APPREHENSIONS OF DEMOCRACY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: CALHOUN, EMERSON, DOUGLASS, AND WHITMAN

By

DUSTIN FRIDKIN

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2016

© 2016 Dustin Fridkin

To my family: Jennifer Forshee and Eleanor Fridkin, Jeff and Lucy Fridkin, Elysia Dawn, James Forshee, and Debby Simmons, with love and gratitude

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would have had neither inspiration, nor time, nor hubris enough to finish this work absent the love and camaraderie, intellectual and otherwise, of Jennifer Forshee. Her, et praeterea nihil. I must also thank my parents, Jeffrey D. and

Lucy J. Fridkin, whose consistent and ongoing support has been invaluable and inspirational. My daughter, Eleanor, has only begun to teach me about the importance of time. My gratitude to her is second only to my anticipation of what more I have to learn. The co-chairs of my committee, Daniel I. O’Neill and Daniel A. Smith, continued to encourage and believe in my work even when my own faith faltered. Additional debts include the members of my committee, professors Lawrence C. Dodd, Leslie Paul

Thiele, and Sean P. Adams, as well as professors Thomas Biebricher, Margaret Kohn,

Keith Fitzgerald, Eugene Lewis, John C. Hayes, Beth Rosenson, Douglass Berggren, and Barbara Hicks, among others, all of whose influence is visible, to me at least, in this work. For the ideas that inform this project, and for a great deal more besides, I thank my grandparents, Harold and Louanne Fridkin, and Howard and Lucile Wilson. Last, but not least, I must thank my friends, family, and colleagues. First among equals is J.

Maggio, without whom, in myriad ways, my life would be significantly less wonderful.

Elysia Dawn, James Forshee, Debby Simmons, Greg Wilson, Patrick Quinney, Robert

Marshall, Jessica Stevenson, Laura Jane Grace, Matthew DeSantis, Donald Russell,

Ryan Quinney, Kevin Mahon, Joey Brenner, Maren Abromowitz, Adam Volk, Tom

Thompson, Graham Glover, Chris Manick, Anthony Ateek and others spent years letting me bounce ideas off of them. Thanks, y’all. I wouldn’t have done it without you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 7

CHAPTER

1 SHOOTING NIAGARA: ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS ...... 9

2 APPREHENSION OF DEMOCRACY: THE TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT FROM THE FOUNDING TO THE AGE OF JACKSON ..... 26

3 THE CAST IRON MAN’S LAST STAND: JOHN C. CALHOUN AND THE ANTIDOTE TO DEMOCRACY ...... 69

4 EMERSON, SELF-RELIANCE, AND THE CONDUCT OF DEMOCRACY ...... 109

5 AMERICANS IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THE IDEA: FREDERICK DOUGLASS, DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE ...... 161

6 DEMOCRACY AND PROPHECY: WALT WHITMAN’S COMPOUND “I” AND THE POLITICAL FORCE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE ...... 205

7 CONCLUDING REMARKS: AMERICAN APPREHENSION OF DEMOCRACY ... 253

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 290

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 303

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

E&L Emerson: Essays and Lectures

LG III Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition

LW The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass

MBMF My Bondage and My Freedom

NLFD Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave

NUPM Whitman’s Notebooks and Unpublished Manuscripts

PE The Political Emerson

SSW Selected Speeches and Writings of Frederick Douglass

WWC With Walt Whitman in Camden

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida  Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

APPREHENSIONS OF DEMOCRACY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: CALHOUN, EMERSON, DOUGLASS, AND WHITMAN

By

Dustin Fridkin

August 2016

Chair: Daniel I O’Neill Cochair: Daniel A. Smith Major: Political Science

To an extent that has not heretofore been fully appreciated, conflicting ideas about democracy are central to understanding political thought in the late-antebellum

America. I examine the role ideas about democracy play in the political thought of four

American thinkers: John C. Calhoun, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and

Walt Whitman. In the process, I also examine the relationship between democracy and other traditions of American thought. For Calhoun, democracy named an existential threat not only to the states of his beloved South, but to republican government in general, and, ultimately, to civilization itself. Emerson is ambivalent about democracy, but he primarily considers it an obstacle to the development of self-reliant individuals.

Douglass sees in democracy a goal to be achieved, if only his fellow countrymen could be induced to think and act as though they truly believed in the ideological premises upon which their system was based. For Whitman, democracy was the name for a future system, one built from the ground up by dense networks of loving comrades. As disparate as their interpretations of the relevance and implications of democracy were, all four are agreed about its nature and meaning. Democracy, for all four, names a

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political system characterized by majority rule, which was understood to imply the political power of the laboring classes, strong emphasis on the fundamental equality of persons, and broad-based political participation. While we need not be bound by past understandings or apprehensions, uncovering and explaining the way democracy has been understood, deployed, defended, and attacked can help us sharpen our own apprehensions of it, and clarify our thinking about democracy’s place among the multiple traditions of American political thought.

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CHAPTER 1 SHOOTING NIAGARA: ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Whence comes it, this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the meaning of it? —Thomas Carlyle Latter Day Pamphlets1

In 1867, Thomas Carlyle, who was at the time among the most influential political and cultural critics writing in the English language, penned a piece called “Shooting

Niagara: And After?” in which he decried the ascendency of democracy in the United

States and Great Britain.2 He likened the moves toward universal manhood suffrage that were taking place on both sides of the Atlantic to taking a plunge over a great waterfall—a foolish thing to do on purpose, and a decision likely to result in self- destruction.

To empower the masses meant subjecting control of social, economic, and political affairs to what Carlyle calls “swarmery,” by which he means groups of men gathered together in swarms. Once thusly gathered, “any commonplace stupidest bee,” by which he means any common person, “if he can happen, by noise or otherwise, to be chosen for the function, will straightaway get fatted and inflated into bulk.” Such a human swarm, with some bulky, bombastic bee at its head “finds itself impelled to action, as with one heart and mind. Singular, in the case of human swarms, with what perfection of unanimity and quasi-religious conviction the stupidest absurdities can be

1 The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Carlyle (1850), 9. 2 Carlyle (1867); for the reception of Carlyle’s works among his contemporaries, see Siegal (1971). 9 received as axioms of Euclid, nay as articles of faith.”3 To understate the case considerably, Carlyle was not a fan of democracy.

These words, and many others in Carlyle’s oeuvre, may strike readers, nowadays, as unduly harsh and excessively purple. Carlyle was, to be sure, avowedly elitist—he was, among other things, largely responsible for popularizing “great man” history—and stridently racist, sufficiently so to raise eyebrows even at a time when race-based chattel slavery was still practiced in many sectors of the Western world. But he was also influential and, for the most part, well-respected in the United States.

Carlyle’s strongest influence on an American thinker can be seen in the pro- slavery writings of George Fitzhugh, whose books Cannibals All and Sociology for the

South were essentially paraphrases of Carlylean arguments. But he is also noted as an influence on the likes of Thoreau and Whitman, and he was a personal friend and lifelong correspondent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Carlyle’s very public doubts about democracy did not render him, in the middle of the 19th century, a pariah, as they likely would today. What happened in the meantime, and what are we to make of the close connections between an avowedly anti-democratic thinker like Carlyle and a number of

Americans whose writings are often considered the sine qua non of democratic aspiration?

Increasingly, and perhaps happily, around the world democracy has ceased to be something political leaders or would-be public intellectuals can plausibly argue against.

The United States has spent the better part of two decades attempting to establish what it calls stable democratic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The so-called Arab Spring

3 Carlyle (1867), 674 10 promised a wave of democratic reform in places like Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Greece, in the name of democracy, recently fired a salvo against the imposition of fiscal austerity policies in their corner of the European Union, and for all the bluster about the unwisdom of Greek policy, few denied the right or the ability of the Greeks to make their own decisions democratically. Several American states have recently enacted legislation denying rights to transgendered Americans. They have done so through democratic means, namely legislative action, and they have done so in defense of democratic ends, namely the preservation of personal and religious liberty. Opponents of such legislation invoke democracy, too. They say that guarantees of equality are the sine qua non of democracy, and, as such, any denial of access to public accommodations on the basis of group-identity is, by the nature of things, anti- democratic.

On all sides, democracy is the justificatory language of politics. Democracy is thought to be both the established state of affairs in the West and a desirable objective for the rest of the world to pursue. And yet, there is very little agreement as to what exactly democracy means. If democracy simply means majority rule, then on what grounds do western nations object to the election of Islamist parties, or the imposition of

Sharia, in places where such things enjoy majority support? Perhaps the answer can be found in liberal democracy, where the word “liberal” modifies the majoritarian implications of democracy by insisting that majority rule is limited by respect for the rights of those who find themselves outnumbered. But what happens when the respecting the rights of minorities runs directly counter to the will of the majority?

Perhaps the degeneration of many of the Arab Spring nations into civil war is a partial

11 answer to the question. Perhaps so too is the ongoing controversy between Greece and the EU. So, too, perhaps, may be the continuing conflicts between religious conservatives and LGBTQ communities in the United States. It is at the very least obvious that we are not entirely clear about what we mean when we say democracy or any of its compound variations.

In spite of the present vogue for “liberal democracy,” these two terms sit uneasily next to one another. Rhetorically at least, liberalism tends toward universalism. It describes a regime that is primarily concerned with individual self-determination and protection of individual property. Democracy, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with mass-participation in politics, and the participation of the masses in political decision-making has usually been understood in class terms. In any society with a commercial economy, we are likely to find a significant degree of economic inequality, as wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of a relative few. Even if commerce benefits everyone, its benefits are almost never evenly distributed, and the benefits tend to be heritable. Hence the common perception that the best way to get rich is to have rich parents: wealth accumulates. In such a society with such an economy, democracy is a problem, as the few who manage to accumulate wealth tend to be outnumbered by the many who do not.

In a democracy that is not liberal, the property of the wealthy is insecure, because the many who lack wealth control the power of government. It has been said, not inaptly, that while liberal democracy “might appear today as a pleonasm…it was initially an oxymoron.”4 Such a statement is only surprising when we fail to consider the

4 Ranciere 2006, 53 12 relationship between minority rights and majority rule, and the class implications of this relationship are only difficult to locate when class divisions are cross-cut or obfuscated, as they are, by design, in the United States. The problem with democracy, unless it is subjected to liberal and institutional controls, is obvious. When those who do not own property sit in the political catbird seat, those who do own property feel, rightly, insecure.

My paternal grandfather, Harold “Fritz” Fridkin, liked to say that many of the biggest and most persistent problems facing the United States stem from our national unwillingness or inability to figure out what we want to be when we grow up. The suggestion, though perhaps a bit glib, has animated my work, scholarly and otherwise, since I reached the age of reason. A quick look around at the domestic and international controversies in which the United States and its citizens find themselves embroiled is enough to give one the distinct sense that no two among the myriad people talking about America, Americans, Americanism or American democracy agrees on what, exactly, they mean to designate by those terms.5 What is, or ought to be, American democracy? This is the fundamental question behind my dissertation.

Contemporary theorists, like contemporary events, offer very little guidance as to what we should make of this. For some, the question of democracy is resolved into a mostly practical matter of designing the proper procedures through which deliberation is to be accomplished and by which political decisions are to be reached. For these

5 For example, even as Americans were “narrowing the portals” of democratic participation in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century (Keyssar 2000, 61), they were, in several states, increasing the power of voters to directly decide matters of statewide policy (Smith and Fridkin 2008). 13 theorists, what is needed is an enumeration of the proper rules for deliberation.6 Once those are agreed upon, all that’s left is the relatively simple matter of adjusting our institutions and policies accordingly.

Many other theorists have doubts about this. For starters, deciding upon the proper list of procedures is a necessarily a priori act, and, as such, it entails removing from political discussion a decision that ought properly be a political one. For this reason, some accuse the proponents of deliberative democracy of sneaking a kind of imperialism or essentialism in through the back door.7 If the rules of deliberation run contrary to the desires of the majority of a polity that is to be made democratic, isn’t this a self-defeating business? At best, it would seem to elide a number of difficult questions.

Some have gone so far as to dismiss democracy as a mostly empty signifier, a name given to an always-elusive desire, a way of deferring responsibility for actions taken in the present in hopes that they might be redeemed by the future, or of simply ladling ideological dross over what would otherwise be recognized as the naked aggression of capitalists and imperialists eager to establish their rights to productive properties here and there around the world as a defense against the many who might make countervailing claims to ownership or use. If the creation of a just and participatory mode of political, social, and economic life, the thinking goes, democracy may simply be a dead end.8

6 See, for example, Gutmann and Thompson (2004), Habermas (1996), and Benhabib (1996). 7 See, for example, Biebricher (2007), Kymlicka and Norman (2000), Mouffe (1999) and Sanders (1997). 8 Dean (2007) 14

Before we give in to despair, we might take a step back. John Dewey once suggested that a partial answer to the question of democracy’s meaning might be found by a thorough and clear-eyed examination of the past. “The old saying,” as Dewey put it,

that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and re-make its political manifestations.9

By examining democracy’s past, we can return “to the idea itself,” while also “clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it.” We would then be equipped to deploy our understanding of democracy as a tool for evaluating our present social, political, and economic circumstances. What has been the relationship, for example, between liberal rights and the democratic insistence on both equality and majority rule?

The history of American political thought seems to me a good place to look for answers. In late-antebellum America, democracy was still a live issue, an idea that thoughtful, well-meaning people could, while expecting to begin or maintain careers as public figures, be for or against. And so they were. The Civil War itself, as it turns out, was at least in part a contest over competing notions of democracy, or, more specifically, competing notions of the proper place of democracy in American politics.

A look at American political thought in the antebellum period reveals what a handful of folks on the left have never forgotten: that democracy had strong class connotations. Democracy meant majority rule and political equality. As we shall see, the

9 John Dewey. (1927), 144 15 democratic notion of majority rule was not synonymous with what some scholars, then and now, call “popular rule.” Popular rule means “the people” have a significant amount of say-so when it comes to governmental decision-making. Democratic majority rule means that the actually extant majority has final say-so in decisions about what government does. This is an important distinction.

In most actually existing societies with a reasonably well-developed commercial economy, majority rule means rule by those who earn their living by working. To put it another way, one that resonates with thinking about democracy from ancient Athens to the Federalist Papers, democratic majority rule means rule by the many, who are relatively poor, over the rich, who are, in a well-developed commercial society, relatively few. Understanding the class dimension of democracy is crucial here. It suggests both the promise, and the danger, of the idea of American democracy.

Through a great deal of American history, and certainly through the early decades of the nineteenth century, “democracy” named a social, economic, and political system that was, for many if not most Americans, to be dreaded. To put it another way, if we return to the history of American political thought, we find that democracy “was once considered a radical notion, and for that reason was viewed with suspicion and even downright dismay.”10 What ought we make of this?

Quentin Skinner suggests that the lesson to be gleaned from the study of the history of political thought is that we must do our own thinking for ourselves.11 That’s fair enough, though it leaves the reader wondering why Skinner would bother doing the

10 Hanson (1985), 16 11 Skinner (1969) 16 historical work he’s done. If all we have to learn is that history can’t speak to us, and that we need to speak for ourselve, then why bother with history? A good answer, I think, is one also suggested by Skinner. History frees us from the present.

Demonstrating that things were once other than they are now gives us a certain kind of license. If people thought differently, once, than they do now, then they might think differently again sometime in the future.12

In the chapters that follow, I examine the role democracy played in the works of four American thinkers who were roughly contemporaries of one another, all of whom completed major works in the decade prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War:

John C. Calhoun, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass.

Democracy in America was, for each, a central theme and an animating concern. Two,

Whitman and Douglass, dedicated a significant portion of their energies toward the furtherance of democracy. One, Calhoun, saw the rise and spread of democracy as an existential threat and spent the latter decades of his considerable career looking for ways to avert it. The last of the four, Emerson, is the most conflicted about democracy.

While neither embracing it nor denouncing it, Emerson looks instead to transcend democracy through the elevation of the individual to a place above and beyond the (in his view) petty conflicts—from the expansion of the suffrage to abolitionism to the establishment of intentional communities—in which his countrymen were engaged.

Although each of these authors have received considerable attention from scholars—though by no means as much as they are due—no scholar so far has considered the works of all four as interrelated responses to a particular political

12 Skinner (1995), 38 17 context, namely the rise of American democracy as a political problem. The decades during which each of them produced their most important works have been recognized as the “American renaissance,” during which time a peculiarly American style of prose and verse writing emerged, but very little systematic attention has been paid to the extent to which the problems attending the democratization of America during the first half of the nineteenth century provides not only a backdrop but also the crucial, animating impulse for the production of the aforementioned works.13 If the 1850s witnessed the re-birth of American intellectual life, the proximate cause for this naissance was the rise of American democracy. Understanding the works of Calhoun,

Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass as, at least in part, responses to what we might call the problems of American democracy, illuminates both the works themselves and the political milieu from which they emerged. That is to say, reading the works of Calhoun,

Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass as responses to the problems of American democracy simultaneously increases our capacity to make sense of their works, our capacity to make sense of the time in which they lived, and our ability to apprehend their relevance to the present.

A note on my reasons for selecting these four authors from the admittedly wide field available is probably in order here. Of the many I might offer, two seem to me particularly salient. First, while the pages that follow largely concern the history of

American political thought, therefore placing this work in the genre of political theory,

13 The phrase comes, of course, from F.O. Matthiessen’s book The American Renaissance. The decade of the 1850s saw the publication of major works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and, of course, Whitman, Douglass, and Emerson. Although Calhoun is outside of Matthiessen’s scope of inquiry, his Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution were published posthumously in 1851, deserves to be considered along with the others. 18 what I am attempting here is something like a comparative case study. These four authors offer sufficient diversity of background and perspective while at the same time addressing broadly similar thematic issues to warrant treating them together. Given their diversity, the similarities and differences between them are instructive. Understanding all four will go some distance toward understanding what democracy meant in late- antebellum America, and will, therefore, offer some purchase for understanding subsequent developments and, therefore, some sense of how we might understand the way similar ideas work in the present. This, I hope, will make the present study useful to students of American political thought, political development, democracy, republicanism, and liberalism alike, as well as, perhaps, empirical scholars of the history of American politics.

Second, all four of the authors to whom I devote chapters are, unquestionably, major thinkers in the history of American political thought. Each was influential in his time, and each continues to influence theorists in the present. As such, understanding the context out of which each thinker emerged, and to which each of them responded, gives us an opportunity to better apprehend the nature of their ideas. This will be of interest to democratic theorists in particular. How, for example, did Emerson’s notion of self-reliance relate to democratic political culture and politics at the time? A good answer to this question ought to inform considerations of the ways in which Emersonian notions of self-reliance might be expected to work in the present.

At the heart of the works of the authors considered in the pages of this dissertation is a question—what is, or ought to be, American democracy? For Calhoun, democracy in America named a path down which the United States would only find

19 disunion and disaster. For Emerson, democracy was simultaneously a form of government well-suited to the present state of the American citizenry and a roadblock to the full development and deployment of their faculties. For Douglass, democracy in

America named both a brutal regime of white supremacy and the best hope for the destruction of that regime and its replacement with one truer to the promise of equal justice and citizenship proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. For Whitman, democracy named the central idea around which American politics and culture ought to be organized. For all four, democracy in

America was a novel development, though its origins could be traced to the founding, and it was the locus of a fundamental conflict over the future of the nation, and the world.

This dissertation proceeds through five substantive chapters. Chapter 1 provides some necessary historical background on the history of American political thought, and it seeks, specifically, to locate American apprehensions of democracy. I use the word

“apprehension” here precisely because of its twofold meaning: both understanding and fear. I outline the ways in which Americans understood democracy and the reasons why they were afraid of it.

Chapter 2 seeks to clarify and deepen our understanding of the history of

American apprehension of democracy from the founding through the first few decades of the nineteenth century. It does so, because this history is the context to which the primary writings of the authors with whom we are concerned were, more or less apprehensively, responding.

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John C. Calhoun is the subject of Chapter 3. The things for which Calhoun is best remembered—his defense of race-based chattel slavery as a “positive good” for both the masters and the enslaved, the theory of nullification, the rationale for secession, and the idea of concurrent majorities—might appear, on the surface, disparate, but they are of a piece. Each of them forms a part of what was, for Calhoun, an all-out assault on what he saw as the single greatest danger facing the American republic: democracy.

That democracy posed an existential threat to the South and its peculiar institution is easy enough to grasp, but Calhoun goes further. The leveling impulse, whether implicit or explicit, in democratic political rhetoric and ideology would, if implemented institutionally, sound the death knell not only for the South, but also for the

United States as a whole. Deploying arguments and idioms that combine a republican concern for preserving natural hierarchy and organic communities with rights-based liberal institutionalism, Calhoun articulates a systematically anti-democratic theory of what he calls “popular rule.”

Chapter 4 addresses the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose relationship to democracy is more ambiguous than Calhoun’s, and, indeed, more ambiguous than is commonly recognized. While by no means, or at least no straightforward means, ought we call Emerson, like Calhoun, an anti-democratic thinker, we might reasonably follow his ostensible mentee, Walt Whitman, in citing the non-democratic attitude of Emerson’s works. Emerson’s primary concern, best expressed in his theory of self-reliance, was with the cultivation of the individual. There is nothing inherently anti-democratic about this, but it is important to recognize, to a greater extent than is common among

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Emerson’s recent interpreters, that Emerson was interested in cultivating individuals of a particular kind. Specifically, he hoped to inspire those at the fringes of America’s commercial aristocracy to recognize their latent potential to be leaders, not followers, to be great rather than esteemed. Democracy, political and otherwise, inasmuch as it demands concern for the opinions and approval of others, is for Emerson an obstacle to self-cultivation and self-reliance.

While Emerson’s individualism leads many interpreters to consider him as a peculiar kind of liberal, his concern with self-reliance, viewed politically, ought to be understood in the republican context of natural aristocracy. That is to say, self-reliance is a method by which natural aristocrats might be encouraged to arise. Self-reliance, therefore, requires an aversive attitude toward democracy.

Frederick Douglass, the subject of Chapter 5, has, like Emerson, an ambiguous relationship to democracy. Unlike Emerson, however, Douglass argues that the problem with American democracy is not that it is a bad or pernicious idea, but rather that its implications are insufficiently recognized and only prejudicially carried out. The most obvious instance of this, of course, is the willingness of so-called democrats to countenance the institution of chattel slavery, and the unwillingness of so-called democrats to countenance the notion that people of color be considered their political equals.

In pressing the argument that the internal logic of democracy militates against many of the practices approved and enabled by the actual practices of American democracy so-called, Douglass highlights several important issues that have been overlooked, and, in so doing, Douglass blends a republican concern with status and

22 qualitative distinctions among the people with a liberal insistence on the priority of rights. First, that democracy empowers the people themselves to interpret the meaning of their own constitutions. Second, that to have meaning, democratic equality must be expressed in institutions. Third, that to be recognized, democratic rights-claims must be backed up by force. If the state will not provide the force necessary to protect the rights- claims of its citizens, it is incumbent upon the people themselves to make good on them. Pace his erstwhile friends at the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass argues that equal rights must be asserted and taken, rather than begged and received as a boon.

Chapter 6 addresses the political thought of Walt Whitman who, among the four authors I consider here, offers the most unqualified endorsement of democracy. That

Whitman was a democrat will not be surprising to anyone familiar with his work.

However, while it is generally accepted that he was a political poet, and that his poetry represents a continuation of, rather than a break with, his youthful political and partisan activism, it is not clear what Whitman was trying to do when he wrote his political poetry.

In Chapter 6, I argue that Whitman’s poetry, at least through the first three editions of his Leaves of Grass, attempts to do at least three things. First, Whitman’s famous list-making, in which he rapidly presents scenes of American life from the perspectives of many different kinds of Americans, is an attempt at dramatizing democratic equality. The jumble of persons and images is a sort of representation of the hurly-burly of democratic life. Second, Whitman’s thematization of the relationship between author and reader is an attempt to dramatize the relationship among democratic citizens—one speaks or writes, in hopes of being understood; another

23 listens or reads, in hopes of understanding. This kind of give-and-take is essential to the work of democratic citizenship. Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, Whitman’s poetry is an attempt at cultural renovation. Whitman hopes, simultaneously, to inspire in his readers a quasi-religious faith in themselves, in their fellow-citizens, and in democracy, not only as a set of institutions, but as an organizing principle for democratic life.

The ideas, commitments, attitudes, and modus operandi of Calhoun, Emerson,

Douglass, and Whitman are wildly different from one another, but, as I will attempt to show in the following pages, they all evince a common set of concerns about democracy in America—what it means, how it works, and how we should respond to it.

In what follows, I do not attempt to plant any ideological flags—I do not contend that we should consider any of these thinkers liberals or republicans, for example—save one: all four share a sense that democracy means equality, majority rule, and the broadest possible access to political participation, and all four agree that following the logic of democracy would mean empowering people, including women, laborers, and people of color, as citizens. Calhoun, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Emerson, see danger in this. Whitman and Douglass see hope.

To see the threads that connect these four thinkers, it is necessary for us to have a sense of the landscape of American political thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. In each thinker’s work, we will see the influence of both liberal and republican ideas and ideological languages. We will also seek to understand the particular place the occupied by democracy within both liberal and republican political frameworks. The

24 next chapter will paint a picture of the political landscape of the mid-1800s and highlight its most relevant features, so that we might keep them in mind as we move forward.

