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The American Republic

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




There were greater issues in the late war than negro slavery or
negro freedom. That was only an incidental issue, as the really
great men of the Confederacy felt, who to save their cause were
willing themselves at last to free and arm their own negroes, and
perhaps were willing to do it even at first. This fact alone
proves that they had, or believed they had, a far more important
cause than the preservation of negro slavery. They fought for
personal democracy, under the form of State sovereignty, against
social democracy; for personal freedom and independence against
social or humanitarian despotism; and so far their cause was as
good as that against which they took up arms; and if they had or
could have fought against that, without fighting at the same time
against the territorial, the real American, the only civilized
democracy, they would have succeeded. It is not socialism nor
abolitionism that has won; nor is it the North that has
conquered. The Union itself has won no victories over the South,
and it is both historically and legally false to say that the
South has been subjugated. The Union has preserved itself and
American civilization, alike for North and South, East and West.
The armies that so often met in the shock of battle were not
drawn up respectively by the North and the South, but by two
rival democracies, to decide which of the two should rule the
future. They were the armies of two mutually antagonistic
systems, and neither army was clearly and distinctly conscious of
the cause for which it was shedding its blood; each obeyed
instinctively a power stronger than itself, and which at best it
but dimly discerned. On both sides the cause was broader and
deeper than negro slavery, and neither the proslavery men nor the
abolitionists have won. The territorial democracy alone has won,
and won what will prove to be a final victory over the purely
personal democracy, which had its chief seat in the Southern
States, though by no means confined to them. The danger to
American democracy from that quarter is forever removed, and
democracy a' la Rousseau has received a terrible defeat
throughout the world, though as yet it is far from being aware of
it.

But in this world victories are never complete. The socialistic
democracy claims the victory which has been really won by the
territorial democracy, as if it had been socialism, not
patriotism, that fired the hearts and nerved the arms of the
brave men led by McClellan, Grant, and Sherman. The
humanitarians are more dangerous in principle than the egoists,
for they have the appearance of building on a broader and deeper
foundation, of being more Christian, more philosophic, more
generous and philanthropic; but Satan is never more successful
than under the guise of an angel of light. His favorite guise in
modern times is that of philanthropy. He is a genuine
humanitarian, and aims to persuade the world that humanitarianism
is Christianity, and that man is God; that the soft and charming
sentiment of philanthropy is real Christian charity; and he dupes
both individuals and nations, and makes them do his work, when
they believe they are earnestly and most successfully doing the
work of God. Your leading abolitionists are as much affected by
satanophany as your leading confederates, nor are they one whit
more philosophical or less sophistical. The one loses the race,
the other the individual, and neither has learned to apply
practically that fundamental truth that there is never the
general without the particular, nor the particular without the
general, the race without individuals, nor individuals without
the race. The whole race was in Adam, and fell in him, as we are
taught by the doctrine of original sin, or the sin of the race,
and Adam was an individual, as we are taught in the fact that
original sin was in him actual or personal sin.

The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses
men in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor
to secure the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother
Jansenist sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the
freedom of grace. Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of
slavery, to-day he agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality,
and announces that when be has secured that be will agitate for
female suffrage and the equality of the sexes, forgetting or
ignorant that the relation of equality subsists only between
individuals of the same sex; that God made the man the head of
the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for the woman.
Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in social,
industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and
agitate for equality of property. But since property, if
recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he
must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of
property, as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with
M. Proudhon, or the Englishman Godwin. It is unjust that one
should have what another wants, or even more than another. What
right have you to ride in your coach or astride your spirited
barb while I am forced to trudge on foot? Nor can our
humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as long as there
are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and some are
uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger or
weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and
therefore some have natural advantages which others have not.
There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied
only by the abolition of all individualities, and the reduction
of all individuals to the race, or humanity, man in general. He
can find no limit to his agitation this side of vague generality,
which is no reality, but a pure nullity, for he respects no
territorial or individual circumscriptions, and must regard
creation itself as a blunder. This is not fancy, for he has
gone very nearly as far as it is here shown, if logical, be must
go.

