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The American Republic

b >> by O. A. Brownson >> The American Republic




But, if you permit all to vote in the re-organization of the
State who, under the old electoral law, have the elective
franchise, you throw the State into the hands of those who have
been disloyal to the Union. If so, and you cannot trust them,
the remedy is not in disfranchising the majority, but in
prohibiting re-organization, and in holding the territorial
people still longer under the provisional government, civil or
military. The old electoral law disqualifies all who have been
convicted of treason either to the State or the United States,
and neither Congress nor the Executive can declare any others
disqualified on account of disloyalty. But you must throw the
State into the hands of those who took part, directly or
indirectly, in the rebellion, if you reconstruct the States at
all, for they are undeniably the great body of the territorial
people in all the States that seceded. These people having
submitted, and declared their intention to reconstruct the State
as a State in the Union, you must amend the constitution of the
United States, unless they are convicted of a disqualifying crime
by due process of law, before you can disfranchise them. It is
impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with
those alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the
Union throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States.
The State, resting on so small a portion of the people, would
have no internal strength, no self-support, and could stand only
as upheld by federal arms, which would greatly impair the free
and healthy action of the whole American system.

The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana,
Arkansas, and Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but
without authority and without success. The organizations,
effected at great expense, and sustained only by military force,
were neither States nor State governments, nor capable of being
made so by any executive or congressional action. If the
disorganized States, as the government held, were still States in
the Union, these organizations were flagrantly revolutionary, as
effected not only without, but in defiance of State authority; if
they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was the fact, they
were equally unconstitutional and void of authority, because not
created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who alone
are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.

If the Unionists had retained the State organization and
government, however small their number, they would have held the
State, and the government would have been bound to recognize and
to defend them as such with all the force of the Union. The
rebellion would then have been personal, not territorial. But
such was not the case. The State organization, the State
government, the whole State authority rebelled, made the
rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists, very
respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at
home, in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective
States, and shorn of all political status or rights. Their
political status was simply that of the old loyalists, or
adherents of the British crown in the American war for
Independence, and it was as absurd to call them the State, as it
would have been for Great Britain to have called the old Tories
the colonies.

The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that
the people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the
power of the Union vests in the General government. The first,
as we have seen, is the principle of so-called "squatter
sovereignty," embodied in the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which
gave birth, in opposition, to the Republican party of 1856. The
people are sovereign only as the State, and the State is
inseparable from the domain. The Unionists without the State
government, without any State organization, could not hold the
domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to
the United States, that is to say, ceases to exist. The American
democracy is territorial, not personal.

The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union.
This is the war power. But, though apparently unlimited, the war
power is yet restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural
limitation when peace returns;, and peace returns, in a civil
war, when the rebels have thrown down their arms and submitted to
the national authority, and without any formal declaration.
During the war, or while the rebellion lasts, it can suspend the
civil courts, the civil laws, the State constitutions, any thing
necessary to the success of the war--and of the necessity the
military authorities are the judges; but it cannot abolish,
abrogate, or reconstitute them. On the return of peace they
revive of themselves in all their vigor. The emancipation
proclamation of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in
certain States and parts of States, and if those whom it
emancipated could not be re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish
slavery, or change the laws authorizing it; and if the Government
should be sustained by Congress or by the Supreme Court in
counting the disorganized States as States in the Union, the
legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with the exception
of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before the
war.*

The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it
is in its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being
effected by military force, since its validity depends entirely
on its being the free action of the territorial people to be
reconstructed, the General government had and could have, with
regard to it, only its ordinary

* This was the case in August, 1865. It may be quite otherwise
before these pages see the light.

peace powers. Reconstruction is
jure pacis, not jure belli.

Yet such illegal organizations, though they are neither States
nor State governments, and incapable of being legalized by any
action of the Executive or of Congress, may, nevertheless, be
legalized by being indorsed or acquiesced in by the territorial
people. They are wrong, as are all usurpations; they are
undemocratic, inasmuch as they attempt to give the minority the
power to rule the majority; they are dangerous inasmuch as they
place the State in the hands of a party that can stand only as
supported by the General government, and thus destroy the proper
freedom and independence of the State, and open the door to
corruption, tend to keep alive rancor and ill feeling, and to
retard the period of complete pacification, which might be
effected in three months as well as in three years, or twenty
years; yet they can become legal, as other governments illegal in
their origin become legal, with time and popular acquiescence.
The right way is always the shortest and easiest; but when a
government must oftener follow than lead the public, it is not
always easy to hit the right way, and still less easy to take it.
The general instincts of the people are right as to the end to be
gained, but seldom right as to the means of gaining it; and
politicians of the Union party, as well as of the late secession
party, have an eye in reconstructing, to the future political
control of the State when it is reconstructed.