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CHAPTER 2 APPREHENSION OF DEMOCRACY: THE TRADITIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT FROM THE FOUNDING TO THE AGE OF JACKSON

For the past several decades the question of the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the American Revolution and the Constitution has been a matter of considerable scholarly debate. Where once there was broad agreement about the fundamentally, even preternaturally, Lockean character of American political thought, scholars have identified several significant, and often countervailing ideological commitments in the works of Americans of the founding generation. At the very least, scholars typically recognize both liberal and republican language in the writings of

Americans of the founding generation, as well as both liberal and republican influence on the institutions they established. In addition to liberalism and republicanism, scholars have also suggested that Protestant work-ethic ideology, state-centered ideas about sovereignty, and ascriptive ideologies of racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies are also clearly identifiable.1 What are these different ideologies, and what do we make of them?

Once upon a time, around the middle of the twentieth century, the question of the philosophical underpinnings of American politics seemed an easy one to answer: Locke et praeterea nihil.2 Building on the works of Progressive historians like Charles and

Mary Beard, who located the origins of the American Constitution in the economic interests of its authors, scholars of American political thought in the middle of the

1 Astute readers will note that “democracy” is absent from this list, a matter to which I will return below 2 Shalhope (1972), 49. 26 twentieth century developed the idea of a “liberal consensus” in the United States.3

Liberalism “describes a tradition of thought that emphasizes toleration and respect for individual rights.”4 From the Declaration of Independence, which clearly echoes Locke in its subtle rephrasing of his notion that governments exist to protect the rights of the governed to life, liberty, and property, through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which enshrine the protection of individual rights, understood as protections from unwarranted government action, as the fundamental basis of the American government, to the New Deal consensus of the post WWII era, whatever conflicts arise in American politics are always and everywhere hemmed in by Lockean, liberal language.

First and foremost, liberal political thought is characterized by methodological individualism; or, to put it another way, the relevant unit of liberal political analysis is the individual. Second, liberalism is concerned with the rights of individuals, and is primarily concerned with individual rights to property. An individual, from a liberal perspective, has a right to whatever he (or, hypothetically, she) has produced by labor. Third, government exists to protect the rights of individuals. It was instituted to do so, and the justice of government obtains in the extent to which it successfully protects the rights of its citizens.

Crucial here is the notion that government, from a liberal perspective, has no claim to legitimacy other than its protection and preservation of the rights of the individual citizens over which it exercises authority. Liberal citizens owe nothing more to society or government than obedience to the laws and respect for the rights of their

3 See, for example, Beard (1913); Beard and Beard (1927). 4 Sandel (1996), 4 27 fellow-citizens, and they only owe that much as long as their own rights are being protected. These rights are self-evident, and they exist prior to any political decision- making.

Fourth, and finally, the primary function performed by government, other than the protection of the rights of citizens from hostile external forces, is the neutral adjudication of disputes arising between citizens. Hence, liberalism is often described as presenting a vision of politics that obtains between self-interested and atomistic individuals overseen by a government acting as a neutral umpire when disputes arise as an inevitable result of the jostling that occurs when these various atoms bump into one another. Liberal politics is merely the business of adjudicating disputes between individuals with competing individual and/or proprietary rights-claims.

According to an eminent midcentury historian and consensus scholar, whatever

“fierceness” we see in American political conflict is mostly on the surface, and is therefore “misleading: for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties [to these conflicts] has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, and the value of competition.”5 That is to say, political conflict in the

United States tends to be about the proper application and interpretation of liberal political ideas, which form an unquestioned—perhaps unquestionable—set of background commitments even among the severest disputants.

5 Hofstadter (1948), xxxvi-xxxvii 28

Take the debate over abolition, for example. On the one hand, abolitionists insisted that holding human beings as chattel property violated the rights of the enslaved by taking from them, without their consent, the fruits of their labor. On the other hand, defenders of slavery argued, at the very least, that emancipating enslaved persons would deprive their owners of property to which they had a just claim. Both sides in this debate use the language of rights and individualism, though the intensity of their disagreement is not diminished by the proximity of their ideological commitments.

Even the debate over slavery, on this reading, was conducted in largely liberal terms.

The primacy of the individual, the priority of rights to politics, and the integrity of individual labor to the just procurement of a livelihood are always assumed. Sic semper

Americanis says the scholar of the consensus school.

Upon closer examination, however, several cracks appear in the consensus model. For starters, consensus scholars tend to run together Locke and liberalism. This is troubling for at least two reasons. First, applying the word “liberal” to the late seventeenth and eighteenth century is anachronistic, as the constellation of ideas that we tend to group under that term did not come together until the middle to late years of the nineteenth century. We say “Locke and liberalism” when we really mean to indicate

Locke’s influence on later thinkers like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, with whom Locke would have been in fundamental disagreement on a number of points.6 To put it another way, while it is clear that Locke influenced the American

6 For example, Locke’s qualification on an individual’s right to acquisition, on the grounds that as much and as good be left for others, is particularly significant in times of scarcity, and certainly challenges Sumner’s notion that those who prove to be the fittest in economic competition will and ought be entitled to whatever rewards they’re able to reap. Similarly, Locke’s idea that the earth is the common inheritance of all mankind has potentially interesting implications for the political and economic relationship between landowners and everyone else. For thoughts on this issue, see Thomas Paine’s “Agrarian Justice.” 29

Revolutionaries and the framers of the Constitution, it is not clear that Locke’s influence leads directly to liberalism in the way that is implied.7

Second, if much of the rhetoric around the revolution and founding was Lockean and liberal, it only seems to dominate America if one ignores the significant counter- example of the American South. While the political philosophy of the northern states may well have been strongly influenced by Locke, and characterized by general acceptance of the notion that human beings are created free and equal, only entering into government to preserve the rights that are theirs by nature, the slaveholding South quite naturally had other ideas. In several southern states, a majority of the population was quite literally enslaved. For these unfortunates, heady revolutionary talk about throwing off the yoke of British tyranny might’ve been risible if not for the tragedy of their situation.

The irony was not lost on Samuel Johnson, who noted in Parliament that the loudest yelps for liberty seemed to come from “the drivers of negroes.”8 For the masters of slaves, loose talk about natural rights and the justice of overthrowing governments that violate them was enough to induce mortal dread.9 To state the point more plainly, the notion that a nation that enslaved some twenty percent of its total population was

7 See Ashcraft (1980) 8 Quoted in Boswell (1820), 591 9 And, I should point out, their dread was not entirely unreasonable. In addition to Jefferson’s trembling for his country when he reflected upon God’s justice, Gabriel Prosser’s averted revolt in Richmond and the successful revolution in Haiti caused the backsides of many American slaveholders to pucker at the thought of a servile rebellion. 30 resolutely committed to liberalism, or that it would have been if its people had not been blinkered by racism, seems flimsy at best.10

To preserve the notion of a liberal consensus, believers in and proponents of that school are obliged to treat the decidedly illiberal political philosophy of the American slaveholders as aberrant or anachronistic, which is precisely the approach taken by

Hartz and Hoffstadter.11 This, in spite of the facts.

Southern cotton production was increasingly central to the American economy during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, southern representatives were critical to debates and decision-making in the Constitutional Convention and subsequent meetings Congress, and slaveholding members of the Virginia gentry held the presidency of the United States, with the brief four-year breaks of the John and John

Q. Adams administrations, from 1789 till 1824, the bulk of the nation’s formative years.12

The implication would seem to be that southerners were important contributors to the development of American political institutions and development, if not to American political thought.

There is something almost baffling about this tendency to treat at least half the nation—the half whose cotton was the engine of the national economy, whose working class was locked into a race-based system of chattel slavery, and whose planter class

10 Indeed, there is evidence that racial attitudes developed in response to, and were, therefore, not a cause of, race-based chattel slavery in the United States (see, for example, Fields 1990 and Jordan 1974). 11 Hartz (1952, 32; 1955, 186) dismisses the South’s illiberal political ideology as “a simple fraud,” that threw the South’s defenders “into fantastic contradictions.” Hoffstadter, in a chapter on Calhoun, Hoffstadter (1948, 117-118) considers him an anachronism, a Marxist avant la lettre, a theorist of class conflict in defense of the masters of the means of production rather than the proletariat. 12 On the increasing importance of the cotton economy, see Beckert (2014) 101-110 31 was source of many of the nation’s most prominent political leaders—might be treated so cavalierly. Slavery, and its defenders, presents a far greater challenge to the notion of a preternatural American commitment to liberalism than is admitted by scholars of the consensus school.

Third, and finally, scholars of the liberal consensus cannot explain why, even if the motivation for the American Revolution was Lockean or liberal, the founders of the

United States styled themselves after the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and established governments that they called republics. Scholars of what has come to be called the “republican synthesis” picked up this issue starting in the late 1960s and continuing with vigor through the 1980s.13 When one looks closely at the political language and ideology deployed at the time of the American Revolution and the ensuing decades, one finds not Locke, or at least not Locke et praeterea nihil, but a rather different political ideology with a fundamentally different understanding of the nature of politics, governance, and citizenship.

With origins at least as far back as Aristotle, and contiguous with a tradition that ran through Machiavelli to James Harrington and the radical Whigs of the late seventeenth century, republicanism, or civic humanism, made its way to the New World along with boatloads of Britons of a Whiggish persuasion who had imbibed elements of this tradition prior to emigrating. American soil proved fertile ground for the cultivation of republican ideas. Liberalism entails “commitment to freedom, tolerance, self-rule, the rule of law, and justice,” understood negatively as the absence of constraints, an ecumenical attitude toward the variety of Christian sects, occasional participation in the

13 See, for example, Bailyn (1967), Wood (1969), and Pocock (1975) 32 selection of rulers, the supremacy of the law to the rulers, and respect for property rights. Republicanism, though it shares some of these commitments, offers a rather different understanding of their import.14

The republican political tradition can, without excessive violence, be boiled down to a handful of propositions. First, freedom requires not merely the absence of constraint on the private decision-making of individuals in their economic lives, but also the positive participation of virtuous citizens in the public life of a political community. To be virtuous, citizens must be willing and able to put the public good over their private interests. To be capable of doing accomplishing such a feat, citizens must be possessed of sufficient economic wherewithal to be above considering the pecuniary implications of public policy.

This meant, as a practical matter, that republican citizens were expected to be property-holders. Anyone who did not possess property enough to see to his material needs without worrying about the health of his business or the receipt of pay from debtors or employers or consumers, was ineligible for republican citizenship because he was incapable of the kind of independence required for virtue. Considered negatively, anyone who was dependent upon another for his livelihood—such as a wage-earner who owns nothing but his capacity to work, for example, and is therefore dependent upon the man who cuts his checks—would be incapable of independent decision- making, because he would have to consider the impact of political decisions on his livelihood, and would be incapable of the kind of public-spirited independence required of virtuous republican citizens.

14 Cohen (2002), 6 33

Second, and related, republicanism assumes qualitative distinctions within the population, and it presupposes that subgroups within the population are likely to conflict with one another. In any society with a complex economy, wealth is likely to accumulate. While some people will spend most of their time working to procure the necessities of life, others will, by virtue of their wealth, find themselves free to engage in other pursuits. These two groups of people are liable to find themselves at odds with one another, politically. Republican government both recognizes this conflict and attempts to diffuse it. Aristotle’s conception of a republic, to take a particularly influential example, is a “mixed regime,” that incorporates aspects of aristocratic and democratic rule—understood as the rule of those who do not need to labor to live and those who do, respectively—in hopes of circumventing the tendency toward degeneration endemic to both.

True aristocracy means rule by the aristoi, the best men in the community.

Because the difference between the best and the rest is not always, or even often, readily apparent, wealth is often an easy shorthand for virtue and ability.15 As a result, aristocracy tends to degenerate into oligarchy. Instead of disinterested and virtuous rule by the best, we get corrupt and self-interested rule by the rich. Democracy, for Aristotle and for most of the republican theorists who follow him, has no ideal form akin to aristocracy. It means rule by the many, which, practically and as a result of the nature of the distribution of wealth in any advanced and civilized society, always means self- interested rule by the poor. Over time, democracy always ends up in self-destruction.

When the vulnerability of property to the caprices of the many short-circuits the

15 See Morgan (1988) 34 economy, anarchy ensues, and democracy devolves into tyranny when the many cast about for someone to lead them out of the mess they’ve created.

To maximize the benefits of aristocracy while minimizing the risk of oligarchy, the many—the democratic element—must have some say in the conduct of government to prevent the development of a predatory oligarchy. But to protect property, and to give voice to those whose position gives them time and space to cultivate learning and virtue, the few—the aristocratic element—must likewise have its share. In a well- ordered republic, the latter share should predominate.16 Hence, the republic is a mixed regime that blends aristocracy and democracy, which divides citizens on the basis of qualitative differences of virtue, talent, ability, and wealth. In general, the aristocratic element is presumed to have much of the aforementioned, while the democratic element is presumed to have very little of them.

The upshot, here, is that for most republican theorists, the virtues required for republican freedom are not evenly distributed throughout the population. Those who are expected to be independent and disinterested participants in politics, to be, in a word, virtuous, and to occupy positions of political leadership, are natural aristocrats, those who are—truly rather than by mere accident of bloodline, title, or wealth—the best.

These natural aristocrats are the ones expected to evince the active virtues valued by republican theorists. For the rest, the democratic element, virtue is also expected, but not in the same way.

The proper virtue for the democratic element is deference. “It was,” Pocock argues, “self-evident to any republican theorist that the people in a commonwealth must

16 See Politics IV, 11

35 be differentiated into an aristocratic and a democratic component.”17 For the American republicans of the Revolutionary Era, as for their progenitors in England, this division would, or should, be natural and voluntary. In all matters of public affairs, however many people are gathered together to make decisions, some few will lead the debate, and their ideas will hold sway over the rest. These few are natural aristocrats, and they will, or ought to be, deferred to in matters of political leadership.

This does, indeed, seem to be what some influential American republicans had in mind. As John Adams put it in a letter to Jefferson,

Pick up the first 100 men you meet, and make a Republick. Every Man will have an equal Vote. But when deliberations and discussions are opened it will be found that 25, by their Talents, Virtues being equal, will be able to carry 50 Votes. Every one of these 25 is an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word.18

Looking around, one finds that the people are usually not a homogeneous mass.

They are, instead, usually diverse, composed of people with various and unequal abilities who are also, usually, unequally virtuous. The virtuous and talented will, if given the freedom to participate in politics and accorded the due deference of their fellow- citizens, lead. Those who are less virtuous and less talented will, in a rightly organized society, willingly follow their betters.

After the Revolutionary War had been successfully prosecuted, “Americans liked…to think of themselves as a society without rank. Yet they had always distinguished the ‘better sort’ among them from the ‘middling sort’ and from the ‘poorer

17 Pocock (1976), 518 18 Quoted in Cappon (1988), 398 36 sort,’” and lacking the rigid hierarchy provided by a world of titles and official positions, wealth, or the lack of it, served as a proxy for worth.

“In any society,” it was believed, “different natural capacities and abilities would mark out some men for distinction,” and “it was they whom their compatriots must place in the upper houses of their legislatures, and so bring to government the stability and wisdom that hereditary aristocracy so poorly supplied through the House of Lords in

England.”19 Republicanism, at least the strain of it expressed by Adams, in America entailed an attempt at replacing the role of the hereditary aristocracy with a natural one.

If the increasing size and scope of the nation made it difficult, if not impossible, to measure the worth of each individual by personal knowledge of his virtue, the capacity to amass wealth vouchsafed for a measure of prudence, frugality, and personal magnetism.20

Unfortunately, the republican synthesis, like the liberal consensus, has serious flaws. First, for all their vehemence about the importance of republican ideology to the

Revolutionary and Founding Eras, scholars of republicanism tend to agree that the adoption of the Constitution marked “the end of classical politics” in the United States.21

According to Wood, Federalist supporters of the Constitution abandoned republicanism and, in so doing, eliminated “whatever chance there was in America for an avowedly aristocratic conception of politics and thereby contributed to that encompassing liberal

19 Morgan (1988), 248-249 20 This, perhaps, goes some distance towards explaining Adams’s horror, after 1776, about the rise of “new men of no background and—as he conceived it—selfish aims, who had been thrown to the top by revolutionary ferment. His greatest fear was that they would knock the props from under the essentially stable colonial society in a wild rush to profit from its destruction,” (Douglass 1955, 183). 21 See Wood (1969), 606-610; Bailyn, too ends his book by sounding a sour note on the abandonment of republicanism after the adoption of the Constitution. 37 tradition which has mitigated and often obscured the real social antagonisms of

American politics.”22

Driven by a neo-Harringtonian humanist ideology that stressed the importance of civic virtue, the political participation of disinterested and public-spirited men, and the importance of qualitative distinctions amongst the people, the founders of the United

States styled their government a republic and themselves the natural—rather than merely titular—aristocrats who by rights ought to find themselves, as they did, in positions of leadership. When the republican governments they created faltered in the face of events, the founders suffered a failure of nerve. A new generation of natural aristocrats did not appear on the scene to take the reins from the men who led the revolution. Americans despaired of their republic and replaced it with the liberal

Constitution under which America drifted from republican and toward liberal-democratic government. The revolution and the decades that followed it, then, witnessed in rather quick succession both the high noon and the sunset of republicanism in the United

States.

This is the sense that Pocock has in mind when he cites “the American

Revolution and the Constitution” as “the last act of the civic Renaissance.”23 It is interesting that for all the hubbub about a republican synthesis at the founding, many of the seminal historians and theorists of American republicanism suggest that this powerful motive force of the Revolution expired, or was eclipsed, after no more than two decades. The victorious arguments of the Federalists during the ratification debates

22 Wood (1969), 562 23 Pocock (1975), 462 38 referenced “the people” as the authorizing agents of government, but abandoned both the notions of republican virtue and the qualitative distinctions upon which virtue was predicated that might have given specific meaning to the notion that the people ruled.

The Federalists assumed that enlightened and virtuous statesmen “will not always be at the helm” of the ship of state.24 People are ineradicably selfish.

Governance is a specialized business best left to experts, and the people ought not participate in any way other than the occasional election. Human beings are, fundamentally, self-interested individuals rather than virtuous citizens. Government exists to protect their rights. Locke may not have dominated the Revolution, but he does seem to dominate its aftermath.

The federal Constitution, so the argument goes, enshrined Lockean assumptions in the governing institutions of the United States, and moved the nation’s political theory away from republicanism and toward liberalism. As such, scholars of the republican synthesis merely push back the arrival of the liberal consensus from the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. “In America,” according to Pocock,

the relative unimportance of hereditary station and political patronage meant that political elites, where they existed, were, above all in the postindependence era, cast more exclusively in the role of natural aristocracy and compelled to rely on the expectation of deference to the exclusion of any other means of maintaining their status…[which] explains why American political thought soon became and long remained preoccupied with acclaiming or deploring the failure of natural aristocracy, and the Federalists with the role of aristocrats struggling to understand the failure of the deference due to them.25

24 Madison Federalist 10, 43 25 Pocock (1976), 523 39

This, then, goes some distance toward explaining the destruction of the

Federalists after the wave of democratization that swept the United States in the decade after the ratification of the Constitution. As the United States moved toward universal white male suffrage, and property qualifications on the suffrage fell in state after state, the aristocratic posture of the Federalists meant doom in a democratized electorate.

Pocock insists that the republican “vocabulary of virtue and corruption persisted in American thought,” even after the end of the Federalists, “not merely as a survival slowly dying after its tap-root was cut, but with a reality and relevance to elements in

American experience that kept it alive and in tension with the consequences that followed its partial abandonment in so crucial a field as constitutional theory and rhetoric.”26 Although this seems true, Pocock presents very little evidence of the “reality and relevance” of republicanism to Americans after the ratification of the Constitution.

There are, perhaps, good reasons for this.

For starters, if one looks for the reality and relevance of aristocratic republican language in post-Founding American politics, one quickly finds the group of agrarian slaveholders called the Tertium Quids, for whom republicanism provided a language by and through which they could defend slavery and reject the egalitarian democratic and liberal language and practice that was ascendant in the United States around the turn of the 19th century.27 This aristocratic republican language informed the work of later defenders of slavery, like Calhoun, who saw the enslavement of the toiling classes as a means to solve the problem of democratic majority rule.

26 Pocock (1975), 526 27 Although he does not intend to do so, Russell Kirk (1997) illustrates this point quite clearly in his intellectual biography of John Randolph of Roanoke, the leader of the Tertium Quids. 40

One can also find remnants of republican language in the works of democratic- republicans, who rejected the notion of aristocratic privilege but retained a republican commitment to political participation. Perhaps because scholars of the republican synthesis, by and large, are not interested in endorsing slavery or democratic- republicanism, they have for the most part failed to theorize the works of antebellum

Americans in republican terms. This leads me to another criticism of the republican synthesis.

In their insistence that republicanism was an alternative to Lockean liberalism,

Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock, probably inadvertently, instigated something of a scramble for American ideological history. A voluminous literature has arisen arguing that this or that historical figure in American political thought can only be rightly understood as a liberal or a republican.28 The unfortunate thing about this literature is that it presumes that an either/or choice needs to be made when, in fact, it is a fairly easy thing to find political thinkers at the revolutionary or founding eras—or, indeed, later decades— blending, willy-nilly, political commitments that could be described as both liberal and republican.

One need not go so far as to insist that “Lockean liberalism and neo-

Harringtonian republicanism are joined at the trunk,” but accepting the plausibility of the assertion would go some distance towards explaining why it is that most Americans, during the first half-century of their nation’s existence, evinced no discomfort when they blended the idioms of liberal rights and republican virtue.29 Republican notions of the

28 See, for example, Kloppenberg (1987), Shain (1994), and Rodgers (1992). 29 Huyler (1997, 532). Locke was, after all, the personal assistant of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftsbury, one of the leading Commonwealthmen whom Pocock (1975) identifies with the republican tradition of Atlantic humanism. Furthermore, a cursory glance over Locke’s life and works hardly comports 41 zoon politicon, vita activa, and homo politicus and liberal notions of homo laborans and otium seem to have coexisted without much sense of their internal contradictions in the minds of many American thinkers, to say nothing of average American citizens.30 If these were distinct traditions, one wonders at the extent to which American writers, thinkers, and citizens at the time failed to notice.31

Third, and at least as importantly, the scholarly focus on liberalism and republicanism has crowded out from the academic discussion a number of other traditions. Kramnick adds at least two. In addition to liberalism and republicanism, we find aspects of Protestant and Calvinist work-ethic and state-centered theories of sovereignty that are not reducible to either of the two aforementioned traditions.

Furthermore, republican notions of virtue, for example, were demonstrably altered by their contact with these other traditions. Older republican commitments to the classical virtues of independence, courage, and magnanimity were replaced, or eclipsed, by

Protestant notions of thrift, sobriety, and diligence.32 To put the point another way, contact between republicanism and liberalism likely altered both.

And yet, as Pocock argues, something of a real transition seems to have taken place around the turn of the nineteenth century. Where republican virtue describes relations among people who are qualitatively “differentiated into diversely qualified and

with the notion of an atomistic liberal self, “socially adrift, alienated, and alone.” Instead, Locke was a prodigiously active participant in a politically active and intellectually engaged community (Huyler 1997, 529). 30 Indeed, many Americans, if Altschuler and Blumin’s (2001) analysis is correct, never bought fully into either the liberal regime of neutral rights nor the republican notion of active and virtuous political engagement, preferring instead what the authors call a vernacular liberal-republicanism. 31 Kramnick (1990). 32 Kramnick (1990), 187 42 functioning groups,” the Constitution and its Federalist defenders assume that “the people” is an undifferentiated mass that authorizes government but never directly participates in government.33

But arguments based on “the people” as a qualitatively undifferentiated mass were not universal in post-ratification America, as would seem to be indicated by the fact that American politics at the turn of the nineteenth century revolved, in part, around conflicts in many states between proponents of “universal suffrage” and defenders of property-based qualifications on the right to vote. Among the latter were many

Federalists, who often argued that the interests of the people were so unified, that the public good was so general, that control of the government could be safely entrusted to the property-owners. Among the former were groups of artisans and laborers, yeomen farmers and others, who rallied around Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican banner. These Democratic-Republicans argued that there were, indeed, qualitative distinctions amongst Americans, which was precisely the reason why they wanted the suffrage. The interests of property-owners were not identical to the interests of what came to be called the “productive classes,” by which was meant those who earn their livelihood by work, not rents. That is to say, the Democratic-Republicans were republicans, but not aristocrats.34

Additionally, however, as Rogers Smith demonstrates in considerable detail, all of these traditions of political thought coexisted alongside another strand, to which none

33 Pocock (1975), 517. 34 As Edmund Morgan (1988) points out, qualitative distinctions amongst the population of the United States did indeed obtain, though as time went on through urbanization and industrialization, it became more difficult to assess, personally, the difference between people of the higher, middling, and lower sort. Wealth became a quantitative proxy for this qualitative assessment. 43 of them are reducible but from which none were immune, which he calls “ascriptive

Americanism.”35 Americans have a long tradition of circumscribing their notions of who qualifies as a “man” in the liberal sense of being a possessor of unalienable rights, and although we have already discussed some of the ways in which eligibility for political citizenship in the republican sense were conditional on the basis of qualitative distinctions, we have yet to consider the role of race and gender.

