nature needed social checks to prevent chaos. Education, in his understanding, dealt not with theoretical knowledge or technical expertise, but with a moral and cultural social vision that stressed man’s role as “a moral actor.” Randolph . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , , , , . Paul Fussell argues that the Augustan humanists believed that man’s will was “entirely in his own command” and actually served as a partial remedy for his fallen nature. Man’s dignity, according to the humanists, depended upon his free exercise of the will. Augustan humanists therefore rejected as evil a deterministic or mechanistic explanation of human nature. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, . . Randolph to Theodore Dudley, February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . For the Augustan view of man as a social animal see Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, . Fussell uses the phrase “moral actor” on page . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , .
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was not educating Dudley to be an Enlightenment rationalist, but a traditional, cultured Virginian. Ideally, according to Randolph, society included cultured discourse about the most important things in life. He praised the cultured life: “The man who, by abridging his wants can find time to devote to the cultivation of his mind, or the aid of his fellow-creatures, is a being far above the plodding sons of industry and gain. His is a spirit of the noblest order.” The person who spent time learning the Western tradition served mankind and society. Randolph used the word “society” in two ways, to mean both the people in his community organized in various institutions and human company. The latter meaning explains the former. Frequently in his letters to Dudley, Randolph lamented the loss of Dudley’s “society,” or social interaction with him. He also complained about his isolation from meaningful relationships. What emerged from his letters was the idea that society, the broader community, was founded upon civilized discourse among small groups of people, particularly families, who were grounded in the Western intellectual tradition. Randolph told Dudley time and again to read more Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, and Burke. He encouraged his nephew to read the history of Western civilization. Like Bolingbroke, Randolph seemed to think that history was philosophy teaching by example. He told Dudley to study closely the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and the Stuarts. He advised him to read carefully Hume’s History of England as well as other works of European history. Randolph, referring to the Dutch republic, gave Dudley an example of how to read history: “May we, my dear son, take warning of the fate of that once powerful republic. Their cruel task-master is now forging chains for us.” Randolph read Western history literally for demonstrations of true principles. His relation to history was primarily a moral one. Meaningful society, therefore, necessitated a consensus on Western civilization so that educated men might enjoy each other’s company by calmly . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , , , , , , , , , , . See also Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, chaps. –. Dawidoff argues that Randolph read history as a literal representation of his values. He looked at history ideologically. See also H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution. Randolph advised Elizabeth T. Coalter on a plan for educating herself in the Western tradition. He suggested reading the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. January , , Bryan Family Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
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discussing the lessons of history and the implications of true principles on their lives. In an letter to his nephew Tudor, Randolph described a trip he had taken to Bermuda with his brother Richard in . “My sojourn in Bermuda,” he began, “was of essential service to me in many respects . . . There was a good country gentlemen’s library in old Mr. Tucker’s house (where I staid), and here I read many sterling English authors.” The library provoked many discussions: “Your father [Richard Randolph] and myself were always bookworms. It was a sort of bond to the affection that united us. Our first question at meeting was generally, ‘What have you read?’; ‘Have you seen this or that book?’” Culture as well as blood formed the basis of the society between the Randolph brothers. So too would culture and blood form the foundations of larger society. Cultured gentlemen should lead society. For Randolph the gentleman embodied the humanistic tradition and all aspects of gentlemanly conduct and appearance conveyed the strength of that tradition. In his letters to Dudley, Randolph repeatedly corrected Dudley’s “orthography and syntax” in the letters he received. For Randolph the proper use of the English language seemed to be connected with proper expression and even with proper thinking. In other missives he derided the poor spelling and pronunciation of words among southerners. To him carelessness with language betrayed “a negligence and a carelessness of excelling” that marked the new barbarism enveloping American civilization. Randolph also advised Dudley, “Let your dress . . . without being foolishly expensive, be that of a gentleman.” Like the proper speech and dress, the gentleman must respect proper social relations. Dudley, said Randolph, could engage in field sports, “But I hope you will take care how you exchange shots with any but gentlemen.” The young gentleman must know and assume his place in the social hierarchy. Because he was training Dudley to be a country gentleman, knowledge of hunting, horses, rifles, and bird dogs was also important. Randolph’s letters discussed his hunting excursions and favorite dogs and horses with almost as much seriousness as his discussions of Homer and Shakespeare. Most importantly, Randolph stressed the value of independence. He told Dudley that independence “grows out of self. Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . . Randolph to Dudley, January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Fussell notes that the Augustan humanists believed ethics and expression to be closely allied. When a man has the proper self-control and lives the proper moral life, his writing and speaking will reflect his virtue. The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, .
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denial” and is “respectable.” Independence or liberty was not “as the poor negro thinks,” that is, “being supported in idleness, by other people’s labour.” Rather independence meant doing one’s duty. Randolph insisted that the “rogue” does not gain respect. “It is the man,” he argued, “who by the exercise of the faculties which nature and education have given him, asserts his place among his fellows; and, whilst useful to all around him, establishes his claim to their respect, as an equal and independent member of society.” The “real gentleman,” according to Randolph, was not the rich fop who presented a facade of civility, but a man who displayed “truth, courtesy, bravery, generosity, and learning.” Truth was the most important virtue, for the character could “survive many defects, where there is a rigid attachment to truth.” Financial debt and political centralization indicated dependence, and dependence brought slavery. Dependence prevented the individual from the free exercise of his will and thus from the possibility of moral behavior. It hindered one from doing one’s social duty as well. As Randolph put it, “He who contentedly eats the bread of idleness and dependence is beneath contempt.” As suggested by his celebration of the gentleman, Randolph rejected the modern notion of equality, arguing that society was a hierarchy that necessitated deference. He attacked the Declaration of Independence, at least in the way most Americans understood it, as demagoguery. The principle that “all men are born free and equal,” pushed to extreme consequence, was simply false. Randolph lamented the fact that the Declaration of Independence had “been set up, on the Missouri and other questions, as paramount to the Constitution.” Invoking his familial image of society, he argued that of all the animals on earth, man is the worst example of the principle of equality. Man, rather, “is born in a state of the most abject want, and a state of perfect helplessness and ignorance, which is the foundation of the connubial tie.” Randolph rejected Lockean epistemology, which held that man was born a tabula rasa. Instead, man was “born with certain capacities—which assume the impression, that may be given by education and circumstances.” Randolph’s rejection of Locke, and thus of the modern understanding of equality, was the basis for his social vision of hierarchy. Because men were born with unequal capacities, hierarchy was necessary. Just as in a family where the father must be the head in order to . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , , –, . Randolph to Dudley, February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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educate his ignorant and dependent children, so in society the better classes must lead and be awarded the deference of their “children,” the lower, less talented classes. Randolph commented that the “rickety and scrofulous little wretch who first sees the light in a workhouse, or in a brothel, and who feels the effects of alcohol before the effects of vital air, is not equal in any respect to the ruddy offspring of the honest yeoman.” Furthermore, “a prince, provided he is no better born than royal blood will make him is not equal to the healthy son of a peasant.” Because of man’s fallen nature and because of natural inequalities among men, Randolph deemed civilized society a fragile thing. What held it together was a sense of duty. Duty must be “correspondent to the power,” and thus “the richer, the wiser, the more powerful a man is, the greater is the obligation upon him to employ his gifts in lessening the sum of human misery.” The “weak and wicked” sought happiness not in duty but in “wealth, finery, or sensual gratification.” Randolph asked rhetorically, “Who [was] so miserable as the bad Emperor of Rome?” The lesson to Dudley was that greater abilities require greater moral courage and responsibility. The inordinate expression of the passions could upset the delicate balance of the hierarchy. Society, as Randolph meant it, had to be taught as he was teaching his nephew. Natural society was insufficient to create harmony. Civilized society was artificial in that it was based on human volition, but it was founded on the natural order of the family. For Randolph, society and culture strengthened nature. People, although grouped together in the natural society of families, did not automatically act civilized and engage in cultured discourse. Civilization, however, placed families into the civis, the city or community, where they learned of their duties and obligations. As Randolph once wrote, “Natural affection nothing: affection from principles & duty very strong.” But the veneer of civilization, which kept order through a cultivated sense of duty, was frail. He remarked, “I look out towards the world, and find a wilderness, peo. Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Randolph’s familial image of society contradicted Locke on other grounds too. Like Bolingbroke, Randolph rejected the idea that there had been an anarchic state of nature. Because man was by nature a social animal, society was natural in its origins, not contractual. Society grew out of the family where the father ruled. In turn, the state grew out of local associations of families. Natural authority, hierarchy, and deference, therefore, existed and had implications for the political realm. See Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, –. See Eugene Genovese, “‘Our Family, White and Black,’” in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, –, –.
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pled indeed . . . with monsters tearing one another to pieces for money or power, or some other vile lust.” The very fact that civilized society was something that had to be taught and learned meant that the possibility existed that people would reject it. Randolph worried about that possibility. Randolph, like Burke, defended traditional institutions—family, church, law, and other associations—as keepers of order and preservers of civilized tradition. Traditional institutions stabilized society, reducing the risk that inordinate passion could wreck the civilized culture that had taken many years to construct. Randolph maintained a spirit of reverence toward society and the institutions that constituted it. Clearly, he considered the family to be the most important social institution. Not only did a good family name carry distinction, but the family was the primary teacher of culture and the first society one experienced. The disgrace of his brother Richard Randolph weighed heavily on John Randolph’s mind, and he made his thoughts known to Dudley in an letter. He wrote that “a decayed family could never recover its loss of rank in the world, until the members of it left off talking and dwelling upon its former opulence.” The family members had to display habits of industry and independence to restore their sullied name. But “men are like nations,” he added. “One founds a family, the other an empire—both destined, sooner or later, to decay,” he insisted. The family, like every other institution in fragile society, suffered from decay due to human vice. It required the utmost reverence from its members. When a family received the proper respect, it served as the primary enculturator of the next generation. As Randolph wrote to Elizabeth Coalter, “You are quite right my dear, the happiness of life depends upon the cultivation of the benevolent affections, and where shall we look for them if we find them not in the Domestic circle.” The respect of social institutions sprang from the family. Rather consistently, Randolph rejected the use of government coercion . Randolph to Dudley, February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Randolph’s understanding of social fragility and duty was part of the antebellum southern conservative worldview. See Dickson Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South, –. The quote about affection appears in Bruce, Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism, . Because of sin, the natural world is fragile. Without a strong society and culture, Randolph believed nature would end in disorder. Randolph to Francis Scott Key, June , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, . Randolph to Elizabeth T. Coalter, January , , Bryan Family Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
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to enforce a moral vision, and celebrated the ways in which customs and tradition could shape human action. Randolph discussed the effectiveness of custom in checking human behavior in the published edition of his speech in Congress on “Retrenchment and Reform.” He told Virginians that “as we in Virginia have proscribed or abandoned the cheerful exercises and amusements of our fathers, we have become less amiable and moral as a people.” He contrasted old Virginia with the new, all the while identifying the government as responsible for the poor state of present affairs. In the Virginia of his youth, “no gentleman was ashamed of playing a game of billiards or of cards,” remarked Randolph. “Men then drank and played in public,” he remarked, “from a spirit of society, as well as the love for both inherent in human nature.” He insisted that there were few ill social effects from the drinking and gaming because it was done in public. He maintained, “Publicity is the great restraint upon individuals as well as government.” Publicity reduced “excess” because of the principle of “shame.” Shame and shaming deviant individuals were integral parts of traditional society. Communities upheld standards through rituals of honor and shame. Certain behavior, for example alcohol consumption, was done openly and in certain controlled environments to limit the potentially destructive effects. The success of shame as a method of social control lay in the corresponding sense of duty in individuals. An individual mindful of his duty to the community would shun excess both to avoid shame and to act morally. On the contrary, a society dedicated to individual rights remains uneasy with community self-rule. The liberal state imposes laws to limit behavior dangerous to individual rights. It is not that traditional communities were lawless. Just the opposite is true. Traditional communities had intricate systems of laws. Often, however, the focus of such laws was to protect communities, not individuals, first. Randolph identified the litigious nature of the liberal state as destruc. “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . For similar points about the cultural decline of Virginia, see Randolph to Elizabeth T. C. Bryan, July , , Bryan Family Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. . See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. See also Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South.
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tive of local communities and, therefore, of morality itself. He cited two examples dealing with drinking alcohol and gaming. Once the state passed laws against public drinking, the gentleman who formerly drank publicly now settled for “solitary intoxication . . . in some den of thieves.” Drinking and gaming in such places led to cheating and robbery, for there was “no witness of the fairness of the game but his desperate and profligate undoers.” Similarly, outlawing gaming had limited the power of local communities. “Formerly, friends had it in their power to restrain the coteries of chance or of the bottle; but now their incurable ruin, in mind, body, and estate, gives the first notice of their devotion to play or drink.” Privacy and the government’s destruction of traditional communal means of policing behavior had worsened the plight of society by destroying the social supports for morality. Randolph pointed to dueling as another example of the restraints of custom. He denied that he was an “advocate” of dueling, but thought that it served a purpose. Bad as dueling was, insisted Randolph, “it is better than dirking and gouging; and they are hardly worse than calling names and bandying insults, if so bad.” The government’s act of outlawing dueling only increased violence and made it worse. Instead of violence being contained by the watchful eye of the community through limited dueling, it turned into furtive actions that brought unrest. In the South dueling was linked, of course, to honor. But Randolph’s comments did not deal with honor in this instance. The heart of his critique was the loss of selfgovernment because of the meddling of the state government in social matters. He protested too the oath against dueling the state law forced men to take. The oath, which Randolph considered a religious bond, “prescribed by the dueling law is in the teeth of every principle of free government, of the act for establishing religious freedom, and would justify any test, religious or political, even an oath of belief in transubstantiation.” Once again, government weakened society by attacking tradition. . See Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, –, on gambling and drinking as gentlemanly pursuits. See Timothy H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia,” in Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America. Jack R. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social History. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South. . “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. See also Bruce, Jr., The Rhetoric of Conservatism.
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Randolph insisted that Virginians had become more puritanical as a result of government interference in society. He proclaimed that Virginians were a “merry-making, kind-hearted, hospitable people” and that the old colonial gentry had enjoyed the social traditions of Virginia currently under attack. Even Chief Justice John Marshall enjoyed “a game of billiards” as an “innocent amusement.” Randolph continued, “Yes, I regret, nay, deplore, the change from our old and innocent pastimes and holidays to the preset state of listless ennui or prowling rapacity.” Virginians had moved far from the traditions and virtue of their forefathers. “In proportion as we have approached puritanical preciseness and gloomy austerity, so have we retrograded in morals,” he added. For Randolph, the Puritan tried to shape individuals and direct morality by the threat of government power. Such efforts always failed, he thought, because moral behavior had to be a voluntary decision. With the decline of social customs went virtue, manners, and civility, essential elements for a Christian humanist culture. In Randolph wrote to Brockenbrough, “Whichever way I look around me, I see no cheering object in view.” Decline was pervasive. He continued, “All is dark, and comfortless, and hopeless: for I cannot disguise from myself, that the state of society and manners is daily and not slowly changing for the worse.” In another letter to Brockenbrough, Randolph waxed long on the decline of manners. “My good friend,” he began, “I have long been of the opinion, that we are fast sinking into a state of society the most loathsome that can be presented to the imagination of an honorable man.” Furthermore, things “have not yet reached the lowest deep.” Randolph identified “the system” or modernity as the culprit because it had a “uniform tendency to bring forward low and little men, to the exclusion of the more worthy.” But “education and manners, as well as integrity” had also deteriorated greatly, harming society further. The new order of society frightened him. “The period has arrived of living by one’s wits,” he said, “of living by contracting debts that one cannot pay—and above all by office hunting.” The breakdown of traditional society meant that men were isolated and had to live by their “wits,” relying only on themselves. The consensus of principles needed for traditional society and freedom had . “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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disappeared. Selfishness and individualism replaced principled conduct. All that was left to the traditional gentleman were private relationships. He wrote to Brockenbrough, “To me, the prospect is as cheerless and desolate as Greenland,” he wrote. “Yourself, and one or two others, separated by vast distances and execrable roads, form here and there, as it were an oasis in the Sahara,” he commented. Clearly, by destroying manners, and thus society and culture, modernity had made a humanist community impossible. Randolph concluded, “I dream of the snow-capped Alps, and azure lakes and waterfalls, and villages, and spires of Switzerland, and I awake to a scene of desolation such as one might look to find in Barbary or upper Asia.” Traditional face-to-face society had disappeared. Although Randolph preserved other tenets of the traditional worldview, his love of liberty weakened the force of his traditionalism. He accepted the traditional view of human nature as severely wounded by sin. Fallen man could not trust his reason to lead him to a perfect world. Man, insisted Randolph, had to rely partially on social institutions and partially on his own will to shape his behavior. Religion, education, the law, families, and local government were all integral in fashioning traditional people. But Randolph’s traditionalism was in the context of liberty. His unwillingness to use the coercive power of government to fashion society led him to consider education within the family very important. He filled his letters to Dudley with traditional advice, but the letters contained an air of apprehension. Randolph realized that because individuals were free, they could reject freely the culture of the West and traditional society. European traditionalists saw society as fragile because it was composed of sinful men. But Randolph’s fear of social fragility was more acute because he rejected the traditional method of guaranteeing social order, coercion. While other Virginia conservatives settled on property ownership as the guarantor of order and later southern conservatives would champion slavery in that role, Randolph drifted toward education. Free men deserved to . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, May , , January , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, , . Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Randolph opposed Jefferson’s hope that the people would rewrite their constitutions every twenty years to reflect the ideological shifts in America. The fact that Virginia was going down the Jeffersonian road infuriated Randolph. See Laura J. Scalia, America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, –, .
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make free choices. Randolph turned to traditional institutions, especially the family, not because they presently possessed great authority, but because their authority was quickly disappearing. He hoped that properly educated men would rescue and preserve the traditional society that had formed their great cultural inheritance. Randolph ultimately had to place his trust in the next generation. The consequence of his love of liberty was that he had to trust that free men would see the truth and goodness in the traditional social world and choose it. He once wrote that in order “to work any material change in the state of things, we must begin . . . a great way off.” “I mean,” he added, “with the children; the old folks have taken their ply, and will neither bend nor break.” But Randolph, being much of an Augustan humanist and traditional gentleman himself, did not think much of fallen man’s ability to reason or choose the good consistently. The result of this dilemma was an overwhelming sense of declension. The fragility of society made it unlikely that traditional values and culture, once rejected by many, could ever return to dominance. Randolph saw this. His preoccupation with declension conveyed the point that without either coercion or responsible individuals, traditional society and Western civilization were doomed. Views on Religion, the West, Slavery, and Sectionalism The basic distinctions made by Taylor and Randolph regarding the good society, coupled with their libertarian insistence on the separation of state and society, informed their views on numerous social issues in the early Republic. Their different views of society caused them to construct different explanations and justifications for thorny problems. Taylor and Ran. Eugene Genovese argues that southern slaveholders often admired the liberal assertion of “the free rational individual as the criterion of the good society.” But the same slaveholders realized that such an assertion would produce an individualistic bourgeois ethic in the marketplace that could undermine slavery. Early southern conservatives were torn. They desired the “individual freedom promised by liberalism,” but they did not want a liberal society. The World the Slaveholders Made, , . Genovese, The Southern Tradition, . . Quoted in Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . In an extraordinary letter to Francis Scott Key in , Randolph remarked: “There are two ways only which I am of opinion that I may be serviceable to mankind. One of these is teaching children; and I have some thoughts of establishing a school.” Quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . See Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, –, , and Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties, for Jefferson’s view of education, which differed from Randolph’s views.
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dolph differed on the role of religion in society, the exact place of the West in American life, the position and use of slavery in the South, and the impact of sectionalism. Their views on these issues reveal the diversity of social visions, even among political allies, in the antebellum South. Determining the role of religion in society was a challenge for those raised with an eighteenth-century Enlightenment prejudice against dogmatic Christianity. Taylor, moreso than Randolph, expressed an enlightened suspicion of the social utility of religion. Taylor, like Randolph, was an Anglican. For the twenty-eight years he lived with Edmund Pendleton, he was a member of Drysdale Parish in Caroline County. Drysdale Parish, wrote historian C. William Hill, “had a reputation for being secular minded.” It “imposed no fines for lax church attendance as was the legal requirement and common practice” before the Revolution. Caroline County had a number of dissenting congregations, particularly Baptists. Taylor did not specifically credit his parish environment with his religious views, but they clearly were compatible. He believed, “If a government is invested with a power to inflict on the mind religious coercion, it will add political.” Thus protecting religious freedom translated into guarding political freedom. Taylor despised “religious fanatics,” that is, anyone who thought of his religion as the true one. He commented to Thomas Ritchie, “Fanaticism, in politics, as in religion, can supersede reason by imagination.” As did other republicans, Taylor criticized systems of hierarchy in the Christian churches, especially pompous clerics. He portrayed Catholics as religious tyrants led by a greedy pope who would bend any doctrine or political alliance in order to turn a profit. In his works, Taylor never commented on any personal faith. He was a libertarian in matters of religion. As long as religious opinions remained private, they could not harm the state or society. Taylor opposed only religious opinions that tread on politics, particularly the antislavery opinions of the Quakers and the traditionalism of Catholics. Randolph, after his conversion from religious skepticism, expressed traditional Christianity as a part of his social vision. His belief in Christianity moved him further away from the ideology of the Enlightenment and reinforced his familial notion of society. Randolph discussed his religious . Hill, The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, –. Taylor, Inquiry, . Taylor, A Pamphlet Containing a Series of Letters, .
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conversion and his religious beliefs in letters to his friends. He wrote to Dr. Brockenbrough that “we have ruined ourselves” through sin and “can do nothing to save ourselves” from the eternal misery we have merited. Christ the Savior, however, “gives us all we want—pardon, peace, and holiness.” Christ did not expect righteous men to come to him, but sinners. Thus all men could go to Christ, as they were, for salvation. The basic teaching of the Gospel assured Randolph that there was “another and a better world,” heaven, which he was called to inhabit after death. He asked Brockenbrough, “If there is [a heaven] as we all believe, what is it but madness to be absorbed in the cares of a clay-built hovel, held at will, unmindful of the rich inheritance of an imperishable palace, of which we are immortal heirs?” The traditional Christian should focus most of his attention on heaven because “the world is a vast desert.” The existence of God and of heaven alone gave life meaning, according to Randolph. “For my part, could I be brought to believe that this life must be the end of my being, I should be disposed to get rid of it as an incumbrance,” he remarked. He wrote to Francis Scott Key that “an eternity here [on earth] would be punishment enough for the worst offenders.” He began to see himself as a pilgrim, one on a journey with a religious end. The Enlightenment conception of man as a rational creature of self-interest who fulfilled his purpose in life through rationally reforming social institutions for greater earthly harmony was far different from Randolph’s Christian vision. Randolph thought of Christianity not as an irrational force but as a sacred mystery. Brockenbrough thought that Randolph’s conversion occurred because of a “heated imagination,” in other words, due to irrational passions. Randolph replied that Brockenbrough’s response was typical of an Enlightenment skeptic but was false. His conversion had been a gradual process in which he had read the Bible and reflected on his own sinfulness. In many ways, his conversion was a mystery, as was the faith itself. Because God was transcendent and infinitely beyond the human mind “unassisted by grace,” Christianity could not be completely grasped by reason. This fact did not bother Randolph. He insisted, “To me it would . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, May , , July , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, , . Randolph to Francis Scott Key, June , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . Randolph to Francis Scott Key, August , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , .
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be a stronger objection to Christianity did it contain nothing which baffled my comprehension, than its most difficult doctrines.” Just because one did not understand a doctrine did not mean the doctrine was false. Randolph was certain of the truths of Christian doctrine—even the ones he struggled to understand, like the problem of evil—because God Himself was “the teacher.” His contentment to live with mystery coupled with his vision of himself as a pilgrim underscored his traditional Christianity. Randolph perceived in Christianity a brotherhood of the faithful bound together by love and the traditions of the faith. Christianity, like society, was ultimately a family. Thus Christianity complemented his familial social vision. The grace of his conversion manifested itself in love and understanding. He noted, “I feel my stubborn and rebellious nature to be softened.” Randolph was able to “cultivate and cherish feelings of good will towards all mankind” and “to strive against envy, malice, and all uncharitableness.” He claimed to have forgiven all his enemies and noted that he would hurt no one, “not even Bonaparte,” if it were in his power to do so. Love, therefore, made possible through conversion and the forgiveness of Christ, could bind all men together. Randolph also noted that “real converts to Christianity” agreed to the same doctrines of the Bible. He remarked to Key on his love of reading the Psalms: “It is there that I find my sin and sorrows depicted by a fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer; and there too I find consolation.” Randolph experienced a commonality in religious experience as well. He remarked, “Taking up, a few days ago . . . the life of John Bunyan . . . I find an exact coincidence in our feelings and opinions on this head as well as others.” Christianity not only supplied links to the next life and with one’s fellow man, but also joined one to the Christians of the past. Thus Randolph’s Christianity became a remembrance of the . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, July , , and August , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, , , . Randolph rejected evangelicalism for a traditional expression of Christianity. Writing about Virginia in , he remarked: “I see self-righteous people, who grind the faces of the poor, drive their slaves to the top of their speed, take the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, & then abuse their neighbors for worldly mindedness & want of religion as if it were a piece of goods. They talk of getting religion as one would of getting a coat or hat. These people never think of those who ‘cry Lord, Lord’ or ‘of the people that draweth neigh unto me with their mouths but their heart is far from me.’ ” Randolph to Elizabeth T. C. Bryan, July , , Bryan Family Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
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Christian tradition in his own past. He wrote his nephew in : “Your parents were born members of the Church of England and your forefathers have been of that persuasion. You can have no good cause to desert it.” Because of the power of Christianity to link the present with the past and the future, tradition took on a new meaning for Randolph. Tradition was relevant to the present, and Christianity had made it so. Thus, Randolph’s view of religion and society complemented his traditional social vision, one that was Christian, familial, hierarchical, civilized, cultured, and a part of the Western tradition.
R Conservative Virginians became obsessed with the decline of their state after the War of . While the West was growing at a rapid pace after the war, Virginia was afflicted with falling tobacco prices, soil exhaustion, and massive emigration. Land values in Virginia dropped from $ million in to $ million in . Exports declined significantly as well. Slave prices dropped precipitously. Robert Sutton noted that a “slave worth $ in could be sold ten years later for only $.” Difficult economic times in Virginia elicited more laments of decline from Virginia planters, and conservative politics in the Old Dominion strengthened significantly. Many young Virginians suddenly turned toward states’ rights and the Principles of ’98 as a reaction against the new order. By the Old Republicans had some company. The revived states’ rights movement possessed a pervading sense of nostalgia in the s. Old Repub. Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, August , , and September , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, , . Randolph to Francis Scott Key, August , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . Inscribed by John Randolph on August , , in his Book of Common Prayer given to his nephew, John St. George Randolph, John Randolph Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. See the letters of Randolph to Elizabeth T. C. Bryan in the Bryan Family Papers (#3400), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. In these letters Randolph reiterates his conception of tradition and his opposition to Puritanism and evangelicalism. . Robert P. Sutton, “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise: The Doomed Aristocrat in Late-Jeffersonian Virginia,” VMHB (): –. Risjord, The Old Republicans. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion. Sutton, “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise.” William Taylor’s description of the Southern Mugwump in Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character, –, reveals that men of Randolph’s principles and mentality were a definite intellectual group in the s and s.
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licans such as Taylor and Randolph tried to determine reasons for the decline of Virginia and its society. Part of the blame lay with the lure of the American West, which served to destroy libertarian political principles and the society of Virginia. Both Taylor and Randolph had supported the Louisiana Purchase in . They realized, like Jefferson, that the West offered the opportunity to retain an agrarian social order for many years and to protect the fledgling nation from foreign interference. But despite the West’s possibilities, it lured settlers with cheap land and government promises of patronage, thus dissolving established eastern communities and creating social instability in eastern states. Taylor and Randolph shared similar opinions of the West, but stressed different problems and solutions, fitting with their divergent social visions. The reality of the American West exposed the tension between Taylor’s devotion to a laissez-faire society and his dedication to the landed community. The West offered great opportunities to spread an agrarian republican society. Taylor compared the agricultural system of the English to that of the Americans to make his point. In England, the government used force, in the form of regulations, to improve agriculture. Such “oppression” through the use of authority would never work in America because American farmers could “flee from it [oppressive regulation] into a wilderness . . . and gain greater profit with less labour.” Potentially, the West was the material foundation for agricultural freedom, for any threat to farmers made by the government could be ignored because farmers could always leave. The West had a darker side as well. It tempted men to flee their established communities and leave the land “exhausted.” Instead of working the land and raising its value through better agricultural methods, some individuals deemed it in their best interest to “flee . . . to new climes with joy,” thus making “our agricultural progress, to be a progress of emigration, and not of improvement.” Such emigration weakened the social bonds in eastern communities that had been created by a common economic interest in agricultural land. For this reason, Taylor believed that his agricultural reforms would be hard to implement. . Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. I agree with Kirk’s interpretation of Randolph’s position on the West. See also John Devanny, Jr., “`A Loathing of Public Debt, Taxes and Excises,’” –. . Taylor, Arator, , .
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Taylor’s solution to the problem of the West revealed his attachment to the Enlightenment. He did not oppose western expansion either ideologically or politically. His solution to the difficulties of the West was twofold. First, he argued that ideological unity between easterners and westerners could be established through the free use of reason rather than the application of governmental authority. In the United States, “instead of being able to lash him [the farmer] into excellence for the benefit of others, we can only solicit him by his own interest and happiness.” Education for farmers could convince them that their best interest lay in remaining a part of established communities and improving their land through scientific agriculture. Such was the faith Taylor placed in ideas and persuasion. His second solution was to reform laws regarding the sale of western land. Farmers were often “seduced by the temptations of the wealth with which they are solicited, to sell their lands, which require labour, for the purchase of a better profit requiring none.” Land speculators played on the weaknesses of human nature to undermine the community. When the general government promoted internal improvements to connect the West to the East, available capital flew “to the legal monopolies, banking, and manufacturing,” all of which had interest in expanding artificial investment opportunities in the growing Republic. Changes in both the law and politics could defeat the American System, which, Taylor insisted, only penalized eastern agricultural communities. A separation of government from modern financial frauds such as speculation in land could be written into law, thus preventing the West from receiving government largesse. Far from being a place of complete freedom or the ultimate laissez-faire paradise, the West, according to Taylor, was a region heavily subsidized by the government and capitalist interests. In this case, Taylor’s insistence on laissezfaire was designed to stabilize the established communities by separating the government from society in the West. Taylor hoped that the economic and social stability brought by a reformed agriculture would keep people from choosing the political stability offered by consolidated government. In keeping with his traditionalism, Randolph complained that the West lacked the institutions necessary for civilized society. He remarked that he opposed the admission of new states into the Union because the new ter. Ibid., , . For a brief discussion on the West in Taylor’s thought that is consistent with mine, see MacLeod, “The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline,” .
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ritories were “vast deserts of woods” and were “inhabited by the Aborigines” who had rights to the land. He noted that the government ought not to “encourage sparse settlements.” Randolph added, “I am against the rabble of your great cities, but I am equally opposed to having a land without inhabitants.” Just as cities produced political corruption, poverty, and dependence, so would the West. He often referred to Kentucky as the “Australia of Virginia,” a comparison showing his contempt for westerners. Ultimately, the western states lacked a history and traditional institutions, which would take time to develop. Randolph regarded the westerner as a barbarian in the Greek sense of the word, as an outsider. Just as the ancient Greeks had disdained anyone who lived outside of the polis, so Randolph feared and disliked those not linked to traditional institutions and who lacked a sense of place. The West drained population from the eastern seaboard society by offering cheap land and the possibility of quick profits. In an letter to Josiah Quincy, Randolph lamented the destruction of traditional Virginia. “The old mansions,” he maintained, “are fast falling to decay” because of the “poverty and carelessness” of their owners. The old families are “dispersed from St. Mary’s to St. Louis” or remain in the East “sunk into obscurity.” “They whose fathers rode in coaches and drank the choicest wines,” he added, “now ride on saddlebags, and drink grog, when they can get it.” The “enterprise” and “capital” of Virginia “retired westward.” The West, according to Randolph, had permitted the destruction of traditional Virginia society and its best citizens. Taste and refinement, part of a cultured life, were suffering from neglect and the coarseness of the new society in the West, which focused solely on profit. In an letter to Harmanus Bleeker, Randolph bemoaned the “tide of emigration” flooding the Old Southwest. He remarked, “Alabama is at present the lodestone of attraction—Cotton, Money, Whiskey, & the means of obtaining all these blessings, Slaves—The road is thronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcass-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market & recalls to memory Clarkson’s Prize Essay on Slavery & the Slave trade, which I . For views of the American West in the s and how they relate to Randolph’s views, see Lance Banning, “Sectionalism and the General Good,” in Michael Allen Gillespie and Michael Lienesch, eds., Ratifying the Constitution. Peter S. Onuf, “Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the s,” –. Randolph’s fears of the West reflected almost perfectly the fears of strict republicans during the s.
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read upwards of thirty years ago.” He understood that slavery would be perpetuated by the West because it supplied the labor in a sparsely settled territory, and he recognized that the demand for slaves in the West could cause eastern slaveholders to sell their slaves, thus destroying another element of traditional Virginia and its familial society. The West presented a major political and constitutional problem. One of Randolph’s central anti-Federalist political principles was that the government must have a common feeling and common interest with the governed. Because it would be impossible for the federal government to achieve such a bond with the large population of the country, state and local governments better governed their smaller and more homogeneous populations. According to Randolph, the West had no common interest with the established states of the East, making a common government impossible. “Louisiana is not my country,” he remarked. “I respect as much the opinions of the people of London as of the Western States,” he added. A lack of common interest was only part of the problem. Randolph noted that the new western states, states that lacked strong traditional institutions, possessed equal representation in the highest representative body in the nation, the Senate. He insisted that it was “the height of injustice” for “thirty or forty thousand persons, who so long as they remained in Pennsylvania or Virginia, were represented in the Senate only as the rest of the Pennsylvanians or Virginians, should by emigrating” westward “acquire, ipso facto, an equipollent vote in the other House of Congress with the millions that they left behind at home.” The result was a loss of equity in the Union. Western states could exercise real political power that could threaten eastern interests. Randolph summed up his opinion on the political power of the West in a letter to Josiah Quincy: “We are the first people that ever acquired provinces, either by conquest or purchase . . . not for us to govern but that they might govern us—that we might be ruled to our ruin by people bound to us by no common tie of interest or sentiment.” In addition to their overrepresentation, the western states had received . John Randolph to Josiah Quincy, March , , quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . John Randolph to Harmanus Bleeker, October , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. . John Randolph to Francis Scott Key, March , , quoted in Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Randolph to Josiah Quincy, October , , quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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massive amounts of government aid. In an speech, Randolph asked, “What have we not done for the West?” The government had spent much time and money securing the West for the emigrant population. The government had signed “Indian treaties for the extinguishment of title to lands” for the benefit of western settlers. It had also bequeathed land grants, derived largely from the old territories of the eastern states, to new western states. The government had given “laws granting every facility for the nominal payment” for the land that did not apply to the older states. Also, the western states had money supplied to them by the federal government for the “establishment of schools” and “for other great objects of public concernment,” moneys not given to the eastern states. The federal government had disbursed “millions . . . for the acquisition of the navigation of the Mississippi, and for the purchase of Louisiana.” Randolph concluded that the West should cease demanding federal aid on account of the previous generosity of both the government and the eastern states. Unfortunately for Randolph, the West was a haven for Henry Clay’s principles of government-aided commercial development by means of the American System. Randolph believed that Clay’s American system threatened traditional republicanism by willfully expanding western migration, modern commerce, and government largesse. Randolph viewed the West as the home of American imperialism. The young War Hawks who pushed America to war with Britain in were largely young men from the new society of the West, impatient with traditional republicanism. The push westward meant more war-hawk politicians, resulting in an increased militarism and centralization of government. Expansionists sponsored a “splendid system of crusades,” he added. Randolph perceived that American imperialism would not end with the West but would spread elsewhere as opportunities for greater wealth and power appeared. The possibilities and realities of the West caused Randolph to despair because he realized that he could not stop “the growth of the rising empire in the West.” Supposedly, Randolph was buried facing the West . “Speech on Surveys for Roads and Canals,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. . “Speech on the Greek Cause,” January , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, –, –. Quoted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, . See John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, –. Randolph realized that later southerners would want a southern nation based on economic interest. See Randolph to Andrew Jackson, March , , Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , .
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so that in death he could, as the legend goes, keep an eye on Henry Clay. Randolph’s apprehensions about the West were prophetic, for as later southern nationalists embraced the West as territory that would perpetuate slavery and cotton forever, they exacerbated the political tensions that brought about disunion.
R Historians have pointed out consistently that the Jeffersonians violated their political principles by their acceptance of slavery. But historians have not always appreciated how thinkers such as Taylor and Randolph blended slavery into their visions of the good society in ways that attempted to compliment and strengthen their social ideals. John Taylor provided a laissez-faire, rationalist view of slavery that complemented his broader social vision, while John Randolph viewed slavery as another institution of a traditional society that transformed masters into paternalistic patriarchs. Taylor’s views on slavery coincided with his appreciation of wealth and the possibilities offered by the modern economic order. In order to obtain wealth through agriculture, one had to raise crops for market. If one wanted to increase one’s wealth, one had to grow more crops, a task requiring a larger labor force and more land. In the South, the best means of increasing one’s labor force was the purchase of slaves. Slavery, therefore, was the means to wealth in the agricultural South. Taylor’s own life bore out this process. As indicated previously, he inherited a few slaves as a young man and continued to purchase more slaves to work his increased landholdings, eventually becoming a prosperous planter. Though Taylor remarked that black slavery was “a misfortune to agriculture, incapable of removal, and only within the reach of palliation,” he did not seem especially bothered by his “misfortune” at owning slaves. He objected, however, to the ownership of unproductive slaves. He attacked southern attitudes toward slavery as a major part of the decline of the agrarian South. He . Edmund Morgan argued that Jefferson’s views of slavery fit into his broader social concerns with debt and republican independence. Like Morgan, I see strong connections between social concerns and justifications of slavery. Of course the idea of holding human beings as chattel violates the libertarian principles of the Old Republicans. Nevertheless, they tried to fit slavery into their broader social theory. See “Slavery and Freedom: An American Paradox,” –. See also Jan Lewis, “Southerners and the Problem of Slavery in Political Discourse,” in David Thomas Konig, ed., Devising Liberty: Preserving and Creating Freedom in the New American Republic, –.
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wrote, “The slave-holding states have been deterred from making agricultural improvements, and establishing any tolerable system of police for the management of slaves, by the lazy and hopeless conclusion, that the destruction of their lands, and the irregularities of their negroes, were incurable consequences of slavery.” Ultimately, Taylor thought that the problem was ignorance. He set out to “refute these errors” in order to transform southern slaves into a productive labor force that would strengthen the agricultural economy of the region. Because Taylor’s overriding concern in slave management was profit, he did not argue for a benevolent paternalism, nor did he advance a familial image of slavery as did Randolph. All the measures Taylor undertook toward his slaves were to increase the production and efficiency of his plantations. He perceived slaves to be nothing more than children with a proclivity for vicious behavior. He noted that “slaves are too far below, and too much in the power of the master, to inspire furious passions.” Masters were as rarely “disgraceful towards slaves as toward horses.” To argue that slavery corrupted the master gave the inferior slave too much power. Instead the lot of slaves was much like the lot of the master’s horses—they were well cared for in order to fulfill their important purpose of producing wealth for their master. Comparing slaves to farm animals again, Taylor maintained, “Animal labour is brought to its utmost value, by being completely supplied with the necessaries and comforts required by its nature.” Such comforts “have more force to attach the reasonable than the brute creation to a place.” If slaves were well treated, Taylor implied, they would be loyal to their masters and perform their duties. He justified the care of slaves by naked self-interest in the following way, “The addition of comfort to mere necessaries, is a price paid by the master, for the advantages he will derive from binding his slave to his service, by a ligament stronger than chains, far beneath their value in a pecuniary point of view; and he will moreover gain a stream of agreeable reflections throughout life, which . Taylor, Arator, , . On Taylor and slavery, see Hill, The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, –. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, –. Eugene T. Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline: A Study in Jeffersonian Democracy, –. Keith M. Bailor, “John Taylor of Caroline: Continuity, Change, and Discontinuity in Virginia’s Sentiments toward Slavery, –,” –. MacLeod, Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution, –, –. Bailor noted that Taylor did not link slavery to states’ rights and differed considerably from later proslavery apologists.
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will cost him nothing.” Just as Taylor thought that in order for agricultural reforms to take hold in the South they must be presented in terms of selfinterest, so too did he think of slavery in terms of self-interest. His justification of slavery in southern agriculture was distinctively modern. The goal of proper slave management was to produce “docile, useful, and happy” slaves. Taylor provided good housing and sufficient clothing for his slaves, but maintained that “the best source for securing their happiness, their honesty and their usefulness, is their food.” He warned that farmers who starved their slaves would suffer greatly. The farmer would lose “the profits produced by health, strength and alacrity,” and suffer “the losses caused by disease, short life, weakness and dejection.” “A portion, or the whole of the profit, arising from their increase is also lost,” he believed. Starving slaves would not breed. Mistreatment of slaves was simply bad business. A mistreated slave would become a disgruntled slave and would reject “the best sponsor for his happiness,” his master. Taylor proposed using food as a reward or punishment for behavior. The slave would then come to see that it was in his own self-interest to behave well. He encouraged masters to plant large vegetable gardens exclusively for the use of their slaves. The daily diet for slaves included bread, salt fish, and milk for two meals, and one meal of “salt meat boiled into a soup with peas, beans, potatoes, turnips, cabbages, cimblins or pumpkins.” On such a diet slaves would be happy and productive. Feeding slaves well could also diminish theft on the plantation. Taylor realized that the whole community of slaves on a plantation was complicit in thefts of the master’s property. He knew that it was so because the slaves had no interest in preventing petty thievery of food from their master. Thus he proposed punishing theft by any slave by placing the whole slave workforce on a diet of only bread. The result would be that “all will have an interest to prevent and forbear theft, provided a diet much more comfortable is thereby secured.” Taylor also advised that a daily allowance of cider be given to the slaves on the basis of their behavior. He noted that apportioning cider had the effect of “diminishing corporal punishments.” His use of food as a reward and a pun. Taylor, Arator, , . Taylor remarked that slave owners should treat slaves well because of religious mandates as well. But even here he portrays the master-slave relationship in terms of self-interest: “Religion assails him [the slaveowner] both with her blandishments and terrors. It indissolubly binds his, and his slave’s happiness or misery together.” Arator, –. . Taylor, Arator, , , , –.
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ishment reinforced the slave’s condition of complete dependence on the master. Slavery also had to be kept safe. Taylor held that it was “idle even to think of a good system of agriculture . . . if the labour on which it depends is convulsed by infusions the most inimical to its utility; and if those who direct it, are to live in a constant dread of its loss, and a doubt of their own safety.” Discipline exacted by the master and rigorous slave codes were absolutely necessary. Taylor argued that in order to have success, the planter must use “stern authority, strict discipline, and complete subordination” with his slaves. If “white soldiers cannot be kept in order, or rendered useful, without all three,” then slaves certainly could not. In addition, slaves could not be “governed by the finest threads of the human heart” because they possessed “only the coarsest” hearts. Ready discipline was the only way to maximize the profit gained by slave labor. Taylor insisted that the “object of punishment is to deter by example, and not to gratify the passion of revenge.” The laws of slave states should reflect this principle. Taylor advocated a tightening of the slave codes to better secure the property of slave owners. Just as he called for laws protecting natural property from artificial interests, he wanted legal protection of slave property. Runaway slaves were one of the biggest threats to the master. Thus the slave code had to be reformed to discourage runaways. Taylor suggested that a “law, compelling the sale of every negro who should run away or be convicted of theft, out of the state, or at a considerable distance from his place of residence, would operate considerably towards correcting these great evils.” If slave codes dealt with runaway slaves more harshly, the “common good” of slave owners would be preserved and “national prosperity” enhanced. Taylor considered emancipation at any time in the near future dangerous. He claimed to approach the subject of emancipation with a “practical” morality, aware of all the social problems it would cause. Abolitionists, “our religious and philosophical Quixotes,” desired “to bestow a capacity for liberty and rule on an extreme degree of ignorance,” black slaves. The result would be that southern society would suffer severe dislocations. Because slavery shielded the simple-minded blacks from the harsh realities of the aristocracy of paper and patronage, once blacks were emancipated and freed from the protection of slavery they would suffer at the hands of . Ibid., , .
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capitalists and others and end up “more enslaved than they are at present.” Abolitionists, “in pursuit of an ideal of freedom for them [slaves] will create some vortex for ingulphing the remnant of liberty left in the world, and obtain real slavery for themselves.” Slavery, at the present time, could only be improved, not ended. Taylor insisted: “The fact is that negro slavery is an evil which the United States must look in the face. To whine over it, is cowardly; to aggravate it, criminal; and to forbear to alleviate it, because it cannot be wholly cured, foolish.” He invoked his political principle of the separation of state and society to answer the slavery issue. The Constitution of had settled the issue, and, as a result, slavery had given the country “no trouble” until northerners used it to “excite hostile feelings” between the sections. If abolitionists continued causing trouble, their “mischiefs may exceed the most apprehensive anticipation.” Taylor hoped for caution and a conservative attitude toward change in the case of slavery. He continued, “Besides, all politicians agree that a reformation of long standing evils is best effected by slow remedies, and the progress made by the states themselves towards diminishing this, shews that they may be trusted with confidence in an affair of their own, of which they are the rightful and best judges.” Federalism and southern society, not the general government, could best deal with slavery. Taylor feared that immediate emancipation might also cause a race war like the one in St. Domingo in . He charged that French antislavery writers and speakers foolishly provoked the massacre of whites on the island. They “wrote the slaves into rebellion, finally liberated them, and these friends of the blacks turned out to be the real murderers of the whites.” The abolitionists possessed “an intemperate zeal” and remained ignorant of the local circumstances on the island. Though at first their writings did not call for emancipation, the slaves, who Taylor thought either read or heard the antislavery grumblings, understood their attitudes and began to revolt. The general assembly of France, under the influence of antislavery factions and ignorant of the local circumstances of St. Domingo, emancipated the slaves. St. Domingo reinforced Taylor’s anti-Federalist principle of representation and his distrust of the government meddling in social af. Ibid., , –. Taylor, Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, . Taylor wrote, “Slavery to an individual is preferable to slavery to an interest or faction.” Arator, .
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fairs. He wrote, “This awful history engraves in the moral code the consequences of a legislation exercised by those who are ignorant of local circumstances, and the wisdom of our distinction between internal and external powers.” The massacres at St. Domingo proved to Taylor that an interracial society was impossible, for black slaves “were incapable of liberty.” The experiment of emancipating the slaves of St. Domingo “pronounced that one colour must perish.” It would be foolish, as foolish as the French Revolution turned out to be, to make “republicans of negro slaves.” If attempted, it would “create a body politic, as monstrous and unnatural as a mongrel half white man and half negro.” The South was in too similar a situation to St. Domingo to risk emancipation. Thus talk of emancipation had to stop because it threatened the lives of southerners. If complete emancipation would produce a race war, gradual emancipation, unless coupled with colonization, would harm agriculture and endanger slavery. Free blacks in the South wounded “agriculture in the two modes of being an unproductive class, and of diminishing the utility of the slaves.” Taylor believed that the “situation of the free negro class is exactly calculated to force it into every species of vice.” Because free blacks did not possess “most of the rights of citizens” nor the “allowances of slaves,” they were “driven into every species of crime for subsistence” and were “destined to a life of idleness, anxiety and guilt.” The example of free blacks would devastate the utility of slaves. Slaves would see the idleness and “theft with impunity” of free blacks and imitate them. The very condition of blacks living in relative freedom in a society containing black chattel slavery could give slaves hopes of their own emancipation and even produce insurrections. The color line in society had to be drawn absolutely. The vice of free blacks would also harm the morality of whites who . Taylor, Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, . Taylor, Arator, –. Bailor, “John Taylor of Caroline,” . Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth FoxGenovese, “Political Virtue and the Lessons of the French Revolution: The View from the Slaveholding South,” in Richard K. Matthews, ed., Virtue, Commerce, and Corruption: Political Values in the Eighteenth Century, . The Genoveses argue that Federalists and Jeffersonians turned the French Revolution into a “prism through which to interpret the political implications of the American Revolution.” Taylor’s dislike of the French Revolution, which he expressed well in Arator, caused him to reject the radical politics of equality, which some of his principles might have led him to adopt. Especially after the revolts on St. Domingo, Taylor rejected the principles of the French Revolution. . Taylor, Arator, –.
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dealt with them. A removal of free blacks from the South would benefit whites, slaves, and the free blacks themselves. Taylor proposed that they be shipped back to Africa or resettled in northern or western free states on government-owned land. Agriculture could prosper in the wake of their departure as slavery would be made more secure. Taylor believed that black chattel slavery did not violate republicanism. He emphasized this point in Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated during his discussion of the Missouri Compromise. Some northerners argued during the debates that Congress could impose antislavery clauses in Missouri’s constitution. They reasoned that because the Constitution required a state to have a republican form of government, and because slavery was incompatible with republicanism, then Congress could tell Missouri that it could not allow slavery. Taylor viewed such an argument as absurd on two counts. First, he disagreed that the general government could dictate to a sovereign state-nation the constitution it should write. Such an action would violate federalism and the division of powers. Second, he insisted that slavery and republicanism were not irreconcilable. “All the states in the first confederation were slaveholding states, when they formed their constitution,” he added. He continued, “If slaveholding states possessed the contemplated republican forms of government, then that circumstance is not inconsistent with such forms.” To this indirect defense of slavery, Taylor added a host of other arguments more explicit in nature. Despite his declarations that he opposed slavery, it is clear from his defenses of the institution that he thought slavery could be a positive influence on the Republic. Taylor concentrated his arguments in defense of slavery in the fourteenth essay of Arator as a response to Thomas Jefferson’s antislavery opinions in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson had argued that the institution of slavery produced an environment that corrupted society. He had written, “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” Children of slave owners absorbed tyranny and despotism from their environment, a classic Lockean point, and became vicious. Jefferson commented: “The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals unde. Taylor, Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, .
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praved by such circumstances. The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a context.” Thus the environment created by slavery in the South made the southerner more likely to be vicious, a despot, and a tyrant. It followed that if this were the case, all true republicans had to reject black chattel slavery. In response, Taylor argued that Jefferson had been influenced too much by the ideas of the French philosophes. He wrote, “Circumstances affect the mind, as weather does beer, and frequently produces a sort of moral fermentation, which throws up bubbles of prismatic splendor, whilst they are played upon by the rays of some temporary effervescence, but destined to burst when the fermentation ceases.” Taylor admitted that he too had been influenced by the “war for liberty” but had become more rational when his passions subsided. A practical look at the issue of slavery would show that Jefferson was wrong. Taylor insisted that if Jefferson were correct, it would be better “to run the risque of national extinction by liberating and fighting the blacks, than to live abhorred of God, and consequently hated of man.” Jefferson was wrong, however, and thus his insistence on emancipation should be ignored. Taylor explained that slavery had traditionally been a support of the great civilizations of the West. “Slavery was carried farther among the Greeks and Romans than among ourselves, and yet these two nations produced more great and good citizens, than, probably, all the rest of the world,” he noted. By his invocation of ancient Greece and Rome, he hinted that the South simply had inherited the Western tradition, which included slavery. Later pro-slavery apologists would expand on his point. Taylor then asserted that the slave states of the South had produced some great men, including Jefferson himself, who attacked the institution. He wrote, “In the United States it is also probable that the public and private character of individuals is as good, as in the countries where locomotive liberty and slavery to a faction, exist; nor do the slave states seem less productive of characters on whom the nation is willing to confide than the others.” Slavery, therefore, did not necessarily corrupt manners, as Jefferson had charged. Slavery even could be a boon to republican virtue and morality in general. He noted that “vicious and mean qualities become despicable in the eyes of freemen from their association with the character of slaves.” He added: “Character, like condition, is contrasted, and as one . Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, –. Taylor, Arator, .
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contrast causes us to love liberty better, so the other causes us to love virtue better. Qualities odious in themselves, become more contemptible, when united with the most degraded class of men, than when seen in our equals; and pride steps in to aid the struggles of virtue.” Thus white children and slave owners would not be corrupted by slavery but rather in “seeing the bad qualities in slaves” would be spurred on to virtue. Virtue and vice acted as mirrors “in which the other can be seen.” Taylor concluded, “It may be thus that personal slavery has constantly reflected the strongest rays of civil liberty and patriotism.” Like many of Taylor’s arguments, this one would be reused and perfected by later southerners. Taylor’s ultimate justification of slavery lay in his contention that blacks were naturally inferior to whites. His positing of racial inferiority allowed him to rest assured that blacks could not exercise self-government and become republican citizens. Slaves were a “black mass of ignorance” and had no “capacity for liberty” in a republic. His belief that blacks were naturally inferior contradicted his political principles regarding aristocracies. John Adams had argued that some men were naturally superior to others and thus formed an aristocracy. Taylor had contended that superior abilities were based only on knowledge, not nature. Because knowledge was a moral power and could be modified by the human intellect and will, aristocracies were artificial and fraudulent. Taylor’s beliefs on the moral inferiority of blacks undermined his response to Adams in that Taylor seemingly believed that natural orders, at least among the races, existed. If Taylor did believe that emancipation would eventually occur when circumstances in the South became right for it, then given his views on racial inferiority of blacks another system of racial control would have to be instituted. Taylor’s belief in the moral inferiority of blacks was the gravest violation of his political principles, but otherwise, his view of slavery coincided with his laissez-faire social vision. He used laissez-faire arguments to defend slavery. He argued that the government should only protect slavery through . Taylor, Arator, –. . Ibid., –. See also Hill, The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline, . Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline, . Bailor, “John Taylor of Caroline,” . I cannot agree with Bailor’s point that Taylor actually believed that emancipation would take place in the future and that his assumption of black inferiority was not “vindictive.” Despite Taylor’s pronouncements to the contrary, it is hard to see that he held any real hopes that emancipation would take place. By holding that blacks were inferior, Taylor could simply say that his political and social principles did not apply to them.
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law and not interfere in the social relationship of master and slave. He noted that self-interest could be used to make slavery more efficient and beneficial to the master. He also showed southern planters how to harness slavery for the production of greater wealth. He insisted that a lack of knowledge about slavery, not the nature of slavery, caused its problems. Finally, he advocated caution in handling slavery so that the good of the community could be preserved. In all of these arguments, Taylor consistently applied his libertarian republican principles. Instead of destroying his social vision, his racist view of slavery actually complemented his social views. John Randolph was not as forthright as Taylor on the issue of slavery, and the discrepancies between his private writings and public utterances on the subject have resulted in different opinions about the importance of slavery in his thought. Some believed that Randolph differed significantly from the proslavery politicians of the s because he never defended slavery “in the abstract” as later southerners did. Privately, Randolph made statements to the effect, “I have no hesitation in saying slavery is a curse to the master.” In public, however, he defended slavery from any political attacks. By the end of his life, he wrote to President Andrew Jackson to propose that the United States acquire Cuba so that the “slave holding interest” could rule an empire. His public and private opinions conflict. Despite his utterances of hostility to slavery, in practice he believed that slavery could support the traditional society of Virginia that he worked to preserve. Paternalism, a trait essential to traditional society, revealed itself in slave ownership. In November Randolph wrote a letter to Harmanus Bleeker in which he discussed the rigors of slave ownership. He wrote that owning slaves “obliges me to endeavor to extort from the labouring portion of my slaves as much profit as will support them & their families in sickness & in health, in infancy and when past labour.” Randolph provided for his slaves first before “reserving to myself, if practicable, a fair rent for my land & profit on my stock.” He looked out for his dependent slaves before himself, just as in politics he served his constituency, receiving their praise as his reward. Randolph lamented the difficulty involved in making a profit without being severe with his slaves or “pinching them in necessaries of . Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , –; .
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life.” He noted that absenteeism was a major problem in Virginia. Randolph remained “fixed to the freehold” because he believed that the “master’s presence is the only check (& that insufficient) upon the malpractices of the overseers & of the negroes too, poor creatures.” While he admitted that he “bewailed the lot that made me their ‘keeper,’” he “bows with submission to the decree of Him who has called me to this state, & pray to be enabled to discharge the duties of it.” In a letter to Brockenbrough, he told his friend that the way to show “true humanity to the slave was to make him do a fair day’s work, and to treat him with all the kindness compatible with due subordination.” If the master performed these duties he “could afford to cloth and feed” his slave “and take care of him in sickness and old age.” Thus the master’s coercion became a paternalistic virtue of charity. Randolph pushed his “school for paternalism” in his letters to Theodore Dudley. It was important for Dudley to acquaint himself with the institution of slavery. He had to learn to be a paternalistic patriarch in the school of slavery. Randolph encouraged him thus, “You cannot oblige me so much as by thinking yourself to stand to me in the relation of a favoured son, and by acting as master in my house, and on my estate, on every occasion, where your own pleasure or a regard to my interest may prompt you to do so.” The role of the master, taught within the master’s family, handed on the traditions of paternalism. In later letters, Randolph suggested ways in which Dudley could better manage his slaves. The master’s primary concern, Randolph thought, was to keep order among the slaves and ensure that the plantation ran smoothly. Randolph’s portrayal of slave ownership as the benevolent treatment of “poor creatures” entrusted to his care matched well his view of politics and society. The gentry were entrusted with a noblesse oblige to be fathers to their children, lesser freeholders. Exploitation for personal gain was not an option. Though Randolph might profit from slavery, it was only after the onerous task of faithfully managing his resources and providing for the welfare of his slaves. He was not inconsistent: while claiming throughout . Randolph to Harmanus Bleeker, November , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, –. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , . For Randolph and slavery see Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, chap. . Also see Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, –. On familial views of slavery, see Norton, Alternative Americas, – . Genovese, “‘Our Family, White and Black,” –. . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, –.
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his life to be a friend of blacks and an opponent of slavery, he adopted slavery easily into his wider social vision as a school for paternalism. Randolph, like later proslavery apologists, mentioned that slavery was humane and mutually beneficial to master and slave. In Randolph composed a letter to Andrew Jackson concerning a recent voyage he had taken on a U.S. naval vessel. On the three-week voyage, he witnessed the severe disciplining of sailors by the officers. He noted that the sailors were “raw” and “utterly ignorant of the rigging or management of a square rigged vessel.” Punishment, therefore, was continuous. Randolph exclaimed that he retreated to his stateroom “to avoid the odious spectacle which surprised and shocked my negroe slaves.” He continued, “In seven years the same quantity of punishment would not be distributed among the same number of slaves as was inflicted in a voyage of three weeks from Hampton Roads to Portsmouth.” Randolph called for Jackson to end the use of the lash in the navy. His reference to slavery is instructive. The harsh discipline of the lash “degraded” slaves and freemen, and thus should be abolished. But the example implied that the southern slave owner was kinder and gentler to his slaves than the government of the United States was to its white citizens. A paternalistic master served as a buffer, protecting his slaves from the vicious nature of the government. At the Virginia constitutional convention Randolph again argued that slavery benefited both slave and master. He noted that “there are few situations in life where friendships so strong and so lasting are formed” as in the relation of master and slave. Mutual duties and interests bound the parties. “The slave,” noted Randolph, “knows that he is bound indissolubly, to his master, and must from necessity, remain always under his controul.” The master, on the other hand, “knows that he is bound to maintain and provide for his slaves so long as he retains him in his possession.” Both members accommodate themselves to the situation and make the most of it. The master receives labor and gives protection; the slave receives protection and sustenance in return for his loyalty and labor. The paternalistic relationship, added Randolph, sometimes evolved into long friendships between master and slave. He said of his favorite slave, John, “I have not a truer friend.” Thus slavery appeared to be harmless and even innocent. . Randolph to Andrew Jackson, October , , and March , , Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. , , .
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Randolph never hinted that the master did not profit from slavery. But the profits came with the duty to care for the laborer. The planter might prosper, but it was not by unrestrained capitalism. It was paternalism and the familial nature of the master-slave relationship that humanized the southern economy. Randolph may have been uncomfortable with the contradictions of slavery, but he recognized the benefits it provided for a traditional social order. Thus he could criticize slavery and its cruelty while practically celebrating it as a boon to tradition. Later proslavery apologists would echo Randolph’s rhetoric. Like Taylor, Randolph believed that emancipation of slaves could be disastrous for the United States. Although Randolph was not a strong supporter of the American Colonization Society, he indicated that free blacks were a danger to southern society. Not only did free blacks provide bad examples to slaves, but also their presence ensured racial antagonism. Randolph contended, “No two distinct peoples could occupy the same territory, under one government, but in the relation of master and vassal.” His stress on racial homogeneity is born out in a letter he wrote from Europe to William Leigh. He asked Leigh to give his regards to his slaves and to relay to them that their master wished that he could make them all white. The specter of the Haitian Revolution and the slave rebellions in Virginia (Gabriel’s Conspiracy in and Nat Turner’s Rebellion of ) convinced Randolph that emancipation was too risky. It was better, he seemed to think, to use slavery to buttress traditional Virginia society.
R Perhaps the dominant feature of national politics after the s was sectionalism. Southern conservatives during the antebellum period, particularly the southern nationalists, conceded that because a distinct society and culture set the South apart from the North, the South should be its own nation. Taylor was a sectionalist in a qualified sense. He distinguished . Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of –, –. Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . Genovese presented the argument concerning paternalism and slavery in his Roll, Jordan, Roll and The World the Slaveholders Made. Drew McCoy, in The Elusive Republic, maintains that on the “conscious level of conceptualization, at least, slavery had never found a place in the Jeffersonian vision of a republican political economy” (). Randolph and Taylor seem to disprove this conclusion. . Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, vol. , , .
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between types of sectionalism. He rejected political sectionalism, the use of sectional differences to create a coalition of power in the government, but acknowledged that social and cultural differences among the states existed and formed distinct sections in the country. He developed his opinions on the cultural differences between Virginia and the Northeast during his term of service in the Revolution, as witnessed in his youthful letters to Edmund Pendleton and his authorship of the Remonstrance against the northeastern states in for their failure to aid the South. Taylor feared that political sectionalism, either northern or southern, would destroy the Union. He maintained throughout his life the general anti-Federalist principles on diversity, interest, and representation. Taylor, like Randolph, believed that the United States, because it was founded on the principles of self-government and division of power, maintained a localistic political flavor. He considered this only natural, as he expressed in : “It is not in human nature to possess equal affection for a distant country, as for that of its nativity and abode.” Differences in “soil, climate, and productions” within the United States had been protected by the Constitution in its entrusting of representation to the separate states. A respect of diversity was the only way amicable relations between the states could be preserved. Taylor encountered sectionalism throughout his life, but two instances stand out to illuminate his struggles with sectionalism in the context of his social vision. In , when Taylor was a U.S. Senator, the actions of Great Britain toward U.S. sailors divided the Congress. In James Madison proposed legislation that would have imposed duties on Great Britain unless they signed a treaty renouncing their practice of impressing sailors. The Federalists in Congress, especially Oliver Ellsworth and Rufus King, opposed Madison’s plan, desiring peace with Great Britain rather than further antagonism. President Washington agreed to send John Jay to London to discuss a peace agreement. Taylor gave a speech opposing Jay’s mission. He argued that it would be improper for the chief justice to negotiate a treaty he might later have to review. Madison put forth another measure calling . John Taylor, An Argument Respecting the Constitutionality of the Carriage Tax, . Joseph J. Persky calls Taylor a nationalist, pointing out that he rejected sectionalism until immediately before his death. The Burden of Dependency: Colonial Themes in Southern Economic Thought, . To call Taylor a “nationalist” is inaccurate as Taylor largely rejected the nationalism of his time.
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for a halt to all importations from Great Britain until it agreed not to impress American sailors. Taylor again supported Madison’s measure. He gave a strong speech demanding both that Great Britain pay for slaves it had stolen during the Revolution and that British troops abandon their North American frontier posts. His speech had a strong sectional element as he made it clear that the protection of the eastern shipping interest was not the only issue in U.S.-British relations. In May of , in the midst of the ferocious debate, Ellsworth and King approached Taylor in private to suggest a peaceful means of disunion. King initiated the meeting, and Ellsworth wandered into the room later as if by accident. Taylor was sure the incident had been planned by the two Federalist politicians to foment political discord and stir up sectional animosity. He made a summary of the meeting and gave it to James Madison, who kept it with his political papers. King began the discussion by insisting that sectional divisions were so deeply ingrained in the United States that it was no longer possible to keep the Union viable. He complained that the South continuously opposed legislation which the East desperately needed. King feared that if the South ever obtained a majority in Congress, the East would be forced to take up arms in order to resist domination by a foreign interest. A peaceful secession to which both sections mutually consented would be preferable to a future war. From his notes on the meeting, it is easy to see that the resolute character of King’s northern sectionalism shocked Taylor. By Taylor had immersed himself in the attacks on the Hamiltonian system, seeing it as the great enemy out to destroy the Republic. His focus was, therefore, primarily national. He thus responded to King’s suggestion of secession by stating that he supported the Union. Departing from the professions of regional distinctiveness that colored his letters during the Revolution, Taylor maintained that regional differences were not at all problematical in the United States. The true culprit was the public debt, which created many divisions within American society. Once the debt was retired, regional peace would return. He suggested that King and Ellsworth resort to republican means to end the financial manipulations that lay behind sec. John Taylor, Disunion Sentiment in Congress in : A Confidential Memorandum Hitherto Unpublished Written by John Taylor of Caroline, Senator from Virginia, for James Madison, –. . Ibid., –.
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tional antagonism—pay down the debt, reduce government spending, reduce the army and taxes, and sell cheap western land to raise revenue. King, of course, refused, and asserted that dissolution of the Union was the only solution to the dilemma. The East and South, he declared, “never had and never would think alike.” He accused Madison of plotting to disband the army and leave the United States defenseless. Refusing to elaborate further on the exact differences between the sections, King ended the conversation. Taylor speculated to Madison that there existed a secret plot by Yankee Federalists to dissolve the Union and that the British commercial interest was behind these efforts. According to Taylor, the Yankees were the practitioners of sectionalism, and they stubbornly refused to adopt republican means to restore peace and stability to the country. Political sectionalism, therefore, was opposed to republicanism in Taylor’s mind. Taylor did, however, see that cultural differences existed between the Northeast and the South. A telling incident occurred in in an exchange of letters between Taylor and Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College. Taylor’s desire to send his sons to the North for schooling prompted the exchange. He sent to Dwight an inquiry into the curriculum, fees, schedule, and general flavor of the college. Taylor apparently wanted to send his sons to the North as an attempt to bring “the moral quality of the States nearer together.” In other words, Taylor wanted some kind of student exchange program between the sections, a clear admission that sectional differences and animosity existed. Dwight responded on September , . His letter began with the customary information about the school that Taylor had requested. Dwight seemed to be itching for a fight, and halfway through the letter he launched into a diatribe against southerners, Virginians in particular. He bluntly stated, “Permit me to say that I do not think it would forward your design to send your son to this college.” He noted that from his experience of Virginians at Yale, “I cannot form a rational hope that youths from that country will at all acquire here any portion of the New England manners.” Only two Virginians had completed their studies at Yale during Dwight’s tenure while the rest “despised and hated our manners, morals, industry, and religion.” His sectional animosity was explicit; he even referred to Virginia as a “country” instead of a sister state. “No part of our system or conduct was agreeable” to the Virginian . Ibid., –.
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students, he added. He noted that New Englanders held the “Christian Religion in high estimation” but that the Virginians “despised it entirely.” While New Englanders were “universally industrious,” the Virginians “considered industry as the business of slaves and wretches only.” Dwight advised Taylor not to send his sons to Yale because they “would probably dislike the government of the college and the Faculty, and consider them as rigid, superstitious and mean-spirited.” Taylor’s sons would surely “regard their New England companions as plodding drudges, destitute of talents as well as of property” and “would esteem their New England life as slavery, unreasonable and useless.” Dwight concluded the letter with the gall only a Connecticut Yankee could muster, “I have thus briefly stated my real views of this subject, and presume you will not wish an apology for the freedom I have used.” Taylor, obviously insulted, responded with an equally sectionalist diatribe against Dwight and the Northeast. He began, “Whether your letter was dictated by prejudice or civility, it merits an acknowledgment, for the purpose of repaying the one by endeavoring to remove the others.” Taylor continued, “It is evident that you have used Virginian youths as a speculum to reflect your own opinion of the Virginians.” He then attacked Dwight’s motives. He noted that youthful minds were “incapable by nature of nurturing the black and criminal passions of malice and hatreds against poverty, talents, morals, industry and religion.” Those of “unbending age,” by which Taylor meant Dwight, were “enslaved by habit, avarice or ambition, and blinded by nursing party or fanatic zeal” and harbored those “black and criminal passions.” Such people would “ascribe their own vices to the innocent object of their malevolence.” Thus Dwight was simply a fanatic and hater of Virginia. Taylor added that he had never heard from southern youths “an expression containing any portion of that mass malignity towards their New England brethren, ascribed to them in your letter.” Yankees in the South were “undistinguishable from ourselves” and were not hated by good, hospitable southerners. . John Taylor to Timothy Dwight, September , and Timothy Dwight to John Taylor, September , , reprinted in “A Sheaf of Old Letters,” –. For an interesting portrayal of Dwight as a northern conservative see Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, –, –. . Timothy Dwight to John Taylor, September , , reprinted in “A Sheaf of Old Letters,” –.
