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The American Republic

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THE

AMERICAN REPUBLIC:

CONSTITUTION, TENDENCIES, AND DESTINY.

BY
O. A. BROWNSON, LL. D.





NEW YORK:
P. O'SHEA, 104 BLEECKER STREET.
1866.

Entered according to Act of Congress, In the year 1865,
By P. O'SHEA,
In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States
for the Southern District of New York.


TO THE
HON. GEORGE BANCROFT,
THE ERUDITE, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND ELOQUENT
Historian of the United States,

THIS FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO SET FORTH THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERN-
MENT, AND TO EXPLAIN AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED,
IN MEMORY OF OLD FRIENDSHIP, AND AS A
SLIGHT HOMAGE TO GENIUS, ABILITY,
PATRIOTISM, PRIVATE WORTH,
AND PUBLIC SERVICE,
BY THE AUTHOR.



CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION 1


CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT 15


CHAPTER III.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT 26


CHAPTER IV.

ORIGIN OF GOVERMENT-Continued 43


CHAPTER V.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Continued 71


CHAPTER VI.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded 106


CHAPTER VII.

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT 136


CHAPTER VIII.

CONSTITUTION OF GOVERNMENT-Concluded 166


CHAPTER IX.

THE UNITED STATES 192


CHAPTER X.

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 218


CHAPTER XI.

THE CONSTITUTION-Continued 244


CHAPTER XII.

SECESSION 277


CHAPTER XIII.

RECONSTRUCTION 309


CHAPTER XIV.

POLITICAL TENDENCIES 348


CHAPTER XV.

DESTINY-POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS 392





PREFACE.


In the volume which, with much diffidence, is here offered to the
public, I have given, as far as I have considered it worth giving,
my whole thought in a connected form on the nature, necessity,
extent, authority, origin, ground, and constitution of government,
and the unity, nationality, constitution, tendencies, and destiny
of the American Republic. Many of the points treated have been
from time to time discussed or touched upon, and many of the views
have been presented, in my previous writings; but this work is
newly and independently written from beginning to end, and is as
complete on the topics treated as I have been able to make it.

I have taken nothing bodily from my previous essays, but I have
used their thoughts as far as I have judged them sound and they
came within the scope of my present work. I have not felt myself
bound to adhere to my own past thoughts or expressions any farther
than they coincide with my present convictions, and I have written
as freely and as independently as if I had never written or
published any thing before. I have never been the slave of my
own past, and truth has always been dearer to me than my own
opinions. This work is not only my latest, but will be my last
on politics or government, and must be taken as the authentic,
and the only authentic statement of my political views and
convictions, and whatever in any of my previous writings conflicts
with the principles defended in its pages, must be regarded as
retracted, and rejected.

The work now produced is based on scientific principles; but it is
an essay rather than a scientific treatise, and even good-natured
critics will, no doubt, pronounce it an article or a series of
articles designed for a review, rather than a book. It is hard to
overcome the habits of a lifetime. I have taken some pains to
exchange the reviewer for the author, but am fully conscious that
I have not succeeded. My work can lay claim to very little
artistic merit. It is full of repetitions; the same thought is
frequently recurring,--the result, to some extent, no doubt, of
carelessness and the want of artistic skill; but to a greater
extent, I fear, of "malice aforethought." In composing my work I
have followed, rather than directed, the course of my thought,
and, having very little confidence in the memory or industry of
readers, I have preferred, when the completeness of the argument
required it, to repeat myself to encumbering my pages with
perpetual references to what has gone before.

That I attach some value to this work is evident from my consenting
to its publication; but how much or how little of it is really
mine, I am quite unable to say. I have, from my youth up, been
reading, observing, thinking, reflecting, talking, I had almost
said writing, at least by fits and starts, on political subjects,
especially in their connection with philosophy, theology, history,
and social progress, and have assimilated to my own mind what it
would assimilate, without keeping any notes of the sources whence
the materials assimilated were derived. I have written freely
from my own mind as I find it now formed; but how it has been so
formed, or whence I have borrowed, my readers know as well as I.
All that is valuable in the thoughts set forth, it is safe to assume
has been appropriated from others. Where I have been distinctly
conscious of borrowing what has not become common property, I have
given credit, or, at least, mentioned the author's name, with three
important exceptions which I wish to note more formally.

I am principally indebted for the view of the American nationality
and the Federal Constitution I present, to hints and suggestions
furnished by the remarkable work of John C. Hurd, Esq., on The Law of
Freedom and Bondage in the United States, a work of rare learning
and profound philosophic views. I could not have written my work
without the aid derived from its suggestions, any more than I
could without Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas,
Suarez, Pierre Leroux, and the Abbate Gioberti. To these two
last-named authors, one a humanitarian sophist, the other a
Catholic priest, and certainly one of the profoundest
philosophical writers of this century, I am much indebted, though
I have followed the political system of neither. I have taken
from Leroux the germs of the doctrine I set forth on the solidarity
of the race, and from Gioberti the doctrine I defend in relation
to the creative act, which is, after all, simply that of the
Credo and the first verse of Genesis.

