The Promise of American Life. Herbert David Croly
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II
SLAVERY AS A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION
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 upon a conception of the Constitution, which made the national organization the expression of a democratic idea, more comprehensive and dignified than that of existing legal rights; and in so doing the Northerners undoubtedly had behind them, not merely the sound political idea, but also a fair share of the living American tradition. The Southerners had pushed the traditional worship of Constitutional rights to a point which subordinated the whole American legal system to the needs of one peculiar and incongruous institution, and such an innovation was bound to be revolutionary. But when the North proposed to put its nationalistic interpretation of the Constitution into effect, and to prevent the South by force from seceding, the South could claim for its resistance a larger share of the American tradition than could the North for its coercion. To insist that the Southern states remain in the Union was assuredly an attempt to govern a whole society without its consent; and the fact that the Southerners rather than the Northerners were technically violators of the law, did not prevent the former from going into battle profoundly possessed with the conviction that they were fighting for an essentially democratic cause.
The aggressive theories and policy of the Southerners made the moderate opponents of slavery realize that the beneficiaries of that institution would, unless checked, succeed eventually in nationalizing slavery by appropriating on its behalf the national domain. A body of public opinion was gradually formed, which looked in the direction merely of de-nationalizing slavery by restricting its expansion. This body of public opinion was finally organized into the Republican party; and this party has certain claims to be considered the first genuinely national party which has appeared in American politics. The character of being national has been denied to it, because it was, compared to the old Whig and Democratic parties, a sectional organization; but a party becomes national, not by the locus of its support, but by the national import of its idea and its policy. The Republican party was not entirely national, because it had originated partly in embittered sectional feeling, but it proclaimed a national idea and a national policy. It insisted on the responsibility of the national government in relation to the institution of slavery, and it insisted also that the Union should be preserved. But before the Republicanism could be recognized as national even in the North, it was obliged to meet and vanquish one more proposed treatment of the problem of slavery—founded on an inadequate conception of democracy. In this case, moreover, the inadequate conception of democracy was much more traditionally American than was an exclusive preoccupation either with natural or legal rights; and according to its chief advocate it would have the magical result of permitting the expansion of slavery, and of preserving the Constitutional Union, without doing any harm to democracy.