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Taylor then attacked the religion of New England. He noted that Christianity taught southerners “not to make our faith the proscriber of other faiths” and “not to hate those who differ with us in opinion, because, though it may please an ambitious or rapacious hierarchy, it will not please God.” Tolerant southern Christians lacked “this cruel, malicious and impious temper,” which by implication resided in New England Christians, Dwight being their representative. Virginia “abounds with Christian ministers” because “religion is not banished by intermeddling with civil government,” an attack on the state government establishment of the Congregationalist churches in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In his brief mention of religion, Taylor put forth the stereotype of the Puritan Yankee— intolerant, malicious, secretly impious, and essentially anti-republican in using the state to promote religion. His sectional stereotyping matched Dwight’s own cliché of Virginians as carefree, corrupt, lazy, spoiled, irreverent ignoramuses. Taylor sarcastically ended his comments on religion by writing, “These defensive observations are not intended to insinuate that the people of New England are deficient in an equivalent respect for the Christian religion with their Southern brethren.” Next Taylor defended slavery by arguing that it did not oppress Virginians as badly as the paper system oppressed New Englanders. He regretted that slavery had been used by Dwight as a reproach to southerners because southerners had been “unable to remedy an evil forced upon us against our will, by arbitrary power,” a reference to the idea that the British king forced the slave system on the colonies. But, Taylor added, southerners have shown “the sincerity of this regret by our enmity to the system of hierarchy patronage and public diet, for making slaves of freemen.” He charged that mathematical evidence would reveal that the paper system of “indirect slavery extorts from the laboring people of England far greater profit than direct slavery has ever produced to Virginia.” The result of such oppression was social—the profligate extravagance of avarice for the Yankee contrasted with the honest industry of the Virginian. Taylor remarked, “A Boston nabob, it is said, is able to expend in a single entertainment a year’s income of a good Virginia farmer.” He feared that the . Ibid., . See also Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, –, for a treatment of southern images of Yankees as Puritans. William Taylor also discussed northern images of southerners as lazy and corrupt. For southern views of Yankees as Christian apostates see Genovese, A Consuming Fire.
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happiness of the Union would end if the sectional prejudices and hatred expressed by Dwight were officially taught in academic institutions. Taylor decided: “In one sentiment we agree. That it would be extremely injudicious of me to send my son in search of instruction to one who believes him to be a wretch destitute of morals, industry and religion, when the last of such prejudices suffices to plant the dagger of a barrister in the heart of a great prince.” Taylor’s response to Dwight was ironic in that it showed a drift toward the sectionalist arguments he had repudiated in . He exhibited an attitude similar to Randolph’s in this regard. Both men professed love for the Union but became outspoken sectionalists when outsiders attacked Virginia. Taylor and Randolph could criticize Virginia politics and society for their deficiencies, but a Yankee could not. Taylor, in this case, used a sectionalist defense of slavery and the image of a culturally inferior Puritan Yankee as ammunition for sectional arguments. Despite the fact that he had denied great differences between the sections, except due to the public debt, in , in he seemed to say that socially, religiously, and economically, the South was not only distinct from but also superior to the Northeast. As discussed in the previous chapter, during his speeches in and protesting the coming of war, John Randolph used political sectionalism in appealing to the southern interest to protect slavery as an argument to maintain peace with Great Britain. Henry Adams charged that Randolph was the first politician to join states’ rights and slavery in order to make sectional appeals. Randolph’s political sectionalism, like that of Rufus King as described by Taylor, was defensive in its nature. In a confederated republic in which government stayed within its constitutional boundaries, there would be no need for sectionalism. But that some used the general government to harm the South, and many southerners, as weak human beings, failed to appreciate this, gave Randolph cause to use self-interested sectional appeals to unite the South. The irony of Randolph’s sectionalist position can be found in his personal letters, in which he usually attacks southern culture as too limited in its scope and deficient in its humanism. A planter’s life often thwarted Randolph’s cultural ideal. Despite his cel. Timothy Dwight to John Taylor, September , , reprinted in “A Sheaf of Old Letters,” .
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ebrating the life of the Virginia gentry, he did not particularly admire certain aspects of plantation life. Randolph’s ideal of a cultured, civilized planter clashed with the mundane duties of managing a plantation. He was more comfortable reading or giving long orations before Congress than managing his plantation, and though his efforts at management were successful, Randolph complained to Theodore Dudley of the boredom he felt. For example, in Randolph told him, “Your welcome letter of the sixth arrived today, most opportunely, to withdraw my mind from those vexations and vulgar details to which a Southern planter must, in some degree, attend, or encounter certain ruin.” He complained of having to deal with bad overseers, lazy slaves, and boorish neighbors. In one letter, he told Dudley, “I have tried to strike root into some of the people around me—one family, in particular.” But Randolph found the task too laborious. He continued, “I found the soil too stony for me to penetrate, and, after some abortive attempts, I gave it up—nor shall I ever renew the attempt, unless some change in the inhabitants should take place.” Randolph obviously found most Virginians uncultured and even uncivilized. He told an unhappy Dudley in , “I am afraid you will find nothing in our solitary and deserted habitation to raise your spirits.” Randolph’s portrait of his own life stressed his isolation and dismay. In , in the midst of a personal crisis, he wrote, “I have been ossified by a petrifying world.” The South and particularly Virginia had been overwhelmed by prejudice and had rejected civilized society, leaving the gentleman Randolph isolated in his traditional life. Randolph seemed uncomfortable with the provincialism of Virginia, his broad humanism chafing against the ignorance within his own society. In Dudley lived in Philadelphia, where he attended medical school. That was the year Randolph began to link rhetorically the defense of slavery with states’ rights and the South in his speeches opposing war with Britain. In an August letter, he advised Dudley not to choose Virginia medical students for his companions. He wrote, “I have no doubt that many of the medical students of the south, leave Philadelphia as ignorant of every thing worthy to be known in that city, as when they entered it.” The reason for this was “a clannish spirit, which makes them associate . Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, , , . Randolph to Dudley, December , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, .
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exclusively with one another, and fosters their ridiculous prejudices against the people of the middle and northern states, of whom, in fact, they know nothing.” This remarkable letter revealed that Randolph’s defensive position in the debates over the war with Britain in was merely a rhetorical tactic. For historians who would see Randolph as a southern patriot or a defender of the Slave Power, the letters to Dudley tell a more complicated story. Randolph’s social vision was not one of provincialism, but of humanism and civilized discourse in the Western tradition. His advice to Dudley showed that his aim in coupling slavery with states’ rights was ultimately a social one. He hoped that by making southerners defend themselves in traditional republican terms, they might become traditional republicans and adopt the same traditional social vision that supported his own republicanism. Randolph admired the traditional southern culture of the Virginia gentry, but feared that modernity, preaching selfishness, irresponsibility, and the pursuit of quick profit, was destroying it. In , early in Dudley’s education, Randolph wrote a letter in which he described the challenge Dudley faced in becoming a classically educated traditional gentleman in a declining Virginia society. “A petulant arrogance,” he began, “or a supine, listless indifference, marks the character of too many of our young men.” These young Virginians “assume airs of manhood” at an early age, but “remain children for the rest of their lives.” Randolph complained, “Upon the credit of a smattering of Latin, drinking grog, and chewing tobacco, these striplings set up for legislators and statesmen; and seem to deem it derogatory from their manhood to treat age and experience with any degree of deference.” In his advice, Randolph made it clear that Dudley would need to avoid the cultural morass of young Virginians and adopt the traditional ways. Randolph continued: “They are loud, boisterous, overbearing, and dictatorial: profane in speech, low and obscene in their pleasures. In the tavern, the stable, or the gaming-house, they are at home; but placed in the society of real gentlemen, and men of letters, they are awkward and uneasy: in all situations, they are contemptible.” Young Virginians were selfish and self-absorbed and lacked any concept of duty or moral obligation. They had refused completely to ask the great ques. Letters of John Randolph to a Young Relative, . . Ibid., –.
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tions in life that only civilized discourse and learning could lead them to consider. Randolph viewed such men with contempt, not out of snobbery (although that might have been a part of it), but because these new men who represented modern Virginia had rejected the venerable traditions of the past. The end result of modernity would be the destruction of Western civilized society. Randolph therefore let Dudley know what was at stake— the society of the West and of the traditional Virginia gentry. In an letter to Brockenbrough, Randolph gave an especially vivid depiction of Virginia in decline. “On my road to Buckingham,” he began, “I passed a night in Farmville, in an apartment which in England they would not have thought fit for my servant; nor on the continent did he ever occupy so mean a one.” Here he revealed perhaps the primary purpose of manners: social distinction. Without manners, Randolph implied, servants were treated the same as their masters, an unacceptable state of affairs. “Wherever I stop,” he continued, “it is the same—walls black and filthy—bed and furniture sordid—furniture scanty and mean, generally broken—no mirror—no fire-irons—in short, dirt and discomfort, universally prevail, and in most private houses the matter is not mended.” Manners also provided for comfortable living, something else missing from modern Virginia. He complained that “the old gentry are gone and the nouveaux riches, where they have the inclination, do not know how to live.” Even the food was horrible: “every thing animal and vegetable smeared with melted butter or lard.” For Randolph the lack of hierarchy and the discomfort involved paled in comparison to the apathy and ignorance of the people that their once grand traditional society was gone. He maintained, “Poverty stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations, England and France especially.” Such ignorance of traditional society conveyed more than anything else, the raw quality of American society. He concluded, “We hug our lousy cloaks around us, take another chaw of tubbacker, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons, where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon constitutional points.” . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, November , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, –. See Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities, xi–xix.
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Randolph doubted that traditional culture could be restored in Virginia. He thought that it would be foolish to hope “to restore the state of society and manners which existed in Virginia a half a century ago.” He continued, “I should as soon expect to see the Nelsons, and Pages, and Byrds, and Fairfaxes, living in their palaces, and driving their coaches and sixes; or the good old Virginia gentlemen on the assembly, drinking their twenty and forty bowls of rack punches, and madeira, and claret, in lieu of a knot of deputy sheriffs and hack attorneys, each with his cruet of whiskey before him, and puddle of tobacco-spittle between his legs.” The progress of modernity was indomitable. Taylor on John Penn and Randolph on Alexander Hamilton Two short pieces illuminate the differences between Taylor’s and Randolph’s social visions. Taylor’s unpublished “Sketch of the Life of John Penn” is, according to historian Robert Shalhope, “as self-revealing as anything Taylor ever wrote.” The work succinctly and clearly stated Taylor’s libertarian, laissez-faire social vision. The “Life of John Penn” was a morality tale and showed that Taylor was far from a Virginia reactionary or a Burkean conservative. The sketch showed his acceptance of an individualistic society based on rewarding merit and the pursuance of personal liberty. In a similar fashion, Randolph’s December , , letter to his friend John Brockenbrough concerning Alexander Hamilton reveals Randolph’s devotion to a traditional vision of society. Taylor viewed John Penn’s life as an American republican life, the tale of a man who worked hard to achieve status and property, yet performing his social duty all the while. John Penn was born in Caroline County, Virginia, in . He “grew up in his father’s family without ever having left it in search of an education, or to acquire knowledge in a profession.” Penn’s filial devotion paid off. When John was eighteen, his father died and John became “the sole manager of his patrimony, which though not large, was competent.” Upon his father’s death, John set out to acquire knowledge. He was “animated by an ardent desire to improve his understanding” and spent much time at the library of his neighbor and kinsman Edmund Pendleton, the prominent Virginia lawyer. Taylor stressed the desire of . Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, July , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, . . Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, .
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Penn to improve his state in life as well as emulate the virtue of Pendleton, who provided the opportunity for his kinsman’s social progress. Penn attacked the library “with unremitting industry,” the result being that he learned the law and obtained a license to practice. His efforts continued, and “he soon became eminent for eloquence.” Taylor noted that Penn’s diligence paid off in that Penn “reaped the fruits of merit in his profession,” wealth. According to Taylor, Penn moved to North Carolina in in order to follow his relatives who had moved there. In reality, Penn, a devoted Whig, probably moved because he had been “indicted for treasonable remarks before a County Court.” Taylor highlighted Penn’s loyalty to his family, the only traditional institution Taylor staunchly upheld. Penn made the most of his new situation, studying the laws of his new state and becoming a successful lawyer there. Taylor stressed that Penn was “sent” to the Continental Congress by the people of North Carolina, who recognized the extraordinary talent and virtue of the newcomer to their state. He was “annually rechosen as long as he found it convenient to serve,” for about five years. During the Revolution the people of North Carolina turned to Penn for guidance and “invested him with dictatorial powers” to save the state from the British army. Because of his powerful position, he had many enemies and “had a task to discharge not less arduous than delicate.” In the time of crisis, Penn proved himself to be a true republican. He was “conciliating in his manners,” “firm in his political principles,” and “invigorated by an inextinguishable ardour.” Penn and the thirteen colonies triumphed. He brought honor both to himself and to his state. He continued to serve his state after the Revolution, remaining an example of republican virtue. Penn died in , on the eve of the birth of the new nation. His life, Taylor explained, was one of virtue and self-sacrifice. Taylor stressed that Penn did not profit from his unselfish service to the republican cause. His property “derived from his patrimony, his profession, and agriculture, not increases, but diminishes by the . . . employments he had discharged.” Thus the fruits of Penn’s hard work, his property, were diminished by his magnanimity in agreeing to public service. Taylor did not want to make that same mistake. To Taylor, Penn’s life revealed the greatness of a free . John Taylor, “Sketch of the Life of John Penn,” John Taylor Papers (#2521), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. . Hill, The Political Thought of John Taylor of Caroline, . . Taylor, “Sketch of the Life of John Penn.”
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society, a society without rigid social orders. Penn achieved greatness because of his merit, not because of his station. Penn was an individualist; that is, he was in charge of his own destiny. Penn’s strength of character propelled him to success and virtue. Clearly, Penn’s life was a distinctly American tale of heroism for Taylor. America, the land without entrenched social orders and hereditary aristocrats, was the land of opportunity. Taylor’s conception of individualism had a social component as well. Penn succeeded not by destroying society or by leaving his family and moving west. Penn succeeded from within society with the special help of his kin, particularly Edmund Pendleton. Penn triumphed over ignorance, not social mores or the community in general. Taylor’s brand of individualism was neither anarchic nor a celebration of the autonomous self. Penn’s industry and merit were rewarded only because he lived in a community willing to recognize it. Taylor moralized on his brief sketch of Penn’s life, noting that mankind should look to men like Penn as leading exemplary lives. Men like Penn “excite more useful energies, and . . . create a class of citizens unactuated by ambition, depending on their own industry, and yet ready to serve their country with patriotick zeal.” Taylor hoped that Penn’s life would “teach individuals, instead of despairing of themselves, to search in their own minds for that divine spark, which may enlighten them in their efforts to make competence compatible with virtue, and patriotism with moderation.” The first lesson was of the superiority of individualism. Taylor next appealed to the moral quality of freedom. Penn’s life would also show that the preservation of a “free form of government” depended in part on more John Penns. He maintained that “to suppose that exclusion of talents or services exist in a few, or in any one order of men, is an error fatal to the contemplation, and productive of the very evils intended to be removed” by a free society. The establishment of social orders would penalize those who had achieved personal happiness through their own efforts. Morality would better be served by individual merit. Thus John Penn, though only a mere farmer, could teach Americans the way to happiness. Taylor’s “Life of John Penn” described the American ideal to which Tay. Richard Weaver, “Two Types of American Individualism,” in George M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson, Jr., eds., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, –. Mark G. Malvasi, The Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, Introduction. . Taylor, “Sketch of the Life of John Penn.”
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lor aspired. In many ways, Taylor was a self-made man. Though well connected through his kinship to Edmund Pendleton, Taylor’s patrimony, which he sold on credit, did not make him an extremely wealthy man by the standards of the Virginia gentry. He added constantly to his holdings in land and slaves, using the profits of his law practice to increase his property, standing, and success. As C. William Hill has shown in his excellent analysis of Taylor’s life and thought, Taylor was no mere apologist for the Virginia gentry. Taylor’s love of a laissez-faire society in which individual merit could triumph led him to encourage the small farmers and mechanics to labor industriously and thereby achieve wealth and success. His defense of wealth and his support of increased consumption as a sign of wealth signaled that Taylor’s republicanism was not a Spartan agrarianism that wished to relegate all to self-sufficient farming. In Taylor’s social ideal there was little reliance on traditional institutions, except for the support of family. Instead of Burke’s ordered liberty, Taylor supported a society dedicated to individual freedom. For Taylor freedom was not an end in itself, but it did have its reward, prosperity. John Penn ultimately was virtuous because he achieved success as an individual within the community but without the unfair interference of government or class. The greatest proof of Randolph’s devotion to a traditional society came in his evaluation of the great political demon of his youth, Alexander Hamilton. By Randolph thought that America’s slide toward democracy, egalitarianism, and tyranny was inevitable. His nostalgia for past times was acute. In a letter to his trusted friend Dr. Brockenbrough, Randolph discussed his admiration for Hamilton, who embodied the manners and civility (though not the lineage) of a traditional gentleman. “I have a fellowfeeling with Hamilton,” he noted. “He was the victim of rancorous enemies, who always prevail over lukewarm friends,” he continued. Randolph, like Hamilton, fought fierce political battles and suffered isolation as a result. Randolph maintained: “He died because he preferred death to the slightest shade of imputation or disgrace. He was not suited to the country, or the times; and if he lived now, might be admired by a few, but would be thrust aside to make room for any fat-headed demagogue or dexterous intriguer. His conduct, too, on the acquisition of Louisiana, . Hill, The Political Thought of John Taylor of Caroline, and chap. . Joseph Stromberg, “Country Ideology, Republicanism, and Libertarianism: The Thought of John Taylor of Caroline,” –.
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proved how superior he was to the Otises and Quincys, and the whole run of Yankee federalists.” The fact that Randolph, the most virulent of the Old Republicans, would praise Hamilton, the creator of the national banking system, is in itself amazing. Only after Hamilton was long dead could Randolph express his solidarity with the man. Nevertheless, the commentary on Hamilton revealed much about Randolph himself. He, like Hamilton, was a man of honor, willing to stake his name on the dueling field. He was a man of another, earlier time, a man of traditional culture and society. Unlike the duplicitous Jefferson, who hated Randolph’s traditional Virginia, Hamilton was straightforward and shunned the political intrigue that plagued the Yankee Federalists. Hamilton’s personal conduct revealed a social vision based on tradition, honor, and civilized conduct, social values that were quickly perishing in the age of egalitarianism, democracy, and the triumph of boorishness. Like Hamilton, Randolph would live on after death in the influence he had on American politics. Hamilton’s stamp on the nation was grand and institutional, Randolph’s negative and ideological. Conclusion Both Taylor and Randolph struggled to balance tradition and liberty. Taylor, supporting a liberal society, tended to view traditional social norms as restrictive. His political and social thought celebrated the new American way of life—individualistic, materialistic, and self-interested. Randolph’s thought was more complex. He realized that traditional European societies had been ordered by the identification of political rulers and social elites. The state had kept social order through coercion. Randolph rejected this model. He believed that men of little education but great common sense could serve well in American government. He did not, however, want these men dominating society. For Randolph society had to be the preserve of cultured gentlemen steeped in the Western tradition. He realized that in a free society, he had to allow for the possibility that tradition would fade away. Randolph hoped that by keeping society free from government interference and from the effects of modern financial centralization, natural superiors would rule and the people would regard them as their leaders according to custom. The process began in the family and ex. Randolph to Dr. John Brockenbrough, December , , reprinted in Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, –, .
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tended throughout society. He doubted that traditional culture and society could survive outside of a face-to-face community. The differences in the social views of Taylor and Randolph weakened the potential impact of a unified Old Republican southern movement. Although Taylor and Randolph consistently voiced a libertarian political approach—at least for whites—their different social visions indicate that the Old Republican “tradition” in southern thought remained merely political. Attempts to create a “southern tradition” out of the past must necessarily gloss over important differences southerners expressed over the best society for the South. Antebellum southerners remembered both Taylor and Randolph as southern icons in the Early Republic primarily for their states’ rights views or Taylor’s love of scientific agriculture. They did not appreciate the significant division in social theory between the two friends. Whereas Randolph expressed a conservative social vision, Taylor did not. The next generations of antebellum southerners struggled with the division in social thought expressed by Randolph and Taylor. Many proslavery theorists appreciated traditional social norms, while southern Whigs celebrated a form of the liberal society. The political differences between the two groups, expressed in the second party system, has led historians to miss the ways in which both groups tried to balance liberty and tradition in similar fashion to the Old Republicans. Taylor and Randolph, like others of their generations, were some of the first southerners in the Early Republic to deal with the fundamental American problem of balancing freedom and order, liberty and tradition. Many antebellum southern thinkers followed in the footsteps of Taylor and Randolph and in the process created different “southern traditions” of political and social thought.
. On the relationship between political and social elites in traditional English society, see Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and Social Structure in Virginia,” in James Morton Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, –. Randolph preferred both a civilized society of gentlemen and plain, commonsense political leaders. See his comments on Andrew Jackson and George Washington in: “Speech on Retrenchment and Reform,” February , , reprinted in Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke, , , , . . Kenneth Lynn argues that the image of John Randolph was a powerful one for later southerners who idolized him as a southern national icon. Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, chap. . Anne Norton, in Alternative Americas, chap. , discusses the image of Randolph portrayed in Garland’s biography. She stresses the idea that southerners loved Randolph’s idea of freedom and appearance as a political outsider.
our A N T E B E L L U M P RO S L AV E RY I N T E L L E C T U A L S Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms
8 Despite a few important scholarly debates, historians had reached a consensus about antebellum southern history by the s. Briefly, the story went as follows. By the mid–s, the Era of Good Feelings ended and the second party system began to form. The South, like other sections of the country, participated in the second party system and debated the major issues of banking, internal improvements, the tariff, and westward expansion. Southerners followed the lead of the Democratic Party, which spouted the rhetoric of states’ rights and limited government that had been advanced by the Old Republicans, because they believed that the party’s policies would best protect slavery. Slavery became the major political issue in the South during the s when southerners acutely feared their loss of power in a growing nation. Southerners became political extremists, defending slavery above all else. Southern intellectuals became more conservative and more devoted to the proslavery argument. Tensions over slavery finally erupted during the presidential election in , leading to the secession of South Carolina and other Deep South states. The southern states formed the Confederate States of America and devoted their country to the preservation of slavery forever. Historians have challenged several facets of the consensus. Because this book concerns primarily ideas, a brief discussion of the revision of southern intellectual history is important. Norman Risjord’s The Old Repub. Important works that form the “consensus school” that I identify include: David M. Potter, The South and Sectional Conflict; David M. Potter and Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis, –; Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, – ; Eaton, The Mind of the Old South; Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, –.
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licans made the case that the second party system in the South diverged from Old Republican ideology. Clement Eaton, who posited that there was a great shift in southern thought in the s from liberal to conservative, agreed with this analysis. Both Risjord and Eaton correctly observed the changing emphases in southern thought during the s, but their focus on a decisive shift in southern intellectual history tended to obscure the ways in which antebellum intellectuals dealt with the Jeffersonian inheritance. It is difficult to understand antebellum southern intellectual history without a grasp of the Old Republicans, who framed many issues— states’ rights and sovereignty, westward expansion, defenses of slavery, the role of traditional social institutions—that southern thinkers considered. A few scholars have begun to recognize this point, including F. Thornton Miller and William Shade. The work of Eugene Genovese, Michael O’Brien, and Drew Gilpin Faust, the three most important scholars of southern intellectual history, has revised further the consensus view of antebellum intellectual life. Broadly speaking, their scholarship has revealed that while antebellum southern intellectuals were concerned greatly over slavery, they examined many other topics, including European philosophy, history, religious and social thought, and economics. Ignoring the wide-ranging interests of southern intellectuals only distorts their legacy and their intellectual universe. Genovese in particular sees antebellum intellectuals as concerned with creating a stable social order in a world besieged by the twin revolutions of industrialization and democratization. Antebellum southern intellectuals turned to African slavery because they thought that it would stabilize society so that the South could enjoy modernity and progress without the revolutions that usually accompanied both forces. Genovese, O’Brien, and Faust argued contra Eaton that antebellum southern conservative intellectuals were not mindless reactionaries but individuals who desired a progressive, modern social order that maintained stability. Southerners, especially through the proslavery argument, displayed an interest in conservative social thought, social organicism, and the necessity of controlling . Risjord, The Old Republicans, –. Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization. Eaton, The Mind of the Old South. Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. Miller, Juries and Judges versus the Law. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion. William Cooper, in Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to , discussed the Old Republicans and acknowledged their influence, but did not explore their continuing appeal in the South.
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the lower (laboring) classes of society. Faust has indicated the particular desire felt by southern intellectuals to carve out a place of respect and influence in southern culture. She has also written insightfully about the influence of nationalism on southern intellectuals in the s and s. Intellectual life in the antebellum South, then, was dynamic and engaged significant intellectual controversies in the Western world. This section of the book concerns two antebellum southern intellectuals, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms, and their contributions to the southern conversation about political and social thought. Tucker, born in , was the half brother of John Randolph and son of St. George Tucker. He wrote often on political themes and displayed the continuing relevance of Old Republican thought in the South. Simms, born in , was the foremost man of letters in the antebellum South and rightfully could be called the “father of southern literature.” Tucker and Simms belonged to different generations, but more importantly both matured after the American Revolution and the vicious party battles of the s. Thus they faced different political and social tasks than the Old Republicans and inhabited a different political universe. Both men can be labeled as “conservative” in the sense that they wanted to preserve both the political ideals of the American Revolution and, for the most part, the traditional institutions of American society. Tucker and Simms faced the problems of the West, slavery, and sectionalism, which had become more pressing since the early nineteenth century. They provided vigorous defenses of slavery and argued that the institution benefited southern society by excluding European working-class radicalism. Both eventually turned to southern nationalism to preserve their social and political ideals. Tucker and Simms differed from John Randolph and John Taylor in some ways, but also preserved much of Old Republican political thought. Old Republicans and antebellum southern intellectuals dealt with the same fundamental problem: how southerners could create a society that respected both tradition and liberty without threatening either. . Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made; The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: The Southern Tradition; The Southern Front; A Consuming Fire. The Ideology of Slavery, edited by Drew Gilpin Faust. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, –; James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery; The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Michael O’Brien, Rethinking the South. Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, edited by Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-Hansen. All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse in the Old South, edited and with an introduction by Michael O’Brien.
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R Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, the half brother of John Randolph of Roanoke, was born on September , , in Virginia. He was the third son of the famous jurist St. George Tucker and Frances Bland Randolph-Tucker. The death of his mother in and the family’s removal to Williamsburg, Virginia, in greatly influenced him. St. George Tucker became judge of the General Court in Virginia in and later a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. He was a man of great learning and fully endorsed the Enlightenment project, a fact evident in the education of young Beverley. Beverley Tucker’s education, which began at an early age, was rigorous. In he studied with John Coalter, a Scot from Staunton, Virginia, and his father’s law student. Later that year, St. George Tucker sent Beverley to the Reverend John Bracken’s grammar school at the College of William and Mary. Beverley performed poorly due to his boredom with his studies. In Beverley attended the College of William and Mary, but his father withdrew him the next year because of the radical Francophile atmosphere among the student body. St. George Tucker should not have worried, for Beverley rejected the French Revolution and Enlightenment rationalism as harmful to traditional culture and social order. He became a conservative at a young age and began to form his political and social views at a time in which many scholars view the South as still following the liberal course of the Enlightenment. Beverley again studied privately with John Coalter, this time in law. He passed his law licensing exam in and, defying his father’s wish that he begin a practice in the growing town of Fredericksburg, became a country lawyer in Charlotte County, Virginia, in order to be close to his beloved half brother John Randolph. Tucker quickly became disappointed in the legal profession and his life as a country lawyer. He had trouble finding sufficient work. He wrote his father about his isolation, “I see no one, hear from no one, and witness nothing that can excite an interest in you, or even in myself.” Tucker spent more time with Randolph and came to support Old Republican politics, . Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: Prophet of the Confederacy, –, . . Autobiographical fragment, Tucker-Coleman Collection, Earl Gregg Swem Library, Williamsburg, Virginia. Quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –. Robert J. Brugger, Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South, –.
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to the consternation of his father. He opposed Jefferson and the Embargo Act and supported James Monroe for president in . In , he traveled with Randolph to North Carolina to visit the powerful Old Republican congressman Nathaniel Macon. He not only absorbed the Old Republican political views but also longed to enjoy the prestige of his half brother. He began to mimic Old Republican themes of declension as well. The country, he said, suffered from a lack of virtue, and “men of integrity and firmness” were sorely needed. “The prating youngsters who disgrace the hall of our Assembly, and sometimes that of congress, raise my gall,” the young Tucker wrote to Randolph. Virginia had become overrun with those who rejected the traditions and virtue of their fathers. Culture suffered a severe decline. Although his legal practice did not improve, his personal life became more satisfying when he married Polly Coalter, the sister of his early tutor, in . John Randolph, to St. George Tucker’s displeasure, gave Tucker three hundred acres, fifteen slaves, and animals for his farm so that he could enjoy some measure of independence. Tucker was grateful, but when a rift with Randolph developed in , he returned the property. Polly gave birth to a stillborn child in , but in bore a son, named “Jack” after his uncle John Randolph. In , Tucker received a commission as a lieutenant in an infantry company to serve in the war with Great Britain. He saw no action during the war and soon realized that his situation in Virginia was a dead end. In , after nine unsuccessful years as a country lawyer, he decided to move west to seek financial independence and escape the family problems with both Randolph and his father. Tucker bought some land in Missouri and moved his family there in . Tragedy struck early. In September , his son Jack and his twoyear-old daughter died of fever within a week of each other. Despite their grief and distress, Tucker and his wife decided to remain in Missouri. He established a law office in January and was admitted to the St. Louis . Brugger, Beverley Tucker, –, . Virginia reformed its legal system in in an attempt to break up powerful combinations of country lawyers. Previous to , lawyers had traveled the circuit with the judge and received business on court days on which the judge presided. Usually the judge was a local man, and, therefore, country lawyers formed a network with the judge who referred business to them. By rotating circuit judges and requiring country lawyers to travel on more extensive circuit districts to find work, the legislature made Tucker’s career even more difficult. He became more dejected.
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Bar later that year. His farm prospered and he speculated in land with the money he made. His Virginia roots and extensive education made him a prominent lawyer in Missouri. The territorial governor appointed him judge of the northern circuit of Missouri. During his career as a judge, he began writing political essays, which he published anonymously in the local papers. In he wrote, under the name “Hampden” (an English republican hero), a series of important essays on the issue of Missouri’s statehood and its constitution. He reiterated the Old Republican principles of states’ rights and opposed the Tallmadge Amendment, which restricted slavery in Missouri. He also attacked the American System of Henry Clay, a position to which he would return in later writings. Tucker’s early professional successes in Missouri turned sour in the s due to personal tragedies. He resigned his judgeship in February but was immediately appointed to a judgeship on the third circuit court. As a judge, Tucker dealt with the reactions to the Panic of , which had severely affected the Missouri economy. Tucker’s strict constructionist decisions were unpopular, but he survived politically and increased his calls for an independent judiciary in the process. In he became gravely ill from an abscessed tooth. On the verge of death, he had a religious conversion. He became a thorough evangelical, stressing a personal relationship with God and celebrating Arminian theology. St. George Tucker died in , and Beverley’s beloved wife, Polly, followed in . Tucker became severely depressed. In he married Eliza Naylor, Polly’s niece, but she too died in after only a few months of marriage. Tucker moved to western Missouri, hoping to escape his grief, and married in the seventeen-year-old daughter of his friend General Thomas Adams Smith. Lucy Ann Smith would bear him seven children. Tucker resigned his judgeship in and began to practice law again. Tucker involved himself in politics. He wrote newspaper essays defending states’ rights and professing loyalty to the Old Republican Principles of ’98. Initially involved in Missouri’s Democratic Party, he found that his positions had made him an unwelcome minority. He ran for Congress as an Independent in , but withdrew before the election as he had little chance of victory. Tucker expressed a distrust of political parties. Jackson’s Proclamation and Force Bill during the Nullification controversy convinced Tucker that parties, particularly the Democratic Party, were dangerous to a republic. Tucker opposed nullification in theory but nevertheless
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supported South Carolina’s resistance to the Tariff of Abominations and federal coercion. At the request of the dying John Randolph, Tucker returned to Virginia early in and helped organize protests against Jackson’s actions. He penned a series of resolutions against both nullification and Jackson that Randolph promoted in Charlotte County, Virginia. He also contributed newspaper articles on the crisis. When en route to Missouri in April , he learned that Randolph had died. He returned to Virginia, discovered that he had been elected to fill his father’s old position of professor of law at the College of William and Mary, and took up residence in his boyhood home in Williamsburg. Tucker began teaching in October , and delighted in the opportunity to spread his Old Republican views. In his law classes he focused upon the foundation of the common law and Virginia statutes. Opposing the nationalistic school of constitutional law led by Joseph Story, Tucker expounded his states’ rights constitutionalism as better preserving the heritage of the founders and the English legal tradition. He told his students that his goal as a teacher was to prepare them to be statesmen and leaders instead of legal drones who simply possessed more arcane knowledge than others. He perceived the bar as a fraternity of gentlemen who could lead society if called upon to do so. He also showed his students that slavery supported republican government and thus the political inheritance of the Revolution. Tucker greatly enjoyed his teaching and felt that he had finally fulfilled his purpose in life. In he wrote his wife, “If the esteem of the wise and the good, and the confidence of the public is honor, I never gained so much of it in any one year of my life as the last.” Tucker was becoming an intellectual with influence. His intellectual exertions manifested themselves in a steady stream of literary output. Starting in , he began publishing his lectures in the Southern Literary Messenger, an organ he used well into the s. He also wrote a few novels. In he published George Balcombe, a romance set in Virginia and Missouri, and it became a popular novel. Edgar Allan Poe reviewed the work and wrote, “George Balcombe, we are inclined to regard upon the whole, as the best American novel.” He also published The Par. Ibid., –, . The quotation is from Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to Lucy Smith Tucker, November , , Tucker-Coleman Collection, Earl Gregg Swem Library, Williamsburg, Virginia.
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tisan Leader in , a futuristic, Romantic novel about a southern confederacy formed in response to the tyranny of President Martin Van Buren. Tucker published a third novel, Gertrude, in in serialized form in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. It was a tale of honor and the story of a young woman’s travails in Washington, D.C. He published a collection of his lectures in , funding the whole enterprise himself. In , Brown and Little Publishers of Boston published Tucker’s Principles of Pleading, a book outlining the steps of pleading a legal case. The book sold well and was received favorably in legal journals. Tucker’s final academic essays appeared in the Southern Quarterly Review in –. His friend William Gilmore Simms edited the journal and solicited pieces from him. Tucker’s public writings covered all his major ideas on political, constitutional, and social thought. For Tucker ideas were not supposed merely to be contemplated, but were to serve as spurs for action. Tucker became involved in Whig and southern rights politics in the s and s. In he declared himself a states’ rights Whig, but mentioned his wariness of Calhoun and his faction of the Whig Party. Tucker supported Tennessean Hugh Lawson White for the presidency in . Disappointed with Martin Van Buren’s victory in , he continued to support Whig candidates, eventually backing William Henry Harrison and John Tyler in the election of . When Harrison died one month after his inauguration, Tucker rejoiced in his opportunity to influence the course of the presidency of his friend and fellow Virginian Tyler. He hoped that under Tyler’s leadership a new party could be formed, centered upon constitutional states’ rights principles. He wrote the president advisory letters, most of which Tyler ignored, and publicly attacked Henry Clay’s banking scheme, which Tyler eventually vetoed. Tucker became passionately involved in the debates about the annexation of Texas. He thought that Texas could be a great boon to southern nationalism and slavery. He worked with his friend, Secretary of State Abel Upshur, in drawing up parts of the annexation treaty. During the political fights over annexation, Tucker departed from the states’ rights stance he normally championed and based his arguments on certain interpretations of the general and . Quoted in Maude H. Woodfin, “Nathaniel Beverley Tucker: His Writings and Political Theories with a Sketch of His Life,” . Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –.
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implied powers of the Constitution. He justified his departure from principle on sectionalist grounds. Because the North no longer abided by the rules of the Constitution, the South should not shackle herself to the document either and instead should assertively take what it could politically. He also supported the Mexican War, hoping that the mettle of war would teach southerners that “to a stout heart and strong will in a good cause nothing is impossible.” Texas could be the first push for a southern nation, he thought. During the s Tucker had his greatest public influence, but the decade ended on a sour note. In the revolutions across Europe surprised Tucker and many other Americans. He wrote to his friend from South Carolina, James Henry Hammond, “Has Hell opened all her mouth?” The class conflict Tucker so feared had reared its ugly head. He insisted that the revolutions showed that the South was Great Britain’s only reliable conservative ally and that southern conservatives should strengthen their ties to British conservatives. He also feared radicalism and democracy in his beloved Virginia. Like Randolph in the s, Tucker opposed the movement for constitutional reform in Virginia. He feared that traditional institutions would be swept away by a convention consumed with lust for King Numbers. Also in , Henry St. George Tucker, his older brother, died. Although Beverley had felt competition with his brother over political and intellectual achievements, he deeply mourned his brother’s death. Tucker had been a secessionist since , but by he supported immediate secession as the only attractive and realistic option for the everbeleaguered southern states. When Mississippi politicians announced the holding of a southern convention in Nashville, Tennessee, to reevaluate the South’s place in the Union, Tucker was ecstatic. He believed that it would be his chance to push for southern secession with other southerners who were disgusted at what would become the Compromise of . He told Hammond, “The man I most dread is Calhoun.” He feared that . Brugger, Beverley Tucker, –, . Tucker had economic interests in Texas. In he had loaned fifty of his Missouri slaves to a friend who settled near Galveston. He even briefly considered moving to Texas so that he could become an influential politician. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, October , , quoted in Brugger, Beverley Tucker, . See Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, November , , and December , , quoted in Brugger, Beverley Tucker, –. On the Nashville Con-
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Calhoun and other politicians would deprive radicals like himself of their moment to push for secession. The Virginia legislature elected Tucker as an alternate delegate to the Nashville Convention. Delighted, he traveled to Nashville with plans to lead a radical southern response to northern attacks on southern rights. He recounted proudly to his wife that some at the convention told him that he resembled his half brother John Randolph in politics and in his appearance. Tucker spoke at the convention, telling the delegates that secession was not only possible but also necessary to realize the great possibilities of a southern nation. He warned of a growing military despotism in the North, but assured his listeners that peaceful secession was possible. The North, he claimed, depended too much on the South for revenue and raw material for its factories and would refrain from violent coercion. He warned against party politicians in the South who would place southern interests and unity secondary in order to reestablish the “old party lines,” which had begun to fade. Tucker then expounded on his vision for the new nation. The lower South would have to secede first, he noted, and only then would the upper South follow. The southern states could form a free trade confederation that would attract midwestern states and Pennsylvania. The Confederacy, linked by a common interest in slavery, could then expand into the Caribbean and form a large slave empire based not on centralized or consolidated power but on states’ rights, limited government, and a slave economy. The new confederacy, he added, would embrace all things needed for agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. After a while, Tucker’s voice gave out and he had to cut short his speech. A vention, see Thelma Jennings, The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, –. For a general account (one that excludes Tucker) of the rhetoric of the FireEaters during the s, see H. Hardy Perritt, “The Fire-Eater,” in Waldo W. Braden, ed., Oratory in the Old South, –, –. . In early Tucker wrote Hammond about constitutional changes that could end sectional conflict and head off secession. He supported a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority in Congress to pass tariff bills. He also proposed an excise tax on manufactured domestic goods in order to balance tariffs on imported goods. He even contemplated pushing for full representation for slaves and abandoning the threefifths clause. In Tucker’s opinion, the Union had become a sectional numbers game with the South on the losing end. Sounding like John Taylor, he warned that a northern sectional majority impoverished the South through tariffs. Despite his various plans, when he obtained a chance to address the convention he spoke of secession, not reform. Brugger, Beverley Tucker, .
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few newspapers reprinted the speech and a copy of it was published, but it had little influence on the course of the convention. In the last year of his life, Tucker focused on the theme of decline. The Nashville Convention left him disappointed; he returned to a Virginia that seemed to be rejecting fully its traditional ways. The constitutional convention held in democratized state government more fully, negating the conservative accomplishments of the previous convention of – . Tucker called the delegates to the convention a “rabble of low ignorant demagogues.” The new constitution had established “a tyranny” which, he said, “will prove at once insolent and base, which will delight to dominion over all that is wise and brave and true, and at the same time surrender the Sovereignty of brave old Virginia to her enemies, persecutors & revilers.” He asked William Gilmore Simms, “And what are our democracies but mobs?” He continued to advocate secession as well as more radical measures. For example, besides wanting to hang all abolitionists, he advocated the reenslavement of all free blacks. In he wrote to Hammond, “I do not know how to bear the thought of surrendering the hope of being remembered in future times as one of the founders of that glorious Southern Confederacy which I begin to see in prophetic vision.” But Tucker’s wish was not to be. He died on August , , at his late brother Henry’s home in Richmond, Virginia, never having seen his southern confederacy become a reality.
R On April , , in Charleston, South Carolina, Harriet Singleton Simms gave birth to a son, William Gilmore Simms, Jr., who was to be. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to Lucy Smith Tucker, October , , and Tucker to James Henry Hammond, March , , quoted in Brugger, Beverley Tucker, . Tucker must have been quite angry at the response of Virginians to his speech at the Nashville Convention. The Richmond Whig insisted that Tucker’s ideas were not those of all or even many Virginians. The paper also lamented the fact that Tucker taught at William and Mary. The minds of Virginia youths at the college were being “polluted by political poison” and “their hearts alienated from the love of that Union which from our cradles we are taught to cherish with almost religious devotion” (July , ). The charge that Tucker was poisoning the minds of his students undoubtedly angered Tucker and made him even more hostile to the moderate stance taken by most Virginia Whigs. See Henry T. Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, –, –. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to William Gilmore Simms, March , , reprinted in William P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms, . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, February , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, .
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come the leading man of letters in the Old South. The baby’s father, William Gilmore Simms, Sr., was an immigrant to Charleston from Ireland. Little Simms’s mother did not recover well from the childbirth and died in when Simms was only twenty-one months old. Simms, Sr., finding it difficult to deal with his wife’s death, failed at business and then moved west. He became an Indian fighter, serving under Andrew Jackson, and developed a successful plantation in Mississippi. He left his son in Charleston to be raised by his grandmother. When Simms was ten years old, his father tried to obtain custody of the boy and move him to Mississippi. The judge in the case demanded that young Simms choose between his father and grandmother. Simms chose to remain with his grandmother in Charleston, a decision that altered the course of his life drastically. Simms received formal schooling until the age of twelve. His grandmother sent him to the common schools. “They taught me little or nothing,” Simms bitterly remembered. “The teachers,” he continued, “were generally worthless in morals and as ignorant as worthless.” Despite his poor schooling, Simms read voraciously, particularly the Greek and Roman classics and the early English Romantics. He also took several trips to the Old Southwest to visit his father. His first trip in – and his second trip in taught him much about the importance of society and the difficulties in American culture caused by the West. Also during his trip, he gathered much material for his future novels. In Simms began to study law in Charleston and was admitted to the bar on his twenty-first birthday in . Simms experienced excitement in his life from to . In he married Anna Malcolm Giles, and the couple’s only child, Anna Augusta Simms, was born in . Simms began to write poetry as well and met with artists and writers in Charleston. He published several volumes of poetry. Simms was not cut out for the discipline and drudgery of a legal practice; he gave it up to edit two failed periodicals and, from January , , to June , , the Charleston City Gazette, a daily newspaper. Simms entered politics as the editor of the City Gazette, in which he opposed the Nullification movement within the state. Though he opposed the tariff and defended states’ rights, Simms, like many other southern conservatives, thought nullification to be ridiculous. Simms suffered persecution for his views and stepped down as editor in . Also in that year his young wife died, leaving him a widower at the age of twenty-six. . Quoted in John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life, .
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Simms launched himself into national prominence in with the publication of his first novel, Martin Faber. He followed in with Guy Rivers, the first of his border romances, and in with The Yemassee, an Indian tale set in colonial South Carolina. The novels were huge successes and led to a string of books in the s and s that established Simms as the premier man of letters in the South. His novels were historical romances, very popular in the nineteenth century, and combined aspects of realism with a distinctly southern social vision and portrayal of American history. In addition to authoring books, Simms edited several different journals and wrote articles for major national and regional journals such as the American Quarterly Review and the Southern Literary Messenger. He gave speeches throughout the South, in which he encouraged the development of southern society along traditional lines. Simms maintained an extensive correspondence with literary figures, businessmen, and politicians in both the North and the South. His literary output was enormous, for Simms was a disciplined writer, although in many cases he selected quantity over quality. In the mid s Simms remarried, and in the mid s he became actively involved in state politics again. He married the eighteen-year-old Chevillette Eliza Roach in and moved into her family home, the Woodlands Plantation, fifty miles from Charleston on the Edisto River. Chevillette bore Simms fourteen children, many of whom died young. Nevertheless, Simms loved his wife and enjoyed his life as a planter-aristocrat. In the early s Simms began to consider running for state office. He ran successfully for the state legislature in but served only one term as he suffered a surprising defeat in his reelection bid. Simms spoke often in the legislature and offered political advice to his friend, Governor James Henry Hammond. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a diplomatic position so that he could have a steady income to support his career as a writer. By the s, Simms had articulated well his social philosophy. He rejected the iconoclasm of the French Revolution and desired a traditional social order that had progressed to a point in which individuals had to practice responsibility or stewardship in regard to society. He did not advocate mindless reaction or a stagnated traditionalism, but rather he promoted a conservative society that progressed toward greater freedom for individuals and greater civility. In terms of his political positions, Simms wrote in , “I am a genuine Southron, well hated by New England,
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hostile to the Tariff, Abolition &c, not to speak of a hundred other Yankee abominations.” Simms’s sectionalist political positions grew more extreme after . In Simms, like many other southern conservatives, supported the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor for the presidency. He hoped that Taylor’s candidacy would force Carolinians to view politics on a sectional basis rather than in terms of party loyalty. He backed the annexation of Texas in order to ensure the safety of the slave South. He wrote to Calhoun about Texas, charging that the “Anglo-Norman race would never forgive the public man who should fling away territory.” Simms ran as a Democrat for a seat in the U.S. Congress in but lost. His disappointment in his own defeat and his growing disillusionment with Taylor’s presidency made Simms consider secession seriously. He supported the Nashville Convention in but stood firm against the single-state secessionists in South Carolina. He believed that South Carolina should create a southern confederacy before withdrawing from the Union. The rest of the s would be both exhilarating and difficult for the novelist-turned-secessionist. Simms continued his literary output in the s. In he became the editor of the Southern Quarterly Review, the most prestigious of the journals he edited, and remained in that position until . Simms made the journal a mouthpiece for sectionalist rhetoric and southern history. He wrote additional Revolutionary War romances as well, his most famous being Woodcraft, published in . His fiction during the s dealt heavily with the themes of the South’s conservative slave society and the necessity of the South to progress and reform itself. His most trying experience was his failed lecture tour in the North in . He had originally planned to tour the North to speak about the social habits and culture of the South in order “to establish better relations” between the sections. But national politics diverted his plans. In the early summer, the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner gave an incendiary speech in which he attacked the . Simms to Armistead Burt, January , , Letters, vol. , . . Jon L. Wakelyn, The Politics of a Literary Man: William Gilmore Simms, –. . Donald Davidson called Woodcraft Simms’s highest achievement. “Introduction,” Letters, vol. , xiv. Simms to James Thomas Fields, April , , Letters, vol. , . On Simms’s lecture tour see Miriam J. Shillingsburg, “Simms’s Failed Lecture Tour of : The Mind of the North,” in Long Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, –.
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reputation of South Carolina during the American Revolution and the family of Preston Brooks, a fiery South Carolina politician. Brooks’s vicious caning of Sumner caused an uproar nationwide. Simms decided to change his topic to South Carolina’s role in the Revolution, a major theme of his recent novels. He hoped to defend the state’s honor against the charges of Sumner. The tour failed horribly, and hostile crowds refused to listen to Simms. The tour ruined Simms’s reputation in the North (where most of his books were sold) for the rest of his life. When secession came in , Simms expressed elation. South Carolina had achieved her destiny. Personal tragedy marked the last decade of Simms’s life. His beloved plantation Woodlands burned in and after being rebuilt was torched in by stragglers from Sherman’s invading army. Simms’s extensive library, containing thousands of primary sources on the Revolution that he had spent his lifetime and fortune acquiring, and his art collection were destroyed in the fire. In his wife died, leaving him a widower once more. In James Henry Hammond died, depriving Simms of his close friend and confidant of twenty-five years. Reduced to poverty, Simms took up writing to earn what little money he could. He wrote continuously for the final five years of his life, authoring short stories, southwestern humor, articles, and books. His health gradually deteriorated as he died a slow death from cancer. On June , , Simms died in Charleston. His life had been devoted to the city of his birth, the southern region, and his literary muse. As South Carolina mourned the death of its most famous writer, many realized the central role Simms had played in dispersing conservative thought through his writings and in building a southern nationalist political movement.
R Examining the lives and thought of Tucker and Simms reveals that antebellum southern intellectuals remained concerned over the proper balance between liberty and tradition. Both Tucker and Simms worked hard as public intellectuals to shape popular views of southern history and culture. The next chapter examines the political principles of Tucker and Simms and probes the ways in which the two men dealt with the Old Republican political tradition. Chapter focuses on their social principles, especially their concerns over westward migration and slavery. The themes of slavery and southern nationalism played crucial roles in the thought of
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Tucker and Simms. They believed that a free southern society had to rest, at least temporarily, on the social institution of slavery. Their concern with history and their attempts to preserve and promulgate a specific southern tradition led them to embrace a nationalistic reading of southern culture. When compared to Old Republican thought, their ideas show that the “southern intellectual tradition” was neither static nor monolithic.
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8 Louis Hartz wrote in his The Liberal Tradition in America, “When we penetrate beneath the feudal and reactionary surface of Southern thought, we do not find feudalism: we find slavery.” Hartz believed that the antebellum southerners, in their reaction against liberal thought, confused themselves into thinking that they were conservatives. The great southern reaction exchanged a “fraudulent liberalism for an even more fraudulent feudalism.” In identifying the shift in southern thought, Hartz misinterpreted it. The liberal separation of state from society allowed a southerner to praise limited, constitutional government in matters of the state while appealing to traditional principles in the social realm. Thus the antebellum southerner was not necessarily confused, but was exploiting the possibilities of the American sociopolitical landscape. Southerners after the s may have been more insistent on the benefits of slavery than Jefferson had been, but that does not imply that they rejected the Jeffersonian political tradition. A glance at the political ideas of Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms shows the continuing effects of the Principles of ’98 on their ideological world. Neither Simms nor Tucker was a political or economic reactionary in any European sense. If anything, Tucker and Simms participated in the nascent nationalism of the nineteenth century rather than in a political reaction. Both men supported a strong commercial economy to aid the development of the South. Their understandings of nationalism and defenses of slavery will be considered in the next chapter on their social views. In politics and economics, Tucker and Simms tried to work out the implications of Old Republican thought in the context of antebellum America. While not carbon copies of Randolph and . Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, –.
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Taylor, Tucker and Simms addressed many similar themes and held comparable positions on many issues. Sovereignty, States’ Rights, and Secession Tucker and Simms participated in the broader national discourse about the nature of sovereignty in America, questions of states’ rights and federalism, and the possibility of secession. Their discussion of these subjects followed the analysis provided by John Randolph and John Taylor. As might be expected, Tucker, as a law professor, wrote more than Simms, a poet and novelist, on these questions of political and constitutional thought. Simms concerned himself with the history of sectionalism in the Union, rather than constitutional doctrines. Yet both men shared the common assumptions of the states’ rights tradition in the South. Tucker and Simms agreed that the purpose of government was the establishment of peace and the enforcement of justice. Tucker noted that “the attention of those who frame and of those who administer” governments “should be primarily directed to two great objects.” First, government should “preserve peace by such regulations as may prevent or redress or punish the wrongs of our own people to other nations, and to place ourselves in a condition to exact the like respect for our rights.” The second goal was “to order matters at home with a due regard to the equal rights of all, securing to each citizen the tranquil enjoyment of life, liberty, and prosperity, providing remedies for all injuries, prescribing punishments for all crimes, and enforcing all these regulations by a well arranged system of jurisprudence.” Thus for Tucker the role of government was limited to handling foreign relations and establishing and enforcing a rule of law to carry out the specific demands of justice. “A government which accomplishes these ends,” he maintained, “and affords a reasonable security for their accomplishment in future, is a good government.” Simms concurred in his frequent statements that the Union had been formed to protect the states from foreign aggression and to secure life, liberty, and property rights of citizens. The Union thus conceived was for Simms a just government. The central political question Tucker and Simms faced was the location of sovereignty, which Tucker described as “where all power rightfully is,” . Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” –. Simms, “The Southern Convention,” .
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in the United States. Speaking of the state of Virginia, Tucker quoted from the Virginia Bill of Rights to identify the people of the state as sovereign: “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the people,” and “magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.” Tucker noted that the people of Virginia expressed their sovereignty in writing a constitution and declaring independence from Great Britain, thereby exercising the right of self-government. As a result, the people established Virginia “in the character of a free, sovereign and independent state.” Government, he insisted, was but a creature “and the people the creator.” Thus sovereignty could rightly be predicated only on the people, “the creator and master” of government. Like John Taylor he rejected as monarchical the idea that governments were sovereign. Once created, the state of Virginia had “the indefinite right to govern her people, to control and direct their conduct in all things, to hold them responsible to her for all their acts, and irresponsible to all the world besides.” When Virginia and twelve other states ratified the federal Constitution, they created a “central government” but neither surrendered nor divided sovereignty. A state merely delegated “an authority to exercise some of the functions of sovereignty.” When Virginia joined the Union, she, Tucker noted, ordered the people of Virginia to obey the officers of the federal government “as her trustees and agents, as the ministers of her will.” The relationship of the federal and state governments to the people was not one of masters to servants but of “servants to a master.” Simms agreed, asserting that sovereignty was “reserved to the separate states” and that the “General Government” had “no authority” over the reserved sovereignty of the states. Tucker spent much energy attempting to refute the idea that the people of the United States as a whole were sovereign. He argued that the “people of the United States” was an “imaginary body politic.” When some of the framers floated the idea of creating such a body politic during the Constitutional Convention in , he noted, the notion had been rejected. Instead, the United States was “a league” among “several bodies politics . . . each retaining its several and distinct political individuality, without constituting a new body politic compounded of the whole.” In order for nationalists such as Daniel Webster and Justice Joseph Story to be correct, . Tucker, “Political Science,” –. Simms, “The Southern Convention,” .
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the Constitution would have had to abolish all the states and create one state, the United State, ruled solely by a general government. Such a situation had not occurred. Each state continued after to govern itself, except for the powers it had delegated to the federal government. The nationalist theory of sovereignty threatened to produce a tyrannical majoritarian democracy that would destroy the traditional societies in the states, leaving southern slavery vulnerable. In Tucker remarked: “Let every Southern man rest assured, that, if once we are brought to admit that the whole population of the States constitute one people, twelve months will not pass over before a majority of that people will give us a constitution that will place all our rights at the tender mercies of our enemies, and expose all our property to their rapacity.” Tucker advanced several arguments to illuminate the historical record on the issue of sovereignty. He published a lecture in entitled “Liberal and Strict Construction of the Federal Constitution,” a discussion of his friend Abel Upshur’s A Brief Enquiry into the True Nature and Character of our Federal Government: Being a Review of Judge Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Upshur’s book was the first lengthy critique of Story’s nationalist constitutionalism to appear in the South. Tucker’s biographer Robert Brugger notes that Tucker had collaborated with Upshur on the book, providing Upshur with the central arguments. Tucker hoped that Upshur’s political reputation (Upshur was a state superior court judge in Virginia and became in secretary of the navy and later secretary of state under President Tyler) would cause many to take the book seriously. In his lecture, Tucker defended state sovereignty by pitting Story’s views against history. He quoted copiously from Upshur’s book to make his point. He first noted that Story and other nationalists misunderstood the concept of a “people” or a “nation,” thus leading them astray. Referencing Upshur, he charged that the nationalists held that “a common allegiance to a common sovereign, and a common subordination to his jurisdiction” sufficiently defined a people. Such a definition was incomplete, he added, for if the nationalists followed their own logic, they would have to assume that “the people of Jamaica, the British East Indian possessions and the . Tucker, “Political Science,” . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “South Carolina: Her Present Attitude and Future Action,” .
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Canadas are . . . ‘one people’ at this day” because of their common subordination to Great Britain. Instead, the term “people” referred to a “political corporation” of members who owed “a common allegiance to a common sovereignty, and do not owe any allegiance which is not common.” In the case of the thirteen North American colonies in , the allegiance of the colonist to the king was not a “common allegiance of the people of all the colonies to a common head” because it was made through the agencies of the separate, and structurally different, colonial governments. The colonial governments “were clothed with the sovereign power of making laws, and of enforcing obedience to them, from their own people.” He continued, quoting Upshur again, “The people of one colony owed no allegiance to the government of any other colony, and were not bound by its laws.” Additionally, the colonies had “no common legislature” and no common judiciary. “The people of one colony,” he pointed out, “were not liable to pay taxes to any other colony, nor to bear arms in its defense; they had no right to vote in its elections; no influence nor control in its municipal government, no interest in its municipal institutions.” The Declaration of Independence further proved this point because each colony signed the Declaration voluntarily and independently. Theoretically, a colony could have refused to sign and simply remained attached to the crown. The other independent colonies could not “have compelled it to unite with them in their revolutionary purposes” because the colonies did not claim that they were “one people.” Tucker added to Upshur’s thesis a historical argument against the nationalists from The Federalist. He identified the authors as “framers of the constitution” and “the most extreme centralists of their day.” By using their words against Story’s position, he hoped his proof for state sovereignty would be “conclusive.” He thought that a general reading of The Federalist would show that the authors never suggested the authority of the states would be abolished under the new Constitution. Tucker asked, “Are the people ever . Brugger, Beverley Tucker, . Upshur was also a friend and ally of John Randolph’s. He had supported Randolph’s conservative position against democracy at the Virginia constitutional convention of –. For more on Upshur, see Freehling, The Road to Disunion, –. Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, –. Story had written his most important judicial opinion as a Supreme Court justice in the case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (), which trumped the state courts of Virginia. The decision had enraged states’ rights Virginians and contributed to the revival of states’ rights opinion in Virginia.
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told [in The Federalist], that the whole population of the continent would tumble together into one confused and unsocial mass, in which all, who wish to establish again the dominion of law and order, would have to seek out associates . . . and form new bodies politic, of which the local habitation, the boundaries and the name were yet to be ascertained?” The answer was negative, of course, for Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, the authors of The Federalist, promised that the states would remain as they were. Tucker also infers from the discussion in The Federalist of possible sectional alliances among the states that the authors presumed the existence of state sovereignty. The states could not enter into sectional leagues if they “owed their political existence (as they then existed) to the confederation, or to the constitution, or to any imaginable exercise of the common will of the universal and comprehensive body politic.” The states, contended Tucker, were “either the creatures of the constitution, or its creators.” History clearly showed that the states created the Constitution and its form of general government. Therefore, Tucker concluded that state sovereignty was a historical fact and Story’s position a myth. Tucker and Simms’s view of sovereignty allowed them to view American federalism in Burkean terms. Smaller societies formed state governments, and through their state governments, the people formed the federal government. The American federal system recognized the primacy of society by staggering power in such a way that governments had little ability to corrupt the people. Ideally, the citizen would not experience government power often, and if he did, it would most likely be state, not federal, government. American federalism retained power in local governments, leaving it close to the seat of sovereignty, the people. States’ rights, the proper interpretation of American federalism, prevented the Congress of the United States from legislating “in all things for the whole of this vast continent” and thereby from attacking liberty. Like the Old Republicans, they viewed the Union as a confederation. The Constitution attempted to “dissociate . . . all authority to legislate over the private interests of men” from officials of the federal government. Unfortunately, Tucker believed, the North violated constitutional protections, and the southern states had . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . It is important to note here that Tucker, like other dominant antebellum southern conservatives, perceived his beliefs to come out of the Jeffersonian, not Federalist or nationalist, position.
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reverted back to the situation of the British colonies before the Revolution. Simms used the Revolutionary analogy as well. In he wrote, “So far, the history of our relations with the Northern States is a precise counterpart of the case of the whole of the colonies of Great Britain, prior to , with the mother country.” Tucker and Simms both hoped that southerners would respond to the North as their Revolutionary forefathers had to Great Britain—by secession. Then, the new southern nation could restore constitutional government to North America. Like Randolph, Taylor, and other southern states’ rights theorists, Tucker and Simms firmly believed that the Union was a political means to preserve liberty, not an end in itself. Secession, therefore, was a distinct possibility if the Union failed to secure the means for which it was established. Tucker noted that although the right of secession did not appear formally in the Constitution, it was implied through the question of sovereignty. Because neither the government nor a unified mass of the “American people” was sovereign, neither could be used to prevent the sovereign people of the states from rewriting the Constitution or abolishing the United States. Tucker quoted from the Virginia Bill of Rights to prove his point. “The fundamental principle of our revolution,” he noted, “vindicated by the event, recognized in the treaty of peace, and consecrated by the public act of each State, is, that ‘whenever any government shall be found inadequate, or contrary to the greatest degree of happiness and safety, a majority of the community hath the inalienable, indubitable and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it in such a manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.’” Governments were not made to be perpetual and thus become ends in themselves. He wrote to Simms in : “What folly . . . for any generation of men to think itself called to establish political institutions in perpetuity. Our Constitution, just sixty years old, is an example. What has become of it? Except as an engine of power it has no existence.” Men, he concluded, had no duty to give allegiance to government because it did not possess sovereignty. Instead, allegiance was due to the people or nation that comprised the body politic. He maintained, . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” –. Both Simms and Tucker called the United States a “confederacy.” Simms does this frequently in his History of South Carolina, , , –. Tucker does so throughout his writings, especially his “Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System.” In that lecture he praises the anti-Federalists for being the true federalists, not centralists like the Federalist Party. Simms, “The Southern Convention,” .
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“That sentiment; that subordination of the heart; that devotion of spirit, which accounts the surrender of life itself a cheap sacrifice, is due alone to that collective whole, of which we ourselves are part.” Secession—the extreme expression of popular sovereignty—could not be construed, therefore, as disloyalty. Tucker and Simms believed that secession was a response to injustice, not an aggressive move, and was sometimes necessary to protect threatened rights. Tucker believed that secession could be undertaken “justly or unjustly, rightfully or wrongfully,” but the right of a state “to be recognized and dealt with” as an independent entity “could not be denied by the United States, or by any nation of the civilized world.” He had been an advocate of secession for most of his adult career, although he usually restricted his opinions to private correspondence until the publication of The Partisan Leader in . He wrote to Simms in that he had first perceived the Union as a curse in , during the Missouri debates. “I vowed then,” he ranted, “and I have repeated the vow, de die in diem, that I will never give rest to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids until it is shattered into fragments.” He continued, “I strove for it in ’; I strove for it in ’, and I will strive for it while I live, and leave the accomplishment to my boys.” Tucker counseled the leaders of South Carolina to use a convention of the people—the same method South Carolina used to ratify the Constitution—to take South Carolina out of the Union. As Simms corresponded with Tucker about secession in –, he believed that the southern states had to secede together in order to survive. He hoped, however, that southern politicians would build secessionist sentiment in their constituents. He advised William Porcher Miles, a member of Congress, in , “Let all your game lie in the constant recognition & assertion of a Southern Nationality!” By Simms advocated that South Carolina secede alone, but clearly believed that Lincoln’s election would result in the formation of a southern nation. . Tucker, “South Carolina: Her Present Attitude and Future Action,” . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to William Gilmore Simms, March , , reprinted in Trent, William Gilmore Simms, . Tucker, “Political Science,” . For a summary of different views of secession in the early s see Arthur C. Cole, “The South and the Right of Secession in the Early Fifties,” –. . Tucker, “South Carolina: Her Present Attitude and Future Action,” –. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to William Gilmore Simms, February , , reprinted in Trent, William Gilmore Simms, . Simms to William Porcher Miles, December , , Letters, vol. , –.
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Tucker and Simms, like Randolph and Taylor, participated fully in antebellum political debates. Their views that the people of the states retained sovereignty and that government was an artifice constructed to protect the people led them, as it had Randolph and Taylor, to place primacy on society, not politics. They kept the theme of protecting society at the center of their discussions of politics and economics in the antebellum period. Republican Principles That a slaveholding society expressed and endorsed numerous libertarian political ideas is an irony of southern history noticed by many observers during the past years. The “English Libertarian Heritage,” as David Jacobson called it in reference to Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, blended Lockean ideas with a republican vocabulary to present a radical challenge to the claims of the state. Randolph and Taylor addressed numerous republican concerns about homogeneous communities, standing armies, political parties, executive power, and the importance of individual virtue. The positions taken by the Old Republicans on the issues of the s—standing armies, political parties, and executive power—shaped the political rhetoric of Tucker and Simms. The Court-Country vocabulary appeared in their writings too. Tucker in particular credited the Old Republican influence in his political views. In a letter to his wife, Lucy, in , Tucker, who was tending to Randolph during his last few weeks of life, wrote, “The politics of the country are viewed by us both in the same light, and I can see the pride and pleasure with which [he] regards my steadfast and solitary adherence to principles, and the spirit and ability with which I have maintained them.” Simms admired Randolph as well, particularly his devotion to republican principles. Tucker and Simms perpetuated the libertarian republican political rhetoric of the s in the antebellum period and applied the principles of decentralized local government taken from their states’ rights theory to current political issues. Tucker and Simms portrayed the world as a battle between the forces of power and liberty and sometimes characterized the struggle in terms of Country ideology. Tucker held the Court to be the locus of corruption and . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to Lucy Smith Tucker, January , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, . Simms commented on Randolph in his letters. For an example, see Simms to James Henry Hammond, April , , Letters, vol. , –.
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dependency spawned by the ambition of the executive power. In his novel The Partisan Leader, he portrayed President Martin Van Buren as the head of the Court party. Van Buren resides in a “palace” with “rich and costly” furnishings. Like an oriental despot, he reclines on a sofa, displaying his pride in his power and riches to his advisers and guests. Tucker described the Court advisers as “fawning” and thoroughly corrupt, placing their own ambitions above loyalties to family, country, and the Constitution. “I am tired of hearing of constitutional scruples,” one court lackey comments. Bernard Trevor, Tucker’s Virginia patriot, refers to one Court adviser as “that tame slave of power, that shameless, mercenary pander [sic], who, having both talent and reputation, sold the one and sacrificed the other for office and infamy.” The Court held power, according to Tucker’s republican reasoning, by centralizing power and corrupting the people. “The money thus thrown into the country seduced the corrupt, while terror subdued the timid,” he insisted. Through consolidation, force, and financial corruption, the court extended its tyranny and reduced the people to slaves, a fertile image in Tucker’s writings. In Simms’s Revolutionary novels, corrupt British officers often represented the Court party. In Woodcraft, British officers attack the virtuous Widow Everleigh after she uncovers their conspiracy of stealing and reselling South Carolina slaves. The Court party claims legal authority as representatives of the king, but Simms identified such rhetoric as hypocritical. Widow Everleigh notes that there “is a higher fidelity to one’s self, one’s honor and individual character” than blindly serving the king. The loyalty of the Court party came from their greed, selfinterest, and lust for power. The Country party, representing liberty, fought the corruption of the Court through the efforts of independent, honorable, and virtuous propertyholding citizens. Unlike the Court, which subordinated all things to political power, the Country party upheld the primacy of society. The good society, one centered upon family, liberty, and property, could insulate people from Court power. Property remained essential to independence. The independent property owner, whether he was a gentleman planter or a backcountry small farmer, preserved freedom, virtue, and society against the consolidating tendencies of the Court. Tucker wrote in that “liberty itself is only valuable as it permits the pursuit and secures the enjoyment . Tucker, The Partisan Leader, , , , , . Simms, Woodcraft, .