The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and
abroad, be interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social
or humanitarian democracy. It was because they regarded the war
waged on the side of the Union as waged in the interest of this
terrible democracy, that our bishops and clergy sympathized so
little with the Government in prosecuting it; not, as some
imagined, because they were disloyal, hostile to American or
territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor of freedom for
all men, whatever their race or complexion. They had no wish to
see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any
other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would
have regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up;
but they held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy
represented by Northern abolitionists as hostile alike to the
Church and to civilization. For the same reason that they were
backward or reserved in their sympathy, all the humanitarian
sects at home and abroad were forward and even ostentatious in
theirs. The Catholics feared the war might result in encouraging
La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian sects
trusted that it would. If the victory of the Union should turn
out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized
world will have no reason to applaud it.

That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be
taken as a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be
idle to deny. It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party
throughout the world are in ecstasies over it. The party claim
it. The European Socialists and Red Republicans applaud it, and
the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict on us the deep
humiliation of their congratulations. A cause that can be
approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must
be strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element.
It is no compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of
men who assert not only people-king, but people-God; and those
Americans who are delighted with them are worse enemies to the
American democracy than ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow
conspirators, and more contemptible, as the swindler is more
contemptible than the highwayman.

But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their
host. Not they are the real victors. When the smoke of battle
has cleared away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by
the Republic, and that that alone has triumphed. The
abolitionists, in so far as they asserted the unity of the race
and opposed slavery as a denial of that unity, have also won; but
in so far as they denied the reality or authority of territorial
and individual circumscriptions, followed a purely socialistic
tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a watery
sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been
crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late
insurrectionary States are fully reconstructed. The Southern or
egoistical democrats, so far as they denied the unity and
solidarity of the race, the rights of society over individuals,
and the equal rights of each and every individual in face of the
state, or the obligations of society to protect the weak and help
the helpless, have been also defeated; but so far as they
asserted personal or individual rights which society neither
gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State
sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General
government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action,
they share in the victory, as the future will prove.

European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly
against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State,
have no lot or part in the victory of the American people: not
for them nor for men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams,
have our brave soldiers fought, suffered and bled for four years
of the most terrible war in modern times, and against troops as
brave and as well led as themselves; not for them has the country
sacrificed a million of lives, and contracted a debt of four
thousand millions of dollars, besides the waste and destruction
that it will take years of peaceful industry to repair. They and
their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and civilization has
won its most brilliant victory in all history. The American
democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of
barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and
placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate
authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all
civilized governments--not with the revolutionary movements to
overthrow them. The American people will always be progressive
as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which
they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught
them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of
place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical
state; and that the government should always be clothed with
ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its
destruction. They must never be delighted again to have their
government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor
to his own sovereign as the nation's guest. The people of the
Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late
rebellion than the people of the Southern States. Their press
had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused
to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or
assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad
denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan
governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors.
But their own government has found it necessary for the public
safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they will
most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the
governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead
of lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins,
revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the
reign of barbarism.

The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by
the failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the
disintegrating element, either in the particular State or in the
United States, is henceforth to be apprehended. But the tendency
in the opposite direction may give the American state some
trouble. The tendency now is, as to the Union, consolidation,
and as to the particular state, humanitarianism, socialism, or
centralized democracy. Yet this tendency, though it may do much
mischief, will hardly become exclusive. The States that seceded,
when restored, will always, even in abandoning State sovereignty,
resist it, and still assert State rights. When these States are
restored to their normal position, they will always be able to
protect themselves against any encroachments on their special
rights by the General government. The constitution, in the
distribution of the powers of government, provides the States
severally with ample means to protect their individuality against
the centralizing tendency of the General government, however
strong it may be.

The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General
government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look
upon it as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to
regard the several State governments as subordinate instead of
co-ordinate governments. It is not improbable that the
Executive, since the outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded
throughout on that supposition, and hence his extraordinary
assumptions of power; but when once peace is fully re-established
and the States have all resumed their normal position in the
Union, every State will be found prompt enough to resist any
attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights. Its instinct
of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will be
protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United
States.