The secessionists, if permitted to retain their franchise, would,
even if they accepted abolition, no doubt re-organize their
respective States on the basis of white suffrage, and so would
the Unionists, if left to themselves. There is no party at the
South prepared to adopt negro suffrage, and there would be none
at the North if the negroes constituted any considerable portion
of the population. As the reconstruction of a State cannot be
done under the war power, the General government can no more
enfranchise than it can disfranchise any portion of the
territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage must be
left, where the constitution leaves it--to the States severally,
each to dispose of it for itself. Negro suffrage will, no doubt,
come in time, as soon as the freedmen are prepared for it, and
the danger is that it will be attempted too soon.

It would be a convenience to have the negro vote in the
reconstruction of the States disorganized by secession, for it
would secure their re-construction with antislavery
constitutions, and also make sure of the proposed antislavery
amendment to the Constitution of the United States; but there is
no power in Congress to enfranchise the negroes in the States
needing reconstruction, and, once assured of their freedom, the
freedmen would care little for the Union, of which they
understand nothing. They would vote, for the most part, with
their former masters, their employers, the wealthier and more
intelligent classes, whether loyal or disloyal; for, as a rule,
these will treat them with greater personal consideration and
kindness than others. The dislike of the negro, and hostility to
negro equality, increase as you descend in the social scale. The
freedmen, without political instruction or experience, who have
had no country, no domicile, understand nothing of loyalty or of
disloyalty. They have strong local attachments, but they can
have no patriotism. If they adhered to the Union in the
rebellion, fought for it, bled for it, it was not from loyalty,
but because they knew that their freedom could come only from the
success of the Union arms. That freedom secured, they have no
longer any interest in the Union, and their local attachments,
personal associations, habits, tastes, likes and dislikes, are
Southern, not Northern. In any contest between the North and the
South, they would take, to a man, the Southern side. After the
taunts of the women, the captured soldiers of the Union found,
until nearly the last year of the war, nothing harder to bear,
when marched as prisoners into Richmond, than the antics and
hootings of the negroes. Negro suffrage on the score of loyalty,
is at best a matter of indifference to the Union, and as the
elective franchise is not a natural right, but a civil trust, the
friends of the negro should, for the present, be contented with
securing him simply equal rights of person and property.




CHAPTER XIV.

POLITICAL TENDENCIES.


The most marked political tendency of the American people has
been, since 1825, to interpret their government as a pure and
simple democracy, and to shift it from a territorial to a purely
popular basis, or from the people as the state, inseparably
united to the national territory or domain, to the people as
simply population, either as individuals or as the race. Their
tendency has unconsciously, therefore, been to change their
constitution from a republican to a despotic, or from a civilized
to a barbaric constitution.

The American constitution is democratic, in the sense that the
people are sovereign that all laws and public acts run in their
name; that the rulers are elected by them, and are responsible to
them; but they are the people territorially constituted and fixed
to the soil, constituting what Mr. Disraeli, with more propriety
perhaps than he thinks, calls a "territorial democracy." To this
territorial democracy, the real American democracy, stand opposed
two other democracies--the one personal and the other
humanitarian--each alike hostile to civilization, and tending to
destroy the state, and capable of sustaining government only on
principles common to all despotisms.

In every man there is a natural craving for personal freedom and
unrestrained action--a strong desire to be himself, not
another--to be his own master, to go when and where he pleases,
to do what he chooses, to take what he wants, wherever he can
find it, and to keep what he takes. It is strong in all nomadic
tribes, who are at once pastoral and predatory, and is seldom
weak in our bold frontier-men, too often real "border ruffians."
It takes different forms in different stages of social
development, but it everywhere identifies liberty with power.
Restricted in its enjoyment to one man, it makes him chief, chief
of the family, the tribe, or the nation; extended in its
enjoyment to the few, it founds an aristocracy, creates a
nobility--for nobleman meant originally only freeman, as it does
his own consent, express or constructive. This is the so-called
Jeffersonian democracy, in which government has no powers but
such as it derives from the consent of the governed, and is
personal democracy or pure individualism philosophically
considered, pure egoism, which says, "I am God." Under this sort
of democracy, based on popular, or rather individual sovereignty,
expressed by politicians when they call the electoral people,
half seriously, half mockingly, "the sovereigns," there obviously
can be no state, no social rights or civil authority; there can
be only a voluntary association, league, alliance, or
confederation, in which individuals may freely act together as
long as they find it pleasant, convenient, or useful, but from
which they may separate or secede whenever they find it for their
interest or their pleasure to do so. State sovereignty and
secession are based on the same democratic principle applied to
the several States of the Union instead of individuals.