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of property.” Property, then, “becomes the measure of the value of liberty.” By definition, the property owner was independent of Court power and could resist slavish dependence on Court patronage. Furthermore, men of the Country, unlike the lackeys of the Court, were honorable. They performed their social duties and regarded highly truth, hierarchy, and the proper treatment of women and dependents. Honorable men preserved freedom. Tucker contrasted the characters of Owen and Douglas Trevor, brothers, to make his point. Owen, a corrupt, dishonorable, ambitious military officer and servant of President Van Buren, thinks little of the “simple joys of his childhood’s home” because he is absorbed with “the pleasures of an idle life and the schemes of ambition.” Douglas, on the other hand, supports and respects the community of blood and feeling that Tucker identified with society. While Owen serves tyranny, Douglas thinks only of the wrongs perpetrated against Virginia society by the federal government and burns “with impatience for the time when he might draw his sword on her [Virginia’s] behalf.” Whereas Owen places self-interest before duty and is thus vicious, Douglas forgoes the obvious material benefits of serving the Court as a faithful military officer by resigning his commission and becoming the partisan leader who battles for traditional Virginia society and independence. By remaining part of Virginia’s communal society, Douglas is able to be virtuous and resist the temptations of ambition and power. Many of the heroes of Simms’s Revolutionary novels were also partisan warriors. Simms depicted the partisan, such as the historical figure Francis Marion, as defending home, honor, and the nation, defined as the extended kin networks of the rural countryside. In Woodcraft, Captain Porgy, a partisan who had risked life and property to fight the British, returned to his destroyed plantation, the “payment” for his sacrifice. Simms wrote that Porgy and his partisan comrades displayed an “honest patriotism” and resembled “an ancient loving household.” They were the Country party and recognized the importance of social bonds. Both Tucker and Simms recognized that virtue often required the subordination of private interest to the greater cause of society. Tucker and Simms agreed with Randolph and the anti-Federalists about the importance of local, homogeneous communities as the foundation of political order. Simms told William Porcher Miles in that the “future . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, . Tucker, The Partisan Leader, , . Simms, Woodcraft, .
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secret of safety & success must depend wholly upon the homogeneity of our society & institutions.” Tucker noted, “Every man is more deeply sensible of the ties which bind him to his own immediate family, than of his more extended relation to the society of which his family is a member.” If, however, society was made up of “jarring opinions,” “uncongenial feelings,” “incongruous habits,” “adverse prejudices,” and “conflicting interests,” then it was possible that one’s love of family would contradict his love of his country. The solution was to have, as the anti-Federalists advocated, small homogeneous communities constituting the building blocks of the larger country. Tucker insisted that “it is in small communities only, that the love of country is found to grow, with the intensity of those passions, which account life as worthless, in comparison with the honor of a wife, the purity of a daughter, or even a wanton’s whim.” In the “homogeneous” community, “the ties of blood and marriage and personal acquaintance pervade it so extensively, as to ensure a strong sympathy on behalf of any whose rights might be assailed.” Men would identify rightly their individual and family needs as those of the whole community. Liberty and virtue, therefore, would be untouched by consolidation or ambition. Tucker repeated on several occasions the anti-Federalist notion that the system of representation under the legislative branch of the federal government threatened homogeneous communities. He asked how a single legislative body, deemed “supreme in all things,” could make laws for “a country extending from Passamaquoddy to Cape Florida, to the Gulf of Mexico, and to the shores of the Pacific.” The United States embraced “every variety of soil, and climate, and production” and included “various states, some exclusively fitted for agriculture, some for manufactures, and some for commerce.” In such a diverse country, a singularly powerful legislature could subvert liberty through consolidation. The potential power of the federal legislature scared Tucker. It had the power to dispense patronage and unite interest groups around limited and possibly sectional agendas. A legislature that lacked the common interests of the local communities was an imperfect republican body. It preempted self-government. The end result, Tucker said, would be the formation of local interest groups . Simms to William Porcher Miles, February , , Letters, vol. , . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Letter of “A Friend to State Rights,” Fayette (Missouri) Western Monitor, October , . . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . See also A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, .
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who advanced federal legislation designed to oppress minorities. In doing so, government would interfere with society and subvert peaceful communities by giving ambition and self-interest, which had been restrained from seeking dominance by a lack of opportunity for influence and gain, a powerful national sphere of influence. Along with John Randolph, Tucker and Simms envisioned active participation by the citizenry in government. In Simms’s Woodcraft, Porgy and the partisans take responsibility for creating order in their community after the Revolution. While agreeing to the importance of the rule of law, Porgy has to work against the sheriff at times to preserve the honor and independence necessary for self-government. For Simms, self-government was an active task. Tucker viewed political duty as “promoting temporal prosperity, . . . upholding political institutions, and . . . transmitting to remote generations the blessings inherited from our fathers.” Whereas Randolph had stressed active participation in the governing of the republic, Tucker, while not denigrating service on juries or in the militia, focused more upon individual introspection as necessary. Before man was capable of governing societies, he had to govern himself. Tucker insisted that republicans had to instill the love of freedom into the people. Tucker remarked that “no people can be free who do not, in the strongest sense of the word, WILL to be so.” Once the people loved and desired freedom, they would fight hard to obtain it and then to preserve it. Freedom also demanded sacrifice. The love of freedom, he maintained, “manifests itself more unequivocally in respect for the rights of others than in jealousy of our own rights.” Citizens could not become lazy and complacent, for “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Most importantly, Tucker noted, republican citizens had to study their political history and constitution in order to preserve it. Ignorant republicans would only bring to the United States the “ignorance and folly, the passion and presumption, which so often disgrace the sovereigns of the old world, and heap wretchedness and ruin on their subjects.” Therefore, Tucker intoned, it is “only by the diligent study of our duties” as citizens “that we can qualify ourselves so to administer its functions, as to save the free institutions inherited from our fathers, from the same reproach which the testimony of history fixes upon all other governments.” . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, , , . Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” . Tucker, “A Lecture on the Study of
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The Old Republican celebration of militias and fear of standing armies appeared in the works of Tucker and Simms. In The Partisan Leader, Tucker contrasted the virtuous Virginia rebels, who fought as a decentralized militia, with the General Government, which used only a standing army. The standing army, he charged, gave its loyalty to him who paid it. Accordingly, unionists in the novel refer to the army as the “President’s Army” or “Van Buren’s troops.” The army thus became an instrument of consolidation and corruption. At one point in the story, President Van Buren sends troops to Virginia to influence the elections and make sure that secessionist leaders lose votes. Van Buren says to his advisers that “we have but to play it boldly and we must win.” The army would destroy states’ rights: “It shall go hard, too, if, in the end, we do not make this superfluous State Legislature, this absurd relic of imperium in imperio, abolish itself. At all events, the course of conduct which they [the army] will necessarily pursue, must sink the body in public estimation, and dispose the people to acquiesce in the union of all power in the hands of the Central Government.” Instead of protecting the citizenry, the standing army would be used against it by the government. In addition to being an agent of corruption, the standing army also cost too much to maintain. The officers of the hypothetical army in The Partisan Leader traveled in luxury and became rich due to their salaries. The government had gradually raised the pay of the army over a thirty-year period, paying the salaries with the revenues from the “iniquitous tariff.” Tucker implied that in order to justify an expensive army, ambitious leaders would use it to solidify and expand their power. Simms praised the character of the partisans during the Revolution and suggested in his works that the militia represented the true spirit of the community. Militias could respond immediately to local problems and, if composed of knowledgeable, virtuous individuals, could triumph. Regular army troops seemed to fail and to resent South Carolina partisans. In Woodcraft Simms lamented the fact that Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” had been excluded from the American military procession into Charleston. Standing armies often separated themselves from the virtue of the community. Like the Old Republicans, Tucker embraced the anti-partyism of the Law; Being an Introduction to a Course of Lectures on That Subject in the College of William and Mary,” . See also A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . . Tucker, The Partisan Leader, , , .
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republican tradition. He contended that parties usually existed to make individuals forget principles and pledge loyalty to men instead. Demagogues used parties to accomplish their seizure of power and spread corruption. First, the demagogue played on the “love of gain,” which was the “master passion” of a corrupt people, and then corrupted them with “the spoils of the treasury.” He “tempts them with the plunder of the rich,” “engages them in the service of his profligate ambition,” “gilds the fetters he prepares for them,” and then teaches the people to wear their fetters as “the badges of party, and the trappings of distinction, until, familiar with their weight, they permit them to be riveted on their limbs.” Party devotion became the devotion to the “spoils which purchase[d] the vote.” Parties bound men to the interests of the demagogue rather than the common good of the community. Parties also used symbolic actions and played on people’s desire for community to pry men away from principles. Tucker asked rhetorically, “For what is it but to dance around a hickory pole, or to celebrate the orgies of a log cabin, or to rally to some symbol, no matter what, of a man like themselves, the idol of the moment, identified with no interest, pledged to no right, consecrated to no principle?” In September , Simms wrote to Tucker about parties and the true principles of democracy. He stated, “I am a democrat, but rather upon our South Carolina platform than that of the nation’s, and my democracy really has nothing at all to do with party.” He called his view of democracy a “religious sentiment” rather than a “principle in politics.” By democracy Simms meant the “principle which lifts man into responsibility & trust.” This idea “renders me conservative and not destructive—intent on that progress which leads to natural transitions and a regular advance, rather than that which is forever in the fashion of children, throwing down that it may reconstruct.” Parties obscured conservative democracy by inflaming popular passions. Politicians played on popular passions, rather than performing their duties, a theme Simms commented on in many places. Simms hated the “utter shamelessness with which” parties “grasp at power in the teeth of principles.” Parties thus engaged in “systematic immoralities.” Simms believed that southern leaders, particularly Calhoun, had become . Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, . See also Ronald Formisano, “Political Character, Antipartyism and the Second Party System,” –.
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so mired in partisan politics that they could not lead the southern people to their destiny as a nation. Personal ambition, thought Simms, had kept Calhoun in the Democratic Party and had slowed the development of southern nationalism. “The national parties, Whig and Democratic, by subsidizing Southern leaders, here and there, divided the people upon false issues; kept the truth from their ears, and have thus maintained the Union twenty years longer than the South should have suffered it to last,” declared Simms. He added that southerners would never “obtain their rights until the Democratic party was annihilated.” Tucker, however, did see a use for political parties as long as they were means to achieve principled goals. He insisted that cooperative effort in political affairs was necessary. He told his students in that “he, who, in political life would act alone, must always act without effect.” A principled man engaged in political coalitions must associate his efforts “with those of men who do not fully possess his confidence.” In order to “secure their cooperation, he must frequently tolerate, and sometimes support measures which his judgment condemns.” Such a situation bothered Tucker, and he warned his students not to place their faith in any political leader, but instead to devote themselves to principles. He often identified John Randolph as a model for participation in parties. Randolph had been a Jeffersonian when the party had been dedicated to republican liberty. When Thomas Jefferson deviated from the course of liberty and took the party with him, Randolph refused to abandon principle and became “stigmatized as a sort of tertium quid.” Randolph was no slave to party. Tucker wrote his friend James Henry Hammond in , “My great aim is to supply materials for the reconstruction of the States Right party.” He noted that his students were his contribution to the states’ rights movement. He continued, speaking of his students: “I have never endeavored to influence their choice between men and factions. I have told them plainly that it was a choice of evils, of which each, according to his own notions, should choose . William Gilmore Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, September , , Letters, vol. , . Simms, “The Southern Convention,” . Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , Letters, vol. , . In a brief review in the Southern Quarterly Review of April , Simms wrote that the South’s “older politicians are so numerously the creatures of self, or of party, which is pretty much the same thing, that nothing can be expected at their hands” (). See also Simms to John Caldwell Calhoun, February , , Letters, vol. , . Simms’s hostility to parties resembled the positions of other southern nationalists. See George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics.
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the least.” Tucker pragmatically assumed that political parties would remain a fixture in American life but hoped that good principles could keep parties from destroying liberty. Tucker also worried about executive power. He understood that the president of the United States had enough power to corrupt society and destroy liberty, as his depiction of President Martin Van Buren in The Partisan Leader revealed. He saw the president’s proper role as a “representative of the whole people.” The president had the serious task of defending the rights of minorities through the use of his veto power. Tucker recognized that Congress could become dominated by corrupt interests and could pass discriminatory legislation against a certain minority. He continued, “Hence it has been always argued that consolidation would be the first step to monarchy.” Consolidated government for Tucker meant that the federal compact guarding the states’ right to self-government would be ignored and the general government would assume that it possessed sovereignty. In such a case, all minorities were subject to the arbitrary will of the ruling government interest. Tucker maintained that as consolidation progressed, “all who wished any security for a portion of their rights would desire to strengthen the only hand from which they could expect protection,” the presidency. The president, therefore, occupied a precarious position. He could defend minorities from discriminatory legislation and thus preserve constitutional liberty, or he could become power hungry, even by the will of the people, and endanger liberty by furthering consolidation. The presidency clearly worried Tucker. He wrote John Randolph about Missouri in , “[W]e have . . . a comfortable proportion of men who do not hold the doctrine of prudential infallibility, and who can see as much of the pride of power in a round hat as in a golden crown.” A healthy fear of executive power was necessary according to Tucker. His fear of executive power explained his membership in the Whig Party. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “A Lecture, Delivered to the Law Class of William and Mary College, June , , Being the Last of a Course of Lectures on the Philosophy of Government and Constitutional Law,” . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to James Henry Hammond, December , , quoted in Faust, A Sacred Circle, . . Letter of “A Friend of States Rights,” Fayette (Missouri) Western Monitor, August , . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Randolph, September , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, .
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After first endorsing Andrew Jackson for his opposition to internal improvements and the Bank of the United States, Tucker came to despise the man after his Proclamation against South Carolina in December . He wrote that “no man in the United States was more deeply imbued with the spirit of centralism than Andrew Jackson.” Tucker implied that Jackson cynically played on the sympathies of the people in order to further consolidate power. He noted that the republican principles of Randolph and John Taylor had been revived during the administration of John Quincy Adams as opposition to his centralizing policies. Jackson “came into power, under the states’ rights or anti-central banner,” and the true republicans championed him as the solution to the consolidationist policies of Adams. It seemed to Tucker, therefore, that the friends of liberty, those opposed to consolidated government, made the mistake of placing too much trust and hope in the presidency. As a result, Jackson could claim popular support for grabbing power. Jackson, Tucker wrote, “found such pleasure in wielding all the just authority of his office, and he could have found so much greater pleasure in wielding ten times more.” His love of power convinced him that consolidation was good and that “all attempts to curb the power of the general government, and to uphold the dignity of the states, were heretical, treasonable, damnable.” Jackson’s reelection in “gave him a right to consider himself as the organ and exponent of numbers as such, and fully authorized to put forth his own sentiments, upon every subject, as the opinion of numbers.” Jackson betrayed the role of the president as a protector of minorities, claiming a popular mandate for his consolidationist actions. Jackson then named his party “Democratic” and made it the “highest church of centralism.” Tucker joined with other “anticentralists” and entered the Whig Party to oppose the abuse of executive power. Both Tucker and Simms sided with Randolph on the primacy of virtue over constitutional mechanics. They hoped to preserve both virtue and a good machinery of government. Their understanding of the primacy of society influenced their stance. If constitutional mechanics determined freedom, then government, not society, was most important. For Tucker, . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, –. The Partisan Leader also reveals Tucker’s dislike of Jackson. He demonstrated in the novel that Jackson’s embrace of consolidated government during his second term prepared the way for Van Buren’s own tyranny.
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this rang of the Court ideology. Virtue, he countered, was “the only safeguard” of freedom. Freedom did contain a political and constitutional aspect, but it alone could not sustain liberty. Freedom lay in performing one’s duty and ultimately “the perfection of man in all that civilization can achieve.” Therefore, freedom and vice could never coexist in the same people. Tucker asserted that if man “be sunk in sloth, enervated by luxury, devoted to pleasure, infatuated by a taste for splendor and display, or given up to the dominion of licentious passions,” then “all the forms of free Government become but the instruments by which he renders an active compliance with the behests of Power.” All forms of government, even republican forms, could “be made instrumental to the purposes of tyranny.” Popular virtue served to guard the constitutional protection of freedom. “In proportion as government is free, so is its structure intricate and delicate, and liable to derangement from the unskillful hand of meddling ignorance,” Tucker wrote. Simms pointed out frequently that constitutional mechanics could be used, as they had been by the North, to threaten liberty. He recognized that statesmen must show restraint, that is, virtue, and an understanding of the principles of free government in order to protect society. The active, virtuous citizen preserved the delicate balance of freedom through the performance of his conservative duty of preserving social and constitutional institutions according to their rightful purposes. Forms could not make men free, but free men could guarantee good forms. Within the context of advocating the primacy of popular virtue in a republic, Tucker and Simms urged American citizens to remain faithful to the legacy of the American Revolution. Throughout his writings, Tucker portrayed the Revolution as a conservative fight for freedom: “We must commune with our own hearts—we must examine the springs of action in our own minds—we must try to institute a candid comparison between ourselves and that devoted generation who poured out their blood like water in the cause of Freedom, and left, in the institutions handed down to us, the noblest monument of their virtue and wisdom.” By comparing present citizens to the past generation of virtuous patriots, Americans could estimate their own social progress. In his lecture “South Carolina in the . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, , . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, –. Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , Letters, vol. , –.
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Revolution,” Simms insisted, “I contend that purer patriots were never found—that hands cleaner of self and of offence—freer from the reproach of base and selfish motive,—never grasped the weapons of war—never more bravely, or faithfully carried life, property & sacred honour, as their pledges into the field, or for more generous & national purposes.” He hoped that southerners of his day would remain faithful to the example of their ancestors, who showed subsequent generations the pathway to freedom. Simms devoted much of his literary work and historical works to this lesson. The example of the Revolution showed Tucker that an active, virtuous citizenry, willing to submit self-interest to the common good, could enlarge freedom and enshrine republican principles in institutions, thus creating a legacy, a tradition. He thought that by imitating the virtue of the Revolutionary era, Americans “can . . . fulfill our duties as members of that great partnership, which not only unites together the present generation, but which connects the living with the dead, and with those who are yet to be born; and in which man is elevated to a sort of fellowship with the Creator himself.” His paraphrase of Burke’s famous quotation from Reflections on the Revolution in France reveals that for Tucker, as for Randolph, popular virtue ultimately meant remaining faithful to a conservative American republican tradition. Because Tucker and Simms believed that virtue was primarily an individual moral decision and duty, they rejected the suggestion that government should promote virtue by means of positive law. They feared that increasing the scope of government power to include individual behavior would preempt the role of society in forming individuals. Once society was no longer necessary to help form individuals, it would fade and die. Tucker believed that a government strong enough to promote its vision of virtue would be powerful enough to extend vice and dependency as well. Moral legislation by government, therefore, would have the unintended consequence of encouraging vice. He claimed that an expanding government would provide an outlet for ambitious and avaricious men to seize power and use government to promote special interests. The best course . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, –. Simms, Letters, vol. , . See any of Simms’s Revolutionary novels, especially The Partisan and Woodcraft. Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” –.
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of action was to keep government strictly limited and small so that society could preserve individual freedom while encouraging the independence and virtuous conduct necessary for a republic. Society’s role in education trumped the need for government to coerce virtue. Simms dedicated his public career as a writer to educating southern society about its history and duties. His desire for a southern nation did not symbolize a desire to use government power to create virtue in southerners, but rather a desire to use it as a means to protect southern society, especially slavery, so that it could continue its task of shaping virtuous individuals. Economic Principles Neither Tucker nor Simms dwelt extensively on economic issues. Their understanding of economic issues corresponded with Old Republican critiques of the Hamiltonian system. Like Taylor and Randolph, Tucker and Simms also supported a commercial, laissez-faire economy as best conducive to liberty and, like Adam Smith, viewed neomercantilism with suspicion. They supported an agricultural commercial society, but increased demands for a progressive southern economy that would make the South more self-sufficient. In their nationalistic goal, they resembled Alexander Hamilton, but the means they proposed differed from the Hamiltonian system. Simms, for example, supported some state funding of internal improvements, but disapproved of federally funded programs. The economic order envisioned by Tucker and Simms revealed their celebration of modern commercial society and freedom, but both men realized that freedom could be abused, thereby making society fragile. Economic policy, therefore, was of great consequence to free governments and societies. Like John Taylor, Tucker advocated Adam Smith’s system of laissez-faire in commercial relations. He believed that government, not the capitalist economic system, was the primary source of oppression in the world. He wrote, “We disparage . . . the advantages of free Government if we deny that when all the avenues to prosperity are open to all the industrious, enterprising, vigilant and enlightened are most apt to win the prize.” Government interference in a free society and economy could introduce artificial orders into society and corrupt it, the same point John Taylor made repeatedly in his writings. Most importantly, Tucker saw economics as a . Tucker, “An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” .
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moral sphere or a theater for moral action. As long as property received protection, Tucker judged not the economic system but human action within that system. He insisted that avarice, not capitalism itself, threatened a free society. Tucker did not oppose merchants or commerce per se. He saw the necessity of and benefits from the expanding global economy. Men needed, however, to act morally in their economic transactions and to reject economic calculation as the primary determinant of social activity. In an address, “The Nature and Function of the Commercial Profession,” Tucker celebrated commerce as a moral activity highly beneficial to mankind. Commerce spread science, the Christian religion, and learning throughout the world. Tucker began the essay explaining the idea that “knowledge is the guide of enterprise—the co-worker with industry—the purveyor of plenty—the minister of comfort—the nurse of prosperity.” The growth of scientific knowledge helped mankind in many ways, easing the drudgery of material existence. Science, said Tucker, paraphrasing Scripture, fulfilled the “gracious precepts of divine benevolence” by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and ministering to the sick. The merchant had the greatest opportunity of using and spreading the new knowledge for the benefit of all. Furthermore, the merchant fulfilled the divine task through commerce: “She [commerce] is herself the great apostle of civilization to the whole human race: and the commission of her apostleship is found in the wide distribution of the bounties of Providence over all the earth.” Through commerce, the merchant improved the “whole human race” by spreading scientific knowledge and Christianity everywhere. Tucker called for merchants to be “men of enlightened minds” so that they might fulfill their divinely ordered task. Instead of portraying merchants as anti-republicans who had interests outside of the community, Tucker emphasized that they were part of the common interest of humanity. He argued that by the spread of trade and systems of credit, commerce had linked different parts of the world in an intimate fashion. Commerce, he predicted, would respect cultural diversity through the law of comparative advantage. Because “distant parts of the earth” produced “spontaneously and without stint, articles peculiar to each,” commerce would spread these goods throughout the world while preserving the unique nature of the producer. For Tucker, the interconnectedness of the commercial world raised the possibility for abuse as well . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, , , .
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as for good. The international nature of modern commerce brought the merchant into the political arena, a fact that had frightened earlier republicans who feared massive corruption from mercantile wealth. Merchants could abuse their links to government and use the power of the state to further their interests. Tucker, however, believed that the peculiar historical situation of the nineteenth century could make merchants a conservative force that would protect Western civilization from rising social radicalism. He mentioned that the prosperity of the modern economy had unleashed avarice, resulting in a “war against property” that threatened “the harmony and happiness of the world.” In two important ways, merchants protected property and stood as bulwarks against radicalism. First, merchants held their property in a relatively liquid form, which could be employed quickly “to enlist force against force” and to “drive back the robber to his den.” The landowner could not liquidate his property fast enough to aid in suppressing radical insurgency. Secondly, merchants had the “pacific” and “honorable” duty to “divert this struggle” over property and “to disarm the cloud of its thunder before it strikes.” Merchants had to “show the world that the interests of all mankind, in every class, of every country, are indissolubly connected with, and dependent upon” commerce. Thus “all who war against it, war against themselves.” Tucker concluded, “This fact . . . is in truth, the great security for the peace of the world, and the harmony and good order of society in all civilized communities.” Interest, then, bound the world together in an anti-radical stance. Tucker’s conservative spin on self-interest led him to believe that the interconnectedness of humanity brought about by commerce led to peace, not strife. . Ibid., . Tucker’s ideas on commerce reflected Enlightenment themes laid out both by Voltaire in his Philosophical Letters and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in Cato’s Letters. In Letter Six of Philosophical Letters, Voltaire argued that Western countries had to move away from their foundations in Christianity. The explicit religious nature of Western countries promoted discord and even violence as different religious factions assaulted one another. Voltaire thought that a common interest in money-making through commerce would bind the world together in peace. All would have an interest in preserving peace so that profitable commercial relations could continue. He hoped that an increase in economic fervor would decrease religious fervor. Cato’s Letters mentioned the same points. It is important to note that Tucker did not repeat the anti-Christian message of Voltaire’s argument in Philosophical Letters. Tucker also echoed the sentiments of a contemporary British conservative Thomas Carlyle who noted, “Commerce is King.” Carlyle’s dictum became the motto of De Bow’s Review, a journal edited by another southern conservative and fire-eater, James De Bow. See Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South, .
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Tucker firmly insisted that economics was a moral sphere of action. The merchant himself realized that “where PRUDENCE and INTEGRITY are wanting, CREDIT cannot exist.” A prosperous economy needed a virtuous people because trust was an integral part of commerce. Because merchants worked on credit, they trusted that debtors would pay their debts. If a people proved to be vicious and untrustworthy, Tucker insisted, merchants went elsewhere, leaving the vicious people impoverished on account of their vice. The commercial economy also needed the rule of law to survive. Tucker wrote that in tyrannical countries, people hoarded wealth to avoid confiscation by the government. The economy suffered from a lack of capital and credit due to the immorality of the rulers. “But,” Tucker continued, “where law and order and Christian morality, and the inviolable fidelity of mercantile faith have given birth to a system of commercial credit, wealth needs no hiding place.” A system of laissez-faire was, therefore, a moral system. Not only was it in the best interests of government to avoid meddling in commercial affairs, but it was also the proper moral choice. Merchants too had a moral duty to restrain avarice and be fair in their transactions. The commercial system aided individual morality by making it in the merchant’s best interest to be virtuous. Prosperity came to virtuous merchants while vice ultimately brought poverty. Tucker saw little role for government in the commercial system other than upholding the rule of law. Government interference in the economy led to corruption. This meant that merchants had to choose virtuous behavior; the economic system alone would not save them. Simms’s views on commerce and agriculture reflected his faith in progress. Far from being an agrarian reactionary, Simms embraced the development of commerce and manufacturing in the South as a sign of social progress. He noted that in America material progress, while not always good, had to precede the moral progress of society as a whole. Americans first had to build “towns and villages” in the “wilderness,” thus advancing materially. Once a material culture had been established, “culture, education, and civilization” could arise. Simms saw proof of this process in the history of South Carolina. Since the state’s founding, religion, the arts, and education had grown in the state to the more stable material order. He asserted, however, that “agricultural communities can never enjoy the same advantages of education which are possessed by such as are commercial . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, , –.
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and manufacturing.” It was difficult for agricultural states to have vigorous intellectual activity because they lacked dense centers of population that could facilitate intellectual communities. The problem could be overcome through social progress beyond a mere agricultural economy. Simms discussed how agriculture aided society in the South. Hardly a staunch advocate of self-sufficient, small-scale agriculture, he celebrated the positive aspects of commercial farming. He wrote that the “influence of cotton” had been powerful upon the “destiny of man” in the Southwest. Cotton “and its resulting manufactures have wonderfully expedited civilization” in the region. As a result, “employment and habits of industry have been furnished to millions, who would otherwise have been sunk in squalidness and sloth.” Cotton and the commerce it brought gave a “comfortable subsistence” to many southerners and thus created social happiness, peace, and prosperity. Cotton had transformed a rough and raucous Southwest into an increasingly civilized society. Simms also perceived the problems that commercial agriculture brought to the South both politically and culturally. Cotton agriculture may have introduced civilization and prosperity in the South, but it created political and social dependence on the North. In the s Simms observed, “A people wholly devoted to grazing and agriculture are necessarily wanting in large marts, which alone give the natural impulse to trade and manufactures.” In addition, staple agriculture scattered farmers “remotely over the surface of the earth” and prevented a vigorous intellectual life from developing. Simms concluded, “As a natural consequence . . . of the exclusive occupation of agriculture in the South, the profits of this culture, and the sparseness of our population, the Southern people left it to the Northern States to supply all their wants.” The Yankees, Simms ranted, supplied books and opinions to deceive southern minds and prevented social progress in the South by keeping the South dependent. “The Yankees furnished,” he charged, “all our manufactures, of whatever kind, and adroitly contrived to make it appear to us that they were really our benefactors, at the very moment when they were sapping our substance, degrading our minds, and growing rich upon our raw material, and by the labor of our slaves.” Simms feared that further dependence upon the North would . Simms, History of South Carolina, –. . William Gilmore Simms, “Editor’s Table,” .
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leave the South “emasculated, and finally subdued.” Only social progress, brought partially by economic progress, could save the South. Simms insisted that manufacturing would not hurt the South’s culture. He believed that “to perfect or . . . secure the powers of any people” they had to “leave no province of enterprise or industry neglected, which is available to their labour, and not incompatible with their soil and climate.” The South, therefore, should develop industry in its economy. “To secure a high rank in society, as well as history,” he noted, “it is necessary that a people should do something more than provide a raw material.” Recalling the Italian Renaissance, Simms noted that the “mechanic arts thrive as well as the fine arts, in regions which prove friendly to the latter.” There was no reason that the South could not have agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, and a civilized intellectual culture just as Renaissance Italy had. A republic should strive toward self-sufficiency (though not isolation), which would aid the authentic goal of politics and society, the good life. Tucker and Simms addressed the American System of Henry Clay, a major political issue of the day. They predictably took the libertarian positions outlined by the Old Republicans on the Bank, tariffs, and internal improvements. Simms stated his political positions bluntly in an letter to his friend James Lawson: “. . . I am a Democrat of the Jackson School, a State rights man, opposed to Tariffs, Banks, Internal Improvements, American Systems, Fancy Rail Roads, Floats, Land Companies, and every Humbug East or West, whether of cant or cunning. I believe in the people, and prefer trusting their impulses, than the craft, the cupidity, & the selfishness of trades & Whiggery.” In his one-term stint in the state legislature, Simms supported state funding of internal improvements . William Gilmore Simms, “Summer Travel in the South,” . . Ibid. Aristotle, Politics, book , chap. . John W. Higham, in an important article on Simms, notes that Simms shifted his opinions from pro-commerce and industry to proagriculture by the s. He sees this as part of Simms’s broader movement from nationalism to sectionalism. Simms’s fiction definitely shifted in the s toward the defense of an agricultural society, but even in Simms called for social progress so that the South could move beyond the limits of its agricultural system. Those who see a great shift in Simms’s career from nationalism to secession sometimes overstate their cases and miss the continuity in Simms’s thought. “The Changing Loyalties of William Gilmore Simms,” –. . Simms to James Lawson, December , , Letters, vol. , –.
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and gave hesitant support to the Bank of South Carolina. Both men recognized the need for sound credit to support the economic order they envisioned. The realities of economic growth in the nineteenth century led both Tucker and Simms to alter the doctrinaire positions established by the Old Republicans while trying to maintain the spirit of libertarian principles. Tucker’s views on banking shifted during his career. Like Randolph and Taylor, he opposed the second Bank of the United States. He argued that though the Bank might have economic advantages, the political ramifications were severe. In he deemed “the establishment of Banks by the Government of the U. States” to be a departure from the Principles of ’98 and the true construction of the Constitution. He feared the power of the Bank to control politics. In he charged that President Jackson had fallen under the influence of the moneyed interest that controlled the Bank and doubted that Jackson could bring it down. The Bank, Tucker charged, was a “subject of contention & humbug, and a sharp weapon in the hands of a demagogue.” But when the Whigs won the presidency in , and Henry Clay proposed the chartering of a new national bank, although Tucker opposed Clay’s proposal, he devised a banking scheme of his own that was more amenable to republican ideas. He wrote to President John Tyler in about his plan. He stated that a bank could supply a sound currency and source of credit for economic growth, both Whig goals, and that Tyler needed to appease the Whigs while protecting the Constitution and the South. Tucker outlined a federal banking association formed by a common agreement of each state. Each state would contribute money to the initial subscription of the bank and place the funds in the U.S. Treasury. A bicameral body, appointed by Congress, would govern the financial affairs. Each chamber would contain ten officials. The free states and the slave states each would elect ten delegates in order to provide sectional balance. The bank would issue notes, take care of the financial matters of the general government, and distribute profits to the states in proportion to their initial contributions to the bank. The charter for the bank would be renewable only by a vote of all the states, diminishing the chances that a centralized cabal could gain control for political purposes. Nothing came of Tucker’s approach, however, and he sulked . (Jefferson City, Missouri) Jeffersonian Republican Extra, March , . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Tyler, April , , quoted in Brugger, Beverley Tucker, .
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back in Virginia. Tucker’s proposal revealed that he was not a hopeless reactionary opposed to economic growth, nor was he a nostalgic agrarian who resented all modern developments. Instead, his bank idea exemplified a dominant theme of his thought: the attempt to integrate the modern world into his conservative republican principles. Simms generally mistrusted banks as well. He stated his opposition to the Bank of the United States in letters to his friends. He also remained suspicious of state banking initiatives, although he recognized the necessity of state banks. In , while in the South Carolina legislature, Simms served on a legislative committee to examine the finances of the Bank of South Carolina. He wrote a friend that the job was “tedious & uninteresting” and would “consume a full month of my time.” He was shocked at the influence the state bank had over South Carolina politics, but did not move to dissolve it. In March he wrote Tucker about the prospect of secession in the state. Simms lamented that the professional politicians controlled the state and had no interest in any radical move. He mentioned, “But we are ruled pretty much by cliques who have got into their hands the money power of the state—the Bank—and nothing but such an outbreak as will shake the state to the centre, can possibly throw off their dominion.” He told Tucker that their mutual friend James Henry Hammond had “distinguished himself as an enemy of the Bank,” but Simms did not think that this had endeared Hammond to anyone in power. Simms clearly remained suspicious of the power banks had over politics but did not articulate remedies to the problem. Tucker strongly defended free trade and denounced the protective tariff as a violation of liberty. The southern states, especially Virginia, were “properly and almost exclusively agricultural.” “The quality of their soil and climate, and the peculiar character of their laboring population, concur to make agriculture the most profitable employment among them,” he continued. It was in the best interest of Virginia that her citizens trade their crops to Great Britain for manufactured goods. Such a relationship exemplified the natural economic law of comparative advantage. The government, “by coming between the manufacturer and the farmer, and interrupting . Simms to Evert Augustus Duyckinck, June , , Letters, vol. , –. Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, May , , Letters, vol. , . Wakelyn, The Politics of a Literary Man, –.
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this interchange by perverse legislation,” only caused harm to the people. Commercial legislation, said Tucker, had caused the American Revolution. After the Revolution, the “monopolizing spirit” of the landed aristocracy in Great Britain demanded trade barriers and tariffs on American agricultural products in order to protect their own agricultural interests. Instead of attempting to restore free trade through negotiation, the U.S. government enacted retaliatory tariffs. As a result, their respective governments impoverished British manufacturers and southern farmers, who had previously participated in a profitable, free, natural commercial relationship. Tucker believed that the protective tariff threatened American politics as well. In his fictional The Partisan Leader, he listed the tariff, not slavery, as the reason for Virginia’s secession from the Union. While in Missouri in the s, he argued that the tariff was unconstitutional and violated the Principles of ’98. Tucker charged that the manufacturing interest in the northern states was behind the high tariff. The Yankee manufacturers “wanted nothing but a monopoly of the southern market to enable them to enrich themselves.” Repeating John Taylor’s critique of the tariff, Tucker charged that a minority had imposed discriminatory laws on the majority interest. In “a country of farmers and planters, they have been taxed that manufacturers may thrive.” The South became impoverished because the British government and the U.S. government seized the profits of their agriculture through tariffs. Tucker put it glibly: “It [the retaliatory tariff ] was impoverishing the South for the benefit of the North, to requite the South for having been already impoverished for the benefit of Great Britain.” The northern interest and the government acted as agents of corruption. The tariff had introduced a dangerous sectional element into American politics and would, he thought, push the South to extreme action in defense of her liberty. . Tucker, The Partisan Leader, . . Ibid., , –. See also Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Randolph, March , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, . See also Letter of “A Friend to State Rights,” Fayette (Missouri) Western Monitor, November , . Tucker argued that the tariff served only to enrich the government, thereby increasing the opportunity for corruption. Drew Gilpin Faust points out that Tucker was not against manufacturing. He wrote to Hammond in that the southern planters had to introduce manufacturing in the South or “the Yankeys will.” March , . Quoted in Faust, A Sacred Circle, . Tucker based his views of manufacturing on nationalist principles. He knew that if the South would secede that it would need a strong economy and some manufacturing in order to survive.
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Simms blasted the tariff too. During the nullification crisis, Simms remained a Unionist, but vigorously condemned the protective tariff. Throughout the antebellum period, he depicted the tariff as a sectional attack against the South. Greedy Yankees used the power they wielded in government to discriminate against the South and rob southern farmers of their money. He charged that Yankees raised tariffs “for the two-fold object of appropriation among themselves, and for the stimulation of their domestic manufactures.” He continued, “In the adoption of tariff laws, their simple rule, if less bold than that of Rob Roy, the outlaw—‘That they should take, who have the power, / And they should keep who can’— is not more barefaced and unscrupulous.” Furthermore, Yankees “deny protection to the very regions from which they make their levies” and use the government for the “degradation and ruin of the South” by attacking slavery. The tariff was not only unjust and unconstitutional but also the vehicle of sectional oppression. Free trade was the only just policy. Tucker and Simms opposed federally funded internal improvements, another aspect of Henry Clay’s American System. Simms, as indicated previously, believed that the injustice of internal improvements lay in the fact that the general government obtained revenues for improvement projects from the protective tariff. Then the northern politicians who controlled the general government used these funds, mostly drawn from the South, for the benefit of their constituencies. John Taylor had made the same complaint. Simms was not, it seems, adverse to state-funded internal improvement projects. While a state legislator, he worked to pass a bill that would charter the Edisto and Ashley Canal Company. Tucker deemed “the construction of Internal Improvements by the General Government, unrestricted by a regard to some specific delegated power, to which the same may be believed to be actually necessary and proper, a departure from” sound constitutional principles. He also repeated the charge that internal improvements were unfair. In some areas of the country, he charged, internal improvements were not needed. Thus to tax citizens in those areas to pay for internal improvements outside of their communities was “a system of oppression and plunder.” The internal improvement program would also initiate extensive corruption in government as politicians sought “logrolling combinations of various interests” in order to enrich themselves. Tucker suspected that the “true motive” behind internal improvements . Simms, “The Southern Convention,” –.
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was “consolidation” and “the aggrandizement of the federal government, in aid of which project numbers are engaged by bribes addressed to individual interests.” As in the case of the protective tariff, the government’s interference in economic affairs would benefit the few at the expense of the many. Tucker and Simms realized that a vicious people would abuse economic freedom, but the possibility for abuse was linked more to fallen human nature than to a free economic system. Quoting Montesquieu approvingly, Tucker noted, “When virtue is banished . . . avarice possessed the whole community.” In such a situation, greedy individuals sought positions of political influence so that they could indulge their special interests. “The love of power is rarely any thing but the love of money,” Tucker said. Simms recognized that vicious people would place the love of money before all else, allowing the potential progress envisioned by the free market to vanish. The love of money, he noted, “chains the virtues—bends the moods— buys the affections—tames Ambition—subjugates Love, and walks, the Universal Conqueror!” The great danger posed by unleashed avarice was the destruction of culture as well as virtue. Simms did not oppose prosperity. He did oppose the confusion that came about when free market principles were ripped from the economic world and applied to the world of culture. He wrote: “Our prayer is, that something may be spared . . . to the spirit which was great and glorious in the history of the past. If we cast down the idols of ancient superstition, let us not destroy, with headlong stupidity, the proud temples, the high columns, and the vaulted grandeur, of its dwellings and its worship.” In other words, the principles of political and economic freedom should be used to destroy tyrannical government, not civilization. Avarice distorted the free economy into a system of exploitation and tyranny. Simms and Tucker, therefore, celebrated modern freedom but insisted that society resist the temptations brought by liberty . Ibid. See also Wakelyn, Politics of a Literary Man, –. Simms to James Henry Hammond, May , , Letters, vol. , –. (Jefferson City, Missouri) Jeffersonian Republican Extra, March , . Letter of “A Friend of State Rights,” Fayette (Missouri) Western Monitor, August , . . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” –. Simms, Self-Development. An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of Oglethorpe University, Georgia; November , , . Simms, “The Philosophy of the Omnibus,” .
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to destroy the arduous and delicate life of virtue. Their major battle lay, therefore, in society. That was where the ultimate battle for culture would be won. Tucker on the Missouri Compromise and Simms on the Compromise of Tucker’s constitutional thought, unlike his social thought, did not develop much after . Therefore, John Randolph and the Old Republican doctrines of his youth formed the core of his mature thought. Until his death in , Tucker spread anti-Federalist, Old Republican Jeffersonian political thought in his writings and teaching. He and other states’ rights theorists in the South, contrary to what some historians have claimed, were far from being marginalized men. By , a wide range of southerners held their constitutional principles and acted successfully upon them. By examining his published letters in the Missouri Gazette in on the Missouri question, one can appreciate the continuity of his principles. In his first letter on the crisis, Tucker laid out his ideas of sovereignty and constitutionalism. He believed firmly in popular sovereignty. He noted that “the people have the undoubted right to make, alter, and abolish their government according to their will and pleasure.” He then argued that a constitution was nothing more nor less than a “fundamental law establishing a form of government.” Because the people of the state created the federal government through the act of writing a Constitution, the government was the servant, not master, of the people. If government violated the Constitution, it was essentially claiming sovereignty over its creators and thus usurping power. For Tucker, the Missouri question primarily involved the fundamental right of self-government and the issue of sovereignty. The federal Congress demanded that Missouri prohibit slavery in its constitution as a precondition for union. Tucker claimed that this not only violated the federal constitution of but also confused the issue of sovereignty. The federal Constitution had only two preconditions for state constitutions: that they be republican in form and that they be consistent with the federal Constitution. Tucker insisted that once a prospective state complied with both minimal conditions, it should enter the Union. He wrote, “And when they [Congress] presume to discuss its [the state constitution’s] details, they transcend their constitutional limits; they intermeddle with an affair that does not concern them, and violate the very law by which they hold their existence.” “To submit to that usurped authority,”
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he continued, “would be to renounce the right of self-government, and to subject ourselves to the caprice of Congress; moulding our institutions according to their notions of political expediency; for if they can prescribe one article of our constitution, they can dictate the whole.” Tucker also stressed to his readers that “the government of the United States is a confederate government, the very essence of which is that it is formed by compact between several separate, independent states.” The states were separate, “otherwise they would form one consolidated government and not a confederacy,” and independent, “otherwise they have no power to form such a compact.” He maintained that as independent and separate, the states in the compact, regardless of their age, were “equal in all respects.” He noted that the territories of the United States, like Missouri, had to be admitted as equals in the Union with their citizens enjoying “all the rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States.” According to Tucker’s logic, “every new state must of necessity be sovereign and independent before it can, on constitutional principles, become a member of the federal family.” The attempt of the federal Congress to attach unconstitutional requirements to Missouri’s entrance into the Union treated her and her citizens unequally. Tucker noted that Congress could always refuse to admit a state to the Union, but rejection did not relegate the state to its prepolitical condition. Rather, by writing a constitution, the people of the state had declared their sovereignty and independence and had demanded to become part of the confederacy as equals. Because the state retained its sovereignty, it could also later withdraw from the Union if necessary. Tucker also discussed the connection between government and freedom in his letters. Government did not make one free. Because the government of the United States was a compact, it required the consent of free . Tucker, Letter signed “Hampden.” Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, April , . . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, Letter signed “Hampden.” Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, April , , and June , . Tucker’s father, St. George Tucker, claimed in his famous appendix to Blackstone’s Commentaries, “View of the Constitution of the United States,” that the Union was a confederacy. St. George Tucker wrote that “the union is in fact, as well as in theory, an association of states, or, a confederacy.” Each member of the Union “is still a perfect state, still sovereign, still independent, and still capable, should the occasion require, to resume the exercise of its functions, as such, in the most unlimited extent.” Quoted in Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority, .
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individuals to form it. He did not view government as diametrically opposed to liberty, but clearly saw it as a threat to freedom. Government had to tread lightly to prevent uprisings and rebellions, he warned. If the general government persisted in denying Missouri’s sovereignty, then it faced the risk of dissolution. Tucker also tied the issue of freedom to slavery: “When you hear of a slave you ask ‘who is his master?’ But when you hear of a freeman you do not ask ‘who set him free?’ unless you know him to have been once a slave. But, fellow citizens, we were never slaves. We have been in a state of pupilage and wardship, but never in a state of bondage.” Congress was attempting to treat free Missourians as slaves by denying them their sovereignty and independence. If Missourians submitted to congressional usurpation, he warned, they were slaves and the federal government their master. The image of slavery was a powerful one, given the fight over black slavery in the state constitution. Tucker, however, mentioned frequently that the Missouri question did not concern black chattel slavery. He wrote, “Bear in mind, fellow citizens, that the question now before you, is not whether slavery shall be permitted or prohibited in . . . Missouri; but whether we will meanly abandon our rights, and suffer any earthly power to dictate the terms of our constitution.” Despite his claim, he invoked fear of emancipation in his arguments. If the Congress was “possessed by the demon of frantic democracy,” it would require a subservient Missouri to “extend it to every vagrant rabble that straggles through the country.” It could then emancipate “our slaves” and “bring them to the hustings, and into the legislature, and into the judgment seat.” A government that served as master to Missouri, Tucker warned, could extinguish freedom by making black slaves masters of white freemen. In the Missouri question, Tucker perceived the fate of southern society and the Constitution to be at stake. The Nashville Convention of along with the Compromise of served to incite Simms’s frustration with national and state politics and to illuminate his growing fervor for an independent southern nation. In his letters and published articles on the issue, he presented a summary of his political principles. The crisis of – began when California applied for statehood as . Tucker, Letter signed “Hampden.” Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser, April , , April , , and May , .
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a free state. Not wanting to lose equality in the Senate, southern politicians protested. Numerous politicians scrambled to engineer a solution to the problem and to remove slavery as a national political issue. The federal Congress devised a five-part plan that they hoped would put the issue of slavery to rest. Throughout the crisis, Simms expressed his major political principles: hostility to political parties, disgust with the North’s “treachery,” and southern nationalism. From the beginning of the crisis, Simms warned Tucker of the faithlessness of political parties. He wrote to Tucker in January , “I have no hope, and no faith in compromises, of any kind; and am not willing to be gulled by them any longer.” He argued that any compromise “must originate in cowardice and a mean spirit of evasion on the part of the South and “in a spirit of fraud . . . on that of the North.” Simms predicted that Lewis Cass and Henry Clay would “aim at some miserable pottering to stave off the difficulty” and call it a Compromise. Their motivations were to “found their new claims to the Presidency.” Simms thundered, “Those scoundrelly professional politicians are at the bottom of all our troubles.” He did not want compromise because it would delay his goal of a southern nation. A few months later, Simms again lectured Tucker: “. . . [T]here is not hope for us in the South, any where, but by taking the affairs out of the hands of the professional politicians. To do this, we must appeal directly to the people.” The crisis of reinforced Simms’s ideological convictions that parties abandoned principles in order to further the interests of politicians and to thwart the destiny of the South. Simms also complained during the crisis that the North persecuted the South horribly. By using the rhetoric of victimology, Simms hoped to rouse the states to action. He wrote an article in the Southern Quarterly Review in in which he claimed that Yankees manufactured a false history of the nation, particularly concerning the role of New England during the Revolution, to malign the South. Then, Yankees pilfered the South through tariffs, threatening the region’s prosperity. When southerners protested this depiction and treatment by Yankees, devious New Englanders labeled them rebels and traitors to the Union. In such a way, charged Simms, they sought to “avert . . . reform.” He told Tucker in July that clearly “there . Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, January , , Letters, vol. , . Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, May , , Letters, vol. , .
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is no living with a people so utterly hostile & reckless as those of the North.” Prolonging the Union would only last temporarily “unless you could change by it their minds & moods & hearts.” Change would never occur under the Union. Abolitionists would “push the South to extremities.” Simms explained, “Abolition, which is not a placable madness—not to be soothed—if let alone will so kick your state & others, that resistance becomes inevitable.” Simms, disappointed by the Compromise of , realized that southern independence would come over attacks on southern honor and slave property. His nationalist goals would then be achieved. Simms, therefore, used the Compromise of to call for the South’s independence. “The Union,” he told Tucker, “even if we remain quiescent, cannot last five years.” He was not far off the mark. He regarded the Nashville Convention as “a Southern Confederacy” and hoped it would result in further cooperation among southern states. He identified “blind confidence in the integrity of the Union” as an obstacle that had to be overcome. Simms hoped that southerners would realize that they had “no worse enemies without [the Union], than those which assail us from within.” The Yankee states “appeal to us continually in behalf of the Union for our detriment.” In threatening slave property by forbidding slavery in the territories, northern states aggressively attacked the South. Simms hoped that southerners would realize that the Union could no longer protect southern liberty and property and thus secede. The North, he predicted, would oppose secession strongly and forcefully, just as the British had done in . A united South could meet the risk, however. This was Simms’s political dream. He waited ten more years for it to occur. Conclusion As their political principles and stances indicated, Tucker and Simms believed that the purpose of politics was to protect society, the primary area of human activity. Therefore, society became the arena in which both men tried to hash out the exact balance of liberty and tradition in the context of American life. Nationalism and slavery greatly influenced their . Simms, “The Southern Convention,” . Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, July , , Letters, vol. , . Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, March , , Letters, vol. , . . Simms to Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, March , , Letters, vol. , . Simms, “The Southern Convention,” .
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conceptions of the good society. The diversity of antebellum social thought becomes evident when considering their social views in conjunction with the visions of Randolph and Taylor. Antebellum southern thought, while possessing continuities with previous thinkers, also displayed diverse opinions about the good society. This diversity increased in importance as the Southern Nation neared its birth.
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8 Loyalty to states’ rights principles constituted only part of the southern tradition. The social thought of southerners conveyed the most significant parts of their cultural vision. Tucker and Simms desired traditional societies with strong social institutions that remained open to gradual change. In their desires for southern society, they articulated the concerns of Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In fact, Tucker adopted Burke’s insight that Anglo American political rights and freedoms were rooted in the past. He referred to Burke often in his writings, particularly to Reflections on the Revolution in France and to speeches supporting the American colonies in the s. Simms celebrated what he called the “social principle,” meaning the customary devotion of Anglo Americans to forming strong communities to protect freedom and tradition. Neither Tucker nor Simms advocated a return to a mythical past, nor did they envision utopia in the future. Their instincts were conservative and modern at the same time. They could not return to the past, but could construct, at least partially, a culture devoted to conservative principles. Both men shared an interest in history, especially the history of the American Revolution, and nationalism as means of fostering American and southern identities. They also focused on slavery as the critical element in southern society that balanced liberty with tradition. Burkean principles, along with a dose of nationalism and proslavery ideology, shaped the conservative social visions of Tucker and Simms. On Human Nature and Society Tucker based his view of society upon his understanding of human nature. Like other southern conservatives, he believed that human nature was flawed and weak. He argued that thinkers must observe and reflect 189
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“on man as he is,” not on “man as he might have been, had it pleased God to have made him differently.” One could easily see the “infirmity of man’s nature” simply by examining reality. Man combated his passions and appetites, which always threatened to run out of control. Tucker attributed the human condition to original sin: “The stain of far-descended ancestral sin is upon it [the human heart], and it is not, and it cannot be subject to that will which should be his.” Man would not be happy until he learned “to subdue his passions and his appetites to his maker’s will.” Tucker argued that avarice and ambition were the two strongest passions and were often linked in the human heart. He also believed that most people acted out of self-interest and thus threatened the social order. Though sometimes self-interest could be a positive force, often it was mere selfishness, which caused the individual to forget his social duty. Tucker insisted that man had to use his reason to control his passions and choose the good. Moral behavior, a central component of society, rested on the strength of the will. Tucker called the human will “the master of DESTINY.” For Tucker, knowledge alone, the realm of the intellect, was insufficient to shape human action and to prevent the free rein of the passions. In order to perform his duty, the individual had to will it, to choose it. By the will Tucker did not mean “slight and frivolous acts of volition,” but rather moral choices. Using the biblical example of King Solomon, he illustrated his point: “He who chose wisdom in preference to beauty, and strength, and wealth, and grandeur, and power, was already wise.” Tucker did not argue that the intellect and will necessarily opposed each other, but that without the will to choose what was true, the intellect was impotent. The primacy of the will affected Tucker’s worldview by leading him to focus on the “heart” as superior to the “head,” causing some scholars to note the influence of Romanticism on him. God, Tucker said, demanded of man the subordination of his heart. God disciplined man through suffering to purge his heart of the selfishness of self-love. Once purged, the individual could decide to subject himself to the divine commands. Thus for Tucker, man needed both self-knowledge to understand his weakened condition and self-control to harness his will to the Truth. Without self-control, a . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries. Vol. , Page . Being the Substance of Remarks on the Subject of Domestic Slavery, Delivered to the Law Class of William and Mary College, December d, ,” . Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” , . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, .
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pure heart, and a strong will, Tucker insisted that there was no real freedom. Freedom, in one sense, was “an affair of the WILL.” It was inextricably linked to the performance of duty and the recognition of Truth. He concluded that “the people to whom the allurements of ease and luxury and splendor are without temptation, and death itself without terror when encountered in the cause of freedom—that people is ALREADY FREE.” Being partially the act of the will, freedom was a moral state. “Man,” Tucker wrote, “is emphatically a social animal.” Man was “social from necessity,” he added. He believed that the laws of human nature imposed society upon man. Tucker noted pragmatically that unlike other animals, man enters life “in the state of absolute helplessness.” His mother too “is hardly less helpless than himself, and both must perish did not the institutions of social life connect them with others to whom their existence is never so precious, as when in this precarious condition.” Because of social institutions, “the father owes the means of identifying his offspring, who thus become the objects of that instinct of parental love which, in the brute creation, the mother alone is seen to display.” Thus, the family is natural to man and is the foundation of society. The early dependence of man on the kindness of others fostered in his heart “a sense of inextinguishable obligation” and put forth “those filaments which cling to the breast that feeds and cherishes him, with a tenacity that no time can relax, and no violence can sunder.” Nature, therefore, linked men to one another and bestowed upon them a love of community. He continued, “Originating thus in the weakness of man, the primary end and object of society is SECURITY.” The social condition protected men from the harsh conditions of the world and from possible dangers from other men. In sum, “society is essential to the preservation of the human species and that man cannot be supposed to ever have existed outside of a social relation.” Tucker did not think that societies could survive without government. Two social problems made government necessary. First, the threat of violence from other societies created a need for political leagues for protection. Second, societies experienced internal tensions that necessitated a common judge and the rule of law. Tucker wrote, “Society . . . without the . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, –. Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . . Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” –.
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agency of Government, divides itself into classes; and these are distinguished by circumstances which may well engender contempt on the one hand—envy and hatred on the other.” Because society consisted of families of sinful people, it was always endangered by the rule of passion. Quoting Montesquieu, Tucker claimed, “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.” Government restrained the appetites of man through law and the enforcement of justice. Tucker believed that in small societies justice potentially was uncertain because the “exclusive sympathy” the members felt toward each other “would incapacitate them from enforcing the laws against delinquents.” In a larger, extended society, the lack of sympathy among individuals due to the loss of face-to-face relationships could aid in the growth of factions and the oppression of minorities within that society. Government, added Tucker, was “decreed of God.” By protecting individuals and minority groups from harm and by ensuring justice, government helped weak men to rule themselves. Tucker insisted that government had to respect society and remember that it was society’s servant, not its master. Like John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, Tucker maintained a conservative wariness of the concept of rights, fearing that a society based on rights would be anarchic. An individual could appeal to his natural rights as a means to free himself from social obligations, thus making society seem artificial and secondary to the individual. Appealing to Blackstone’s Commentaries, Tucker noted that many rights grew out of man’s “relation to other individual members of society.” Parental rights were one such example. Man also possessed absolute rights of “personal liberty” and of “security to life, limb and reputation.” Although absolute rights were not “the creatures of civil society,” they could be “regulated and modified by municipal law.” By subjecting rights to the law, Tucker hoped to avoid anarchy. He also believed that the concept of duty limited the application of rights to social problems. Agreeing with Randolph, he insisted that responsibilities and duties came with absolute and social rights. Because man had a duty to conduct himself according to the truth, rights were never anti-social, but rather they protected men from the abuses of tyranny and vice. Tucker, then, claimed that men had absolute rights, but by stating . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Letter of “A Friend to State Rights,” Fayette (Missouri) Western Monitor, October , . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, .
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that law could modify these rights he made them no longer absolute. He hoped to find a middle ground in which he could salvage important Enlightenment concepts of freedom while restraining their effect with a conservative social order. For Tucker, self-government could contain the anarchic tendencies of natural rights. He stated that self-government was a right given to the people by God as a “corollary from the right and duty to fulfill the purposes of our being, which accompany each one of us into the world.” Self-government was ultimately a form of virtue. Tucker frequently referred to it as a “sacred right” consisting of the people of a community “to decide for themselves, in the last resort, in all that pertains to their welfare.” He wrote, “The philosophy of social freedom is the philosophy of self-government.” He denied that “all men—every where—under all conditions—and in all circumstances” possessed the right to self-government. Unlike Rousseau, who believed that men were born free, Tucker held that man had the “capacity for freedom” through self-government. God had bestowed on men the agency of the “inborn sense of right and wrong, the native love of good and aversion to all that is evil, which is among the strongest instincts of man.” To deny this fact was “to deny the capacity of man for self-government.” Self-government depended on public and private virtue. It depended on man “to decide whether he will live under the regulated discipline of self government, or fall under the subjection to the arbitrary dictates of another’s will.” “The vicious, the licentious,” and “the self indulgent” could not achieve self-government. By predicating the right to self-government on the duty to be virtuous, Tucker was able to . Tucker, “A Lecture on the Study of Law,” –, , . For an excellent discussion of Calhoun’s theory of rights and his broader constitutional vision, see Marshall DeRosa, The Confederate Constitution of : An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism, –. See also Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, –, . Genovese makes the point that most southern conservatives rejected the concept of natural rights or redefined it so that it no longer took on radical or subversive characteristics. . Tucker, “A Lecture on the Study of Law,” . Tucker, “A Lecture, Delivered to the Law Class of William and Mary College, June , ,” . Tucker, “Political Science: A Discourse on the Questions, ‘What Is the Seat of Sovereignty in the United States, and What the Relation of the People of Those States to the Federal and State Governments Respectively,’ Read before the Petersburg Lyceum on the th of May, ,” . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Tucker, A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, .
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hedge the concept of rights within a moral framework while preserving the importance of liberty. Tucker thought that self-government was difficult but necessary for freedom. Like Randolph, Tucker often viewed self-government in libertarian terms. He wrote, “To live under a government of laws faithfully administered is indeed to be free, but there is little comfort in freedom, where the law takes the cognizance of all we do, and requires us to act by a fixed rule, whether we go out or come in, whether we lie down or rise up.” A free society had to allow individuals freedom of action. Tucker realized that self-government could turn into a kind of communal totalitarianism. He maintained, “A man feels little like a freeman, when abruptly accosted in the street by a watchman, and rudely questioned, and taken to the watch-house if his account of himself happens not to be satisfactory to the guardian of the night.” Self-government ultimately lay in recognizing the primacy of society to regulate itself. Government and law would interfere only when rights and duties clashed, and caused social problems. Tucker expressed mixed feelings concerning the principle of equality. He wrote, “Every where in the world there are diversities of natural and acquired endowments of strength, courage, intelligence and prudence, of industry, steadiness and sobriety, and these make differences in acquisitions, and in the estimation of mankind.” Unlike Randolph, who paid lip service to meritocracy while endorsing a hierarchical society, Tucker supported meritocracy and the principle of political equality. A free society, he argued, necessitated political equality. One is only free as long as he does not do “something which may conflict with the equal rights” of another “to do as he pleases.” Equality, therefore, restrained individual freedom. Tucker, however, did not argue for an egalitarian society. The natural inequalities among men, in addition to “Fortune” and “Convention,” quickly separated individuals, causing some to succeed and others to fail in the pursuit of wealth, power, and comfort. Those on the losing end of the social game must be “equally zealous” for the original political equality and the results it produces. Tucker wrote, “Hence it follows that a respect for the principle of equality demands that the inequalities that grow out of . Tucker, “An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” .
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it must be respected and defended.” The free society did not hamper talent in search of a mythical perfect equality, but rewarded it. Tucker believed that the many cases of “men rising to distinction from a low condition” in the United States revealed a meritocracy. “None of the walks of life,” he insisted, “are fully occupied, and for every youth, however humble, who makes any display of intellectual power, there is always a place at the same time.” All citizens could improve themselves in order to better their chances for prosperity. The principle of meritocracy also imposed a duty on society to honor the best citizens. He noted, “The right to fill that place in society to which the merit of the individual entitles him, and the right to discharge those public functions for which he is better qualified than other men, are indeed but imperfect rights.” “But,” he continued, “they are still rights; and the latter is one which no people denies without injustice to the party, and detriment to itself.” Societies that refused to honor merit were “detrimental to the State.” Tucker feared that the tide of democracy sweeping the country would infect society with a false notion of equality. He asked, “May we not be permitted to doubt whether the affairs of any people can be wisely administered, who thus, by a sweeping disqualification, discard from their service, not the ignorant, the abject and the depraved, but the wise, the prudent and the sagacious?” The principles of radical democracy subverted freedom through the rule of numbers. The poorer classes would overwhelm the rich or successful classes to destroy a free meritocratic society. Class envy and greed would lead them to overturn the “empire of Reason,” invert “the order of natural society,” and dethrone the “MIND of the community from its just supremacy” in the name of equality. The new mass society would assign “the tasks of thought to the unthinking and the authority of law to those who should be the subjects of its corrective discipline.” Like Randolph, Tucker feared that democratic social principles would subvert southern society. He lamented in that democracy and a false notion of equality had led Virginians to neglect and forget her men of genius. He turned to South Carolina as the southern state least corrupted by the rule of numbers and praised her for recognizing her . Tucker, A Discourse on the Dangers That Threaten the Free Institutions of the United States, –. . Tucker, “Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” , .
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“prophets,” believing “in their inspiration,” and aiding and sustaining “them in the performance of their missions.” Freedom, he implied, resided in South Carolina because it recognized merit. “South Carolina,” he wrote to William Gilmore Simms, “is the only State in which the gentleman retains his place and influence, and in which the statesman has not been degraded from his post.”
R Simms, like Tucker, defined man as a social creature. Man’s nature constituted him for the purposes of society: “security for his possessions and his life.” He insisted that the purposes of society were “the most rational . . . in which man can ever engage.” To match his reason man had a strong social instinct and “tacitly yielded” himself to the “sway of a government in which” security of life and property were “most thoroughly guaranteed.” Simms regarded the family, which he called the “sacred circle of family and home,” as the primary and dominant social institution. The family taught individuals their duties to God and fellow man. Parents provided “holy, love-compelling influences” that nurtured young people and prepared them for engaging the outside world, the broader society. Simms argued that man must be rooted in the family to perform his duties properly. He called this the “secret of home.” Man conquered both nature and disorder by establishing societies and families rooted to specific places. Simms, like Aristotle in Book One of the Politics, used an organic image of social growth. A simple society of a few families gradually grew and progressed to a more complex social organization with broader institutions. Society disciplined and restrained human nature, he insisted. Simms defined society as “the presence and the restraints of neighbors, gentle, loving, and considerate—the cheerful home—the certain school house—the ‘decent Church that tops the neighboring hill.’ ” Social institutions were . Ibid., . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to William Gilmore Simms, March , , reprinted in William P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms, . . William Gilmore Simms, The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence. An Oration, Delivered before the Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama, at its Twelfth Anniversary, December , , , . On the importance of The Social Principle to Simms’s thought on history and society see Moltke–Hansen, “Between Plantation and Frontier,” –. . Simms, The Social Principle, .
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not primarily instruments of oppression but necessary elements of freedom. Like Burke, Simms trusted that social institutions could direct man to a higher good. He used the classical Roman image of the household gods to indicate that piety, self-sacrifice, and patriotism, all necessary for the strong state and society, began in the home. The other institutions served, then, to reinforce the positive cultural lessons of the home and to guard against mistaken ideas and individual expression. Society also civilized men. Simms noted that society shaped the “sensibilities” of men for civilized life. He gave an image of civilized English society to reveal the connection between society and civilization. The English home of “some two hundred years ago” possessed “placid sweet . . . unaffected grace . . . hearty cheerfulness . . . sweetness of . . . repose . . . the polish of . . . simplicity,” and hospitality. Society centered upon the “cheerful fireside.” The atmosphere of the home created a civilized environment in which servants did their duty with promptness, children were treated with proper reverence, and domestic love was passed from generation to generation. Authority, a central element of society, was “felt without being heard.” Society in the home influenced the behaviors of individuals when they engaged the world, thus bringing civility, reverence, and honor to the broader society. The people venerated the “patriarchal authority of home” and enjoyed peace and security in which to progress and thrive. Tied to the civilizing factor of society was its moral component. Simms insisted that the moral component of society transcended mere issues of functionality. He did not celebrate traditional social institutions because they brought wealth or success, but because they led men to live moral lives. Simms described virtue as “that profound reverence for the social tie.” Individuals should strive to order their passions, he thought, and live according to the moral law. Reverence for the family recalled religious piety and submission to patriarchal authority, both necessary for the performance of one’s duty. Simms believed that liberty, an integral part of individual self-development and social progress, had a moral and social context. For Simms, liberty was “the undisturbed possession of that place in society to which our moral and intellectual merits entitle us.” A free individual “fills his proper place” and thus performs part of his moral duty. . William Gilmore Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” . Simms, The Social Principle, .
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Simms rejected hereditary “castes, professions or parties” as “usually selfish, creatures of routine, and forever hostile to all novel forms of truth.” Hierarchy had to be flexible. Like liberty and virtue, it reflected the moral side of man’s social nature. Simms discussed natural rights in the context of liberty and society. Like Tucker, he limited the radical tendencies of natural rights doctrine by linking rights to the natural law and moral duty. He wrote, “The truth is, that our rights depend entirely upon the degree of obedience which we pay to the laws of our creation.” Rights, he insisted, “result from the performance of our duties.” Far from being inalienable as Jefferson had claimed in the Declaration of Independence, rights depended upon duty. “Unless we perform our duties, we have no rights,” Simms declared. Man’s primary social duty according to the laws of nature was to apply his “mental and physical energies to the improvement of the passive world around him.” If rights were dependent on social progress, inferior peoples or nations possessed no rights, a point Simms used to justify slavery and to blunt the radical aspects of the natural rights doctrine. Simms’s conception of progress lay at the heart of his social theory. He exclaimed, “[N]o civilized people can continue stationary!” The “law of civilization is a law of progress,” he wrote. By progress Simms meant the orderly growth of education, the arts, literature, religion, morality, and better government. In his edition of the History of South Carolina, Simms noted that South Carolina society, while far from perfect, had progressed in its civilization. He cited the expansion of higher education and “popular education” in the state as proof that South Carolinians were improving their social institutions. Simms celebrated a civilization “at once stationary yet susceptible of progress” because in progressive societies individuals tried to improve their condition without encouraging reckless ambition, avarice, or social mobility. For Simms, traditional society could . Simms, The Social Principle, . Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” . Simms to James Henry Hammond, November , , Letters, vol. , . See Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South, –. Rubin argues that Simms represents the bourgeois American ideal in his fiction, particularly in The Yemassee. He reads Simms as class conscious and overly sensitive to social standing. Rubin points out that Simms’s theory of informal hierarchy explains why Simms loved and wrote about the frontier. The frontier, for Simms, was open and mobile. . Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” . . Simms, The Social Principle, . Simms, The History of South Carolina, .