Looking into the history of American definitions of citizenship, Smith found that

“much of the history of America’s citizenship laws [does] not fit with liberalism as Hartz described it or republicanism as Pocock described it.” Instead of “stressing protection of individual rights for all in liberal fashion, or participation in common civic institutions in republican fashion,” American citizenship laws are “shot through with forms of second- class citizenship, denying personal liberties and opportunities for participation to most of the adult population on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and even religion.”36 These are what Smith calls the “illiberal, undemocratic traditions of ascriptive Americanism” that have shaped political ideology and institutions in the United States from the founding through the present.37

Ascriptive Americanism, the creation of racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies, informs and qualifies American thinking about citizenship, freedom, and government at every level and on all sides. Smith insists, however, that the logic of ascriptive hierarchy fits much more neatly with republican thought than it does with liberalism. Against

Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, among others, Smith argues that liberal commitment

35 Smith (1997) 36 Smith (1997), 2 37 Smith (1997), 36 44 to universal rights exists alongside, but separate from and in considerable tension with, racist and patriarchal commitments to racial and gendered hierarchies.38 The logic of republican virtue, on the other hand, insists already upon qualitative distinctions amongst both citizens and denizens, and is therefore much more amenable to the logic of ascriptive Americanism.39 Whereas critiques of ascriptive hierarchies are immanent in the logic of liberalism, the logic of republicanism reinforces them.

Although Smith’s Civic Ideals is thoroughgoing in its consideration of the laws of citizenship, I propose that we, for now, remain agnostic as to the relationship between either republican or liberal thought, and ascriptive hierarchy, for at least this reason: republican citizenship entails both virtue and participation, while liberal citizenship does not. To put it another way, and to echo Pocock, treating citizens as an undifferentiated mass and requiring nothing but obedience to (and perhaps authorization of) the laws is a much lower bar to clear than the one presented by liberalism. Perhaps because this is true, American theorists of elite politics, such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, were often much more willing to countenance the political participation of people toward the bottom of the usual social hierarchy, as long as they could demonstrate their worthiness by, for example, accumulating wealth, than were more egalitarian theorists, such as Thomas Jefferson, who feared what might happen if slaves or former slaves were freed and allowed to participate on the level of their erstwhile masters.40

38 Smith (1997), 29-30 39 For this reason, Smith (1997, 197-242) dubs the era of Jacksonian democracy the “High Noon of the White Republic.” 40 In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson worries that emancipation would result in a race-war that would lead to the extermination of either the blacks or the whites. The latter stages of the French Revolution, in particular, put a fear in the hearts of Democratic-Republicans. “Our Negroes,” as Edmund C. Holland of South Carolina put it, “are truly the Jacobins of the country,” (quoted in Wilentz 2005, 239).

45

So, we have either competing ideologies informing the language of American political thought, or we have a set of relevant issues that are dealt with, variously and in piecemeal fashion, by American political thinkers and actors who were willing to draw on the multiple traditions and languages at their disposal, adapting and adjusting them in the process, to address what they see as the pressing needs of the present. The latter seems significantly more plausible, but heretofore our discussion has been abstract. Let’s turn to a few examples, and let’s attend to the role democracy plays in the conflicts between liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive Americanisms.

The reasons for, and bases of, Americans’ apprehension of democracy are myriad, but a few are particularly salient and consequential for our purposes. First, many Americans worried that, when understood as majority rule and direct participation in governance, democracy provided no security for the rights of property and was, on a national scale, impracticable. Second, many Americans worried that democratic egalitarianism was not conducive, or was actively hostile, to the generation and elevation of great and good men to public esteem and high public office. Third, many

Americans worried that democratic egalitarianism created a stultifying atmosphere in which dissent from the opinions of the majority would be all but impossible for any but the hardiest and most hard-headed citizens. Fourth, and finally, many Americans worried that the egalitarian logic of democratic citizenship—combined with the prima facie egalitarian language of the Declaration of independence—would tend irresistibly toward promiscuity in the distribution of rights and liberties, which promiscuity would all but certainly undermine the entire project of self-government by introducing unfit persons to both the franchise and public esteem.

46

The framers of the Constitution of the United States wanted to put as much distance between themselves and democracy as was practically possible. They had very good reasons for doing so. In the process of prosecuting the Revolutionary War, the architects of American independence, with whatever reservations they might have had subordinated to the exigencies of the great national cause, had embraced broadly egalitarian arguments for and interpretations of the revolution. It would have been difficult, otherwise, to convince the yeoman farmers, laborers, mechanics, and artisans who formed the basis of the Continental Army to serve on any other grounds. If not to guarantee their full citizenship and economic rights under a new system, why risk death against the might of the military of Great Britain?

These revolutionary chickens began to come home to roost during the 1780s.41

Veterans began to demand that the United States government make good on the debts they owed for the service rendered by the soldiers of the Revolution. American soldiers were paid mostly in script—essentially promissory notes printed and signed by the

Continental Congress. The colonies, by and large, depended upon transatlantic export markets for their livelihood. Prior to the revolution, by dint of official policy as well as the vagaries of transatlantic travel, this market had primarily entailed trade between the

American colonies and Great Britain. Great Britain was in no mood to treat a newly independent nation, with which it had just lost a war and from which it could collect no taxes other than tariffs, as a friendly commercial ally. As a result, the economy in the former colonies collapsed. Times were hard. Many Americans found themselves in debt and at risk of imprisonment, forfeiture of their assets, and loss of their livelihood. The

41 Douglass (1955) 47 national Congress established by the American Articles of Confederation had no capacity to raise money or coordinate internal policy. Among other things, it could not make good on the IOUs issued to continental soldiers.

Many of the Americans suffering from the postwar economic downturn were

Revolutionary War veterans, and many of them had a significant number of promissory notes given to them in lieu of pay by the Continental Congress. Sadly for these unfortunates, their creditors refused to accept a revolutionary IOU at anything approaching face-value, and the Continental Congress had neither the wherewithal to make good on payments nor the authority to raise the requisite funds, which could only come, voluntarily, from the governments of the various states.42 So, many veterans of the Revolutionary War, having abandoned their farms and fields for a season or two to fight the British, found themselves in debt, holding irredeemable script from a government they’d fought to establish, and at risk—at the very least—of being imprisoned and/or losing their property for debts owed to local bankers and merchants.

Many found this situation untenable, and some found in it cause for a new revolution.

Shays’s Rebellion was one such revolution, and it was likely the most consequential.43 Daniel Shays joined the Revolutionary War as a soldier and rose in the ranks about as far as was possible for a man without political connections. When he returned to his home in western Massachusetts, he found himself in precisely the

42 Many others had sold, at less than face-value, their continental script to speculators, whose deep pockets allowed them to hold the promissory notes until such a time as their value could be redeemed. 43 In his explanation of the need for a stronger national government (in Federalist #6), Alexander Hamilton mentioned Shays by name, noting that if the old revolutionary “had not been a desperate debtor it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.” Hamilton’s point was that conflicts between debtors and creditors are often intense, and Shays’s Rebellion serves as an example of what can happen when government is too weak to prevent such conflicts from boiling over. 48 situation described above. He, along with many of his neighbors, was in debt, due in part to the time he’d spent away from his farm and also in part to the economic depression that followed the war. He also had a fair amount of script which the

Continental Congress would not or could not redeem, and which the banks would not accept as payment. Many of his friends and neighbors were hauled into debtors’ courts and held in debtors’ prisons. In the summer of 1786, Shays and several comrades, many of whom were also Revolutionary veterans, decided they’d had enough.

Shays and his allies began by attacking and shutting down debtors’ courts in western Massachusetts, the idea being that if it were impossible to legally adjudicate a person’s liability for debts, it would be impossible to collect, thereby saving families from foreclosure and men from imprisonment. This activity continued through the year, and the movement built momentum. By early 1787, much of western Massachusetts was in open rebellion against the government in Boston. Shays and his allies set upon the idea of attacking the armory in Springfield, liberating the heavy guns therein, and marching on the state legislature to demand redress of their grievances. The rebellion was put down by a combination of state militia, hired guns, and bad weather.

This was the final straw for many Americans who were convinced that government under the Articles of Confederation was unworkable. Not only had the national government failed to deliver on its promises to the soldiers that had enabled its existence, it had also failed to muster an army of its own to put down the rebellion in

Massachusetts. This was a national embarrassment, and it boded ill for the future of the country.

49

This, many thought, is what democracy looks like: armed and indebted soldiers attacking the rule of law itself in hopes of thereby finding relief from their penury. Such fears were not far from the minds of the framers of the Constitution, which was written in the shadow of Shays.44 The apprehensions of the founders were quickened by the election, in the aftermath of the rebellion, of a number of men who expressed sympathy with the ends, if not the means, of the rebels.45 Having thrown off the yoke of British tyranny, the new nation found itself at risk of degenerating into democratic chaos. The

Constitution was made to avert the disaster of democracy.

Consider, for example, James Madison’s insistence, in the tenth issue of The

Federalist, that “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.

Theoretic politicians,” by which Madison meant political philosophers with little or no actual experience with government or governing, “who have patronized this species of

Government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their personal rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”46 That is to say, the political theory of democracy holds that it is enough to give individuals equal rights and allow them to participate in political decision-making. This ignores the possibility, even the likelihood, that residual dissimilarities between political equals— differences of wealth, ability, opinion, passion, and so on—might serve as grounds for

44 Hamilton mentions Shays by name in the sixth issue of The Federalist 45 See Miller (1959) 143-146 46 Federalist 44

50 the formation of factions, self-interested groups of individuals, that would, if they constituted a majority of the political community, run roughshod over the rights of their countrymen.

The problem of faction and the problem of democracy are, for Madison, joined at the trunk. Faction, by which Madison means “a number of citizens…united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,” is a persistent problem to which free governments are most peculiarly susceptible, particularly when free government is to be instituted over a diverse and civilized community. 47 This is so because factions are inevitable anytime and anywhere liberty and diversity are found together. And they will be found together anytime a commercial society enjoys a free government.

“Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire,” as Madison famously puts it, “an aliment without which it instantly expires.”48 Just as one would not deprive oneself of air to avert the danger of fire, so one ought not deprive oneself of liberty to avert the danger of faction. Liberty obtains, primarily, in the capacity to use, amass, and dispense of property, and liberty is particularly likely to be an aliment to faction in a society that is economically diverse.

The “most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property,” Madison argues.49 The material interests of creditors and debtors, landholders and manufacturers, financiers and laborers, rich and poor do

47 Federalist 41 48 Federalist 41 49 Federalist 42

51 not naturally align with one another. To give liberty to an economically diverse people is to enable the formation of faction. So, Madison argues, because we do not wish to extinguish liberty and because we are unable (or unwilling) to equalize property (and because there is no guarantee that, even given equal shares of property, people would not find some other difference—of ethnicity or religion, for example—around which to factionally organize), we cannot remove the causes of faction. We can only deal with the effects. This, according to Madison, is where democracy fails.

If a faction constitutes only a minority of the population of a political community, popular government provides its own remedy. The faction will be voted down if it cannot marshal sufficient numbers to its cause. If, however, a faction constitutes a majority,

“the form of popular government on the other hand enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens.”50 Democracy, understood (as Madison understands it) as simple majority rule, has no answer to this problem, and is, in fact, susceptible to majority faction in a particular and dangerous way. In nearly all commercially successful and economically diverse societies, the poor outnumber the rich. As such, democracy would mean, as a practical matter, the rule of the rich by the poor, the former of whom form a minority and the latter a majority faction.51

Although Madison does not explicitly describe democracy as rule by the poor, his concern with this point is constantly present at the edges of his argument. Among

50 Federalist 43 51 In this understanding of democracy, Madison follows his Greco-Roman antecedents. Aristotle preferred a republican mixed government over either democracy or oligarchy, while the Romans organized their republic into an aristocratic Senate and democratic Tribunate. 52

Madison’s list of deleterious policies to which a democratic United States would be prone are included “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property,” each of which were demanded by poor men like Daniel Shays and his fellow travelers.52 In any state where debtors outnumber creditors, which, it must be said, includes more-or-less all states in which there are debtors and creditors, democracy would hand the reins of public authority to the former, to the material detriment of the latter. Much better, then, for the rights of persons and property and for the rule of law, to avoid putting public power in the hands of a democracy. A representative republic, Madison continues, is the only option for the friends of popular government who would see the rights of persons and property respected.

Madison, rather distinctively, defines a republic as “a Government in which the scheme of representation takes place.”53 We will return to the matter of republicanism at the American founding in a moment. Madison extols the virtues of a representative republic, including its tendency to “refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,” and its ability to render “the public voice,” via the selection of representatives “more consonant to the public good an if pronounced by the people themselves.”54 That is to say, requiring the people to select representatives to conduct public business, rather than allowing the people to do it themselves, entails a filtration process whereby the opinions of the people are refined and improved. We might reasonably expect the people’s representatives to be better at

52 Federalist 46 53 Federalist 44 54 Federalist 44

53 seeing beyond particular, factional interests and discerning the interests of the people as a whole.

Most importantly, however, the principle of representation, rather than directly democratic decision-making, makes it possible to encompass more geographic territory and a larger population within the same polity. This has the effect, Madison argues, of increasing the number of fault lines along which factions might form. “Extent the sphere” of the government, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests. You make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or, if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength.”55 By increasing the size and scope of government, a representative republic enables the proliferation of factions, and the proliferation of factions makes it less likely that any one faction will constitute a majority.

So, for example, regional and economic differences between poor white farmers in South Carolina and poor white laborers in Massachusetts would make it less likely for either group to unite with the other, and their position in a national, rather than regional, system of government might make them less likely to apprehend the fact that, collectively, they form a majority with interests distinct from those of the gentleman planters, financiers, and merchants to whom they were and ought to be economically and politically subordinate.56

55 Federalist 45 56 This is the aspect of Madison’s argument in Federalist 10 that is frequently cited as the foundation of the modern theory of interest group pluralism. It is also one of the reasons why, as E.E. Schattschneider (1975, 34-35) put it, “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent,” a point explored in considerable detail by Schlozman, Verba, and Brady’s (2012) The Unheavenly Chorus.

54

“The class focus of the Federalists’ republicanism” according to Isaac Kramnick,

“is self-evident.”

Their vision was of an elite corps in whom civic spirit and love of the general good overcame particular and narrow interest: men of substance, independence, and fame who had the leisure to devote their time to public life and the wisdom to seek the true interests of the country as opposed to the wicked projects of local and particular interests. This republicanism of Madison and the Federalists was, of course, quite consistent with the general aristocratic orientation of classical republicanism, which was, after all, the ideal of the independent, propertied, and therefore leisured citizen with the time and reason to find fulfillment as homo civicus.”57

That is to say, the Federalist supporters of the Constitution understood their project as an intervention against the excessively democratic spirit that had been ascendant since

1776.

In doing so, however, particularly under Alexander Hamilton’s leadership, the

Federalists sallies against democracy led them to abandon traditional republican concerns, such as virtue and disinterested participation, in favor of a system that assumed self-interest and sought to channel it in ways that would limit its corrupting influence and serve the development of a powerful state, poised to compete on the international stage. 58 Importantly, among the things that held the Federalists together was a conviction that democracy was a threat to both the position of the natural aristocracy and to the vision of the United States as a powerful commercial empire.

57 Kramnick (1990), 271 58 Kramnick (1990, 287) writes, “Hamilton held the new American state to be valuable for its own sake as assertive power. He saw the nation-state, with its historic and heroic goals, as seeking power in a competitive international system of other power-hungry states. Madison saw the nation-state as necessary only to protect private rights and thus to ensure justice. Like Locke, he saw the need for a grant of power to the state, but a grant of limited power. Madison saw the central government as providing an arena for competitive power, where free individuals, groups, and interests would bargain among themselves; the state would define no goals of its own other than ensuring the framework for orderly economic life.” 55

Many republican revisionists locate the end of classical politics at the adoption of the Constitution. That constitution established a political order in which “all government was the people’s, and yet the people never directly governed.”59 It jettisoned the idea of a polity marked by qualitative distinctions amongst its citizens and denizens in favor of an airier notion of “the people,” construed as a lump, from whom authority emanated but who had no immediate role in politics beyond authorization. Neither virtue nor obligation nor duty plays a role in the constitutional system. Self-interest is assumed, and institutional measures are taken to ensure that no one self-interested group predominates over others. In a word, the Constitution is a liberal document.

As we have seen, there is some plausibility in this argument, particularly if republicanism is primarily identified with aristocracy. Many Americans, on the other hand, chose a later date. “The Republic,” an editor at the Richmond Whig cried after

Andrew Jackson was reelected to the presidency in 1832, “has degenerated into a

Democracy.”60 What once had been a well-ordered polity was being overrun, a subtle balance of powers subverted, by the ascendency of a voting public hell-bent on replacing the reasonable compromises embodied in the Constitution with the tyranny of tis own judgment. Jackson was, after all, the leader of a political party calling themselves the Democrats, who referred to themselves collectively as The Democracy, and who were beginning to look like they would dominate American politics for the foreseeable future.

59 Pocock (1975), 524 60 Quoted in Remini (1984), 270 56

That this particular editor would mark the moment as a sea-change in American politics is understandable, as most of the nation’s founders, and in particular those who participated in the drafting and defense of the Constitution, were emphatically opposed to the idea that America should be a democracy. It should, instead, be a republic. If such degeneration had occurred or was occurring, what was lost in the transition? In a word, we might say deference, or, alternatively, we might say the loss of leaders and the rise of leadership.61

If the Constitution was an attempt at circumventing, preventing, or forestalling democracy in America, or at least the “excesses” of democracy here, if classical aristocratic republicanism was threatened by the Constitution, it met its doom with the rise of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans had fought, successfully, to tear down class-based restrictions on the suffrage (even as they solidified and codified race- and gender-based exclusions). As the old Federalists found themselves increasingly on the outs with this newly expanded electorate in most places around the country, for reasons including but not limited to their opposition to the aforementioned expansion, Democratic-Republicans who were unsatisfied with the present dispensation of leadership positions took the previously unheard of step of mobilizing voters, particularly among recent immigrants and the urban working classes, in favor of their chosen candidate.

61 As Morgan (1988, 306) points out, “leader” is an old word, but “leadership” has its provenance in the early nineteenth century. While the former points to the nature of things—one is a leader, for example, by virtue of the circumstances of one’s birth or one’s position in a religious order—the latter indicates qualities of persuasion or personal magnetism, the capacity to sway opinion and guide action. From this perspective, the natural aristocrat is a leader, while the party boss or demagogue exhibits a capacity for leadership. 57

For democratic reformers in the 1820s, the practical meaning of democracy was three-fold:

first, the right of the community to reform its constitution, second, the continued responsibility of the government. These goals were shared by republicanism. In seeking their third goal, however,—equality of rights— democrats diverged from republicans. Democratic reformers saw liberty in terms of rights and majority rule. IN practical terms, this meant universal suffrage, equitable representation, and equal access to public office. Conservatives, still mistrusting the people, continued to argue that an egalitarian and majoritarian conception of liberty would disturb the delicate balance of interests upon which order and good government rested. Fearing oppression at the hands of the majority, the propertied minority still looked to government to protect them through institutional restraints on the peoples’ power.62

While democratic reformers and their conservative opponents shared a set of goals, they disagreed as to the universality of rights. To put it another way, democratic reformers were egalitarians, while conservatives generally clung to the notion that qualitative distinctions among groups of people ought to continue to hold sway in the distribution of rights. As democratic reformers succeeded, they made it very difficult for conservatives to maintain control over political affairs and political offices.

Andrew Jackson rode a wave of popular support all the way to the White House in 1828, and was reelected in 1832. His Democratic Party used class-inflected language to mobilize voters. As the primary architect of the Democratic victory, Martin Van Buren, put it, the nation was at risk of takeover by the power of organized wealth, and nothing but the power of the democratic mobilization of large numbers of people could counterbalance the power of wealth.63 The “productive classes,” by which was meant

62 Morantz (1971), 167 63 Van Buren (1867, 180-181) 58 those who live by labor, must organize and work against the political influence of the

“non-productive classes,” by which was meant those who live from rent, speculation, interest on lending, and the like.64

After a decade or so of Democratic domination in national politics, rump

Federalists and other opponents of the Democrats organized the Whig Party. The

Whigs were never a particularly well-organized political force; they were primarily an opposition party. Nevertheless, they exhibited something of an articulate theory of government and governance. By 1840, the Whigs abandoned their Federalist elitism and sought, instead, to beat the Democrats at their own game. The Whigs built a populist structure upon old Federalist elitism, countering the Democrats’ class-based rhetoric with an insistence on “American classlessness and underlying social harmony, the oppression and corruption of Democratic government…[and] the doctrine of self- improvement and reform.”65 We might say, then, that the Whigs used the liberal language of universal rights and an undifferentiated citizenry against a democratic rhetoric that insisted upon class-based distinctions and in support of a political program that was fundamentally elitist.

To get a sense of Whig fears about democracy in America, we might look to the work of an outsider whose perspective was shaped by his contact with the political elites of New England.66 Officially, Alexis de Tocqueville had come to the United States in the early 1830s to examine the operation of the prison system. Yet he observed far more, and ultimately sought “to find there…the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations,

64 Foner (1980); McCormick (1966) 65 Wilentz (2005, 488) 66 See Wolin (2001) 59 its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”67 By “we,” Tocqueville meant the French in particular, and

Europeans in general. He was interested in determining what they might have to hope or fear from the progress of democracy because such progress seemed, to him and many others, inevitable.

The progress of democracy was inevitable, he reakoned, because it is an unavoidable consequence of material equality, which, he argued, is “a providential fact,” both “universal” and “lasting,” and which “constantly eludes all human interference,” as

“all events as well as men contribute to its progress.”68 For Tocqueville, then, the

United States, as the nation in which “the general equality of condition among the people” is most thoroughgoing, serves a preview of coming attractions for the rest of the world. America, for Tocqueville, is the western world’s Petri dish.69

In a review essay published in 1840 on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,

John Stuart Mill lavishes the book with praise, and suggests that he is more or less on board with both Tocqueville’s empirical investigative methods and his substantive conclusions. The only real point of contention that arises between Mill and Tocqueville is on the assignment of causality. Tocqueville seems to suggest that the equality of condition visible in America, with all its drawbacks and advantages, result from a combination of democratic political institutions and the unique circumstances of its creation.

67 Tocqueville (1994), 14 68 Tocqueville (1994), 6 69 Tocqueville (1994), 1 60

Mill suggests, on the other hand, that many of the conditions Tocqueville sees in

America are visible in Britain, too. This suggests that the “defects which M. de

Tocqueville points out in the Americas, and which we see in the modern English mind, are the ordinary ones of a commercial class.”70 What’s unique about the United States, for Mill, is less its political institutions than the fact that it is a commercial nation without an aristocracy, and, as such, the extent to which the political tendencies of its large commercial class are, unlike their Anglo-European counterparts, unfettered by an entrenched, hereditary nobility. Neither the advantages provided by the energy of the commercial classes, nor the defects stemming from their venality and their homogeneity, ran into the hereditary, aristocratic barriers that characterized the

European political and economic scene.

These “defects” include what Tocqueville famously, but not originally, called the tyranny of the majority, by which he meant something more than the ability of a legislative majority to work its will against a legislative minority. More importantly, and more perniciously, equality of condition entails enforced homogeneity, and insofar as diversity exists, it does so profoundly uncomfortably, in the face of majority tyranny. In the old days of monarchy and feudalism, when someone broke the rules, when one was heterodox, a non-conformist, “the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed at it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free and the soul is enslaved.”71 The soul is enslaved by the soft pressure exerted by

70 Mill (1977), 196 71 Tocqueville (1994), 264 61 neighbors, peers, and kin, that is to say, through the force of public opinion, which, though it has no juridical capacity to corporally punish, possesses an immense capacity to conform the minds of those who differ from established norms by disapprobation, exclusion, or—to borrow a nineteenth-century phrase—moral suasion.

Recognizing that popular opinion is now, or is becoming, the ruling political force, at least amongst commercially developed or developing countries, amongst which could be counted most of Western Europe, meant recognizing the need to safeguard unpopular opinions. This is, at least in the main, what Mill attempts to do in On Liberty.

The concept of liberty, he says, was originally invoked to protect the people from their rulers. This becomes a trickier matter when people and ruler are co-extensive. When

“society itself is the tyrant—society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts it may do by the hands of its political functionaries.”72

That is, as Tocqueville worried, democratic societies do not need the hand of the state, or the sword of Leviathan, to ensure compliance. Social pressure, soft or hard, can generally do the trick. At issue here, then, is a phenomenon we tend, nowadays, to call a race to the bottom. The political and social power an increasingly large and undifferentiated mass of people tended, it was argued, to limit the scope of disagreement and debate, and as it fostered a general prosperity and equality amongst people, it inhibited the development of anything or anyone extraordinary.