In treating the several questions which the preparation of this
volume has brought up, in their connection, and in the light of
first principles, I have changed or modified, on more than one
important point, the views I had expressed in my previous
writings, especially on the distinction between civilized and
barbaric nations, the real basis of civilization itself, and the
value to the world of the Graeco-Roman civilization. I have
ranked feudalism under the head of barbarism, rejected every
species of political aristocracy, and represented the English
constitution as essentially antagonistic to the American, not as
its type. I have accepted universal suffrage in principle, and
defended American democracy, which I define to be territorial
democracy, and carefully distinguish from pure individualism on
the one hand, and from pure socialism or humanitarianism on the
other.

I reject the doctrine of State sovereignty, which I held and
defended from 1828 to 1861, but still maintain that the
sovereignty of the American Republic vests in the States, though
in the States collectively, or united, not severally, and thus
escape alike consolidation and disintegration. I find, with Mr.
Madison, our most philosophic statesman, the originality of the
American system in the division of powers between a General
government having sole charge of the foreign and general, and
particular or State governments having, within their respective
territories, sole charge of the particular relations and
interests of the American people; but I do not accept his
concession that this division is of conventional origin, and
maintain that it enters into the original Providential
constitution of the American state, as I have done in my Review
for October, 1863, and January and October, 1864.

I maintain, after Mr. Senator Sumner, one of the most
philosophic and accomplished living American statesmen, that
"State secession is State suicide," but modify the opinion I too
hastily expressed that the political death of a State dissolves
civil society within its territory and abrogates all rights held
under it, and accept the doctrine that the laws in force at the
time of secession remain in force till superseded or abrogated by
competent authority, and also that, till the State is revived and
restored as a State in the Union, the only authority, under the
American system, competent to supersede or abrogate them is the
United States, not Congress, far less the Executive. The error
of the Government is not in recognizing the territorial laws as
surviving secession but in counting a State that has seceded as
still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted as one
of the United States in amending the Constitution. Such State
goes out of the Union, but comes under it.

I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political
views; to their general principles, and to show that the general
principles asserted have their origin and ground in the great,
universal, and unchanging principles of the universe itself.
Hence, I have labored to show the scientific relations of
political to theological principles, the real principles of all
science, as of all reality. An atheist, I have said, may be a
politician; but if there were no God, there could be no politics.
This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must follow
science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
mistake their darkness for light.

I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as
a Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real
principles are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either
in nature or revelation. I am a Catholic by God's grace and
great goodness, and must write as I am. I could not write
otherwise if I would, and would not if I could. I have not
obtruded my religion, and have referred to it only where my
argument demanded it; but I have had neither the weakness nor
the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it. I could never
have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with
the great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of
all that is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with
Catholics or non-Catholics.

Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction
of sect or party, I have had more especially in view the people
of my own religious communion. It is no discredit to a man in
the United States at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and
devout Catholic. The old sectarian prejudice may remain with a
few, "whose eyes," as Emerson says, "are in their hind-head, not
in their fore-head;" but the American people are not at heart
sectarian, and the nothingarianism so prevalent among them only
marks their state of transition from sectarian opinions to
positive Catholic faith. At any rate, it can no longer be
denied that Catholics are an integral, living, and growing
element in the American population, quite too numerous, too
wealthy, and too influential to be ignored. They have played too
conspicuous a part in the late troubles of the country, and
poured out too freely and too much of their richest and noblest
blood in defence of the unity of the nation and the integrity of
its domain, for that. Catholics henceforth must be treated as
standing, in all respects, on a footing of equality with any
other class of American citizens, and their views of political
science, or of any other science, be counted of equal importance,
and listened to with equal attention.

I have no fears that my book will be neglected because avowedly
by a Catholic author, and from a Catholic publishing house. They
who are not Catholics will read it, and it will enter into the
current of American literature, if it is one they must read in
order to be up with the living and growing thought of the age.
If it is not a book of that sort, it is not worth reading by any
one.

Furthermore, I am ambitious, even in my old age, and I wish to
exert an influence on the future of my country, for which I have
made, or, rather, my family have made, some sacrifices, and which
I tenderly love. Now, I believe that he who can exert the most
influence on our Catholic population, especially in giving tone
and direction to our Catholic youth, will exert the most
influence in forming the character and shaping the future destiny
of the American Republic. Ambition and patriotism alike, as well
as my own Catholic faith and sympathies, induce me to address
myself primarily to Catholics. I quarrel with none of the sects;
I honor virtue wherever I see it, and accept truth wherever I
find it; but, in my belief, no sect is destined to a long life,
or a permanent possession. I engage in no controversy with any
one not of my religion, for, if the positive, affirmative truth
is brought out and placed in a clear light before the public,
whatever is sectarian in any of the sects will disappear as the
morning mists before the rising sun.