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be progressive because he measured progress in terms of moral improvement, which was aided by traditional institutions. Simms took pains to distinguish between material and moral progress. Americans had often confused the two, he charged, and thus had missed the moral and intellectual aspects of civilization. “An improvement in Railroads or Steam Engines, is spoken of as a great moral improvement” by many Americans. Simms warned, “The powers of steam—the facilities of railroads—the capacity to overcome time and space, are wonderful things, but they are not virtues, nor duties, nor laws, nor affections.” “All the steam power in the world” could not bring happiness, which was a moral quality. Nor could “all the railroads in the world” carry “one poor soul to heaven.” Simms did not think that material progress was bad, for he advocated it elsewhere in his writings, but he stressed that moral progress was far more important. Americans’ vices and worship of material progress shaped their society, which in turn formed “the character of a popular Government.” Simms thus attributed the degeneracy of Americans to their lack of social progress and their forgetfulness of moral principles. Whereas Randolph, Taylor, and Tucker identified constitutional tinkering with social decline, Simms focused more on the legacy of the American Revolution. In colonial America, the Anglo settler desired to possess “a chosen spot” and to “make of it a garden—to multiply its fruits around him.” The settler desired only “to live well and hospitably—decently and reverently.” He wanted “security and plenty” to buttress the nascent, vulnerable society around him. Soon the settler had children and a “Parish Church, with its simple but imposing tower” that reminded him of the old country. The settler “had reached this stage of social progress in America—his dwelling and his Church were built . . . his graves lay in sight of his evening walks—and improving resources had added to his pride by enabling him to add to the simple virtues of the patriarch.” The settlers had reproduced the old English culture in their social institutions. The newly formed traditional society “needed but repose from external pressure—time for contemplation—a respite, in which to grow the nobler plants of social culture,—taste and education, the arts and graces of civilization.” Repose, however, was not to be, for the events of and shattered social peace in America. . Simms, The Social Principle, , . . Ibid., –.
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Simms argued that the American Revolution was a civil war that destroyed traditional society in America. The Revolution began, he noted, because of the greed of the British in wanting to tax unjustly the prosperity of the colonies. “Seven years of social war” severely harmed “social progress.” During the war “domestic strifes were fermented—families divided” and “communities and cities” destroyed. People abandoned their homes “in terror,” which were then “destroyed by hate.” Simms concluded, “Hamlets perished by fire, and the domestic affections were extinguished in the blaze; while the disruption of all those ties which bound together, as one, the members of a family, effectually dissipated the prestige of domestic authority.” Civilization needed peace to survive and progress. Unfortunately, the Revolutionary War caused so much damage to American society that Simms insisted as late as that the country still had not overcome the setbacks of the conflict. Simms maintained that once traditional society had fallen, there was no social discipline to prevent unruly passions from dominating culture. In order to illustrate his point, he used the example of a family moving from an established community in the East to the frontier. He noted that when “the restraining presence of society” was “withdrawn” and “the provocation to civilization which the ancient customs of a settled neighborhood once inspired” was at an end, the family loses all sense of shame and manners. The father crowds his family into a “miserable hovel,” and all become “slovenly” in their dress. The children become “squalid” and “ignorant.” The father and son engage “in the free use of whiskey and tobacco,—those two gross, brutal and terrible tyrannies of our nation.” Social intercourse becomes crude and unpleasant. Simms insisted that the destruction of traditional society unleashed avarice that undermined morality and social bonds even further. He charged that the impoverished state of the first settlers led them “to attach to wealth an undue importance.” As soon as traditional morality became divorced from the restraints of traditional social structure after the Revolution, . Ibid., –. In his romance Woodcraft, Simms illustrates the social destruction caused by the Revolution. . Simms, The Social Principle, . James E. Kibler argues that Simms saw that “the greatest limitation of man would of course be empiricism or utilitarianism.” “Stewardship and Patria in Simms’s Frontier Poetry,” in Guilds and Collins, eds., William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, .
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Americans adopted the “love of gain” as their major passion. Avarice caused individuals to adopt the cash-nexus in judging culture and society. Americans sought only immediate profits and lost “that care of home, which was the superior passion with their ancestors.” The cash-nexus undermined traditional social relations. Once avarice became “the master passion,” it “chains the virtues—bends the moods—buys the affections— tames Ambition—subjugates Love, and walks, the Universal Conqueror!” Avarice conquered American society and dominated American culture. Simms argued that avarice had produced selfishness and an ungrateful spirit. He also showed that Americans never fussed about the lack of culture—of art and literature—in America, but about economics. “Our clamor,” he declared, “is for something better, sweeter, dearer,—more necessary to our souls—for gold, for silver, or, more specious delusion still, though more harmless, for good current paper of banks not yet absolutely broken.” Americans needed to satisfy their lust for money. But he insisted that “the natural appetite rages” and “will never be satisfied.” Unleashed avarice had become a cruel taskmaster. He concluded his thoughts on American character with an exhortation: “Gentlemen, we must pray to God, and not to fortune.” Culture and home had to transcend the pursuit of wealth, a prospect that grew dimmer as American prosperity increased. On Religion, the West, Slavery, and Southern Nationalism Whereas Edmund Burke had promoted the established Church of England as a stabilizing social institution, Tucker and Simms rejected religious establishment but affirmed the importance of religion in human life. Tucker and Simms celebrated religious liberty as a sign of America’s social progress. Tucker expressed an evangelical Christianity that respected the family and social reform movements. Simms, though nominally a Christian, displayed a classical understanding of religion that also placed significance on the family’s religious duty. Tucker’s religious beliefs changed over time. He had been raised in the Protestant Episcopal Church but became a Presbyterian when he moved to Missouri, even helping to found a Presbyterian church there. He was not a Calvinist, however, and after his conversion appeared to be an . William Gilmore Simms, Self-Development, . . Simms, The Social Principle, –, .
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evangelical. Tucker realized that the Virginia society of his youth was fairly impious. He wrote, “I was brought up among people who hated kings— despised priests—derided religion—and disclaimed authority of all sorts except the authority of the laws emanating from the majority of the people for the time being.” He commented to his father, “I do not know to what to attribute it, but to the spirit of the French Revolution, that this last quality [piety] was so little common among the politer class of society when I was young; but I think it is owing to this cause that for a long time I valued it but little.” He advocated the formation of strong families to counteract the pernicious influence of the Revolution upon religion. He noted that “there is no situation in which a family can be brought up so happily as among those who are at once unreservedly devout, and who recommend their piety to the young mind by cheerfulness and urbanity, accomplishment & information.” His solution was, therefore, an individual one. Individuals must first be converted before they could pass on the faith through the basic institution of society, the family. Interestingly enough, Tucker did not rely on church denominations or the state to promote religion. That was the proper job of families. Tucker’s religious beliefs reflected his views of society and human nature. He enthusiastically supported religious freedom. Using a familial image, he explained that the young often struggled with the love of pleasure, which concerned parents. He wrote, “In truth the great evil of the love of pleasure is that it is an antidote to the love of God, and when the authority of God is used to force one away from a much coveted enjoyment, there is danger that it may but make him love God less, and pleasure more.” Coercion only destroyed the freedom that allowed for virtue. His depiction of the proper religious society centered upon a noncoercive family unit. He portrayed the family as a domestic church in which the father was “a priest in his own house . . . charged with the care of the souls of his children.” The father not only presented Christianity to his children, but also was “bound, as far as possible, to make them instruments of good to others.” Tucker’s celebration of the family as the fundamental religious institution showed again his focus on the primacy of society. It . Quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, September , , quoted in ibid., . . Tucker, “Christian Education,” , .
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was the job of parents, not government, to instill virtue in the young and build within them a Christian worldview. For Tucker religion would flourish only when it was a matter centered in the family far from the reach of the state. Tucker did not see the religious family as a source of indoctrination but of training in love. In keeping with his view of the primacy of the will, he shortchanged a doctrinal or ideological approach to religion. He cautioned parents not to “afflict” the spirits of their children “with the perusal of works of theology.” Christianity lay, he said, primarily in love, the domain of the heart. A parent should “carefully show both himself and his Maker” to the child’s mind “as the personification of love.” “Let their heads alone,” Tucker exhorted. Instead focus on the heart and the will. Tucker believed that Christian conduct was the goal of Christian education and such a result would come only by focusing upon the training of the will. He spoke often of following the law of love and placing the heart over the head. Tucker described God as his “best friend” and encouraged others not to become bogged down in rigid ritualism, but to approach God as children full of “endearment and love.” Tucker’s evangelicalism showed the dual nature of his social vision. On the one hand, religion was a matter of the will and was thus an individual choice. On the other hand, society had the responsibility of training the young in truth and Christian principles. He maintained this approach to education and social reform as well. Tucker’s religious principles led him to embrace education and reform as necessary for a good society. Like Burke, he argued that society must find some way to restrain the appetites of individuals in order to maintain peace. The free society accomplished such a task through teaching selfcontrol rather than through government coercion. In an address to the Temperance Society of William and Mary, Tucker recognized that intemperance was a serious vice and urged the society to teach “self-knowledge,” “the habits of self-command,” and “self-respect.” He emphasized that only personal virtue could restrain intemperance. Self-knowledge, the awareness of fallen human nature, alone brought repentance and then reform. Tucker asserted that the Temperance Society was only a temporary association . Ibid., –. For Tucker, moral progress meant the spread of Christian morality. In this he was in agreement with the consensus of southern conservatism. See Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, .
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responding to a specific social ill. He did not seek to institutionalize reform or to have the Temperance Society lobby for legislation. Rather, he encouraged the society to teach individuals. His solution was not atomistic, but relied on social organizations such as the family and voluntary associations to accomplish its goals. Education and reform should focus on forming good habits in young people through the example of good families. Tucker recognized that some punishment was necessary to control the appetites but stressed that “the business of education is at first, to play off the passions and appetites against each other.” Until the individual’s reason became “strong enough to contend alone with Passion,” it “must engage the alliance of rival passions, till, having used them to conquer, and finally to destroy each other, she may establish her serene empire over the mind.” Tucker’s approach to social problems upheld his deep respect for Christianity, individual freedom, and the primacy of the will. In his appeals to the benefits of a traditional society based on reverent family relationships, Simms echoed the religion of the ancient Roman Republic. In the Republic, religion primarily centered upon the family. The Romans believed that the family was a sacred institution. The father was head of the family and served as the household priest, performing special liturgical functions in the home related to offering sacrifices and oblations to the gods. Because the ancient Romans lacked any authoritative religious text, they passed on their formal prayers and liturgies by mouth—the father taught his sons. The prayers and liturgies, the cult, took on a special importance because they linked the present with past generations. Within each family, ancestors were remembered fondly. Each household also possessed certain gods—the household gods—that were supposed to watch over the family in a special manner. The Roman religion was essentially conservative and traditional. Romans believed that they were subordinate to an exterior power, the power of the gods, and that this great power demanded their sacrifices. This belief was manifested in the concept of pietas, roughly translated as “piety.” To the Roman, pietas was the heart of culture, linking religion with everyday affairs. Pietas meant doing one’s . Tucker, “Temperance. An Address Read before the Temperance Society of William & Mary College,” , . See also Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, –. Walters notes that early reform movements stressed individual conversion to good behavior whereas later movements settled on government coercion to achieve their ends. Tucker fit into the first part of the reform impulse.
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duty to the gods, the family, and the broader community. The Roman cult, therefore, was linked inextricably to the notions of sacrifice and duty, important concepts in Simms’s religious thought. Simms, though a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, was not a traditional Christian. He wrote in that his mind “has always . . . been governed by an earnestness of tendency approaching religion.” But he added that he “stubbornly opposed every creed of every Christian Church extant.” Simms maintained, “I rejected the Old Testament as a religious authority altogether, & satisfied myself that the New was, however, true and good, & wise & pure in many things, a wonderfully corrupt narrative.” To avoid seeming irreverent in attacking the Bible, he insisted that he “was not sufficiently virtuous . . . —not sufficiently superior to my own passions—with no adequate restraint of will over desire.” His point, however, had been made: he opposed much of traditional Christian doctrine. Simms professed a love of religious freedom and religious diversity. He hated forms of religious intolerance and the suppression of religious ideas. In The Yemassee, Simms depicted a South Carolina Puritan, Pastor Matthews, as a despot and a bigot. He described Matthews as “an ascetic,” a “stern Presbyterian,” and “one of the ultra-nonconformists.” Matthews disliked the interference of the Church of England in the colony of South Carolina, but Simms assured the reader that Matthews “was a bigot himself, and, with the power, would doubtless have tyrannized after a similar fashion” as the Anglicans. Simms depicted Matthews as a fool. He was so “wedded to old habits and prejudices” that he could easily be convinced to “throw aside principles” while rabidly “preserving forms” of the old religion. Matthews’s fanaticism taught him to push for uniformity in every facet of life. Simms noted, “He could not be brought to understand that . For a brief treatment of Roman religion during the Republic, see R. H. Barrow, The Romans, –. . Simms to Justus Starr Redfield, May , , Letters, vol. , . See Simms to James Henry Hammond, January , , ibid., –. Simms and Hammond consulted one another on spiritualism, hardly a traditional Christian practice. In a January , , letter to Hammond he stated that he was “attended by representatives from the spirit world.” Ibid., . See Faust, A Sacred Circle, for more information on Simms’s views on religion. Also see R. T. Valentine, “William Gilmore Simms, Episcopalian,” –. A. J. Conyers, “Simms’s Sabbath Lyrics and the Reclaiming of Sacred Time in the Religious Imagination,” –. For Simms, social conservative principles had their basis independent of traditional institutional Christianity.
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climates and conditions should be various, and that the popular good, in a strict reference to the mind of man, demanded that people should everywhere differ in manner and opinion.” Simms accused sectarianism of “banishing religion” in the world by creating hypocrites and bigots. Only the free exercise of religion could ensure social stability and the survival of Christianity. He wrote to his friend James Lawson that in religion “is the only truth and the only consolation,” but he failed to indicate just what form of religion he meant. Simms condemned as false and harmful certain social effects of particular Christian sects. He hated Puritans, calling them “diseased fanatics” at one point. He repeatedly attacked Oliver Cromwell as a “hypocrite” and a “murderer,” and regarded the Puritans as forcing unnatural practices on men. Simms spoke of the Puritans, “Denying . . . to the young, all those natural forms of enjoyment and amusement which the Deity, speaking through their own nature, designed for their wholesome nurture, you [Puritans] cast a shadow over all things around you.” Because of this, the young seek for “less obvious and more artificial enjoyments, which are not often innocent, and which are frequently ruinous and destructive.” He regarded Puritanism as dangerous because its suppression of the natural order undermined human morality, a point he also made about traditional religion in general. In Guy Rivers, Simms described a frontier religious service given by a pious Methodist preacher as the perfect example of natural religion. Unlike satirical literary descriptions of camp meetings found in antebellum southern literature, Simms professed admiration for the lack of rigidity in the gathering. The scene in Guy Rivers reveals Simms’s attachment to American religious freedom. People from all over the frontier converge to hear the preacher. “No chiming and chattering bells,” noted Simms, “warn them of the day or the duty—no regularly-constituted and well-salaried priest—no time-honored fabric, round which the old forefathers of the . William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee, –. William Gilmore Simms, Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia, . In his criticisms of hypocrites and sectarianism Simms repeated common Enlightenment points made by philosophes such as Voltaire. For Voltaire’s view of religion, especially in his Philosophical Letters (which sometimes resembles Simms’s views), see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. , –. Simms to James Lawson, August , , Letters, vol. , . . Simms, Guy Rivers, . Simms, The Yemassee, . John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon make this point in Cato’s Letters, Letter .
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hamlet rest—reminding them regularly of the recurring sabbath, and the sweet assemblage of their fellows.” The lack of traditional religious forms was an asset, however. “We are to assume,” he continued, “that the teacher is from their own impulses, and that the heart calls them with due solemnity to the festival of prayer.” Freedom made religion more sincere and therefore more influential in society. Simms reveled in the fact that the frontier people worshiped in the cathedral of nature. “Here, indeed,” he wrote, “without much effort of the imagination might be beheld the present God—the trees, hills and vales, the wild flower and the murmuring water, all the work of his hands, attesting his power, keeping their purpose, and obeying, without scruple, the order of those seasons, for the sphere and operation of which he originally designed them.” By implication, man-made churches distorted the natural appreciation of God and thus could corrupt society more easily. Simms regarded religion’s chief importance as supporting a civilized social order. In his writings, Simms used many different religious images and examples to outline religion’s proper function. In Guy Rivers he praised the Methodists for doing more, “and with motives as little questionable as any, toward the spread of civilization, good habits, and a proper morality, with the great mass, than all other known sects put together.” In The Social Principle, his use of the example of the conservative devotion of the ancient Romans to their household gods revealed his appreciation of religion’s proper role in civilization. When Simms spoke of Christianity he shied away from discussions of Divine Revelation and instead praised the religion for its basic moral message. Most importantly to Simms, religion should bring peace to society and avoid division. Simms understood the individual’s religious duty to be simple. He began with the premise of man’s contingency on the Divine. Man had daily “a thousand wants and exigencies, for which, unless by the care and under the countenance of Providence, he could never of himself provide.” One’s utter dependence on God should lead one to humility, argued Simms. He counseled his friend James Lawson to “look constantly” to God “with a humble delight” because He had “so unreluctantly and without recalling . Simms, Guy Rivers, , . See also Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, –, on the connection between freedom and religious devotion. . Simms, Guy Rivers, .
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any of his gifts, conferred upon you so many and exquisite ones.” Lawson, commanded Simms, should pray frequently throughout the day and should “inspirit your little family, one and all, with this necessary & becoming duty.” Finally, he told Lawson, “Be righteous.” Man’s duty to God led naturally to the moral life. The individual should try to control the expression of his passions and to practice moderation. For Simms, humility, prayer, and moderation were the extent of the individual’s Christian duty. Simms expressed best his understanding of the social and individual roles of religion in a letter to his son, a cadet at the Citadel Academy, in . He maintained that his son should perform his duties to God, his family, and his country in going off to war. Simms wrote, “You are to remember that you are to defend your mother country, & your natural mother, from a hoard of mercenaries & plunderers.” Reminding him to forgo the instinct of self-preservation, Simms added, “The less you fear for yourself, the more your security.” Quoting the biblical injunction “He who would save his life, the same shall lose it,” he warned his son that a “lack of firmness . . . is fatal to all heroism.” He counseled the young man to “do your duty faithfully” and “let nothing . . . divert your mind, from the immediate duty which is before you.” Joining his call for duty with Christianity, Simms insisted, “. . .[P]ut yourself in God’s keeping.” He continued: “We are in his hands, all of us! Pray to him. It will not lessen your strength & courage to do so, even on the abyss of battle!” Simms connected moral duty with individual reliance on the Divine in his own version of Roman pietas. The young Simms would become a hero just as the classical Romans had, by defending his family and country and acknowledging his dependence on the Divine. For Simms, pietas was the essence of religion in a traditional society. Simms could not connect Christian doctrine and the Christian churches to the social conservatism . Ibid., . Simms to James Lawson, August , , Letters, vol. , . The intense suffering Simms experienced in his life undoubtedly cast his religious beliefs in a stoical character. He lost numerous children and two wives to early deaths. His letters revealed the depth of his anguish and despair. Simms dealt with his grief through his religious belief. He realized that there were “numberless and sudden events in the progress of life and human circumstance, over which, as they could neither be foreseen nor combated with by man, he had no control” (Guy Rivers, ). God’s ways were inscrutable. But Simms hoped that the “successive strokes of Providence” were “intended for some great end,—perhaps some benefit.” . Simms to William Gilmore Simms, Jr., November , , Letters, vol. , .
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he espoused. Ultimately, other institutions, particularly the family, would have to compensate for the failure of Christianity to hold traditional society together in rapidly changing nineteenth-century America.
R Tucker and Simms thought deeply about the role of the West in southern culture. Like John Taylor, both men were ambivalent toward the West. They appreciated the immense economic possibilities the West could offer, but feared the social dislocation southern states suffered from westward migration. Both men hoped that the West could be civilized. Tucker, due to his time in Missouri, remained more hostile to the West than Simms, who eventually embraced westward expansion while cautioning prudence and the need for order. Both men presented their Burkean social views in their discussions of the West. Tucker’s view of the American West illustrated his broader social vision and outlined the role the man of culture should have in the United States. He thought that men inhabiting the West must seek to form institutions to order their nascent communities. Tucker believed that on the one hand, the West allowed American society to develop, or in his view, corrupt, more slowly and provided opportunities for individual prosperity. On the other hand, he maintained that the crass nature of culture in the West diminished the important roles of the gentleman and the man of mind. Tucker’s position reveals much about his thoughts on American destiny and the challenges of a republican society. Like many southerners, Tucker moved to the West to make money and seek social prominence. In February , after having decided to move West, Tucker wrote his father explaining that his overarching desire for honor as a lawyer and profit significantly influenced his decision. He insisted, “The utter destruction of our judiciary system renders the practice of law in the Country, utterly unprofitable disgusting and laborious—producing neither honor nor profit, and justifying the hope of neither.” Tucker complained to his father that Virginia lacked profitable opportunities for young lawyers, but he had heard that Tennessee was a promising area. He noted, “The accounts which I have heard from Tennessee are so uniform, and give me so high an opinion of the soil and climate in the Nashville Country, that I feel a strong bias in favor of it.” He expressed hope that he could distinguish himself “in the infamy of the state of the Nashville Bar”
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and gain enough money to buy land to “place my family out of the danger of want.” As for his friends in Virginia, he remarked that with the unbelievably busy and unrewarding life of a country lawyer, he did not see them anyhow. He made it clear to St. George Tucker that he could have a better life, one that offered what every gentleman needed, in the West. Beverley Tucker traveled west in June at the age of thirty to find his fame and fortune. Especially after losing money in the Panic of , Tucker noted that the West needed order. He initially believed that Missouri possessed a good base of republican people. He told John Randolph that Missourians were fiercely independent and mistrustful of executive power; they were members of the Country party. He also praised their ingenuity: “We have no men of very superior genius of attainments, but a vast proportion who possess considerable information, long views, & great enterprise.” When Tucker became a circuit court judge in , he established government institutions throughout the state. He did not neglect voluntary social institutions, however. He worked actively with the Freemasons in Missouri and in served as the second Grand Master of the Missouri Lodge. He also joined the Presbyterian church and was a member of the Missouri Auxiliary Bible Society, organized in to spread Presbyterianism in St. Louis and to build Protestant churches throughout the state. In keeping with his views on the primacy of society, Tucker worked hard to bring order through institutions in Missouri. Above all, Tucker saw lawyers as ordering western society. In an lecture to his students at the College of William and Mary, Tucker, reflecting on his experiences as a lawyer and judge in Missouri, noted, “To be eminent in our profession is to hold a place among the great ones of the earth; and they, who devote themselves to it, have the rare advantage of treading the path which leads to the highest objects of honorable ambition, even while walking the rounds of daily duties, and providing for the daily wants of private life.” The history of the United States, he emphasized, “is full of proof that the bar is the road to eminence.” Lawyers had . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, February , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Randolph, September , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –. See also page on information concerning his membership in the Masons.
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ordered the new country through the Constitution, and the new generation of lawyers had to guard their inheritance of free government. In an lecture he encouraged his students to view the bar as a “fraternal” corps, which embraced both lawyers and judges, and even look on them as respected “elders.” Lawyers and judges protected society from chaos and tyranny. He asserted that the “honor of the bar, and the dignity of the bench are the only sure guardians of private right.” He continued, “When the one is tainted and the other outraged (and they can only exist together) there is no peace or safety, at least in public life.” Lawyers preserved republican society by bringing order to chaos. Lawyers in the western territories and states had an even greater task of creating legal institutions in order to make a republican society possible. Tucker believed that his special task was to install Virginia institutions in the West. When contemplating a move west in , he assured his father, “I certainly cling most strenuously to the soil and name of Virginia—and I would not live in any state which was not an emanation, & as it were, a part of her.” Upon arriving in Missouri, Tucker expressed optimism at the continuity between Virginia and Missouri in terms of its citizenry. He told John Randolph that “we have some Yankees it is true but more Virginians.” He hoped that the Virginia émigrés would support traditional political and social forms in designing a constitution in preparation for statehood. He believed that “we shall follow in many respects, the Virginia model.” He insisted, “The noble stand which the old dominion has made in defense of her ancient institutions commands very general admiration, and is admirable contrasted with the wanton freaks of democratic despotism now exhibiting in Kentucky.” Tucker saw his task in Burkean terms. He was perpetuating the “ancient institutions” and society of Virginia in Missouri, thus maintaining organic social ties even on the disorderly frontier. Tucker did not necessarily see himself as creating institutions to keep order, but as transferring and conserving them. He told Randolph in that “my feelings are entirely Virginian.” He professed a veneration of Virginia’s constitution “such as I feel for none of the institutions of the United States.” Insisting that his life in Virginia was beneficial . Tucker, “A Lecture on the Study of Law,” . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “Professor Beverley Tucker’s Valedictory Address to His Class,” –. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, November , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, .
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to his native state, Tucker declared, “It has been my study in the country of my adoption . . . to introduce as much as possible of her spirit and character.” He claimed a “good measure” of success and trusted that Virginia’s principles could bear fruit in Missouri. Tucker saw his Virginia heritage as a mandate for a kind of secular, conservative evangelization process. The West would be beneficial as long as it imitated the institutions and principles of Virginia. Tucker’s attempts to found a community of émigré Virginians in Missouri—the Dardennes community—best displayed his conservative view of the West. He dreamed of founding a “true Virginia settlement” in Missouri as soon as he arrived there. He recruited family relations and friends from Virginia and South Carolina to join the community located on a six-thousand-acre tract northwest of St. Louis. He remarked, “We shall have in this quarter a neighborhood hardly to be surpassed on the Continent.” Tucker’s best biographer, Robert Brugger, called the plan a “slaveholders’ Camelot.” Tucker dreamed that the gentlemen of Dardennes could lead active intellectual lives while pursuing political careers if called upon by the state. He wrote his father in about his developing community: “How happy am I in having been the instrument to bring them together. I came here like the patriarch of old, leaning on my staff, & behold I am become a great nation.” Tucker’s portrayal of himself as a patriarch suggests that his focus was not solely institutional. He also sought to preserve the Virginia tradition of the gentleman planter and the political principles such a man embodied. Tucker deceived himself into thinking that he had preserved the organic nature of society in Dardennes. The membership in his community was completely voluntary, itself an indication of the artificial character of western society. Tucker came to be more skeptical of the West the longer he remained there. His feelings of declension came first over the Dardennes project. The Richmond Enquirer published one of his letters to friends back in Virginia recruiting them to move to Dardennes in . An editor of the Missouri Gazette read the letter and reprinted it anonymously in the Mis. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, February , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Randolph, September , , and May , , quoted in ibid., , . . Quoted in Brugger, Beverley Tucker, . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, January , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, .
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souri paper along with some sarcastic notes. Tucker’s letter had called for throwing Missouri nonslaveholders into Illinois to preserve the increasing “homogeneity” of the soon-to-be state. There was public outcry from many Missourians who complained of a slaveholding aristocracy growing in their midst. Tucker’s idea was discredited. Where at first Dardennes was to be a continuation of Virginia in Missouri and a stepping stone for the transformation of Missouri into Virginia, in the s it became a place for “sober men from the old States” to seek refuge in the chaotic frontier. Tucker particularly blamed the increase of Yankee immigrants in Missouri for the decline of the State. He accused a vigorous democratic politics and society of destroying the gentlemanly tradition as well. Tucker mentioned that radical democrats sought “to bring every thing under the feet of the legislature,” particularly the judicial branch of government. The destruction of the independent judiciary would end the rule of principle and employ a sort of legal positivism in its place. He wrote, “The monstrous doctrine that courts, tho’ convinced of the unconstitutionality of a statute, are still bound to carry it into effect, is the natural offspring of misrule & the parent of anarchy, but seems to be not without its advocates among men whose years and services entitle them to such respect, that indignation is sunk in astonishment.” Not only was the independent judiciary endangered by democracy, but also meritocracy, the tradition of the gentleman, and Virginia constitutional principles, the Principles of ’98. The West had failed Tucker. Simms took several trips to the Old Southwest during his lifetime, journeys that provided him with artistic material for his novels and many questions about American culture to ponder. He made his first western journey in – to visit his father. He did not leave any record of his visit, but scholar James Kibler has uncovered several letters by Simms from a second trip in at the age of nineteen. In his short letters, Simms described the beauty of the natural landscape in addition to the atmospheres of the mercantile cities New Orleans and Mobile. He lamented the lack of civilization. The “construction of the houses” in Mobile was “rude” and society in the city was “poor.” At the theater in Mobile, the young . Brugger, Beverley Tucker, . The quotation is from Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, November , , quoted in Beverley D. Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, . Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, February , .
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Charlestonian complained of bad lighting and “intolerable” smoke. In addition, performances were frequently interrupted by “backwoodsmen who had never seen such queer things before.” Of New Orleans he noted that the streets were “narrow, confined and filthy in the extreme.” The “civilized portion of the town” had tolerable architecture and gentlemen, but the main occupation of the city’s inhabitants was gambling and “every species of slow torture.” The crudity of society in the West angered, shocked, and disappointed young Simms. In Simms took another trip West and commented extensively on the lure of economic prosperity. In Georgia, buyers of land did not ask questions such as “are the situations fine—is the scenery attractive—the society fine or good,” but “are the lands productive and fertile—what amount of rice or cotton did they produce to the acre” and “such other questions of utility, as a planter well to do in the world, and who knows a thing or two, may be supposed first to propose.” Simms deemed the brash utilitarianism of the frontier as insufficient for maintaining traditional culture. He noted that a number of politicians in Macon, Georgia, desired that it become the state capital because of its central location. He added that the “chief ” questions on the possibilities for the new capital would be “whether it [Macon] is in the center of the population, and of the wealthy portions of the country.—Are its facilities for business more or less great— are the lands contiguous, more or less productive—are the waters more frequent, and is the country better wooded, & c.?” Barring political consideration, desire for economic advantage would determine the decision. Simms worried that the lure of easy profits in the West would not only destroy the chances of civilized society there but also drain the population of eastern communities and keep the frontier in a constant state of flux. Writing from Mississippi in , he noted that “the great rage at this time . . . is the possession of the new Indian purchase, the Choctaw lands.” Many Choctaws had already been deported to Arkansas, and greedy whites waited eagerly to turn the new land into money. Simms maintained, “I cannot but think the possession of so much territory, greatly inimical to . Simms letters, February and March , , in James E. Kibler, Jr., “The First Simms Letters: ‘Letters from the West’ (),” –. On the behavior of American audiences in the theater from a similar perspective as Simms, see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow. . Simms to the City Gazette, March and March , , Letters, vol. , , .
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the well being of this country.” The West “not only conflicts with, and prevents the formation of society, but it destroys that which is already well established.” Frontier dwellers never set down roots. “Scarcely have they squatted down in one place,” he wrote, “and built up their little ‘improvements,’ than they hear of a new purchase, where corn grows without planting, and cotton comes up five bales to the acre, ready picked and packed—they pull up stakes and boom off for the new Canaan, until they hear of some still better.” The process continued until death stopped the travelers “on the road, before they have had time to hew their burial stone from the quarries which surrounded them.” The desire for profit without consideration of social responsibility drove Americans to move west. Like John Randolph, Simms partially blamed the government for the social problems caused by western expansion. The mobility of Americans made society difficult to establish. “The unwise measures of our statesmen,” he wrote, “by which the public lands have been thrown into the market at almost nominal prices, and long before they were necessary to the growing wants of our people” fixed the “injurious habit” of mobility upon Americans. Few could resist “the vast temptations to cupidity . . . held out by the immense . . . tracts of plain and prairie in the west.” The easy availability of new lands “produced a sleepless discontent” among Americans “with their existing condition.” Thus Americans were always willing to fracture society in order to seek wealth farther west. The lack of society, thought Simms, could only hurt American culture and ultimately harm American government. Simms illustrated his view of the West powerfully in his romance Richard Hurdis: or, The Avenger of Blood. A Tale of Alabama. At the opening of the book, Richard Hurdis, the protagonist and son of a prosperous small planter, prepares to leave his Alabama home to travel west. Simms gave a few reasons for the young man’s journey from his family. Hurdis declares, “My thoughts craved freedom, my dreams prompted the same desire, and the wandering spirit of our people, perpetually stimulated by the continual opening of new regions and more promising abodes, was working in my heart with all the volume of a volcano.” His restlessness and . Simms to the City Gazette, April–May , Letters, vol. , –. On the West and the South see Avery Craven, “The ‘Turner Theories’ and the South,” –. . Simms to Philip C. Pendleton, December , , Letters, vol. , –.
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drive for freedom from social bonds pushed him inexorably westward so that he could fulfill his desire to explore individualism. But the desire for wealth also prompted Hurdis to leave. “The Choctaw territory was reported to be rich as cream,” he notes. He admits that “some of our neighboring capitalists” had urged him to purchase the new lands for them as well. Hurdis tells his mother, “I will be a rich man yet.” His desire for individualism and money combine with his longing to extricate himself from uncomfortable social situations with his family. Hurdis charges that he had been his father’s “best Negro,” working hard to make the family farm profitable. Now he desires his own farm and income far from his father’s interference. He also flees because he thinks that the woman he loves is engaged to his brother, a situation that angers and shames him simultaneously. Hurdis’s flight, therefore, is a rejection of community and social ties. Simms did not judge the West to be completely evil. The same qualities that made the West dangerous to ordered liberty—its opportunity, its individualism, and its openness—made it exciting and full of possibilities, something Simms realized as a man of nineteen. After witnessing a day at court in Mobile, he wrote that the pleadings were “dull, heavy and unimportant” but that the Bar of Mobile was a “fair field open for some of the young lawyers of our city, who cannot procure, from the extensive competition, a sufficiency of business at home.” He saw that the West presented opportunity. He appreciated the lure of better opportunities and the chance to bring excellence, culture, and gentlemanly conduct to the frontier. The lack of deference in western society captivated Simms. While traveling through Georgia in , he learned of a local story regarding Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who had written a travel book about his journeys through North America in the mid s. The Duke had reserved four seats on a Georgia stagecoach so that he could travel alone and in comfort, but had failed to pay up front. When he boarded the stage, he found another passenger asleep in the coach. The enraged . Simms, Richard Hurdis, –, . On Richard Hurdis see John Caldwell Guilds, “The ‘Untrodden Path’: Richard Hurdis and Simms’s Foray into Literary Realism,” in Guilds and Collins, eds., William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, –. Guilds writes that “Simms perceived that the frontier held the key to America’s development” (). . Simms letter, March , , in Kibler, “The First Simms Letters,” . Rubin, in Edge of the Swamp, argues that Simms believed in the American bourgeois view that talent rules, which explains his view of the West.
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Duke confronted the driver about the interloper “in a very princely manner, though not, it seems, in very princely language.” The Duke, Simms remarked, “had yet to receive his first lesson of republicanism.” The driver, “one of those sturdy Southrons who can always . . . whip his weight in wildcats,” resented the princely tone of the Duke and informed him that the “traveler was just as good, if not a better man than himself, and that no alteration of the existing arrangement, could be permitted.” The traveler had paid in advance and thus got to ride. The Duke “became violent at this opposition” and threatened to beat the driver with his cane. The driver “lept . . . from his box” and called “upon the Prince of a five acre patch to put his threat into execution.” The Duke wisely declined, but told the driver that he would report him to the governor. The Duke’s appeal to authority sent the driver into a tirade. Simms used some dialect in relating the response: “The Governor might go to —-, &c. &c. For his part, he would just as leave lick the Governor, as the Duke. He never did like the Governor— didn’t vote for him at last ‘lections, and wouldn’t, if it lay with him, make him a county justice. He’d like no better fun than to give both Duke and Governor a dressing in the same breath—could do it, he had little doubt, &c.” The Duke silently took his seat in the coach. It was a victory for republicanism. Simms portrayed the incident in a humorous tone. A Georgia backwoodsman bests the pompous European aristocrat. The moral of the story was quite simple: in the West, money made men equal. The traveler who paid up front was regarded as the equal of the wealthy Duke. Whereas the Duke turned to traditional forms of social discipline in his threats (caning and reporting the man to the authorities), the Georgian was willing to resort to brute force rather than law to settle the matter and rejected any hint of deference. The individualism of the frontier could be exciting and humorous but also dangerous. For Simms, the result of social individualism was anonymity and the breakdown of stable social bonds that kept order and provided a sense of identity. Anonymity could be a tool for exploitation and subversion, a point he illustrated in Richard Hurdis. When Richard Hurdis leaves for the West his good friend rides along and is brutally murdered. Hurdis vows to avenge his friend’s death. For these purposes, Hurdis disguises his appearance, acts . Simms to the City Gazette, March , , Letters, vol. , –.
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the part of a criminal in order to infiltrate the band of robbers who killed his friend, and in the process uncovers a vast criminal conspiracy led by a secret organization, the Mystic Brotherhood. Hurdis quickly learns that on the frontier, one cannot trust appearances. During a riverboat card game, he meets a “puritan of the bluest complexion” who “deceived me by his sanctity,” but who is in reality the leader of the criminal gang and a superb card cheat, Clement Foster. Just as Hurdis benefits from the anonymity of the West in his pursuit of justice, so too does the anonymity and disguise of a preacher help Foster maintain his extensive criminal network. Even the plantation of the honorable Col. Grafton, who aids Hurdis in his pursuit of justice, is unsafe. A member of the criminal gang had managed to court Grafton’s daughter. Only Hurdis’s discovery of the man’s true identity prevents Grafton’s daughter from a humiliating marriage. Simms depicts the frontier as a masquerade. No one is who he seems to be. Identity is elusive. The loss of traditional society, while creating opportunity for men of talent, has destroyed order and, therefore, freedom. For where men were unsafe, they could hardly be free. Simms provided a solution to the individualism and lawlessness of the frontier in what he termed the “secret of home.” In his important lecture “The Social Principle,” he offered a comparison among the English, French, and Spanish settlers in their exploits in the West of their day, the New World. Simms argued that both the Spanish and French empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were much more powerful and impressive than that of the British. It was ironic, he thought, that North America was “left to a race of traders—fewer in number—poorer in purse and spirit—less practiced in war—less fervent in zeal.” The British succeeded because they knew the “secret of home.” Simms wrote, “While the Spaniards and the French, in the new world, sought either for gold, for slaves, or for conquest, the English sought for nothing but a home.” He later noted that a “wandering people is more or less a barbarous one,” showing that he thought a stable society necessary for freedom and order. The Englishman, he noted, had “set up his household gods, in whatever wilderness he sought abode.” Simms’s use of a classical Roman image conveyed the ideas of tradition, patriotism, and piety. The Englishman maintained his traditions and “preserved the superior organization of the society . Simms, Richard Hurdis, .
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in which he had been taught, and, by this alone, maintained his foothold in the forest.” Simms concluded, “Having security in the homestead, with that feeling of dignity which a conscious permanence of position inspires,— and a farther appreciation of the vast importance to civilization of a community, at once stationary, yet susceptible of progress,—and how naturally does the man improve his condition.” Identity and stability started with the household. The establishment of homes and communities had transformed successfully the barbarian shores of North America. Simms hoped that southern homes, based on the traditions of European civilization, would order the West and thus bring freedom and progress to American society there. For Simms, the family was the basic unit of civilization and only families devoted to the “household gods” of tradition and freedom could order the West. He hoped to recreate a traditional southern society in the Old Southwest.
R More so than earlier Jeffersonians, Tucker and Simms made slavery an integral part of their social vision. Like Taylor and Randolph, Tucker and Simms justified slavery to fit their social views. In , a few months before his death, Tucker wrote to Simms, “If we will not have slaves, we must be slaves.” He had come to see slavery as “the only basis on which the temple of freedom can stand firm and enduring.” He used Burke’s observations from the s that slave owners were often the most concerned about freedom and that slavery and freedom in the South were connected. Tucker declared, “We certainly have reason to believe that the existence of domestic slavery among us has been of singular advantage in preserving the free spirit of our people.” They viewed slavery as solving the dilemma of liberty and tradition. Enslaving blacks allowed the white South to preserve . Simms, The Social Principle, , , . See Carey M. Roberts, “The Mighty River of Providence or the Secrets of Home: The Historical Theories of Simms and Bancroft,” –. David Moltke-Hansen, “Ordered Progress,” in “Long Years of Neglect,” –. . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to William Gilmore Simms, reprinted in Trent, William Gilmore Simms, . Tucker, “South Carolina: Her Present Attitude and Future Action,” Southern Quarterly Review (October ): . Tucker, “Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries,” . See Tise, Proslavery. See also Drew Gilpin Faust, introduction to The Ideology of Slavery, –. Faust discusses the proslavery argument as dealing with the form southern society was to take.
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freedom and to remain linked to the traditional societies of Western civilization. This tactic allowed southerners to identify with long-standing traditions. By implication, abolitionists in attacking slavery were really assaulting the social foundation of Western greatness. Following the abolitionist course would lead to social revolution and the fracturing of the noble tradition of Western civilization. Tucker supported slavery only after becoming a slave owner in . He had earlier absorbed a general antislavery attitude from his father, St. George Tucker. In , after learning that John Randolph was considering giving him some land, Beverley Tucker wrote that he felt “a serious apprehension that too much of my father’s mantle may have descended upon me, to permit me to venture to meddle with Land & negroes.” As he approached marriage and desired financial independence, his views on slavery softened. He wrote St. George Tucker in , “I know your aversion to this kind of property [slaves] and I have inherited something of it, but I am at the same time sensible that there is none which in proportion to its nominal value affords its possessor so much substantial comfort.” Far from having a philosophical insight into the benefits of slavery, Tucker altered his views on the subject as a matter of pure economic interest. Not desiring to live penuriously as a country lawyer any longer, he accepted Randolph’s gift and became a slave owner when he married in . Tucker rarely discussed slavery until the s but did mention during the Missouri debates in that slavery had been a “salutary influence” on the United States. Although Tucker changed his views on slavery solely as a matter of selfinterest, he began to defend it as more than a mere economic benefit to the South. During the s, he argued that there were both “moral influences flowing from the relation of master to slave” and “moral feelings engendered and cultivated” by the relation. Both the master and the slave benefited from their relationship. The slave possessed “a degree of loyal devotion . . . to which the white man’s heart is a stranger” and had the duty to live up to his loyal feelings. The master had a “reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependant” and thus the moral duty to care for the needs of his slave. Tucker insisted, “That these sentiments in . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to John Randolph, February , , quoted in Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker to St. George Tucker, August , , quoted in ibid., . “Hampden,” Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser, May , .
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the breast of the negro and his master, are stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race, we believe.” The moral feelings made the heart better, he added, and had their genesis in the personal relationships between masters and slaves from birth. The habits formed by white children as they grew up with black nurses and playmates underlay the later affections between the master and slave. Tucker noted that the habitual use by young whites of the word “my” in relation to slaves engendered feelings of paternalism and care in the future masters. In keeping with his focus on the superiority of the heart over the head, Tucker pointed to the master-slave relation itself instead of ideology as the moral center of southern society. The southern slave owner violated “no law divine or human” in commanding “the services of their slaves.” Instead, southerners’ “true duty” lay in “the faithful discharge of their reciprocal obligations.” He concluded, “Let these be performed, and we believe (with our esteemed correspondent Professor Dew) that society in the South will derive much more of the good than of evil from this much abused and partially-considered institution.” Southern society would even transcend the selfish, exploitative capitalist society of the North. The pinnacle of his thought on slavery came in two articles in the Southern Literary Messenger. He wrote “On the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave” as an address to be given before the National Institute in April . The leaders of the National Institute, fearing the topic too inflammatory, withdrew their invitation for Tucker to speak. Tucker published his slavery lecture in the Messenger instead and also included it in his self-published collection of lectures in . The address attempted to portray slavery as both a progressive institution in order to appease northern critics and as a conservative institution to reaffirm the southern commitment to it. He concluded that slavery was a virtual panacea for the ills of Western civilization. The first part of Tucker’s address examined the question of liberty and racial diversity. He began: “Our large experience of the blessing of personal and civil liberty awakens in every benevolent mind a desire to see that blessing extended to every individual of the human race. But what is liberty, and how far it may be enjoyed by all, are questions of acknowledged . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “Slavery,” –. Tucker, “Note to Blackstone’s Commentaries,” –.
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difficulty.” The general fact of human existence, perceived through observation, was that men were created unequal in certain respects. Tucker charged that God “himself has thrown obstacles in the way of that equality of enjoyment [of liberty]” by endowing “different individuals” with different “capacities for enjoyment” of liberty. Because the divine purpose for creation was “the temporal and eternal happiness of his creatures,” man’s duty lay in following the will of God outlined in His creation and in accepting one’s lot in life. Tucker believed that the black race was inferior to the white race, according to the order of creation. He reasoned that inferiority was a reality that all had to accept. Far from being a burden, racial diversity suggested that “each race may be useful to the other, and may lead to combinations by which the condition of all may be improved, and the light of truth diffused among all.” Racial interaction in slavery had resulted in “the physical, intellectual and moral improvement of the inferior race, and, in some respects, of both.” As long as slavery remained a progressive moral institution, Tucker supported it. Tucker maintained that through slavery, Christians could “christianize” and civilize the inferior African race. Unlike Europe, which suffered from class conflict that endangered Christianity and ordered civilization, southern masters and slaves improved each other and the strength of civilization. One reason for the moral improvement of blacks was their subservient position. Tucker noted that the morality of the Gospel begins with humility, a trait the slave had to learn. It was “the natural and proper effect of slavery on an inferior race placed in direct subjection and immediate communication with a master race of unquestionable superiority” that humility would be the main lesson gained by slaves. Once the slave learned humility and faithfulness to his master, whites could be morally affected by the good example of slaves. The “humble, faithful, affectionate and cheerful African slave” served as a foil and rebuke to the “proud, self-seeking, restless, discontented, and unthankful master.” Slavery thus “proved a nurse . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “An Essay on the Moral and Political Effect of the Relation between the Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” –. Tucker’s motivations for the speech seem to have been to urge his northern audience to consider slavery from a scientific and conservative viewpoint. He attempted to show that a slave society best balanced progress and stability. Tucker therefore differs from David Donald’s characterizations of proslavery theorists (as nostalgic defenders of a static society) in a few ways. “The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered,” –. See Genovese, A Consuming Fire, –.
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to virtue through the agency of religion” and came to the “aid of religion” by reforming “the heart and life of the slave.” Christianized slaves adopted previously unknown civilized traits such as wearing clothes, holding the “connubial tie” sacred and disapproving of “licentious practices,” and respecting private property and condemning theft. The master had accordingly become “more kind, more indulgent, milder in his methods of government and more confiding.” Whites and blacks persisted in a “state of steadily progressive advancement in the comforts of civilization, and in the moral and intellectual improvement that civilization imparts.” Slavery had become a benign institution. By presenting slavery as a progressive institution, Tucker was able to reject emancipation as a naive scheme that would destroy a beneficent relationship between master and slave. He admitted that everyone did not share his view of slavery as moral. Some southerners saw slavery only as a means of profit and would perhaps agree to emancipate their slaves for monetary compensation. Tucker, however, considered slavery “an affair of the heart” and promised never to consent to any emancipation strategy. He wrote that emancipation “presents not a question of profit and loss, but the sundering of a tie in which the best and purest affections are deeply implicated. It imports the surrender of friendships the most devoted, the most enduring, the most valuable.” Emancipation would “break up that beautiful system of domestic harmony, which, more than anything else, foreshadows the blissful state in which love is to be the only law, and love the only sanction, and love the supreme bliss of all.” Tucker warned that emancipation would also unleash a virulent racism that would poison the relationship between the races. Once emancipated, blacks would lose the “community of interests” with whites and would enter into a “conflict of interests” with them. There would be no friendship possible between the races except through “exemplary virtue.” Racial peace would be tenuous and would “perish in a moment on the failure of any one of the innumerable conditions essential to its existence.” Whites and blacks would be thrust into a relationship in which there was a “total want of sympathy” between them. Moral progress for both whites and blacks would end. In the second part of the address, Tucker examined slavery in regard to . Tucker, “Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” –. . Ibid., –.
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political happiness in the modern world. He insisted that “order, harmony, tranquility, and security” contributed to a good state and society. If slavery could be proven to aid the components of political happiness, then it could be justified morally well beyond the effects it had on masters and slaves. In the modern world, he noted, class conflict most directly threatened political happiness and made the job of government more serious. Industrialization had concentrated wealth in the hands of a few while simultaneous demands for democratization sought to extend “equal political rights and functions in every member of the community from the highest to the lowest.” “All experience has shown that the more powerful class will sacrifice the interests of the weaker, whenever its own can be advanced by doing so,” he maintained. He believed that the danger to society came not from the rich but from the more numerous, poorer lower classes. An aristocracy, he wrote, would not be inclined to fleece the poor through government power because such actions would not add significantly to their wealth. The opposite scenario would produce different results. “The temptation,” he asserted, “to a hungry multitude, armed with political authority, to gorge themselves with the superfluities of the rich would be such as human nature cannot be expected to resist.” The situation of the modern West was, therefore, precarious. If there was a large neglected lower class in society, another French Revolution could transpire. If the lower class was given political rights that were respected by the upper class, then a benevolent empire like Great Britain could result. Tucker disliked both radicalism and authoritarian government. He believed that slavery could produce the best solution to class conflict in the United States by reintroducing a common purpose to society. Tucker did not believe that constitutions, private property, or strong government could address the dilemma of modern society. Like Randolph and John Taylor, Tucker understood that the major problem of constitutional government lay in who interpreted the constitution. He wrote that there was “no such check on the abuse of constitutional authority by the more numerous class.” The democratization of Western politics meant that demagogues would arise and would “profess to make the greatest good of the greatest number the sole object of all their legislation, and . . . proclaim an irreconcilable war of the poor against the rich.” He similarly . Ibid., –.
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rejected the proposal that property owners could be given special rights in an attempt to buttress the conservative element in society. Such a solution, Tucker explained, only ignored the reality of the French Revolution, which destroyed property through mob action, and the reality of encroaching democracy. Under democracy “the property of the rich” would become “the prey of the poor” and “would lose half its value from a sense of insecurity.” Furthermore, “the motives to industry would be lost, and all those innumerable evils would ensue, for which men could never find a remedy but under the dominion of a Despot.” Trusting in property in a democratic world could end in the despotism of numbers. Others wished for a strong or repressive conservative government to halt the radicalism of the mob by reemploying the traditional social order in places where it had atrophied. The problem with this solution was that it could easily become too authoritarian and end up denying the freedom that modern people enjoyed. For Tucker slavery was the best answer that he could provide for the modern dilemma. In a slave society, freedom was greatly valued and appreciated. “The existence of slavery in a community will always keep alive a jealous passion for liberty in the lowest class of those who are not slaves,” he insisted. Through enslaving the laboring class, modern men could maintain freedom and prevent radicalism from destroying society. Tucker did not want to “introduce domestic slavery” into a country to prevent the modern dilemma, but believed that the slave South had an opportunity to combine “Order and Freedom” in an effective way. He believed that slavery strengthened the republican order found in the South. Like other republicans and Romantics, he was interested in promoting a common interest in society and in encouraging a form of self-government free of oppressive outside interference. Slavery allowed Tucker both options. By using the racial dimension of southern slavery, he hoped to create a broad interest among white citizens—the perpetuation of slavery and . Ibid., –. Jesse Carpenter contended that the South trusted constitutional guarantees until the s. This was true for neither Tucker nor John Randolph, however. Both men protested that democracy would kill constitutionalism. Tucker seemed to appeal to constitutionalism when it suited his interests, but like the anti-Federalists, he believed that only a homogenous community could govern itself constitutionally without resorting to tyranny or giving way to usurpations of power. See The South as a Conscious Minority, – . . Tucker, “Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” .
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racial subordination of blacks. A single, shared interest could mold the southern people into a strong, unified political force. Slavery also allowed for active participation in communal self-government. By policing slaves, white citizens exercised their right to keep and bear arms and resembled the Country party. Society, not government, kept discipline and meted out justice on a daily basis. The basic protection of law gave slaves some dignity and prevented the worst abuses associated with communal rule. Slavery thus provided for the conservative self-government promised by the American Revolution. Tucker seemed not to have been bothered by his exclusion of blacks from the benefits of republican government. Racism and a belief in inequality allowed him to celebrate slavery as a means of freedom for southern white society. He rooted his apology in southern society, in republican and conservative ideology, and in the promise of the American experience. Tucker hoped that slavery could temper democracy. He believed that slavery would “make it safe to extend the political privileges of the people,” even to the point of universal suffrage. In a slave society the “temptation of the lower classes to abuse political power would be much diminished, and the presence of a class lower than all, and more numerous than all, of a different race, and requiring equally the concert and cooperation of all for its safe control and management, would be a prominent point on which all other classes would act together in a common spirit and in perfect harmony.” Economic and social diversity within the white community became harmless if all whites possessed a broad common purpose. Tucker thought that slavery promoted the freehold suffrage too. Because the poorest members of society were enslaved, the free citizens would often be property owners. Voters would have an interest in preserving social order. Because of slavery “the poor man . . . is not ashamed to manifest his gratitude to a wealthy benefactor, by a devoted attachment to his person, and a sense of his private virtues by readiness to commit to him the functions of public office.” Slavery upheld deference and meritocracy. Slavery, along with the freehold suffrage, would remove the influence of wealth from . Ibid., , . See also George M. Fredrickson, “Aristocracy and Democracy in the Southern Tradition,” in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., eds., The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, –. Fredrickson addresses the idea of white supremacy muting class conflict among whites in the Old South, an idea Tucker endorsed.
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elections. The rich could no longer buy the votes of the “rabble” because under slavery the rabble, who were all enslaved, could not vote. The great number of small, independent property owners would resist the corrupting bribery of the rich and form a strong voting bloc against legislation designed to benefit the wealthy alone. Slavery also solved for Tucker the problem of subordination and freedom within society. He believed that in free societies “the sovereign will” of the people needed some restraint in order to preserve their free institutions “without annihilating the freedom they are meant to secure.” The solution to the problem lay in the realm of virtue. Tucker, however, rejected a too rigorous form of virtue as being ridiculous. “The Spartans,” he wrote, “preserved their political liberty by condemning themselves to discipline as stern as that of the most rigorous personal slavery.” Such “absurdity” negated the benefits of freedom. While individuals possessed a responsibility to act morally and virtuously, society could help establish public virtue. By enslaving the working class, generally inferior in moral and intellectual virtue, society used coercion on its greatest threat, vicious people, while preserving freedom and communal self-government for the free population. Society used force on its slaves but left the Constitution free from coercive measures toward freemen. Tucker did not argue that all free citizens would be models of virtue, but he hoped that by removing freedom from the potentially most vicious members of society, he could create an environment in which modern freedom could be exercised longer and with better effects. Tucker, addressing the South, concluded: “You have, moreover, a constitution of society, which makes the tasks of Government easy, leaving no pretext to ambition, and no motive to misrule. Preserve that, and you will find no difficulty in preserving the institutions bequeathed by your ancestors, and in perpetuating a form of Government under which all are free, and none so free as those the world calls slaves.” A progressive slave society, therefore, was Tucker’s cure for the destruction of traditional institutions caused by the French Revolution and Enlightenment ideologies and for the problems of American society and government. . Tucker, “Caucasian Master and the African Slave,” . See Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Course of the South to Secession: VI, The Fire-Eaters,” –. Phillips stressed that the Fire-Eaters tried to protect both slavery and self-government simultaneously through secession. They also believed, he noted, that slavery helped to preserve self-government, the same point Tucker made.
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R Simms interpreted slavery in light of his views about society and progress. In Simms penned a hostile review of Harriet Martineau’s Society in America in the Southern Literary Messenger. He defended slavery against Martineau’s attacks and mischaracterizations. The review was an instant success, being reprinted in pamphlet form in and revised and republished in The Morals of Slavery in . Simms regarded slavery as a conservative, historical institution that remained essential for the South’s hope for a traditional yet progressive society. Simms was a racist. His understanding of racial hierarchy lay at the center of his discussion of slavery. Whites occupied the top position of the racial hierarchy by means of moral and social superiority. Blacks were an “inferior race,” and Simms viewed American Indians as even lower on the racial ladder. Simms’s view of mulattos revealed his racial theory well. He wrote, “The result of illicit intercourse between the differing races, is the production of a fine specimen of physical manhood, and of a better mental organization, in the mulatto.” He noted that in a “few generations” the color of the mulatto would be “effectually removed.” When “the eye ceases to be offended, the mind of the white will no longer be jealous, and that of the colored person will gradually approximate to the general capacity, the inflexible courage, and directness of purpose, which, at present, constitute the moral difference between the two people.” For Simms racial differences rested on moral qualities, social prejudices, and the conditions of black culture. Simms measured the progress of the races through their public morality and their ability to create stable, civilized societies. The Indians, he argued, had not progressed since their contact with whites. They “have built no house of sufficient comfort or importance to be occupied by two successive generations,” he added. “Their towns,” he held, “if the collections of filthy wigwams in which they fester and breed vermin, may be called towns—are few, far between, and the men seldom in them.” Indians treated their women as “drudges” and abused them horribly. While the Indians did have admirable qualities, in particular their heroism in battle and their . See Larry Tise, Proslavery for a review of the scholarship on proslavery writers. . Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” .
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devotion to fight for their survival, they were inferior to the blacks of Virginia and Carolina who had learned a settled lifestyle. Simms concluded with a principle he used to justify African slavery: “The inferior people must fly from the presence, or perish before the march of approaching civilization.” Simms portrayed the enslavement of black Africans as a means of progress for their race. The African, like the American Indian, was “destined . . . to final obliteration, unless rescued from incapacity and sloth by the coercive vigor of some conquering race, which shall compel him to the work of self-development.” Slavery, therefore, was necessary for progress. Slavery taught blacks that “they cannot improve until they learn to labor.” By forcing the wandering African tribesman to become stationary, slavery had taught blacks the “home secret” and vastly improved their morals. Simms saw little wrong with the principle of slavery. “He is a slave only,” he wrote, “who is forced into a position in society below the claims of his intellect.” The inferior intellects of black Africans momentarily fitted them for servitude. As the superior people conquered and educated the inferior, they gathered their reward from the labor of the inferior race. Simms believed that it was the “duty . . . of civilization” to subdue uncivilized peoples, to “compel their labor,” and to “teach them the arts of economy and providence.” Civilization “must conquer, or she will perish.” Simms added that civilization’s “sway is the more gentle, and as she conquers only to improve, while the savage only conquers to destroy, it follows, inevitably, that her’s [sic] is the only legitimate conquest, and every other is but tyranny.” “Every primitive nation,” he added, “has been subjected to long periods of bondage,” but “they have all been elevated and improved by its [slavery’s] tasks and labors.” Slavery was “simply a process of preparation for an improved and improving condition, to work out” a people’s “moral deliverance.” Simms firmly believed that the “negro slave of Carolina” would eventually “be raised to a condition, which will enable him to go forth out of bondage.” Southerners may not recognize the time for freedom or may fight freeing their slaves, but they had to acknowledge that moral progress would eventually raise blacks from the inferior moral status and bestow freedom upon them. . Ibid., . . Simms, Self-Development, . Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” –.
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Because Simms believed that the interaction among the races furthered moral progress, he rejected the concept that a homogeneous population was the basis for republican government. He hinted that perhaps “the very homogeneousness of a people is adverse to the most wholesome forms of liberty.” Homogeneity “may make a selfish people . . . a successful people; but it can never make them, morally a great one.” He thought that liberty, “which prompts us to love justice for its own sake, requires strange admixtures of differing races.” A heterogeneous society would bring about “the combination and comparison of the knowledge which each has separately arrived at” and would lead to the union of true principles “after that subjection on the part of the inferior class, which compels them to a knowledge of what is possessed by the superior.” Simms gave the example of the Norman conquest of the “Saxon boors” that produced “one of the most perfect specimens of physical and moral organization which the world has ever known,” the Englishman. In addition, “insulated communities” usually degenerated over time and disappeared. Simms warned southerners not to exclude the black African slave from southern culture. Slavery served as an instrument of moral progress not only for blacks but also for whites. Simms, therefore, refused to acknowledge that slavery was immoral. It was a positive good and a necessary aspect of civilization. He argued that Miss Martineau’s (and the abolitionists’) listing of the abuses that occurred under slavery failed to condemn the institution itself. All the abuses of slavery did not negate the positive essence of slavery. Simms called for an end to the abuse of slaves, which he acknowledged as a real and serious problem. Too many slaveholders “made their slaves the victims and the instruments alike, of the most licentious passions.” Simms concluded, “Regarding our slaves as a dependent and inferior people, we are their natural and only guardians; and to treat them brutally, whether by wanton physical injuries, or by a neglect, or perversion of their morals, is not more impolitic than it is dishonorable.” The master, he stressed, had an interest in “the life and health of his slave,” usually preventing what Simms considered immoral exploitation. Simms used the antiquity of the institution of slavery as another defense of its morality. Slavery had been used throughout history, and he re. Simms, “Miss Martineau on Slavery,” . . Ibid., .
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garded it “as constituting one of the most essential agencies, under the divine plan, for promoting the general progress of civilization.” Slavery violated no divine law. “Negro Slavery,” he wrote in , “is one of the greatest of moral goods & blessings.” Slavery, he added, “in all ages has been found the greatest and most admirable agent of Civilization.” For Simms slavery linked the South to the great civilizations of the West, particularly ancient Greece and Rome, which owned slaves. The South simply continued the tradition of the West in civilizing the world. Linking the South to history gave meaning to the quest of southerners like Simms for moral progress, education, the arts, and civilization. Instead of perceiving the South as a provincial outpost of the Western World, Simms saw his region as a rising star of moral progress in the storied greatness of the Western tradition. Slaveholders, far from being the despised tyrants of abolitionist literature, were “the great moral conservators . . . of the entire world.” Simms illustrated his view of slavery in his novels, most thoroughly in his Revolutionary War novel Woodcraft, published in . In a letter to James Henry Hammond, he quipped that the novel was “probably as good an answer to Mrs. Stowe as has been published,” referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although Simms probably did not write Woodcraft with Stowe’s work in mind, he used the novel to illustrate the development of southern society after the Revolution and the role slavery played in the South. The book tells the story of Captain Porgy, a corpulent soldier-philosopher, returning home from the war, in which he had served as a partisan. Porgy finds his old plantation largely in ruins and some of his slaves stolen by an unscrupulous merchant/politician. Woodcraft portrayed slavery much as earlier Simms novels had. Drawing upon his themes of racial inferiority, moral progress, and social hierarchy, Simms depicted the southern plantation as a family of white masters and black slaves. Simms portrayed most slaves as childlike and dull. The slaves in Woodcraft . Ibid., . Simms to John Pendleton Kennedy, April , , Letters, vol. , . Simms also expressed a common view of slavery among southern conservatives, including his friend Beverley Tucker, that slavery in the South reconciled “the great problem now threatening all Europe, and all the North,—the struggle between capital and labor.” He noted, “Our labor is our capital.” Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , Letters, vol. , –. . Simms to James Henry Hammond, December , , Letters, vol. , –.
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slept through danger, lacking the awareness of their moral duty to protect the home. Slaves also lacked ingenuity. In the beginning of the book, a number of slaves are captured by slave traders working for the fleeing British army. Although some slaves escape capture, the slave stealers easily take most. As Captain Porgy and his men stumble upon a few slaves who had managed to escape, the relieved slaves quickly lead the partisans to apprehend the thieves. Simms commented, “The negro guides did their duty with the exactness and promptitude of persons who knew exactly what was required of them, and what was the object of the arrangement.” The slaves had done nothing to help their cause until the whites showed up to direct them. In a similar fashion, Porgy’s slaves who had fled to the woods to escape capture by the British were elated to see Porgy return and resume his duties as master on the plantation. Simms wrote, “The negroes, glad once more to find themselves in possession of a homestead, certain provisions, and the protection of a white man, have worked with a hearty will and cheerfulness which have amply made up for lost time.” Simms depicted some slaves as more dependable and trustworthy than others. In Woodcraft Porgy’s slave Tom was the closest to attaining his freedom through moral progress. Tom served as a sort of body servant to Porgy. He accompanied his master during the war and served as the camp cook for the partisans. Well known for his delicious stews and treasured for his culinary ability, Tom occupied a special place among the partisans. Porgy trusted Tom, at times even arming him. Tom also trained younger slaves to perform their duties around the house and kitchen. Though Porgy does not view Tom as an equal, the lighthearted banter between the two men differs from the more commanding tone Porgy uses with the rest of his slaves. At the end of Woodcraft, Porgy, grateful for Tom’s faithful service, offers to free him, but Tom refuses. “Ef I doesn’t b’long to you, you b’longs to me,” exclaims Tom. He tells Porgy that he enjoys fixing meals for him and enjoys having a benevolent master. He continues, “I’s well off whar’ I is I tell you; and I much rudder [rather] b’long to good maussa, wha’ I lub, dan be my own maussa and quarrel wid mese’f ebbry day.” In short, Tom rejects the independence and risk associated with freedom and . Simms, Woodcraft, , , . On Woodcraft and the place of slavery in the book see James B. Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Simms’s Woodcraft,” in “Long Years of Neglect,” –. Mary Ann Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, –. . Simms, Woodcraft, . The scene in Woodcraft relates a very different message from Simms’s earlier thoughts on emancipation. He wrote in his article “Miss Martineau on
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thus chooses to retain his inferior status. Tom views his enslavement as a symbiotic relationship. He provides Porgy with good food, and Porgy provides him with protection, security, and care. In the end, Tom prefers to preserve the family relationship, an attitude Simms hoped all slaves possessed. Simms contrasted two views of slavery and race in Woodcraft: the overtly racist views of the overseer Millhouse and the progressive view held by Porgy. Millhouse states his philosophy of race bluntly: “The difference between a white man and a nigger, or an Ingin, is that a white man was made to gather substance about him, and a nigger and an Ingin was made to waste it . . . . The Ingin was born to clear the woods of the varmints for us; and the nigger to clean up after we’ve eaten.” Millhouse’s theory is inflexible and does not factor in moral progress. Furthermore, Simms portrays his ideas as driven by avarice. When Porgy discovers a community of his slaves living in the woods for safety, he welcomes them back to the plantation warmly and with genuine care. Millhouse, on the other hand, thinks only of how fast he can get them to work in the fields. Millhouse’s utilitarianism regarding the slaves leads him to protest the slaves’ hunting coons at night, one of their favorite pastimes. He complains that the slaves would be tired the next day and would not work. Likewise he protests to Porgy during the celebration of a wedding involving one of the partisans that the slaves should not be dancing and carousing. Millhouse regards the slaves’ presence at the wedding as an “infraction of the laws” of the plantation and wants to punish them for “insubordination.” Simms reveals Millhouse’s attitudes as inhumane and retrogressive. Blinded by greed, Millhouse Slavery”: “Of late dates some arbitrary laws have been passed in Carolina, which forbid the citizens to free their slaves. I do not approve of these laws myself, but they have their advocates among the majority; and reasons of policy are given in their behalf, which are imposing enough, if not altogether sound” (). Simms then remarks that the laws should be repealed. In , in light of the sectional situation, Simms did not think that emancipation was a wise topic to discuss. Miriam J. Shillingsburg, a Simms scholar, in “The Influence of Sectionalism on the Revisions in Simms’ Revolutionary Romances,” –, does not see much evidence that Simms placed the political concerns of the moment into his fiction. This may have been true during the s, but in terms of Woodcraft it is obvious that political concerns did play a major role in the story. . Simms, Woodcraft, , . This distinction brings to mind George Frederickson’s distinction between the aristocratic proslavery arguments and the Herrenvolk proslavery arguments. See The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, –. On Millhouse as a utilitarian and a character with which Simms did not agree, see Charles S. Watson, “Simms’s Answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Criticism of the South in Woodcraft,” –. Moffitt Cecil, “Simms’s Porgy as National Hero,” .
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has no understanding of the duty of the white race to be moral guardians of their inferior brothers, the black race. Captain Porgy is more judicious and progressive in his theory of race. He is an indulgent and generous master. Whereas Millhouse wants to prevent the slaves from having fun, Porgy realizes that because they are human beings, the slaves must have recreation. Porgy also respects his Mammy and cares for her in her old age. He sees his slaves as entrusted to him by God. Thus he looks after their needs and encourages good moral behavior. Childlike slaves lacked “foresight and forethought,” and thus Porgy had to ensure their future security as if they were his own children. Porgy sees the world as a hierarchy and his plantation as “an ancient settlement” where society had organically grown, linking black slaves and their white master inextricably in a common pursuit of moral progress. For Simms, Porgy exemplified everything that a planter should be: generous, civilized, honorable, and, above all, patriarchal and paternalistic.