The tendency to this sort of democracy has been strong in large
sections of the American people from the first, and has been
greatly strengthened by the general acceptance of the theory that
government originates in compact. The full realization of this
tendency, which, happily, is impracticable save in theory, would
be to render every man independent alike of every other man and
of society, with full right and power to make his own will
prevail. This tendency was strongest in the slaveholding States,
and especially, in those States, in the slaveholding class, the
American imitation of the feudal nobility of mediaeval Europe;
and on this side the war just ended was, in its most general
expression, a war in defence of personal democracy or the
sovereignty of the people individually, against the humanitarian
democracy, represented by the abolitionists, and the territorial
democracy, represented by the Government. This personal
democracy has been signally defeated in the defeat of the late
confederacy, and can hardly again become strong enough to be
dangerous.

But the humanitarian democracy, which scorns all geographical
lines, effaces all in individualities, and professes to plant
itself on humanity alone, has acquired by the war new strength,
and is not without menace to our future. The solidarity of the
race, which is the condition of all human life, founds, as we
have seen, society, and creates what are called social rights,
the, rights alike of society in regard to individuals, and of
individuals in regard to society. Territorial divisions or
circumscriptions found particular societies, states, or nations;
yet as the race is one and all its members live by communion with
God through it and by communion one with another, these
particular states or nations are never absolutely independent of
each other but, bound together by the solidarity of the race, so
that there is a real solidarity of nations as well as of
individuals--the truth underlying Kossuth's famous declaration of
the solidarity of peoples."

The solidarity of nations is the basis of international law,
binding on every particular nation, and which every civilized
nation recognizes and enforces on its own subjects or citizens
through its own courts as an integral part of its own municipal
or national law.

The personal or individual right is therefore restricted by the
rights of society, and the rights of the particular society or
nation are limited by international law, or the rights of
universal society--the truth the ex-governor of Hungary
overlooked. The grand error of Gentilism was in denying the
unity and therefore the solidarity of the race, involved in its
denial or misconception of the unity of God. It therefore was
never able to assign any solid basis to international law, and
gave it only a conventional or customary authority, thus leaving
the jus gentium, which it recognized in deed, without any real
foundation in the constitution of things, or authority in the
real world. Its real basis is in the solidarity of the race,
which has its basis in the unity of God, not the dead or abstract
unity asserted by the old Eleatics, the Neo-Platonists, or the
modern Unitarians, but the living unity consisting in the
threefold relation in the Divine Essence, of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, as asserted by Christian revelation, and believed,
more or less intelligently, by all Christendom.

The tendency in the Southern States has been to overlook the
social basis of the state, or the rights of society founded on
the solidarity of the race, and to make all rights and powers
personal, or individual; and as only the white race has been able
to assert and maintain its personal freedom, only men of that
race are held to have the right to be free. Hence the people of
those States felt no scruple in holding the black or colored race
as slaves. Liberty, said they, is the right only of those who
have the ability to assert and maintain it. Let the negro prove
that he has this ability by asserting and maintaining his
freedom, and he will prove his right to be free, and that it is a
gross outrage, a manifest injustice, to enslave him; but, till
then, let him be my servant, which is best for him and for me.
Why ask me to free him? I shall by doing so only change the form
of his servitude. Why appeal to me! Am I my brother's keeper?
Nay, is he my brother? Is this negro, more like an ape or a
baboon than a human being, of the same race with myself? I
believe it not. But in some instances, at least, my dear
slaveholder, your slave is literally your brother, and sometimes
even your son, born of your own daughter. The tendency of the
Southern democrat was to deny the unity of the race, as well as
all obligations of society to protect the weak and helpless, and
therefore all true civil society.

At the North there has been, and is even yet, an opposite
tendency--a tendency to exaggerate the social element, to
overlook the territorial basis of the state, and to disregard the
rights of individuals. This tendency has been and is strong in
the people called abolitionists. The American abolitionist is so
engrossed with the unity that he loses the solidarity of the
race, which supposes unity of race and multiplicity of
individuals; and falls to see any thing legitimate and
authoritative in geographical divisions or territorial
circumscriptions. Back of these, back of individuals, he sees
humanity, superior to individuals, superior to states,
governments, and laws, and holds that he may trample on them all
or give them to the winds at the call of humanity or "the higher
law." The principle on which he acts is as indefensible as the
personal or egoistical democracy of the slaveholders and their
sympathizers. Were his socialistic tendency to become exclusive
and realized, it would found in the name of humanity a complete
social despotism, which, proving impracticable from its very
generality, would break up in anarchy, in which might makes
right, as in the slaveholder's democracy.