I expect the most intelligent and satisfactory appreciation of
my book from the thinking and educated classes among Catholics;
but I speak to my countrymen at large. I could not personally
serve my country in the field: my habits as well as my
infirmities prevented, to say nothing of my age; but I have
endeavored in this humble work to add my contribution, small
though it may be, to political science, and to discharge, as far
as I am able, my debt of loyalty and patriotism. I would the
book were more of a book, more worthy of my countrymen, and a
more weighty proof of the love I beat them, and with which I have
written it. All I can say is, that it is an honest book, a
sincere book, and contains my best thoughts on the subjects
treated. If well received, I shall be grateful; if neglected, I
shall endeavor to practise resignation, as I have so often done.


O. A. BROWNSON.

ELIZABETH, N. J., September 16, 1865.





CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION


The ancients summed up the whole of human wisdom in the maxim,
Know Thyself, and certainly there is for an individual no more
important as there is no more difficult knowledge, than knowledge
of himself, whence he comes, whither he goes, what he is, what he
is for, what he can do, what he ought to do, and what are his
means of doing it.

Nations are only individuals on a larger scale. They have a
life, an individuality, a reason, a conscience, and instincts of
their own, and have the same general laws of development and
growth, and, perhaps, of decay, as the individual man. Equally
important, and no less difficult than for the individual, is it
for a nation to know itself, understand its own existence, its
own powers and faculties, rights and duties, constitution,
instincts, tendencies, and destiny. A nation has a spiritual as
well as a material, a moral as well as a physical existence, and
is subjected to internal as well as external conditions of health
and virtue, greatness and grandeur, which it must in some measure
understand and observe, or become weak and infirm, stunted in its
growth, and end in premature decay and death.

Among nations, no one has more need of full knowledge of itself
than the United States, and no one has hitherto had less. It has
hardly had a distinct consciousness of its own national existence,
and has lived the irreflective life of the child, with no severe
trial, till the recent rebellion, to throw it back on itself and
compel it to reflect on its own constitution, its own separate
existence, individuality, tendencies, and end. The defection of
the slaveholding States, and the fearful struggle that has
followed for national unity and integrity, have brought it at
once to a distinct recognition of itself, and forced it to pass
from thoughtless, careless, heedless, reckless adolescence to
grave and reflecting manhood. The nation has been suddenly
compelled to study itself, and henceforth must act from
reflection, understanding, science, statesmanship, not from
instinct, impulse, passion, or caprice, knowing well what it does,
and wherefore it does it. The change which four years of civil
war have wrought in the nation is great, and is sure to give it
the seriousness, the gravity, the dignity, the manliness it has
heretofore lacked.

Though the nation has been brought to a consciousness of its own
existence, it has not, even yet, attained to a full and clear
understanding of its own national constitution. Its vision is
still obscured by the floating mists of its earlier morning, and
its judgment rendered indistinct and indecisive by the wild
theories and fancies of its childhood. The national mind has
been quickened, the national heart has been opened, the national
disposition prepared, but there remains the important work of
dissipating the mists that still linger, of brushing away these
wild theories and fancies, and of enabling it to form a clear
and intelligent judgment of itself, and a true and just
appreciation of its own constitution tendencies,--and destiny;
or, in other words, of enabling the nation to understand its own
idea, and the means of its actualization in space and time.

Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to
realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or
destiny. Every nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God.
The Jews were the chosen people of God, through whom the
primitive traditions were to be preserved in their purity and
integrity, and the Messiah was to come. The Greeks were the
chosen people of God, for the development and realization of the
beautiful or the divine splendor in art, and of the true in
science and philosophy; and the Romans, for the development of
the state, law, and jurisprudence. The great despotic nations of
Asia were never properly nations; or if they were nations with a
mission, they proved false to it--, and count for nothing in the
progressive development of the human race. History has not
recorded their mission, and as far as they are known they have
contributed only to the abnormal development or corruption of
religion and civilization. Despotism is barbaric and abnormal.

The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and
is chosen of God for the realization of a great idea. It has
been chosen not only to continue the work assigned to Greece and
Rome, but to accomplish a greater work than was assigned to
either. In art, it will prove false to its mission if it do not
rival Greece; and in science and philosophy, if it do not surpass
it. In the state, in law, in jurisprudence, it must continue and
surpass Rome. Its idea is liberty, indeed, but liberty with law,
and law with liberty. Yet its mission is not so much the
realization of liberty as the realization of the true idea of the
state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the
freedom of the individual--the sovereignty of the people without
social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. In
other words, its mission is to bring out in its life the
dialectic union of authority and liberty, of the natural rights
of man and those of society. The Greek and Roman republics
asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern
republics either do the same, or assert individual freedom to the
detriment of the state. The American republic has been
instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with
advantage to the other.