R Though southern historians have argued about the strength of southern nationalism, the formation of the Confederate States of America in proved that southern nationalism did exist and was a strong force. Nationalism is the desire for self-government on the basis of a perceived common identity. Benedict Anderson has noted that nationalism can best be described as an “imagined political community,” a myth, an artificial concept. Nationalists envision the nation as a community united in certain traits, ideas, blood, government, and principles. Although nationalism posits a bond among fellow members of the nation, in reality the “members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Anderson maintained that nationalists’ obsession with unity and corresponding panic at the specter of disunity causes them to ignore real differences within the defined nation. Nationalists appropriate the myth of a united community as a means to stress and enforce loyalty to the nation. . Simms, Woodcraft, , . For more on Simms’s paternalistic view of slavery see Faust, A Sacred Circle, . . For the scholarship on southern nationalism, see the appendix. . Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, –. See also Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism. Gilbert discusses
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Tucker and Simms became southern nationalists and struggled to define a common southern identity. Tucker used the Puritan-Cavalier myth to argue that American identity began in Britain. Simms also promoted the Puritan-Cavalier myth, but saw southern identity linked to the history of Western civilization. As nationalists, both men perceived history to be important, especially the history of the American Revolution. Tucker’s stress on tradition fleshed out his ideal southern community. Simms, more realistically, saw that southern identity was linked to agriculture and slavery. The nationalism of Tucker and Simms shows that they participated in the broader intellectual currents of the nineteenth century. Like many antebellum southerners, Tucker believed that the United States was divided culturally between the descendants of the Puritans in New England and of the Cavaliers in Virginia. Tucker admired certain aspects of the Puritan legacy but usually associated Puritans with disloyalty and fanaticism. New England had absorbed Puritan culture. Just as the Puritans supported Oliver Cromwell and the Protectorate after the English Civil War, New Englanders endorsed political centralization and the trampling of the Constitution. English Puritans engaged in radical parliamentarian politics during the seventeenth century, and nineteenth-century New Englanders reveled in fanatical social movements such as the abolition of slavery. The other colonies, particularly Virginia, “had no part” of Puritan culture. Instead, Virginia had been settled by the “gallant Cavaliers,” who “had poured out their blood like water in loyal devotion to an undeserving prince” during the English Civil War. The Cavaliers served King Charles I faithfully until his execution in and then supported his son, the future Charles II, “in defiance of the parliament of England,” as the rightful ruler. Virginia adopted the culture of the Cavaliers who settled there. Virginians in the mid-seventeenth century “had defied Cromwell in the plenitude of his power” and had kept alive the English constitution in the face of the usurpations of the Long Parliament. Tucker thought different theories of nationalism including the one used here. The school of thought represented by Anderson believes that nationalism is subjective and necessitates self-consciousness to function as a unifying factor. See also David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” . . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Tucker, The Partisan Leader, . See also Tucker, Review of vol. , George Bancroft, “A History of the United States,” . For broader treatments of the Puritan-Cavalier myth see William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee.
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that the antipathy between the Puritans and Cavaliers in England had been transferred to American soil and served as an impetus for the present sectional conflict in the United States. The Cavaliers transported to Virginia unique cultural traits such as “chivalrous gallantry, all the self-renouncing generosity, all the unwavering fidelity to plighted faith, to which they had sacrificed everything at home.” For Tucker the unique Cavalier heritage of Virginia revealed itself in the southern code of honor. In politics, honor manifested itself in fidelity to the true meaning of the Constitution and an opposition to all usurpations of power. In social relations, honor revealed itself in gender roles. Virginians treated women with respect, honored their word, and conducted themselves with good manners. Tucker portrayed the values of New England culture as the antithesis of the Virginia cultural ethic of honor. He warned his students at William and Mary College that if they renounced honorable conduct at the college, the school “must be given over to prying Yankee pedagogues.” The Yankees possessed no honor, nor did they trust the word of a gentleman. Instead, the Yankees would send “spies” among the students to catch immoral behavior, an affront to any independent man of honor. Tucker also insisted that Cavalier honor placed a high regard on women and carved out a special place for them in the privacy of the home. The public realm was the place for gentlemen. Yankees dishonored women by making them face the crass nature of public life. In The Partisan Leader, Mr. B—-, Tucker’s mouthpiece, argues: “A woman, exposed to notoriety, learns to bear and then to love it. When she gets to that, she should go north; write books; patronize abolition societies; or keep a boarding-school. She is no longer fit to be the wife of a Virginia gentleman.” By following the ethic of honor, Virginians would maintain an organic link to their gallant forbearers and remain joined to present Virginia’s community of gentlemen. For Tucker, Virginia was the mother of the South and “the Virginian is a Virginian every where.” “In the wilds of the west,” he asserted, “on the sands of Florida, on the shores of the Pacific—everywhere his heart turns to Virginia—every where he worships with his face . Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, “Judge Tucker’s Address,” . . Tucker, “Judge Tucker’s Address,” . See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor. Tucker, The Partisan Leader, .
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toward the temple of freedom erected here.” Those who remained in Virginia should, noted Tucker, “minister at the altar,” “feed the flame,” “and, if need be . . . supply the sacrifice.” “Do this,” he concluded, “and Virginia will again be recognized as the mother of nations; as the guide and exemplar of the states that have sprung from her bosom, and been nourished by her substance.” Virginians, by living as honorable gentlemen, spread their culture. Cavalier culture held the key to freedom for the rest of the southern states—those which had been “nourished” by Virginia. Tucker hoped that the cultural separation of New England and Virginia could produce a self-conscious awareness among southerners of their cultural superiority. Then they might push for the cultural independence of Virginia in the form of a southern Cavalier nation. Tucker indicated that tradition and memory were important aspects of southern culture. The word “tradition” comes from the Latin traditio, meaning, “to hand down.” Tucker, like Burke, believed that culture was linked to the past through tradition, which transmitted a common vision from preceding generations. Tradition gave a sense of an organic community. Tucker at times paraphrased Burke’s famous quotation on the organic nature of society. Society, noted Tucker, was “bound together in one great permanent co-partnership of generation with generation; of the living with the dead, and with those who are yet unborn; in which the wisdom of each is the wisdom of all.” The organic nature of society not only included institutions and families, but also a common mind, the common intellectual inheritance. According to Tucker, tradition obliged the individual to join himself with both the past and the future. The individual had the duty both to receive the common inheritance and to hand it down to the next generation. Tradition, therefore, was a living concept. He wrote: “Thus it is, that in celebrating the virtues and achievements of our ancestors, we perform a duty, not only to the illustrious dead, but to ourselves and our posterity. It is a duty which brings its own reward in its chastening, purifying, and humbling, yet elevating and ennobling influence on our hearts.” Tradition involved remembering the past and possessing a self-conscious awareness of culture. The duty of tradition “teaches us to . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” . Jay Hubbell, “Literary Nationalism in the Old South,” in David Kelley Jackson, ed., American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd, .
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prize our rights at the full value of the sacrifice they cost: it renews the love of liberty in our bosoms; and, above all, we are encouraged to feel that all the obstacles to success in a good cause must go down before the concentrated energy of a people resolved to live free or die.” Southerners, according to Tucker, had to pay close attention to the history of the American Revolution and Founding. States’ rights, anti-Federalist principles, and republicanism constituted the South’s intellectual patrimony. In his writings, Tucker repeatedly invoked the “fathers” of the South, in particular Patrick Henry, George Washington, and, when it suited his argument, James Madison. He hoped that southerners would recognize the wisdom of their ancestors and recover their rich intellectual inheritance. Tucker focused on the meaning of the Revolution and linked it to the Glorious Revolution. In Virginians had acted as good Whigs, as they had in . During the American Revolution, Virginia “had not dishonored her old renown.” Although she was “foremost in the race of revolution,” Virginia “had been the last to renounce her allegiance.” In her “resolute fidelity to the crown,” Virginia “saw a justification of her resistance to the usurpation of parliament and her final renunciation of that relation to the king himself, to which he, by abetting that usurpation, had shown himself unfaithful.” Thus Virginia’s resistance was not a promotion of modern radicalism, but an act of cultural preservation. Virginia’s Cavaliers revolted in to protest the usurpation of power and the death of the old constitution. Echoing Edmund Burke’s praise of the Glorious Revolution of as an act of restoration, Tucker saw the Virginia patriots of as reaffirming the validity of constitutional government and the primacy of honor. According to Tucker, Virginia’s worthy heritage did not come from either great numbers of settlers or excessive wealth “but by intellectual pre-eminence—by moral worth—by magnanimous and self renouncing devotion to the common weal.” Virginians were, therefore, the true Americans, and Virginia rightly occupied “the first place in this vast confederacy,” Tucker exclaimed. Memory of the past provided a prescription for present action. Tucker used his appeals to tradition in order to invoke a southern na. Tucker, “Political Science,” , . . Tucker, “A Discourse on the Genius of the Federative System of the United States,” .
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tion. He insisted in that southerners were “conservatives and republicans” and were “conservative because we are republican.” He mentioned that the “best hope of discovering that scheme of things which will most conduce to the permanent welfare of society, depends upon the relinquishment of some present advantages, as the price of stability and security for those that we retain.” The good society required change and adaptation in order to retain its effectiveness. Tucker was not a millenialist or utopian. He rejected the possibility of a perfect society, but believed that progress could be made through reform of government and society. For example, Tucker perceived that the Virginia Constitution served as a model of good government, but that the condition of the Union made it difficult for Virginians to live out their tradition. Therefore, in order to conserve the tradition of self-government, they had to secede and form a southern confederacy. Tucker did not view his southern nation as a reactionary political body either. The southern confederacy, he hoped, would embrace both modern commerce and modern freedom as means to preserve traditional principles. According to Tucker, a slave society and an independent southern nation would bring the best of modern freedom to white southerners and would serve to protect the Virginia tradition.
R Like Randolph, Taylor, and Tucker, Simms professed both national patriotism and sectional loyalty simultaneously. Whereas some historians and literary critics have perceived a shift in Simms’s thought in the late s that explains his secessionist views, Simms’s ideas do not seem to have changed drastically. In many ways, his thought reveals the hazy demarcation between national and state loyalty in southern conservative thought. Simms’s thought did not so much shift as it adapted the events of the s to conservative principles he had long held. “The Southern people form a nation,” Simms insisted in . By he believed that the South, through secession, could realize its nationhood. In the new southern nation, the confederacy would explicitly protect “minorities, or feeble States” from the oppression of the majority and would spell out in a new . Tucker, [Review of ] “The History of England, from the accession of James II: by Thomas Babington Macaulay,” . See also Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Cause of the South to Secession: VI, The Fire-Eaters,” –. Tucker, “A Lecture on Government,” .
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constitution the principle of secession as a means to prevent future oppression of the states. Simms noted, “The wrongs we have suffered from the North are a thousand-fold more offensive, dangerous and degrading than any we ever suffered at the hands of Great Britain in ; and, longer to submit to them, would only prove us capable of any baseness.” The distinct southern people must prove themselves to be hardy, independent republicans like their forefathers. Simms believed that the southern people shared characteristics that would forge them into a nation. He compared southerners to the ancient Spartans, not on account of their harsh military virtue but because of the agricultural tradition. “Our agricultural population is of stern, simple, Spartan character,” he wrote. Southerners were “calm” and “determined.” “They feel the necessity which coerces them; and they will ask, not what is to be said, but what should be done,” he explained. Southerners, because of the effects of agriculture, were “a loyal people, tenacious of [their] habits, usages, and traditions.” Thus the conflict between North and South was similar to the clash between Athens and Sparta in classical Greece. Simms noted that the aggressions of Athens upon Sparta were similar to those committed by the North upon the South. He commented that “the commercial aggressions of the Athenians . . . upon the agricultural states, and the continued exaction & appropriation by Athens, of the subsidies raised by the agricultural states for their defense against the Persians (our Tariff engendered by the necessities occasioned by the War with Britain of ) drove the Lacedaemonians to the necessity of arming against & destroying Athens.” The “constant aggressions” of Athens roused Sparta, and it “subdued & crushed Athens forever.” Simms concluded that the “events of the world . . . come round periodically” and that the North had driven the South “to the wall.” The response, Simms hoped, would be the liberation of the agricultural South from the North. By connecting the South to . Simms, The Morals of Slavery, . Simms to William Porcher Miles, November , , Letters, vol. , . Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , ibid., . Jon Wakelyn in The Politics of a Literary Man and Charles S. Watson in From Nationalism to Secessionism believe Simms changed his views over time. For scholars who see consistency in Simms’s views, see John C. Guilds, “Simms’s Views on National and Sectional Literature, –,” –. William Lamar Cawthon, Jr., “The Mother Land: The Southern Nationalism of William Gilmore Simms,” –. . Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , Letters, vol. , , . Simms to James Henry Hammond, January , , ibid., .
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classical Greece, Simms placed southern civilization squarely within the broader tradition of Western history. In addition to historical precedents, the agricultural South shared common interests that could bind the disparate southern states into a nation. First, Simms acknowledged that the “great object” for the South in its sectional struggle was independence. He noted about the South, “We only need to be firm, to be independent, and only need to be Independent to be the most prosperous nation of the Earth.” After secession, however, other concerns arose. Simms wrote to South Carolina fire-eater William Porcher Miles in that “our future secret of safety & success must depend wholly upon the homogeneity of our society & institutions.” Homogeneity of interests would flow from a unified society and conservative social vision. He maintained that “unanimity among our [South Carolina’s] citizens will always give them unconquerable strength.” For Simms a southern nationalist vision went beyond an “imagined community” of myth and symbol to real interests that could materially unite the vast territory of the southern states. He believed that two issues provided a means of unity for the South: slavery and free trade. Simms not only regarded slavery as a great moral blessing to the South and an opportunity to participate in the Divine plan of progress for mankind but also viewed it as a national blessing for the southern Confederacy. He wrote that the “Southern States are welded together by the one grand cohesive institution of slavery.” The northern states, however, had no such common economic and social interest. He noted: “What binds the North together? Pennsylvania, New York & New England, are all deadly rivals, in the same occupations, for the trade of the South. We have them all at our mercy.” In his criticism, Simms repeated the republican dichotomy of agriculture and commerce, not to denigrate trade, but to show the benefits agriculture could have for the southern nation. Commercial society produced a proliferation of interests that endangered the prospects for economic and national unity. Although Simms often complained about the limits of an agricultural society in the realm of culture, he recognized its strengths in terms of fostering unity. . Simms to James Henry Hammond, January , , ibid., . Simms to William Porcher Miles, February , , ibid., , . Simms, History of South Carolina, . . Simms to John Jacob Bockee, December , , Letters, vol. , . Simms to James Lawson, November , , ibid., .
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Slavery could keep the South united and could lead to common goals. Simms realized that the South suffered divisions on important issues governing slavery. Discussions among the southern states in regard to the Confederate Constitution touched on slavery in issues of representation and the transatlantic slave trade. Simms argued that South Carolina politicians should resist firmly the efforts of border-state politicians to insert a three-fifths rule of representation into the new constitution. Such a clause “discredited our institution” under the federal Constitution of and should not be agreed upon to appease ambitious politicians in the upper South. He also wanted to reopen the African slave trade under the careful regulation of the new Confederate government. “The hostility of the Border States to the slave trade,” he maintained, was grounded partially on their desire to increase their representative power under a new three-fifths clause and on “their interest as slave breeders for the Cotton Market.” Once such divisions ended, the South could allow its common interest in slavery to determine its national destiny. Simms envisioned a slave empire in North and Central America. He insisted, “In process of time all Mexico is destined to be civilized through the medium of negro slavery.” National devotion to slavery necessitated expansion. If prevented from expanding due to political difficulties, the “Slave States will die inch by inch, upward, like the tail of a snake!” The South needed room to expand and to find better farmland for its agricultural society. A common interest in free trade further united the agricultural slave South. Because the slave economy worked to produce cash crops for foreign markets, southern states, which had suffered high tariffs for too long, could expand their wealth through free trade. Complaints about the tariff played a major role in antebellum politics, especially in South Carolina, and drove many southern conservatives to argue for independence on economic grounds. In Simms wrote to James Henry Hammond, “I myself . . . would go out of the Union with or of the Cotton States, on the simple ground that our relations are unprofitable, that our bargain is a bad one, that the tariff is sucking our substance, and that sooner or later, we shall be required to succumb, from mere exhaustion.” Interest was the major factor in the example of the tariff. The Union had failed to unite profitably the different interests in the Union. An independent slave . Simms to William Porcher Miles, February , , ibid., . Simms to James Henry Hammond, January , , ibid., .
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South would escape such a dilemma. Simms desired that the new southern Confederacy possess “the lowest possible amount of duties” in order to maximize trade. He also prescribed a policy of commercial discrimination against the North to preserve peace. He noted in December , “If vext, we shall discriminate against the North, in importations, and if blockaded, we will let loose a thousand privateers, under letters of Marque, and— England—must have our cotton.” “Peace,” he assured, “is the best policy for all parties.” Free trade, he insisted in the best tradition of the Enlightenment, could maintain both peace and prosperity for everyone. Like Tucker, Simms celebrated remembrance of history as critical to shaping a national southern culture. Like other nineteenth-century nationalists, Simms used history, particularly the history of the American Revolution, to demonstrate the peculiar characteristics of his nation, the South. He perceived history as an organic process that linked past, present, and future. The meaning of historical events lay both in objective philosophical truth, which was unconstrained by time, and in the subjective experience of history, which confined events within a certain context. One who rejected the objective philosophical truths of history failed to truly appreciate it, while the individual who rejected historical context in preference for philosophical truth became a raving ideologue. Simms most appreciated history for its practical and moral purposes, not for its attempts at scientific precision. For Simms, “the chief value of history consists in its proper employment for the purposes of art.” The artist was the “true historian” because he made the past come alive and interpreted the meaning of past events for the present. The artist united the “scattered fragments” of the past, endowed them “with life and action,” and produced meaning for the nation in its history. “It is by such artists, indeed, that nations live,” Simms maintained. The artist, by bringing national history to life, allowed people to think in terms of the nation. He presented a common vision to the people that could supply the opportunity for collective action. As the artist familiarized himself with the history of a nation, “he becomes a living and authentic witness of the past.” The artist, therefore, had an important national duty. . Simms to James Henry Hammond, August , , ibid., . Simms to William Porcher Miles, March , , . Simms to James Lawson, December , , ibid., . . Simms, Views and Reviews, –. Simms’s view of history was influenced by Romantic theory, especially that of Thomas Carlyle. On this point see C. Hugh Holman, introduction to Views and Reviews, vii–xxxvii. See also Stephen Meats, “Artist or Historian:
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Simms’s artist-historian was essentially a moralist. History taught morality through the human experiences of the past. “We care not so much for the intrinsic truth of history,” he added, “as for the great moral truths, which . . . induce excellence in the student.” Simms’s failure to distinguish between art and history and his emphasis on the social significance of history made the artist-historian essentially an ideologue. Simms described himself in such terms: “My novels aim at something more than the story. I am really, though indirectly, revising history.” He believed that the artist-historian’s work exercised “a sort of symbolical influence” upon the popular mind. He argued, “A national history, preserved by a national poet, becomes, in fact, a national religion.” He therefore tried to create both national and sectional memories through his literature. He hoped to shape culture and understanding. Simms, who had defined man as an artist, took the purpose of his life to be the creation and defense of a southern nation both in reality and in art. Conclusion Nationalism, concerns about slavery, and Burkean principles informed the social views of Tucker and Simms. Nationalism conveyed to them that a common social purpose which united the members of society would strengthen their communities and preserve their traditions. Art, literature, and education, the goals of both men, could strengthen this sense of nationalism. As Tucker wrote in , “We seek to imbue” our southern children “with the high, bold, manly morality of Old England, (not New England, or modern England).” He continued, “We teach our boys to walk by the light that was in the world sixty years ago, when the last shades of darkness had been dispelled by the flame kindled by the hearts of our William Gilmore Simms and the Revolutionary South,” in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth Century Florida and the Revolutionary South, –. Meaks proposed that Simms wanted a new historical novel that “would neither alter history . . . nor to a large extent ignore history . . . but would instead represent history accurately and authentically on both the formal and legendary levels” (). See also John C. Guilds, “Simms’s Use of History: Theory and Practice,” –. Daniel J. Ennis, “William Gilmore Simms and the Mexican War,” –. Ennis discusses Simms’s view of history in relation to his poetry. See also Clyde N. Wilson, “Tiger’s Meat: William Gilmore Simms and the History of the Revolution,” –. Wilson argues that Simms regarded history as an important part of encouraging civic duty. . Simms to John Reuben Thompson, February , , Letters, vol. , . Simms, Views and Reviews, , .
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Revolution.” Nationalism and tradition cemented southern identity. Tucker and Simms looked back to the Revolution as the most recent example of southern nobility and looked forward to the formation of a southern confederacy to realize such noble social purpose again. Both men perceived that slavery could help the process of creating social harmony and unity among whites. Slavery buttressed tradition. Finally, in their acceptance of Burke’s belief that society must be strengthened by a firm adherence to traditional order so to guard against the intrusiveness of the state, Tucker and Simms found themselves linked to John Randolph, who also realized the primacy of society. Nationalism, slavery, and traditional institutions allowed Tucker and Simms both to create (ideally) and shape southern society and to preserve traditional social relations and political structures. Their blending of these elements identified them not as premodern thinkers, but as modern Americans, people who sought stability and formed identity through conscious cultural constructions.
. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, review of The History of England, from the Accession of James II, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, .
even WHIG HUMORISTS Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper
8 Beginning with Augustus Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, published in , southwestern humor became a popular literary genre in the antebellum period. Humorous tales of life on the ever-expanding southwestern frontier appeared in northern sporting newspapers, in southern newspapers and literary journals, and in book format. The humorists attracted a nationwide audience, perhaps because their humor played on the theme of westward migration, an aspect of American life that affected thousands of people during the antebellum era. The humorists were a diverse group intellectually and politically. This section considers two important humorists, Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper. Some scholars of southwestern humor have described the body of literature as part of a tradition of literary realism. Others have even viewed southwestern humor as social history that described life on the frontier in the nineteenth century. Scholars have pointed to the graphic violence, sexual allusions, use of dialect, and actual historical settings of the stories to argue that the humorists portrayed an accurate view of the frontier. While southwestern humor certainly used realism, it was not social history, and the authors made no attempt to describe frontier society as it actually existed. The tales were an “image” of society, but not a “photograph” of it. In other words, the humorists distorted frontier society in order to make humorous and ideological points. Because humor “depends upon the juxtaposition of reality and fancy, both exaggerated for effect,” southwestern humor is not realistic in a historical sense. Southwestern humor depends . See W. Stanley Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper, –. For other views of southwestern humorists and Hooper as realists, see Franklin J. Meine, Introduction to Tall Tales of the Southwest: An Anthology of Southern and South-
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on the incongruity between frontier life and the civilized culture of established eastern communities. The humor implies a common cultural and social vision (not necessarily reality) of civilization and frontier. The scholar can thus detect the writer’s view of civilized life and his assumptions about his audience’s understanding of civilization. This reveals the social conventions and ideals behind the humor. Southwestern humor discusses the continuing American dilemma of balancing freedom with tradition, the unfettered life of the frontier with the demands of civilization. The humorists, particularly Baldwin and Hooper, often used satire to convey their ideas. The Augustan writers, so beloved by John Randolph, had popularized satire in the eighteenth century as a political weapon and as a form of social commentary. Baldwin and Hooper used satire in similar ways. One critic has defined satire as “a playfully critical distortion of the familiar.” Satire’s concern, therefore, is the real world, not a fantasy world or a utopia. Satirists use distortion and dissimulation to highlight certain faults of people or social institutions. The distortion of reality introduces disorder into the setting of the story. The conflict between pretense and reality allows the satirist to comment upon morality and proper principles. In most satire, the main character adopts the pretense that “he is always motivated by the ideal, the moral, the good” and “never by the actual, the immoral, the evil.” The satirist delights in unmasking reality to reveal the naïveté, hypocrisy, and ignorance of people. Therefore, satire “serves a function that the realist and romantic [writers] do not fulfill, by dramatizing and exaggerating objectionable qualities in man and society.” The moral lessons of satire are often ambiguous, however. Satire “does not always teach a moral lesson or offer a desirable alternative to the condition it criticizes.” Ultimately, satire is negative in its social vision and often discomforting to the reader. western Humor, –, xv–xxxii. Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain’s America. Edd Winfield Parks, “The Three Streams of Southern Humor,” –. Harry C. West, “Simon Suggs and His Similes,” –. Edgar E. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper: A Bibliographical Study of Primary and Secondary Material (With a Collection of Hooper’s Letters).” For humor as a kind of social history, see Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South, –. The quotations are from M. E. Bradford, review of With the Bark On: Popular Humor of the Old South, edited by John Q. Anderson, –. Jack Q. Anderson, “Scholarship in Southwestern Humor—Past and Present,” . . Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire, , , , .
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The figure of the confidence man played a large role in southwestern humor. Some scholars have identified Simon Suggs, Hooper’s protagonist, as the archetype for the confidence man, a character unique to American literature in the early nineteenth century. William Lenz argued that the figure of the confidence man was linked directly to the hopes and fears of the emerging frontier society. The confidence man embodied a specific motive, one that many frontier immigrants shared, “pursuit of personal profit.” To many Americans, the West symbolized not only change, opportunity, and potential, but also chaos. Southwestern humor reconciled “Americans to the s’ new country.” The confidence man was an antihero of society who personified “the ambiguities of the new country in a nonthreatening form.” He mirrored the very nature of the West. He offered “wealth, comfort, and success,” but once he was trusted, he pulled away these promises. Lenz believed that humor allowed Americans to laugh off the tensions created by the ambiguity of frontier society. Recent literary critics have explored the subversive aspects of southwestern humor. The theme of subversion was actually bandied about by nineteenth-century commentators. For example, William Garrett, a nineteenth-century Alabama Democratic politician, disliked Hooper greatly. He wrote, “The convivial habits which had been growing upon him for several years, increased no doubt by his defeat, terminated his life in , while he was comparatively in the vigor of his days.” Out of Hooper’s personal immorality, charged Garrett, flowed his immoral humor. “Thousands and tens of thousands of readers have laughed over it,” he noted, “and his grotesque situations and characters introduced; but probably not one of them all has had his reverence for virtue increased by the perusal.” Garrett thought that Hooper subverted morality by his behavior and his writings. Recent critics have agreed. Critics have linked satire and subversion in the works of some humorists, Hooper in particular. Arlin Turner and Willard Thorp both argued that the primary target for Hooper’s humor was the aristocracy of the South. These critics stressed the juxtaposition of chaos and order in his stories and showed how the characters of southwestern humor always vio. William Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention, , , . . William Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama for Thirty Years, –. Garrett has Hooper’s death date wrong.
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lated aristocratic values. Turner insisted that the humorists intentionally tried to offend aristocratic sensibilities in order to reveal the reality of their hypocrisy and pretentiousness. David S. Reynolds agreed that the humorists used satire to expose the hypocrisy of elites, but he noted that humorists also used it to make a democratic point that everyone was part of a single, often corrupt, mass of humanity. The humorists thought that democratic America tended to blur artificial social distinctions. The frontier proved to be a powerful, malleable image in their hands. They exaggerated the liberty of the frontier until it portrayed a “grotesque democratic carnival.” Reynolds saw little contrast between chaos and order in the works of the humorists. Instead, chaos always triumphed because there was no traditional order to halt the carnival. On the frontier, savage behavior openly challenged gentility and lacked the subtle deception of trickery in the East. Literary scholars have examined southwestern humor rigorously and thus have indicated the importance of the humorists in antebellum intellectual life. Because they dealt with an unstable frontier situation, the humorists were acutely aware of the differences between state and society. Baldwin and Hooper were members of the Whig Party and had migrated to Alabama during the s from the eastern seaboard. Their writings reveal the thought of an often-misunderstood group in southern intellectual history—the southern Whigs—and show the continuing problem of balancing liberty and tradition. Whigs believed that government had a broader role to play in society to establish order and to protect freedom. They linked freedom with order and showed that traditional societies could not keep order because they were either not yet created in the West or insufficient for the task. Yet Whigs also appreciated the need for tradition. Baldwin chose the legal profession as the means to balance liberty and tradition, while Hooper, during his career as a partisan newspaper publisher and author, selected southern nationalism as the answer to the same tension. In addition to their humor, Baldwin’s and Hooper’s Whig principles need to be examined.
R . Arlin Turner, “Seeds of Literary Revolt in the Humor of the Old Southwest,” –. Willard Thorp, “Suggs and Sut in Modern Dress: The Latest Chapter in Southern Humor,” –. David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, –.
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Henry Adams once declared, “Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.” Twentieth-century historians have debated Adams’s statement vigorously. As the literature on the second party system expanded after World War II, historians attempted to deal with the nature and ideas of the Whig party. Some lively historical debate resulted. Explanations of the Whigs have ranged from the Progressive view articulated by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the idealist view of Glyndon Van Deusen to the ethnocultural view of Lee Benson and the New Political historians. Schlesinger portrayed the Whigs as greedy, capitalistic, aristocratic old Federalists who reached success by oppressing the laboring classes of America. Marxist historians have tended to agree with him. Van Deusen, trying to salvage Whig thought from its dismissal by Adams and the Progressives, viewed Whigs as enlightened conservatives who were optimistic about the future of the country. While there was a class aspect to party membership, the Whigs were not antisocial, greedy capitalists; they promoted governmentaided economic development in an effort to improve the lives of all Americans. Whigs expressed conservative reservations about democracy and a concern for maintaining order through the rule of law. Whigs were also nationalists, Van Deusen added, who desired a unified nation in which diverse interest groups labored together for a common good. Lee Benson concluded that ethnic and religious differences, not economic class, molded the ways voters approached political issues. Party affiliation therefore was caused primarily, though not solely, by ethnocultural issues. Other interpretations soon followed. . Henry Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin, . Solid historiographical treatments of the Jacksonian era include Charles Grier Sellers, Jr., “Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,” –. Alfred A. Cave, Jacksonian Democracy and the Historians. Daniel Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” –. . Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson, . Cave, Jacksonian Democracy and the Historians, –. Bray Hammond’s award-winning Banks and Politics (Princeton, ) challenged Schlesinger’s bias against business and banking by noting that many Democrats attacked the second Bank of the United States because it blocked their economic interests in state banking and speculative schemes. For a Marxist view, see Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “Who Were the Southern Whigs?” –. Charles G. Sellers, Jr., The Market Revolution. For a challenge to Sellers’ thesis see Grady McWhiney, “Were the Whigs a Class Party in Alabama?” –. Thomas B. Alexander, Kit C. Carter, Jack R. Lister, Jerry C. Oldshue, and Winfred G. Sandlin, “Who Were the Alabama Whigs?” –. Alexander et al. qualify McWhiney’s article while avoiding the Marxist pitfall. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, “Some Aspects of Whig Thought and Theory in the Jacksonian Period,” –. Van Deusen, The
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In the s and s two works in particular added to understanding of the Whigs: Daniel Walker Howe’s The Political Culture of the American Whigs () and Lawrence Frederick Kohl’s The Politics of Individualism (). Howe regarded the intellectual output of the Whigs as significant. He argued that the Whigs had been unfairly and wrongly cast as neoFederalists, when in reality they had sprung from the Madisonian branch of the Jeffersonian Republican party. Howe delineated different wings of the Whig party, noting that evangelical reformers, conservatives, moderates, and proslavery southerners all inhabited and contributed to the “political culture” of the Whig party. Howe argued that the political culture of the Whigs was decidedly bourgeois and focused on the importance of selfrestraint to preserve social order. The Whigs’ obsession with order led them to stress the rule of law and made them ardent defenders of the Constitution and nationalism. Kohl gave a psychological and intellectual analysis of the parties, insisting that party affiliation resulted from the personality and ideas of the individual. Using the ideas of sociologist David Riesman, Kohl distinguished between “inner-directed” Whigs, who easily adapted to the modern, impersonal individualistic world, and “traditiondirected” Democrats, who either resented the destruction of the traditional order or lacked the self-restraint to live comfortably in the new order. Kohl dismissed the idea that Whigs were conservatives, stressing instead that they were modernizers who promoted the social changes brought by modern economics and culture. Kohl noted that Whigs focused on building personal character as a way to keep order in modern society. Whigs advocated a host of voluntary associations to accomplish their goals. Scholarship on the Whigs culminated in Michael F. Holt’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (). Holt addressed Jacksonian Era, –. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy. See Daniel Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” . . Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era. Kohl drew heavily on the psychological interpretation of the Jacksonian Democrats given by Marvin Meyers in The Jacksonian Persuasion. In an insightful work, John Ashworth noted that the Whigs and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. The Whigs found the Democratic endorsement of egalitarianism frightening and responded in a conservative fashion. Anti-party rhetoric, anti-democracy sentiment, and a limited reaction against aspects of Enlightenment thought expressed Whig concerns well. He wrote that the Whig party was “the first political party to offer a mass electorate a viable and appealing conservative programme.” ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats,’ , , .
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numerous historiographical questions in his work. He noted that the Whigs were an ideologically based party. They sought to preserve the ideology of republicanism, especially the concept of liberty, against the power wielded by the Jacksonians. The Whigs faced severe organizational difficulties. They were a diverse collection of many anti-Jackson men. The Whig party’s center was the National Republicans, consisting of nationalist Jeffersonians such as Henry Clay. In the s the National Republican wing battled the anti-Jackson, states’ rights southerners, particularly Calhoun, in the South and the evangelical, populist Anti-Mason party in the North. The diversity in the party necessitated compromise on principles. Holt asserted that when the Whigs focused on purity of principle, they lost elections and widened the gaps dividing the factions within their party. When the Whigs unified around the goal to defeat the Democrats, the party tended to win. The Whigs after formed a general economic plan—essentially National Republican economics—that became the basis of their party ideology. The second party system worked well when the two parties offered clearly differing plans for America, and the populace responded by heavy voter turnout. Holt also noted that ethnocultural issues could swing elections, especially in the North. Holt not only showed the diversity within the Whig party but also recognized the conservative aspects of the party. Southern historians have been varied in their approaches to the Whigs. C. Vann Woodward in Origins of the New South identified the Whigs as proto-progressives and liberal southern capitalists who for the most part opposed the paranoid and reactionary politics of the Democrats. Some scholars, such as Charles Sydnor and William J. Cooper, Jr., have not seen much difference between the Whigs and Democrats. Sydnor believed that come election time the “southern voter, unable to see much difference between the Whigs and Democrats, therefore made his choice on the basis of minor events and insignificant words.” William Cooper insisted that the southern Whigs used the “politics of slavery,” not economic issues, to win elections. Whigs portrayed themselves as the most strident defenders of slavery and states’ rights to draw voters to the polls. Cooper insisted that the politics of slavery built unity among white southerners and muted . Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War.
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class divisions in southern society. J. Mills Thornton believed that southern Whigs differed significantly from the Democrats on state and federal issues. The Whigs sought to further individual independence through the creation of beneficial institutions such as banks and internal improvements. Whigs favored the emerging commercial economy, while Democrats preferred a simpler agrarian economy. Both parties also vigorously defended slavery, but their ideological differences on economic issues did influence elections. Thomas Brown noted that many southern Whigs were philosophic conservatives who had a deep-abiding appreciation for republican institutions. They had a republican conception of restrained leadership for the public good, which caused them to see the Jacksonians as radical demagogues. Brown also noted that some southern Whigs were more commercially based and had little interest in republicanism. There has been no dominant portrait of southern Whigs. Scholars interested in southern conservatism have not dealt with the Whigs in a satisfactory way. Both Eugene Genovese in The Southern Tradition and M. E. Bradford in Remembering Who We Are used statements of Whig writers and politicians as examples of southern conservative ideas but did not discuss the Whig ideology itself in relation to either those ideas or to the southern tradition as a whole. If southern conservatism includes a challenge to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the preservation of the republican ideology of the Revolution and Founding, then some members of the southern Whig party deserve the title of “conservative.” In his significant essay “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition” (), Clyde Wilson rejected the notion that Whigs were conservatives. According to Wilson, Whigs were neomercantilists, hardly deserving the titles of either “Jeffersonians” or “conservatives.” The Whigs’ acceptance of government . C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, –. Michael O’Brien, “C. Vann Woodward and the Burden of Southern Liberalism,” –. For other expressions of the idea of a liberal South in relation to the Whigs, see Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders and Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. Charles Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, –, . On the southern Whigs, see Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Southern Whigs, –,” Essays in American History Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner. Arthur Charles Cole, The Whig Party in the South. E. Malcolm Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party. Henry H. Simms, The Rise of the Whigs in Virginia, –. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, xiii. J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, –. Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party.
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activity in economic matters separated them from the libertarian conservatism of the pure Jeffersonians. Wilson’s treatment of the Whigs, albeit limited because of the length restrictions of his article, does not explore Whig theories of states’ rights nor does it acknowledge that southern Whigs regarded state governments, not the federal government, as the primary promoters of government-aided economic activity. If F. Thornton Miller was correct in Judges and Juries versus the Law that Jeffersonian Virginia entailed a fight between localists and state centralizers, then a significant part of the Jeffersonian movement must be recognized as favoring plans of political centralization and economic activism on a state level, much like Whig plans. It is, therefore, too narrow to dismiss southern Whigs from the body of Jeffersonian southern conservatism. Whig principles played significant roles in the careers and writings of Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper and informed their conservatism. Whig conservatism in the South differed greatly from the early southern conservatism of the Old Republicans. Baldwin and Hooper based their conservatism on principles and a tempered individualism rather than on a traditional social order. Baldwin and Hooper, both of whom had moved to the southwestern frontier as young men, inverted the ideas of Edmund Burke. Whereas Burke emphasized the preservation of traditional institutions, manners, and mores to blunt the force of Enlightenment politics, philosophy, and culture, Baldwin and Hooper advocated the creation of traditional institutions to strengthen frontier society. Baldwin and Hooper pointed out that frontier society lacked the organic quality of the societies Burke celebrated. Social order had to be created out of chaos before it could be conserved. Baldwin and Hooper appreciated modern freedom as well and loathed a return to a traditional society ordered through coercion. Both men were modernizers and conservatives at the same time, a seeming contradiction but one that makes sense given the contexts of their lives. Far from abandoning the doctrines of traditional southern republicanism, they gave them a modern flavor. Their conservatism was self-conscious as well. They had to fight for their principles under chaotic conditions. In being self-conscious conservatives, they sought to preserve the republican tradition of self-government and community cohesion and individualism simultaneously. Like southern Democrat conservatives, southern Whig conservatives promoted states’ rights, republican principles, and proslavery ideology. Both opposed government attempts
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to promote virtue and were suspicious of party loyalty. Their differences lay primarily in their social views and solutions to the problems of frontier disorder. An examination of the thought of conservative Whigs can reveal the flexibility of southern conservatism and the ways in which later southerners interpreted the Old Republican basis of southern political thought. Biography of Joseph Glover Baldwin Joseph Glover Baldwin was born in Virginia on January , , the second son of Joseph C. and Eliza Baldwin. The Baldwin family originated in England and first settled in Connecticut upon coming to America. Clark Baldwin, the grandfather of Joseph G., left New England for Ohio. Clark’s son, Joseph Clarke Baldwin, moved to Winchester, Virginia, the largest town in the Shenandoah Valley, and in established cotton and woolen mills at Friendly Grove Factory and Front Royal. The mills prospered during the War of but fell on hard times by the end of the decade. Joseph Clarke Baldwin moved his family to a house in Winchester and opened a distillery on the outskirts of town. He neglected his business, however, in order to devote his time to his inventions and moneymaking schemes. His finances and his family suffered as a result. Joseph Glover Baldwin’s education strongly influenced his character. As a boy in Winchester, Jo, as he was called by his friends and family, had a reputation for being a dull boy, impatient with his studies. At first his mother educated him at home with his brothers and sisters, attempting to give the children a strong attachment to the Episcopal faith. After the family moved to Staunton, Virginia, a small rural town, Jo attended school with his older brother Cornelius. He excelled at writing and developed a love of English literature, particularly the works of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. His brother Cornelius wrote later that “we often had to tear him from them [his books] to eat his meals.” Jo also anonymously contributed brief literary pieces to the Staunton Spectator, the local paper. At fourteen, he quit school to find work and supplement the income of his incompetent father. He found a position as deputy clerk of the chancery court, where his job was to record the court’s proceedings. He became . Samuel Boyd Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –. Stewart’s excellent dissertation is the only book-length study of Baldwin’s life and writings. It was written under the direction of the Vanderbilt Agrarian Donald Davidson.
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intrigued with the law and decided to study under his uncle Briscoe Baldwin. He completed his legal studies at the age of twenty. Once he finished his study of the law, Baldwin began his slow drift westward. In the early part of , he traveled west to Lexington, Virginia, where his brother Cornelius edited the town’s paper, the Union. The two disagreed on politics, Jo being a states’ rights Whig and Cornelius being a nationalist, but they got along well. In August he moved to Buchanan, Virginia, upon being invited to edit the town’s newspaper, the Advocate and Commercial Gazette. Baldwin liked the town but found his job boring. In March of the Advocate was discontinued. Jo had finished his study of William Blackstone’s Commentaries, obtained his license to practice law, and set off on his horse with seventy-five dollars in his pocket to seek his fortune as a lawyer in Mississippi. Baldwin arrived in Mississippi in April toward the end of flush times. Land speculation was rampant, along with fraud, as people sought to make money as quickly as possible. A mobile and transitory population exacerbated the confused situation. The new society needed order. Baldwin realized that financial opportunities abounded and grew obsessed with wealth and security. He expressed a characteristic sentiment in a letter to his wife in : “I want to start in dead earnest to making money— for it seems in this selfish world money is at last the only title to respect as it is certainly the only sure dependence against the ills of life, that are independent of health of mind and body.” Baldwin exemplified the American individualism of the nineteenth century. He stressed conventional morality, conservative politics, and man’s acquisitive nature. Baldwin initially settled in De Kalb, Mississippi, in Kemper County in the eastern part of the state, and began to practice law. In July of Jonathan Bliss, a lawyer from Vermont who settled in Gainesville, Alabama, invited Baldwin into a legal partnership. Baldwin jumped at the chance. Gainesville, a prosperous town on the Tombigbee River, was in Sumter County at the heart of the Black Belt. There were a number of planters in . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, December , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The original Baldwin letters are in the Joseph G. Baldwin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. I read microfilm of the collection and shall hereafter cite the collection in its microfilm form.
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the area, and they gave Baldwin a good deal of business. The Panic of occurred soon after Baldwin moved to Gainesville, but lawyers benefited from the depression and the end of the chaotic flush times. Baldwin and Bliss developed a prosperous practice, with Baldwin specializing in civil law. He rode circuit with the judges and also returned to eastern Mississippi. Traveling the circuit gave him firsthand knowledge of the Alabama and Mississippi frontier. It also gained him valuable political connections. In he married Sidney White, the daughter of Judge John White of Talladega, Alabama. Sidney was to bear him six children. They settled in Gainesville, and Baldwin planted a few acres of cotton for some extra income. His search for wealth and the long hours required of an ambitious frontier lawyer kept him away from his new bride. In December Sidney gave birth to their first son. Baldwin could not stay for long due to the demands of his job and even missed Christmas with his new family. His wife wrote a distraught letter to him on December that would typify her sentiments throughout their marriage: “How I wish you could spend it [Christmas] with us. I don’t know what has made me so egotistical, but I have been hoping all the while that you loved your wife enough to come back and spend Christmas with her. I think I would be the happiest woman living if it could be so.” Sidney soon realized that her ambitious husband’s first love was wealth, despite all his protests to the contrary. By January of , Baldwin enjoyed a solid legal reputation and some prosperity. He had publicized his political views in when he made political speeches for the Whig party during the presidential campaign. His good reputation and oratorical skills led some to consider him to be a strong political candidate. He decided to run for the state legislature in , spent the summer campaigning, and was elected to the Alabama House in the fall. He took his seat in Tuscaloosa in December of and distinguished himself by his speech in support of a state representative system based on federal numbers. The Whigs, many of whom were planters, supported the federal number scheme in order to maintain their political power in a state that was mostly Democratic. During the legislative session, Baldwin gave speeches defending southern rights, slavery, and the . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –. . Ibid., –. Sidney Baldwin to Joseph G. Baldwin, December , , LesterGray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
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Constitution. He opposed the democratization of the state constitution and defended republicanism. The voters of Sumter County urged him to serve another term, but he declined so that he could return to his legal practice. After his term of service, his family and legal practice grew. He acquired a few slaves to serve as house servants. Baldwin also experienced a religious conversion after a long illness almost killed him. He regained his health, but suffered from severe headaches and other maladies for the rest of his life. Baldwin remained involved in Whig politics. He traveled to the Whig party convention in Philadelphia and gave stump speeches in Alabama to support the Whig candidates Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. In he campaigned to represent the Tuscaloosa district in the U.S. Congress but lost. In he supported Fillmore and the Compromise of . Baldwin soon turned his attention from politics to his legal business and literary endeavors. In Baldwin moved to Livingston, Alabama, sixteen miles from Gainesville, and formed a new legal practice with T. B. Westmore, a young lawyer who had moved to Alabama from North Carolina. He bought a house outside town and moved his family and six slaves there. Between and , Baldwin wrote nineteen humorous sketches of life on the southwestern frontier for the Southern Literary Messenger. These humorous tales made him famous. Readers greatly enjoyed his stories, so Baldwin collected most of his sketches into the book The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, published in December . The book was republished throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Although Flush Times was fictional, Baldwin based many of the characters in the book on people he knew in Alabama. He wrote his humor in a gentlemanly style, rarely using dialect as other humorists had done. Some of the book can be classified loosely as social history. Baldwin’s biographer Samuel Stewart notes that many of Baldwin’s descriptions of contemporary people and situations fit with the more scholarly histories of the time. The book expressed well Baldwin’s view of republicanism and his love of . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –. McWhiney, “Were Whigs a Class Party in Alabama?” –. For a recent general description of Alabama Whigs see William Warren Rodgers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State, –. Also see Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society. . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –.
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individualism and modern society. It is impossible to separate Baldwin’s Whig principles from his humor. In he decided to move to California. Having become dissatisfied with the lack of opportunity in Alabama, Baldwin wanted to make his fortune in a frontier setting again. Before he left for California, he began working on his second book, Party Leaders, a popular political history in which he compared the lives of Jefferson, Hamilton, Randolph of Roanoke, Jackson, and Clay. The book was an interesting mixture of historical nostalgia and realism. He wrote it with the present in mind, for it was essentially a moral tale. Baldwin analyzed the characters of his subjects to show that their personal and political successes and failures could be traced back to individual character. The book also subtly attacked party politics as a departure from Revolutionary republicanism and was a fine example of Baldwin’s states’ rights, Whig political views. In July , Baldwin began his trek to California. He traveled first to New York City again to meet his brother Cornelius and arrange for the publication of Party Leaders. The same printing house that published Flush Times, D. Appleton and Company, agreed to publish Party Leaders the next year. On July , his business in New York finished, Baldwin set sail for Panama. From Panama, he sailed to California, arriving in San Francisco in August. Some of his friends from Alabama and Virginia already lived in California, and they willingly aided their old friend. Within a few weeks of arriving in San Francisco, he had a full case load and was searching for a partnership that could benefit him. He rented an office, which doubled as his living quarters to save money, and worked long hours daily. He wrote his wife: “If I ever get able I shall get me a sleeping room separate from my office, and put a good bed in it. But I am so penurious that I grudge every cent that is expended on myself.” He tried to save enough money to pay for his family to join him. Once again, he had left his family behind in order to seek his fortune. Baldwin enjoyed success in California. He soon found a law partner and obtained a few well-paying clients. Party Leaders appeared for sale in the autumn of and was a success. Electrified by the brisk sales of his book, Baldwin wrote Sidney that he sought only to make enough money . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, November , , LesterGray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
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to give them security so he could become a full-time writer. He was confident that he could earn a solid reputation as a writer. He noted: “I think I can put myself on the roll of American writers somewhat above the names which are counted distinguished. This may not be the case, but, I think, it will.” In the summer of Sidney and three of their children joined Baldwin in California, much to his delight. He became involved in local politics too. In , after the demise of the Whig party, he joined the Democratic party, as had many southerners in California. In the Democrats nominated Baldwin as their candidate to fill the chair of the recently deceased chief justice of the California Supreme Court. He won the election in and served on the court until . He was instrumental in solidifying and ordering the complex body of state law. California had been under numerous legal codes: Spanish, Mexican, territorial, and state. Land titles and especially mining rights were mired in a complex legal web. Baldwin, in judging the numerous complex cases brought before the court, developed an authoritative interpretation of state law. He put his brilliant legal mind and talents for legal research to work for the state. The law, however, was not the only thing to occupy Baldwin’s mind, for he engaged in a few failed investments in mining for silver. The Civil War greatly affected Baldwin’s family. One of Baldwin’s sons became involved with blockade runners and almost served time in prison as a result. Baldwin’s oldest son was a staunch supporter of the Union and even served as a government informant in Virginia City to report on prosouthern activities there. Baldwin’s brother Cyrus served in a Mississippi regiment and died in the war. Federal troops captured his wife Sidney’s brother and interned him in a prison camp. Thus the war was very real to Baldwin, though he managed to stay busy with his mining interests and legal practice. In September , Baldwin traveled to New York on business. He hoped to locate Sidney’s brother and to visit his family in Virginia. After completing his business in New York, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to obtain a pass that would allow him to travel to Virginia. A good friend of Baldwin’s from California occupied an important government position . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, December , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –. . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –.
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and was able to set up a meeting between Baldwin and President Lincoln. It was a comfortable conference between the two former Whigs. Baldwin wrote a friend, “Abe and I grew very pleasant and spent an hour together in the White House very cozily.” Lincoln “was very kind and affable and knew all about me and more about Flush Times (which seems to be one of his classics) than I knew myself.” Lincoln told him that he quoted Flush Times when he got “facetious.” Lincoln also mentioned that he kept a copy of the book under his pillow. Apparently, Lincoln did not like Baldwin enough to grant him a pass to Virginia. Baldwin did not let Lincoln’s praise go to his head either, for he publicly supported General George McClellan for president in . Upon returning to California, Baldwin began to write again. He started a work he titled “The Flush Times of California” but never completed it. It remained unpublished after his death until the s. In August of , his namesake, Joseph, Jr., died at the age of twenty, bringing the family much grief. Baldwin contracted a mild case of typhus the same month but recovered. During his convalescence, however, his doctor convinced him to undergo surgery for chronic hemorrhoids. He consented and the surgery appeared to be successful, but while recovering he contracted tetanus and soon afterward, on September , , he died. He was forty-nine years old. Joseph Glover Baldwin never achieved his dream of wealth despite the tremendous effort he undertook to attain it. In many ways, he was an American type, an individualist. Furthermore, he exemplified the dream of many nineteenth-century Americans who traveled to the West in search of riches. Baldwin was also an important southern thinker. His Whig conservatism and devotion to states’ rights and southern rights offered a marked contrast to the traditional republicanism of the Old Republicans. Instead of seeking to preserve traditional society like Randolph, Baldwin decided . Joseph G. Baldwin to John Felton, November , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” –. A eulogy to Baldwin in the California newspaper the Daily Union on October , , read: “He combined unwonted industry with most consummate ability. His adjudications are models of clear and logical perception, and reveal the most extensive research, and stringent power of analysis, and copious and refined illustration, and are characterized by grace of style, and scholarly learning and sound deduction.” Quoted in Eugene Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist?” .
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that conservative principles could better serve Americans who were absorbed in a rapidly changing society. Celebrating the individuality and freedom of American society in the West, he attempted to order modern life according to conservative principles. Biography of Hooper Johnson Jones Hooper was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on June , , to a distinguished American family. The Hoopers had emigrated from Scotland in and settled in Boston. Three Hoopers moved from New England to North Carolina in , and one of them, William Hooper II, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. Archibald Maclaine Hooper, William’s nephew, became a lawyer of some prominence in North Carolina, and in married Charlotte DeBerniere of Charleston, South Carolina, a descendant of Huguenots. Archibald and Charlotte had six children, Johnson Jones being the youngest. Archibald had inherited his father’s plantation and salt works, providing him with a large income. He quit the practice of law to become a banker, and in he bought the Cape-Fear Recorder, Wilmington’s only paper, and served as editor. Thereafter his financial situation deteriorated. Archibald Hooper’s ineptness with finances had serious effects on Johnson. Johnson’s older brothers, George and John DeBerniere, had both received college educations. Unfortunately, the family’s declining economic status did not allow Johnson to progress past the Wilmington public school and some tutoring from his father. Johnson did work as a printer’s devil at his father’s paper from until and even penned a humorous poem for the paper. In , Archibald sold the paper to pay off his debts, took a job, which he promptly lost, at the Wilmington Customs House, and moved in with his daughter Louisa. Having few opportunities for advancement in Wilmington, George Hooper migrated to Alabama around . . For biographical information on Hooper see Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs. Paul Somers, Jr., Johnson J. Hooper. Johanna Nicol Shields, Introduction to Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census” and Other Alabama Sketches. . John DeBerniere Hooper became a renowned classics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. George Hooper graduated from West Point and became a lawyer. Somers, Johnson J. Hooper, .
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By , Johnson, who at age twenty was already showing his father’s volatility, decided to join his brother on the frontier. Johnson’s move to Lafayette, Alabama, in Chambers County, did not, as his mother hoped, settle him down. In Alabama was at the height of what Joseph Baldwin called the flush times. Chambers County exemplified the rapid growth of the period. The county had been created in December from land ceded to the state in a treaty with the Creek Nation. Despite having only a scattering of white settlers in , the county claimed more than seventeen thousand residents at the census in . After trying his hand in an unsuccessful mercantile venture, Johnson traveled to Louisiana and Texas in and . Upon returning to Alabama he entered another mercantile partnership, which collapsed and left him heavily in debt. Finally, in late Johnson began to read law under his brother George in Lafayette. The early s were dynamic times for Hooper. In he obtained a job through a Democratic friend as the assistant marshal for the census in Tallapoosa County, an experience that became the subject of his first major humorous sketch. After being admitted to the bar in , he formed and then dissolved a few months later a law partnership in Dadeville, Alabama. In he joined his brother George in a law practice, but soon afterward he took over the editorship of a small Chambers County weekly paper, the East Alabamian, leaving him less time to practice law. Hooper married Mary Brantley in after unsuccessfully courting her older sister. Brantley came from a respectable Whig family, and Hooper, it seems, adopted the politics of his father-in-law, for the East Alabamian became a Whig organ. Mary bore Hooper three children, one of whom would die in at the age of two. Upon becoming an editor, Hooper began writing frequently and soon turned his talents to humorous sketches. He published his first story, “Taking the Census in Alabama,” in the East Alabamian in . He had little idea of the impact his story would have. In New York City, William T. Porter, editor of a sporting journal called Spirit of the Times, culled southern . Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, –. . Hooper’s wife brought one slave into the marriage, a female house servant. Hooper did not purchase any other slaves. His first son, William DeBerniere Hooper, was born in February . Shields, “Introduction” to Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, xxiv–xxv.
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newspapers for interesting material. In September Porter ran Hooper’s story, and it was a success. Hooper wrote stories set during the flush times of Alabama which recounted the exploits of the rascal Captain Simon Suggs, who made his living swindling people. Porter printed the first Suggs story in the Spirit of the Times on January , . Soon afterward, Simon Suggs became a national sensation. Hooper wrote more Suggs tales in , which were then collected into a volume entitled Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs. The book went through two printings in and by had been through eleven editions. Porter begged Hooper to write additional pieces for publication, but Hooper desired political influence more than literary fame. In late he resigned as editor of the East Alabamian and moved to Wetumpka, a town fifteen miles from Montgomery. There he became editor of the Wetumpka Whig and awaited his chance to enter state politics. As Hooper’s literary fame increased, so did his opportunities in Alabama. His stint as editor of the East Alabamian had marked him solidly as a Whig, the minority party in the state. He had supported Henry Clay for president in and promoted Clay’s American System. In he was appointed as an engrossing clerk for the – Alabama legislative session. Desiring more influence, Hooper moved to Montgomery, the new state capital, in May and began editing the Alabama Journal, one of the major Whig newspapers in the state. Because of Hooper’s status as a prominent Whig editor, the Democrat-dominated legislature refused to grant him any further political appointments. In January , Hooper moved back to Lafayette and edited the Chambers County Tribune. He also campaigned in for the office of solicitor of . See Eugene Current-Garcia, “Alabama Writers in the Spirit,” –. Eugene Current-Garcia, “ ‘Mr. Spirit’ and The Big Bear of Arkansas: A Note on the Genesis of Southwestern Sporting and Humor Literature,” –. The New Orleans Picayune referred to Suggs’s stories as “worthy enough to take a man’s life if laughing could bring about such consumption.” Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, . Baldwin considered himself a more refined author than Hooper and desired literary fame. Baldwin wrote his wife, Sidney, about Flush Times, “I am glad to see that the notices of the book do not speak of it as a Suggs-like affair but as gentlemanly authorship.” December , , Lester-Gray Collection, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Baldwin and Hooper knew each other and even corresponded, although only one of their letters survived. See Joseph Glover Baldwin to Johnson Jones Hooper, June , , Lester-Gray Collection, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
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the Ninth Circuit, a district that included six east Alabama counties. Hooper won the election and served a four-year term as solicitor. He was pleased by his political success. During the early s, Hooper’s social and literary status rose. In he published a collection of humorous tales, A Ride with Old Kit Kuncker. He followed it in with The Widow Rugby’s Husband, another compilation of humorous sketches. Hooper joined the Freemasons in , a sign of his social status. While still professing Whiggery, Hooper expressed doubts about the party’s viability. In the wake of the Compromise of , Hooper declared the Whig Party “dead as a mackerel.” Although still a Unionist, Hooper became much more concerned with the place of the South within the Union. For example, he refused to support the Whig presidential candidate Winfield Scott in because of Scott’s abolitionist friends. His Whig friends worried that Hooper’s political loyalties were changing. In he lost his reelection bid for the solicitorship of the Ninth District. Disappointed, he settled in Lafayette to await his next opportunity. In the spring of , Hooper moved back to Montgomery and founded and edited the Montgomery Mail, an independent paper. Despite the Mail ’s independent status, Hooper continued to support in his editorials old Whig policies, particularly state-funded plans for internal improvements and states’ rights. As the national Whig Party collapsed in following the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Alabama briefly became a one-party state. Loath to join his longtime nemesis, the Democratic Party, Hooper cast his fortune with the Know-Nothing or American Party and affiliated the Mail with the new party. Hooper argued that the American Party was friendlier to the South than the Democratic Party and better protected slavery. In he backed the Know-Nothing gubernatorial candidate, George D. Shortridge. Shortridge supported temperance and state aid for internal improvements, two Whig issues that Hooper had long backed. Shortridge lost badly to the Democratic candidate. Hooper then supported Know-Nothing candidate Millard Fillmore in his failed bid for the presidency in , despite wanting a stronger proslavery candidate. The . Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, . . Quoted in Lewy Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama from through , . For the Freemasons and American society see Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, –.
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Democrats trounced the Know-Nothings in the state elections in , effectively ending the antebellum two-party system in Alabama. During , Hooper began seriously considering southern nationalism. He traveled to Savannah, Georgia, as secretary of the fifty-member Alabama delegation to the annual Southern Commercial Convention. By the commercial convention movement had become rife with southern nationalist overtones. Both the convention and southern nationalist arguments intrigued Hooper and augmented his sectionalist rhetoric. His nationalism received a boost from the presidential election of in which the Republican candidate Fremont made a strong showing in the North. The strength of the Republican Party as well as its free soil ideology frightened Hooper, causing his strong Unionism to weaken. After the state elections in , Hooper had no political home. The Democratic Party had been split between a Unionist wing, which desired to remain closely tied to northern Democrats, and a Southern Rights wing, which contained many southern nationalists. Hooper’s editorials in the late s excoriated Unionists for their desire to maintain ties with free soil northern politicians. Such ties to the North endangered slavery, Hooper claimed. By Hooper declared, “The position of the Mail politically, is a most decided Southern Rights American Paper.” His conversion to southern nationalism was almost complete. From to Hooper published a few works, but nothing that matched the quality of his Suggs stories. In he wrote Dog & Gun, a manual on hunting in the South. Hooper repeated much advice from English sporting magazines in the book and portrayed the hunt as a gentlemanly southern tradition. In he contributed to a collection of essays on Freemasonry, Magnum Opus. The essays in the volume were satires of Masonic rituals, and the book was not published until . In Hooper edited and published Woodward’s Reminiscences of the Creek, or Muscogee Indians, Contained in the Letters to Friends in Georgia and Alabama, a collection of letters and reflections on the early history of Alabama by General Thomas S. Woodward. Woodward was a Georgian who had moved to Alabama in and had fought in the Seminole War under General . Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, April , .
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Andrew Jackson. Hooper wrote the introduction to the volume, and the book was a success, selling out in a few months. By Hooper’s literary career had ended, but his editorial labors would bear fruit during the secession crisis of and . Hooper entered the campaign season of devoted to protecting southern political interests and supported the Southern Rights Democrat William F. Samford for governor. Samford also obtained the assistance of William L. Yancey, who went throughout the state forming Leagues of United Southerners. The purpose of the leagues was to divide the Democratic Party and form a sectional party of southerners under Southern Rights principles. Samford, who in essence was a secessionist, campaigned on an anti-party platform, declaring that he was running on constitutional and republican principles instead of partisan interests. Samford lost in a landslide to the incumbent governor, A. B. Moore. The secessionists and fire-eaters had been decisively thwarted again. Hooper fumed about the North throughout the campaign and warned Alabamians about the dangers of the “Black Republicans” in the upcoming presidential election. Hooper supported southern Democrat John Breckinridge for president in , collaborating fully with Yancey’s disruption of the Democratic Party. Hooper advocated instant secession in the case of Lincoln’s victory. He warned Alabamians throughout that Lincoln was a “thief ” who desired to steal southern slaves and that his running mate Hannibal Hamlin was black. He also assured southerners that secession would not be too disruptive of the economy and would be peaceful. After Lincoln’s election, Hooper demanded that a secession convention be called. Upon Alabama’s secession from the Union, he rejoiced that the bonds of party had been broken and that Alabama had become an independent republic. On February , , Hooper received the nomination to be the permanent secretary of the Confederate States of America. He also became the personal secretary of Alabamian Leroy Pope Walker, the new Confederate secretary of war, and was made a staff officer in the Confederate army. . Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, –. . Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama, –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, August , , and August , . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, January , . For a brief treatment of Yancey’s role in secession see Alto L. Garner and Nathan Stott, “William Lowndes Yancey: Statesman of Secession,” –.
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Hooper sold the Mail and moved to Richmond, Virginia, to serve the new nation that he had worked hard to create. In Richmond, Hooper’s life took an unexpected turn—he became religious. Although he had been raised in the Episcopal church and had his children baptized as Episcopalians in Montgomery, Hooper had not been a religious man. His reputation was that of a drinker and gambler, not unlike his famous character Captain Simon Suggs. As a Freemason, satirist, and Know-Nothing, he had never held religion in much regard. His friends were shocked to learn that Hooper converted to Roman Catholicism while in Richmond. He befriended Father Robert Hayne Andrews of St. Peter’s Cathedral, himself a convert to Catholicism, and devoutly practiced his newfound faith, even reciting his prayers in Latin to the wonderment of his friends. In Hooper contracted tuberculosis and after spending two months bedridden died on June , , two days before his forty-seventh birthday. When news of his death reached Montgomery a week later, Henry Coyne, Hooper’s friend and the new editor of the Mail, wrote: “Few men have ever lived of more genial impulses and warmer affections . . . and he never stopped to consider the sacrifice to himself if he could serve a friend. The past year has deprived every community of some of its best loved, but of the many who have fallen in war or by diseases, few will be more severely regretted, or longer remembered, than Johnson J. Hooper.” Hooper’s life as a writer, editor, Whig, and southern nationalist begs for closer analysis. The biographies of Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper are remarkably similar. Both were born in eastern southern states to formerly prominent families. Both had fathers who were inept with money and lost their earlier wealth. Baldwin and Hooper worked on newspapers in their youth and continued writing throughout their adult lives. They . Shields points out Hooper’s disregard for religion, which caused his mother quite a bit of concern. Johanna Nicol Shields, “Introduction” to Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, xviii. Joseph O’Beirne Milner also identifies Hooper’s irreligious attitudes in the Suggs stories. Joseph O’Beirne Milner, “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris.” See Stanley Hoole’s letters to the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, inquiring about information on Hooper’s conversion. Johnson Jones Hooper Papers, Hoole Special Collections, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. . Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs, .
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became lawyers and Whigs. Both men had political aspirations that went largely unfulfilled and spent much of their lives in search of wealth on the frontier. Neither man owned many slaves. Both moved away from their families. Both died during the war. The next chapter will examine their political principles, and the following chapter will discuss their different views of society. An appreciation of the Whig conservatism advocated by Baldwin and Hooper can expand our understanding of antebellum southern conservatism.
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8 While Whig economic programs diverged from the strict libertarian principles of the Old Republicans, the two groups shared an appreciation for states’ rights and a constitutional republic. In comparing the political principles of Baldwin and Hooper with those of the Old Republicans and Tucker and Simms, one can see similarities and significant differences, especially concerning the role of the state. Like other southerners, Baldwin and Hooper discussed the states’ rights tradition and dealt with the republican vocabulary that remained a part of southern discourse. Their views of Andrew Jackson reveal a common perspective on politics. Unlike the more libertarian Old Republicans, Baldwin and Hooper did not seek to separate state and society completely. Their views of politics arose from their understanding of human nature and their celebration of a voluntary society. Human Nature and Government Baldwin and Hooper shared with other southern conservatives a traditional Christian view that human nature is weak. They thought that men are primarily creatures of passion. Baldwin divided the passions between those higher and lower. The higher passions included emotions such as patriotism, restraint, and, to some degree, religion. The lower passions included selfishness, partisanship, and disorderliness. The lower passions were “the more active and energetic faculties.” Baldwin illustrated his view of human nature with a political example. “A man in politics,” he noted, “may do a good deal from patriotism, but he does it by spasms and desultorily; while he will work all the time for money and promotion.” Baldwin saw the passions as amoral. Individuals had to choose which passions to follow. Free will brought responsibility and elevated individual character to great importance. He regarded “the will as the man; as not so much giv270
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ing individuality as being it.” He continued, “The strong will, therefore, is the strong man.” Consequently, a weak will made a weak, servile individual. Uncontrolled passions led to immoral and dangerous behavior. An individual had to exercise some restraint to preserve social order. If individuals could not be trusted to restrain their appetites, then self-government would be impossible and anarchy would result. The intellect alone could not restrain antisocial impulses because the lower passions exercised too great a force on human reason. Baldwin held that the intellect was only “the servant of the will” and was controlled by the will. At most, the intellect was “the light by which the will may work.” The intellect was as “inferior to [will] in true dignity, as the lamp is inferior to the man that reads or walks by its rays.” Like John Randolph, he accepted the limited nature of the intellect as a fact. Man was not primarily a rational creature of selfinterest, but most often a passionate creature of self-interest. Moral success, therefore, depended more “upon self-confidence than any thing else.” Talent had to “go in partnership with will or it cannot do a business of profit.” Baldwin’s idea of the primacy of the will explained his obsession with the notion of individual character. For Baldwin, history was the story of individuals succeeding or failing according to the strength of their wills. . Joseph Glover Baldwin, Party Leaders; Sketches of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Including Notices of Many Other Distinguished American Statesmen, , . Michael Holt, in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, noted that the Whigs styled themselves as the party of self-improvement and self-discipline. They realized that men were passionate creatures and must control their passions in order to improve. They portrayed the Democrats as men of wild passions who were unable to use reason to control themselves (). Lawrence Frederick Kohl, in The Politics of Individualism, writes, “The Whig ideal was the man who had brought his passions under control and whose will, while it mastered his inner drives, was not yet a law unto itself ” (). . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . Baldwin, Flush Times, . Lawrence Kohl maintains that the Whigs “saw both individual and collective progress as dependent on the willingness of Americans to exercise self-control.” The Politics of Individualism, . Whigs championed institutions to help inculcate the virtue of self-control in individuals. On another point, Daniel Walker Howe, in The Political Culture of the American Whigs, notes that Whigs often thought of themselves as conservatives. Whig beliefs in “moral absolutism, their paternalism, and their concern with imposing discipline” set them apart from twentieth-century American liberals (). Howe also insists that Whig social thought stressed duties over rights (). Finally, John Ashworth notes that conservative Whigs protested an atomistic society based upon self-interest. He pointed out that Whigs viewed self-interest as selfishness, not as a rational response. John Ashworth, ‘Agrarians’ & ‘Aristocrats,’ .