The abolitionists, in supporting themselves on humanity in its
generality, regardless of individual and territorial rights, can
recognize no state, no civil authority, and therefore are as much
out of the order of civilization, and as much in that of
barbarism, as is the slaveholder himself. Wendell Phillips is as
far removed from true Christian civilization as was John C.
Calhoun, and William Lloyd Garrison is as much of a barbarian and
despot in principle and tendency as Jefferson Davis. Hence the
great body of the people in the non-slaveholding States, wedded
to American democracy as they were and are could never, as much
as they detested slavery, be induced to make common cause with
the abolitionists, and their apparent union in the late civil war
was accidental, simply owing to the fact that for the time the
social democracy and the territorial coincides or had the same
enemy. The great body of the loyal people instinctively felt
that pure socialism is as incompatible with American democracy as
pure individualism; and the abolitionists are well aware that
slavery has been abolished, not for humanitarian or socialistic
reasons but really for reasons of state, in order to save the
territorial democracy. The territorial democracy would not unite
to eliminate even so barbaric an element as slavery, till the
rebellion gave them the constitutional right to abolish it; and
even then so scrupulous were they, that they demanded a
constitutional amendment, so as to be able to make clean work of
it, without any blow to individual or State rights.

The abolitionists were right in opposing slavery, but not in
demanding its abolition on humanitarian or socialistic grounds.
Slavery is really a barbaric element, and is in direct antagonism
to American civilization. The whole force of the national life
opposes it, and must finally eliminate it, or become itself
extinct and it is no mean proof of their utter want of sympathy
with all the living forces of modern civilization, that the
leading men of the South and their prominent friends at the North
really persuaded themselves that with cotton, rice, and tobacco,
they could effectually resist the anti-slavery movement, and
perpetuate their barbaric democracy. They studied the classics,
they admired Greece and Rome, and imagined that those nations
became great by slavery, instead of being great even in spite of
slavery. They failed to take into the account the fact that when
Greece and Rome were in the zenith of their glory, all
contemporary nations were also slaveholding nations, and that if
they were the greatest and most highly civilized nations of their
times, they were not fitted to be the greatest and most highly
civilized nations of all times. They failed also to perceive
that, if the Graeco-Roman republic did not include the whole
territorial people in the political people, it yet recognized
both the social and the territorial foundation of the state, and
never attempted to rest it on pure individualism; they forgot,
too, that Greece and Rome both fell, and fell precisely through
internal weakness caused by the barbarism within, not through the
force of the barbarism beyond their frontiers. The world has
changed since the time when ten thousand of his slaves were
sacrificed as a religious offering to the manes of a single Roman
master. The infusion of the Christian dogma of the unity and
solidarity of the race into the belief, the life, the laws, the
jurisprudence of all civilized nations, has doomed slavery and
every species of barbarism; but this our slaveholding countrymen
saw not.

It rarely happens that in any controversy, individual or
national, the real issue is distinctly presented, or the precise
question in debate is clearly and distinctly understood by either
party. Slavery was only incidentally involved in the late war.
The war was occasioned by the collision of two extreme parties;
but it was itself a war between civilization and barbarism,
primarily between the territorial democracy and the personal
democracy, and in reality, on the part of the nation, as much a
war against the socialism of the abolitionist as against the
individualism of the slaveholder. Yet the victory, though
complete over the former, is only half won over the latter, for
it has left the humanitarian democracy standing, and perhaps for
the moment stronger than ever. The socialistic democracy was
enlisted by the territorial, not to strengthen the government at
home, as it imagines, for that it did not do, and could not do,
since the national instinct was even more opposed to it than to
the personal democracy; but under its antislavery aspect, to
soften the hostility of foreign powers, and ward off foreign
intervention, which was seriously threatened. The populations of
Europe, especially of France and England, were decidedly
anti-slavery, and if the war here appeared to them a war, not
solely for the unity of the nation and the integrity of its
domain, as it really was, in which they took and could take no
interest, but a war for the abolition of slavery, their
governments would not venture to intervene. This was the only
consideration that weighed with Mr. Lincoln, as he himself
assured the author, and induced him to issue his Emancipation
Proclamation; and Europe rejoices in our victory over the
rebellion only so far as it has liberated the slaves, and honors
the late President only as their supposed liberator, not as the
preserver of the unity and integrity of the nation. This is
natural enough abroad, and proves the wisdom of the anti-slavery
policy of the government, which had become absolutely necessary
to save the Republic long before it was adopted; yet it is not as
the emancipator of some two or three millions of slaves that the
American patriot cherishes the memory of Abraham Lincoln, but,
aided by the loyal people, generals of rare merit, and troops of
unsurpassed bravery and endurance, as the saviour of the American
state, and the protector of modern civilization. His
anti-slavery policy served this end, and therefore was wise, but
he adopted it with the greatest possible reluctance.

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