72 Mill (1947), 6 62

Of course, Americans were aware of the extent to which their “country [had] become an object of general curiosity and attention throughout Europe.”73 Furthermore, they were not insensitive to the criticisms aimed at them. Though some Americans chaffed at criticism from English and European sources, many were, at the same time, making similar criticisms themselves. So, for example, James Fennimore Cooper, who, while traveling abroad in 1828, had authored a book for European audiences in which he suggested that, in America, “if we except the trifling collisions of pecuniary interests, everybody is of the same mind.”74

In 1828, the unanimity of Americans was a good thing. Upon his return to the

United States, however, Cooper found “many occasions to observe the manner in which principles that are of the last importance to the happiness of the community are getting to be confounded in the popular mind.” This is no idle concern, as, for Cooper, multitudes of Americans were becoming or had become wedded to political ideas “that are impracticable, and which if persevered in, cannot fail to produce disorganization, if not revolution.”75 His primary concern was the extent to which Americans had become enamored of equality, liberty, and univseral suffrage. His point in this was not unlike

Mill’s or Tocqueville’s: “Power always has most to apprehend from its own illusions…and, in a democracy, the delusion that would elsewhere be poured into the ears of the prince, is poured into those of the people.”76 That is to say, democrats and democracies think themselves free insofar as they are unconstrained by any unitary

73 O’Sullivan (1837), 91 74 Cooper (1828), 267. 75 Cooper (1838), xxiii 76 Ibid, xxiv 63 sovereign authority, and as such they fail to recognize the potential for majority tyranny, an inevitable result of granting the venal masses access to political power.

Along similar lines, Daniel Webster noted, in 1832, that though America produces

“party men and party leaders in abundance,” it produces “few, very few statesmen,” a fact that is “natural, nay, almost unavoidable, considering the popular character of all our institutions.” 77 The influence of the masses on American politics, Webster argues, ensures that the nation’s leaders will be not necessarily those best suited to lead, but rather those most pleasing to the masses, as or more likely to be partisan jobbers than enlightened statesmen. As such, the absence of great statesmen in the United States ought come as no surprise, though this absence is admitted with some chagrin. These arguments eventually gained traction with voters sufficient to elect the first Whig to the presidency in 1840.

On a cold and wet day in March, 1841, William Henry Harrison gave his inaugural address. This was a momentous occasion. For the first time in American history, multiple candidates for the presidency had actively campaigned for the office, and, for the first time since the advent of the Democratic Party, a Whig had won.

Harrison might have been the first beneficiary of “retrospective voting” in the United

States.78 He was certainly the first member of the Whig Party, which had only organized itself a few years prior and deigned to engage the Democrats in a contest over mass- mobilization even more recently, to win the presidency.

77 Webster (1834), 92 78 It is certainly true that most Americans, as a result of an economic bust in 1837, would have answered the question “are you better off today than you were four years ago” in the negative. 64

The Whigs were, and were widely understood at the time to be, inheritors of Old

Federalism. They were the party of business, commercial development, and commerce.

They arose in opposition to the Democrats, who were, and were widely understood at the time to be, the party of laborers, small farmers, and immigrants. If you’d asked the

Democrats, they’d likely have told you that theirs was the party of producers, and that their aim was to counter the power of organized wealth with the power of organized numbers. If you’d asked a Whig about it, he’d likely have told you that the Democrats have a misguidedly antagonistic understanding of the relationship between workers and merchants. Rather than conflicting, the interests of the two are the same: wealthy merchants make for wealthy farmers, as the rising tide of commerce lifts all boats.

The Whigs spent the first decade of their existence fruitlessly arguing the greater wisdom of their position. In 1840, they ran on the slogan of “hard cider and log cabin,” a slogan handed to them by a misguided Democratic editorialist who’d hoped to tar

Harrison as a political amateur and backwoods dilatant, sitting in his log cabin, drinking hard cider, and reading philosophy. The Whigs seized on the characterization. Posing as populists, they rallied around Harrison and touted his dubious record as the hero of the battle of Tippecanoe. Log cabin and hard cider worked. Harrison won, and, having avoided taking a stand on any substantive issue during the campaign, he saw the inaugural as a fit occasion to explain himself.

The United States of America are a republic, he reminded his audience. This meant for Harrison, as it had for most political thinkers of the preceding millennium, a government in which power is shared between the two great factions that, always and everywhere, tend to exist in any complex society: the rich and the poor, identified with

65 aristocracy and democracy, respectively. But the American republic has an interesting wrinkle to it. “The broad foundation upon which our Constitution rests being the people,”

Harrison intoned, sovereignty “can be assigned to none of the great divisions of government but to that of democracy.” This is a significant concession. However,

Harrison continues, the vesting of sovereignty in the democracy does not give the democracy final say in all matters of policy.

There are, Harrison argues, “certain rights possessed by each individual

American citizen which in his compact with others he has never surrendered.” That is to say, the sovereignty of the democracy is not absolute. It is limited by, among other things, the rights retained by American citizens when they agreed to the establishment of democratic sovereignty in the first place. Naturally, among these rights are included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. More fundamentally, the spirit of liberty, which asserted these rights in the first place, is of at least as much importance to the

American republic as the vesting of sovereignty with the democracy.

Indeed, it is precisely this spirit that makes democratic sovereignty safe for a civilized nation. “When the genuine spirit of liberty animates the body of a people to a thorough examination of their affairs, it leads to the excision of every excrescence which may have fastened itself upon any of the departments of government, and restores the system to its pristine health and beauty.” Here, Harrison is quite clearly referring to the

Democratic practice of rewarding political supporters with patronage jobs. This was, by

1840, a familiar Whig trope. Where the Democrats warned of a moneyed aristocracy, the Whigs warned of a political one.

66

More important to Harrison, however, was the possibility that Democratic fears of a moneyed aristocracy would vitiate the spirit of liberty. After all, at least since Magna

Charta, the principle of liberty had served to preserve and protect property, at least for those who already had title to it. Preserving and protecting property, of course, is generally of greater interest to those who have it than it is to those who don’t. It is here that Harrison saw danger in the development of American democracy and the

Democratic Party.

The Democrats speak “in the name of democracy…warning the people against the influence of wealth and the dangers of aristocracy.” They usually do so, Harrison warns, through charismatic leaders. “History, ancient and modern,” however, offers, according to Harrison’s account, “no instance on record of an extensive and well- established republic being changed into an aristocracy. The tendency,” he warned, “of all such governments in their decline is to monarchy, and the antagonist principle to liberty there is the spirit of faction.”

By “spirit of faction,” Harrison means democracy. By democracy, Harrison means class-conscious and consolidated political action of the lower orders of society, and he worries that the democracy in America, represented by the Democratic Party, was busily doing precisely this. The “spirit of liberty,” he hopes, will be stronger than the

“spirit of faction,” but he worries that the victory of the latter over the former would put the United States, like the Roman Republic, on a path toward despotism. Such were the

Harrison’s apprehensions of democracy in the 1840s, and many Americans shared them.

67

Concern with the rise of demagogic leaders, with the instability of the extant socio-political and economic order, and with the consequences of empowering persons and groups of people that had previously been relegated to subject positions, of is perhaps an inevitable facet of democratic politics, because democratic notions of equality call into question the bonds of obligation and deference that characterize most non-democratic political societies. As Edmund Morgan argues,

The word ‘leader’ is old, but ‘leadership’ was a term that no one seems to have felt a need for as long as the qualities it designates remained an adjunct of social superiority. The decline of deference and the emergence of leadership signaled the beginnings not only of a new rhetoric but of a new mode of social relations and a new way of determining who should stand among the few to govern the many. It signaled not only the rise of the professional politician and the religious hero but the vulnerability of any institution that denied the equality in which men and women had been created.79

Such concerns were, quite clearly, on the minds of many Americans in the middle- nineteenth century.

The charged atmosphere of the American 1830s and 1840s is both the background and the impetus for the works of Calhoun, Emerson, Whitman, and

Douglass that we shall be considering in the pages that follow. This rather long journey through the history of American political thought and praxis is a necessary preface if we are going to get anywhere near an accuarte understanding of what these writers were up to. To them, we shall now turn.

79 Morgan (1988), 306 68

CHAPTER 3 THE CAST IRON MAN’S LAST STAND: JOHN C. CALHOUN AND THE ANTIDOTE TO DEMOCRACY

John C. Calhoun gave his last major address to the United States Senate on the

4th of March, 1850. Though his tone was measured, almost professorial, this was not the most collegial speech Calhoun had delivered over the course of his forty-year career in national politics. The Senate, faced with sectional infighting that seemed likely to threaten the very existence of the Union if not quickly and effectively papered over, was considering the admission of California as a free state as part of a series of compromise measures that, it was hoped, would ease tensions and prevent the calamitous disunion that many presaged.1 Perhaps Calhoun was foresightful here. Perhaps he was an instigator.

Calhoun rose to oppose the admission of California as a free state in part because of irregularities in the formation of its territorial government and the fact that a significant portion of its territory laid to the South of the Mason-Dixon line, which meant that its admission as a free state would violate the Missouri Compromise. But the

California question, important as it might have been, was ancillary to Calhoun’s broader point. In the name of democracy, the people of the North, and their representatives in the national government, were seeking to disrupt the delicate balance of power that had characterized the relationship between northern and southern states, and between the national and state governments. They sought, though they did not say so out loud, to

1 The Compromise of 1850, which eventually passed over the objections of many members of Congress from both the northern and southern sections of the Union, was a series of trade-offs. The North won the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, while the South got the admission of the territories of Utah and New Mexico under the principle of popular sovereignty, the continuation of the institution of slavery in D.C., and the promise that the Fugitive Slave Laws would be enforced in the North. 69 make free labor and majority rule the law of the land not only in the North, but in the territories, too, and, after the admission of free territories, across the entire country.

This, for Calhoun, was impossible to endure.

The entire notion of compromise at this point was to Calhoun a red herring, and he would have none of it.2 In the name Union and compromise, the northern states were attempting to subjugate the South by augmenting their numbers in the national government by admitting free states, threatening the social fabric of the South by entertaining abolitionism, and offering nothing to the southern states by way of

“compromise” than the enforcement of the Constitutionally mandated remittance of fugitive slaves to their “rightful” owners. Enforcement of the provisions of the

Constitution by which all states had agreed to abide, and which all elected members of the national government had agreed to defend, should not be a bargaining chit, however vociferously some citizens in the North might object.

This so-called compromise was, for Calhoun, intolerable. If the Union was under threat, it was under threat precisely because of northern aggression against the South.

If the Union was to be saved, the northern states, which already controlled a preponderance of power in the national legislature, could act unilaterally to save it without any concomitant compromise on the part of the South. So, Calhoun said to his northern colleagues, if you would save the Union, take the decisive steps necessary for its salvation. You know what to do: relinquish your attempts at disrupting the rough equilibrium established between the sections by the Missouri Compromise (which

2 It was precisely by such hard-headedness, once he’d come to a conclusion on a position, that Calhoun earned the nickname “cast-iron man.” Having taken a position, he was generally immovable. 70 meant dropping the question of California’s admission to the Union as a free state, the proximate object of Calhoun’s speech that day). Start enforcing the Fugitive Slave

Clause, as the Constitution itself requires, and take positive steps to tamp down abolitionist activity and anti-slavery influence on the conduct of northern politics and its representatives.

Anything less than the foregoing was tantamount, for Calhoun, to admission by the North that saving of the Union was not the object in view. It would prove that, though they were loath to say so, the northern states were interested in, more-or-less slowly but absolutely surely, marginalizing the southern states, politically and economically, until slavery, the South’s peculiar institution, could be overthrown and the southern states, for Calhoun the last bastion of rightly ordered society in the civilized world, would be brought to heel under the boot of northern industrial and political power.

He ended his final address to the national legislature in which he had spent most of the years of his adult life on a note both ominous and threatening. “It is time,” he enjoined his colleagues from the North, “that there should be an open and manly avowal on all sides, as to what is intended to be done.” If the Union is to be saved on the only basis by which it could, namely the preservation of the balance of power between the two sections, then it was incumbent upon the North to take action, decisively and unilaterally, to save it.

This meant nothing more than a choice by the representatives of the northern states to act “on the broad principle of justice and duty.” If the representatives of the

North were unwilling to take the necessary steps, then they ought to “say so; and let the

States we both represent to part in peace.” If peaceful separation is impossible, that

71 ought also be made explicit and its consequences considered. “If you are unwilling we should part in peace,” Calhoun adjured, “tell us so, and we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.”3 These, clearly, were fighting words. They gestured to the dark clouds that were already lowering on the horizon of

American politics.

Calhoun would not survive the month. In late March, he succumbed to the illness that had prevented him from personally delivering the bulk of his final speech, most of which was read aloud by a junior colleague, to Congress. The Union outlived him by a decade, but so too did his words and his ideas. Calhoun, the preeminent philosopher- statesman of his era, was also his section’s most stalwart defender. Borrowing from the various political-theoretical materials at hand, he enunciated, from the late 1820s till his death, an interconnected defense of states’ rights, slavery, and a profoundly anti- majoritarian conception of American politics. In so doing, Calhoun poured the foundation upon which the southern “fire-eaters” built, and shaped the profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic edifice they erected in the later 1850s.4 It is no accident that the first state to secede from the Union after Lincoln’s election, the state that would fire the first shots of the Civil War, was Calhoun’s own South Carolina.

Given Calhoun’s centrality to what must be considered the most cataclysmic conflict in the history of the United States, the absence of any serious and sustained consideration of his ideas in the historiography of American political thought is somewhat surprising. For the most part, the few scholars who have considered the

3 Calhoun (2003), 706-707. 4 The term “fire-eater” refers to mostly-southern extremists who favored secession to compromise on the question of slavery. 72 political thought of the antebellum South concur with Wilbur Cash (1941: 97), who dismissed the southern mind as “a superficial and jejune thing.” Louis Hartz, though he recognizes the articulation of a distinctly southern political theory as “one of the great, creative episodes” in the history of American political thought, nevertheless dismisses it as, ultimately, “a simple fraud.” Because the South’s defense of slavery was, as a defense of slavery, inherently illiberal, it could not exist within the mainstream of

American politics.

Similarly, though from a rather different perspective, Richard Hofstadter insists that Calhoun’s ideas are of only “antiquarian” interest, with no consequence beyond his own time. Both Hartz and Hofstadter insist, albeit in distinct ways, that Calhoun’s ideas, and the ideas of those whom he influenced, were anachronistic even as they were uttered. They can easily, then, be dismissed and sidelined by those concerned with the broader currents in American political thought and history.

Of course, such dismissal is only possible if one believes, in spite of the evidence, that American politics is, and always has been, monolithically liberal, and if one ignores the presence and influence of both ascriptive Americanisms and republicanism. Such dismissal of southern political thought also requires one to ignore not only “one of the great, creative episodes” in American political thought, but also the fact that Calhoun, alone among his contemporaries, was recognized by no less a light of liberal thought than John Stuart Mill as “a speculative thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the Federalist.” 5

5 Mill (1991), 329. 73

The republican revisionists have demonstrated that Locke et praeterea nihil is stultitia. Though the republican revisionists identify an intellectual tradition and a language of politics that had broad and lasting resonance in the antebellum American

South, they offer little indication that they’ve recognized this fact. This is understandable. Most of these writers suggest that republicanism ceased to be a live issue after the ratification of the Constitution, and most of the revisionists who suggest a more durable and lasting impact for republicanism believe that the tradition they are tracing offers a number of good things, things that could be antidotes to some of the defects of liberalism.

These latter, then, omit the antebellum South and the republican lineage that could is clearly traceable from the Revolution, through John Taylor of Caroline and John

Randolph of Roanoke to Calhoun, whom we might reasonably regard as, if not the last classical American republican, at least “the greatest post-Madisonian republican.”6 But considering Calhoun thusly means reconsidering the legacy, trajectory, and praxis of

American republican politics. Specifically, recognizing the extent to which Calhoun operates, at least in part, within the ambit of republican political language illustrates the amenability of aristocratic republicanism to chattel slavery. If the end of classical politics in the United States came when qualitative distinctions among the people were rejected, the end must be antedated from 1787 to 1865.

Calhoun’s political thought presents an amalgam of ideas drawn from classical republicanism, Lockean liberalism, and Burkean traditionalism, but the whole he constructs is not reducible to its parts. The notion that any thinker ought easily be

6 Ford 1988, 411 74 categorized as a liberal, conservative, Lockean, or republican presents a false choice.

One need only look, for example, to the Lockean language and neoclassical architecture of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and his home at Monticello, respectively, to see that more than one theoretical thread could be followed simultaneously. So, we ought not be surprised when we find, in Calhoun’s thought, elements drawn from different traditions presented, more or less harmoniously, side-by- side as a part of a systematic political philosophy.

It is enough to say that Calhoun fits no political category neatly, on the one hand, and that the proponents and defenders of any of the aforementioned traditions from which Calhoun drew would probably prefer to avoid having has company foisted upon them as an ally or fellow-traveler. Establishing the fact that Calhoun’s ideas emerge from and form a part of a distinctly American landscape of political thought and action, and insisting that he must, for at least this reason, be seriously considered, is precisely the point of the pages that follow. Whatever the amalgam of liberal and republican ideas that informed Calhoun, the upshot of his entire political philosophy is fundamentally antidemocratic and inegalitarian.

Calhoun’s systematic articulation of his political philosophy, which began with a deep and profound antipathy towards the practices and implications of majoritarian democracy was, in both the first and last instance, hitched to a defense of hierarchy in which he sought refuge from the disordering tendencies of democracy. Though it may be true that the notion that “all men are created equal” carries an internal, expansive logic, Calhoun, alongside many of his progenitors and progeny, rejected this aspect of the Declaration of Independence explicitly, forthrightly, and unapologetically. Indeed,

75

Calhoun’s rejection of majoritarian democracy, and his attempt at articulating a substitute for it, a “popular rule” of the concurrent majority, is explicitly designed to sidestep the egalitarian premises of the Declaration and the leveling implications of democratic majoritarianism.

Few Americans had a profounder apprehension of democracy than Calhoun. He very well understood the egalitarian logic and leveling tendencies of democratic political language, and he was very much afraid of what might happen were democracy allowed to grow and spread from the realm of rhetoric to that of institutions. Democracy was not only an existential threat to the South’s peculiar institution of race-based chattel slavery, though it was certainly that—Calhoun and his fellow slaveholders lived in constant dread of winding up like the erstwhile plantation owners of Haiti, whose estates, and often lives, were forfeited once their slaves caught wind of their masters’ commitment to notions of natural liberty and universal rights.

Democracy posed, for Calhoun, a more fundamental threat. Its leveling tendencies were not only destructive of slavery; they would, if allowed to continue, destroy civilization as such. To function as wisdom and providence would direct, civilization requires a subtle balance of liberty and power. The virtuous and energetic must have liberty enough to pursue their wills in the world, while the weak and shiftless must be prevented from using their numerical strength to derail the plans of their betters. Democracy not only has no answer for this problem. It actively exacerbates it by inflating the egos and increasing the power of those among society’s lower orders.

76

After the late 1820s, Calhoun’s political positions remained more-or-less consistent, in the main if not in every particular, for the rest of his life.7 Beginning in the late 1840s, and continuing until his death, Calhoun attempted a comprehensive explanation of his politics. His defense of slavery and nullification, his antipathy towards free-labor capitalism and majoritarian democracy, hang together in the posthumously published Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the Constitution and

Government of the United States.8 In these two works, Calhoun mounts a thoroughgoing and systematic attack on egalitarianism, individualism, and majoritarian democracy in defense of organic community, hierarchy, and slavery.

It is proper to begin, with Calhoun, at the beginning. Prior to understanding the nature of politics, one must understand human nature, as politics is an essentially, fundamentally and characteristically human activity. At the outset of his Disquisition,

Calhoun insists that human beings are, by nature, social animals. Man’s “inclinations and wants, physical and moral, irresistibly impel him to associate with his kind,” and, as such, he is “so constituted as to make the social state necessary to his existence and

7 Prior to 1827, when he began writing the “Carolina Exposition,” in which he made the case in favor of South Carolina’s nullification of the 1824 tariff law, Calhoun had been known as a nationalist, a supporter, alongside Henry Clay, of internal improvements, and a war hawk in and after the War of 1812 between the U.S. and England. The reasons for Calhoun’s transformation from nationalist to sectionalist are unclear, but the Missouri Compromise, the influence of John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke (Henry Adams [1996, 190] claims that Randolph “converted” Calhoun), and Calhoun’s thwarted presidential ambitions seem to be relevant. 8 Calhoun did not originate the doctrine of nullification, which asserts the right of a state to declare an act of the national government unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it. Nullification had been invoked by Jefferson and Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, in protest against the Alien and Sedition Act. Jefferson and Madison were later cited by anti-slavery forces who invoked nullification to oppose enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Laws. Only Calhoun, however, made nullification a central element of a systematic analysis of popular government. Further, no American publicly pushed the doctrine of nullification more vociferously than did Calhoun. 77 the full development of his faculties.”9 Humanity’s natural state is social, and human flourishing is impossible in any other state.

This is true and providentially ordained, but it is not unproblematic. Human nature is, for Calhoun, twofold. On the one hand, human beings are motivated by social and affectionate feelings.10 Human beings are often affectionate towards one another, and it is not possible for them to live in any meaningful way absent the presence of others.

Look wherever and whenever you will, you’ll never find human beings living other than in societies, and you’ll never find societies without government.

This conception of human nature and the origin of society is pitched, quite explicitly, against the voluntarist version of the origins of society and government presented in most versions of contract theory and on which democratic ideas about equality and mass-participation are usually based. Calhoun insists that, despite what you might have heard from Locke or Jefferson, human beings “instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose protection they first draw breath.” Their births, and their lives, are made possible precisely by the fact that they do not, never had, and could not live in a state of nature, but in society.11 To be born social is to be born subject; to be a social animal is to be the sort of creature who lives within a hierarchy.

9 Calhoun (1992), 2 10 Calhoun’s account of human nature and the origin of government has clearly visible roots in the ideas of Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Edmund Burke, and James Madison. The sum, however, is not reducible to any of its parts. 11 There are important political implications connected to Calhoun’s notion that human beings are not only born social creatures, but born into subject to a series of social and political hierarchies to which they owe their very lives, but these implications will have to wait until later. 78

For Calhoun, the search for the origins of society and government leads not to some arbitrary moment of contract amongst people who’d been till then free, equal, independent, and alone. Such a search would instead lead all the way back, well past the beginnings of humanity as a species, because human beings live in groups in a state of interdependence. To put it another way, creatures found free, equal, and alone, are probably not humans.

The flipside to natural human gregariousness is an equally natural self-regard.

Human beings are by nature drawn together into groups, but they also everywhere evince a tendency to prefer themselves to others, and those nearest themselves to those further away. This innate and natural self-regard—Calhoun makes a point of avoiding the word “selfishness” in hopes of avoiding the normative opprobrium attached to that word—leads societies towards conflicts internal and external. As human beings are naturally social and naturally selfish, requiring the proximity of other people but preferring themselves over others and those nearest themselves to those further afield, society naturally tends towards “a universal state of conflict...if not prevented by some controlling power.” In “this twofold constitution of [human] nature,” Calhoun locates the origin of government.12

Human beings are naturally social and naturally selfish. This leads to conflict, because the former urge leads people to live together in groups while the latter urge leads to collisions among individuals and groups. As such, society requires government.

Government, which is as naturally and divinely ordained as is society, exists to prevent the self-regarding individuals of which society is composed from becoming predatory

12 Calhoun (1992), 3 79 upon one another. Troubles do not end, and indeed may be compounded, with the institution of government. Government may exacerbate the conflicts it is ordained to ameliorate.

The problem is, government must necessarily be composed of human beings, and government is, for this reason, prone to the same weaknesses as is society. The powers of government, Calhoun argues, “must be administered by men in whom, like others, the individual are stronger than the social feelings. And hence, the powers vested in them to prevent injustice and oppression on the part of others, will, if left unguarded, be by them converted into instruments to oppress the rest of the community.” Human life entails human society, and human society likewise entails government. Yet in creating governments over themselves, human societies and the individuals that compose them risk organizing themselves as so many sheep under a shepherd intent, sooner or later, quickly or slowly, on devouring them. Society and government, then, are simultaneously natural, necessary, and, particularly when they are imposed upon diverse societies, self-defeating.

This, then, is a conundrum. Government must be powerful and independent enough to fulfill its divinely appointed duty of controlling the conflicts that, as a consequence of humanity’s two-fold nature, must necessarily arise both within a single society and amongst separate ones. The trick is to make government simultaneously powerful, independent, and responsible. This cannot be done by any means other than constitution. For Calhoun, “constitution stands to government, as government stands to society.”13 Government exists to protect and preserve society; constitutions exist to

13 Calhoun (1992), 11 80 protect society from government. All three are necessary to bring the human life to the full fruits of its potential.

There is a clear difference between constitution and government: the latter is a providential necessity, arising directly from the requirements of human nature, while the former is a human contrivance, the latter exists in all human societies, while the former is rare. Government is necessary for the preservation of society; society is necessary for the preservation of human life, and self-preservation the first law of both communities and individuals. So, society and government, as prerequisites for self- preservation, are natural to man and are, indeed, divinely ordained. Constitutions, designed to ensure that governments protect society rather than prey upon it, are man- made, humanly conceived, and they exist to serve human ends. Thus constitutions are rare, while society and government are coextant with the presence of human beings.

Only where constitutions exist, however, is human progress possible. Society and government always will be, while constitutions and the progressive societies they enable are, unless well-constructed, are fleeting and even if well-constructed in the beginning, prone to decay over time.