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Baldwin believed that men too often underestimated their abilities. “Men are fit for more and higher uses than they are commonly put to,” he noted. Part of the problem lay in theories of human nature that stressed systems of hierarchy as remedies for man’s corrupted, depraved nature. Baldwin disagreed with the ideas that “genius is self-conscious of its powers, and that men naturally fall into the position for which they are fitted.” Men certainly could act selfishly and depraved, but they could also be heroic. They needed freedom to do so, however. Because he celebrated free will, Baldwin believed that the best moral action was one in which the individual chose the good without any type of coercion. “What a man does well he must do with freedom,” he noted. Freedom itself was a moral quality, necessary for forming strong character. Men needed to become self-reliant in order to succeed in modern society. One could obtain self-confidence most easily in a “new country, where he is thrown upon his own resources.” In a free environment, even one as radically free as the frontier, men more easily could learn individualism because there the responsibility for their successes and failures was completely their own. On the other hand, “an old society weaves a network of restraints and habits around a man.” Old societies had hierarchies, and policy was often made by “wealth, family, influence, class, caste, fashion,” and “coterie.” In such societies, “character necessarily becomes, in some sort, artificial and conventional.” Character was “less bold, simple, direct, earnest and natural, and, therefore, less effective.” He thought that because traditional society used force instead of voluntarism as the basis for order, the moral accomplishments of men were less heroic. Tensions existed between tradition and freedom. For Baldwin, George Washington was an example of greatness. That Washington was by nature a great and talented man, Baldwin did not deny. But “talents alone are not distinction.” Washington captured fame by succeeding in adverse circumstances through the ways his will shaped his passions. Baldwin asserted, “Probably the very ordeal through which he passed to greatness purified and qualified him for the self-denial and self-conquest, the patience and the fortitude, which made its crowning glory.” For Washington to be great, there had to be “great work to be done.” . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. See Kohl, The Politics of Individualism, , on the differences in social control used by traditional and modern societies. Major L. Wilson noted that Whigs viewed liberation from the traditional authorities of the past as a good thing. They were not traditional conservatives. Wilson, “The Concept of Time,” .
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In many cases, men who previously showed no signs of great talent would demonstrate heroism when a trying moment presented itself. Such cases made Baldwin optimistic about human capabilities, but they did not bestow on him naive expectations of human greatness. Men were, after all, fallen. In Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, all of the characters are deeply flawed. He stressed in the Suggs stories that both the liberal view of rational self-interest and the traditional trust in hierarchy were inadequate to keep order because they distorted the real nature of man. Passionate men usually were either too ignorant to realize their own selfinterest or too vicious to act rationally and morally. Hooper was aware of his own weak nature. In a letter to E. S. Sayre of Montgomery, he described some of his mistakes during a trip to New Orleans. Hooper told Sayre that he arrived in New Orleans broke because he had lost all his money playing cards during the trip. He commented, “That a man in debt as I am, and afraid almost to stay about home on that account, should have been guilty of the meanness of losing $ at poker, when on a business trip is not only disgraceful to my self, but humiliating to human nature in general.” Though Hooper knew his best interest, he lacked the will and virtue to seek it. For Hooper, a society based solely on self-interest was anarchic. Unless human nature could be contained or directed in some way, modern freedom degenerated into license. Some of the Suggs stories illustrated the fallacy of liberal social ideals. Hooper noted of Suggs: “His whole ethical system lies snugly in his favourite aphorism—‘IT IS GOOD TO BE SHIFTY IN A NEW COUNTRY’—which means that it is right and proper that one should live as merrily and as comfortably as possible at the expense of others.” Hooper remarked that Suggs’s whole life illustrated his shiftiness. Suggs, therefore, personifies self-interest, which Hooper depicts as utter selfishness. In the story “Simon Speculates,” Hooper clarified his conception of . Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, . . Johnson Jones Hooper to E. S. Sayre. Reprinted in Edgar E. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper,” . The letter is undated, but was probably written in . Joseph O’Beirne Milner also noted that Hooper saw human nature as fundamentally weak. “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris,” . . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, .
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self-interest. The story takes place in with Suggs penniless but working as a speculator in Creek lands. Hooper quipped in a Whiggish tone that to the “uninitiated it may seem odd that a man without a dollar should be a land speculator.” Greed, however, could not be restrained. Satirically, Hooper mentioned that “to buy, to sell, to make profits, without a cent in one’s pocket—this required judgment, discretion, ingenuity—in short, genius!” The genius involved meant following naked self-interest even if it meant cheating or oppressing others. Suggs eavesdrops on a conversation between two speculators, one of whom is in a race with an unknown man to get to Montgomery and enter a claim on a mineral-rich piece of land. The speculator had ridden too hard in his avaricious haste, for his horse was stiff and could barely walk. Suggs gives the man a headstart and then meets him on the road to Montgomery where he convinces the speculator that he is the competitor for the piece of land. The speculator’s greed gets the best of him and he pays Suggs one hundred and seventy dollars to refrain from entering the land and swaps horses with Suggs. Suggs makes off with a better horse, though one temporarily slowed by fatigue, and a fair amount of cash for exploiting the speculator’s greed and self-interest. He comments that he could still enter the land before the speculator, but that “honesty’s the best policy.” He concludes, “Ah yes, honesty, HONESTY’S the stake that Simon Suggs will ALLERS tie to! What’s a man without his inteegerty?” “Simon Speculates” shows how rational self-interest is subverted by the passions, particularly greed. Hooper implied that if everyone sought after his self-interest, chaos would result. Suggs as the confidence man teaches in a negative fashion that trust, not self-interest, is the basis of social relations. When the speculator realizes that the object of his self-interest, the land, is unattainable under the circumstances, he tries to bribe Suggs. The speculator knows that the land he seeks is very valuable and trusts that Suggs, in taking the bribe, will forgo the more expensive land. Suggs’s acceptance of the money implies a social bond of trust. Suggs, however, defrauds the speculator. He follows his self-interest, money, and is content to deceive his companion. Suggs does not enter the land claim because it is not part of his self-interest. He practices no honesty or willingness to uphold the trust of the speculator. The whole scheme, for both Suggs and the . Ibid., , .
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speculator, revolves around self-interest. Each man is willing to break trust and manipulate the other in order to follow his self-interest. Hooper pointed out through the confidence game that without trust, community is impossible. Like John Randolph, Hooper doubted that people would act virtuously most of the time. Baldwin and Hooper believed that in a disorderly society, especially the one that existed on the frontier, government must actively help in the process of creating order and preserving freedom. Government, therefore, must be strong and vigorous to install and enforce the rule of law. Weak government became anarchy as the rule of the passions victimized those of both good and bad character. Baldwin praised Whig politician Henry Clay because Clay “thought the General Government a vast and mighty agency, which, made vital by the will of a free and energetic people, could accomplish, by its affirmative action, signal blessings to his country and the world.” Hooper also praised the role state government could play in stabilizing Alabama society. Baldwin presented the best example of the convergence of good individual character with the active role of government in his character Francis Strother, the hero in Flush Times. Baldwin based Strother’s character on Francis S. Lyon, a lawyer he knew and respected in Alabama. Strother was a member of a class “rapidly disappearing in the hurly-burly of this fast age of steam pressure and railway progress: a gentleman of the Old School with the energy of the New.” He was the perfect Whig conservative, a man of strong moral character, a forceful will, and virtue. While Strother was a man of traditional honor and manners, he appreciated the freedom of the . Hooper’s distrust of rational self-interest as the basis of social relationships can be seen in an extraordinary letter he wrote to his old Democratic friend Joseph A. Johnson of Dudleyville, Alabama. Hooper and Johnson had traveled to Louisiana and Texas together in the late s, and Johnson had gotten Hooper his job as a census marshal in . When Hooper began editing the East Alabamian in , Johnson subscribed. When he found out that Hooper had become a Whig, he cancelled the ads he was running in the paper. Hooper wrote him a self-revealing letter that stated, “I would not barter the information which my intercourse with you has given me of human nature, for any amount of money. I have loved you as I do my brother, and without reference to politics or any other damned stuff; and the thought that you could be influenced by any consideration to desert me, has wounded me in a most tender place . . . Joe, if I have a feeling which is altogether free from any alloy of interest, it is my love for you.” Reprinted in Edgar E. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper,” . (The letter is undated.) . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –.
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new society. Strother “had passed through the strong temptation which beset a man in a new country” but his character and will sustained him. Baldwin noted that during the flush times it was easy to accumulate “an immense fortune by an agency for the Indians in securing their claims under the treaty of .” Strother “was offered the agency with a compensation which would have made him a millionaire; he took the agency but rejected the fortune.” Strother was a buttress in an unstable world. He resisted the temptation to cheat others. He controlled his will and thus properly used freedom. Baldwin used the example of Strother to illustrate the benefit of honest industry. “He was the genius of labor,” he stated. Strother loved “system— order—punctuality” and worked hard. “He loved labor for its own sake as some men loved ease,” he noted. Strother carefully managed his legal practice and his personal affairs, and thus prospered. His success was not due to his place in any kind of traditional social network. He had no family ties leading him to prosperity, only his good character. He offered a courteous disposition to all and was “never out of temper, never flurried, never excited.” He was “respectful, impressive and persuasive” and never offended “good taste” in any of his cases. He had a “complete mastery” of his will, rarely allowing extraneous circumstances to divert his attention from his duty. “There was business skill in every thing he did,” Baldwin wrote. Strother succeeded, Baldwin implied, because of his devotion to moral action and honest, hard labor. Strother was the model of individual self-control. He succeeded on his own initiative and depended on the force of his will to order his universe. Strother created order on the frontier. Baldwin related that he was made “commissioner of the State Banks of Alabama” because of his excellent reputation. The job was a difficult one because the state banking system was a “mess of confusion.” “[S]uch a bundle of heterogeneous botches in which blundering stupidity, reckless inattention, and both intelligent and ignorant rascality had made their tracks and figures, never before was seen,” remarked Baldwin. Strother had inherited an unenviable but important job. “He was to bring order out of chaos,” a fundamentally conservative task. Strother was able to sort through the corruption and poor . Stewart, “Joseph Glover Baldwin,” . Baldwin, Flush Times, , . . Baldwin, Flush Times, –.
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bookkeeping and save the honor of the state of Alabama. Using the power of state government vigorously, he cracked down on debtors and speculators and restored the solvency of the state banks. Strother had been vested with “such vast trusts, greater than were ever before confided . . . in the South-West to a single man.” He discharged his task “with a fidelity which can neither be exaggerated nor denied.” Strother was “more instrumental than any other in redeeming the State from the Flush Times . . . that hell carnival.” For Baldwin, Strother exemplified the point that success in the age of individualism was due to good moral character. Strother had good character and therefore he succeeded personally and politically. His good character allowed him to use government power justly to attain order and the rule of law. His public-spiritedness, honor, and character made him both the perfect Whig and the incarnation of republican virtue. States’ Rights Baldwin’s and Hooper’s views of human nature and the necessity of active government explain their understandings of states’ rights and the Old Republican tradition. Both men predicated their acceptance of states’ rights doctrine on its ability to achieve freedom and security. They did not view government as a completely negative force, and hoped that through a correct understanding of federalism government could aid the development of the nation. Baldwin hoped that states’ rights principles, properly understood, could unify the country. He had a different conception of states’ rights than other southern conservatives, particularly the Old Republicans. Men like John Randolph of Roanoke held a states’ rights approach that supposed “a state of hostility or rivalry between the General and State governments.” The Old Republicans feared that “the General Government will invade the province of the state jurisdictions.” Whatever the federal government took, they thought, be it “loyalty, respect, homage” or “affection,” it took from the states. Thus men like Randolph, in defending states’ rights, celebrated the local attachments and local power of their respective states. The Old Republicans like Randolph and John Taylor used states’ rights to keep the country divided and power localized in order to prevent political and economic centralization. The Old Republicans did not use states’ rights to . Ibid., –.
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eliminate sectional differences or to seek a national unity. Baldwin viewed states’ rights differently. He regarded it as a means to bring free states together for a common purpose. As a southerner, Baldwin viewed states’ rights as a legitimate legacy left by Jefferson, one that could support his vision of a free society based on individualism. Baldwin agreed that the federal government derived its powers from the states, the foundation of all states’ rights theory. The federal government had “only limited powers” and had to “confine itself . . . to those powers.” The legislators possessed a duty to uphold the legitimate powers of the federal government. If the legislator experienced “a well-founded doubt whether he has the particular power he is asked to exercise,” then he was “bound, in honesty, not to exercise it.” Baldwin summarized, “No one has a right to do that of the propriety of which he is conscientiously doubtful.” He did not support the rigid strict constructionist, however. He believed that Jefferson, in theory, had erred in making his definition of state and federal powers “too narrow.” But Jefferson “modified his definition by his practice.” Some rigid followers of Jefferson, particularly southerners, believed that a strong federal government meant a despotic government. They opposed Hamilton because he made “the new government felt” by the people. Baldwin insisted that a strong government did not necessarily oppress its citizens. He maintained that there was no “sound policy” to forbid “the strengthening of the Federal Government within the circle of its acknowledged powers.” A tyrannical government was always bad, but a strong government, “unless it gets its strength by usurpation, or exercises it with oppression,” could benefit the people. Baldwin insisted that the federal and state governments were not rivals. Both governments shared a common purpose, the good society. He lamented the fact that “in the construction of the powers, and the settlement of the relations of such an anomalous system as our double governments, men leaned to the State or Federal governments according to their attach. Baldwin, Party Leaders, , –. On states’ rights and Whiggery, see Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship, –. Major Wilson maintains that Whigs saw government as a great agent of improvement. It could provide for a better future by strengthening existing institutions and binding the community closer together. Baldwin’s view of states’ rights partially reflected Wilson’s observation. Baldwin retained some suspicion of an activist government. “The Concept of Time,” –. . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –, . On the Whig view of a limited but energetic government, see Kohl, The Politics of Individualism, , , –.
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ments or jealousies.” The constitutional system established in did not see the two governments as competitors, Baldwin claimed. The federal government managed “national affairs,” and the state governments managed “domestic concerns.” The Founding Fathers intended the two governments to be “co-ordinates,” not “rivals.” Each government was to be “master in its own jurisdiction” and was “to keep each to its own track, and to give all due efficiency to each to enable it to accomplish its ends.” Baldwin asserted that whenever the United States went to war the true nature of American federalism was revealed. During war, citizens turned their attention “away from the state governments to the General Government.” “Patriotism,” he added, “becomes love for the Republic.” He proclaimed: “Who thinks of the poor states, unconsidered and unnoticed; or who, in time of war, calls himself a citizen of Virginia or Alabama? No; he is one of the great American nation.” States’ rights guarded liberty. It was a constitutional doctrine, not a social one. Baldwin believed that too often southerners used states’ rights to defend provincial societies within their states instead of seeing the doctrine as a check against consolidated government. States’ rights, by freeing men from consolidated power, allowed men to become moral individuals. Baldwin’s theory of states’ rights matched well his vision of individualism. Baldwin viewed consolidated government as an evil. He charged, “A consolidated government would be the most corrupt government on earth, and the most impracticable.” A consolidated U.S. government would be impossible to maintain and “would soon fall to pieces by its own cabals and corruptions.” Baldwin noted that the Federalists’ interpretation of the “general welfare” clause in the Constitution “was really, in effect, the principle of consolidation; for, under it, Congress could do what it thought necessary to promote the general welfare, that is, any thing it chose.” States’ rights denied that the Federalist construction of the Constitution was valid. Baldwin agreed with the Old Republicans that a consolidated government would produce either civil war or secession. He professed, “The very first assault made upon the rights of the states, by extending the jurisdiction of the general government into the domestic forums, would be followed by armed resistance and this would lead to a dissolution, if not of the Union, at least, of the government.” In Baldwin’s understanding of . Baldwin, Party Leaders, , .
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states’ rights, federalism preserved the Union by checking the tendency of government to interfere in affairs outside its realm of power. States’ rights could bring national unity, but consolidation would destroy it. Hooper regarded states’ rights as the means to protect slavery. During most of the s, Hooper was a states’ rights unionist. He supported, for example, the Alabama American Party’s platform that upheld “the perpetuity of the Union of these States upon the principles of the Constitution, and a perfect reservation to them of all the powers which they have not delegated to the Federal Government.” Hooper’s unionism was not the mystical nationalist variety of fellow Whig Daniel Webster, but shared more in common with that of John Randolph of Roanoke. Randolph had made the point, which many southern conservatives would repeat, that the Union was not good in itself but only as a means to protect liberty. Once the Union oppressed liberty, it had to be dissolved. Hooper repeated the argument in , writing, “Zealous unionists we have always been, . . . when the question is upon the preservation, beyond the probability of danger, of the institution of slavery.” He continued: “We should not hesitate to vote for a dissolution of any connection which brought that institution into the slightest jeopardy. In other words, we would not imperil slavery for a thousand Unions.” In an editorial a few days later, Hooper urged southern Whigs to form a “Southern phalanx” with the Democrats in the House of Representatives so that the two parties “would work harmoniously on the slavery question.” In the custody of such a phalanx, the South could “safely leave the direction of its destiny.” Even as late as May , after he had accepted many southern nationalist concepts, Hooper’s lingering unionism showed itself in his refusal to support Constitutional Unionist John Bell for president on the ground that he did not clearly support the rights of southerners to bring slaves into the territories. He backed John Breckinridge instead, still hoping for the Union to be saved and slavery protected. It was not until Lincoln’s election that Hooper advocated immediate secession. . Ibid., –, . For the modern distinction between secession and civil war, especially in the thought of David Hume, see Donald Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, –. Donald Livingston, “The Secession Tradition in America,” in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State and Liberty, –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, June , , November and , . David M. Potter noted that sectionalism did not necessarily translate into southern nationalism.
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Hooper used the term “Southern Rights” to indicate the defense of slavery. That he referred to “Southern Rights” instead of states’ rights is an important distinction. In the s, when sectional concerns peaked for Hooper, he sometimes addressed states’ rights, particularly in regard to economic development, but Southern Rights was the only national issue upon which he consistently agitated. He thought that every issue was subordinated to the protection of slavery. In he commented: “There was never a time so full of hope for the South, and for the maintenance and extension of slavery . . . We battle not for half our rights, but for the whole.” He promised that the South would secede if the House of Representatives tried to “repeal the fugitive slave law” or passed a bill “abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.” Commenting on the Democratic victories in the elections, Hooper wrote, “The voice of the South just expressed very cordially invites the extinction of her most important institution, and the consequent reduction in the production of her staple commodities, and her people may rest assured that the invitation will be readily accepted.” Again in he reaffirmed the primacy of the slavery question: “If . . . the Union is worth more than the institution of slavery . . . Lord forbid that we should be Union men.” During William L. Yancey’s walkout at the Democratic convention in , Hooper advised Alabamians to “Stand by Yancey.” He asked: “Reader, do you believe that the southern system of slavery is right? Do you believe that being shut up within present limits will ultimately destroy it? Do you believe it has the constitutional right to go into the territories? If you answer each of these interrogations affirmatively, then you will stand by Yancey and the Southern movement.” By phrasing the question of slavery in terms of a constitutional right, Hooper refused to compromise on the protection of slavery and its place in the territories. Anything less, his logic implied, would have been unconstitutional and a violation of true unionism. The active hostility of the general government to the rights of states, charged Baldwin, was not the only danger to federalism. Apathy also could But in Hooper’s case, his logic propelled him toward southern nationalism. “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa” in The South and Sectional Conflict. Hooper’s persistent unionism validates Don Feherenbacher’s discussion of southern nationalism. See Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism, –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, April , , April , , April , , May , .
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bring centralization and destroy states’ rights. He criticized the southern states’ rights party for making “the government sit too lightly upon the people” by abolishing internal taxes under Jefferson. Baldwin was no advocate of high levels of taxation, but he did think that taxation forced people to be vigilant. His argument tied the principle of individual selfinterest to government. “The tax collector brings to vivid remembrance the cost of governmental luxuries,” he wrote. Under the current system, “the process of government is as easy as the process of breathing” and men “forget that they pay” any taxes at all. Vigilance would disappear as apathy numbed the people. Baldwin regarded democracy as the greatest threat to states’ rights and constitutional republican government. He argued that the American people, “eminently practical, aggressive, warlike, ardent and impulsive, never, when in pursuit of a great object, stop to scan logical niceties or solve subtle questions of political power.” When the American people desire something, “they mean to have it, and have it at once.” Often, “public opinion will mould the constitution to suit itself.” Democratic excesses made the rule of law and constitutional government difficult. He sounded like John Randolph in his distrust of “King Numbers.” Baldwin believed that the people, especially through the agency of Jackson, “have already swelled out the constitution to be the representative of their own character.” He concluded that states’ rights principles, “though sometimes ascendant, and seemingly received with favor in calm times, will not always, or even often, prevail, when they come in contact with the impulsive and eager utilitarianism and impatient wishes of the people.” Baldwin thought that there was a solution to the problem, and it lay with the ideas of a senator from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun. . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . . Ibid., –. For a modern treatment of Calhoun, especially highlighting his political fights with Clay, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. During his famous speech against the white basis, Baldwin denounced the Democrats’ attempts to use the tyranny of the majority, democracy, to remove the political, constitutional rights of the Whigs in Alabama. He shouted, “No artful appeals to party feelings; no juggleries of State; no mere arrangements of political maneuvers to create party capital by the deprivation of their rights, will excuse, or palliate to them what they esteem a reckless scheme of legislative robbery.” Baldwin’s invective reminds the reader of Randolph’s speech “On King Numbers.” Quoted in Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, .
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Baldwin invoked the authority of Calhoun on the question of preserving the Republic from democratic excesses. Immediately before the chapter in Party Leaders concerning Jefferson’s doctrine of states’ rights, he wrote that Calhoun’s “luminous speech in reply to Mr. Clay on the Veto Power” was “one of the profoundest expositions ever made of the true character of the constitution.” Baldwin did not analyze in his history the text of Calhoun’s speech. His appeal to Calhoun’s speech revealed much about Baldwin’s republican values and his conception of states’ rights. A brief digression, therefore, is in order. Calhoun gave his “Speech on the Veto Power” in the Senate on February , . He responded to Henry Clay’s resolution calling for a revision of the president’s veto powers. Congressional Whigs hated President John Tyler for vetoing two national bank bills and opposing a protective tariff. Tyler had been elected vice president on the Whig ticket in the Log Cabin campaign of , but Tyler was a different kind of Whig. He was no nationalist. Clay, frustrated by Tyler’s vetoes of Whig legislation, proposed a resolution that would require only a simple majority in Congress, rather than a two-thirds majority, to override a presidential veto. The resolution also called for the abolition of the “pocket veto.” Calhoun vigorously protested the resolution, arguing that Clay’s plan would alter significantly the federal republican structure of the Constitution. Sounding like John Randolph protesting the rule of “King Numbers,” Calhoun attacked democracy as a violation of republican principles. A switch to a simple majority would violate the rights of states and subject them to the tyranny of the majority. Calhoun began his speech by showing that neither the president nor the Senate was elected simply by a numerical majority. Both branches proved that the Constitution was not a democracy committed to a simple majority. The Constitution established the Electoral College, Calhoun pointed out, to thwart a democratic selection of the president. The Senate offered a clearer opportunity to refute the idea of democracy. Because each . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . John Ashworth maintained that Calhoun had “the political opinions of a conservative Whig” but did not agree with actual Whig policies, which often expanded government. Calhoun, like conservative Whigs, questioned democracy and the egalitarianism promoted by radical Democrats. ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats,’ –. . Editorial introduction to Calhoun’s “Speech on the Veto Power,” in Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, –.
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state appointed two senators, small states with small populations became equal to large, more populous states. Calhoun pointed out that if the senators from the smaller states combined to vote together, they could thwart the rule of the larger states. It was thus possible for senators representing one-fourth of the country’s population to block the senators from large states who represented three quarters of the nation’s population. Furthermore, state governments could shut down the federal government by refusing to elect senators. Such principles were hardly democratic. The “equality among states, without regard to numbers, including the branch where it prevails [House of Representatives], would seem to be the favorite with the constitution.” Calhoun charged that if Clay’s resolution was passed and carried out it would “sweep away, not only the veto, but the Executive, the Senate, and the Judiciary, as now constituted; and to leave nothing standing in the midst of the ruins but the House of Representatives, where only, in the whole range of Government, numbers exclusively prevail.” Clay’s resolution would destroy the Constitution and “would not leave a fragment standing amidst the ruin in its rear.” Calhoun then delved into a defense of state sovereignty. He argued, as Baldwin did, that the powers of the federal government were derivative. The federal government derived its powers from the states. Calhoun proved this by appealing to the history of the Constitution. The Constitutional Convention “was called by a portion of the States,” and the states appointed the members of the convention. Thus the Framers of the Constitution “received their authority from their separate States.” The Framers “voted by States in forming the constitution” and “agreed to it, when formed, by States.” The process of ratification revealed state sovereignty as well as republicanism. The Constitution would go into effect only if nine of thirteen states ratified it. This meant that only four states, which, if small states, could contain only a small fraction of the population, could have blocked the implementation of the Constitution. Calhoun remarked, “Such was the total disregard for population in the adoption and formation of the constitution.” The Framers, he noted, were not democrats. He also pointed to the process of amending the Constitution as further proof that the Constitution did not advocate the simple rule of the majority. He . John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Veto Power,” in Lence, ed., Union and Liberty, –.
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argued that “ours is a union . . . of States,” not of individuals or governments. The United States was a “Federal Republic, with the same equality of rights among the States themselves.” The United States was not a nation but an “assemblage of nations, or peoples . . . united in their sovereign character immediately and directly by their own act, but without losing their separate and independent existence.” Calhoun predicted that democratizing the Senate would promote the rule of interest and bring about tyranny. He feared that a rule of numbers in the federal government would allow the North, which had a majority of the population, to oppress the South. He noted that from its inception, the federal government was home to competing interests “on subjects of the first magnitude—the currency and finances, including taxation and disbursements; the bank, the protective tariff, distribution, and many others.” He warned that the effect of placing “the powers of the Government under the exclusive control of the numerical majority” would be “to give the dominant interest, or combination of interests, an unlimited and despotic control over all others.” The predominant interest would have “the power to administer the Government for its exclusive benefit.” In a country as diverse as the United States, a dominant interest could subject the rest of the country “to the most grinding despotism and oppression.” He pointed out that the House of Representatives exemplified the potential problem the Senate would face if it democratized. In the House, each state “has a representation according to its federal numbers.” A majority of the members controlled the House. States with large populations dominated smaller states. Calhoun noted that “if the House were the exclusive organ of the voice of the people,” the result would be “the domination of the stronger over the weaker interests of the community, and the establishment of an intolerable and oppressive despotism.” Democratization would also affect the presidency negatively. Calhoun maintained that the presidential veto checked the popular rule of the majority and gave the president a tool by which he could protect the Constitution from harm by the majority. If Clay’s resolution passed, the president would have to pander to Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, to maintain power. Calhoun witnessed a drift “steadily towards the . Ibid., –. . Ibid., .
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numerical majority” in the government, particularly noticeable in Congress. As Congress transcended its limits and began to legislate on more than it had been authorized to do, the power of the president would increase through the power to give patronage. Calhoun asserted that if Congress “should extend its legislation in every direction” to include “subjects never contemplated by the constitution,” government offices would proliferate. As Congress framed “its laws vaguely and loosely,” it withdrew “its supervising care over their execution,” and increased the power of the president to “alarming” proportions. Calhoun called upon Clay and his party to limit their legislative proposals to that with which the Congress was authorized by the Constitution to deal. He also reiterated the need for states’ rights and vigilance. Calhoun’s explication of the Constitution made sense to Baldwin for many reasons. Baldwin did not believe that all men were capable of selfgovernment. The Constitution, as Calhoun explained it, checked popular excesses and gave government enough power, within defined limits, to order society and prevent chaos. Calhoun’s construction also left room for individualism. The government’s powers were limited, thus protecting individuals from oppression. The government was strong enough to unite the people of the states for a common purpose as well, the whole point of Baldwin’s conception of states’ rights. Baldwin’s acceptance of states’ rights should not be seen as an attempt to play the “politics of slavery” with southern Democrats. He was not attempting to be more radical or more fervent in his states’ rights principles than Democrats in order to convince southerners of his loyalty to slavery. His view of states’ rights coincided with his vision of human nature and of an orderly society friendly to individualism. A few of the differences between Baldwin’s and Hooper’s states’ rights doctrines and that of the Old Republicans resulted from historical context. The issue of slavery played a much larger role in the politics of the s than in the politics of , when the states’ rights doctrines took center stage in Republican thought. Randolph had linked states’ rights and slavery during the debates over the War of , and Hooper made that link the centerpiece of his sectional politics. In terms of Baldwin’s views of states’ rights, Whig views of human nature and society played an impor. Ibid., , , .
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tant role in his interpretation of federalism. Baldwin supported limited constitutional government, but perceived that states’ rights should protect citizens from a national consolidated government while unifying citizens within the states to work for a free society. States’ rights should bring men together rather than divide them. States’ rights served as a basis for consensus, not division. Just as their Whig focus on unity colored their understanding of states’ rights, Baldwin’s and Hooper’s Whig views also colored their discussions of republican issues. Republican Vocabulary and Political Issues Scholars have recently argued that the ideology of republicanism weakened during the antebellum period as commercial liberalism strengthened. While few would argue that American political ideology remained constant from to , some scholars have of late shied away from noticing the continuity in political ideas throughout the early national and antebellum periods. Baldwin and Hooper did not seek to replicate the republican ideology of the eighteenth century, but they were aware of its persistence, as evidenced by their use of republican concepts and vocabulary in critiquing political parties and advocating economic progress. Baldwin distrusted democracy and supported what he called Jefferson’s “popular system,” an important concept for his understanding of republicanism. According to Baldwin, the Constitution prevented democracy and upheld republicanism. He thought that political democracy was unnecessary for a popular social arrangement. Jefferson’s “popular system,” charged Baldwin, “elevates the masses.” He insisted: “By making a man independent of external control, he becomes his own master. He relies on himself. He gets that individuality of will, which is the distinctive attribute of freedom and of manhood. With it comes self respect.” Once the individual possessed a strong, self-reliant will and the right of self-government, he would respect the rights of others. Baldwin did not imply that selfinterest would produce virtuous, public-spirited citizens. Instead, selfreliance could produce public-spiritedness and concern for others. The distinction is significant. Baldwin did not endorse unrestrained self-interest along the lines of Bernard Mandeville’s infamous Fable of the Bees as a positive influence on society. Nor did he posit a Lockean self-interest as the social glue of the Republic. Self-indulgent individuals acting on their desires produced chaos. Baldwin’s view of the Jeffersonian “popular system”
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was that it inspired individual responsibility, not license. The sense of responsibility then transcended the individual and obligated him to seek the good of society at large, while at the same time directing society along new paths. “The man free, and stimulated to activity, finds a thousand avenues of business and enterprise, that invite his talents,” noted Baldwin. Rather than relying on others to think for him, the free individual’s mind “is awakened to energetic and independent action.” “The whole nation is thus aroused; the contagious influence of mind on mind obtains; and the immense volume of its aggregate thought and enterprise, starting from its millions of streamlets, pours forth its mighty current.” Responsible individuals of strong moral character could promote the progress of a whole nation. Baldwin credited Jefferson’s principle of self-government with the tremendous economic and moral progress made by the United States. The “popular system” was Baldwin’s view of American republicanism. Baldwin and Hooper thought that political parties, as they were constructed during the second and third party systems, threatened freedom. Baldwin blamed Andrew Jackson and his lieutenant Martin Van Buren with orchestrating an extensive system of parties that fundamentally threatened the Republic. Political parties threatened republicanism by inflaming popular passions, by destroying the notion of a general or common good, and by threatening to alter the Constitution permanently. Baldwin indicted political parties for exciting human passions and exploiting the weaknesses in human nature. He insisted that the “feeling of partisanship seems natural to man.” The passions of sympathy and combativeness led men to pick sides in any quarrel. A party organized such passions and served as “a powerful fomenter of zeal and violence.” Parties created a mob mentality. He asserted that “men think and do, when aggregated, what each one singly would be ashamed of, or shrink from, as weak and wicked.” Worst of all, “the most ignorant are the most prone to this passion.” The common ignorant masses “go into a political struggle, as they take sides in a muster fight.” They not only “love the excitement,” but the party “gives employment to all their passions.” Parties gave people “a sense of power.” Politicians pandered to the people, thereby flattering . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –. See McCoy, The Elusive Republic for the extremes of the ideological debate during the eighteenth century in the Anglo-American world. See Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, , and Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, , –, on why the Whigs were not liberals and why they were not Federalists.
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them. Parties gave people a feeling of belonging too. People enjoyed “promoting the common enterprise” of the party. They liked the feelings of closeness with others. Baldwin wrote, “A sort of free-masonry of feeling and affiliation grows up between the members.” Most of all, parties gave people an identity. He noted, “The jealousies and strifes of rivalry and opposition, party and individual, tend to wed them more closely to their own, and to separate them from the opposite party and its members.” According to Baldwin, parties encompassed all of modern American political and social life. Baldwin and Hooper believed that political parties usurped republican principles and threatened social unity. Baldwin argued in Party Leaders that republicanism had given Americans a sense of power as they had defeated the British and achieved independence and had unified them in a common cause for a common good. The republicanism of the Revolutionary generation had even joined the diverse sections of New England and Virginia in a common cause. Most importantly, republicanism gave the American people an identity as a modern nation set apart from the politics and society of Europe. Hooper charged that partisanship detracted from the unified social vision advocated by the Whigs. Throughout his editorials, he called for social unity around principles for the common good. Parties tended to divide people artificially, causing many to lose any sense of a common good. Parties subordinated society to politics. Hooper felt the tensions of partisanship in his own career as a Whig editor. In a bit of self-deprecating humor, he has Suggs tell the narrator Johns (Hooper himself ), “. . . quit ritin lies for the d—d feddul whigs, and come back to your ole princippels.” The idea that Hooper was “writing lies” in order to further his party’s political fortunes did not sit well with him. It did not, however, prevent him from espousing Whiggery. Baldwin believed that parties tended to inflate insignificant differences . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –. On anti-party sentiment among the Whigs, see Major L. Wilson, “Republicanism and the Idea of Party in the Jacksonian Period,” in Ralph D. Gray and Michael A. Morrison, eds., New Perspectives on the Early Republic: Essays from the Journal of the Early Republic, –, –. Formisano, “Political Character, Antipartyism and the Second Party System,” –. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, –. . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, . Southern nationalists hated parties too. In fact, Hooper’s antiparty editorials throughout the s differed little from his Whig views of the s. See Rable, The Confederate Republic. See also Kenneth Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery. For southern nationalists’
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in opinion among Americans. For Americans, “politics are the safetyvalves that let off the discontent, and the surplus energies of our people.” He continued, “What the theatre is to the French, or the bull-fight or fandango to the Spanish, the hustings and ballot-box are to our people.” Parties formed out of the need in human nature for opposition. He wrote, “The zeal and violence of parties are not always measured by the magnitude of the principles or measures involved.” In fact, often matters were trivial and were “magnified by the politicians” in order to create a contest and obtain votes. Though there were differences in principles between the parties, Baldwin admitted that in the struggle between Whigs and Democrats personalities rather than ideas usually separated the two. He even insisted that the “country could have gone on under either scheme, and the difference in its condition would scarcely have been noticed.” Both parties professed “the main and characteristic principles of republican government.” Partisanship only divided Americans and distracted them unnecessarily from their common republican goals. As parties grew and became older, the social and political divisions hardened and prevented the American people from living up to their republican heritage. Baldwin warned that as parties gained control, they threatened the system of government devised by the Founders. Jackson led the way. Baldwin maintained, “The tendency and character of his administration were to consolidate his party.” Jackson created the most dangerous aspect of party politics, the spoils system. Basically repeating the ideas of John C. Calhoun on parties’ negative effects on the Constitution, Baldwin surmised that the spoils system, “the most effective engine of party,” allowed the president to usurp constitutional power. By rewarding his friends with appointed political offices, Jackson “diffused his own spirit and energy through every department of the government, and into every section of the country” and “excited the public mind in his favor.” He was “the boss of the great political workshop” and his will “was felt at the remotest corners of the empire.” Baldwin’s inference that Jackson was the emperor of the American Empire which he had created revealed that Baldwin thought that Jackson, frustrations at the strength of the American two party system and its ability to prevent southern unity, see Howard C. Perkins, “A Neglected Phase of the Movement for Southern Unity, –,” –. . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –. . Ibid., , .
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at least in practice, had deviated from the Revolutionary ideal and had extended the presidency’s influence over government much further than the Constitution envisioned. Baldwin’s sentiments were those that gave rise to the Whig party in the early s. Baldwin and Hooper worried about the corruption brought by parties. Baldwin identified the spoils system as a threat to the Constitution. In many ways, the spoils system democratized the presidency. The system gave “an interest to thousands in the success of an administration.” It secured “a corps of supporters” and gave them the weapons by which to fight, a system of rewards and penalties. The system transformed political offices into party barracks. The officeholder became “ex officio drill sergeant and recruiting officer.” Office supplied him “with the material for obtaining recruits, and instituting and perfecting organization.” The spoils system significantly broadened the appeal of the party system and increased the impact of the people upon the government. The system, however, addressed “the lower passions,” which “are the more active and energetic faculties.” The system preyed upon the weaknesses in human nature and dragged men and politics down. Baldwin put it bluntly: “A man in politics may do a good deal from patriotism, but he does it by spasms and desultorily; while he will work all the time for money and promotion.” During a trip to Washington, D.C., in , Hooper expressed alarm at the “inaccessibility of the ‘servants of the people’ in higher places.” The situation, he commented, “is especially an outrage under our republican form of government.” The “aristocracy of office” was “thoroughly established at Washington,” insisted Hooper, and would only “grow more exacting” unless some drastic political measures, perhaps even secession, were taken. Parties coarsened American life by transforming government into an engine for corruption. By the s Hooper believed that partisan loyalty interfered with loyalty to the South. In he wrote: “We want people to curse, in their hearts, all those party combinations for spoils, which in turn, practically whatever may be their theories, have contributed to lessen the power and degrade the political condition of the South. The South must throw Whig and Democrat views and politics to the winds, and ask themselves what are . Ibid., . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, April , . Marion Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper,” .
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their rights boldly, and maintain them.” Hooper hoped for a renewal of the republican antiparty spirit in the South: “We need fresh, vigorous, determined minds, free from all aspirations beyond those they breathe for the safety of the South, and perfectly unclogged by past events and associations.” Parties replaced patriotism and a vision of the public good, in this case, protection of the South, with self-interest. Hooper saw parties interfering with identity. By encouraging individuals to identify themselves with a party, partisan politicians circumvented the sectional identity that Hooper believed should trump partisanship. Hooper criticized the Democrats along both republican and sectional lines. Like Baldwin, Hooper charged the Democrats with demagoguery and seeking to manipulate the ignorant yeomanry into supporting schemes that would benefit only party leadership. He also charged the Democratic leaders with hypocrisy. While the Democrat leaders extolled the virtues of the common man, they themselves were a greedy aristocratic elite, almost an antirepublican cabal. Hoping that the Democrats would defend southern rights in their national convention, Hooper noted in an editorial, “We confess, we have little hope from the deliberations of a convention, a majority of whom, by the natural exigencies of their position, can have no very strong inclinations towards the side of Constitutional law, and so many of whom, are mere political plunderers, to whom the aggrandizement or the ruin of States is as nothing compared with the success or failure of personal schemes.” Democratic politicians lacked appreciation both for the common good and for a unified social vision. Instead of supporting the Constitution, Democratic politicians backed policies that would benefit their own self-interests. Thus even southern Democrats, insisted Hooper, failed to demand respect for constitutional rights concerning slavery in the territories because they supported party unity and personal advancement over truth. It seems hypocritical and contradictory for Baldwin and Hooper to denounce parties on the one hand, while being devout Whigs on the other. But Baldwin, being realistic, knew that he could not wish parties out of . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, May , , November , . . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, April , . Joseph O’Beirne Milner also discusses Hooper’s attack on Democrats for their demagoguery. “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris.”
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existence. The circumstances of American life had changed. Just as the new society of the West undermined traditional republican society, the individualism of the new social order undermined the political arrangement of the Revolutionary era. Individuals, Baldwin realized, needed to derive their identity from something. In the traditional world, they had looked to stable institutions such as churches and families to define themselves. The instability of American life undermined traditional institutions. Whereas some turned inward to give their lives meaning, most attached themselves to parties to make sense of their lives and their world. Parties looked to be permanent. Baldwin, therefore, could justify becoming a Whig by appealing to common sense as well as principle. He believed that antipartyism and republicanism matched more closely to Whig principles than to Democratic ones. Hooper too approached parties practically. When they supported his views, he backed them. But he also recognized that parties would not achieve social unity. Social unity, for Hooper, could be won through southern nationalism.
R Like Randolph and Taylor, Baldwin and Hooper reflected on the traditional republican concern over the balance of popular virtue and constitutional mechanics. As states’ rights Whigs, both remained concerned for constitutional government. As conservatives who recognized the importance of individual character for social order, they understood the importance of virtue. Like Randolph, Baldwin and Hooper believed that while constitutional mechanics was important, popular virtue was more so. Baldwin noted that in a free society, one in which traditional institutions rested on a voluntary basis, individual self-control was of the utmost importance. Virtue, Baldwin assumed, meant an excellence of the will that led to self-sacrifice for the public good. Virtue prevented individualism from becoming nihilism. Virtue gave the individual a social duty to perform—to support the civic institutions that brought order. He rejected the liberal idea that the environment could teach moral virtue. Using an example from his experiences as a lawyer on the frontier, he noted that even the free environment failed to make all lawyers “good” and “honorable gentleman.” “In too many cases there was no sub-soil of mind or . Baldwin, Party Leaders, .
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morals on which these advantages could rest,” he wrote. In keeping with his view of the supremacy of the will, he maintained that it was the individual who ordered his environment, not vice versa. Men of weak character could bear ill moral effects from a chaotic environment, but their failure was primarily that of their wills. The environment was only partially to blame. Virtue was an individual’s choice. Hooper echoed these thoughts in an October letter to his son William, who had joined the Confederate army at the age of seventeen. Hooper assured his son that while he was concerned about his “personal safety,” he was also interested in his “habits, moral and intellectual.” Hooper wrote, “There never was a truer soldier to whom his honor was not dearer than life; there was never a great one, who was not a student.” He told William to study “military books” so that he could advance in the ranks. Like Baldwin, who stressed the formation of the will over the intellect, Hooper warned his son, “You will have many temptations to dissipation; you will often feel like indulging a lazy fit; these are the sirens which destroy the promise of hundreds of brilliant young men.” Hooper realized that intellectual prowess was insufficient to sustain morality. The exercise of reason did not make one moral. Hooper was not, as some critics have suggested, a nihilist or positivist who endorsed the will-to-power. He emphasized, “But above all, my Son, remember that Truth is the foundation of all fame and honor—of all that is desirable in life.” William had to conform his actions to the truths of morality, honor, and virtue in order to achieve greatness. “The liar,” Hooper warned, “is always a coward, morally at least.” Hooper’s solution to the problems of freedom was individualistic in that it began with the duty of the individual to conform himself to objective moral standards and to practice self-restraint. The temptation to turn into a shifty Simon Suggs was always present, but the individual’s will could triumph. Baldwin and Hooper, like Randolph and Taylor, rejected the idea that government could make people moral. Baldwin linked the New England . Baldwin, Flush Times, . . Johnson Jones Hooper to William DeBerniere Hooper, October , . Reprinted in Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper,” . See Johanna Nicol Shields, “Introduction,” in Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, xxxviii, for Hooper’s stress on self-restraint as necessary for modern society. See also Johanna Nicol Shields, “A Sadder Simon Suggs: Slavery and Freedom in the Humor of Johnson Hooper,” –.
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tendency to the idea of constitutional balance. “A constitution is made for a people, not a people for a constitution,” he wrote. The government, in Baldwin’s understanding, rested on popular virtue and character. Thus it could only reflect, not remake, that character. Some believed that by “building up a class of people” they could get “a constitution properly balanced.” Baldwin regarded such opinions as futile and ridiculous. By attempting to remake society, the government was sure to produce chaos, not freedom. Hooper concurred in an editorial on the temperance movement, a popular nineteenth-century reform movement advocated by many Whigs. Though Hooper himself drank abundantly, he supported the temperance movement. In an editorial, he wrote: “We claim to be a pretty fair friend to temperance. We regard intemperance as the great curse of the country. But we have small faith in moralizing enactments.” Hooper believed that temperance societies worked as long as they were voluntary and focused on the improvement of individual character. Government enforcement of temperance, however, would have little effect on the problem. For Hooper, temperance laws probably reminded him too much of the coercive measures used by traditional societies to sustain order. Like other southern conservatives, Hooper viewed politics and the state as the servants of society. Government should leave social relations largely alone. Attempts to merge the state and society, which Hooper perceived in movements such as temperance and abolitionism, threatened individualism and freedom. Baldwin thought that republicans who placed primacy on constitutional mechanics made the government too rigid and ideological. He used the example of Jefferson’s doctrine of strict construction. Jefferson and his followers had strictly and narrowly defined the limits of government power during the s before they were swept into office in . After , “Jefferson found the rigid rule of construction which he professed while out of office, too stringent for a practical administration of the government.” In fact, Jefferson, as Baldwin delightedly pointed out, violated virtually all of his professed constitutional mechanics while he was president. According to Baldwin, politics was by necessity a practical science. He did not endorse, however, a practical politics that violated constitutional . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, December , . Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper,” –.
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limits. Constitutional mechanics were important, for Baldwin, after all, was a republican. By focusing too much on the mechanics of government, however, many republicans had become raving ideologues. Ideologues rejected common sense and often used government to coerce those with whom they disagreed. Baldwin implied that ideologues were political Puritans, insisting on doctrinal purity in a most unrealistic fashion. He thought it was wiser to have “a better people” than “better laws.” Because constitutional mechanics could not make people virtuous, they remained of secondary importance to the true republican.
R Most Whigs, including Baldwin and Hooper, supported government involvement in the economic modernization of the United States. Their support for government interference in the economy separated them from the more libertarian Old Republicans, even though they shared similar views on other issues. Baldwin and Hooper believed that government, as long as it did not degenerate into tyranny, could aid in the establishment of order necessary to support a free society. They justified Henry Clay’s American System on the grounds that it would extend freedom through economic progress and the rule of law. Baldwin admired Alexander Hamilton’s and Henry Clay’s views that positive government action could help to achieve national greatness. He praised the American System as a friend of American republicanism. Internal improvements would serve to unite different sections of the country and “to bind the States together with bands of iron.” The tariff would “make us independent of foreign nations for the munitions of war and the comforts of life.” A stronger navy and army would “protect our commerce on the ocean, and command the respect of foreign powers.” Baldwin saw Clay’s programs in terms of republican independence and national unity, not as threats to local rule. In Party Leaders, Baldwin praised Hamilton’s financial system, including the Bank, for invigorating the country. The funding system allowed the government to meet its obligations to pay its debts and also served to extend credit. He concluded, “It is certain that the effect of the system was to raise the credit and character of the government; while the enormous evils predicted from it did not ensue.” Most of . Baldwin, Party Leaders, , .
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the objections to Hamilton’s plan, Baldwin added, “seem to us at this day as almost factious; some of them nearly puerile.” Hamilton achieved the republican goals of the Revolution by allowing the new government to exercise its lawful powers and enabling it “to stand forth as a national government, self-reliant and independent at once of aid and opposition.” The U.S. government reflected the Whig principles of self-reliance and independence. Hooper also thought that government support of economic progress was important. As a Clay Whig who supported the American System, Hooper called for state funding in constructing internal improvements, particularly railroads, in Alabama in the s. Unlike opponents to the American System such as Randolph and John Taylor, Hooper did not use constitutional points to support his position but predicted the social benefits railroads would bring. Like Simms in the early s, Hooper did not see state-aided internal improvements as meddling with social relations but as eliminating the barriers to social development. One of the principal benefits would be a uniting of social interests in Alabama, a central Whig theme. On November , , Hooper published an editorial elaborating his position on a state-aided railroad. He noted that the joining of “different portions of the State with each other” and with the “markets of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts” would improve the state’s economy. He insisted that legislators not pander to their constituencies by proposing schemes only “for the local benefit of particular sections.” Rather, they should settle upon “one or two works whose construction is demanded about equally for the promotion of the best interests of our entire population.” He realized that any internal improvement would not benefit each individual in the state to an “equal extent.” Those who lived nearer to the rail lines would benefit more. But, like the Erie Canal in New York, a north-south railway through the middle of the state would aid all Alabamians by increasing the population, raising land values, boosting the productivity of labor, and developing the use of the state’s natural resources. Hooper pointed to an additional benefit, the increase of communication throughout the . Ibid., , , –, . Baldwin did mention that Hamilton may have given the government too much power. . Johanna Nicol Shields, “Introduction,” Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, xxix.
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state. His focus on increased communication revealed his Whig desire for social unity. Hooper did realize that government ties to economic institutions could produce corruption. In the Suggs stories, characters frequently attempt to use government power to benefit themselves. Such realities reinforced to Hooper the necessity of virtue, but they did not disabuse him of the idea that government had a role to play in economic progress. Baldwin and Hooper on Andrew Jackson Instead of focusing on one political issue to show the similarities between Baldwin and Hooper, this section examines their views on Andrew Jackson. In their views of Jackson, Baldwin and Hooper illustrate their Whig principles as well as their appreciation for states’ rights, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. Baldwin admired facets of Andrew Jackson’s character while disliking his politics. He thought that Jackson had been misunderstood. He remarked: “He was neither a god nor a devil. He was worthy neither of adoration nor of detestation.” Baldwin’s attempts to understand Jackson’s character focused on his early life during the Revolution. He had been formed in great measure by republican principles. He grew up rather poor and uneducated on the colonial frontier, but had overcome the adversity of his youth and had become a lawyer, a prosperous planter, and a general. He was “simple and frugal in his tastes and habits” and a good republican. In many ways, Jackson embodied the spirit of the frontier. The new community on the frontier, according to Baldwin, gave Jackson “a fair chance and an even start.” The community cared about “practical affairs” rather than “refined speculation.” Baldwin noted that only “a bold, frank, decisive man could rise to power in such a community.” One aspiring to leadership on the frontier “must be able to appeal to the strong feelings and the manly common-sense of the people.” Jackson succeeded in the new society and carried many of its characteristics with him, particularly its popular character. His military genius and commanding presence stemmed from his strength of character. It gave him a measure of heroism. He was confident in his abilities and lived a straightforward moral life. He es. Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , . . Baldwin, Party Leaders, , –.
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poused nationalism too, being free from the localistic prejudices of the insular societies of the eastern states. His iron will and his willingness to take risks in order to succeed made him a formidable opponent, either on the battlefield or in the political arena. Jackson was an enthusiast and a man of great passions. Baldwin maintained: “Jackson was an enthusiast; not a flaming zealot, but one of the Ironsides. He was built of the Cromwell stuff, without Cromwell’s religious fanaticism.” His enthusiasm, combined with his iron will, made him a powerful and demanding leader. Jackson had “little toleration for human weaknesses” and was “incredulous of impossibilities.” When he set his will to achieve a goal, he succeeded and entertained “no thought of failure.” Baldwin remarked with admiration, “The world around was a blank to him except as a theatre on which he acted.” Jackson possessed a “fiery soul” and frequently had trouble controlling his passions. Unlike most people, who rose to “passion” and fell “back to lassitude,” Jackson “was ever the same.” He always acted as the commanding officer. His enthusiasm made him view others with condescension. He demanded “undeviating fidelity” from his friends and overlooked their faults as long as they remained loyal to him. Baldwin thought Jackson to be unbending in virtually all things, especially politics. Jackson possessed the mind-set of a fierce partisan and lacked the ability both to judge rationally his opponents and to compromise when necessary. His enthusiasm combined with his military bearing led him to consider politics a form of war. Jackson took no prisoners. In addition to his rigid mind-set, Jackson was essentially a demagogue. More than anyone else, Jackson “thoroughly understood the genius of the American people, and knew what they desired and what they would stand.” He “excited the public mind in his favor.” By understanding the people so well, Jackson could play to their fears for his own political advantage. Baldwin lamented, “He had the ear and the prepossessions of the people; and no man ever lived who could better address their passions, and apply the arguments, and ply the appeals which found approval, or would create an impression on the common mind.” As a result, Jackson “impressed his . Ibid., . Baldwin’s comparison of Jackson to Cromwell is significant. Michael Holt in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party notes that Whigs feared that Jackson’s military past might resurface and force a military tyranny upon the people ().
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name and character upon the country more deeply than any man, the father of his country only excepted, ever did before or after him.” He began the process of the democratization of American government, but ironically held a position more like that of an emperor, according to Baldwin. He “consolidated the strength and energies of the government” as well as that of his party. Baldwin remarked, “he found a confederacy—he left an empire.” He also charged that Jackson skillfully aggrandized himself through political office. Baldwin asserted that Jackson did not so much seize power tyrannically as he was given it by the people. Baldwin commented that it was “the nature of man to side with the strong.” Because Jackson presented himself as a strong leader, the people supported him in large numbers. Baldwin asserted that the “influences which draw men are not the gentler or more loving qualities.” Rather, “the masses” preferred “sterner qualities” in men. “A daring robber on the gibbet excites more of vulgar sympathy than a suffering martyr at the stake,” he insisted. Echoing Machiavelli’s cynicism, Baldwin mentioned that the people only admired those whom they feared. The popular leader had to embody courage. The people viewed Jackson, due to his military background, as a stern man of courage, a man to be feared. His sterner qualities impressed the people of the United States so much that they acquiesced in his rule. Baldwin, of course, was distressed by the facts of the matter, and his general disdain of democracy comes through in his comments about Jackson. He believed that Jackson became so powerful because he knew his strength with the people and willingly used it to advance his agenda. Jackson helped his popularity by couching his programs in popular rhetoric. Baldwin gave the example of the Bank Veto as evidence of Jackson’s demagoguery. He noted that Jackson realized that popular opinion sided with him, and that being an enthusiast, Jackson firmly believed his own propaganda. Baldwin insisted: “Money changers are not, and never have been, popular favorites, from the time they were driven from the temple. Corporations are not popular in republics.” He argued that terms such as “exclusive privileges, money oligarchies,” and “rag-barons” caught “the popular ear.” Banks had their power “independent of the people” and were run by rich men. The people envied wealth and thus wanted to de. Baldwin, Party Leaders, , , –. See Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, . . Baldwin, Party Leaders, .
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stroy the Bank. Jackson obliged them. Baldwin related that “charges were made against the Bank; and to make a charge against a colossal shavingshop, is the same thing as to prove it.” He accused Jackson, therefore, of playing to popular ignorance and class resentment to destroy a beneficial organ of the economy. Even worse was Jackson’s removal of government deposits from the Bank. His actions “involved the question of the powers of the different departments of the government.” The Senate protested and rebuked the president for his boldness. Jackson took his case to the people, again simplifying a complex issue through bombast and demagoguery. Baldwin asserted that Jackson “had the sagacity to disguise his strong measures in popular forms.” Jackson ably portrayed himself as the lone victim of the aristocratic tyrants in the Senate, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster. The people supported their hero, blind to the real issues involved and completely persuaded by Jackson’s rhetoric and posturing as the persecuted underdog. Baldwin charged that Jackson’s policies brought chaos and that the president had little understanding of economic matters. After successfully demonizing the Bank as an enemy to the freedom of the Republic, Jackson established himself as “the impersonation of popular sovereignty, warring against an usurping moneyed institution.” Jackson decided to withdraw government deposits from the Bank of the United States and to place them in state banks. Baldwin noted the results: “The funds of the government, overflowing in all its channels of revenue, became the feeders to numberless bogus banks all over the country. Bank charters multiplied in the land. A state of almost fabulous prosperity, as it seemed, set in.” Jackson had unintentionally created the flush times. Jackson, however, had no replacement for the role played by the Bank of the United States in the economy. His action to crush the “Monster” gave rise to numerous other frauds, state banks. Thus the very institutions Jackson demonized as enemies to liberty proliferated as a result of his policy. The bumbling Jackson then issued the specie circular act requiring specie for government debts, which eventually halted the flush times. Martin Van Buren, Baldwin argued, reaped “the whirlwind, from the wind sowed by his predecessor.” Baldwin, like other Whigs, believed that Jackson’s actions threatened . Ibid., , . . Ibid., –. For a discussion of Whig fears about Jackson’s appeal to democracy see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, –, vol. , –.
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the Constitution. His argument against Jackson was similar to Calhoun’s attack on democracy in the Speech on the Veto Power in . Both Baldwin and Calhoun feared that Jackson’s use of popular power and his extension of democracy undermined the foundations of constitutional liberty. “The popularity of Jackson was with the masses,” remarked Baldwin. Jackson milked his popularity by playing the victim in his struggles against strong Whig senators, particularly Clay and Daniel Webster. By appealing to the people’s sympathy, Jackson captured their support and thus made his push for democracy indomitable. Baldwin thought that Jackson had violated the Constitution in his attacks upon the Senate. He wrote, “The man of the whole people would beat the confederation of the men of the states, with any thing like an equal-showing.” By marshaling popular support through his control of the party press and his spoils system, Jackson destroyed the power of the Senate and thus the checks and balances of the Constitution. In addition, he “struck down the doctrines of State Rights, in their sanction and substance, and in their strongholds, and with them the flower of the disciples of that school, to which he had, in great part, owed his election; and he established national doctrines.” After Jackson “subdued the Senate,” he “raised up another president . . . to rule after him.” He did this by sheer force of will. “He operated directly upon the public mind,” Baldwin insisted. He became powerful enough “to raise up whom he chose” and “to put down whom he chose.” Jackson had become a despot through democracy. Baldwin suspected that Jackson’s seizure of power had been aided by a misunderstanding of the meaning of liberty among the people. Liberty was “a very indefinite term” and conveyed “a very vague meaning, until some overt act, coming home to the people, gives it an interpretation.” For Baldwin liberty lay with the rule of law through the Constitution. The people as a mass, he charged, were unable to sustain constitutional liberty. He wrote, “That sort of liberty, which is invaded in the small beginnings— in the cautious encroachments of tyranny, feeling its way gradually to ungranted and unlawful dominion—the seed-acts, from which spring up, at a distant day, a harvest of errors and precedents of evil—these it required . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –, –. John Ashworth, in ‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats,’ notes that by supporting the legislative branch over the executive in the Age of Jackson, Whigs took the conservative side.
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sharper acumen than the masses possess, to see at the right time, and in their real character.” Democracy was unable to preserve liberty. Responsible, knowledgeable political leaders, an aristocracy of merit of sorts, were needed to preserve the rule of law. As an example, Baldwin pointed to Jackson’s removal of government deposits from the second Bank of the United States. The common people perceived no invasion of their liberty in Jackson’s blatantly unconstitutional act. Baldwin saw the people as creatures of passion, not of reason. Jackson betrayed his vocation as an American republican leader. Instead of practicing public-spiritedness and emotional restraint, Jackson gave in to the forces of demagoguery and selfinterest. Political democracy perverted republicanism, and Jackson was responsible for this scourge on the American Republic. Jackson’s policies reworked the American political landscape by weakening the power of local elites and by subverting principles to naked selfinterest. Baldwin commented that men who “before the Jackson era had flourished as pachas in their local demesnes, found to their sorrow, that they had raised up a Sultan, who could bow-string them at pleasure, for a word of contumacy or an act of rebellion against his authority.” The elites who initially had seen Jackson as friendly to their local systems of power had been deceived by him. Jackson, in Baldwin’s mind, was a cunning emperor. By marshaling the forces of party and democracy, Jackson made the traditional American aristocratic elite meaningless. Baldwin also accused him of destroying the ideological basis of American politics. Principles “had been the shibboleths with which they [older politicians] had passed the disputed defiles of politics.” After Jackson, however, “political conjurers found the old cabalistic phrases of ‘State Rights,’ ‘Reform,’ and the like, superseded by the modern cry of ‘Hurrah for Jackson.’” By destroying ideological politics for a politics based on interest groups and government spoils, Jackson ended the republicanism that had driven American politics since the Revolution. Baldwin continued, “Jackson had got into the hearts of the people, and the unreasoning affection for the man was stronger with the masses than the wise words of the politicians’ argumentation.” Jackson replaced a thoughtful, rational style of politics with hero . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –. Lawrence Kohl maintains in The Politics of Individualism that law, for the Whigs, was “the only basis for order in a society which denied the necessity of popular consensus, the legitimacy of any ruling class, and the wisdom of granting government any considerable power to coerce” ().
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worship or a cult of personality, charged Baldwin. “Principles,” he wrote, “are hard to understand, but sympathy and passion work their way without troubling the brain for thought or research for facts.” The “masses,” he insisted, preferred passion to thought and willingly accepted the destruction of traditional American republicanism.
R Hooper thought no better of Jackson and the Democrats. He satirized the campaign biographies of Andrew Jackson in order to critique Jackson’s principles and the positions of the Democratic Party. Campaign biography was a genre of nineteenth-century American literature that introduced candidates to the electorate in a flattering manner. The short biographies would relate stories of the candidate’s youth, tell about his honorable exploits, give a brief physical description, and state his intentions when elected. Hooper compared his Suggs stories to campaign literature at the beginning of the first chapter of Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, but dealt extensively with the theme during chapters seven through nine, the stories of Suggs’s formation of a militia company, the Tallapoosa Volunteers. Satirically, Hooper invoked the name of a partisan Jacksonian and author of a biography of Jackson, Amos Kendall: “And we beg the reader to believe, that we approach this portion of our subject with a profound regret at our own incapacity for its proper illumination. Would that thy pen, O! Kendall, were ours! Then would thy hero—and ours—the nation’s Jackson and the country’s Suggs—go down to far posterity, equal in fame and honors, as in deeds!” The chapters on Suggs’s militia campaign are highly satirical. Suggs aspires to be like General Jackson, but is a cheap imitation. On the one hand, the theme of the militia chapters is to criticize Suggs the confidence man as a demagogue who used “the Jacksonian myth as a smokescreen in order to achieve his own ulterior ends.” On the other hand, Suggs’s demagoguery satirizes a pet Jacksonian institution, the militia. Whereas Kenneth Lynn read the militia chapters as a Whig critique of expansion into Texas, Hooper’s deeper concern was to expose the sham republicanism of the frontier. Satire attacks corrupted institutions, and Hooper’s Suggs stories were no exception. Chapter seven begins in at . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . . Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times, . . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, . Robert Hopkins, “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography,” .
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the height of an Indian scare in east Alabama. Settlers, petrified at the thought of Indian massacres, begin fleeing the state. Suggs knows that the scare has no basis in reality but senses that there is a profit to be made from the fear. Around a crowd of men in a general store, Suggs scares people with tales of Indian massacres and then offers to form a militia company. The crowd of men agrees and quickly elects Suggs as their captain. He replies, “I’m more’n proud to sarve my country at the head of sich an independent and patriotic cumpany!” His use of the republican theme of independence is a charade, for Suggs hopes to use his position for monetary gain. He declares martial law in the area surrounding the general store (which he names Fort Suggs). That night old widow Haycock wanders into the “fort” seeking her wagon in which she kept her tobacco, but the sentries fire at her. She is captured alive, and Suggs decides to have her court-martialed for breaking the rules of the fort. Chapter eight concerns her trial, at which Suggs threatens to execute her according to “the Rules of War.” He had no intentions of killing her, however, and gladly gives her freedom when she pays him a twenty-fivedollar fine. Suggs pockets the money, telling the militia that he is saving it to give to the government, and with his simple-minded Lieutenant Snipes spends it on liquor and cards. Some time has passed at the start of chapter nine, and the Tallapoosa Volunteers are still living at Fort Suggs on supplies, particularly whiskey, that they “requisitioned” from those passing through the town. Upon hearing that the Creeks would be holding a lacrosse game on the other side of the river, Suggs decides to take the militia there to protect the settlers from possible violence. There is heavy betting on the game, especially by the Volunteers, and one gambler, who was losing money, falsely tells Suggs that the Indians are planning to attack the militia in the midst of the game. The gambler hopes Suggs will stop the game. Instead, Suggs gives orders to his militia to steal the Indians’ horses. Then Suggs, riding the chief ’s horse, takes the pouch containing the bets and with the militia rides to the river and back to Fort Suggs, the Indians in pursuit. While the militia crosses the river, one of the chiefs arrives and pleads with Suggs to return the money. He assures him that the Indians . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, . Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, . Joseph O’Beirne Milner thinks that Hooper was attacking military power in general. He says that Hooper preferred a “mercantile Republic.” “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris,” .
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had planned no attack. Suggs orders the militia to fire on the chief, killing him. The chapter ends with Suggs’s complaining that the state legislature refused to grant him remuneration for the horse (which he had stolen from the dead chief ) that he had lost during the retreat to Fort Suggs. Suggs exclaims that “republics are ungrateful!” The militia chapters identify central Whig complaints against Jackson’s use of executive and military power. Suggs’s imitation of Jackson satirically criticizes the actions of both men. Like Suggs, Jackson fought the Creeks along the Tallapoosa, declared martial law (in New Orleans), and held courtmartial trials. Jackson executed one private, John Wood, an action later publicized to demean Jackson’s harsh temperament. That Suggs fails to achieve the success of Jackson further indicates Hooper’s fear of executive corruption and military force. Jackson succeeded in his power grab, while Suggs only made off with a few dollars and minimal loss of life. Both men, Hooper implied, used the military for personal aggrandizement instead of for defense. Thus Democrat appeals to the virtuous yeoman and republican institutions like the militia were largely shams. In reality, Democrats used military power for oppression. Though the rhetoric of republicanism survived, its existence as a formative ideology and institutional presence did not. Hooper identified Democratic demagoguery as a major reason for the decline of republicanism. Jackson was the nemesis of republicanism. Conclusion In their political principles, Baldwin and Hooper greatly resembled the Old Republicans, except for their views on government involvement in economic development. Baldwin and Hooper supported states’ rights, albeit with a slightly different emphasis than Randolph and Taylor; constitutional rather than democratic government; the rule of law; the primacy of popular virtue; and the importance of economic progress. Where Baldwin and Hooper differed from the Old Republicans most significantly was in their views of the good society. Baldwin’s and Hooper’s view of society and their experiences on the frontier made them Whigs and offered a different alternative for southern social development. The next chapter considers their social visions. . Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, , . . Hopkins, “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography,” –.
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8 Whigs were optimistic about the possibilities of modern freedom and the chance that men of good character would benefit from free government and economic prosperity. Despite their appreciation of individualism, Whigs understood that men lived their lives with others, in society. Society, then, became the primary realm for human endeavors. Baldwin believed that American society was artificial. He noted that from its beginning as a collection of royal colonies, America had lacked the organic social institutions such as an “aristocracy of exclusive privileges” that dominated Europe. American society was new and fluid. Society along the eastern seaboard solidified and stabilized as it grew older, but the western frontier kept alive the new society that had characterized America. Both Baldwin and Hooper maintained that Americans needed to bring order to their society without destroying freedom. They hoped that by encouraging the development of voluntary institutions Americans could develop a good society. Baldwin’s Social Vision Baldwin held that, though Americans had emerged from the Revolution with a common political tradition of republicanism, the common inheritance had failed to maintain unity, partly because of the divisive rise of political parties but mainly because of differences among republicans arising from differing views of society. Both the novel character of America and the existence of the West challenged republican thinkers. “In a new country like ours,” noted Baldwin, “where every thing consecrated to unreasoning veneration by the old world, has been overhauled and re-examined . Baldwin, Party Leaders, .
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with perfect freedom of past doctrines, and where the whole policy and the interests on which it bears are new, . . . it would be miraculous if any statesman” would not alter his principles of government to meet with new necessities. The material condition of American life, because it was different from the historical European experience, produced a new society. Baldwin regarded the American West as the most dynamic force affecting republicanism and society in the United States. To Baldwin the West played a dual role. It simultaneously symbolized both disorder and freedom. On the one hand, the West lacked the civic institutions necessary to keep order; on the other hand, the West opened society to men of talent and initiative. A major problem in the West was the fluidity and anonymity of social relations. Western society lacked stability. In fact, some of Baldwin’s humor built on the anonymity of the West and the ability of charlatans to defraud trusting people. The same anonymity that Baldwin detested as a conservative also made western society consider individual talent to be more important than family lineage in its social organization. The West created a conceptual problem for conservatives as well. Modern conservatism, elucidated by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, defended the important role that traditional institutions played in ordering society and preserving liberty. Burke defended the role of institutions such as the established church, the family, traditional legal codes, and the aristocracy against the attempts of Enlightenment radicals, who resented the control such institutions had on individuals, to destroy them. Traditional institutions, Burke contended, not only ordered human affairs but also protected the individual from the direct influence of the government. Traditional institutions thus preserved freedom. Baldwin agreed with Burke, but he noted that America, particularly in the West, had very few organic traditional institutions to defend. Baldwin took conservatism in a new direction. He inverted Burke. In America, the role of conservatives, especially on the frontier, was to create traditional institutions to bring social order. Because the new institutions were not organic, they had to be voluntary in nature. They could not use the coercion that European institutions applied to keep order. American . Ibid., , . Baldwin remarked in his unfinished manuscript, The Flush Times of California, “Our forefathers seem to have underrated the American genius for making pleasure excursions and taking other people’s land” (). Because the founders had not adequately planned for the problems of the West, some adjustment of politics was necessary.