The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of
the States is far less than the danger that the Executive will
usurp all the powers of Congress and the judiciary. Congress,
during the rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could,
with dictatorial powers, and these powers the Executive continues
to exercise even after the rebellion is suppressed. They were
given and held under the rights of war, and for war purposes
only, and expired by natural limitation when the war ceased; but
the Executive forgets this, and, instead of calling Congress
together and submitting the work of reconstruction of the States
that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to
reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign;
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and the people seem to like it. He might and should, as
commander-in-chief of the army and navy, govern them as military
departments, by his lieutenants, till Congress could either
create provisional civil governments for them or recognize them
as self-governing States in the Union; but he has no right, under
the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil
governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in
regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without
authority and without the slightest plea of necessity. His acts
in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are
inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do
them. Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public
sentiment, and a deep wound is inflicted on the constitution,
which will be long in healing.

The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not
originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a
long time before. There is a growing disposition on the part of

Congress to throw as much of the business of government as
possible into the hands of the Executive. The patronage the
Executive wields, even in times of peace, is so large that he has
indirectly an almost supreme control over the legislative branch
of the government. For this, which is, and, if not checked will
continue to be, a growing evil, there is no obvious remedy,
unless the President is chosen for a longer term of office and
made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous doctrine
of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the true
interests of the public. Here is matter for the consideration of
the American statesman. But as to the usurpations of the
Executive in these unsettled times, they will be only temporary,
and will cease when the States are all restored. They are
abuses, but only temporary abuses, and the Southern States, when
restored to the Union, will resume their rights in their own
sphere, as self-governing communities, and legalize or undo the
unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.

The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the
individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able
to become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not
begin at home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance.
In the States in which the humanitarian tendency is the
strongest, the territorial democracy has its most effective
organization. Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion the
American people had asserted popular sovereignty, but had never
rendered an account to themselves in what sense the people are or
are not sovereign. They had never distinguished the three sorts
of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of the
three is the distinctively American democracy. For them,
democracy was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought
to avoid them either by exaggerating one or the other of the two
exclusive tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself
through restrictions on suffrage. The latter class began to
distrust universal suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to
dream of modifying the American constitution so as to make it
conform more nearly to the English model. The war has proved
that the were wrong, for nothing is more certain than that the
people have saved the national unity and integrity almost in
spite of their government. The General government either was not
disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against secession,
till forced to do it by the people themselves. No wise American
can henceforth distrust American democracy. The people may be
trusted. So much is settled. But as the two extremes were
equally democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of
popular sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling
to allow separation, and would not and did not engage in the war
against secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of
the national domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it
was not democracy in the sense of either of the extremes that
made the war and came out of it victorious; and hence the real
American democracy must differ from them both, and is neither a
personal nor a humanitarian, but a territorial democracy. The
true idea of American democracy thus comes out, for the first
time, freed from the two extreme democracies which have been
identified with it, and henceforth enters into the understandings
as well as the hearts of the people. The war has enlightened
patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes reason--a
well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional conviction.

In the several States themselves there are many things to prevent
the socialistic tendency from becoming exclusive. In the States
that seceded socialism has never had a foothold, and will not
gain it, for it is resisted by all the sentiments, convictions,
and habits of the Southern people, and the Southern people will
not be exterminated nor swamped by migrations either from the
North or from Europe. They are and always will be an
agricultural people, and an agricultural people are and always
will be opposed to socialistic dreams, unless unwittingly held
for a moment to favor it in pursuit of some special object in
which they take a passionate interest. The worst of all policies
is that of hanging, exiling, or disfranchising the wealthy
landholders of the South, in order to bring up the poor and
depressed whites, shadowed forth in the Executive proclamation of
the 29th of May, 1865. Of course that policy will not be carried
out, and if the negroes are enfranchised, they will always vote
with the wealthy landholding class, and aid them in resisting all
socialistic tendencies. The humanitarians will fail for the want
of a good social grievance against which they can declaim.