For Calhoun, the history of constitutional government is a catalogue of failure.

Noteworthy instances of success are mostly short-lived, but there are myriad examples of backsliding, degradation, and self-inflicted destruction amongst the more conspicuous and illustrious instances of constitutional governments. One need, he points out more than once, look only to the ancient world—to Athens, Sparta, and

Rome—or, closer to home, one could consider the examples of Britain or Poland. This is understandable. Always and everywhere, constitutions are human ventures aimed at

81 augmenting, mitigating, or modifying providential designs. Providence being both wiser and stronger than human cognition, it is no wonder that such attempts by human beings at altering the dispensation of providence so often fail. Fallible, finite creatures that we are, we tend to get enamored of particular aspects of the present dispensation or understanding of things as we forget the providential facts.

Even now, perhaps especially now, Calhoun intones, errors abound in the modern world about the broader meaning and import of constitutions in general and the

Constitution of the United States in particular. There has, he complains, grown in the

United States a notion that universal suffrage and majority rule are, of themselves, sufficient to prevent government from becoming abusive. As Calhoun said as early as the 1820s,

No government, based on the naked principle that the majority ought to govern, however true the maxim in its proper sense, and under proper restrictions, can preserve its liberty even for a single generation. The history of all has been the same—violence, injustice, and anarchy— succeeded by the government of one, or of a few, under which the people seek refuge from the more oppressive despotism of the many.14

Universal suffrage, the story goes, will prevent government from developing a will of its own and will, thereby, provide sufficient protection for society, in all its parts, from government abuse. This is the maxim underlying the progress of democracy in the

United States. As far as maxims go, it would be difficult, Calhoun says, to imagine one more wrong.

Universal suffrage and majoritarian democracy offer no protection at all to numerical minorities. Furthermore, universal suffrage and majority rule offer to society

14 Calhoun (1991), 341 82 nothing more than the illusion of popular constitutional control over the government.

When implemented, the rule of the numerical majority, regardless of the extent to which the suffrage is extended, necessarily results in tyranny, first of the numerical majority, and then of the leading portion of that majority.

The Constitution of the United States, as defended by the authors of The

Federalist Papers, articulates a system of checks and balances that are intended to either mitigate or prevent the deleterious effects of majority rule. However, Calhoun argues, changes at the state level that have occurred since the ratification of the

Constitution, especially the loosening of restrictions on the suffrage and the development of political parties, have changed the equation. The Constitution was designed to give equal weight to majoritarian democracy, on the one hand, and majority of geographically located interests—the states—on the other. Over time, “the provisions of the constitution, which intended to give equal weight to the two elements,” namely numbers and interests, “have been defeated; and an overwhelming preponderance” has accrued to the power of numbers.15 This situation has been created by the (unforeseen) arrival of two great, national political parties that compete with each other for the votes of the majority of enfranchised people.

The equation has been fundamentally changed in such a way as to subvert the object the Framers had in view. The checks and balances between the branches of the national government, and between the national and state governments, have been cancelled. The rise of the national political parties has created a situation in which “the antagonism relied on...between the government of the United States, on the one hand,

15 Calhoun (1991), 159 83 and all the separate state governments, on the other, has proved to be, in practice, between the former, supported by a majority of the latter, and of their population.”16

Thusly has the Constitutional framework been defeated, and on this basis Calhoun argues for the necessity of some kind of substitute to restore the balance.

In this assessment, Calhoun takes issue with James Madison. In the tenth number of The Federalist, Madison suggests that the sheer size of the United States, in terms of both geography and population, would prevent permanent majority factions from forming at the national level. This may have been a fair assumption at the end of the 18th century, Calhoun says, but it fails to comprehend 19th-century politics. The development of national, mass-based political parties means that the myriad little factions Madison described, scattered hither and thither with different aims and interests, can be combined with one another such that, if cobbled together correctly, they can create large-scale factional majorities at the national level. Even if these majorities are not agreed, and therefore incapable of acting, upon every particular, there will always be a core set of commitments upon which the majority can act and to which resistance will be futile. If this does not work on a permanent basis, it can at least work cyclically. Either way, it embarrasses American political institutions and damages

American political character.

Calhoun does not argue unsympathetically here. Madison’s aim was to mitigate the problems he associated with majoritarian democracy. Calhoun does not impugn the aim; he only points out the inadequacy of the means. The federal system designed by the Framers of the Constitution was, for Calhoun, in practice incapable of affecting its

16 Calhoun (1991), 124; 131 84 end. The rise of the national political parties defeated the scope-of-conflict-based, in terms of both geography and population, mechanism for avoiding the problem of numerical-majoritarian democracy.

The particular problem with majority rule was, for Calhoun as it was for the authors of the Federalist Papers, a familiar one for all republican thinkers at least since

Aristotle. Generally speaking, those who own a significant amount of property are outnumbered by those who don’t. As such, majoritarian democracy is an invitation for the latter to invade, with force of law, the rights and the property of the former. And this fact, for Calhoun, is precisely the rub. A constitution enshrining majoritarian democracy, since it provides no defense for the (few) wealthy against the (many) poor, does not deserve the name “constitution” and, of course, cannot affect the designated end. If a constitution serves to protect the whole of society from abuse from any of its members, then a democratic constitution, construed along majoritarian lines, is functionally no constitution at all. Calhoun’s fear—his conviction—was that the United States were plunging headlong in exactly this direction.

This is no nit-picking exercise. The problem is a fundamental one. If the United

States were to complete its Niagara leap into the democratic abyss, it would destroy its constitution, in spirit if not in letter, and it would inflict mortal wounds upon the communities over which it governed. In a society under government but without a constitution, “there can be little progress or human improvement.”17 This notion of the connection between progress and constitution is essential, and must be kept in mind. If majoritarian democracy allows the many who are not wealthy to invade the wealth and

17 Calhoun (1991), 13 85 property of the few who are wealthy, the engine of economic and social progress will seize up.

Progress, for Calhoun as for most of his contemporaries, meant the aggregate increase of wealth, the development of scientific knowledge, and the florescence of industrial and agricultural production. Such progress is promoted by giving to each individual the broadest possible liberty of action consistent with the security of society.

By constitutional alchemy, government, society, and individual liberty can be combined to conduce toward progress. The power of government is

necessary to secure to liberty the fruits of its exertions, [and] liberty, in turn, repays power with interest, by increased population, wealth, and other advantages, which progress and improvement bestow on the community. By thus assigning to each its appropriate sphere, all conflicts between them cease; and each is made to co-operate with and assist the other, in fulfilling the great ends for which government is ordained.18

Constitutional government and human progress are both markers and consequences of the development of civilization. Combined, they make a proper understanding of the relationship between constitution and government all the more imperative.

Constitutions exist to ensure that government and society conduce to their divinely appointed aim, namely the possibility of human flourishing. Progress leads society towards wealth, population, and civilization. When society, Calhoun argues, becomes civilized, prosperous, and populous,

the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be, in governments of the numerical majority, no want of leaders

18 Calhoun (1991), 41 86

among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain control.19

Socio-economic inequality makes and is made by progress, and this must be explicitly recognized by the designers and maintainers of constitutions, since political equality amongst those who are socio-economically unequal is a situation that cannot last long.

A democratic constitution that gives control of the government to the numerical majority has no answer for this problem. Indeed, it only converts a social and economic problem into a political one, and, in so doing, makes it more dangerous and less soluble. As the poor become more numerous vis-a-vis the wealthy, which they do as a natural consequence of the development of civilization, they will, under majoritarian conditions become more capable of exercising political power and, ipso facto, more likely to raid the property of the wealthy. By this mechanism, which is nothing other than exactly what is to be expected given the facts of human nature and the trajectory of human progress, majoritarian democracy threatens to derail the very engine of human progress.

The “main spring of progress is,” Calhoun tells us, “the desire of individuals to better their condition.”20 This desire is fomented and directed by “the inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks in the march of progress” which “gives so strong an impulse for the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.”21 The poor strive to push their way into the ranks of the wealthy, while the wealthy redouble their efforts to maintain their position. As those who are the

19 Calhoun (1992), 36 20 Calhoun (1992), 40 21 Calhoun (1992), 44 87 most able, the most talented, or most deserving are given liberty to pursue their chosen ends, the distance between them and those who are less able, less talented, and less deserving will increase. That is to say, inequality is both a consequence and a cause of progress and improvement. The egalitarian impulse implicit in majoritarian democracy, both as ideology and political praxis, entails a leveling impulse, and leveling tends to arrest progress. To put it another way, democratic egalitarianism is a threat to constitutionalism and to the progress and improvement constitutionalism enables.

Furthermore, the error of conflating majority rule with constitutional government

“leads to others equally false and fatal.” Those who mistake majoritarian democracy for constitutional government are likely to regard any attempts at curtailing the power of the majority—necessary steps, Calhoun believes, towards instituting truly constitutional government—as “restrictions on the will of the people, and, therefore, as not only useless, but wrongful and mischievous.”22 That is to say, the belief, quite mistaken but widely adopted, that majority democracy is coextensive with constitutional government, and the concomitant belief that any restrictions on the rule of the majority constitutes an infringement on constitutional government, is not only a problem but a self-reinforcing one. As such, it requires a robust, thoroughgoing, and unapologetic refutation.

In progressive, wealthy and civilized societies, the poor will always outnumber the rich, and there is no way of avoiding or even mitigating this most-durable and fundamental problem of democracy under majoritarian conditions. As such, a majoritarian-democratic constitution is one in name only. It fails to fulfill the definitional role of a constitution, which is, namely, to make government responsible to the whole of

22 Calhoun (1992), 25 88 society. No so-called constitution that does not recognize and protect both liberty and inequality, then, can is capable of carrying out its providentially ordained function.

A constitution that depends upon universal suffrage and the government of the numerical majority, then, is no constitution at all. Majoritarian democracy only claims to speak for a part, and, on Calhoun’s account, it fails to make good even on this. Ancillary measures are needed to make government truly representative, to make it factually rather than merely numerically majoritarian, to make it legitimately constitutional. To fill this need, Calhoun proposes his notion of the concurrent majority. The concurrent majority is distinguished from the numerical in that it stipulates that any action taken by the government either be approved by each separate interest in society or, failing approval, be subject to veto by any of the aforementioned interests.23

A constitution that enshrined majority rule by instituting universal suffrage would be perfectly reasonable, even ideal, if it were true that all interests in society were the same. Unfortunately, we know that they are not. As such, government action under a majoritarian system will, inevitably, effect “the various and diversified interests of the community” unequally, which will “pervert its powers into instruments to aggrandize and enrich one or more interests by oppressing and impoverishing the others.”24

Government without constitution, or under a poorly constructed one, necessarily leads to this result.

Even if it were to start from a position of total equality and harmony of interests, the “advantages of possessing the control of the powers of the government, and,

23 Calhoun is unclear about what exactly he intends to indicate by “interests” when he discusses them in the Disquisition, so an exploration of his meaning must be tabled for the moment. 24 Calhoun (1992), 9 89 thereby, of its honors and emoluments” would be “of themselves...ample to divide even such a community into two great hostile parties.”25 There is, for Calhoun, no social, economic, or political magic to which we can turn to avoid calamity other than a well- designed constitution. Such a constitution must necessarily contain “some restriction or limitation, which shall so effectually prevent any one interest, or combination of interests, from obtaining the exclusive control of the government, as to render hopeless all attempts directed to that end.”26

While government by majoritarian democracy “regards numbers only, and considers the whole community as a unit,” government under a constitution that considers the concurrent majority “regards interests as well as numbers” and considers

“the community as made up of different and conflicting interests...and takes the sense of each, through its majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all.”27 A constitution must be designed such that no particular interest in society can so much as hope to impose its will on any other. The only way to do this, Calhoun explains, is “by dividing and distributing the powers of government” such that you “give to each division or interest...either a concurrent voice in making and executing the laws, or a veto on their execution.”28

25 Calhoun (1992), 10 26 Calhoun (1992), 14 27 Calhoun (1992), 16; the qualification to the latter portion of this quotation that the concurrent majority “takes the sense of each [interest in the community], through its majority or appropriate organ” [emphasis added] is important, and will be addressed below. 28 Calhoun (1992), 15 90

This latter, the veto power possessed by minority interests over the actions taken by the majority, is crucial for Calhoun.29 The constitutional power of any particular sector of society to arrest the enactment of laws contrary to their interests—which, given the providential fact that society, government, and constitutions are instituted to protect society as a whole and also promote its progress, would make such laws necessarily and inherently unconstitutional—is the only sure way to prevent government from overrunning its delegated powers and turning from protector to predator. Nullification,

“this mutual negative among the various and conflicting interests” that compose society, is the only way to secure “systematic, peaceful, or effective resistance to the natural tendency of each [interest] to come into conflict with the others.” Without such a

“negative power,” there can be “no constitution.”30

In addition to the South Carolina legislature’s publication of some five thousand copies of his Disquisition, Calhoun’s argument for the concurrent majority’s superiority over the numerical one earned him accolades from John Stuart Mill, who called him “a speculative thinker superior to any who has appeared in American politics since the authors of the Federalist.”31 For Calhoun, nothing less than a constitutional mechanism requiring and/or enforcing unanimity amongst the various and diverse interests in society will do to secure the safety of the safety all the member of society under constitutional government. This is what Calhoun means, in the abstract, by concurrent majority. It remains to be seen what this means in practice.

29 Here, clearly, recurs his argument in favor of nullification in a more systematic, abstract, and analytical context than those in which he had first uttered it. 30 Calhoun (1992), 20 31 Quoted in Brown (2000), 330 91

One thing needs to be stated clearly at this point: Calhoun viewed society and the politics it necessitates as a conflictual business from its inception, precisely because it is composed of groups of people who are qualitatively differentiated from one another.

Government is a natural, providentially ordained outgrowth of humanity’s dual nature.

Our gregarious nature brings us together, but our natural selfishness makes us dangerous to one another. We create governments to mitigate the conflicts that necessarily arise within societies and to protect us from the conflicts that inevitably arise between societies.

Government exists to protect the societies by which they were created from external threats and to protect those societies from themselves. While the former task is simple enough, or, at least, the incentives to accomplish it are straightforward, governments are unlikely to do well at the second task of their own accord. After all, the personnel of governments, however constructed or constituted, are inevitably humans, possessed of the same dual nature as everyone else. It’s likely then, if not inevitable, that governments will become self-defeating, that they will, instead of protecting society become predatory upon it. The only sure way to prevent this from happening, Calhoun says, is by creating and imposing a constitution that ensures the responsibility of government to those it governs.

Democracy, for Calhoun, fails the test of constitutionality. It cannot protect society from government. Democracy cannot make government responsible to society, but instead gives control of government over to the numerical majority without offering any protection at all to numerical minorities. Democracy in the majoritarian mode, however widely distributed the suffrage may be, is not constitutional government

92 because it cannot, as constitutional government definitionally must, prevent sectors of the population from turning the auspices of government predatorily towards others. In wealthy and “highly civilized” societies, democratically constituted governments necessarily entail the predation of the poor, ignorant masses upon the rich, educated few. It, inescapably, enables the rule of the lesser over the better sort.32

Calhoun’s concurrent majority is meant to rectify this defect of democracy without abandoning the notion of popular government. Each “interest” in society ought, constitutionally, have a direct say in the actions of their government. Two things are noteworthy here. First, Calhoun is unclear about what he means by an “interest,” at least as far as his treatment of the concept in the Disquisition is concerned, but elsewhere he is relatively clear. Interests can be economic, in the sense that labor and capital, for example, have different interests. Interest can also be said to exist within a community or society, as in the interest of a community or society in its own self- preservation. Second, this, along with his insistence on the centrality of the states in the national governmental framework, bespeaks his belief that individuals, considered in isolation, are not the fundamental units of political analysis. Societies, or communities, are.

This begs, of course, several questions. What constitutes a society, and what are the interests within it? How and by whom are they to be represented? How does this relate to the history of the United States from the Revolution forward, and what kind of nation was formed first by the revolt against Britain and then by the adoption of the

32 For a discussion of distinctions in the United States between the lower and better sorts of people, see Morgan (1988), 192-195 93

Constitution? All of these questions are crucial, and Calhoun addresses each of them more-or-less directly.

Calhoun suggests that there are at least three different and conflicting interests that characterize American politics: North vs. South, state vs. federal, and labor vs. capital. The first two, for Calhoun, can be mitigated by adherence to the Constitution.

The states of the North and the states of the South should respect and retain the balance of power that had obtained between them since ratification, and the national government should refrain from interference in the business of the states, except, of course, in the case of enforcing the Fugitive Slave Clause.

The third conflict, Calhoun argues, can be solved one of two ways. First, labor and capital can go to war with each other. Labor, under the scheme of majority rule, can overwhelm capital politically, or capital, with control over a preponderance of economic means, can starve labor into submission. Neither is particularly desirable, and both are apt to destroy constitutional government.

Second, and importantly, both labor and capital can recognize, by recognizing the South, that chattel slavery provides an alternative to the free-labor system that was then taking hold in the North. Under free-labor capitalism, labor and capital are at war with one another. Under chattel slavery, both are harmonized under the benevolent rule of the master. As the master’s fortune depends upon both the health of his labor-force, his slaves, and the success of his plantation, the master is himself the representative of both labor and capital. This makes him fundamentally different, and for Calhoun, fundamentally better, than either the capitalists or the workers of the North.

94

Too much cannot be made of the connection between Calhoun’s defense of slavery and his conception of the concurrent majority. The latter serves to preserve the former, and the former must, for Calhoun, be protected if the American states are to remain united and free. This is so, because, Calhoun believed, there was no better way to solve the conflict between labor and capital than race-based chattel slavery.

Both of these last two considerations are of the utmost important to Calhoun. The

South cannot remain in the Union if slavery is threatened. As he said in 1837, “Abolition and Union cannot coexist,”33 But it’s also true that, for Calhoun, the free states of the

North, for all their industry, population, accumulation of capital and immiseration of labor, cannot long remain free themselves, absent the ballast and stability provided by the South. Specifically, the South’s social and political stability—bolstered by the fact that its labor force was enslaved and, therefore, not enfranchised, and the fact that the moral, economic, and political leaders of the South were the masters of its great plantations, who embodied simultaneously the interests of labor and capital—could, particularly if granted the power to veto national legislation, as Calhoun proposed in both his defense of nullification and his theory of the concurrent majority, prevent the rising tide of northern democracy from washing away the checks and balances that made republican government possible.

This was a stronger defense of slavery, and the political society it enabled, than had previously existed. Prior to Calhoun’s taking up of the issue, chattel slavery had typically been defended as a necessary evil, a state of affairs to be lamented but endured. Calhoun recognized this as an untenable position. Slavery would not survive if

33 Calhoun (1992), 472 95 it were construed as nothing more than a sad inevitability or an unfortunate consequence of historical conditions—namely the importation of African laborers into the United States during the colonial period—that persisted, primarily, because no good alternative, or workable method of winding it down, had yet been found. Not content to play a game of moral and political attrition that he was confident his section would ultimately lose, Calhoun went on the offensive.34

There has, Calhoun insisted before Congress in 1837, “never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.”35 This is no more or less true of the southern planter than it is of the northern capitalist. It is, indeed, an unavoidable fact of civilization, understood as a particularly well-developed, wealthy, and intellectually progressive state of society. “The devices” that ensure the uneven distribution of wealth “are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.” It seems, indeed, a fact of nature that “those by whose labor” wealth is produced should be accrue, for the most part, “to the non- producing classes.”36

34 He clarified his position in his final address to the Senate, in 1850, when he pointed out that there are, essentially, three positions on slavery in the North. The abolitionists and fanatics view see it as a sin, and, naturally, they feel that any complicity in its continuance implicates them in sin. Thusly convicted, they quite understandably consider it a duty to oppose not only the expansion but also the existence of slavery. Others, more moderate, see slavery as a crime against humanity. Those least invested nevertheless also see slavery a national embarrassment, a blot on the national character. In any event, the whole of northern opinion is, more-or-less, morally opposed to slavery and is content—if not now then soon—content to acquiesce in the most extreme position. 35 Quoted in Merriam (1903), 239; perhaps unsurprisingly, this speech of Calhoun’s does not make it into the (1992) celebratory collection of Calhoun’s works on political freedom, Union and Liberty. 36 Quoted in Crallé (1864), 631 96

The fact that a few live by the labor of the many is a as providential and unavoidable as it is empirically observable. Chattel slavery in the South is no special case in any way other than its explicit recognition of the wisdom of Providence and, having recognized it, attaching duties and obligations to it. Compared to free labor in the

North, and in Europe, southern slavery was positively humane. As Calhoun explains,

in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and so little extracted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. Compare his condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe; look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on the one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind and superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.37

Slavery is, fundamentally, more humane than industrial wage-labor, because it depends upon lasting bonds of reciprocity between labor and capital. The slave-master cannot exploit his labor-force in cavalier fashion, as he is expected to take care of them in sickness as in health. His slaves are dependent upon him such that organization or sabotage would be self-defeating. Hence, according to Calhoun, labor relations at the

South are carried on more harmoniously than they are, or could be, at the North.38

Additionally to its superiority from a humanitarian perspective, slavery is also politically safer than free labor. Northern abolitionists who are also statesmen and proponents of economic prosperity would do well to recognize that “the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political

37 Quoted in Crallé (1864), 631 38 It’s worth noting that though there is an entry for Calhoun’s “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in which he articulates his “positive good” defense of slavery, at the Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, the text of the speech is omitted from Union and Liberty. Perhaps more troublingly, H. Lee Cheek’s (2003) edited volume omits the speech entirely. 97 institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact.” This is so, because chattel slavery solves the problem of the unequal numerical relationship between labor and capital under conditions of political democracy.

“There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization stage of wealth and civilization,” Calhoun argues, “a conflict between labor and capital.

The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict.”39 Unlike the North, in which the laboring classes have been granted, via universal suffrage, a decisive or controlling share in political decision- making, rendering them dangerous, the South is safe because its laboring classes, its drudges, are prohibited on the basis of race from even the hope of political participation.

On no other grounds, for Calhoun, can modern life or popular politics be made safe. By no other means can constitutional government in the United States be preserved.

Calhoun’s was the quintessential “mind of the master class.” By Calhoun is articulated the fondest hopes and aspirations of the white, slaveholding South. As Fox-

Genovese and Genovese point out, the “American Revolution did not initiate a grand social transformation, although some participants tried mightily to have it do so. From the 1830s, antislavery brought a new perspective and urgency to the Southerners’ understanding of the underlying stakes” of the meaning of the American Revolution and, by extension, of American politics.40 This is crucial to Calhoun. The societies and governments of states and localities that predated the Revolution survived it intact, as did their state and local constitutions. Nothing about the Revolution entails, or even

39 Crallé (1864), 632 40 Fox-Genovese and Genovese (2005) 98 implies, an opportunity to rethink or reorganize anything other than the government and constitution that was overthrown by the Revolution, the government and constitution that was exercised over the states, collectively.

Calhoun insisted, in his Discourse, that the American Revolution had accomplished nothing more, or less, than the removal of the authority of Parliament and the crown over the colonies. This meant, simultaneously, that the erstwhile colonies became, by virtue of the Declaration of Independence, free and independent States.

The British government, which had united the colonies, and the crown-appointed governors that had exercised executive power in them, were abolished. But the political communities of the colonies survived intact. The people and their organ, the state legislature, were not affected by the revolution. Because of this, the Americans of the various states were able to pass from colonialism, through revolution, to independence without ever being subjected to the kind of anarchy that might’ve made a more thoroughgoing rethinking of the social and political structures in the states a live and legitimate issue.

To the external threat of antislavery, we might add at least two internal threats within the southern states, and within Calhoun’s South Carolina in particular. First, the majority of white southerners were not slaveholders. Jacksonian democracy and its promise of political egalitarianism, at least amongst the nation’s white, male population, was not only attractive to the South’s non-plantation whites, but, outside of the major cities of the eastern seaboard, found among them its most stalwart base of support.41

In South Carolina during Calhoun’s lifetime, the slaveholding gentry of the low country

41 (O’Brien 1993) 99 was only able to retain their monopoly on political power, after they’d acceded to the yeomanry’s demands for universal suffrage, by engineering a radically malapportioned dispensation of legislative power42. So, when Calhoun railed against majoritarian democracy and individualism, his object was likely as much his home state as it was his nation.

Second, it is important to keep in mind that the Age of Jackson was, in the South,

“the Age of Nat Turner as well.”43 In a state like South Carolina, and particularly in the low country in which the enslaved population outnumbered the master class to a significant extent, the possibility of a race war was never far from the masters’ minds.

After all, Haiti was still nearby, and what had happened there—the spread of revolutionary ideas about of liberty, equality, fraternity, and self-government, culminating in a revolution that saw the destruction of the white plantation aristocracy—could just as easily happen on an even larger scale in the southern portions of the United States.

Hence the vehemence with which the southern states, and their representatives in

Congress, attempted to quash the publication and proliferation of abolitionist literature throughout the 1830s. To their reckoning, the spread of such ideas presented an existential threat.