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institutions had to respect individual free will and base their appeals on reason. Baldwin thought that this was a daunting task, one that provoked both humorous and tragic situations. Baldwin argued, however, that the destruction of traditional institutions by modernity was dangerous to morals. He thus retreated from his fundamentally liberal antagonism to traditional society. In a poignant passage in Flush Times, he pointed out that while the intellects of emigrants to the new country were aided by the free society, the moral effect of the breaking of traditional bonds was catastrophic. He contended, and here he is worth quoting at length: We might, in a debating club, tolerate some scruple of a doubt, whether this violent disruption of family ties—this sudden abandonment of the associations and influence of country and of home—of the restraints of old authority and of opinion—and this sudden plunge into the whirling vortex of a new and seething population—in which the elements were curiously and variously mixed with free manners and not over-puritanic conversation—were efficient causes of moral improvement: we can tolerate a doubt as to whether the character of a young man might not receive something less than a pious impression, under these circumstances of temptation, when that character was in its most malleable and fusible state.
Baldwin doubted that many individuals could emerge unscathed from the destruction of social order. If one did succeed morally in such circumstances, “his moral constitution, like his physical after an attack of yellow fever, would be apt to be the better for it.” But most people had been harmed morally on the frontier. Without institutions to order society, character suffered from chaos and fraud. Westward migration, Baldwin thought, had threatened the American social order and the political principles of the Revolutionary generation. Baldwin conveyed his message of decline in Flush Times through his anarchic portrait of the frontier and his famous character Ovid Bolus, Esq. The frontier appeared as a Hobbesian state of nature where life was nasty, brutish, and short, fraud was rampant, and society was utterly lacking. . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. Daniel Walker Howe noted that many Whigs “assumed that human nature was malleable.” Whigs believed that “the wise person shaped his own nature.” The Political Culture of the American Whigs, . Because not all responded to individualism, Whigs like Baldwin recognized the necessity of traditional institutions.
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Baldwin implicitly contrasted the West with the established society in the East. He criticized the West for its lack of institutions that preserved order and made republicanism possible. People and government on the frontier could not protect property, the foundation of republican government, from notorious swindlers such as Bolus. “Society,” wrote Baldwin, “was wholly unorganized: there was no restraining public opinion: the law was wellnigh powerless—and religion scarcely was heard of except as furnishing the oaths and technics of profanity.” The character Bolus was a republican nightmare. Bolus had no known past and owned nothing except his name. Everything else, Baldwin quipped, “he got under the credit system,” another source of disorder in the West. Bolus’s best talent was lying. Baldwin declared that “all ideas were facts to him,” identifying Bolus as a radical individualist verging toward nihilism. Bolus dictated his own reality by force of his will. Bolus used his utter disregard for the truth, property, and the obligations of community to swindle frontier people through the use of the credit system. Baldwin noted humorously that “Bolus was no niggard . . . [H]e was as free with his own money—if he ever had any of his own— as with yours.” Bolus’s deceit did not bother him because he lacked a conscience. He was the ultimate individualist, free from history, society, morality, and truth. He was Baldwin’s caricature of the new man frontier society encouraged. After Bolus swindled people enough, they figured out his methods and demanded security rather than Bolus’s promises and questionable financial moves, and they drove him from town. Bolus had to retreat farther West—to Texas, and then to California. Baldwin, while being humorous, wondered how so anarchic a place could adopt American republicanism and live the promise of the Revolution. . Baldwin, Flush Times, , , . Charles S. Sydnor wrote, “Geographical distance kept the full force of law from touching the Westerner; the social order diminished the force of law in the South.” “The Southerner and the Laws,” . The West had a tenuous society because the rule of law was hard to establish there. In Beneath the American Renaissance, David Reynolds includes Baldwin’s Flush Times in the category of subversive literature. Nineteenth-century subversive literature, Reynolds contends, portrayed American society as betraying the republican ideals of the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. It was a protest literature that tried “to redefine literary style in terms of a crude Americaness identified with the shocking, the imprudent, the oneiric” (). Reynolds believes that Ovid Bolus was Baldwin’s portrait of “democratic man as consummate liar” (). Christopher Morris argues that Baldwin “presented a new world in which traditional values made no sense.” Surely, Bolus represented this. See Morris, “What’s So Funny?: Southern Humorists and the Market Revolution,” in Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt, eds., Southern Writers and Their Worlds, .
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Baldwin doubted that a traditional society could exist in the West. He insisted that the material changes in culture, particularly the credit system, transformed “the thoughts and habits of the people.” In his chapter in Flush Times, “How the Times Served the Virginians,” Baldwin drew a humorous portrait of old republicans trying to make it on the frontier. He first described the new society as completely fraudulent and overrun with avarice. Andrew Jackson’s specie circular act had worsened the fraud and enhanced the “reign of humbug,” as Baldwin called it. He then discussed Virginia immigrants on the frontier: “Superior to many settlers in elegance of manners, and general intelligence, it was the weakness of the Virginian to imagine he was superior too in the essential art of being able to hold his hand and make his way in a new country, and especially such a country, and at such a time.” Virginians, with their traditional cultural values, could not survive in the individualistic, fraudulent West. Baldwin halfjokingly commented that the problem for the Virginians was that they did not know how to cheat well enough. No Virginian could believe “that that stuttering, grammar-less Georgian, who had never heard of the resolutions of ’98, could beat him in a land trade.” It was clear to Baldwin that manners and tradition meant little in the world of individualism. Order eventually came to the West in the form of law, but the basis of a traditional culture—manners and customs—had been extinguished. Virginians, Baldwin’s epitome of traditionalists, simply could not cope. Baldwin’s story of Major Willis Wormley illustrated the theme that traditional southern culture had passed. Wormley was “the noblest of the noble” people from old Virginia who moved west. He moved to Alabama before the flush times of the s in order to marry his daughter to an Alabama gentleman. Baldwin portrayed Wormley as a gregarious, prosperous plantation owner who treated his family, his neighbors, his slaves, and visitors extremely well, in the hospitable style of old Virginia. The Major was no political partisan, voting instead for his friends. For Wormley, people and community relationships mattered more than money. Wormley’s downfall came from his generosity to his neighbors. He had insured several bills of credit for his poor neighbors, who, when the time came, could not pay their debts. Wormley was served a writ to pay the debts for which he had co-signed. Refusing to get out of the situation by legal trickery and insisting on paying the debts, Wormley went broke. He was forced to send . Baldwin, Flush Times, , –.
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his slaves to the creditor’s plantation in Mississippi to work off the sizable debt. With no one to work his plantation, Wormley turned it into a tavern and continued to entertain guests and travelers by telling them entertaining anecdotes from old Virginia. Baldwin’s comment is revealing: “If the Major had worked his negroes as he had those anecdotes, he would have been able to pay off the bills of exchange without any difficulty.” For Baldwin, the Whig moralist, the traditional Virginia way of life lacked the industry and shrewdness necessary for success in the West. Old traditions, like Wormley’s storytelling and his hospitality, might survive for a while, but because they failed to make money, they would eventually die. The disappearance of traditional society with its manners, venerable customs, and simplicity gave Baldwin a profound sense of loss. Baldwin himself had been born into a changing society. He had received a traditional legal education like the great Virginians of the Revolutionary generation, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. Baldwin understood the pride of Virginians. Virginians were passionate patriots of their home state, constantly boasting about it. Though Virginians might move elsewhere, they always considered themselves Virginians first. Discussing those immigrants from the area around Williamsburg, Baldwin asserted that “they remember it when the old burg was the seat of fashion, taste, refinement, hospitality, wealth, wit, and all social graces; when genius threw its spell over the public assemblages and illumined the halls of justice.” Such were the admirable traits of traditional Virginia society. Virginians, remarked Baldwin, were more politically aware than most, appreciated political oratory, and constantly appealed to their political tradition—to the Principles of ’98—for guidance. Virginians revered their heroic ancestors and were conscious of their place in history. Baldwin also noted that Virginians were gregarious, concerned about manners, and desirous of good food and drink. Baldwin concluded that there “was no character more attractive than that of a young Virginian fifteen years ago, of intelligence, of good family, education and breeding.” But the “Age of Brass,” the age of “credit without capital, and enterprise without honesty,” had assaulted Virginia culture. Unregulated paper money had de. Ibid., , . . Ibid., –. Kohl notes in The Politics of Individualism that Whigs made traditionalsounding appeals and expressed a sense of loss at the passing of traditional ways, but were not trying to reweave the traditional social fabric. Thomas Brown concurs in Politics and Statesmanship, .
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stroyed order by unleashing the passion of avarice. The result was Baldwin’s Major Wormley, a relic of the more orderly, mannerly time. Though he sometimes remembered fondly the old society, Baldwin, unlike John Randolph, was not a reactionary. Baldwin criticized the limits of traditional Virginia, particularly in the political realm. Although he admired the fact that Virginians went back to first principles in their debates, he understood the limitations such political arguments placed on positive government activity. Baldwin noted that Virginian principles went back to “first times,” becoming focused on the old debates between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson “as if the quarrel had begun before time, but was not to end with it.” Such political nostalgia, observed Baldwin, obscured important new issues. Political debates always came back to the issue of strict construction of the Constitution. Baldwin thought that some Virginian thinkers believed that the Constitution’s “chief excellency consisted in not allowing the government to do any thing.” Clearly, Baldwin did not approve of the limiting doctrines of traditional politics. He noted that the Virginia tradition for political oratory was honorable, yet problematic. In order to accommodate political oratory “the State has been turned into a debating society, and while she has been talking for the benefit of the nation, as she thought, the other, and, by nature, less favored States, have been doing for their own.” The result had been that Virginia gained in reputation but declined in “wealth and material aids.” The overly traditional nature of Virginians made them hostile to change, however beneficial. Baldwin concluded that this sort of political conservatism hindered the true progress of a society. Baldwin appreciated the admirable side of the West. He insisted that while both new and traditional societies had strong and weak points, the new society was more desirable. A new society developed, of course, in a new country, where “nothing is at hand” and “every thing must be made.” Baldwin thought that such conditions brought an “almost perfect equality” because all had an “even start and an equal chance.” “A young community, unorganized and free, furnishes an open, unoccupied field for energy and intellect,” he wrote. The fruits of one’s labors would come quickly without a “long and tedious novitiate” in an established institution. The new society would be a practical one in which individual success . Baldwin, Flush Times, –.
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was based on talent and self-reliance; a man’s “only friends are his talents.” There was “no prestige of rank, or ancestry, or wealth, or past reputation— and no family influence, or dependents, or patrons.” Individualism, that ability to control one’s own destiny—to pull one’s self up by one’s bootstraps—clearly excited Baldwin. The new society’s openness lacked order, a problem that could be remedied through law, but, by its voluntary, individualistic nature, the new society left success open to character, talent, and ability. Because a traditional society lacked openness, Baldwin rejected it. Baldwin asserted that a traditional society stifled young, talented individuals in favor of custom and deference. He noted that an “old society weaves a network of restraints and habits around a man,” making it virtually impossible for a meritocracy to exist. Instead of facing an open society with only one’s talent and strength of character, man in a traditional society was “cramped by influence, prejudice, custom, opinion.” One “takes the law from those above him.” Baldwin disliked traditional society because “wealth, family, influence, class, caste, fashion, coterie and adventitious circumstances of all sorts . . . trammel” the individual. Talent played only a minimal role in success. One’s social position had more to do with one’s destiny. Baldwin thought that traditional society limited free will by subjecting the person to “these arbitrary influences” of custom and social standing. In such a society, individual character—for Baldwin the measure of the man—was weakened. He wrote, “What a man does well he must do with freedom.” When freedom was strictly limited, character “necessarily becomes, in some sort, artificial and conventional; less bold, simple, direct, earnest and natural, and, therefore, less effective.” He concluded that in a new society there was more opportunity for virtue (and, hence, republicanism) because the individual freely chose his actions. Baldwin thought that the court systems in old states such as Virginia were unfriendly to individualism. He gave an extended example, perhaps taken from his own experience, of a young lawyer trying his first cases in the courts of an “old State,” a traditional society. The lawyer appears before an old judge, whom he “has looked on, from his childhood, as the . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. . Baldwin, Flush Times, . Robert Ferguson, in his Law and Letters in American Culture, chap. , argues that law represented the primary means of public advancement in nineteenth-century America. Because America lacked an aristocracy, middle-class men such as Baldwin could rise to prominence as professionals.
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most awful of all the sons of men,” the “old seniors” whom he had regarded always as the wisest lawyers in the world, and the “jury of sobersides old codgers” who looked on the young lawyer as they always had—as a boy. Because the young lawyer was part of a fixed order, his chances of success were slim. He first had to pay his dues to the entrenched power of the elders. Baldwin did not argue, as some Virginia constitutional reformers did, that the old court system was corrupt and did not provide justice. Instead, his criticism was that it suppressed individualism. In the example of the young lawyer, the youth failed miserably at his first case because of the intimidation and pressure he felt. Baldwin preferred the bar in the new country because there were “no seniors” and the bar was all “Young America.” If the “old fogies” joined the western bar, “they must stand in the class with the rest.” Age did not give them a higher place. Baldwin concluded that there “were many evils and disadvantages arising from this want of standards and authority in and over the bar . . . but they were not of long continuance, and were more than counterbalanced by opposite benefits.” In Party Leaders Baldwin extolled the possibilities for unity in the new society of the West. The West lacked “cliques or factions” or “previous relations or parties” to divide the people. People in the new society were free from “ideas and prejudices to old men or old systems.” They were “homogeneous in feeling and interest” because all desired the same things, prosperity and an orderly, open society. The people of the West had to be practical-minded to accomplish their goals, but also devoted to principles to create an orderly community. The atmosphere of liberty in the West “refreshes, vivifies and vitalizes thought, and gives freedom, range and energy to action.” The West changed American republicanism by changing American society. The traditional American republican society of John Randolph, therefore, had to change in order to maintain its relevance to the American political experience. Baldwin thought that the new society had the potential to be more effectively republican than traditional American society had been. For Baldwin the new republicanism in the West became tied to providing order and stability in society. He trusted that the American pioneer . Baldwin, Flush Times, –, . . Baldwin, Party Leaders, .
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would bring order to the chaotic frontier. Whereas the French and Spanish settlers were “cooped up in little towns” and had sunk “to the level of the aborigines around them,” the American pioneer retained “his individuality and hardy virtues” so that he could transform the West. Baldwin’s portrait of the pioneer, “armed with his axe and rifle,” was a distinctly Whig one. The American pioneer “subdues alike the wilderness and its inhabitants.” The American pioneer preserves “his institutions” and “draws over the new land the physical and moral characteristics of the civilization he left behind him.” American settlers were men of strong will and “selfrespect” who “would die rather than forfeit” their new homes. Settlers subdued the West by acquiring property and creating institutions to protect their belongings. Lawyers also tempered the excesses of the frontier. Baldwin, expressing his great regard for the bar, wrote, “The bar of every country is, in some sort, a representative of the character of the people of which it is so important an ‘institution.’” The bar in the Southwest served its purpose by bringing justice, not demagoguery, common sense, not endless speculation, to the chaotic frontier. Baldwin’s ideal of the lawyer as an agent of order came from the founding fathers, most of whom were lawyers, Baldwin pointed out. The lawyers of the early Republic created responsible jurisprudence, molding it to “new wants, new necessities and exigencies.” No blind worshipers of custom, the talented lawyers, through common sense and sound judgment, applied only those parts of the British system that were relevant to the unique American situation. On the frontier, Baldwin maintained, lawyers provided the foundations of order, particularly by settling disputes concerning property. Therefore, the lawyers were Baldwin’s republican heroes, who made society possible on the frontier. Once established, the ordered society in the West would be governed by the rule of law and would remain fluid enough for talented young men to succeed. Whereas the traditional society advocated by Randolph was ordered by the gentry who administered justice in the courts, Baldwin’s new society sought a more impersonal agent of justice, the rule of law, wherein . Ibid., . On the importance of property in Baldwin’s scheme and its link to republicanism see Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South, –. . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. Robert Ferguson notes that American lawyers, especially those on the frontier, viewed themselves as creators of a new, orderly civilization. Law and Letters in American Culture, chap. .
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character, not custom, would determine success. Baldwin envisioned individuals deciding their own destinies while the law kept order, preventing the Hobbesian state of nature from destroying society. Baldwin demonstrated his theories of the West in his trip to Virginia and New York City. He had not returned to the Old Dominion since his departure in and was excited to see old friends and family. But the trip solidified in Baldwin’s mind his preference for the frontier over the older societies of the East. Baldwin spent July , , in Richmond, Virginia. He wrote his wife a letter that day describing his despondency over his journey to Virginia. “My journey here is, as I anticipated, a melancholy pilgrimage,” he insisted. “I go to Staunton with feelings anything but cheerful, and shall return the more cheerlessly than I go, bearing back with me to my far home and my dear family a heavy burden of remembrances.” His letters reveal a central part of Baldwin’s mind-set: a discomfort with the past and traditional society. Baldwin was always forward-looking; he constantly dreamed of future successes. Returning to Virginia forced him to contemplate his past and the mistakes he had made. “Thinking of the past, I wept,” he said. “My heart and soul were softened.” He concluded, “I never so felt before the fleeting character of life and all its surroundings as now.” Baldwin thought that the dwelling on the past was stifling, a point he carried to his political ideas. History brought humility as the individual was forced to reflect on the insignificance of his life in the grand scheme of things. For the man of action like Baldwin, such thoughts were depressing. Strangely enough, Baldwin equated his experiences in New York City and Virginia. New York overwhelmed the lawyer from Alabama. On July , , he wrote his wife from New York City, “Well, here I am and that is about as much as I can tell you. Whizfuzz-bliz-rubadub-rumble-timbleracket, jar and jostle, Babel outBabelled, and confusion confounded. I have been trying to get myself in some frame of self-consciousness, but I can’t do it. I’ve lost my identity—all sense of individuality is swallowed up in the seething mass of humanity that is boiling like a caldron around me.” Whereas Virginia trapped him in the past, New York, he thought, . Adam L. Tate, “Republicanism and Society: John Randolph of Roanoke, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and the Quest for Social Order,” –. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, July , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
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took away his freedom. The bustling urban center, worlds apart from rural Alabama, relegated Baldwin to being a simple face in the crowd. He felt stifled by the anonymity and lack of individualism involved. Frontier individualism tempered by a love of order and republican principles was Baldwin’s middle ground between urban life and traditional society. After his stay in New York, he set out for Alabama, but stopped again in Virginia, this time in his old hometown of Winchester. He wrote his wife on July that the trip had been a good one. “It will serve,” he wrote, “to wean me from my old and relatively too strong attachments to Virginia and concentrate them upon my own home and the dear ones who make it a home.” Baldwin’s social solution is eminently an individualistic one. He rejected both the traditional society of Virginia and the mass urban society of New York City for the affections of the home. It was in his family, a private society centered upon hearth and home, where he claimed to find his satisfaction. Baldwin accepted modern society. He believed that he had no choice in the matter unless he wanted to become irrelevant by rejecting social progress. His rejection of traditional republicanism set him apart from other southern conservatives. The Old Republicans had argued that the consolidation of power within the federal government was the greatest threat to the Republic. For Baldwin, traditional society and traditionalist thinking posed the greatest threat to American republicanism. Traditionalists threatened to make republicanism obsolete in American society by rejecting the obvious changes in circumstances and society that the nation had undergone since . Baldwin matched the aims of the Enlightenment philosophes in his attempts to weaken the impact of traditionalism. He did not, however, want to destroy traditional institutions; he wanted to create them on a voluntary rather than a coercive basis. Baldwin was a conservative of a different stripe. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, July and , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Thomas Brown maintained that southern Whigs remained sensitive to Old Republican critiques of their economic and social plans and tried to balance material progress with traditional values. Politics and Statesmanship, –. See also Steven J. Ross, “The Transformation of Republican Ideology,” –, for the flexibility and ambiguity of the republican ideology. Its flexibility allowed politicians to use republicanism long after the material basis of a republican society had passed.
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Hooper’s Social Vision Hooper’s Suggs stories revealed his social vision, which mirrored Baldwin’s in many respects. Hooper, like Baldwin and other Whigs, doubted that the traditional order or liberalism could contain freedom. Hooper’s portrait of traditional society was the opposite of Edmund Burke’s. Whereas Burke saw virtue in traditional orders of society, Simon Suggs constantly exposes scions of the traditional order—religious leaders, legislators, and military leaders—as hypocrites who take advantage of those willing to trust in the efficacy of traditional order. The fact that Suggs escapes his scams largely unscathed or unpunished reveals Hooper’s doubts about traditional conservatism’s answers to the problems of modern freedom. Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs begins as a satire of the traditional order. The first two chapters, “Simon Plays the ‘Snatch Game’” and “Simon Gets a ‘Soft Snap’ Out of His Daddy,” tell about Suggs’s move to the frontier from his home in eastern Georgia. Hooper introduced Suggs as “a miracle of shrewdness” who possessed “that tact which enables man to detect the soft spots in his fellow, and to assimilate himself to whatever company he may fall in with.” The story starts with seventeen-year-old Suggs playing cards with a black boy named Bill. Suggs’s father, Jedediah, “an old ‘hard shell’ Baptist preacher,” exemplifies a traditional source of authority. Hooper noted that Jedediah Suggs, “though very pious and remarkably austere, was very avaricious.” He “reared his boys . . . according to the strictest requisitions of the moral law.” Simon, however, adopted bad habits, like playing cards, whenever Jedediah was absent. Hooper portrayed the traditional order neither as nostalgic nor utopian. Rather, hypocrisy and corruption had tainted traditional forms of authority, a point Simon Suggs revealed. As Jedediah Suggs, armed with hickory switches, approaches the two boys, Simon grabs the pot over Bill’s protests and pockets the cards. Jedediah begins to whip Bill for his laziness and then notices the Jack of Diamonds, which Simon had been sitting upon in an effort to cheat Bill. Jedediah realizes that the two boys had been playing cards and decides that . Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, –. Anderson, “Scholarship in Southwestern Humor—Past and Present,” –. See Bradford, review of With the Bark On: Popular Humor of the Old South, edited by John Q. Anderson, –. . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, –.
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both need a beating. The first chapter ends with traditional authority reestablished. Jedediah, though maligned by Hooper for his greed, has yet to display any weaknesses. He prepares to use coercion in order to preserve the traditional values of hard work, responsibility, and morality. The second chapter opens with Simon trying to devise an escape while watching his father mercilessly beat Bill. Simon contemplates striking his father, but realizes that his brother Ben, who was plowing the adjoining field, would help Jedediah, leaving Simon outnumbered. Jedediah finishes with Bill and approaches Simon. Simon remonstrates with his father, telling him that a whipping would not deter him from his plan to make his living by playing cards. Jedediah replies that “all card-players, and chickenfighters, and horse-racers go to hell,” but the fear of eternal damnation does not change Simon’s mind. Simon tells his father that a local man, Bob Smith, had seen Simon play cards, taught him a few tricks, and praised his deftness. Jedediah, who thinks himself better and more knowledgeable than Smith, agrees to play a card game with Simon to demonstrate his own superiority and to reveal Simon’s ineptness. The game between father and son reveals the challenge of modernity to traditional society. Simon gets Jedediah to place a bet on the game by appealing to his greed. If Simon cuts the Jack from the deck, his father would refrain from beating him and give him an Indian pony, Bunch. If Simon fails, he will give his father a sack of silver coins, which Jedediah greedily eyes in hopes of paying off his land. Simon gives the deck to his father to cut. Jedediah tries to cheat by moving some of the cards, but Simon, looking over his father’s shoulder, catches the move and by sleight of hand cuts a Jack anyway. His father is devastated. Simon then uses religious rhetoric to humiliate his father by saying that his victory was “predestinated.” Jedediah, not realizing Simon’s sarcasm, agrees, “To be sure—to be sure—all fixed aforehand.” Simon obtains Bunch and is “in high spirits . . . at the idea of unrestrained license in the future.” As he rides off to the frontier, Suggs “roared with delight” at his last trick he had played on his mother—before he left he filled her pipe with gunpowder. The anarchic Suggs has vanquished through trickery and violence the corrupt traditional order represented by his parents. . Ibid., –.
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Suggs’s success against traditional society formed part of Hooper’s subversive message. William Lenz points out that while the reader cheers for Suggs in his trickery against his self-righteous, hypocritical father, Suggs’s last trick on his mother turns the reader against him. Suggs is not Hooper’s hero, but only his tool to make social points. Suggs, by attacking his parents, reveals his lack of pietas. Hooper did not necessarily think that the destruction of the traditional order was always beneficial, but he believed that it fell under the weight of its own corruption. Suggs’s victory and escape showed the inability of coercion and religion to order modern freedom. In the face of modern freedom, traditional society was incompetent. In fact, once the traditional order entertained modern ideas of freedom, it began to fall. That Hooper first attacked the traditional society in the eastern state of Georgia is significant, for the rest of the book deals with the frontier, which lacks even the rudiments of traditional society. In the first few chapters, Hooper portrayed the West much as John Randolph did, as an escape from established communities. Suggs’s escape to the West put traditional forms of keeping order in jeopardy, for in the face of coercion one could always flee. For Hooper, as for Baldwin, the frontier represented both the home of modern freedom and the destruction of traditional society. Even religion was unable to keep order. Until the last two years of his life, Hooper was not a religious man, and, therefore, religion played little positive role in his social vision. In chapter of Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Hooper subjected evangelicalism to withering satire. The theme of the chapter is that religion is the haven of hypocrites and often a thin veil covering human depravity. No virtuous religious figure appears in the Suggs tales, and Suggs’s confidence games fit into the program of evangelical Protestantism as Hooper saw it. Whereas Hooper valued religion that was politically useful in shaping character, he had little love for Christianity for most of his life. The themes of greed, ignorance, and sexual perversion figure prominently in “The Captain Attends a Camp Meeting.” The chapter begins . Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times, –. . Hooper’s irreligious attitudes were represented in his secular social views and his Freemasonry. Hooper thought that religion could have a positive influence on politics. If religion served the state, then it could be supported. Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, July , , “The surest mode of keeping this country republican, is to keep it Protestant.”
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with Suggs’s family hungry and virtually penniless, a striking contrast to the wealth present at the camp meeting. Suggs decides to attend the nearby revival to find a way to alleviate his poverty. When he arrives at the revival tents, the scene is complete chaos. Hooper wrote: “The excitement was intense. Men and women rolled about on the ground, or lay sobbing or shouting in promiscuous heaps. More than all, the Negroes sang and screamed and prayed. Several, under the influence of what is technically called ‘the jerks,’ were plunging and pitching about with convulsive energy.” For a Whig who praised self-restraint, such a scene was hellacious and dangerous. Social order had disappeared, replaced by heaps of men and women mixed with blacks. In the story it is Suggs who actually brings order to the meeting through his confidence scheme, a reversal of the usual nature of the stories in which Suggs introduces chaos into a controlled environment. Suggs “viewed the whole affair as a grand deception— a sort of ‘opposition line’ running against his own, and looked on with a sort of professional jealousy,” Hooper stated. The preachers were confidence men who preyed on trusting victims for money or sexual pleasure. Suggs wonders why “these here preachers never hugs up the old, ugly women.” He supplies an answer, saying, “I judge ef I was a preacher, I should save the purtiest souls fust, myself !” The greed of the preachers and the great number of wealthy people at the revival enable Suggs to implement a moneymaking scheme. Suggs plays a confidence game with the preacher, Rev. Bela Bugg. Gaining the trust of the congregation first, Suggs fakes an emotional religious experience and then tells the crowd that he has been converted. He gives credit for his change of heart to Rev. Bugg. He informs the crowd that originally he had come to the revival to steal money, but that God had changed his heart. He then joins the frenzy of religious enthusiasm until late in the night. The next morning Suggs declares his desire to build a church so that he can begin serving the Lord immediately and takes up a collection, using guilt and shame to persuade the wealthy to contribute. Rev. Bugg greedily eyes the collection and offers to “hold” it for Suggs until a church building could be obtained. Suggs, in a pious tone, explains that he must “pray over” the collection first in the nearby swamp (where his horse is tied). As Suggs leaves with the collection, he quips, “Ef them . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, –.
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fellers aint done to a cracklin . . . I’ll never bet on two pair agin!” He continues, “Live and let live is a good old motter, and it’s my sentiments adzactly!” In other words, Rev. Bugg and the evangelicals could not complain about Suggs’s thievery when they practiced the same thing under the guise of religion. After refuting both liberalism and traditional conservatism through the Suggs stories, Hooper tried to find a way to preserve order in modern society without abandoning freedom or adopting the arbitrary and hypocritical authority of the traditional world. The potential for freedom to devolve into chaos made Hooper’s task difficult. Hooper’s social vision highlighted the importance of social institutions in forming moral character. Hooper realized that the anonymity of modern society, caused by extensive social mobility, made it harder for traditional means of coercion to maintain social order. Simon Suggs often succeeded in swindling others by imitating respectable citizens such as legislators. Hooper thought that because frontier society was so fluid, personal accountability was lacking. Strong social institutions could solidify society and thus keep order by forming character in individuals. Hooper, like other Whigs, did not advocate the reestablishment of traditional society; he instead desired to tame the anarchic tendencies of modern freedom by teaching self-restraint and individual responsibility. Hooper advocated voluntary institutions that respected individualism and renounced the principles of coercion. Like other Whigs and southern conservatives, Hooper resisted the egalitarian ethos of nineteenth-century America but did not desire to return to a traditional aristocratic order. He fully supported an individualistic society, which by its nature could not be egalitarian. He believed that people should possess the freedom to choose their own destinies (within certain social limits, of course) despite the fact that such an arrangement would result in inequality. Hooper idealized a meritocracy combined with strong social institutions to guide human behavior toward productive ends. Simon Suggs, in a perverted sense, represents meritocracy, one social goal of Jeffersonian republicanism. “Well, mother-wit kin beat book-larnin, at any game,” Suggs exclaimed. He continued, “As old Jed’diah used to say, book-larning . Ibid., –. Suggs describes his conversion with crude sexual innuendo that the crowd does not understand. See Shields, “A Sadder Simon Suggs,” –. John Randolph also disliked evangelicalism. See also Robert M. Calhoon, Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, –.
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spiles a man ef he’s got mother-wit, and ef he aint got that, it don’t do him no good.” “Mother-wit,” innate talent and common sense, would separate superior and inferior persons in an individualistic society. The attractiveness for Hooper of both Suggs and the frontier was that despite the chaos each embodied, meritocracy seemed possible. Even the rascal Suggs could outwit better-educated and richer men. Extreme individualism and the inequality it produced both captivated and frightened Hooper. Hooper’s first major literary exploit, “Taking the Census in Alabama,” displayed the importance of wit in an individualistic society. As an assistant census marshal in , Hooper, assigned to Tallapoosa County, had been ordered to count all the people and chickens in the county. He commented, “The popular impression, that a tremendous tax would soon follow the minute investigation of the private affairs of the people, caused the census-taker to be viewed in no better light than that of a tax-gatherer; and the consequence was, that the information sought by him was either withheld entirely, or given with great reluctance.” Referring to part of his task, Tallapoosa residents called Hooper “the chicken man.” The contrast between the gentlemanly narrator (Hooper) and the largely ignorant people created humorous situations. Hooper portrayed himself as the intellectual superior of the people of Tallapoosa. The common people accuse Hooper and President Martin Van Buren of all sorts of conspiracies. One old woman promised Hooper that she would kill Van Buren if he ever set foot on her property. She said, “A pretty fellow to be eating his vittils out’n gold spoons that poor people’s taxed for, and raisin’ an army to get him made King of Ameriky—the oudacious, nasty, stinking old scamp!” The woman refused to give Hooper the information he needed and even sicced her dogs on him after he made an insulting gesture toward her. Hooper also meets Kit Kuncker, a strong Democrat, whose parting line is always, “God bless the old Ginnul, and damn all nullifiers!” Kuncker’s dog is even named “Andy” after General Jackson. Hooper encounters Mrs. Naron, who named her young son Thomas Jefferson. The toddler, when Hooper met him, did not wear any pants or diaper and soon urinated on the floor. Hooper relates that Mrs. Naron called to her son but he “did not heed the invitation, but continued . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, –. . Ibid., .
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to dabble and splash in a little pool of water, which had somehow got there, as proud, apparently, of his sans-culottism, as ever his illustrious namesake could have been of his.” After making his dig at Jefferson, Hooper watches as Mrs. Naron whips her son, marveling at the crudity of the citizens of Tallapoosa. Hooper’s aristocratic tone in the story was not meant to keep the lower classes in their places; Hooper appreciated frontier society. Wit, not Hooper’s refinement, separates the citizens of Tallapoosa and all people in free societies. The people of Tallapoosa were equal in their ignorance and flawed natures, but some citizens rose above the others. While trying to cross the Tallapoosa River on horseback, Hooper meets Sol Todd, who tricks him into crossing over a deep hole, which results in a soaking for both Hooper and his horse on a “sharp September morning.” Sol’s wit had beaten Hooper’s refinement. Thinking that turnabout is fair play, Hooper fabricates a story that he had dropped twenty-five dollars in specie in the middle of the deep hole while crossing. He convinces Sol to dive for the imaginary purse, promising to split the money with him. As Sol dives for the purse, Hooper announces that he has to leave for the next town but that Sol should bring him the purse if he should find it. Sol, greedy for the money, continues to dive in the icy water, “his blue lips” quivering. Hooper comments with pride, “The ‘river ager’ made Sol shake worse . . . that fall.” Hooper’s wit, not his refinement or learning, won him satisfaction. Hooper presents the frontier as an equalizer that marked sharply the differences between those who possessed the wit and self-restraint necessary to succeed in the modern order and those who could not cope with modern freedom. Hooper disdained traditional and artificial aristocracies with almost as much vehemence as did John Taylor of Caroline. In a November editorial, Hooper denounced the “Cow Heel Aristocracy,” those of “low origin and contemptible pretensions” who based their pretentiousness on their new wealth. He declared: “In a republican country, there should be no aristocrats—no class to be rated superior to another, by the law, or by custom . . . But if we are to have an aristocracy at all, let it be an aristocracy of birth and blood—let it not be the base counterfeit of a contemptible . Ibid., –, , . . Ibid., –.
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original.” The Cow Heel aristocracy forgot that wit, not wealth, was the great divider in modern society. But Hooper did not like traditional aristocracies either. He condemned the idea that virtue was a birthright or could be obtained by wealth. Through the example of Simon Suggs, he showed that an aristocracy of wealth harmed society by denying freedom. “Simon Starts Forth to Fight the ‘Tiger’” begins with Suggs in a coach en route to Tuscaloosa ready to gamble at cards, his “Achilles’ heel.” The other passenger “was a gentleman who was about to visit the seat of government, with the intention of making himself a bank director, as speedily as possible.” The aspiring banker mistakes Suggs for a legislator, an assumption Suggs does not discourage, and begins lobbying for Suggs’s vote. He flatters Suggs, calling him a “man of high moral principles, refined feelings, pure patriotism.” Suggs claims that he forgot to bring the money necessary for the stage fare, and the gentleman offers Suggs a loan. Whereas Suggs speaks in a rough dialect in the story, the banker’s speech is refined and aristocratic, making his flattery and greed transparent. The man gives Suggs an additional twenty dollars, an obvious bribe, and asks Suggs not to tell anyone about the “gift.” The gentleman begs Suggs to vote him a bank charter, to which Suggs readily agrees. For the rest of the trip, the gentleman and Suggs drank, ate, and “sang their songs” with the gentleman “paying all scores wherever they halted.” The banker represents the aristocracy of wealth seeking political power through corruption. He pays lip service to the wisdom of the common man while trying to establish himself as an aristocrat. Hooper did not repeat Old Republican invectives against banking in the story, but he hinted that the merger of political power with wealth originated in personal corruption. The gentleman is the antithesis of republicanism: selfish, greedy, and a corrupter of the legislature. Suggs is the hero in the story, preserving freedom through trickery and deceit, or as he would have it, through “mother-wit.” The anonymity of frontier society plays to Suggs’s advantage as the gentleman mistakes him for a man of importance. Clearly Suggs is superior in wit to the greedy gentleman and better exemplifies the individualistic ethic. The fact that Suggs preserves freedom through trickery reveals further the subversive aspect of the humor and Hooper’s ambiguity . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , . For the Juvenal reference see Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist: A Study, –. John Taylor made similar points about wealth and freedom. . Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, –.
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about modern freedom. By having wit triumph in such circumstances, Hooper intimated that modern freedom always threatened to become moral anarchy. Despite his disgust for an artificial aristocracy, Hooper believed that a natural hierarchy of talent existed among men. Traditional aristocracies had little room for merit, and thus Hooper rejected a return to a Burkean society. Hooper thought that men could retain the polite customs that elevated life and distinguished the talented from the average. Randolph of Roanoke had made a similar point in decrying the vulgarization of American life as a betrayal of virtue. Hooper commented on the customs of the South’s gentlemanly pastime, hunting. In Dog & Gun, which he published in , he advised southern gentlemen on the correct attitudes, practices, and equipment needed to maintain the genteel sport of hunting. Hooper contrasted utility and gentility in order to support the need for gentlemanly society. He calls the “shooting of game birds” the “gentleman’s amusement.” Then, speaking of the quail, he writes, “Let all true sportsmen call him aright—leaving it to the pot-hunter who shoots the bevy as it huddles on the ground, or murders the whistling cock on the fence or stump, and the clown who nets or traps what he cannot fairly kill, to apply to him a name for which there is no owner on this continent.” The pot-hunter kills only for utility and thus contributes to the decline of mannerly conduct. Worse, the pot-hunter vulgarizes the name of the bird, leading to a loss of propriety in speech. Hooper appealed to talent, sport, and custom to defend hunting as a sort of cultural ritual or tradition that had value beyond its usefulness or necessity in gaining food. He decried the cheap guns used by the pot-hunters as well. He disdained the method of catching quail in large nets, a technique practiced “quite extensively in this region.” Usually “pot-hunting vagabonds” engaged in such a practice, but some gentlemen had been known to do it too. Hooper noted, “I do not mean that all who indulge in the villainous practice are worthless characters—though a majority of them are—but that the thing itself is so vile an outrage upon all sportsmanship, humanity, and magnanimity, that no man who knows better ought to countenance his best neighbor if he will not discontinue it.” Such rhetoric seems silly and pedantic. The idea that one would passion. Johnson Jones Hooper, Dog & Gun: A Few Loose Chapters on Shooting, Among Which Will Be Found Some Anecdotes and Incidents, , , .
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ately believe in the necessity and cultural importance of certain hunting tactics seems preposterous. Dog & Gun, however, reveals much about Hooper’s social vision. For Hooper the culture of hunting was a circumscribed frontier in which talent could prevail. Freed from the demands of the cash nexus and the pretensions of the Cow Heel aristocracy, gentlemen competed for one prize, honor. The hunting culture contained certain rules, customs, and traditions that to Hooper elevated one from the crass utilitarianism of American life. The preservation of the hunting tradition without regard to utility seemed to Hooper important for maintaining some sense of meritocracy and hierarchy in society. Also, because hunting was voluntary, it did not carry the negative or coercive aspects of traditional society. Dog & Gun fit, oddly enough, into Hooper’s Whig social vision. Throughout the Suggs stories Hooper discussed the collapse of traditional society and the ambiguity of modern freedom. Hooper recognized the necessity of both individual self-restraint and strong, but voluntary, institutions to check the excesses of modernity. Hooper expressed the sense of nostalgia that many Whigs felt toward traditional society. Though he had no desire to return to traditional society, he did acknowledge that it often represented good principles. The fact that Hooper selected hunting as a cultural reserve of gentility on the frontier shows just how deeply modernity had been established in Alabama in the s. Dog & Gun represented Hooper’s retreat into a space where he could celebrate his conservative social views without being penalized politically for his skepticism about American egalitarianism. Unlike Randolph, who defended the Western intellectual and social tradition, Hooper showed no enthusiasm for social or religious tradition. Hooper’s love of gentility and honor reveal that some southern conservatives in the s still cared about tradition, although the traditions they defended were not always the political and religious traditions of Western society. Sectionalism and Slavery Like other antebellum southerners, Baldwin and Hooper commented on sectionalism, race, and slavery in their writings. Hooper became a stri. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery. Philip D. Beidler, introduction to Johnson Jones Hooper, Dog & Gun, vii–xxiii. Hooper also celebrated traditions such as the theater and literature. He was fond of Shakespeare in particular. See Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, January , , and December , .
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dent sectionalist during the s as he drifted into a southern nationalist position. Baldwin, like John Taylor of Caroline, disliked political sectionalism. Baldwin admitted that northerners and southerners were culturally different. He traced their distinctiveness back to their colonial origins, cultures, and differences in the environments of New England and Virginia. He believed in the classic distinction between a Cavalier Virginia and a Puritan New England. He wrote, “The difference between the Yankee and the Virginian was as marked as that between the Roundhead and the Cavalier, or that between the Churchman and the Puritan in the mother country; or, rather, the difference was the same.” Baldwin’s thinking on sectionalism was part of a larger search for a national character that antebellum southerners undertook. Although Baldwin’s view of the centrality of the will in forming character necessarily downplayed the impact of sectionalism, he could not escape the reality of a divided America. Baldwin saw the South as possessing its own character and portrayed Virginia as the mother of the South. Virginians influenced new southern states in the West as they settled there, bringing with them their cultural assumptions and eventually social institutions. Virginia had been settled by Englishmen who were “proud of their country” and “loyal to the crown.” Early Virginians settled upon cash-crop agriculture as the most fitting way to turn a profit in a land of fertile soil. Indentured servants and slaves, who could be obtained cheaply, constituted the labor force. Because property and inheritance laws were strict, a landed gentry arose and increased its power with every generation. Social distinctions due to law were enhanced by the gentry’s aping “forms of royalty” practiced by the “Vice-Regal Court.” The abundance of land and the promise of fertility gave planters leisure to pursue occupations such as “horse-racing, gaming” and “drinking.” The dearth of large towns ensured at first that “literature was not much cultivated.” Virginians were not a very pious people either. They were Anglicans “more from regard to their own convenience than to the interests . Baldwin, Party Leaders, . See Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee for analysis of the antebellum search for sectional character. See also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s challenge of Taylor’s (and Louis D. Rubin, Jr.’s) portrayal of the South: “The Fettered Mind: Time, Place, and the Literary Imagination of the Old South,” –. For an interesting perspective, though one that relies too much on George Fitzhugh, on the Puritan-Cavalier dichotomy, see Jan C. Dawson, “The Puritan and the Cavalier: The South’s Perception of Contrasting Traditions,” –.
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of religion, and from the orthodoxy of their profession than the piety of their practice.” Virginians were “gay, dashing, hospitable, careless, proud, high-spirited and gallant, loving pleasure and excitement, unused to labor or self denial.” Slavery affected the culture of the Virginia gentry powerfully, according to Baldwin. He noted that “the pride, the individuality, the social spirit, the refined manners of the higher classes” were all at least partially linked to slavery. He viewed these effects as good or harmless, but there were worse results of slavery. Slavery also created a “caste.” Large plantation owners “lived in luxury and elegance” while trying to imitate the “style of the English nobility.” They seemed to have revived the “feudal times and baronial manners of ‘merrie England.’” The plantation owner might look down “from his castle-like dwelling, over a broad sweep of wood, and water, and patrimonial fields, tilled by his hundreds of slaves” and feel like a noble. Baldwin, of course, opposed the rigidity an aristocracy produced in society. But while the gentry class had its evils, it had “its peculiar virtues too.” He listed the virtues of Virginia as “the esprit du [sic] corps, the kindness and social courtesy, the gentleness of manners, the chivalry of bearing, the point of honor, the homage to woman, and a nice regard for reputation.” Without any sense of shame at his conclusion, Baldwin noted that the existence of slavery revived the medieval cult of honor among the gentry. Slavery also allowed leisure so that some could cultivate their intellects. The Virginia bar and political institutions contained “a distinguished array of talent and eloquence.” Baldwin concluded, “Indeed, at the opening of the Revolution, Virginia had more men of eminent character and intellect, than she or any other state has had at any other period.” Baldwin admired certain aspects of the distinctive New England culture. He admired New Englanders’ determination and toil in building an “empire” in the “northern portion of the Union.” Puritans settled New England and in the process transferred their English cultural values to their new home. Puritans had “fled from persecution” and thus possessed “neither attachments nor regret” to England. They brought “Republicanism” too, and “soon became full-grown Republicans in their forest homes.” The climate and soil in New England was not suitable for cash-crop agri. Baldwin, Party Leaders, –. See Richard Beale Davis, “The Jeffersonian Virginia Expatriate in the Building of the Nation,” –, for a treatment of Virginia settlers on the frontier. . Baldwin, Party Leaders, –.
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culture. Puritans had carried little wealth to their barren colony, “but the wealth of mines was imbedded in their untiring labor, which was a godly virtue, and in their close economy, which was a saving grace; for even the business virtues were the offshoots and products of their religious zeal and character.” They became seafarers and traders in response to the “sterility of the land.” Their weakness drove them to unite, and “their poverty to greater labor.” Baldwin concluded, “The rigorous climate hardened them to endure the added toil it required to afford them food and shelter.” Whereas slavery had been the dominant effect on forming Virginia’s character, the Puritan religion had most greatly influenced the personality of New England. Baldwin characterized New Englanders as “stern, practical, ascetic, serious, devout, prejudiced, fanatical, fearing God and without other fear.” Virginians had celebrated sophistication, but the Puritan Yankees had scorned “the tenderness and humanities, the elegant arts, embellishments, and refinements of polished and cultivated life, as weaknesses, if not denouncing them as sins.” Their religious fanaticism magnified “small frailties into huge crimes.” As a result, Puritans used the government as a means to “enforce religious duties and observances.” Baldwin thought their religion pushed an “inquisitorial spirit of tyranny and espionage into the families and affairs of the members of the community.” Puritans ruled “by fear more than by kindness and love.” They had a mistaken “sense of duty,” which produced meddling in other’s affairs and severity. Puritans had “strong passions, the instruments of stronger wills.” They did not allow adversity to overcome them, but sought to order their lives with a rigid adherence to law and justice without mercy. Baldwin concluded that it was possible that “the world has never seen so efficient a breed of men; for the men of Lexington and Bunker-Hill were of the same strain with the men before whose unpracticed valor, under Cromwell and Fairfax, the trained chivalry and fiery courage of Prince Rupert and his cavaliers went down at Naseby and on Marston Moor.” Baldwin admitted that there was a lack of fellow feeling between the . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –. See also McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation. In chapter of McCardell’s book, he addresses the undercurrent of southern nationalism in southern authors. He identifies several works, including Flush Times, in which the authors began to portray the enemy as northerners rather than westerners. These writers also pursued the Cavalier-Yankee mythology and remained sensitive about the supposed inferiority of southerners to northerners. McCardell thus reads the humorists as latent or even actual southern nationalists. In Baldwin’s case, this is going too far.
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sections and that both sections had severe weaknesses that could lead to their destruction. The carefree Virginian did not understand “his more sour, thrifty, practical, shrewd and calculating neighbor of the north.” Baldwin noted that Virginians and Yankees “belonged to essentially different classes of men.” He explained that there was “but little sympathy between the Southron and the Yankee.” Part of the South’s weakness was that its people “were very much an insular community.” They were “completely homogeneous” and thus cherished “the prejudices against ‘outsiders,’ which such a people are apt to feel.” Southerners had drawn the boundaries of unity too tightly. They naturally distrusted “any external power.” As a result, they tried to shrink the direct actions of government upon the people. The Jeffersonians, for example, had abolished internal taxes. But southerners had become apathetic and did not pay attention to the ways their states’ rights principles were being undermined. The South had committed the great republican sin—it lacked vigilance. Baldwin believed that the North was threatened by “a great and lasting inequality of fortunes.” He figured that in the near future “one man shall own ten millions of money, and a hundred thousand men not a cent” in some northern cities. He concluded, “There will be no practical republicanism there; for, besides the evils poverty entails, the man who cannot call his bread his own, cannot call his vote his own.” The solution for northern woes was cheap land in the West, which facilitated the means of support for many people. Baldwin seemingly believed that capitalism, a product of Puritan New England culture, would destroy northern society. Baldwin used sectional tensions as an occasion for both humor and social commentary. In Flush Times he wrote a story in which a cynical southern lawyer, Samuel Hele, was asked by his friends to convince the new Yankee schoolteacher to leave town. The town had hired the woman because of the “southern propensity of getting every thing from abroad,” quipped Baldwin. Displeased with their choice, the town leaders wanted to send the teacher home in a polite fashion; that is, they did not want to fire her. The humor of the tale results from the dialogue between Hele and the schoolteacher, Miss Charity Woodey. Hele convinces her that the town, and by implication the whole South, was in reality a vast wasteland of ignorance, brutality, and immorality. Hele tells wild, far-fetched stories . Baldwin, Party Leaders, , –, , .
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about the town, in each case exploiting the northern fear that the South was a land of corruption. Although Woodey does not see any evidence of Hele’s stories, she believes him and voluntarily leaves town: Hele’s mission is successful. Baldwin commented that sectional tensions produced an irrational politics that ruined social and political relations between the sections. The North’s irrational prejudices against the South blocked conciliation, but southern willingness to exploit northern fears for their own gain exacerbated the situation. Miss Charity Woodey is the stock Yankee character. Her very name is a pun. Her “charity” was “wooden,” or false. Baldwin called her “the ugliest woman I ever saw.” She was also a feminist. Baldwin said that she was “one of those ‘strong-minded women of New England,’ who exchange all the tenderness of the feminine for an impotent attempt to attain the efficiency of the masculine nature.” Woodey was part of “that fussy, obtrusive, meddling class, who, in trying to double-sex themselves, unsex themselves, losing all that is lovable in woman, and getting most of what is odious in man.” In addition to her radical principles on gender relations, Woodey carried “a bundle of prejudices.” She was “stiff, literal, positive, inquisitive, inquisitorial, and biliously pious.” She talked continuously of her social duty to others. Far from living the carefree life of southerners, “she considered the affections as weaknesses, and the morals a sort of drill exercise of minor duties, and observances, and cant phrases.” Clearly, Woodey thought of herself as the moral superior to those she stooped to teach. Woodey’s Yankee superiority manifested itself in her desire to be “a missionary of light to the children of the South.” She considered southerners heathens to be converted to her ways. She thought that “everything was wrong” and had to be “put right.” She was a natural busybody. Baldwin commented, “Her hands, eyes, and tongue were never idle for a moment and in her microscopic sense of dooty and conscience, the little peccadilloes of the school swelled to the dimensions of great crimes and misdemeanors.” She always offered her “enlightened sentiments” upon all that she considered wrong, particularly slavery. Despite her snobbery, southerners, because she was a woman, treated her with “unbounded hospitality . Baldwin, Flush Times, . . Ibid., . See Clement Eaton, “The Resistance of the South to Northern Radicalism,” –. John S. Ezell, “A Southern Education for Southrons,” –.
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and courtesy.” But this only increased her “self-conceit” and led her to desire the reformation of “things to the standard of New England insular habitudes.” Woodey aroused southerners’ great fear that New Englanders, the meddlers that they were, would not rest until the South was transformed into the image of New England. Woodey, therefore, symbolized cultural imperialism at its worst. Woodey suspects that the South is the Sodom and Gomorrah of the United States. Samuel Hele knows that Yankees believe outrageous depictions of the South, so he paints a picture of the South as possessing the worst kind of community and society. His plan to run Woodey out of town is predicated upon her gullibility and willingness to believe the sectional stereotypes. Some town members introduce Hele to Woodey as a “New England man,” which immediately gives him credibility in her eyes. The theme of Hele’s tales is that southerners are utterly devoid of character, but cloak their depravity with polite manners. Evil deeds are done in secret, away from Miss Woodey’s prying eyes. Hele said that in the South “a man without character is as well off as a man with it.” Lawyers, for example, might live moral lives in private, but are really “occupied in trying to carry out the villainy of others.” The clergy too was corrupt. He notes, “There is also one preacher, who I believe, when not in liquor, recognizes a few of the rudiments of moral obligation.” The preacher got drunk “only in deference to the public sentiment.” The South was the “suburbs of hell” and the “outskirts of civilization.” Hele, appealing to Woodey’s social and intellectual radicalism, refers to modern scientists, who traced “the genealogy of man to the monkey tribe.” “I believe that this is true of this population,” he added, “for the characteristic marks of a low, apish cunning and stealing, betray the paternity.” Even the baboons would be displeased with the degeneracy of their breed, the southerner. With some reassurance from Hele, Woodey accepts as fact the depiction of southerners as depraved beasts. The story turns on Woodey’s protests over the images of the South presented to her. She incredulously inquires as to why she has not observed . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. In The Flush Times of California, Baldwin portrayed the North as seeking power over the South and being willing to violate all constitutional scruples to achieve an exalted position in the nation (–). . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. For northern views of southerners as moral degenerates and the South as a land of sensual passion, see Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, chap. .
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the evils of which Hele speaks. Hele explains that southerners carry out their crimes in secret and upon outsiders. Baldwin played with the theme of a slave power conspiracy in his story. He took Hele’s stories about southern degeneracy from abolitionist propaganda. Abolitionists portrayed the South as a place writhing with vice, both openly and in secret. They accused southern politicians of possessing ulterior motives. Southerners, they insisted, secretly desired power so that they could spread their corruption northward. In Baldwin’s story it is Miss Woodey who has the secret motives. She wants to believe Hele’s tales because she has desires to feel morally superior to southerners. By accepting the contrived stories as true, Woodey assuages her own Puritan sense of moral superiority. Thus, despite all evidence to the contrary, Woodey believes Hele. Baldwin saw this as both humorous and tragic. Southern readers would laugh at the gullibility of the simple-minded Yankee. New Englanders really did suspect the South of a secret conspiracy to destroy the Union, though perhaps not in such explicit terms as Miss Woodey. Baldwin especially saw tragedy in the abolitionists’ views of slavery. In order to shock Woodey, Hele describes the various ways southerners mistreated their slaves. Again he exaggerates, but Woodey, expecting the worst, believes the stories. Abolitionist propaganda about the horrors of southern slavery condemned not only the economic system of slavery but also the South’s social order. Abolitionist literature demonized slaveholders as the most corrupt of men. Hele tells Woodey that southerners regard the subject of slavery as “a chilling mystery of silence.” Southerners either refuse to discuss their treatment of slaves or they lie about it just as the Catholic Church lied about “the horrors and dungeons of the inquisition.” Hele says, “The way negroes are treated in this country would chill the soul of a New Holland cannibal.” He tells a story of a slave on Col. Luke Gyves’s plantation who, while being branded, seized the branding iron and put out the eye of the colonel’s favorite dog. Retribution was swift. “They took the negro down to the rack in the plantation dungeonhouse, and, sending for the neighbors to come into the entertainment, made a Christmas frolic of the matter,” Hele relates. The neighbors “rammed a powder-horn down his throat,” lit a “slow match” and them placed wagers on whether or not the “blast would blow the top of the negro’s head off; which it did.” The loser of the bet refused to pay, and the other party sued. The judge ruled that the bet could not be recovered because the
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winning party had “bet on a certainty.” The humor of the story is that Woodey believes it. She believes that southerners commonly treated their slaves worse than animals. She accepts that slave owners have dungeons with torture equipment in them. She answers, “Why . . . it is a wonder to me that the fate of Sodom does not fall upon the country.” Woodey then inquires as to whether slave owners really “part the young children from their mothers.” Hele answers negatively, but then spins a far worse tale. When cotton was expensive, slave owners found it “cheaper to take away the child than to take up the mother’s time in attending to it.” Slave women, he says, “are so sickly, from overwork and scant feeding and clothing, that the child is worth little for the vague chance of living.” Hele mentions that slave owners would send the slave children to town, on Sundays no less, “in big hamper baskets, for sale, by the dozen.” Hele recounted other horrors perpetrated upon slaves, to which Woodey asks if the slave owners were “afraid the negroes will rise on them.” Hele then describes a fictitious slave patrol that convinced the local planters “to contribute a negro or two apiece, every month or so, to be publicly hung, or burned, for the sake of example.” Some planters, not wishing to give up valuable slaves, gave the patrol local “free negroes.” One planter “painted an Indian black and threw him in” to be hanged. Hele’s picture of southern society is one focused upon exercising racial control through violence and terror. Woodey believes him again. Hele concludes his string of stories by offering the abolitionist argument that the existence of slavery corrupted the white population even further. Besides the brutalities committed upon the slaves, southerners, he charged, were continuously drunk and lawless. The southern white was a slave to passion. Woodey worries for her safety with drunks all around. Hele advises her to carry pistols in public in order to fight off the inevitable mobbings that take place in the South. He notes that the townspeople “mobbed a Yankee school mistress here, some time ago, for saying something against slavery; but I believe they only tarred and feathered her, and rode her on a rail for a few squares.” He warns Woodey that the townspeople were talking of “trying the same experiment on another.” Woodey had heard enough and fled back North on “the next morning’s mail-stage.” . Baldwin, Flush Times, –. . Ibid., –. . Ibid., –.
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Baldwin engaged briefly in social commentary at the end of the story. He noted humorously that Woodey had dropped a letter addressed to Harriet Beecher Stowe which contained “some interesting memoranda and statistics on the subject of slavery and its practical workings, which I should never thought of again had I not seen something like them in a very popular fiction, or rather book of fictions, in which the slaveholders are handled with something less than feminine delicacy and something more than masculine unfairness.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, according to Baldwin, was an abolitionist piece of propaganda based on a joke played on a gullible Yankee. Of course, Miss Woodey was a fictional character, but Baldwin’s point remains strong. Too many northerners, he thought, believed wild propaganda because of their need to feel morally superior to others. The propaganda had little basis in reality and contained no evidence for its suppositions. It was contrived. Thus the sectionalism that had divided the nation, in Baldwin’s mind, was based on untruths, wild passions, and fanaticism. These had to be abandoned for the Union to survive. Baldwin’s dialogue between Hele and Woodey served as his defense of slavery. Humor is essentially a distortion of reality, but it has to be based in reality, at least partially, in order to work. The dialogue between Hele and Woodey was humorous not because it was unrealistic, but because it exaggerated aspects of reality in incongruous ways. For example, not all Yankees were as a gullible as Miss Woodey, but southerners had to believe in Yankee gullibility to find humor in the story. Likewise, Hele’s wild tales of southern depravity contained aspects of reality, particularly in regard to slavery. Baldwin admitted in Party Leaders that slaves suffered severe mistreatment during the flush times, but once society was ordered, their lot improved. Baldwin’s caricature of the New England mentality in Woodey along with his rebuke of Harriet Beecher Stowe reveal that he blamed abolitionists and the meddling tendencies of New Englanders for political sectionalism and the agitation over slavery. Baldwin’s southern audience would have found Hele’s tall tales of the mistreatment of slaves as exaggerated and humorous. No one, they would have thought, would treat slaves so harshly. Baldwin’s humor worked because some people did abuse their slaves, though perhaps not by the methods Hele describes. Baldwin viewed southern slave society as relatively peaceful and paternalistic. Masters generally cared for their slaves and had a limited respect for them as persons. . Ibid., .
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Abuse of slaves was the extreme. The fact that Yankees, without reason or evidence, accepted the extreme cases as the universal rule could be a source of laughter for Baldwin, but he seemed to have perceived the danger of the situation too. Slavery was a southern matter and should be left to the southern states to guard, he thought.
R Issues of race and slavery absorbed a good deal of Hooper’s energies in the s. He was an inveterate racist. In his editorials he mentioned frequently the inferiority of blacks. In a February editorial, Hooper commented upon the election of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington. The new speaker, he charged, “is one of those who believe the African to be the equal of the Anglo-Saxon.” The “unrelenting North forced him down the throats of the humble imbecile South.” Hooper’s fear of racial equality drove some of his political defenses of the South too. In November he remarked, “Those who have these advantages [money and northern connections], may afford to be Union shriekers; but we, being poor at home and friendless in the North, must, (if Alabama submits to being held in the present Union,) stay here, and submit to all the horrors of an equality of the white and black races.” Hooper believed that Lincoln would free the slaves and force racial equality on the South. He continued: “In the struggle for maintaining the ascendancy of our race in the South—our home—we see no chance for victory but in withdrawing from the Union. To remain in the Union is to lose all that white men hold dear in Government.” For Hooper, secession was more than a constitutional question. It was also a matter of maintaining white supremacy. Hooper drew demeaning portraits of blacks in his fiction. He portrayed them as stupid and dull. He neither romanticized the master-slave relationship nor depicted the stock character of the loyal slave. One of his overtly racist humorous pieces, “Captain Stick and Toney,” appeared in A Ride With Old Kit Kuncker in . The brief sketch concerned Captain Stick, “a remarkably precise old gentleman,” who was “a conscientiously . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, February , . See Shields, “A Sadder Simon Suggs” and Introduction to Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, xix, xliv–xlvii, for Hooper’s racism. . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, November , .
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just man.” The captain kept an account book of the daily conduct of his slaves. For each misdeed, the slave received a certain number of lashes, while for good deeds, the slave obtained credits. Captain Stick enjoyed whipping his slaves and settled their accounts every Saturday. After giving his slave Toney the “just” number of lashes, the Captain was not satisfied and wanted to whip him more. Toney, however, successfully convinced the captain to credit his “account” for some of the good deeds he had done that week about which the captain had forgotten. When Stick realized that Toney might escape next week’s whipping because of his credits, he decided to “charge” Toney for the “cost” incurred in providing for him. The captain exclaimed, “[W]here’s my costs—you incorrigible, abominable scoundrel? You want to swindle me do you, out of my costs, you black, deceitful rascal.” Toney protested for naught, and the captain whipped him harshly. The humor in the story is dark. The slave is completely helpless in the face of the unjust violence done against him. The cruelty of the story would hardly strike modern readers as funny, but it does reflect Hooper’s racism. The issue of slavery composed a major portion of Hooper’s politics in the s. He devoted time to promoting his Whig economic views, especially in state-aid railroad projects, but on the national scene he judged the protection of slavery to be the most important issue. He called slavery the South’s “most important institution” and made it clear that any move against slavery by the federal government would provoke secession by the slave states. He vigorously defended the constitutional right to own slaves and to take them into the territories. As a partisan editor, Hooper used slavery as a political weapon. Hooper faced what historian William Cooper has termed the “politics of slavery.” Hooper described the political tactic at length in an editorial. He began, “The newspapers of the Southern Whig party labor strenuously to prove that the Democratic party of the free States is very thoroughly demoralized by abolitionism and that even where the party . Johnson Jones Hooper, A Ride with Old Kit Kuncker, and Other Sketches, and Scenes of Alabama, –. It should be noted that the story differs greatly from Baldwin’s story in Flush Times in which the Yankee schoolteacher leaves town after being told fictitious stories about cruelties perpetrated upon slaves. In Hooper’s tale, the cruelty is real. In Baldwin’s story, the horrors are concocted. . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, August , .
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shout is heard, in the North and West, for ‘Nebraska and the Administration,’ it is accompanied by the declaration that the measure and its promoters are the truest friends of free soil.” Once tarred with the brush of antislavery, the Democratic papers responded in kind and accused the Whigs of harboring abolitionist sentiment in their party. “Each establishes the correctness of its own partisans,” Hooper noted, “by showing the unsoundness of its opponents.” He thought such an argument fallacious. Hooper called for all southern politicians to realize that no party in the North “dares assume to yield to the plainest constitutional rights of the South.” He acknowledged that the southern Whigs had been unfairly charged with antislavery sentiments but insisted that the southern Whigs had forgotten about reestablishing their fractured national party structure. Instead they should focus on electing “men of undoubted ability, nerve, and Southern feeling” so that the South could present a united front against antislavery agitation in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hooper called the politics of slavery a “party drill” and charged that it took away from the defense of the true interest of the South, slavery. Despite condemning the politics of slavery as divisive and harmful to southern interests, Hooper used the tactic in his editorials. As a KnowNothing editor, he accused Alabama Democrats of endangering the safety both of American republicanism and of slavery. On August , , state election day in Alabama, Hooper attacked anyone who planned to vote for a Democrat. Pointing out that President James Buchanan would not protect southern rights, he called Democrats party hacks and betrayers of southern rights. He wrote: “This day settles the question in Alabama. The man whose vote is given to those who stand by the Administration repudiates our rights in the Territories and consents to the ‘restriction of slavery.’ If a majority of the State so vote, Alabama can never again be called a Southern Rights State. If you would take ‘high ground,’ ever, take it now!” The Democrats swept the elections, leaving Hooper to comment that “the people . . . throw themselves willingly and with utmost confidence upon the tender mercies of the Freesoilers for all time to come.” Hooper’s willingness to play the politics of slavery, even after having denounced it, reveals that he regarded slavery as both the fundamental issue in national politics and the basis of southern social interests. . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , . . Ibid., August and , .
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Some historians have argued that fears of slave revolts gave impetus to the secessionist impulse, but Hooper seldom expressed fears of slave revolts in the context of his call for the protection of slavery. In and , however, he did express a few fears of revolt as he began to press more urgently for secession. In November , he reported that northern visitors and immigrants might try to “slip about among the plantations, endeavoring to corrupt the slaves.” Anyone attempting such a thing should be hanged, insisted Hooper. In April he warned his readers that another Harper’s Ferry raid could happen at any time because of antislavery and abolitionist rhetoric. His most extended comments on slave unrest appeared in a Christmas letter to his brother John DeBerniere Hooper in . Hooper noted that the election returns in Alabama on the vote deciding to hold a secession convention were in, and the state would secede. “On all sides we have insurrectionary plots,” he continued, “instigated by the North—thousands of dollars’ worth of negro property destroyed by hanging—strychnine fixed for our food—and a general notion infused into the servile race, that Lincoln is to free them.” Hooper described several hangings of slaves near Montgomery and a hanging of twenty-one men, mostly blacks, in Autauga County (next to Montgomery). Supposedly, the authorities found “Brown’s pikes” in the possession of some slaves and poison in the possession of a miller. Someone confessed to the plot, and the conspirators were rounded up and killed. A few days later, on December , Hooper insisted that the state legislature ban all free blacks from Alabama and prevent all Yankees from migrating to the state, presumably to prevent any future uprisings. Hooper’s fear of northern fanaticism drove him toward extreme sectionalism. As a Whig with a modern conservative social vision, he abhorred social radicalism. He thought that northerners interfered too much in southern affairs and called for independence from the North. With a libertarian attitude, he asked: “What right have the Northern people to meddle with the affairs and rights of the Southern states? Have the Southern people ever, in any manner, shape or form, meddled with the affairs of the Northern people?” Hooper attributed Yankees’ social activism to their impiety: “Now if the Northern people—born such—would only . Ibid., November , . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, December , . Johnson Jones Hooper to John DeBerniere Hooper, December , , reprinted in Edgar E. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper,” –.
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agree to submit to the decrees of the Almighty, we might get along. But the genuine Free Soil Yankee believes Omnipotence to be a mere bungler and always wishes to improve his work.” Hooper shared his distrust of social activism with other southern conservatives who feared the interference of government in society. Northern reformers, according to Hooper, attempted to use the state as a means to remake southern society. Therefore, as the Republican Party came closer to attaining the presidency, Hooper’s fears of northern radicalism grew, causing him to embrace secession. Hooper hated abolitionism the most, of course. In he reprinted comments made about abolitionists in a Virginia paper: “The Moslem zealots who think that they promote the Kingdom of God in this world by warring against the Bible and Christianity, do not exceed in fanaticism and criminality the men who are now at the North actively engaged in warring against the Constitution and the Laws.” Abolitionists, by denouncing the Constitution and appealing to a higher law, frightened Hooper because they violated his Whig love of order. Abolitionists, in Hooper’s mind, were anarchists who had to be stopped, by violence if necessary. He warned his readers, “The Masses of abolition are moving forward to attack us.” The North would not help the South, and thus the South had to defend itself from ruin by meeting “the foe” with “firmness,” “union,” and “preparation.” By , a scared Hooper remarked: “We believe that abolitionists are by nature, or the operation of their principles, made liars, thieves and cowardly murderers. We believe that they have the supremacy in this government and will retain it and apply their principles.” Hooper’s fear of abolitionism was far from unique. He shared his hatred of social radicalism with both northern and southern conservatives. Nevertheless, his hatred of abolitionism caused him to view other parts of northern society with suspicion. . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, May , . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, January , . . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , , May , , and January , . Part of the Alabama American Party’s platform in contained a denunciation of a higher-law approach to the Constitution. Number five of the platform read: “Protection to all persons ‘in the inestimable privilege of worshipping God in the manner most agreeable to their own consciences’: opposition to the election to office of any man who recognizes the right of any religious denomination to power, or the authority of any ‘higher law’ than the Constitution of the United States.” Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, June , .
