The Promise of American Life. Herbert David Croly

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СКАЧАТЬ never was there a more distressing example of confusion of thought in relation to a "noble national theory." The traditional democratic system of ideas provoked fanatical activity on the part of the Abolitionists, as the defenders of "natural rights," a kindred fanaticism in the Southerners as the defenders of legal rights, and moral indifference and lethargy on the part of the Northern Democrat for the benefit of his own local interests. The behavior of all three factions was dictated by the worship of what was called liberty; and the word was as confidently and glibly used by Calhoun and Davis as it was by Garrison, Webster, and Douglas. The Western Democrat, and indeed the average American, thought of democratic liberty chiefly as individual freedom from legal discrimination and state interference in doing some kind of a business. The Abolitionist was even more exclusively preoccupied with the liberty which the Constitution denied to the negro. The Southerners thought only of the Constitutional rights, which the Abolitionists wished to abolish, and the Republicans to restrict. Each of the contending parties had some justification in dwelling exclusively upon the legal or natural rights, in which they were most interested, because the system of traditional American ideas provided no positive principle, in relation to which these conflicting liberties could be classified and valued. It is in the nature of liberties and rights, abstractly considered, to be insubordinate and to conflict both one with another and, perhaps, with the common weal. If the chief purpose of a democratic political system is merely the preservation of such rights, democracy becomes an invitation to local, factional, and individual ambitions and purposes. On the other hand, if these Constitutional and natural rights are considered a temporary philosophical or legal machinery, whereby a democratic society is to reach a higher moral and social consummation, and if the national organization is considered merely as an effective method of keeping the legal and moral machinery adjusted to the higher democratic purpose, then no individual or faction or section could claim the benefit of a democratic halo for its distracting purposes and ambitions. Instead of subordinating these conflicting rights and liberties to the national idea, and erecting the national organization into an effective instrument thereof, the national idea and organization was subordinated to individual local and factional ideas and interests. No one could or would recognize the constructive relation between the democratic purpose and the process of national organization and development. The men who would rend the national body in order to protect their property in negro slaves could pretend to be as good democrats as the men who would rend in order to give the negro his liberty. And if either of these hostile factions had obtained its way, the same disastrous result would have been accomplished. American national integrity would have been destroyed, and slavery on American soil, in a form necessarily hostile to democracy, would have been perpetuated.

II

      SLAVERY AS A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION

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      I have already suggested that it was the irresponsibility and the evasions of the party politicians, which threw upon the Abolitionists the duty of fighting slavery as an undemocratic institution. They took up the cause of the negro in a spirit of religious self-consecration. The prevalence of irresolution and timidity in relation to slavery among the leaders of public opinion incited the Abolitionists to a high degree of courage and exclusive devotion; and unfortunately, also, the conciliating attitude of the official leaders encouraged on the part of the Abolitionists an outburst of fanaticism. In their devotion to their adopted cause they lost all sense of proportion, all balance of judgment, and all justice of perception; and their narrowness and want of balance is in itself a sufficient indication that they were possessed of a half, instead of a whole, truth.

      The fact that the Abolitionists were disinterested and for a while persecuted men should not prevent the present generation from putting a just estimate on their work. While they redeemed the honor of their country by assuming a grave and hard national responsibility, they sought to meet that responsibility in a way that would have destroyed their country. The Abolitionists, no less than the Southerners, were tearing at the fabric of American nationality. They did it, no doubt, in the name of democracy; but of all perverted conceptions of democracy, one of the most perverted and dangerous is that which identifies it exclusively with a system of natural rights. Such a conception of democracy is in its effect inevitably revolutionary, and merely loosens the social and national bond. In the present instance they were betrayed into one of the worst possible sins against the national bond—into the sin of doing a gross personal injustice to a large group of their fellow-countrymen. Inasmuch as the Southerners were willfully violating a Divine law, they became in the eyes of the Abolitionists, not merely mis-guided, but wicked, men; and the Abolitionists did not scruple to speak of them as unclean beasts, who were fattening on the fruits of an iniquitous institution. But such an inference was palpably false. The Southern slave owners were not unclean beasts; and any theory which justified such an inference must be erroneous. They were, for the most part, estimable if somewhat quick-tempered and irascible gentlemen, who did much to mitigate the evils of negro servitude, and who were on the whole liked rather than disliked by their bondsmen. They were right, moreover, in believing that the negroes were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of the white men; and, however much they overworked their conviction of negro inferiority, they could clearly see that the Abolitionists were applying a narrow and perverted political theory to a complicated and delicate set of economic and social conditions. It is no wonder, consequently, that they did not submit tamely to the abuse of the Abolitionists; and that they in their turn lost their heads. Unfortunately, however, the consequence of their wrong-headedness was more disastrous than it was in the case of the Abolitionists, because they were powerful and domineering, as well as angry and unreasonable. They were in a position, if they so willed, to tear the Union to pieces, whereas the Abolitionists could only talk and behave as if any legal association with such sinners ought to be destroyed.

      The Southern slaveholders, then, undoubtedly had a grievance. They were being abused by a faction of their fellow-countrymen, because they insisted on enjoying a strictly legal right; and it is no wonder that they began to think of the Abolitionists very much as the Abolitionists thought of them. Moreover, their anger was probably increased by the fact that the Abolitionists could make out some kind of a case against them. Property in slaves was contrary to the Declaration of Independence, and had been denounced in theory by the earlier American democrats. So long as a conception of democracy, which placed natural above legal rights was permitted to obtain, their property in slaves would be imperiled: and it was necessary, consequently, for the Southerners to advance a conception of democracy, which would stand as a fortress around their "peculiar" institution. During the earlier days of the Republic no such necessity had existed. The Southerners had merely endeavored to protect their negro property by insisting on an equal division of the domain out of which future states were to be carved, and upon the admission into the Union of a slave state to balance every new free commonwealth. But the attempt of the Abolitionists to identify the American national idea with a system of natural rights, coupled with the plain fact that the national domain contained more material for free than it did for slave states, provoked the Southerners into taking more aggressive ground. They began to identify the national idea exclusively with a system of legal rights; and it became from their point of view a violation of national good faith even to criticise any rights enjoyed under the Constitution. They advanced a conception of American democracy, which defied the Constitution in its most rigid interpretation—which made Congress incompetent to meddle with any rights enjoyed under the Constitution, which converted any protest against such rights into national disloyalty, and which in the end converted secession into a species of higher Constitutional action.

      Calhoun's theory of Constitutional interpretation was ingeniously wrought and powerfully argued. From an exclusively legal standpoint, it was plausible, if not convincing; but it was opposed by something deeper than counter-theories of Constitutional law. It was opposed to the increasingly national outlook of a large majority of the American people. They would not submit to a conception of the American political system, designed exclusively to give legal protection to property in negroes, and resulting substantially in the nationalization of slavery. They insisted СКАЧАТЬ