Calhoun’s assertion that “it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty” is understandable in this context. Against those who counted liberty among the common inheritances of all mankind, Calhoun insisted that liberty

42 (Wilentz 2005) 43 (Singal 1982, 15) 100

is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed upon a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable of either appreciating or of enjoying it.44

The immediate reference to abolitionism here is, and was to Calhoun’s contemporaries, quite clear. The abolitionists were operating under a delusion. Those for whom the abolitionists were so enthusiastic about granting liberty, the enslaved people of the South, were not ready for it and were fundamentally incapable of using it well. It is clear, however, that the enslaved people of the South were not the only ones

Calhoun had in mind when he produced this statement.

The problem with majoritarian democracy, with the spread of majoritarian democracy in the North, and with the increasing power of the northern states in the national government, was, ultimately, this: the distribution of power “in proportion to population would be, in fact, to give control of the government, in the end, to the cities; and to subject the rural and agricultural population to that description of population which usually congregate in them—and ultimately to the dregs of their population.”45

Calhoun’s particular concern was the preservation of southern chattel slavery and the society it made possible, but his commitment to hierarchy extended beyond the bounds of his section. Democracy would be cataclysmic for the South, but it would be no picnic for the North.

Calhoun’s insistence, in the Disquisition, that after the Revolution the states

“passed, without anarchy...from their dependent conditions under the colonial

44 Calhoun (1992), 31 45 Calhoun (1992), 218; emphasis added 101 governments, to that of independence under those established by their own authority,” is crucial.46 As Burke, whom Calhoun profoundly esteemed, said of the French

Revolutionaries’ claims to possession of rights of man and citizen were fundamentally incompatible with their claims to be a people, so too Calhoun insisted that the attempt at politically empowering a group of people whose position placed them outside the bounds of political society indicated a failure on the part of democrats and abolitionists to understand the nature of their enterprise.

To be a man and a citizen entails being a member of the society that superintends one’s life from the first breath, and which defines one’s station—and with it one’s rights and duties—in the world. That is to say, again, universal and equal rights and duties, on the one hand, and the existence of a people on the other, are incompatible. “The one supposes the presence, the other the absence of a state of civil society.”47 Calhoun’s insistence that the people of the colonies, in making revolution against the British crown, threw off the governing power that united them but not the legislative assemblies and social organs that established each as a particular people, is, then, crucial. The American Revolution was a political one, concerning primarily the personnel and structure of the governing bodies existing over and above the people of the separate states (née colonies), and not a social one. Questions of the social organization of the peoples of the various states were never, during the Revolution, on the table.

46 Calhoun (1992), 106 47 Burke (1992), 179 102

The continuity of the people of the states from the colonial era, through the

Revolution, to the ratification of the Constitution means at least two things. First, it establishes the states as the fundamental units for analysis of American politics. The states were the first entities called into existence by the revolution, and it was by their authority that the Articles of Confederation and, later, the Constitution, were established.

On this, for Calhoun, rests the genius of the Constitution of the United States. Previous experiments in republican constitutions have relied on a class-based division of authority between the few (wealthy) and the many (poor). Here, the “powers of government were divided, not, as heretofore, in reference to classes, but geographically.”48 Rather than rely upon a balance of power between the few and the many, the Constitution of the United States remains functionally agnostic as far as classes are concerned and instead relies upon the cross-cutting cleavages entailed in the disparate geographical—and the concomitantly disparate social, economic, religious, and ideological—differences entailed in the diverse situations of the various states.

Second, the continuity of the states and their priority to the national government means that the former has no legitimate grounds to interfere with the social organization of the latter. Further, it means that the citizens of the states themselves have no a priori right on the basis of the Revolution to question the organization of the societies into which they were born. Thus, the various and vexing questions facing the South’s master class from internal and external enemies concerning suffrage, apportionment, and of course slavery were essentially moot.

48 Calhoun (1992), 321 103

The relevant political communities were established prior to, and were not made questionable by, the Revolution. This has particular relevance for Calhoun’s assertions that the fundamental unit of political analysis is the community, and “every plantation is a little community, with a master at its head.” A rightly organized political community would be organized like the South (and, one might add, pace Hartz, the way Locke said they’d be in a state of nature, with heads of households as the primary political actors and as the first and fundamental representatives of the politically silent portions of society: wives, children, and slaves. The relationship between masters, dependents, and slaves is for Calhoun the foundation of republican politics in the United States.

This what H. Lee Cheek says, though he doesn’t mean to say it, when he points out that the “organic political community” is “for Calhoun the cradle of social and political life.”49 Clarifying, Cheek points out that, for Calhoun, “the most conspicuous example,” if not the only in the modern world, “of a living community was the plantation.”50 As free- labor capitalism and industrialization continued to gain momentum in the North and elsewhere, the counter-example of the South became ever more important. Southern slave-labor society maintained, intransigently, the fundamentally human relation between master and slave in the face of the increasingly powerful and fundamentally inhuman relationship between capitalist and laborer that was coming, more and more, to characterize the economic system of the North.

In contrast to the industrial system of the North, which seemed simultaneously like something new under the sun and recognizably, under older frameworks, as

49 Cheek (2004), 17 50 Cheek (2004), 91 104 fundamentally corrupt, the southern plantation system resembled the household system suggested by Aristotle.

“Like the Aristotelian household, the plantation possessed a certain hierarchy of status and responsibility,” and, we might add, like the Aristotelian household, this hierarchy began with white male masters at the head.51 From the male master, the hierarchy ran through wives, who were charged with the management (but not direction) of household activities, to the children of masters and mistresses, ending finally with slaves. Ultimately, responsibility for and authority over the Aristotelian household, as with the southern plantation, resides in the master. Other members of the household are dependent on, subordinate to, and represented by, him. Thus, however much Calhoun might have “incorporated [his] slaves into his community...and described their relations as ‘family,’” the relationship he defended when he described slavery as “necessary for both the slave and the plantation owner” is no less rigidly hierarchical and profoundly oppressive in both theory and practice.52

Precisely for this reason, Calhoun’s defense of hierarchy in general and chattel slavery in particular is indeed “an effort in philosophical retrenchment” aimed at arresting “the metamorphosis of republican political thought into democratic ideology.”53

The continuance of such a metamorphosis, Calhoun knew as well as anyone, would pose an existential threat to the South. Not only would it encourage the rumbling rabble amongst the southern yeomanry, it ran the risk of infecting the denizens of the slave- quarters themselves, which, Calhoun and his fellows had no doubt, would result in

51 Cheek (2004), 91 52 Cheek 2004, 104; Calhoun (2003), 91 53 Cheek 2004, 78 105 unmitigated disaster for the white masters of the antebellum South. The effort in philosophical retrenchment required to arrest such an alarming metamorphosis,

Calhoun well knew, entailed shoring up the institution of slavery, and everything up to and including the Union itself was up for sacrifice to that great cause.

Lacy K. Ford might be right that Calhoun was “the greatest of the post-

Madisonian republicans” in the United States. It is certainly true that Calhoun “spent much of his life trying to construct a system of political economy that would provide the proper material and ethical foundation for republican ideas and still accommodate the needs and appetites of a vigorously commercial and market economy.”54 In so doing,

Calhoun was recognizably attempting to square a particularly troubling circle: republican politics assumes economic independence as a prerequisite for political independence, while a commercial economy entails a level of (inter-)dependence that is clearly at odds with republican virtue.55

Perhaps this is a reasonable way of thinking about Calhoun’s ideas, but Ford gives no sense that he appreciates the gravity of what he is saying. Specifically, the system of political economy that Calhoun constructs depends, at its very heart, upon race-based chattel slavery, The various institutional measures Calhoun erects to protect local sovereignty and organic communities, while they might accommodate the needs and appetites of a vigorously commercial market economy, build, quite clearly, upon the material and ethical foundation of what was sometimes called the “mudsill class,”

54 Ford (1988), 411; 413 55 Capitalist and commercial forms and relations of property—particularly inasmuch as they rely on credit and exchange—imply relations of dependency, and for such relations “the appropriate term in the republican lexicon is corruption,” (Pocock 1977, 464). 106 namely human beings held as chattel who were expected to do the drudgework required by that vigorous commercial society and who were excluded, along with their progeny, in perpetuity, from exercising any say-so in the conduct of public affairs.56

One can easily find similar examples of modern interpreters of Calhoun who seek to lionize certain of his ideas while eliding his unfortunate position on the business of holding human beings in bondage as chattels. Russell Kirk, for example, celebrates the conservative legacy of John Randolph of Roanoke (whom Kirk describes as a

“slaveholding ami des noirs,” a “fantastic duelist” a “fanatic enemy of corruption” and

“the architect of Southern conservatism”) and Calhoun, whom Kirk figures Randolph’s protégé. While Kirk admits, obliquely and without specificity, Calhoun’s “faults of head and heart,” he nevertheless exults that “the South—alone among the civilized communities of the nineteenth century—had hardihood sufficient for an appeal to arms against the iron new order.”57 That is, the South alone took a stand against the rising tide of modern democracy. We can certainly thank Calhoun for at the very least providing the groundwork for the political and philosophical hardihood such resistance required.

It is, or it ought to be, disturbing that Calhoun’s answer to the problem of democracy, capitalism, and corruption is, quite clearly and unapologetically, a political economy that is built upon the foundation of chattel slavery. More disturbing is the extent to which Ford, Cheek, and others (the Genoveses, for example) are willing to mention Calhoun’s commitment to slavery but are apparently unwilling to comment

56 The phrase “mudsill class” was used by James Henry Hammond when he was a senator from South Carolina in a floor debate to describe the importance of slavery to the southern political economy. 57 Kirk (1997), 150; 184 107 much upon it critically, approvingly, or otherwise, or to address directly the centrality of slavery to Calhoun’s political ideas and projects. Perhaps this is because they are committed to Calhoun’s conservative and republican principles, on the one hand, but reluctant to own up to the profoundly racist (Calhoun’s was deep and abiding even in the inegalitarian context of his time), hierarchical, and anti-democratic theory and practice entailed in his, and their, conservatism.

The masters of great plantations are unique, according to Calhoun, in their breadth of vision. They alone harmonize the interest of labor and capital. They are the only ones capable of independence and virtue, and they are, as such, the only true republican citizens of the United States. Ending slavery destroys the position of the master, and thereby leaves the entire system in ruins. Therefore, although most proponents of aristocratic republicanism would likely be loath to admit it, the real “end of classical politics” in the United States is probably better dated to 1865 than 1789. This end of classical politics was due less to the rise of liberalism—after all, Calhoun’s institutionalism is liberal and rights-based, and there is nothing inherently illiberal about his system of concurrent majority—than it was to the rise of democracy in America.

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CHAPTER 4 EMERSON, SELF-RELIANCE, AND THE CONDUCT OF DEMOCRACY

The question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? —Ralph Waldo Emerson The Conduct of Life1

For anybody interested in the history of American thought, political or otherwise, in the decades after the Founding, Ralph Waldo Emerson is inescapable. Recognized by a contemporary as the author of America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence” and by F.O. Matthiessen as “the cow from which” the authors of the American

Renaissance—Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman—“drew their milk,” Emerson casts a very long shadow in the world of American letters.2 That Emerson made an impact on American political thought, was a catalyst to the development of a peculiarly

American political idiom, is difficult to question. How to understand Emerson’s impact, however, is a thornier matter. What kind of thinker was Emerson? How does his thought connect to politics?

There have been many attempts to connect Emerson’s thought to politics, none of which have been entirely satisfying. To most of his early biographers and interpreters,

Emerson was a “self-isolated thinker” to whom philosophical and spiritual matters provided necessary reprieve from a turbulent and troubled world.3 Outside of his opposition to slavery, a position he only publicly expressed in the later stage of his career, Emerson’s “intellectual labor condemned him to solitude…and meditation,”

1 The epigraph for this chapter comes from the essay “Fate” in The Conduct of Life (E&L, 943) 2 Holmes (1885), 115; Matthiessen (1941), xii 3 See, for example, Holmes (1885), Cabot (1887), and Emerson (1889). The quotation is from Woodberry 1890, 157). 109 rather than action.4 The lesson to be drawn from Emerson’s ideas and example stresses patience, reflection, self-reliance, and a Stoic refusal to allow the churning winds of life to ruffle one’s feathers.

Emerson himself was “a model of patience and good temper,” with “no affection for ruggedness.”5 In spite of this, Emerson’s ideas were clearly recognized as potentially destabilizing and possibly dangerous. This is particularly true of Emerson’s notion of self-reliance, which Emerson summarized thusly: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”6 In spite of the placidity and temperance of Emerson the man, Emerson’s ideas, if wantonly taken up and applied, could be disruptive, or even destructive. One contemporary admirer worried “that when Emerson proclaimed his new doctrine, to his young disciples, of placing themselves on their instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance…without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, who listened to his teachings.”7 As such, Emerson’s pacific nature and personal conservatism stands in contrast to the potentially radical implications of his ideas.

Dewey called Emerson “the philosopher of democracy” for precisely this reason, and many recent interpreters of Emerson have tended to follow Dewey’s lead.8 Thus, for George Kateb, Emerson’s self-reliance “present[s] and defend[s] the aspirations of

4 Garnett (1888), 108 5 Holmes (1885), 367; Emerson (1889), 229 6 E&L, 260; we shall have an opportunity to examine Emerson’s self-reliance in significantly greater depth, below. 7 Holmes (1885), 394 8 Dewey (1903), 405 110 the mind of democratic culture, nothing less.”9 According to Stanley Cavell, Emerson shares with Nietzsche and Heidegger a commitment to “aversive thinking,” which exhibits precisely the cast of mind proper to democratic citizenship, and for Cornell

West, Emerson is “the indisputable godfather of the deep democratic tradition in

America.”10 Because of his dedication to freeing individual minds from the influence of authority, of religion, of the past, and of social expectations, Emerson is fêted as an inescapably and fundamentally democratic thinker. Emerson’s was a democratic call to thought, to the unfettered development of all men’s, and women’s minds. And yet, while we can be sure of Emerson’s commitment to self-reliance, the way in which—even the extent to which—his work connects to democracy remains murky.

There is ample evidence for Emerson’s commitment to individualism, self- reliance, and the cultivation of unique individual selves. There is, however, only scant evidence for Emerson’s supposed commitment to democracy. One will search, in vain, for anything more than a hint that Emerson might’ve envisioned universal applicability for his ideas. There is, instead, a fair amount of textual evidence suggesting that

Emerson’s commitment to democracy was tepid at best. As one of his more recent biographers has pointed out, Emerson was both “a champion” and “a critic” of American democracy, always insisting on the importance of the character of the individual and unwilling to commit wholeheartedly to any single political position other than, eventually, abolitionism.11

9 Kateb (2002), 6 10 Cavell (1990), 33-60 (I should add that, for Cavell, Emerson has the addition value of having exhibited much less outward hostility to political democracy than either Nietzsche or Heidegger); West (2005), 68 11 Field (2002); 226, 198. Though his embrace of abolitionism is to his credit, it should not be forgotten that Emerson was, even among his close friends, a late convert to the cause, and during the pre-Civil 111

Emerson was not a democratic thinker. When democracy—political, social, economic, or otherwise—enters into Emerson’s work, it usually comes in for criticism, and is never praised for its own sake. Democracy is not among Emerson’s goals. At best, democracy is for Emerson a more-or-less expedient way of organizing particular societies, one that does have the advantage of affording at least some people the option of choosing their own particular style of living (or, to use a phrase nearer to

Emerson’s, it affords one the opportunity of conducting one’s life as one sees fit).

Emerson’s primary goal was the cultivation of individuality, and though democracy can enable such cultivation, it is just as likely to be an obstacle.

Read politically, we can understand Emerson’s work as an attempt to align the best men with the best causes. Emerson was torn, in his own time, between the best cause and the best men because he could not accept the former from anyone whom he did not count among the latter. That is to say, Emerson’s work emerges as a reaction against the plebiscitary democracy that was rising around him, from which issued the best cause, and as a call to action directed at the able minds of the educated but dissipated haut bourgeoisie of New England in general and Boston in particular, from whence the best men were likeliest to issue.

Before moving on from here, a note of caution must be sounded. Emerson is a notoriously slippery thinker. His work is often elliptical. Within the space of a single essay, he is likely to assert, defend, and reject multiple perspectives en route to a conclusion that might have more to do with the process of thinking through a problem

War years Emerson spent delivering occasional addresses on the subject, most of his energies were absorbed in writing English Traits, a celebration of America’s English heritage.

112 than with the specific issues he considered along the way. He does not, as one interpreter memorably put it, always seem to stand behind everything he says.12 One gets the sense that extracting this or that line from one of Emerson’s works gets one about as close to understanding his intent as would cobbling together the utterances of

Thrasymachus, Alcibiades, and Glaucon in hopes of thereby making sense of Plato. In the words of another recent interpreter, “only sampling error can invent a coherent

Emerson.”13

This ought not be surprising. After all, Emerson insists that a “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”14 This should not, however, lead us to despair of making sense, or coherence, out of Emerson. He does not reject consistency as such, as astute readers will have noticed, but only the foolish kind. Though the statement sounds profound, Emerson means it prosaically. His point is only that we ought not feel obliged to cleave to a position simply because we have expressed support for it in the past.

When we realize a mistake, or when we change our minds, we should say so rather than continue in error or in a lie. For all his ellipses, Emerson does have a point to make, even if the point is not always easily reducible to a quip.

In the following chapter, I argue that we misunderstand Emerson if we assume that he is a democratic thinker. I echo Whitman’s sense of what he called Emerson’s

“non-democracy.”15 In Emerson, Whitman complained in an unpublished notebook, “we have always a polite person amid a well dressed assembly, in a parlor, talking about

12 Cavell (2003) 13 Lee (2005), 166 14 E&L, 265 15 Quoted in Baxter (1889), 4 113

Plutarch, Astronomy, good behavior, the impropriety of laughing, &c and evidently dominated by the English.”16 Emerson proclaims the freedom of the intellect, yet he demands good manners. He detests our thralldom to the past, but inveighs against engaging in activities that would disrupt the present. Emerson asks us to think radically while upholding decorum. If Emersonian self-reliance is hypothetically open to anyone, it is so in the sense that stoic virtue is available to anyone whether slave or emperor.

The truly self-reliant slave would not chafe at his physical bondage. He would, instead, rise above it. As Emerson put it in a letter to his friend, Thomas Carlyle, “my whole philosophy—which is very real—teaches acquiescence and optimism” to the slave and the master alike.17

For this reason, among others, I argue that it is a mistake to call Emerson a democratic thinker. Inasmuch as Emerson has to do with democracy, it is as a critic of the way democracy was practiced in the United States at the time when he composed the bulk of his work. His criticism was not entirely hostile. Emerson’s relationship to democracy is one of acquiescence and, more often than not, disengagement.

To Emerson, democracy simply is in America, like it or not, primarily because it fits the times and the general character of the American people.18 Democracy is a rising tide in need of channeling and guidance, not a goal to be achieved. Emerson’s goal is not democracy, but self-reliance, the cultivation of one’s own individuality, particularly as

16 UPWM, 1726 17 Quoted in Holmes (1885), 100 18 As Emerson puts it in his essay, “Politics,” “Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers, born under the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our institutions, though in the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms.” (E&L, 563)

114 self-reliance conduces, in some individuals, to genius. If there is anything like a political program in Emerson’s work, it is precisely the creation of a world in which the greatest realization of self-reliance is possible, because such a world will open the widest avenues to men of genius to take their natural place at the head of the table.

We should not, however, correct the mistake of calling Emerson a democratic thinker by adding another of our own. We should not call Emerson an anti-democratic thinker either. Rather, we should follow Whitman in calling Emerson a non-democratic thinker. Democracy, as a political system, Emerson can take or leave. Emerson’s feelings about democracy seem close to what Bloom says in his gloss on Plato’s

Republic: democracy is not a good regime, but it unique among corrupt regimes in that it affords space for philosophers, as long as they don’t run too far afoul of the authorities.19 Emerson is a non-democratic thinker, because he is, fundamentally, a non-political thinker.

Emerson is non-democratic and non-political in a peculiar but predictable, way.

Democracy is good, insofar as it affords ample room for the development of self-reliant individuality, but it is bad, inasmuch as it calls on people to engage with it or participate in its machinations. One who engages with or participates in democracy will find oneself busy cultivating the favor of the masses, and will necessarily be insufficiently attentive to the proper conduct of one’s own life or the proper cultivation of one’s self. To put it another way, democracy is fine, so long as one doesn’t pay it too much mind.

Although the word “corruption” does not factor prominently in Emerson’s works, understanding its meaning in the republican lexicon is important for understanding

19 Bloom (1991), 421 115

Emerson. Corruption, in the republican sense, refers to the things that compromise one’s independence, which diminishes one’s capacity to disregard one’s personal interests when one considers the public good. When a polity or society is sunk in corruption, as, for Emerson, a democratic society and polity necessarily is so long as public opinion plays a leading role and the public is composed, by and large, of people who are not self-reliant, participating in politics with an eye toward renovation is a self- defeating business.

Politics, then, “must be reduced to ethics if was not to reduce itself to corruption.”20 That is to say, those who would avoid corruption must avoid politics and instead focus on the conduct of life. Works, such as Emerson’s, that proceed in this mode, are “likely to end, not only in moral exhortation, but in the suggestion that virtue as a quality of the personality was the only agency likely to cure corruption.” 21 I do not believe Pocock had Emerson in mind, here, but he might as well have done, as this captures Emerson’s approach fairly precisely. Only self-reliance, only the cultivation of self-reliant individuals, can save American democracy from itself. Emerson eschews politics for ethics, because only ethics can save politics.

So, when I say that Emerson is non-democratic because he is non-political, I do not mean to say that Emerson’s works are without political implications. I simply mean to say that the political implications of Emerson’s works are not necessarily democratic.

As a matter of fact, they are, quite often, not democratic at all. I do not intend this as an argument against Emerson or Emersonianism. If anything, I would urge those who, like

20 Pocock (2003), 484 21 Pocock (2003), 484 116 me, have been moved or touched by Emerson to follow Rorty’s suggestion that we separate those philosophers whose work we find edifying from those whose work we find politically useful.22

Emerson is one of those edifying philosophers whose work may be of immense value to those who would follow him on a journey of personal discovery, but he is not one of those philosophers whose work is of much value when applied to, for example, concrete instances of abuse and exploitation. Or, at least, Emerson is not of much use if your sense of what it means to ameliorate such situations entails intervention into physical circumstances. For Emerson, physical circumstances were beside the point.

This is part of what’s attractive about his work, unless your primary interest is in furthering the cause of democracy.

Physical circumstances did not interest Emerson much, other than as obstacles and distractions to the cultivation of the proper frame of mind and the proper development of the self. From a democratic perspective, there is something troubling in this aspect of Emerson’s work. To put it another way, we should not forget that as late as 1852, when conflicts between anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces in the United

States were boiling over, and while millions of actual human beings were held in bondage, Emerson wrote in his journal that he had “quite other slaves to free than these negroes,” by which he meant, specifically, the “enslaved minds” of the bright young, white men of New England.23 Excessive concern with the external conditions of the lives

22 Rorty (2009), 377 23 Quoted in Gray (1917), 90 117 of people and persons is a distraction from the real work we ought to be doing on, and for, ourselves.

In what follows, I shall develop this argument and attempt to demonstrate its importance not only to our understanding of Emerson, but also to our understanding of democracy in America.

Emerson’s criticisms of antebellum American democracy do not make him an anti-democratic thinker. After all, democracy in antebellum America was generally dedicated to promoting and preserving white supremacy, supportive of slavery, deeply patriarchal, and engaged in the process of “removing” Native Americans from settled eastern states to western ones newly won from Mexico, themselves the consequence of an unjust, but immensely popular, war.24 The years during which Emerson wrote the bulk of his works have been aptly characterized as the “High Noon of the White

Republic” in the United States.25 The racism, hypocrisy, and bellicosity of the American democracy of the Jacksonian Era are often cited as the source of Emerson’s occasional antipathy toward democracy. There is ample evidence, however, that Emerson’s aversion goes further, and deeper, than disdain for certain contemporary practices.

Emerson was born in Boston in the spring of 1803 to a well-respected family at the fringes of Boston’s Brahmin elite. During the Revolutionary War, his grandfather had served as chaplain to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and to the Continental

Army. His father, William, was a Federalist, a Unitarian minister, and served as pastor at

Boston’s First Church (a post that had previously been held by the likes of john Cotton,

24 The extent of Emerson’s opposition to these practices, it is worth noting, is difficult to know with certainty. 25 Smith (1997), 197 118

John Winthrop, and Charles Chaucer) from 1799 until his death in 1811, shortly before his son Ralph Waldo’s eight birthday.26 Following the death of his father, Emerson and his siblings were raised by his well-educated and deeply religious mother and his fiercely independent, though resolutely Calvinist, aunt Mary Moody, the latter of whom

Emerson counted a profound influence on the formation of his ideas.27 Aside from the difficulties imposed by the untimely death of his father, Emerson childhood was typical of a young man destined for the ministry.

At the age of fourteen, Emerson entered Harvard College. He graduated, four years later, with the dubious honor of having been ranked in the exact middle of his class.28 After some years spent as a teacher and schoolmaster, Emerson entered

Harvard Divinity School. Upon his graduation, he took a post as junior pastor at

Boston’s Second Church, and, like his father and grandfather, served as chaplain to the

Massachusetts legislature. Having grown up financially insecure, due to the early death of his father, Emerson married eighteen-year-old Ellen Tucker, the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant.29 By his late twenties, Emerson seemed set for a respectable, if unremarkable, New England life. But this was not to be.