The real mission of the United States is to introduce and
establish a political constitution, which, while it retains all
the advantages of the constitutions of states thus far known, is
unlike any of them, and secures advantages which none of them did
or could possess. The American constitution has no prototype in
any prior constitution. The American form of government can be
classed throughout with none of the forms of government described
by Aristotle, or even by later authorities. Aristotle knew only
four forms of government: Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy, and
Mixed Governments. The American form is none of these, nor any
combination of them. It is original, a new contribution to
political science, and seeks to attain the end of all wise and
just government by means unknown or forbidden to the ancients,
and which have been but imperfectly comprehended even by American
political writers themselves. The originality of the American
constitution has been overlooked by the great majority even of
our own statesmen, who seek to explain it by analogies borrowed
from the constitutions of other states rather than by a profound
study of its own principles. They have taken too low a view of
it, and have rarely, if ever, appreciated its distinctive and
peculiar merits.

As the United States have vindicated their national unity and
integrity, and are preparing to take a new start in history,
nothing is more important than that they should take that new
start with a clear and definite view of their national
constitution, and with a distinct understanding of their
political mission in the future of the world. The citizen who
can help his countrymen to do this will render them an important
service and deserve well of his country, though he may have been
unable to serve in her armies and defend her on the battle-field.
The work now to be done by American statesmen is even more
difficult and more delicate than that which has been accomplished
by our brave armies. As yet the people are hardly better
prepared for the political work to be done than they were at the
outbreak of the civil war for the military work they have so
nobly achieved. But, with time, patience, and good-will, the
difficulties may be overcome, the errors of the past corrected,
and the Government placed on the right track for the future.

It will hardly be questioned that either the constitution of the
United States is very defective or it has been very grossly
misinterpreted by all parties. If the slave States had not held
that the States are severally sovereign, and the Constitution of
the United States a simple agreement or compact, they would never
have seceded; and if the Free States had not confounded the Union
with the General government, and shown a tendency to make it the
entire national government, no occasion or pretext for secession
would have been given. The great problem of our statesmen has
been from the first, How to assert union without consolidation,
and State rights without disintegration? Have they, as yet,
solved that problem? The war has silenced the State sovereignty
doctrine, indeed, but has it done so without lesion to State
rights? Has it done it without asserting the General government
as the supreme, central, or national government? Has it done it
without striking a dangerous blow at the federal element of the
constitution? In suppressing by armed force the doctrine that
the States are severally sovereign, what barrier is left against
consolidation? Has not one danger been removed only to give
place to another?

But perhaps the constitution itself, if rightly understood,
solves the problem; and perhaps the problem itself is raised
precisely through misunderstanding of the constitution. Our
statesmen have recognized no constitution of the American people
themselves; they have confined their views to the written
constitution, as if that constituted the American people a state
or nation, instead of being, as it is, only a law ordained by the
nation already existing and constituted. Perhaps, if they had
recognized and studied the constitution which preceded that drawn
up by the Convention of 1787, and which is intrinsic, inherent in
the republic itself, they would have seen that it solves the
problem, and asserts national unity without consolidation, and
the rights of the several States without danger of disintegration.
The whole controversy, possibly, has originated in a
misunderstanding of the real constitution of the United States,
and that misunderstanding itself in the misunderstanding of the
origin and constitution of government in general. The
constitution, as will appear in the course of this essay is not
defective; and all that is necessary to guard against either
danger is to discard all our theories of the constitution, and
return and adhere to the constitution itself, as it really is and
always has been.

There is no doubt that the question of Slavery had much to do
with the rebellion, but it was not its sole cause. The real
cause must be sought in the program that had been made,
especially in the States themselves, in forming and administering
their respective governments, as well as the General government,
in accordance with political theories borrowed from European
speculators on government, the socalled Liberals and
Revolutionists, which have and can have no legitimate application
in the United States. The tendency of American politics, for the
last thirty or forty years, has been, within the several States
themselves, in the direction of centralized democracy, as if the
American people had for their mission only the reproduction of
ancient Athens. The American system is not that of any of the
simple forms of government, nor any combination of them. The
attempt to bring it under any of the simple or mixed forms of
government recognized by political writers, is an attempt to
clothe the future in the cast-off garments of the past. The
American system, wherever practicable, is better than monarchy,
better than aristocracy, better than simple democracy, better
than any possible combination of these several forms, because it
accords more nearly with the principles of things, the real order
of the universe.

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