In the New England States the humanitarian tendency is strong as
a speculation, but only in relation to objects at a distance. It
is aided much by the congregational constitution of their
religion; yet it is weak at home, and is resisted practically by
the territorial division of power. New England means
Massachusetts, and nowhere is the subdivision of the powers of
government carried further, or the constitution of the
territorial democracy more complete, than in that State.
Philanthropy seldom works in private against private vices and
evils: it is effective only against public grievances, and the
farther they are from home and the less its right to interfere
with them, the more in earnest and the more effective for evil
does it become. Its nature is to mind every one's business but
its own. But now that slavery is abolished, there is nowhere in
the United States a social grievance of magnitude enough to
enlist any considerable number of the people, even of
Massachusetts, in a movement to redress it. Negro
enfranchisement is a question of which the humanitarians can make
something and they will make the most of it; but as it is a
question that each State will soon settle for itself, it will not
serve their purpose of prolonged agitation. They could not and
never did carry away the nation, even on the question of slavery
itself, and abolitionism had comparatively little direct
influence in abolishing slavery; and the exclusion of negro
suffrage can never be made to appear to the American people as
any thing like so great a grievance as was slavery.

Besides, in all the States that did not secede, Catholics are a
numerous and an important portion of the population. Their
increasing numbers, wealth, and education secure them, as much
as the majority may dislike their religion, a constantly
increasing influence, and it is idle to leave them out in
counting the future of the country. They will, in a very few
years, be the best and most thoroughly educated class of the
American people; and, aside from their religion, or, rather, in
consequence of their religion, the most learned, enlightened, and
intelligent portion of the American population; and as much as
they have disliked the abolitionists, they have, in the army and
elsewhere, contributed their full share to the victory the nation
has won. The best things written on the controversy have been
written by Catholics, and Catholics are better fitted by their
religion to comprehend the real character of the American
constitution than any other class of Americans, the moment they
study it in the light of their own theology. The American
constitution is based on that of natural society, on the
solidarity of the race, and the difference between natural
society and the church or Christian society is, that the one is
initial and the other teleological. The law of both is the same;
Catholics, as such, must resist both extremes, because each is
exclusive, and whatever is exclusive or one-sided is uncatholic.
If they have been backward in their sympathy with the government,
it has been through their dislike of the puritanic spirit and the
humanitarian or socialistic elements they detected in the
Republican party, joined with a prejudice against political and
social negro equality. But their church everywhere opposes the
socialistic movements of the age, all movements in behalf of
barbarism, and they may always be counted on to resist the
advance of the socialistic democracy. If the country has had
reason to complain of some of them in the late war, it will have,
in the future, far stronger reason to be grateful; not to them,
indeed, for the citizen owes his life to his country, but to
their religion, which has been and is the grand protectress of
modern society and civilization.

>From the origin of the government there has been a tendency to
the extension of suffrage, and to exclude both birth and private
property as bases of political rights or franchises. This
tendency has often been justified on the ground that the elective
franchise is a natural right; which is not true, because the
elective franchise is political power, and political power is
always a civil trust, never a natural right, and the state judges
for itself to whom it will or will not confide the trust; but
there can be no doubt that it is a normal tendency, and in strict
accordance with the constitution of American civil society, which
rests on the unity of the race, and public instead of private
property. All political distinctions founded on birth, race, or
private wealth are anomalies in the American system, and are
necessarily eliminated by its normal developments. To contend
that none but property-holders may vote, or none but persons of a
particular race may be enfranchised, is unamerican and contrary,
to the order of civilization the New World is developing. The
only qualification for the elective franchise the American system
can logically insist on is that the elector belong to the
territorial people--that is, be a natural-born or a naturalized
citizen, be a major in full possession of his natural faculties,
and unconvicted of any infamous offence. The State is free to
naturalize foreigners or not, and under such restrictions as it
judges proper; but, having naturalized them, it must treat them
as standing on the same footing with natural-born citizens.

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