In 1831, Ellen died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty. This personal tragedy seems to have precipitated a chain of events that led to a profound change in Emerson.

For a year and two months after his wife’s death, Emerson visited her gravesite every day. Then, on the 29th of March, 1832, Emerson records the following in his journal: “I

26 Richardson (1996), 20 27 Richardson 1996, 23-28 28 Buell (2003), 13. 29 Buell (2003) 13; this was prior to the official separation of church and state in Massachusetts, which was not codified until 1835 (Richardson 1996, 209). 119 visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.”30 It is not clear why Emerson did this or what he made of the experience, as he records nothing further in his journal. But it is clear that something changed in him either shortly before or shortly after.

Later in the same year, Emerson left the Second Church. His final sermon was an ultimatum. Emerson announced to his congregation that he would no longer administer the Lord’s Supper. After having presented a number of “other objections,” drawn mostly from Quakerism, he arrived at the rub. At the end of the day, Emerson told his church, “this mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it.”31 Offered the choice between the resignation of their junior pastor and the abandonment of the ritual of communion, the congregation chose the former.

With that, Emerson stepped out of the life of forgettable bourgeoisie respectability to which he’d been born and into the life for which he would be known to his contemporaries and posterity. In the interregnum, Emerson spent time traveling around Europe, during which time he met a number of literary and philosophical luminaries, including Coleridge and, more propitiously, Thomas Carlyle, with whom

Emerson would maintain a lifelong correspondence.

Emerson returned to the United States in 1833, and shortly thereafter found work as a speaker on the burgeoning lyceum circuit in and around New England. In addition to speaking fees, Emerson secured, after some legal wrangling, a yearly income from his late wife’s estate. In addition to impelling his movement toward philosophy, the

30 Emerson (1982), 82 31 Quoted in Buell (2003), 16 120 death of Emerson’s first wife (upon his return to the United States, Emerson married

Lydia Jackson, whom he renamed “Lidian”) provided him with ample enough income to remove pecuniary concerns from his life. With this, Emerson had sufficient wherewithal to pursue a literary career without much worry about pecuniary matters.32

The year Emerson published his first book of essays, Nature, was the year

Martin Van Buren won the presidency, which meant the Democratic Party would extend its dominance of American politics for at least another four years. When the old war hero Andrew Jackson was the party’s leader, the party’s victories could be written off by its opponents as the result of a cult of personality. Van Buren’s victory seemed to signal something darker.

Dubbed the “Little Magician” for his small stature and his ability as a political operative, Van Buren had neither an impressive biography nor political gravitas. He did, however, have control over a vast political machine—designed to drive masses of

Americans, many of whom were poor and had only recently won the suffrage to he polls on Election Day, often with the promise of access to federal jobs in exchange for their loyalty to the Democratic Party—a machine Van Buren himself had no small hand in building. That machine helped Jackson crush John Quincy Adams, an acquaintance of

Emerson’s and fellow New Englander, in the election of 1828. With that victory, the

Democrats defeated the last vestiges of the old Federalists. They dominated American national politics through the 1830s.33

32 Perhaps Emerson had this episode in mind when we wrote, in his essay “Compensations,” “[t]he death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our ways of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth, which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character,” (E&L, 302). 33 See, for example, Howe (2007) and McCormick (1966) 121

They were also, as Emerson recorded in his journal during the election of 1832,

“notoriously the Bad party in the cities & in general in the country.”34 The Democrats were “bad” precisely because of their mass-mobilization strategy. They stirred up the rabble, preached equality at them, and warned them that the country was threatened by a “money power,” a cadre of elites bent on establishing themselves as an American aristocracy.35 As one Democratic Party editorialist put it, the “one great party is composed, in great measure, of the farmers, mechanics, laborers, and other producers of the middling and lower classes…and the other of the consumers, the rich, the proud, the privileged, of those who, if our government were converted into an aristocracy, would become the dukes, lords, marquises, and baronets.”36 The Democrats were self- consciously the party of the lower orders of American society, and Emerson was alarmed by their ascendance.

Emerson was not alone in this. The Whig Party was organized in the 1830s, primarily in opposition to the Democrats. Where the Democrats stressed conflict between parties, and between the “productive classes” and the aristocracy, the Whigs stressed harmony.37 Where the Democratic Party was self-consciously the party of laborers, immigrants, and roughs, the Whigs were notably patrician, and though their adoption of the Democrats’ methods of mass-mobilization made them competitive in national elections—Whigs and Democrats would trade control of the presidency and

Congress back and forth through the 1840s—they were never able to shake the whiff of

34 Emerson (1982), 128 35 See, for example, Wilentz (2005), 425-456 36 William Leggett, quoted in Hanson (1985), 128 37 Wilentz (2005), 491-493 122 elitism that clung to many of their leading members, many of whom, like Daniel

Webster, had been strong opponents of the removal of property qualifications on the suffrage.38

When Emerson wrote, in 1844, that “[o]f the two great parties which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men,” he meant it as a criticism of both the Democrats and the Whigs.39 The best cause—broad suffrage, open access to political office, hostility to privileges, and political equality—belonged to the Democrats. But the Democrats were rough, ill- mannered, the party of Indian-removal and the expansionist war with Mexico. The

Whigs contained the best men, men like Webster and Henry Clay, but these men, out of foolishness or arrogance or cowardice, lend their power to the wrong causes. The right- thinking man “will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrats…for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power.

But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party proposes to him as representatives of these liberalities.”40 “On the other side,” however, “the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population is timid, and merely defensive of property.”41

On the face of it, there is something surprising in Emerson’s rejection of the party of the best ideas. He had, after all, earlier exclaimed that once “ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society…and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and

38 See, for example, Webster’s argument in Luther v. Borden (1849), in which he defended the state of Rhode Island’s refusal to extend suffrage after the Dorr War. 39 E&L, 568 40 E&L, 564 41 E&L, 565

123 philanthropists.”42 Evidently, the messenger can corrupt the message, and an idea can be cheapened by the meanness of its vessel.

As a matter of fact, the problem for Emerson is that the idea of “facilitating” the access of the young and poor to the sources of wealth and power is precisely that it is presented by the poor as a demand. Emerson has no trouble with the idea. “The state,” he argued in an earlier essay, “must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child must have a just chance for his bread.” However, Emerson insists that “the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor.”43 This, then, is the problem. Though the poor should have amelioration, they should not receive it by making demands of government. They should, rather, be granted it willingly by the rich. The best cause—liberty and equality— ought to be championed by the best men. As long as it is not, both the men and their causes are unworthy of allegiance.

“Nature,” Emerson writes, “is not democratic, nor limited monarchical, but despotic.”44 That is, nature itself has no politics other than power, and power accrues to the strong. Ownership of property, for example, is a kind of strength, and as a result, property will always have a share in government. Numbers and organization, too, are a kind of strength. As a result, personal rights, at least for those who are organized and participatory, will likewise always have a share in government, as long as the defenders of those rights are numerous and organized enough to throw some weight around.

42 E&L, 136 43 E&L, 149 44 E&L, 560

124

Worrying too much about the proper relationship between persons and property in government is, Emerson argues, fundamentally misguided.

Wherever property is unevenly distributed, and as long as those who have less of it desire more, there will be political conflict. The presence of conflict is evidence of a moral failing in the polity: “there will always be a government of force, where men are selfish.”45 And furthermore, Emerson argues, as long as men are selfish, there is very little point in bothering with politics. Joining one side or the other in this conflict means either lending yourself to those who selfishly defend property or those who selfishly grasp for it.

Whence comes this selfishness? Emerson argues that it stems from a misunderstanding. We strive for material comforts because we have confused the purposes originally served by material thing. They are not worthy objects, but only means. “Thought, virtue, beauty were the ends” of human striving, once upon a time,

it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the head- ache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whist the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attentions have been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has become the end. This is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich, and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich. This is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pain and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing.46

This, then, is both the problem and its source. The goal of human striving and of human society ought to be thought, virtue, and beauty. The means required for effective striving toward these goals, in part because of the difficulty of attaining of attaining them

45 E&L, 570 46 E&L, 552; emphasis in original

125 and in part because of the comfort provided by them, have elevated the means to the status of ends in themselves. Now, the rich use government power to defend their wealth, and the poor attempt to wrest the power of government from the rich in hopes of thereby becoming rich themselves.

Emerson is not interested in joining this fight. Instead, he seeks to avert it. He hopes to convince both sides that the objects they are seeking will not give them what they want, that material or pecuniary rewards are not worth the effort because they do not, of themselves, conduce toward true human flourishing, which consists, again, in virtue, thought, and beauty. 47 Neither the self-defensive rich nor the grasping poor who hope to become rich have understood this, so neither side is worthy of support.

However, Emerson has a great deal more hope of success on one side than on the other. Emerson holds more hope for the best men, however timid and defensive they might be, than he does for the masses of what he calls poor men.

The poor who envy the rich are wrong to do so not only because the comforts of wealth come with burdens, but also because the fundamental oneness of humanity renders distinctions like less and more, his and mine, nugatory. To these poor men,

Emerson offers the following:

In the nature of the soul is compensation for the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation and malevolence toward More? Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and knows not what to make of it. He almost shuns their eye.

47 For another example of the same tension, see Emerson’s essays “Spiritual Laws” and “Love,” both from his 1841 series of essays. In “Love,” Emerson essentially paraphrases Plato’s Symposium, arguing that everybody should be open to fraternal or romantic love, because the experience of this-worldly love “puts us in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom,” (E&L, 337). In “Spiritual Laws,” Emerson laments that there “are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato,” (E&L, 317).

126

He fears they will upbraid God. What should they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and these mountainous inequalities vanish. The heart and soul of all men being one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is mine. I am my brother, and my brother is me. I feel overshadowed and outdone by my great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so desired and envied is my own.48

The poor need only realize the fundamental oneness of mankind—and, indeed, of the universe—to be transported out of their condition and into the richness of their human and divine inheritance. Only by thusly transcending the difficulties of their particular positions can they cease to be poor men, and become men. Only by so doing will they become worthy of Emerson’s respect, and until they have done so, they are beyond political help.

As long as the poor masses are not men, but poor men, any attempt at bettering their condition must fail, because “the State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen…and that form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population that permits it.”49 Any “foolish legislation” that seeks to elevate the low before they have demonstrated their readiness for elevation, is

“a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting.”50 To put it another way, you can bestow whatever suffrage rights you like to people who are not ready to be the masters of their own minds and, in so doing, accomplish nothing. As long as those who have been excluded from the suffrage or denied the privileges of political power and citizenship seek inclusion in hopes of bettering their condition thereby, the project of inclusion and

48 E&L, 301 49 E&L, 559 50 E&L, 559

127 democracy will only, at best, fail. At worst, it will be destructive of the entire socio- political system.

In a defense of natural aristocracy that echoes the one John Adams offered to

Jefferson,51 Emerson holds that even if the rich “provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded minority revenge themselves on the excluding minority, by the strong hand, and kill them, at once a new class finds itself on top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk.” Even if this conflict should reduce the world to a population of two, “one of these would be the leader, and would be served and copied by the other.”52

Whatever political or legislative doctrines of equality might be in the mouths of reformers, they are no match for the brute fact of the natural superiority of some over others. Try whatever method you can imagine, and you will never truly equalize. The ascendency of one person over another is as natural as the sunrise, and no more eradicable by legislation.

It is not easy to categorize Emerson politically, but I think the nearest we can get to the truth is to call him a proponent of natural aristocracy. He is without question a believer in great men—indeed, it is “natural to believe in great men.”53 As he argues in

“Politics,” the proper and primary role for the state is “the education of the wise man.”

Once the wise man exists, “the state expires. The appearance of character makes the

51 In an 1813 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Adams argued for the inevitability of aristocracy, “Pick up, the first 100 men you meet, and make a Republick. Every Man will have an equal Vote. But when deliberations and discussions are opened it will be found that 25, by their Talents, Virtues being equal, will be able to carry 50 Votes. Every one of these 25, is an Aristocrat, in my Sense of the Word; whether he obtains his one Vote in Addition to his own, by his Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science, learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant,”(quoted in Peabody 1973, 397). 52 E&L, 518 53 E&L, 615

128 state unnecessary. The wise man is the state.”54 The wise man is the state, because the wise man provides the guidance that any state, however organized, can only hope to approximate.

And, indeed, he holds out faith that the entrance of the “wise man” on the scene will finally get us out of the impasse in which we find ourselves. No more would we be roiled by selfish parties of defensive rich and avaricious poor. Under the influence of the wise man, “the rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor, their escapes and resources.”55 Although Emerson is not here arguing for a particular form of government, he is quite clear that some men are, by nature, not only more persuasive or more gifted than others, but better than the rest.

Perhaps as a result of his phraseology—he tends to talk about wise men, great men, and genius—Emerson’s faith in natural aristocracy is often overlooked or elided, but it is quite clear, and quite real. “We must have kings, we must have nobles…only let us have the real instead of the titular,” Emerson argued in his 1842 address to the

“Young Americans.”56 “In every society,” Emerson continued, “some men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well-directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be greeted with joy and honor.”57 Do not, Emerson warns, get too caught up in rhetoric about equality and democracy. Look instead toward the elevation

54 E&L, 568 55 E&L, 623 56 E&L, 225; The Young Americans were, by and large at that time, vociferously democratic, often of a literary bent, and full of enthusiasm for democratic-republican movements in places like Ireland, Greece, Italy, and Hungary (Widmer 1999). 57 E&L, 225

129 of the great and good, to the installation of true leaders to replace the old ones who resist change for merely defensive reasons.

Emerson was convinced that the true natural aristocracy, in America and elsewhere, was not to be found in any titled or moneyed aristocracy, but “only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum.”58 That is to say, Emerson did not look for true leadership or great men among the moneyed and titled any more than he did among the poor. He looked, instead, to those who had some wherewithal but who had also, mostly, earned it. If we are to read Emerson politically, then we can understand his self-reliance as a strategy for awakening young American men at the edge of America’s commercial aristocracy to the power available to them could they but see it, and would they but claim it. In so doing, these young men could transcend American democracy and replace the tyranny of public opinion with the rule of the genius.

Emerson was interested in great men, wise men, heroes, men of genius, and not the drudges of the world. He was, like Socrates, interested in spirited and promising young men. These were his target audience, not only because lecturing on the somewhat experimental but mostly genteel lyceum circuit was where Emerson earned most of his bread, not only because he launched his literary career and built his reputation on a couple of speeches given at his alma mater, one to the graduating class at Harvard’s divinity school and one to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.59 Emerson spoke to the scions of the best families of New England because they were his people, because

58 E&L, 520 59 I refer, here, to the “Divinity School Address” (1838) and “The American Scholar (1837). 130 they were ones “at the edge” of the commercial aristocracy, and because they were the ones most likely to develop into the kind of natural aristocrats Emerson envisioned.

If these young men were to realize their potential, they would have to be inured against the thralldom to history, religion, and philosophy that their teachers and fathers would attempt to impose upon them. They would need to defend themselves against the opprobrium they’d face from their family, friends, and peers should their opinions prove unorthodox. Most importantly, however, they’d need to be able to ignore the conforming pressure of public opinion, which, as Tocqueville had noted only a couple of years before Emerson embarked upon his career as a public intellectual, exercised despotic power in antebellum America.60

“It is easy enough for a man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes,” Emerson intones. “Their rage is decorous and prudent.” However,

“when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow,” Emerson warns, “it needs a habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.”61 It’s easy enough to scandalize the wealthy and wellborn, and, having scandalized them, it’s simple enough to withstand their well-mannered scorn. Upset the masses, however, and you may have a more difficult problem on your hands.

60 Toqueville (1994, 264) argued that democracies were particularly prone to what he called the tyranny of the majority. In olden times, when confronted with heterodoxy, the state’s officials attacked the body of the offender “in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed at it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free and the soul is enslaved.” The extent to which bodies, in democracies, can be made vessels for enslaved minds is among Emerson’s chiefest concerns. 61 E&L, 267

131

I should pause here, for emphasis. Emerson deals with the masses, the demos, only as a problem, as an obstacle to individuality or, more importantly, as an obstacle to greatness, genius, and the rise of the natural aristocracy. Because he was working in opposition to the Democracy, against the Democratic Party’s assertion that the participation and opinion of the masses was, and ought to be understood as, the true sense and ruling power of the nation, Emerson inveighs strongly against the masses not for any particular thing they’ve done, but simply for being masses. His antipathy to the masses ought to prevent us from thinking of Emerson as a democratic thinker. Again, to insist that Emerson is not a democratic thinker is not to say that he is an opponent of democracy. If democracy means anything, however, it must at least entail a mass- based politics. Insofar as Emerson’s political attitude is strongly and stridently averse to the masses, it is at least non-democratic. Inasmuch as Emerson’s aversion to the masses wanders toward contempt, however, we might argue more strongly for

Emerson’s antipathy to democracy.

“Masses!” Emerson wrote in 1860, “the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely sweet…and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population.”62 It is important to note the class inflection of Emerson’s complaint, here. The calamity is masses as such, but he is specifically bothered by masses of poor and working-class people.

The masses are particularly loathsome to Emerson when they are poor, as they often are. As he wrote a decade earlier, “enormous populations, if they be beggars, are

62 E&L, 965

132 disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas—the more, the worse.”63 We might, furthermore, note that there is a racial and ethnic component to Emerson’s disdain. “The German and Irish millions, like the Negro,” Emerson noted at a time when

German and Irish immigrants were targets of nativist bigotry (and of Democratic Party organizers and recruiters) and the sectional conflict over slavery was heating up, “have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over

America, to ditch and to drudge to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely.”64

Perhaps the Germans, Irish, and Blacks in America are destined for guano and early deaths merely because they are employed as drudges and diggers, rather than by any inherent racial or ethnic trait (though the time and effort Emerson expended during the 1850s writing English Traits, an investigation into the peculiar advantages

Americans enjoyed by virtue of their Anglo-Saxon inheritance, suggests otherwise). In any event, Emerson does not expand on this point. At the very least, the Germans,

Irish, and Blacks, like the English stockingers and Italian lazzaroni, are, as teeming millions of mostly poor men, not to be looked to for leadership, and much more likely to be obstacles, particularly when they begin to growl and mow, to the efflorescence of genius that Emerson hoped to instigate.

This was no idle speculation. In the 1840s and 1850s, it was not unheard of, or even uncommon, for angry mobs to violently assault meetings of abolitionists or to attack the persons and presses of those with gall enough to publish material critical of

63 E&L, 615 64 E&L, 950

133 the masses or of popular opinion.65 Nat Turner had reminded Virginians of the consequences of loose talk about liberty and freedom only a decade earlier. The prospect of encountering “the people out of doors” remained a very real threat. So,

Emerson takes pains to remind his audience of the force they would face should they follow his advice.

Politics and power in the United States, increasingly during Emerson’s lifetime, revolved around the mobilization of voters and the power of public opinion. The massification of politics and culture entailed, for Emerson, as a necessary flip-side, hostility toward greatness and genius. The masses are hostile to anyone and anything unlike themselves.

As long as the masses hold sway over public affairs, it will be impossible for anything great or extraordinary to gain purchase even in the rare instances when such a thing might arise. “The heroic,” as Emerson puts it, “cannot be common, nor the common heroic.”66 Emerson’s concerns here mirrors those that travel under such phrases as “massification of culture,” “homogenization of subjectivities,” and “the rise of the social.”67 Inasmuch as there’s a purpose to human life, it is, for Emerson, realization and actualization of one’s individual capacities. One cannot thusly realize and actualize if one is all the time looking over one’s shoulder to see whether or not one is receiving the support of one’s peers and fellows. One must, rather, apply oneself diligently to one’s work, and be prepared to shrug off whatever opprobrium one encounters.

65 For example, see Richards (1971) 66 E&L, 379 67 For example, see Horkheimer and Adorno (2002, 94-136), Marcuse (2002, 225-246) Arendt (1998, especially 38-49), and Pocock (2003, 550-552). 134

Most people, most of the time, are unwilling to do this. Among the common people that make up the masses, who constitute the bulk of what is called the public, and who are referenced whenever the power of public opinion is invoked, “digestion and sex absorb the vital force” from which heroism and greatness are born. “The more of these drones that perish,” Emerson continues, “the better for the hive.”68 To the catalogue of Emersonian unworthies, then, we might add the drones to the aforementioned poor men.69 It is important that Emerson does not merely argue that such drones should be ignored. He suggests, rather, that everyone else would be better off if they should all die.

We should pause here for a moment to consider what Emerson has said. I believe it is beyond argument that Emerson was no fan of the masses. These masses, understood as poor men—as they would certainly have been were they stockingers, lazzaroni, or working class immigrants to the United States—or as drones—as the dissipated and lazy among the commercial aristocracy would certainly have been— were not only a threat to the well-being of the right-minded and heterodox. They were an existential threat to the existence of genius, heroism, and greatness. This is important, because fostering genius, heroism, and greatness is precisely the purpose for which society and politics exist. Again, the proper and primary role for the state is

68 E&L, 947 69 Note, here, that Emerson uses the word “drones,” in 1852. The tendency to which Emerson refers—of the masses to organize and passionately pursue their own pecuniary interests without regard to right or wisdom or virtue—would, a few years later, be memorably described by his friend, Thomas Carlyle, as “Swarmery, or the gathering of men in swarms.” We have moved from ants and cheese to bees, but the assessment of the masses has not improved. 135

“the education of the wise man.” Once the wise man exists, “the state expires. The appearance of character makes the state unnecessary. The wise man is the state.”70

“Emerson,” according to Kateb is “soaked in the democratic spirit.”71 Perhaps this is true, but if it is, it is so rather differently than Kateb implies. Emerson is soaked in the democratic spirit like a man walking down a street after a hard rain is sometimes soaked in muddy water after a car drives by: unwillingly, accidentally, and unhappily. To extend the metaphor, the extent to which Emerson finds himself unwillingly and unhappily soaked in the democratic spirit leads him to articulate what we might think of as the best umbrella method of deflecting or averting such accidents in the future: self-reliance. To be heroic, one must not be too democratic. One must eschew the masses and inure oneself to their various and myriad demands. One must, in a word, be self-reliant.

Self-reliance has been called, not inaptly, “the best single key” for understanding

Emerson’s entire body of work.72 It is the crucial link, the ringbolt that holds together his transcendental metaphysics, his veneration of individual genius, and his antipathy toward the mass democracy as it was practiced in his time.

“Society is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of its members,”

Emerson warns his readers. “Society,” he continues, “is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.”73 This antagonism between society and the individual, in which the former demands the latter sell, as it were, his birthright for a

70 E&L, 568 71 Kateb (2002), 6 72 Buell 2004, 59 73 E&L, 261

136 mess of pottage, is the theme of Emerson’s best-known essay, “Self-Reliance.” Society requires the submersion or submission of the individual to the needs or whims of the community. “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.”74

Self-reliance is an aversive frame of mind and an approach to living one’s life by one’s own lights in a world full of reasons for hiding one’s light under a bushel. The world is full of drumbeats; self-reliance is a set of practices that allows one to find one’s own drum and dance to it rather than any of the others. It eschews conformity in favor of the tugs and twitches of individual volition that society and its myriad ties of obligation and fidelity are always trying to stamp out. One who is self-reliant cares little, if at all, for the judgments of others, preferring the guidance of her or his own intuitions and conclusions to the guidance of tradition or the advice or insistences of friends, family, or fellows. It rejects dogma and tradition, insisting on personal revelation. Self-reliance requires that one act only ever on first-hand faith, and never on the basis of rote imitation or in deference to external expectations. Only thereby is it possible to come to grips with one’s true nature and one’s true calling, and only by living from one’s true nature, and following one’s true calling, is the realization of whatever capacity for genius or greatness possible.

Emerson’s notion of self-reliance can be boiled down to a single phrase. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”75 Responding correctly to that vibration, however, is easier said than done. The first step is withdrawal. “I shun father and mother, wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write upon the lintels of the

74 E&L, 261 75 E&L, 260

137 doorpost ‘Whim.’ I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.”76 As long as we are beholden to the expectations of others, even those closest to us, we will do what is expected of us. We will fulfill our duties and obligations. We may do so in such a way as to be esteemed virtuous by our friends, family, and neighbors, but for Emerson, such virtues “are penances,” performed “as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world.”77

As such, they are not truly virtues for Emerson. They satisfy externally imposed rules, but do not spring from any individual conviction that they are right, that these are duties, or that this is the proper way to behave. To put it another way, the notion of social or political obligation is inimical to self-reliance. So, for Emerson, the first lesson is withdrawal and solitude. Only by quiet reflection can we ascertain the differences, if any exist, between what others expect and what we truly feel is right.78

By individual, isolated reflection, and only by such, we are able to get in touch with ourselves, with what we want and what we believe. This is a necessary first step toward self-reliance, but it begs a question: if we are to become self-reliant, upon what exactly will we rely? Emerson’s answer cannot be understood absent an understanding, or at least an awareness, of his transcendental metaphysics. I do not intend to dwell

76 E&L, 262 77 E&L, 263 78 On the topic of adjusting ourselves and our behavior in satisfaction of externally imposed obligations and expectations, Emerson insists that we “[c]heck this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward, I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law,” (E&L, 273).