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Hooper portrayed northern society as driven by hatred, and he longed for retribution for the wrongs perpetrated upon the South. He believed that northerners taught their children from birth to hate the southern people. Such hatred drove northerners to applaud the efforts of John Brown to arm the slaves of Virginia and cause a rebellion. In December , Hooper reprinted a story from a Philadelphia newspaper that lamented the economic hardship in the North caused by the South’s boycott of northern businesses. The story told of the difficulties faced by the poor urban workers. Hooper commented: “It rejoices our soul to hear of this early justice. Every howl of the North West wind will bring sweet dreams to us, for we shall know that it is pinching the thin-clad limbs of some at least of those who would place the knife at our throats, if they could.” He regarded the situation as vengeance for northern support of the Harper’s Ferry raid. He insisted: “‘Workmen discharged,’ eh! And ‘particularly trying at this period of the year’—is it? It was not ‘particularly trying,’ was it, to send thousands of broad blades to Virginia, to put into the hands of our loyal slaves, for the purposes of rebellion and massacre! Oh, no!” Hooper had faith in neither the northern people nor their politicians to protect the constitutional rights of the South. He made wild assertions that northerners wanted only to see southerners killed. His loss of faith in the North reflected his loss of trust in the benefits of the United States of America. The Whig ideal of a common social vision and a united effort for a common national good had passed. Hooper also depicted the North as a place of hypocrisy and sexual depravity. In he printed a story about sexual immorality in a school for girls in Boston. He commented that “the saints of that city are not altogether free from those carnal weaknesses which their romances are inclined to saddle almost exclusively on slaveholders.” Hooper relished the sexual depravity of hypocrites. It was “very apparent that ‘the Flesh and the Devil’ ‘hold their own’ among the descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims, quite as fully as among the warmer regions of the South.” He concluded: “That is a nice little kettle of fish, for pious, puritanic, nigger-loving, psalm singing Boston! It would be difficult to parallel such detestable pollution in the lowest sinks of rotten and rotting London.” In another editorial he . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, May , . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, December , .
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described a meeting of a Free Love Society in New York City that was frequented by intellectuals. He tied sexual license to social radicalism. “Can we wonder, that in a society where such elements as these exist, abolition vagaries should be produced! A society which submits to the existence of such an association, even on the most limited scale, in its midst, must be depraved to its inmost core.” By painting northern society as inherently depraved, Hooper assured southerners of their own righteousness. He portrayed the radicalism of the North as culturally pervasive, much as the chaos on the frontier in the Suggs stories affected southern culture for a time. Social radicalism challenged the conservative principles and society of the South. “We can only look for destructive principles and action, social and political, where such infinite and ineffable impurity has found a ‘local habitation and a name,’” commented Hooper on New York City. Images of the North as Sodom and Gomorrah could hasten southerners’ desires to separate from the radical and “evil” North. Hooper drew on southern proslavery social rhetoric, although he did not offer a systematic defense of slavery. He held with other southern nationalists that the slave society of the South was superior to northern society. In a November editorial, Hooper reported that there had been a mob in New York City threatening the mayor and promising to loot the city unless they received relief from the food shortages plaguing the North. Hooper gleefully commented, “There’s free society, for you.” He believed that northern capitalist society would implode due to the tensions caused by its labor system, a common view among southern conservatives in the s. Hooper seemed to have retreated from his earlier Whig defense of a free society and individualism. His corresponding Whig appreciation of meritocracy and inequality, however, could buttress his proslavery convictions because the superior wealth of the South was linked to slavery. In November , shortly before the presidential election, Hooper encouraged Alabamians to stand firm on principle. He said that if secession occurred it would take place “with the wealth of a great nation in our depots and in those of the other Seceding States.” He continued: “There will be no war and, after a few weeks, no distress. Out cotton bales are the bond which obligates the armies and navies of Europe to defend us.” The wealth . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , , and October , . Somers, Johnson J. Hooper, –.
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of the South formed “the subsistence” of the North. He predicted that without southern cotton both the North and European nations would suffer hardship. “We have only to be true to our own sense of right, to obtain Security and Prosperity,” he exclaimed. Southern superiority, based on its cotton economy and slave society, would triumph. Hooper deeply loathed the North, particularly abolitionists and anyone who denied the South her constitutional rights. On Christmas Day , he wrote a letter to his brother about the upcoming secession convention in Alabama. Hardly in keeping with the Christmas spirit, he launched into a bitter diatribe against northern radicals. He began: “You seem to think me bitter, perhaps too bitter, toward the fanatical portion of the North. . . . I am bitter towards them and I often regret that I cannot in some way help to destroy them.” Blurring the distinction between radicals and New Englanders in general by using the Puritan myth, he asserted: “I hate them instinctively—I hate the race and the blood from which they spring—from Oliver Cromwell down to Ward Beecher, I regard them as one of God’s punishments for a sinful world.” Almost at a frenzy, Hooper wrote: “I hate them more than I do any thing in this world, or than I can hate any thing in that which is to come; and I cannot repress my joy, when I hear that they are starving and freezing and rotting around the factories of New England.” He ended the thought with a final wish for violence: “They pursue me and mine; if I could, I would visit them with fire, pestilence, famine and the sword.” Secession would rid Alabama of “the accursed tyranny of these demons.” In Hooper’s hatred of the North as a corrupt, radical, aggressive power, he revealed that he viewed the possible war in the future to be one of purification. By separating from the demonic North, a pure southern nation could preserve order, slavery, and constitutional liberty. Hooper’s sectionalism and southern nationalism were largely negative in character, but they also reflected his Whig principles. He feared the . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , , and November , . See Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made for a discussion of slaveholding ideology and northern capitalism. . Johnson Jones Hooper to John DeBerniere Hooper, December , , reprinted in Edgar E. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper,” –. For southern views of the Civil War as an agent of purification see Genovese, A Consuming Fire. Some northern intellectuals had a similar view of the purifying nature of the war. See George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union.
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chaos abolition would bring and the disrespect to the rule of law that a higher law approach to the Constitution brought. He hoped for an economically progressive, Whiggish southern nation that preserved the antiparty purity of republicanism. He yearned for the realization of economic opportunity and individualism with the opening of the West to slaveholders. Although he possessed a positive vision of the future southern nation, he did not articulate it clearly or frequently. Instead, his fear of government interference with slavery and of northern radicalism drove his burgeoning southern nationalism in the late s. Hooper believed that the primary goal of his southern nationalism was to protect and secure slavery in the South. Southern Nationalism or Radical Individualism? The Whigs’ focus on social unity and their trust that government could aid in achieving unity could lead them in two directions: nationalism or a modified libertarianism. Some Whigs believed that an increased devotion to the nation, which was expressed through the American System and the strengthening of government powers, could bind Americans together in a common society. The fruits of such unity would be economic, cultural, and political strength. Nationalism was not the only option, however. Because Whigs championed a voluntary society under the rule of law, they celebrated a free, individualistic social order devoted to order and prosperity. A Whig did not have to sacrifice this free society to a nationalist vision. Hooper and Baldwin reveal the dilemma concerning social unity and individualism. Hooper became a southern nationalist in the s in part as a response to his Whig desire for social and cultural unity, while Baldwin moved to California in the s to recapture the vitality of a free, individualistic society that he thought had been lost in Alabama. Many southern historians have argued that because the antebellum South suffered many geographic and class divisions a strong southern nationalism did not develop. Some have identified three Souths by : the upper South, lower South, and Gulf States. Others have noticed that the major line of demarcation in the antebellum period was between the eastern seaboard states and the western or frontier states. Recently scholars have focused upon the class divisions in southern society that caused a . Potter and Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis, –. Hooper’s southern nationalism reflects Potter’s charge that southern nationalism was primarily negative in character. Shields, introduction to Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, li.
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great deal of social unrest. There were also sectional divisions within each state, causing political fights in many states over the apportionment of representatives. Strong evidence for the fractured nature of antebellum society came from the fire-eaters, many of whom complained that the South was too divided and too uninformed to embrace southern nationalism. As a result of the evidence, scholars have largely dismissed southern nationalism as a chimera. The South was a diverse place of ethnicities and religious groups, hardly making ideal grounds for widespread nationalistic fervor. But the formation of the Confederate States of America in proved that southern nationalism did exist and was a strong force. Hooper used nationalist rhetoric to call for the protection of southern slavery and to solidify his Whig desire for social unity in the South. Hooper admitted that southern nationalism was contrived. In he attended the Southern Commercial Convention in Savannah, Georgia. The Commercial Convention movement began in , seeking independence from the North on economic grounds. The convention movement tried to unite businessmen around a common agenda for aiding the growth of the southern economy. Far from uniting southerners or increasing southern economic independence, the conventions divided participants and achieved virtually no practical results. By the mid–s southern nationalists flocked to the commercial conventions and took control of the movement. At the Savannah convention, nationalists discussed proposals to reopen the international slave trade in order to reduce the price of slaves, making it easier for more southerners to acquire slaves. Hooper understood the tactics of the southern nationalists. He wrote from Savannah in November , “We have talked the South into a belief . . . that all the elements of progress, social, moral, and commercial, abound in our people; and it remains only to cause, in some way, a practical development of the theory to such an extent as will convince not only our own doubters, but the world.” Hooper frankly admitted that the South as a nation was an artificial, contrived concept. Furthermore, he stated that the southern people themselves, though possessing great potential, had to be convinced that a southern nation could exist and prosper. Thus his hope for a Whiggish, progressive southern nation was “imagined.” . For some discussion of the historiography of southern nationalism see the appendix. . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , . For southern commercial conventions, see McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation, –. Potter and Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis, –. For treatments of the move to reopen the slave
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Hooper passionately tried to build southern unity in order to form a national community. He realized that he faced a difficult task. In an editorial, Hooper noted that the Mail was “a most dedicated Southern Rights American paper.” He continued, “Those who manage it have been in minorities during all of their political lives; they therefore are not likely to shrink from opposing majorities.” Hooper promised that he would remain “steadfast to the end.” His admission that southern rights was a minority position indicated to him that he must create a consensus. He stressed unity on principles to do so. Hooper noted that the Constitution obviously protected the right to own slaves. Likewise, the right to bring slaves into the territories was a logical extension of the constitutional right to own slaves. These principles, Hooper insisted, were easy for all to grasp and defend. He did not appeal primarily to interest because he thought that all principled men could defend the Constitution regardless of whether or not they owned slaves. He did, however, warn southerners that if they did not stand up to the abolitionists and defend the Constitution, abolition of slavery would occur with devastating results. In Hooper’s logic, unity on constitutional principles gave southerners a common interest in defeating abolitionism. Hooper used various methods to attain southern unity. Rhetoric was extremely important. He used the term the “South,” referring to the slave states, to suggest a degree of unity that went beyond mere geography. He also used the terms “Southern people” and “our people” to suggest a regional or southern national identity. He tried to reinforce the idea of a unified South in his newspaper. He reprinted stories from other southern newspapers, especially those in Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, to show Alabama readers of the Mail that all southerners faced problems such as abolitionism, the prohibition of slavery in the territories, and northern aggressiveness. By informing his Alabama readership of events of which they otherwise would have been ignorant, Hooper essentially tied the political reactions of Alabamians to occurrences and opinions in other southern states. He used a similar tactic when reporting on different northern cities. He painted each of them as radical in order to portray a unified trade, see Ronald T. Takaki, “The Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade in South Carolina,” –. Barton J. Bernstein, “Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the African Slave Trade,” –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, April , , reprinted in Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper,” .
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enemy, the “North.” It was hoped such tactics could create a national community of southerners united around opposition to the North and constitutional principles. Hooper stressed that all southerners faced a common plight of economic and cultural dependence on the North. In he declared that the South’s “dependence on the North is most degrading.” In he declared, “Today instead of reaping alike with the North the benefits and advantages resulting from the Union, the South stands forth—and has stood forth for years past—the recipient of injurious, insulting oppression.” The North, he charged, had used its superiority in numbers to wear down the South and prevent her from prospering economically. Hooper linked his advocacy of a progressive Whig economy for the South to his southern nationalism. He wrote, “We shall strive to aid in stimulating the South to Industrial Independence, as the best preparation for political Independence.” He also supported efforts at cultural independence. In an April editorial, Hooper praised the formation of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as a means to celebrate southern culture’s superiority. He noted that southerners discovered in such a scheme how to “fire every Southern heart with enthusiasm and patriotic pride.” In the mid-s, Hooper began insisting that southerners unite in order to fight the northern threat to southern rights. In an editorial he warned southerners that northern Congressmen in the House of Representatives were incited to attack slavery “by frantic, howling constituencies at home.” The South had to stand firm and united in national politics, rejecting party loyalty. The South could not back down. Hooper charged that if the South retreated from the fight, “Cuban vassalage would be too mild a doom for her degenerate sons.” By portraying the political fight as a litmus test for republicanism, Hooper hoped to unite southerners from both parties to defend their common constitutional rights. Hooper readily admitted that disunity existed among southerners but hoped, through reason, to convince the southern people to unite. As the presidential election of approached, however, Hooper became much more frightened by the lack of a southern national community. In April . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, May , , and August , . Montgomery (Alabama) Mail, January , , reprinted in Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper,” . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, April , . . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, April , .
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he chastised southerners for being too tolerant of free soilers expressing their opinions in public. Hysterically, Hooper declared that all free soilers were abolitionists and that southerners must not allow any verbal dissent on slavery in social discourse. On November , , fearing that a Lincoln victory was imminent, Hooper expressed hope that southerners would forget their party differences of the past and unite. He wrote: “Shall not our people unite, then, under such circumstances? The political differences of the past—supposing Lincoln elected—ought to be buried among Southern men. We mean, of course, all true hearted men of the South, who only desire the welfare of their country and section. After this day, there is no cause for dispute among us. We can be, if we choose, one people; and we ought to be, and must be.” Hooper opined that unity and loyalty were inextricably linked. Loyal southerners professed unity and abandoned parties. He implied that only disloyal southerners would disagree. “Let Southern Union be the word,” he concluded. In a November editorial, he hinted that one source of possible disloyalty in the South could be wealthy southerners who possessed the means to leave the South instead of fighting. His argument was an old republican one against luxury in republics. Some republicans had claimed that luxury would dissolve public virtue so much that the rich would refuse to fight for any good other than the protection of their wealth. After Alabama seceded in January , Hooper proclaimed: “[A]ll hail! To the glorious, free and independent Flag of the Sovereign Republic of Alabama! Forever may it wave in honor over a happy, chivalrous, united people.” After secession Hooper reported as fact that the people of Alabama were united and desired independence. The imagined political community would be completed upon the formation of the Confederate States of America. Hooper used the image of the South as the patria in order to unite . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, April , , and January , . Montgomery (Alabama) Daily Mail, November , . . The subject of secession in Alabama has produced many works. For book-length treatments see Clarence Phillips Denman, The Secession Movement in Alabama. Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama from –. William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in . Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society. Two historiographical essays, though dated, offer good insights on conceptualizing the secession movement: William J. Donnelly, “Conspiracy or Popular Movement: The Historiography of Southern Support for Secession,” –. Ralph A. Wooster, “The Secession of the Lower South: An Examination of Changing Interpretations,” –. Ralph A. Wooster,
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southerners to oppose northern aggression. In April he wrote a poem expressing the theme of southern unity: Men of the South! Your homes, Where peace and plenty smiled, Have been assailed by thieving bands, And by their tread defiled. The canting traitors of the North With lying tongues declaim, And spit at you their slime and froth, Their venom and their flame.
Hooper’s image of the South seems classical in inspiration. The virtuous southerners, like the ancient Romans, were to defend their homes, the foundations of society, against the aggressive, deceitful “thieving bands” of the North, the equivalent of the ancient barbarian tribes. Hooper shifted the focus away from slavery, his constant theme, to the defense of the home and civilization, a task all honorable men would gladly perform. His image was a conservative one—a united people fighting in self-defense for the very existence of society and civilization. It matched well the images of traditional society used by John Randolph. By focusing on the image of a virtuous protagonist against an utterly evil foe, Hooper revealed the urgency and desperation of his southern nationalism. All of civilization, he thought, hung in the balance.
R Baldwin did not become a southern nationalist, although he sympathized with the Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Whereas Hooper’s desire for social unity led him to endorse a homogeneous slave “An Analysis of the Membership of Secession Conventions in the Lower South,” –. William H. Brantley, Jr., “Alabama Secedes,” –. Hugh C. Bailey, “Disloyalty in Early Confederate Alabama,” –. Hugh C. Bailey, “Disaffection in the Alabama Hill Country, ,” –. Thomas B. Alexander, “Persistent Whiggery in Alabama and the Lower South, –,” –. For a refutation of Bailey’s thesis that the state was profoundly divided over secession, see Durward Long, “Unanimity and Disloyalty in Secessionist Alabama,” –. See also Marshal J. Rachleff, “Racial Fear and Political Factionalism: A Study of the Secession Movement in Alabama, –.” William J. Cooper, Jr., “The Politics of Slavery Affirmed: The South and the Secession Crisis,” in Fraser and Moore, eds., The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture, –. . Montgomery (Alabama) Weekly Mail, April , .
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society, Baldwin was not a fan of social homogeneity. Homogeneous societies often stifled differences and resisted beneficial change. Baldwin had criticized the South on this very point. Hooper’s imagined southern nation was not Baldwin’s dream. As the sectional controversies intensified during the s, Baldwin abandoned the South for California. Just as he had made a new life in Alabama in the s, he hoped his new life in California would bring him riches and prominence. Only success in a free society could slake his thirst for prosperity. Baldwin did not leave for California until , but an incident in revealed his understanding of independence and his distance from other southern nationalists. Baldwin individualized the republican theme of independence. The Old Republicans identified independence as an economic and legal principle. The independent farmer owned his land and his means of subsistence. He was the slave, either actual or figurative, of no one. Baldwin stressed independence primarily as a moral concept. A good example of his theory of independence came in an epistolary exchange with his wife in the summer of . In his trip back to Virginia, Baldwin encountered the love of his youth, Margaret Johnson, who had spurned his youthful advances and married another. He spent some time with Margaret discussing their past, but found her dull. Baldwin wrote letters to Sidney describing his dinners and conversations with his old flame. Needless to say, Sidney was not amused and expressed her jealousy and displeasure in letters to her husband. Baldwin was surprised at his wife’s response and used his reply to lecture her on his theory of moral independence and trust. “Did you ever hear . . . of a man . . . making his wife his confidante of his follies with other women,” he asked. “And you of all women,” he exclaimed. He reassured Sidney that he loved her alone and did not desire trysts with other women. He added, “Why Heaven bless your dear soul, what do you want of a husband that you could only keep like a negro, by keeping him in your sight, whose vagrant affections were only safe when there was no choice?” Baldwin did not want to be bound by tradition in his relationship with his wife. He wanted the independence and freedom to tell her everything and still have her trust. Like other republicans, he contrasted this liberty and independence with slavery, in this case black chattel slavery. He stressed to Sidney that their love, and therefore their moral lives, could only flourish in an atmosphere of freedom. There was no need for jealousy or restraints upon the individual. Sidney knew his good character, and thus she should trust the strength of his will
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to make the correct moral decisions. What seemed a quarrel between a husband and wife held in reality implications for Baldwin’s social vision. Independence, in this case meaning the individual’s free range of action, was necessary for morality and the good society. Independence also meant relinquishing the desire to control others. Baldwin hoped that he would recover true independence in California. The frontier conditions that he found in the new state reminded him of Alabama in the s. He advocated the same remedy: the rule of law. Government, he hoped, could order California by clarifying state law. Baldwin played a role in this task as a state supreme court justice. In addition, he desired to work hard in order to succeed. In December he wrote his wife: “I must work hard and make a fortune for my girls. I am in my office . . . not less than twelve hours a day; never go to the theatre or any amusements, and spend my time in active business. I am determined if hard work will do it, to make myself the first lawyer in S.F. And what I deem more important: to make money.” Baldwin appreciated social unity, but what he prized most was an orderly society that allowed men of talent to succeed according to their abilities and character. Despite the separation from his family and the long hours of work, Baldwin enjoyed life in California. In February he wrote his wife: “I have found out what it was that made me discontented with Alabama. It was the people that did not suit me, that the dull tame routine of Alabama life was not suited to my disposition, aims, ambitions.” Alabama had become too much like the eastern states, with a solidified social order. Baldwin wrote that “I was not appreciated there.” He claimed that he had been “wasting life energy and talents” in Alabama. California, to the contrary, was “the center of the world compared to Alabama.” He continued, “Here are more talent, intelligence, worth, liberality, enterprise, than to be found in all Alabama.” California was “a little less than a Paradise, compared to anything I have ever seen before.” Baldwin had found his beloved frontier again. He assumed that he was free from history and tradition, able to live out his principles in an atmosphere of liberty. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, August , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, December , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. . Joseph G. Baldwin to Sidney Baldwin, February , , Lester-Gray Collection, Microfilm, Gorgas Library, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
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Conclusion In terms of their social principles, Baldwin and Hooper tackled the same dilemma other southerners addressed, the balance between liberty and tradition. Both settled more on the side of freedom. In his southern nationalism, Hooper resembled Simms in many ways. Baldwin’s social message sounded much like John Taylor’s in “Life of John Penn.” Both men believed that individualism and hard work would bring happiness. Baldwin and Hooper lamented the social effects of egalitarianism and political democracy and desired a voluntary, free society. Unlike Randolph, Tucker, and Simms, they remained suspicious of a traditional social order and did not seek consciously to defend the Western intellectual tradition. Baldwin and Hooper had made their peace with the modern world.
Conclusion
8 In his book The Lost Soul of American Politics, John Patrick Diggins made the following observation regarding American society and politics: “Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America . . . we have understood why Americans are a conservative people and why America is a liberal society, a society of free political institutions inhabited by individuals who love property and hate revolution. That America itself was born of violent revolution only highlights the irony of the liberalism peculiar to us, a liberalism that embraces radical means to achieve conservative ends.” Although Diggins does not explicitly identify the liberal principle of the separation of state and society, he understands the same lesson that the southerners in this study learned, that behind the American political tradition, however one labels it, there are diverse visions of a good society. That Americans could use Lockean views of the state and Burkean views of society may aggravate Diggins, but it did not perplex many antebellum southern intellectuals. The divisions in antebellum southern conservatism limited the chances of forging a uniform southern conservative society or movement. Antebellum southern conservatives shared common sources of political thought: Revolutionary republicanism, localist anti-Federalism, and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. When it came to social thought, the six conservatives surveyed had fallen under different influences: Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, European Romanticism—both British and German— cultural nationalism, and the classical tradition. Southern conservatives certainly shared many social principles, but when it came down to issues such as the place of religion or commerce in society, they often disagreed with one another. Historians have long commented on the elaborate proslavery arguments made by antebellum southerners. What is most interesting . John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism, .
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about the proslavery treatises is not their reliance on racism or religion to buttress slavery, but that they saw fit to offer so many different arguments. The very diversity of southern conservative answers on the questions of slavery, religion, and commerce reveals that southern conservatives lacked a shared tradition of social thought, regardless of the republican, states’ rights political tradition in the South. As a result several southern conservatisms developed. While many historians have noted the consistency of antebellum conservatism on political questions, too often historians have failed to appreciate the diversity of southern conservative social thought and its significance for the history of the Old South. In order to avoid misinterpreting antebellum southern thinkers, one needs to appreciate their different views of the good society. Questions concerning liberty and tradition, public and private virtue, localism and nationalism, religion, and slavery all dominated southern intellectual discourse. Perhaps it is time to rethink labels such as the “southern tradition,” “conservative,” or “liberal” with greater precision. Historians should reconsider chronological divisions in southern history as well, and realize both the strong continuity and significant change that shaped southern thinking between and . Ultimately the historian’s task is one of great humility, for it is extremely difficult to re-create the lives and thoughts of those who lived in a different era and thought differently about the world. But the task can and should be done.
Appendix
8 History, being an intellectual re-creation and interpretation of the past, rests on the insights and work of many scholars and writers. Scholarly books appear in the context of a myriad of arguments and interpretations of the past. This book discussed some historiography in the text. Instead of burdening the reader with lengthy historiographical footnotes in the main text, this appendix will place Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, – : Liberty Tradition and the Good Society within the context of the historiography of the Old South and discuss the historiography of the six figures in the book. Until the s the dominant view of the antebellum South and southern intellectual life, stated most eloquently by Clement Eaton, was that the South had undergone a profound shift during the antebellum period from a liberal Jeffersonian region comfortable with Enlightenment forms to a racist, economically conservative South led by demagogues who halted social progress and kept the common people in ignorance. In The Mind of the South, Eaton argued that the debate over slavery in the Virginia legislature in and the new fears about the political safety of slavery were the turning points for the South. “The conservative reaction in Virginia,” he wrote, “was far reaching in its effects, for it not only set an example of conservatism, but gave a powerful rationale to the incipient proslavery defense throughout the South.” The new demagogues, whom Eaton called “conservatives,” led the southern people to support secession and the suppression of minority liberal opinions, particularly those concerning slavery and religion, resulting in a conservative South. Other historians and literary theorists have adapted the general outline of the Eaton thesis to their works. . Eaton, The Mind of the Old South, . Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, –. See also O’Brien, “C. Vann Woodward and the Burden of Southern Liberalism,” –. A literary adaptation of the Eaton thesis, at least in the way I read it, was put forth by Lewis Simpson. Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America.
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In the s a group of revisionists arose to challenge the Eaton thesis. Focusing upon Eaton’s contention that the rise of slavery agitation in the North caused the South’s conservatism, revisionists showed that southerners had always been racists and that virtually all early southern Jeffersonians had been more proslavery than emancipationist. Nor were the Jeffersonians especially liberal. The revisionists deemed them aristocratic conservatives interested in protecting their class interests and property. The revisionists charged that slavery flourished and expanded under the Jeffersonians, who sought greater protection for the peculiar institution. Thus the revisionists did not see a conservative reaction over slavery after . Southern history before and after “differed only in degree, not in kind,” as Robert Shalhope put it. For the revisionists, the great change in southern history had come through the democratization of southern politics and society. This produced a bifurcated southern tradition of aristocratic conservatism and democratic radicalism unsavory to the revisionist critics. The revisionists highlighted the consistency of the South’s commitment to slavery and the rise of a strong two-party system in the South, but missed important aspects of conservative intellectual life. The revisionists failed to appreciate the diversity of southern conservative thought because they mostly examined practical politics. In claiming a bifurcated southern intellectual tradition, they glossed over differences among those they labeled “aristocrats.” Other scholars have tried to adapt the modernization thesis to explain the hardening conservative attitudes. Robert Shalhope, both in a article and in his biography of John Taylor of Caroline, argued that after southern thinkers became rigid ideologues in response to the modernization of their society. The disruptive rise of a market economy corroded traditional southern society, baffling southerners and forcing them to cling ever more tightly to the ideology of republicanism. In addition, as mod. Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” . Shalhope’s article offers solid historiographical analysis, some of which I have repeated here. . The revisionist works include Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, –. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War. Freehling, The Road to Disunion. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery. Frederickson, “Aristocracy and Democracy in the Southern Tradition,” –. William Cohen, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery,” – . Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, –. Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, –. Tise, Proslavery.
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ernization steadily gained in the North, the republican consensus between the sections that had been forged during the Revolution began to crumble. In advancing this thesis, Shalhope maintained that John Taylor’s ideology hardened after the War of , causing him to embrace sectionalism and an inflexible republicanism. Taylor’s life became in effect Shalhope’s model for the whole South. By , southerners chose their version of the republican ideology rather than face further social change and seceded. In a more sophisticated manner, J. Mills Thornton III and Lacy K. Ford, in examining antebellum Alabama and South Carolina respectively, show how modernization disrupted southern life after . The rise of a market economy both in the North and the South along with the increasing democratization of politics in Jacksonian America placed new pressures on southern society. During the s southern conservatives and radicals exploited the fears of common people about their rapidly changing world, eventually producing the secession movement. In Alabama and South Carolina, circumstances allowed for a democratic conservative republican message to triumph. Southern conservatism in the form of southern nationalism triumphed because people feared more social change. Twentieth-century southern conservatives have also assaulted the Eaton thesis. Scholars such as Clyde Wilson and M. E. Bradford have, in some degree, portrayed antebellum southern conservatism as monolithic. Wilson, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of the John C. Calhoun Papers, wrote an article at the beginning of his scholarly career in which he sought to identify the Jeffersonians as the founders of an authentic American conservatism. The Jeffersonian tradition, “properly understood,” revealed the origins of American and particularly southern conservatism. Wilson noted that American conservatism should “seek to conserve the structure of society and government that is the most organic, legitimate, and just for the American nation, i.e., the federal and constitutional republic bequeathed to us by that unique event, the American Revolution, a ‘revolution’ which was prudential rather than revolutionary, preservative rather than innovating, legalistic rather than . Works that concern the modernization thesis include Robert E. Shalhope, “Thomas Jefferson’s Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought,” –. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline. On modernization see O’Brien, Rethinking the South, chap. . Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, –. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, –. Lacy K. Ford, Jr., The Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, –.
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speculative; a revolution for life, liberty, and property, made by propertied, principled gentlemen expressing the best of their inherited political wisdom; a war of national independence waged without mass romantic nationalism.” The three elements of the Jeffersonian conservative tradition were republicanism, constitutionalism, and federalism. The Jeffersonians were led by the Virginia planters and “represented the majority conservative agricultural property interests of the country at large against the aggressive commercial property interests of the Northern cities.” Jeffersonians were “basically English legalists, not French radicals,” and thus rejected the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of human nature. Among the most important Jeffersonian thinkers, Wilson listed James Madison, John Randolph, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, Nathaniel Macon, and, of course, Thomas Jefferson. Wilson attempted to apply this Jeffersonian conservative tradition to the rest of American history, identifying the Jacksonian Democrats, the Southern populists, and the conservative wing of the Democratic New Deal coalition as maintaining the principles of Jeffersonian conservatism. Wilson admitted that his article simplified a complex subject. But his thesis, while making many excellent points, tended to portray antebellum Jeffersonian conservatives as agreeing on a certain tradition and expression. The tendency to see a monolithic southern conservative tradition manifested itself in the thought of other southern conservatives as well. The late M. E. Bradford, a student of Donald Davidson and the Vanderbilt Agrarian tradition, portrayed the South as the true preserver of the organic political, social, and cultural traditions of the American Revolution. Like Wilson, he saw the American Revolution as essentially a conservative event that preserved the organic legal rights of the English constitution. In Bradford’s rendition of southern intellectual history, the principles of “Patrick Henry, John Taylor of Caroline, the better side of Jefferson, Randolph of Roanoke, and the other tertium quid Old Republicans of our first two decades of national existence” retained the English Whig intellectual inheritance and formed the southern tradition, virtually unchanged to the present day. The secessionists of and were faithful American republicans who sought to preserve the proper understanding of the federal Constitution of . . Modern southern conservative writings include Clyde N. Wilson, “The Jeffersonian Conservative Tradition,” , , . M. E. Bradford, Remembering Who We Are: Observa-
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Bradford, while identifying many important aspects of antebellum southern conservatism, limits southern conservatism to the tradition that he chooses to acknowledge. In other words, he constructed his “southern tradition” from one particular aspect of the conservative discourse in the Old South. In his essay “Where We Were Born and Raised: The Southern Conservative Tradition,” he describes the southern conservative tradition as “a position and/or attitude which is here distinguished from other conservative dispositions, and from mindsets part of the durable (and still persisting) mix of Southern thought, but not in any predictable way conservative.” Bradford seems to be saying that he will define the southern conservative tradition and exclude from it those he deems not really conservative. Such an approach may be legitimate for political purposes, but for the purpose of historical inquiry, Bradford’s decision to exclude others who may not be identically conservative to the bearers of his tradition distorts the historical reality of southern conservatism. In the best brief introduction to southern conservative thought, The Southern Tradition, Eugene Genovese challenged both revisionist and southern conservative scholarship on the intellectual life of the Old South. “The principal tradition of the South—the mainstream of its cultural development—has been quintessentially conservative,” he argued. He viewed southern conservatism as a self-conscious movement begun in the s after the radicalization of the French Revolution. Conservatives, such as John Randolph, St. George Tucker, and John Taylor of Caroline, founded the states’ rights tradition under the Constitution. To Genovese, John C. Calhoun best expressed the southern conservative tradition in terms of his constitutional arguments, social vision, and political strategy. While Genovese acknowledged the diversity in southern conservative thought, his book focused on the commonalities instead. To Genovese the idea of tradition, of being faithful to those who shaped the southern way, is the central notion of southern conservatism both today and in the Old South. He insisted that conservatives saw their tradition as a “living faith” to be fought for, not a dead letter of the past. Southern conservatives stressed a corporate life based on personal loyalty and Christianity. Theirs was a moral vision of society and culture. Southern tions of a Southern Conservative, . See also Clyde N. Wilson, ed., A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M. E. Bradford and His Achievements. Kirk Wood, “The Central Theme of Southern History: Republicanism, Not Slavery, Race, or Romanticism,” –. . Bradford, The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political, .
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conservatives attacked consolidated national government and the power of centralized financial institutions. Genovese denied the widespread notion that southerners had been conservative only because of slavery and racial problems and maintained that the principal features of the southern worldview came from republicanism, not slavery. Antebellum southern conservatives realized, however, that “slavery made possible the defense and preservation of a system of values that was unraveling in a North based on bourgeois social relations that undermined all tradition.” Southern conservatives doubted that traditional values could be sustained without slavery. Genovese charged that twentieth-century southern conservatives disregarded the insight of their antebellum cohorts that social relations limited and directed culture and thus ignored the antebellum conservative reliance upon slavery as a social system. John Randolph John Randolph has been a common topic in numerous treatments of the Jeffersonian movement and the Early Republic. There have been important book-length studies of Randolph. None, however, captures together Randolph’s personal eccentricities, his political ideas, and his social vision. Hugh Garland and Henry Adams wrote two important studies of Randolph in the nineteenth century. Garland, writing in , lionized Randolph as a consistent, principled politician who prophesied the South’s sectional dilemma. In the s, Henry Adams dismantled Randolph’s “consistency” and painted a negative portrait of him. Adams saw him as a dangerous example of extreme southern sectionalism and charged him with linking states’ rights and slavery in southern discourse. There have been a few significant twentieth-century works devoted to Randolph. William Cabell Bruce did exhaustive research on Randolph, trying to re-create his public and private careers. Russell Kirk, the prominent post–World War II American conservative, interpreted Randolph as an American version of Edmund Burke. For Kirk, Randolph exemplified a domestic American conservative tradition. Robert Dawidoff saw Ran. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism, , , . In the work, Genovese writes, “Antebellum southern theorists never constituted a monolith, but collectively they did hammer out a world view that has remained central to southern conservative thought” (). See also Eugene Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Culture War. . Garland, The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke. Adams, John Randolph.
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dolph as a Romantic figure who consciously adopted the rhetoric of isolation and persecution to express a Romantic sensibility. He rightly saw that Kirk had overstated Randolph’s resemblance to Burke but he acknowledged the role Burke played in Randolph’s thought. He wrote: “The French Revolution, the unrepublican American innovations of recent times, the new war with England, all of these were discontinuous events; reading Burke helped Randolph recreate a version of the Anglo-American past—a tradition, authority, aristocracy—with alternative values more favorable to his politics and his view of the world than those of democratic America.” Dawidoff ’s book delved into psychological interpretations of Randolph. Other shorter treatments of Randolph deserve mention. John F. Devanny, Jr., penned the best brief treatment of Randolph in print. He examined Randolph’s political economy in the context of Jeffersonian liberalism. Richard Weaver discussed Randolph as a Christian humanist. Richard Beale Davis maintained that Randolph was a conservative romantic and notes Burke’s influence upon his thought. Daniel Jordan examined Randolph’s electioneering and political success in Virginia. David A. Carson probed Randolph’s break with Jefferson. Eugene Genovese noted that Randolph was one of the founders of states’ rights republicanism in the South. Later southern conservatives invoked his message and example. Finally, John Grammer, basing his argument on Dawidoff ’s book, argued that Randolph saw the South as a region defined primarily by slavery. He used his Romantic isolation to buttress slavery and moved the South away from “pastoral republicanism.” John Taylor Historians have not ignored John Taylor either. Most historians of the Jeffersonian party in the s have dealt with him in some fashion. Still, there are debates about Taylor’s ideology and his significance to the southern states’ rights tradition that he helped to found. Modern scholars have claimed Taylor for many causes. Charles Beard . Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke. Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke. Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph, . . Devanny, Jr., “‘A Loathing of Public Debt, Taxes and Excises’: The Political Economy of John Randolph of Roanoke,” –. Weaver, “Two Types of American Individualism,” –. Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia, –, –, . Jordan, Political Leadership in Jefferson’s Virginia. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, , . Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South.
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and the Progressive historians restored Taylor’s reputation as a determined opponent of modern capitalism and a champion of reform. But the Vanderbilt Agrarians, particularly Andrew Lytle, claimed that Taylor’s agrarianism, strict construction, and hostility to government assistance to modern financial institutions represented the heart of southern conservatism. M. E. Bradford repeated the Agrarians’ arguments about Taylor in his writings. Some have claimed him as an Enlightenment liberal who desired to liberate Americans with a government devoted to natural rights, while others have recognized him as a man of traditional instincts, seeking to preserve the life of the southern planter and small farmer. Robert Shalhope labeled Taylor a classical republican whose intention was to form a society that “depended entirely upon the moral character of its people.” He dismissed Taylor by arguing that his thought, by , “no longer bore any relevance to American society.” Still other scholars have called Taylor an agrarian, but this broad term fails to distinguish Taylor’s thought from that of other agrarians such as Jefferson, whose radical ideas on property Taylor would decidedly have opposed. . See Charles Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, , and Vernon Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to for the progressive interpretation of Taylor. This is also echoed by Roy Franklin Nichols, introduction to Taylor, Inquiry, –. M. E. Bradford, introduction to Taylor, Arator, –. Bradford, Remembering Who We Are, . For other treatments of Taylor as a conservative, see Bernard Drell, “John Taylor of Caroline and the Preservation of the Old Social Order,” –. Manning J. Dauer and Hans Hammond, “John Taylor: Democrat or Aristocrat?” –. Williams, The Contours of American History. James Tice Moore, “Majority and Morality: John Taylor’s Agrarianism,” –. For Taylor as an Enlightenment thinker see Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline. McConnell, “John Taylor and the Democratic Tradition,” . Grampp, “John Taylor: Economist of Southern Agrarianism,” –. See also Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, –, –. Duncan MacLeod, in Slavery, Race, and the American Revolution, tied Taylor to many Enlightenment ideas. Hill, The Political Theory of John Taylor of Caroline. Hill also tied republicanism into Taylor’s thought. For the Jeffersonians as Enlightenment liberals see Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order. Shalhope, John Taylor of Caroline, –. For other interpretations of Taylor’s Oppositionist republicanism see Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion, chap. . Wharton, Polity and the Public Good, –. Stromberg, “Country Ideology, Republicanism, and Libertarianism,” –. F. Thornton Miller, introduction to Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked. For Taylor as an agrarian see Andrew Nelson Lytle, “John Taylor and the Political Economy of Agriculture,” :–, –; :–. Avery O. Craven, “John Taylor and Southern Agriculture,” –. Baritz, City on a Hill. Bradford, introduction to Taylor, Arator. Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South. For Jefferson’s radical agrarian vision, see Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View.
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The answer to the confusion over his thought lies in his social vision. Whereas John Randolph represented a traditional conservatism after , Taylor exemplified the heart of modern republicanism, an acceptance of the Enlightenment critiques of the traditional world and a stress on selfgovernment. His thought had a great influence on southern politics, as scholars such as Henry Ammon and Glyndon Van Deusen have noted. William Gilmore Simms Studies of Simms begin with William P. Trent’s biography of the Charleston writer. Although recent books and articles have tried to maintain their independence from the extremely biased work, most scholars have simply taken sides on the issues Trent raised. Trent, a New South ideologue, insisted that the narrow-minded culture of the Old South stifled Simms as a writer and thinker. In order to find social acceptance, Simms had to prostitute his talents to support social backwardness. Vernon Parrington argued in that Simms sought social acceptance from the Charleston aristocracy to compensate for his humble social origins. Simms, said Parrington, was a realist by inclination but wrote sappy romances—to gain acceptance—about his society instead of criticizing it like a true artist. John Higham noted in that Simms shifted his thought from nationalism to sectionalism as a means of political opportunism. His view of Simms was not substantially different from Trent’s, and his thesis of a shift in thought remains popular in present scholarship. There have been other pro-Trent studies that deserve mention. The best one is Jon L. Wakelyn’s biography of Simms, which focuses on his political activities, especially his advocacy of secession. Wakelyn noted that Simms saw his duty as supporting his country, the South. For Wakelyn, Simms’s best work of art was his public life, not his rather substandard literature. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., portrayed Simms as a spokesman for the bourgeois American social vision, a position that seems to challenge Trent’s but still relies on slamming Simms as an artistically inferior writer. Finally, Charles Watson wrote a book on Simms’s shift from nationalism to sectionalism as seen through his novels. The reaction against Trent has been just as vigorous and prolific. . Harry Ammon, “The Richmond Junto, –,” –. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era, –.
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Donald Davidson wrote the introduction to the collection of Simms’s letters and in the essay destroyed Trent’s interpretation. Davidson saw Simms as a southern poet or bard in the remnants of a traditional society in the South. The antebellum South, noted Davidson, was a frontier society, and it is no wonder that Simms wrote relatively unrefined literature given his surroundings. He also stressed the need to see Simms as a critic of the South. J. V. Ridgely published a slim volume on Simms in that took seriously his role as social critic. For Ridgely, Simms’s view of society was the defining issue in his voluminous writings. In explicating his own view of the South, Simms created a literary ideal for southern society. Drew Gilpin Faust included Simms in her work The Sacred Circle. She identified him as part of a group of reformers in the South who sought the proper place for intellectuals in southern culture. Mary Ann Wimsatt wrote about Simms’s major fiction in a work in which she attacked Trent and his followers for misunderstanding the nineteenth-century tradition of literary romances. They misunderstood Simms, she noted, because Simms was primarily a writer of romances. The most important book on Simms is John Caldwell Guilds’s biography. Besides discussing Simms’s life, Guilds gave many fine insights into his writings and politics while offering a persuasive refutation of Trent. Simms no longer suffers from scholarly neglect. Besides a slew of articles on his work and two books of critical essays, a Simms Society and The Simms Review are both devoted to examining his writings. Much of Simms’s thought has been investigated, but many scholars have not sought to place him in the context of southern conservatism except for his obvious views on slavery and secession. Yet Simms represented the major literary expression of southern conservatism. Nathaniel Beverley Tucker Nathaniel Beverley Tucker has not received the scholarly attention that Randolph and Taylor have. Despite a few treatments of his politics and writings in articles, books, theses, and a dissertation, he remained an ob. Trent, William Gilmore Simms. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought. Higham, “The Changing Loyalties of William Gilmore Simms,” –. Wakelyn, Politics of a Literary Man. Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism. Donald Davidson, “Introduction,” in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms. J. V. Ridgely, William Gilmore Simms. Faust, A Sacred Circle. Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life.
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scure southern figure until the rediscovery of his thought in the s. Percy Winfield Turrentine undertook the most extensive work on Tucker in his Harvard doctoral dissertation in American literature, “The Life and Works of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker.” Turrentine’s dissertation was too massive to warrant publication, however. Tucker’s novel The Partisan Leader was republished in and in as scholars attempted to recapture nineteenth-century southern literature in the wake of the twentieth-century southern literary renascence. The interest in republicanism and intellectual history in the s brought Tucker out of obscurity. In A Sacred Circle, Drew Gilpin Faust found that Tucker experienced a profound sense of alienation due to the underappreciation of his intellectual efforts. She also argued that through his proslavery arguments and his other writings on society, Tucker participated in the reform impulse of nineteenth-century America, albeit in a conservative form. Robert J. Brugger’s excellent Beverley Tucker: Heart over Head in the Old South portrayed Tucker as a member of the fading Tidewater elite who represented the impotency and narrow-mindedness of the intellectual in the Old South. Brugger, trying to re-create Tucker’s psychological state, paid attention to Tucker’s use of republicanism and briefly sketched his use of Romanticism. Brugger concluded that by , Tucker had retreated into irrelevancy and partial madness, a sad end to a pathetic figure. In Beverley D. Tucker published Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, which was a distillation of Turrentine’s dissertation. The book does an excellent job of fleshing out Tucker’s familial relationships and includes the text of many of his letters. Two treatments of Tucker in the s deserve analysis. Eric Walther led off his book The Fire Eaters with a chapter on Tucker. Walther showed the disparate views and experiences of the fire-eaters, but saw in republicanism a common thread linking them together. Thus he interprets Tucker as a republican and partially a Lockean liberal. Walther did not examine Burke’s influence on Tucker nor did he discuss Tucker’s Romantic nationalism. Walther leaves the reader with an incomplete and inadequate view of Tucker. Literary critic John Grammer gave another shaky analysis of Tucker in his Pastoral and Politics in the Old South. Grammer called Tucker a “pastoral republican” and analyzed The Partisan Leader as a utopian dream of perfection and fulfillment for the South in a future confederacy. Grammer not only misread the intention of The Partisan Leader but also failed to appreciate any intellectual development in Tucker from until his death
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in . Unlike previous southern republicans, Tucker, he maintained, did not see the South’s future in her past. He was essentially a reformer and millenialist who transformed the pastoral republicanism of the South. Grammer’s analysis falters. Tucker himself rejected utopian politics and envisioned a southern confederacy as a political goal in which a conservative Romantic social order could be solidified (not achieved as Grammer intimated). Grammer, like Walther, failed to see the complexity of Tucker’s vision because he focused exclusively on republicanism. Joseph Glover Baldwin The historiography on Baldwin has been dominated by literary scholars. In Samuel A. Link included a chapter on Baldwin in his Pioneers of Southern Literature. The chapter consisted largely of quotations drawn from Baldwin’s work of southwestern humor, The Flush Times of Mississippi and Alabama. In , George Frederick Mellen wrote a biographical sketch of Baldwin and a brief summary of his works for the Sewanee Review. In Samuel Boyd Stewart completed his dissertation at Vanderbilt on Baldwin. He concentrated on Baldwin’s southern identity and analyzed his writings in detail. Stewart developed two themes in the work: that Baldwin’s search for wealth led him to the frontier and that Baldwin attempted to bring order to the chaotic life he found in the West. Stewart drew extensively on the Lester-Gray Collection, an assortment of Baldwin’s letters and unpublished writings. Unfortunately, Stewart’s dissertation went unpublished, dooming Baldwin to certain obscurity. After there were a few works on Baldwin done by literary critics. In Eugene Current-Garcia published an article on Baldwin in the Alabama Review entitled “Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist?” Current-Garcia, focusing on Flush Times, insisted that Baldwin’s work was moralistic in tone and intent. Current-Garcia determined that the defining theme in Baldwin’s career was his interest in expanding his economic opportunities in the West. In the University of Georgia Press published Baldwin’s last and unfinished manuscript, The Flush Times of California. Richard E. Amacher and George W. Polhemus edited the volume, wrote an introduction, which analyzed the literary quality of Baldwin’s work, and penned a superb concise biography of Baldwin. Kenneth Lynn’s famous work Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, published in , became the starting point for all subsequent studies on southwestern humor. Lynn argued that the humorists for the most part were aristocratic,
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Whig professionals who showed their disdain for the frontier and the new democratic lifestyle by writing in a gentlemanly style. The humorists, in Lynn’s view, portrayed a conservative or even reactionary commentary on the emerging democratic America. Lynn, who read Stewart’s dissertation, fit Baldwin solidly within his thesis. Subsequent scholarship has revealed the weaknesses in Lynn’s thesis. Not all humorists were Whigs or aristocratic, and not all disdained the new American life. Joseph O’Beirne Milner presented the best challenge to Lynn by examining four of the most popular southwestern humorists, including Baldwin, in his doctoral dissertation. Milner examined only Flush Times in regard to Baldwin, not utilizing Party Leaders or the Lester-Gray Collection, thus weakening his conclusions. Milner noted that Baldwin sought a balance between the gentry/aristocratic literary voice and the vernacular literary voice. He also examined Baldwin’s Whiggery in the context of the emerging scholarship on the second party system. Milner maintained that the southern Whigs were not simply a party of aristocratic states’ rights planters, but included middle-class people who looked to the market for opportunities to advance. Milner stressed that Whigs, and thus Baldwin, were not traditionalists looking to reinstate the old republican order on the frontier. Milner used literary analysis of Flush Times to demonstrate the nontraditional nature of Baldwin’s social vision. Apart from brief mentions in books and articles, Baldwin drew only scant attention in the s and s. In , James Justus, an English professor, wrote the introduction to the new edition of Flush Times, published by Louisiana State University Press in their Library of Southern Civilization series edited by Lewis P. Simpson. Justus rejected Current-Garcia’s notion that Baldwin was a moralist and instead focused on the literary quality of the humor in Flush Times. Justus noted that Baldwin juxtaposed order and chaos in his stories to reflect the changing character of American life, particularly that related to the expanding commercial market. He also agreed with Milner that Baldwin was not a traditionalist, but showed that Lynn’s thesis fit Baldwin well in certain respects. Justus stressed that Baldwin sought to humanize frontier life through the humor in his stories. Finally, John Grammer contradicted much of the scholarship on Baldwin, reverting back to older schools of thought. Grammer read Stewart but made little use of the Lester-Gray collection. He portrayed Baldwin as a disgruntled Old Republican who called for the reinstatement of traditional republican society on the frontier, all the while doubting that it
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would happen. Grammer argued that Baldwin expressed a profound sense of declension because the frontier was so chaotic. Grammer thought Baldwin was uncomfortable with the new society, invoking Lynn’s thesis as his proof. He did not examine Baldwin’s Whiggery, nor did he build off of Milner’s excellent analysis. Grammer misunderstood Baldwin because he did not appreciate the ways in which Baldwin’s republicanism and his Whiggery blended in his social vision. Johnson Jones Hooper Historians and literary critics have found Hooper an interesting study, but there have been only three book-length treatments of Hooper published. Although a few dissertations and theses treated Hooper’s life and writings, most of the published material on him appears in journal articles, few of which treat Hooper as the primary subject of inquiry. Whereas most scholars have focused on Hooper’s contributions to the genre of southwestern humor, few have treated his political career. Only one scholar has linked Hooper’s politics and literary output in a thorough manner. Hooper did not receive extended treatment by scholars until the s. In Marion Kelley wrote an extensive master’s thesis at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) on Hooper’s life and writings. Kelley stressed that Hooper’s humor was both sectional and political (–). He briefly explored the relationship between Hooper and the Alabama fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey, suggesting that Hooper’s editorials in the Montgomery Mail contributed significantly to Yancey’s success. W. Stanley Hoole published a biography of Hooper in that drew heavily on Kelley’s thesis. Hoole attempted to track down every reference to Hooper and to identify his unsigned literary pieces in national newspapers. Hoole maintained that Hooper’s humor represented the spirit of the southern yeomanry and exposed the corruption of the southern aristocracy. Hoole also included a solid discussion of Hooper’s politics during the s and . Samuel Albert Link, Pioneers of Southern Literature, vol. , –. George Frederick Mellen, “Joseph G. Baldwin and the ‘Flush Times,’” –. Current-Garcia, “Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist?” –. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Baldwin, The Flush Times of California. Milner, “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris.” Sellers, Jr., “Who Were the Southern Whigs?” –. James H. Justus, Introduction to Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, xiii–l. Grammer, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South, –.
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his role in the secession crisis. Paul Somers, an English professor, published in the latest biography of Hooper. Somers corrected some of Hoole’s errors of fact but did not offer any strikingly new interpretations of Hooper’s works. A number of literary critics addressed Hooper’s works in their writing. Although there were scholarly disagreements over the nature, intent, and origins of southwestern humor, there were no major interpretative disagreements over Hooper’s work. The critics achieved a consensus on different aspects of Hooper’s writings that reflects itself in the latest scholarship on Hooper. First, the critics stressed that Hooper’s humor drew on literary realism. His realism illuminated the problems encountered by nineteenthcentury Americans on the frontier. Most critics agree that Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs revealed the ways in which the chaos of the frontier challenged the mores and customs of the established societies in the East. Hooper’s juxtaposition of frontier vernacular with an aristocratic, genteel commentary in the Suggs stories strengthens this point. Second, the critics stressed the subversive aspects of Hooper’s humor. Recognizing the ambiguity of the moral implications of the Suggs stories, critics have shown that Hooper often undermined moral conventions and the traditional social order in his writings. Finally, Robert Hopkins made an observation in that the Suggs stories were a burlesque of Andrew Jackson’s campaign biographies. Hooper, Hopkins noted, used Suggs to comment upon Democratic hypocrisy and demagoguery. Hopkins more clearly delineated Hooper’s Whig political vision, and his article became an accepted part of all subsequent scholarship on Hooper. Two dissertations discussed Hooper’s politics in relation to his humor. Howard Winston Smith argued in that Hooper was a traditionalist Whig who attacked the democratization of American life in his stories. Suggs represented democratic man, who was motivated by the quest for profit. Suggs exploited people by leading them to abandon rationality so that he could trick them. Hooper’s satire, according to Smith, was a traditional moral commentary on reason and the passions. Joseph O’Beirne Milner argued that Smith and others had misread Hooper’s Whiggery. . Kelley, “The Life and Writing of Johnson Jones Hooper.” Kelley also reprinted a number of Hooper’s letters and editorials in the appendix. Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs. Thompson, “The Literary Career of Johnson Jones Hooper.” Somers, Johnson J. Hooper. Howard Winston Smith, Johnson Jones Hooper: A Critical Study.
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Hooper, Milner insisted, was not a traditionalist. Milner examined Hooper’s use of the aristocratic and vernacular styles to make political and social points. Hooper sympathized with the vernacular style and appreciated the freedom of modernity. Suggs represented both the excesses of modernity and the excitement that freedom brought. Milner also noted that Hooper distrusted the place of religion in society, separating him from traditionalists. By far the best scholarship on Hooper has been done by Johanna Nicol Shields. Shields did extensive research in the archives of Hooper’s family in North Carolina and uncovered previously unexamined letters from and about Hooper. Shields portrayed Hooper as a modernizing Whig whose hopes and dreams of wealth and political influences drove his life. Shields thinks that Simon Suggs was partially an autobiographical character. Like Suggs, Hooper himself had absorbed the freedom of the frontier but in the end came up short of his dream of wealth and prominence. Because of his failures, Hooper’s humor was satirical and sometimes resentful. Hooper, Shields shows, was a virulent racist who rejected egalitarianism. He became a southern nationalist in and, Shields implies, grew increasingly radical due to his frustrated ambition. Shields asserted that Hooper’s love of modernity led him to embrace a sort of positivism, which rejected all tradition and convention. In Shields’s treatment, Hooper becomes almost a nihilist. Shields explored much of the implications of the scholarship on Hooper by integrating history with literary criticism. Of all the scholars of Hooper, Shields came the closest to successfully matching Hooper’s politics with his literary works, although this study disagrees with her reading of Hooper as a positivist and near nihilist. . For Hooper’s literary realism see Parks, “The Three Streams of Southern Humor,” –. Edd Winfield Parks, “The Intent of the Ante-Bellum Southern Humorists,” –. West, “Simon Suggs and His Similes,” –. For a stress on the subversive character of southwestern humor, see Turner, “Seeds of Literary Revolt in the Humor of the Old Southwest,” –. Current-Garcia, “Alabama Writers in the Spirit,” –. Thorp, “Suggs and Sut in Modern Dress,” –. Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush Times. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. Hopkins, “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography,” –. Howard Winston Smith, “An Annotated Edition of Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs.” Milner, “The Social, Religious, Economic, and Political Implications of the Southwestern Humor of Baldwin, Longstreet, Hooper, and G. W. Harris.” Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Shields, “A Sadder Simon Suggs,” –. Johanna Nicol Shields, “Introduction,” Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census” and Other Alabama Sketches.
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Index
8 Abolitionists, ‒, , , ‒, , , ‒, Absenteeism, Adams, John Quincy, , , American Colonization Society, American Revolution, , , , , , ‒, , ‒, , , , , , , , Ames, Fisher, Antifederalists: opposition to the Constitution, ; on Montesquieu, ; on states’ rights, ; support of Jeffersonian Republicans, ; mentioned, , , , , , Anti-party sentiment, ‒, ‒, ‒ Arator, , Aristocracy: John Taylor’s opposition to, ‒; mentioned, , , , ‒ Articles of Confederation, on state sovereignty, , Augustan writers, –, , Avarice: as driving manufacturing, –; as a reason for American decline, ; mentioned, , , , , , , , , , Baldwin, Joseph Glover: biography, –, –; moves to California, –; on constitutional mechanics, –; on economics, –; education, –; historiography, –; on human nature, –; on individualism, –; on Andrew Jackson, –; on liberty, ; on New England culture, –; on sectionalism, –; on slavery, , , ; on social homogeneity, –; on society, –; southern conservatism, ; on states’ rights, –; on Virginia’s cul-
ture, –, ; on virtue, –; on George Washington, – Bank of the United States, , , –, , Bell, John, Blackstone, , Bolingbroke, Breckinridge, John, Buchanan, James, Burke, Edmund, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , Calhoun, John C., –, , , –, , , Capitalism, , , , Cass, Lewis, Cato’s Letters, , , , Choctaw Indians, –, Christianity, –, , –, , – Citadel Academy, Clay, Henry: duel with John Randolph, ; importance of the West, ; opposed by John Randolph, ; opposed by John Taylor, ; mentioned, , , , , , , , Coalter, Polly, College of William and Mary, , , , , Commerce, , , , – Compromise of , – Confederate States of America, , Confederation, , , , Confidence man in literature, Conservatism, –, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , – Constitutional Convention of , –,
397
398
INDEX
Constitutionalism, , Constructions Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, , – Court-Country debate, , –, –, , , Creek Indians, – Cromwell, Oliver, , , , Culture, , , Dardennes Community, – Debt, –, – Declaration of Independence, , , –, Definition of Parties, –, Democracy, –, –, , , –, , Democratic Party, –, –, , , , , , –, , – Dog and Gun, , – Dudley, Theodore, , –, –, – Dwight, Timothy, – Education, , –, Ellsworth, Oliver, – Emancipation, –, Embargo Act, , , Empire, –, , Enquiry into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures, Eppes, John W., Equality, , –, Era of Good Feelings, Erie Canal, Federalist Papers, – Feudalism, Fillmore, Millard, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi, The, –, , , – Flush Times of California, The, Force Bill, Free blacks, – Free trade, , –, – Freemasonry, , , , French Revolution, , , , , , , Gabriel’s Conspiracy, George Balcombe,
Georgia Scenes, Gertrude, Giles, Anne Malcolm, Glorious Revolution, Gordon, Thomas, Guy Rivers, – Haitian Revolution, –, Hamilton, Alexander, , , , , , –, , , , Hammond, James Henry, , , , , , Happiness, , –, , Henry, Patrick, , , Hierarchy, –, , , Hooper, J. J.: anti-party attitudes, –; biography, –; on economics, –; education, ; historiography, –; on human nature, ; on internal improvements, –; on Andrew Jackson, , –; on meritocracy, –; on religion, –; on sectionalism, , –; on slavery, , –; on society, –; southern conservative, ; on southern nationalism, –; on southern rights, ; on southern unity, ; on states’ rights, , ; on virtue, – Independence, , , , – Individualism, , –, , , , , , , , –, , Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, , Internal improvements, , , –, – Jackson, Andrew: Bank veto, –; relationship with John Randolph, –, , , ; mentioned, , , , , , , – Jay, John, , Jefferson, Thomas, , , , , –, , , , , , , , Kansas-Nebraska Act, King, Rufus, , – Know-Nothing Party, –, ,
399
INDEX
Laissez-faire, , , , , , Law, –, –, , , , – Lawson, James, , – Lawyers, –, –, , , –, , Liberty: allows for individualism, ; as a foundation of good government, –; as a moral choice, ; threatened by war, ; mentioned, , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , –, , , , , Lincoln, Abraham, , , , , Locke, John, –, , , , Longstreet, Augustus, Louisiana Purchase, Macon, Georgia, Madison, James, , , –, Mandeville, Bernard, Manufacturing, , –, , Marion, Francis, , Marshall, John, , Martin Faber, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, Martineau, Harriet, , McCulloch v. Maryland, Meritocracy, , , , – Mexican War, Meyer, Frank S., Miles, William Porcher, , –, Militia, , , – Missouri Compromise, –, –, , – Monroe, James, , , –, , – Montesquieu, –, , , Montgomery Mail, Napoleon, –, , Nashville Convention, –, , Nationalism: Old Republican opposition, –; mentioned, , –, , , , , –, –, , , – Nature: Enlightenment view, ; Randolph’s view, –; Taylor’s view, –; mentioned, , New Orleans, New Views of the Constitution, , – Nullification Crisis, , –
Old Republicans: antiwar, –; and Edmund Burke, ; on capitalism, ; on commerce, ; compared to later intellectuals, , , ; on Hamilton, ; importance of independence, ; influence on subsequent southern thought, –; on liberalism, ; as libertarian republicans, ; opposed to internal improvements, ; opposed to tariffs, –; led by John Randolph, ; reputations boosted by their opposition to the Missouri Compromise, –; on separating state and society, ; admiration for Adam Smith, ; on society, , ; as southern conservatives, ; on states’ rights, ; and Whig conservatism, , , , , , , ; mentioned, , –, Paine, Thomas, Panic of , Panic of , – Partisan Leader, The, –, , , , , , Party Leaders, –, , , Paternalism, –, Penn, John, –, Poe, Edgar Allan, Porter, William T., – Presbyterians, , Presidential patronage, – Principles of ’: their attraction after , ; foundation of southern conservatism, ; influence on Old Republicans, ; and proslavery intellectuals, ; and John Randolph, ; as republican principles, ; and the rise of the Jeffersonian Republicans, ; mentioned, , , , , Progress, –, –, –, – Property rights, , –, –, , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , –, Protestant Episcopal Church, , Racism, , –, –, – Randolph, John: against debt, –; against paper money, ; on the Alien and Sedition Acts, ; and anti-
400
INDEX
Federalists, ; antiparty sentiment, –, ; on Augustan writers, ; on avarice, ; and Henry Clay, ; on coercion, ; on commerce, ; on confederation, ; on the Constitution, , –; conversion, ; country ideology, ; criticism of the South, –; cultural decline, –; on culture, ; on decline, –; dislike of Madison, –; distrust of government, ; on dueling, ; education, , –; on empire, –; experience of the Revolution, ; freeing his slaves, ; on the French Revolution, ; gives slaves to Beverley Tucker, ; on Hamilton, –; on hierarchy, ; historiography, –; on history, –; homogenous society, –; hope in Andrew Jackson, ; hostility to tariffs, ; on human nature, ; impeachment of Samuel Chase, ; as a Jeffersonian conservative, –; on the Louisiana Purchase, , –; madness, ; on manners, –; on militias, ; as minister to Russia, ; on nullification, –; and the Old Republicans, ; opposes Jefferson’s Embargo, ; opposes Missouri Compromise, –; on presidential power, –; and Edmund Randolph, ; relationship with his mother, –; on religion, –, –; on secession, –; and sectionalism, ; on slavery, –; on standing armies, –; on states’ rights, , –; and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, –; on virtue, –; on the War of , –; on the West, ; on the Yazoo Compromise, –; mentioned, –, , , , Religion, –, –, –, Republicanism, , , –, , , –, , , , , , –, , –, , , –, –, , –, , , , Richard Hurdis, – Rights, , , –, , Ritchie, Thomas, , , Roach, Chevillette Eliza,
Roman Catholicism, , Roman Republic, , , , , Romanticism, , , Satire, Scott, Winfield, Secession, –, , , , –, , , , Sectionalism, , , –, –, , –, , –, – Self-interest, –, , , , , , –, , Simms, William Gilmore: on the American Revolution, , –; antebellum southern conservative, ; antiparty attitudes, ; biography, –; on the Compromise of , –; on confederation, ; early novels, ; education, , ; experience of war, –; historiography, –; on history, –; on human nature, –; on liberty, ; on militias, ; on natural rights, ; as a newspaper editor, ; on nullification, ; on progress, ; on religion, , –; on republicanism, ; on secession, , ; on sectionalism, –; on self-government, ; on slavery, –, –; on social decline, –; on social homogeneity, ; on society, –; on sovereignty, ; on virtue, ; on the West, , – Slave Codes, Slavery, , –, , –, –, , , , –, –, , , –, –, Smith, Adam, , , , Smith, Lucy Ann, Social orders, – Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, , , –, –, – Southern Commercial Convention, , Southern conservatism, –, Southern Literary Messenger, , , , , , Southern Quarterly Review, , Southwestern humor, –, – Sovereignty, –, –, –
401
INDEX
Sparta, , , Spoils system, Standing armies, –, States’ Rights: and anti-Federalists, ; and the Constitution, ; and the Missouri Compromise, ; and Montesquieu, ; as opposed to political centralization, ; as protecting local diversity, ; and John Taylor, , –, ; mentioned, , , , , , –, – Story, Joseph, , –, Suggs, Simon, , –, , , –, –, Sumner, Charles, – Tariffs, –, , –, – Taylor, John: against aristocracy, ; against the Bank of the United States, ; against feudalism, ; against Henry Clay, ; against Hamilton, , ; against the Missouri Compromise, ; against paper money, ; against the War of , ; on agrarian laws, ; on agriculture, –, ; on the American Revolution, ; antiparty attitudes, ; on avarice, –; biography, –; on blacks, ; on the carriage tax, ; on commerce, ; on constitutional interpretation, ; country ideology, ; on the Declaration of Independence, ; on disestablishment in Virginia, ; education, , ; experience of the American Revolution, –; on factories, –; fear of monarchy, ; on federalism, , , –; on free trade, ; on happiness, –; historiography, –; on human nature, ; influence on later republicans, ; on Thomas Jefferson, , , –; on legal reform, –; on liberty, , , –; on militias, ; on nature, –; as an Old Republican, –; on John Penn, , –; Quid Schism, ; relationship with Edmund Pendleton, ; on religion, ; on secession, –; on sectionalism, , –; on self-interest, ; as Senator, , ; service in the Virginia legislature, , ; on slavery, –; on social homogeneity, –; on social orders, ; on
standing armies, –; on states’ rights, , , ; support of James Monroe, ; on tariffs, –; on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, ; on virtue, –, on wealth, ; on western lands, , – Taylor, Zachary, , Temperance Movement, , Tertium Quid, , , , Tocqueville, Alexis de, , Tradition, –, , –, , , Trenchard, John, Tucker, Nathaniel Beverley: on the American Revolution, ; as an antebellum southern conservative, ; antiparty attitudes, ; biography, –; on confederation, ; on constitutional reform in Virginia, ; on democracy, –; early conservatism, ; education, –; on equality, ; on executive power, ; on free blacks, ; on freedom, , , ; historiography, –; on human nature, –; on Andrew Jackson, ; on militias, ; on the Missouri Compromise, , –; on the Nashville Convention, –; on nullification and the Force Bill, –; and Old Republican principles, ; on religion, , –; on republicanism, , ; relationship with John Randolph, –; on rights, –; on secessions, ; on sectionalism, –; on selfgovernment, –; on slavery, , –; on social homogeneity, ; on a southern confederacy, ; on sovereignty, –, –; as a states’ rights Whig, ; on virtue, , ; on the West, –; as a writer, – Tucker, St. George, , , , , , Tyler, John, Tyranny Unmasked, – Uncle Tom’s Cabin, , United States Constitution: Baldwin’s view, ; Calhoun’s view, –; Hooper’s view, –; Randolph’s view, , –; Simms’s view, ; Taylor on
402
INDEX
constitutional interpretation, ; Tucker’s views, – University of the South, Upshur, Abel, , – Van Buren, Martin, , , Virginia: decline after the War of , Virginia Constitutional Convention, –, Virginia Constitutional Convention, , Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, , , , , , Virtue, , , –, , –, –, , , , , , , , –, Walker, Leroy Pope, War: Old Republican opposition to, –; Randolph’s opposition, ,
War of , , , , , –, Washington, George, Webster, Daniel, , , , West, –, –, –, Whig Party: historiography, –; southern Whigs and conservatism, ; mentioned, , , , –, , , , , , , , , – White, Hugh Lawson, White, Sidney, Woodcraft, , , , , , – Yancey, William L., , Yazoo Compromise, – Yemassee, The,