138 upon this subject in any length, but a brief consideration of it is necessary.79 Perhaps ironically, the lesson taught by the radical individualism of self-reliance is the fundamental unity of the universe.

Emerson, remember, was raised in Calvinist New England and began his career as a Unitarian minister, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. He resigned from his position after his congregation decided they’d prefer a new pastor over one who refused, as Emerson did, to administer a religious rite in which he no longer believed.

Although many recent interpreters would like to strip religion out of Emerson, he remained a committed, though heterodox, believer.80 He was particularly committed to the primacy of the soul. Speaking in terms of self-reliance “is a poor external way of speaking.” It would be more proper to speak “rather of that which relies, because it works and is.” Specifically, here, Emerson is speaking of the soul.81 Without getting too far into the metaphysical weeds, the soul is, for Emerson, a kernel of eternal and universal divinity that exists within each individual human self.82 Thus, when we enter in solitude into honest reflection, our reflections on ourselves lead us inevitably to “the ever-blessed ONE,” the “Supreme Cause,” which “constitutes the measure of good by

79 For more detailed analysis of Emerson’s metaphysics, see, for example, Cavell (2003) and Robinson (2000); on Emerson’s philosophical and metaphysical debt to ancient Stoicism, see Woelfel (2011). 80 I am thinking here specifically of Kateb and Cavell, both of whom attempt, in various ways and in multiple places, to “rescue” Emerson’s transcendentalism from its religious entanglements. 81 E&L, 272 82 Trying to make sense of Emerson’s metaphysics can lead one into a labyrinth. His musings on, for example, “The Oversoul” and “Spiritual Laws,” will be familiar to anyone who’s ever read the label on a bar of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. To be brief, in ways that are unique, but clearly indebted to Calvinism, Quakerism, Platonism, and Stoicism, Emerson believes that all particular phenomena are temporal and physical manifestations of an eternal and universal order, which he calls the One. We are free to live in accordance with, or in aversion to, this One, and we do well or poorly by virtue of doing the former rather than the latter. 139 the degree to which it enters into all lower forms.”83 Only through solitary reflection can we get ourselves in touch with our souls and, by through our souls, with universal truth.

Realizing that the soul is the conduit through which universal truth can enter into one’s person is the second step toward self-reliance.

Emerson’s transcendental faith in the One goes some distance toward explaining his faith in self-reliance and toward harmonizing Emerson’s personal conservatism with the potentially radical implications of his ideas. As long as we do it right, self-reliance will lead us away from the temporary and particular commitments and obligations we absorb from having been born in a particular time and place and toward revelation of and commitment to permanent and universal Truth. This Truth cannot be ascertained second-hand. It can’t be found in books, and it can’t, without our intervention, govern our interactions with others. Only through individual and isolated reflection can we receive it, and only by commitment can we live by it.84

Withdrawal toward reflection is the first step, and revelation is the second. Next, we must move back into the world we share with others, and here we find that it is difficult to live by the lessons we learned in solitude. It is easy, almost frictionless, to live by the world’s opinion when we don’t know any better or when we are cowed by our fears of opprobrium. It is also easy, when we are alone, to live by what we truly believe.

The “great man,” for Emerson, “is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect

83 E&L, 273 84 As Emerson puts it, “I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things,” (E&L, 267).

140 sweetness the independence of solitude.”85 As making common men—whether drones or poor men—into great men is the point of self-reliance and the primary purpose of

Emerson’s entire corpus, this is worth pausing over. To be great is not to be good or kind or esteemed, but rather to be true to oneself, to one’s soul, and to one’s own purposes.

By way of illustration, Emerson relates a somewhat self-deprecating story. In it,

Emerson is approached by a man he holds in high regard and asked for charity.

Emerson refuses, or intends to refuse. The passage demonstrates Emerson’s stylistic tendency to dramatize precisely the point he’s trying to make:

Do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.86

Emerson is chagrined by his willingness to conform himself to expectation.

Having failed to behave self-reliantly, he recommits to doing better in the future. This is precisely the sort of thing Emerson has in mind when he calls “foolish consistency” the

“hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”87

One cannot expect to always be as self-reliant as one might like. Just as one cannot be self-reliant while one is committed to satisfying externally imposed expectations, one

85 E&L, 263 86 E&L, 262 87 E&L, 265

141 cannot be self-reliant while one is committed to external evaluations of the consistency of one’s utterances or actions. One must not, however, take one’s failure, here or there, now and then, to act or live self-reliantly as a reason to continue one’s failure into the future, at all times and places. Consistency in error is foolish, regardless of the expectations we might’ve built for ourselves or caused others to have of us.

Self-reliance, then, entails rejection of public opinion, social expectations, and the obligations imposed by such things as duty, religion, and tradition. It requires individualism, (at least occasional) isolation, and reflection, and it succeeds or fails when one attempts to bring the lessons learned in solitude back into the common world.

It is easy to see the anti-democratic implications of self-reliance. Inasmuch as democratic governance requires leaders to pay at least lip service to public opinion, and insofar as the importance of public opinion imposes equality on the people in a

Toquevillian sense—in which no individual has wherewithal to withstand the conforming pressures of their friends and neighbors and kin—then democracy is an obstacle to the development of self-reliance.

If there is anything democratic about Emerson’s self-reliance, it is the notion that self-reliance, and the potential for greatness and genius it is designed to enable, is equally available to anyone. This is the aspect of it that leads Cornell West to deem

Emerson “the indisputable godfather of the deep democratic tradition in America.”88

Shortly thereafter, however, West points out that this deeply democratic aspect of

Emerson’s thought is primarily hypothetical, and it all but disappears when Emerson

88 2005, 68 142 applies his theory to the world as it actually exists.89 To put it succinctly, Emerson expects self-reliance, and encourages it, from precisely the kinds of people from whom he expects both genius and greatness: neither the masses of poor men nor those who’ve already entered into the moneyed aristocracy. Emerson’s primary audience consists of those who, like him, live at the edge of the aristocracy—those whose aspirations to greatness might have some hope of achievement, which would be dashed by an excess of pecuniary concerns such as exists amongst the laboring drudges whose very lives are at least as precarious as such social standing as they enjoy, but whose energies might be diverted in self-defeating directions.

These promising young men at the edges of the American haute bourgeoisie, particular those of New England, were quite literally Emerson’s audience in the addresses that announced his emergence as a public intellectual, the “American

Scholar” and the “Divinity School Address,” given before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa

Society and the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School, respectively. Such also were his audience in his oration on “New England Reformers.” In that address, Emerson decries the wrong-mindedness, the lack of self-reliance, among the myriad energetic young men of New England—abolitionists, Fourierists, creators of intentional communities, and organizers of political parties—who sought to improve the political

89 Emerson dismisses most prayers as symptomatic of an excessively pecuniary relationship to the world. “[P]rayer as a means to effect private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not beg.” So far so good. The notion that we should get down on our knees and beg God to bless us with prosperity is anathema to Emerson. We should instead only ask that we be our best selves, and either enjoy or suffer the fruits of that without complaint. Once we’ve gained this level of magnanimity concerning our relationship with the divine, we can recognize in “the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it” or “the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar” as “true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends,” (E&L, 276, emphasis added). It requires the self-reliance to see the prayers of the farmer or the oarsman, but it requires remove from their situation—working in order to live—to appreciate the cheapness of their ends. True self-reliance, for Emerson, requires that one’s life not be bent toward mere self-preservation. 143 and social conditions of their region and nation. They should, instead, attend to their own self-cultivation.

In terms that echo his argument in “Politics,” Emerson insists “that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the result.”90 To rephrase this, reform movements are led by zealots, whose commitment to their particular cause or idea consumes their energies, thereby preventing them from becoming properly self-reliant.

This failure of self-reliance among reformers from abolitionists to Fourierists is the seed that dooms their projects. They mistake means for ends. They value external things over the “interior ocean.”91 They forget that “no society can ever be so large as one man” and, by seeking to build movements and communities, they overlook the fact that “the hour in which” a man “mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.”92 “The wise man,” Emerson elsewhere admonishes,

“not only leaves out of his thought the many, but leaves out the few.”93 The movement leader or founder of a small intentional community err, because both engage in projects that rely on others, to a greater or lesser extent, but with equally fatal consequences, for success.

Efforts at reform that do not proceed from self-reliance are self-defeating.

Springing from wrong perspectives, they identify the wrong ends, and, naturally, they

90 E&L, 596 91 E&L, 272 92 E&L, 598 93 E&L, 501

144 adopt the wrong means. By failing to flow from universal truth expressed individually, such efforts result in partial movements of certain classes or sections against others, whereas the appearance of true greatness and self-reliant genius would, according to

Emerson, almost immediately command universal assent. Although the people certainly evince a great deal of “selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you.” In terms that seem almost explicitly designed to irritate those who spend their time accounting for the apparently ideological blinkeredness of the working classes, Emerson continues, “he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not.

You have not given him the authentic sign.”94

The problem is that both messenger and message are partial, not universal, which is prima facie evidence that neither the former nor the latter are self-reliant or universal, respectively. Hence, the New England reformers, and the reforms on which they spend their energies, will fail in the long term even if they succeed temporarily.

Renovation must be entire, and it most begin and end with self-reliance. Anything else

“is all in vain.”95

We can see this, for example, in Emerson’s address at the tenth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies. Said to be a “turning point” in Emerson’s understanding of, and attitude toward, slavery, the oration and essay takes particular pains to point out that emancipation was freely given, and not conceded as a demand or

94 E&L, 605 95 E&L, 608

145 taken by war.96 Though the injustice of slavery cannot be doubted, according to

Emerson, it is important that its abolition occurred as a result of a moral awakening among the masters and not as a concession to the grasping or violence of the enslaved.

Abolitionism awakened Emerson to the fact that the “genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with slavery.”97 That is to say, the revelation, for Emerson, was less the injustice of slavery—that was but one of many injustices practiced with regularity by Anglo-

Americans on both sides of the Atlantic—but rather that injustice was amenable to correction by self-imposed and self-sacrificing actions of the perpetrators of oppression rather than the self-interested actions of the oppressed. The British West Indies were emancipated by the white British themselves, precipitated by the force of moral suasion rather than the destructive power of a slave army. The British, and not the Haitians, for

Emerson, were worthy of praise.

“Mere freedom from physical fetters,” as an early-twentieth century interpreter of

Emerson rightly put it, was “of the least consequence” to Emerson.98 In the midst of the tumult that followed the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, reiterated and recodified the obligation of free states in the North to apprehend and return escaped slaves to bondage in the South, Emerson wrote in his journal that he had “quite other slaves to free than these negroes.” He was instead interested in freeing “imprisoned thoughts far back in the minds of men.”99

96 PE, 91 97 PE, 119 98 Gray 1917, 90 99 Quoted in Read (2011), 160 146

More openly, in his 1841 lecture on the times, Emerson wrote of the triviality of

“the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the circumstance of the slave.”100 Now, we may be tempted to at least partially agree with Emerson here, particularly as we have the advantage of hindsight. Freeing the slaves without affording them education or the means to maintain themselves economically—or, more accurately, freeing the slaves without providing them with the kinds of legal protections that might’ve allowed them to withstand the redoubled efforts of their former masters to return them to a status below full and equal citizenship—was not particularly helpful. As one freedman said, “they turned us out like cattle.”101

While it might’ve been nice to be freed from life under the “chattel principle,” the formerly enslaved inhabitants of the American South were not given a fighting chance to make much of their newfound and hard-won freedom. But that’s not really what

Emerson is saying here. “Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment,” by which Emerson means the notion that a kernel of divinity dwells within each and every human breast, “and he is no slave.”102 That is to say, it is possible for an enslaved person to be self-reliant in the Emersonian sense. The enslaved person who recognizes that kernel of divinity within himself or herself, who lives by the light of that divinity, is not defined by his or her material condition, but rises above it. Freedom is intellectual and spiritual, not material. Focusing, therefore, on the physical or material freedom or enslavement of persons is to miss the point of self-reliance.

100 E&L, 162 101 Clifton and Mieroop (2016), 77 102 E&L, 164

147

It is tempting, here, to accuse Emerson of being merely a proponent or apologist for the bourgeoisie. If some amass great wealth while others are treated as mere chattels, what of it? The society is corrupt, and no amount of material or legislative intervention can change that. What is needed, instead, is a spiritual and intellectual renovation. No Marxist, to my knowledge, has taken up this particular line of argument in any detail, but it’s easy enough to imagine. Emerson’s veneration of those “at the edges” of the aristocracy certainly points in this direction. And yet, Emerson’s emphasis on principle, and on religion, complicates this reading considerably. Nowhere is this clearer than his treatment of the man he deems the representative man of the nineteenth century, Napoleon.

In his book Representative Men, Emerson offers some clarification as to what exactly he means by genius and what it’s possible for particularly excellent men to do in the world when they exhibit the sort of self-reliance Emerson recommends. Each chapter concerns a single individual—Shakespeare, Plato, Montaigne, and others— considered as a representative of a particular human capacity—poetry, philosophy, skepticism, and so on. His chapter on Napoleon—the “Man of the World”—is particularly revealing read alongside both “Politics” and Self-Reliance.” Napoleon, for Emerson, is the quintessential representative, the literal embodiment, of the energy, the spiritual and material force, of the nineteenth century.

Before moving on, we should consider for a moment Emerson’s use of the word

“representative” here. It’s an odd choice of words, one with obvious political implications in a representative-democratic context. Heretofore, Emerson has been concerned with great men, men of genius, wise men, and sages, with the self-reliance that makes true

148 greatness possible, and with the likely location of the sorts of men who, if self-reliant, might become great. Emerson has inveighed against political parties, against throwing one’s weight behind the party of acquisition of property or the party of self-defense. But he’s said very little about representation as a political or social principle. What does he mean by it?

Representative Men is something of an answer to a similar book published a decade earlier by Emerson’s friend and frequent correspondent, Thomas Carlyle, titled

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. In that book, Carlyle finds the origins of social, political, and religious orders in the biographies of a handful of extraordinary men. Its central premise is that

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in the world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or attain; all things we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.103

Emerson, as we have seen, shares Carlyle’s veneration of the great, the wise, and the genius. He also share’s Carlyle’s conviction that history is reducible to—or obtains primarily in—biography104. But while the form and structure of Representative

Men mirrors that of On Heroes—using individual exemplars to illustrate the development and deployment of various human abilities and capacities in the world—

103 Carlyle (2013), 21 104 As Emerson put it in his 1840 essay, “History,” “there is properly no history; only biography,” (E&L, 240). 149 the distinction implicitly drawn between Emerson’s approach and Carlyle’s, between a representative and a hero, seems important.

Indeed, in his introductory essay, “Uses of Great Men,” Emerson makes a theme of his ambivalence. On the one hand, we have a natural tendency to venerate the great.

“Nature seems to exist for the excellent,” Emerson declares, and we lower sorts “feed on genius,” supplementing the meager and insipid diet provided by our usual companions. “What indemnification is one great man for populations of pygmies!” 105

And yet, on the other hand, Emerson is not entirely comfortable with this veneration of the great. He interrupts himself to exclaim, “great men:—the word is injurious.” It implies caste, elevating the great above the rest of us, and it implies ineluctable fate, some destined for greatness and others for digging and drudgery in service to the great. Such veneration of the great is the reason why “the masses, from the down of history down,” have been “food for knives and powder.”106 Because he hopes to retain the veneration of greatness and genius while avoiding the excesses that attend such veneration,

Emerson prefers representatives to heroes.

“Men have a pictorial or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect.”107

That is to say, we learn what it is possible for human beings to do by seeing or learning about what other people have done or are doing. Those who achieve greatness, then, represent to us what we might be capable of ourselves. There is some circularity to this.

To be seen as great, genius has to be recognized as such, so to be a representative, the great man must be recognizable and must, as such, share some likeness with his

105 E&L, 615; 627 106 E&L, 629 107 E&L, 618

150 contemporaries. As Emerson puts it, “the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can only be known by like.”108 So, great men are representative to us because they are like us, but better in some regard.

Rightly construed, then, great men, as representatives rather than heroes, demonstrate to us our own latent talents and capacities. Problems arise when our

“delight” in greatness “degenerates into idolatry of the herald.”109 This occurs precisely at the moment when we mistake a representative for a hero. A hero can guide us, ship us, direct us, and remain always above us. A representative, on the other hand, is great for some identifiable reason—because he is particularly excellent in some regard, or peculiarly devoted to some idea or cause that we find resonant—and is recognizable as a representative precisely because of the qualities he and we share. The last representative, the final great man, will be the one who “can abolish himself, and all heroes” by convincing everyone around him, everyone everywhere, of the greatness in themselves, of “the power so great, that the potentate is nothing.”110 To put it another way, the truly great man is a representative of self-reliance, and through his representation, he teaches others that they need heed nothing but the dictates of their own souls in communion with the “ever-blessed ONE.”

With this in mind, we may turn to consider Emerson’s assessment of Napoleon, his “Man of the World.” Napoleon is, in Emerson’s estimation, a representative man, and perhaps a hero of a sort, but he is not a truly great man, for reasons that we shall

108 E&L, 619 109 E&L, 623 110 E&L, 625

151 see. As a representative “man of the world,” Napoleon’s example is particularly instructive as an object lesson in the capacities of a man whose energies are single- mindedly directed toward the achievement of his chosen ends, and of the long-term results of such worldly success as Napoleon enjoyed. As the representative “man of the world,” we might expect to learn from Emerson’s consideration of Napoleon something of Emerson’s estimation of the value of worldly achievement.

“In our society,” Emerson argues, “there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and democratic classes.”111 As discussed above, the distinction between the two hinges on property, wealth, and power: the conservative classes have it, while the democratic classes want it. The conservatives are “selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death,” while the democrats are “selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always outnumbering the other, and recruiting its numbers every hour by births.” Napoleon, for Emerson, is the representative of the latter, democratic, class. He is, indeed, “the incarnate Democrat.”112

Napoleon is the representative of the able-bodied, industrious, venal, grasping democracy that is, for Emerson, the force most characteristic of the nineteenth century.

He was a man “who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel,—but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood,—and pitiless. He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way.”113 This quality of indomitable will, of hell-bent commitment to an object without regard to obstacles, was less a quality of Napoleon himself than a characteristic of the age. In Europe,

111 E&L, 727 112 E&L, 727 113 PE, 174

152 republican revolutionaries in Napoleon’s wake threatened the old world’s monarchs and nobles. In the United States, the preeminence of old economic elites was challenged by the ascendency of an expanded electorate, and the nations of Native Americans and

Mexico were swept away by the power of the American nation’s drive toward continental dominance. Urbanization and industrialization were transforming the landscape. All that was solid, traditional, and conservative was in the process of supersession by new, democratic forms.

Napoleon’s genius, the quality that makes him not merely a great man but the representative man of the first half of the nineteenth century, consists in his combination of will and receptiveness. Napoleon is, at least partially, a self-reliant man in the

Emersonian sense. He is guided by his own lights without regard to tradition, popular opinion, or sentimental attachments—he “knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better.”114 Yet Napoleon was not unaware of or inattentive to the conditions in which he found himself. He was, rather, “so largely receptive” that he

“almost ceases to have a private speech and opinion” and becomes “a bureau for all the intelligence, wit and power” of his “age and country.”115 This combination of receptivity and self-reliance elevated Napoleon from a mere statesman and general to the defining man of his century.

In this, Napoleon is a representative man. He represents what the scope of human possibility, the heights that can be reached by a self-reliant man who understands the nature of his time and place. For this, Napoleon is worthy of

114 PE, 180 115 PE, 171

153 admiration. “When a natural king becomes a titular king, every body is pleased and satisfied,” Emerson writes:

there is something in the success of a grand talent which enlists an universal sympathy. For in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men have an interests; and as intellectual beings we feel the air purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed out the reach of local and accidental partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories; this strong steam- engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.”116

Napoleon’s career is an object lesson. He represents to us the power of a self- reliant man. The problem with Napoleon, what makes his story as much cautionary as laudatory, is twofold. First, Napoleon is “not merely [a] representative but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other men’s minds.”117

Second, and more fundamentally, Napoleon’s example stands as a monument to the power of unbridled selfishness, of the elevation of material ends over moral, spiritual, or philosophical concerns. His was “an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience.”118 Napoleon represents the power, and the weakness, of materialism divorced from the soul.

Napoleon cared not at all, according to Emerson, about anything that was not amenable to quantification or monetization. This quality, Emerson adds, is precisely what makes Napoleon “the agent…of the middle class of modern society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern

116 PE, 179 117 PE, 170 118 PE, 184

154 world, aiming to be rich.”119 Nearly all of Europe fell before the force of Napoleon’s drive for acquisition of territory, power, and wealth. Similarly, all things—traditions, religions, customs, cultures, peoples, and more—were falling to the acquisitive drive of the capitalistic, democratic middle classes.

The ultimate failure of the project of nineteenth century democracy, of the grasping middle classes, is foreshadowed by the failure of Napoleon himself. While the minds and energies of an entire civilization could be bent, for a time, toward the acquisition of material wealth and the success of material means, the project “came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace.”120 Napoleon died alone in exile. So, too, in Emerson’s estimation, will any project directed toward merely material ends and driven by merely material means. That is to say, Napoleon’s self-reliance was partial. He rejected the influence of tradition, religion, and propriety, but he replaced them with public opinion and material success as his primary guides.

He did not, heed the lesson he ought to have learned in moments of solitary and silent reflection, that the universe is One, that material success count for nothing, that public opinion is fleeting, that only structures built upon eternal verities will stand for long. His failure and destruction is the result, and will always be the result of any project built on the shifting sands of material and public opinion. “As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness,” Emerson concludes, “it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick.”121 Napoleon, then, is an object lesson in the power and the weakness of self-reliance half-learnt.

119 PE, 182 120 PE, 184 121 PE, 184

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“Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds,” Emerson asserts.

Most people, who are not self-reliant, do their best to reflect ourselves back at us. They conform to popular opinion and hew to popular expressions. We don’t learn much from them, other than, perhaps, the banality of our own selves. But a great man, a self-reliant man, “inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty.”122 That is to say, we need great men; we need to witness self-reliance, in order to awaken the latent talents within us.

On the other hand, Emerson interrupts himself to exclaim, “great men:—the word is injurious.” The power of the great “dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred;—but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill?”123 That is to say, the danger posed to the rest of us by great and self-reliant men is that they subjugate, rather than elevate, those of us who are not similarly great and self-reliant.

Here lies the problem for those who would read Emerson as a democratic thinker. Clearly, Emerson does not follow his friend Thomas Carlyle down the road to hero-worship. Emerson is no willy-nilly venerator of the great. Emerson urges self- reliance as both an avenue toward greatness and a method for averting the potentially deleterious consequences of the rise of great men. But to do its work properly, self- reliance cannot simply mean reliance upon oneself. It must, for Emerson, entail recognition of the fundamental insignificance of oneself, the fact that each of us

122 E&L, 616 123 E&L, 629

156 contains some kernel of divinity. Emersonian self-reliance is not a method for individual self-creation. It’s a method for gaining contact with the divine oneness of the universe.

The self-reliant men to whom Emerson looks and for whom he works will not look to other men for approval. Neither will they measure success in material terms. They will instead set their lights by the dictates of their own souls, which they can only hear in the quiet of solitary reflection. To accomplish this, they must be, in a word, heroes.

Here, we can see Emerson partaking of the old republican ideology of his New

England Federalist forbearers. That ideology

was founded on a presumption of real property and an ethos of the civic life, in which the ego knew and loved itself in relation to a patria, res publica or common good, organized as a polity, but was perpetually threatened by corruption operating through private appetites and false consciousness. To save personality, it urged an ideal of virtue which at times reached unreally Stoical heights of moral autonomy, and was based on the maintenance of a propertied independence hard to sustain in a speculative economy; to save polity, it depicted the British constitution as a classical balance of independent yet coordinate elements or powers, to maintain which was to maintain virtue but which only the assertion of personal virtue would in the last analysis maintain. Since its ethics were reducible to an idea of the wholly self-sustaining personality, it found it terribly easy to see corruption as irreversible by merely human means; and since its economics tended to ground that personality on a form of property held to have existed in a pre-commercial past, it tended to see history as a movement away from value which only heroic, not social, action could reverse.124

Something like this is what Emerson is getting at when he says it “will never make any difference to the hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not.”125 Nothing short of such heroic self-

124 Pocock (2003), 486 125 E&L, 188

157 reliance, rightly directed, could prevent the democratic nineteenth century from falling victim to the next Napoleon.

His concern with the development of true greatness and true self-reliance, rather than mere material power, goes some distance towards explaining Emerson’s enthusiasm for John Brown, first, and, later, the Civil War. Emerson is rightly lauded for his conversion to abolitionism, though it should not be forgotten that his conversion was late, and his abolitionist lecturing was only occasional, taking a back seat to his real work at the time on the lectures and essays that went into his book, English Traits, a celebration of the unique Anglo-Saxon inheritance that made America such a fertile ground, at least potentially, for the development of self-reliant genius.

That the cause of abolition should lead to war seemed to Emerson a salutatory result. War “breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the personal merits of all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected…The man of courage and resources is shown, and the effeminate and base person.”126 That is to say, the war will separate cant from principle, self-reliance from mere enthusiasm. The New England reformers will be given the chance to put their lives on the line for their avowed beliefs. In the crucible of war, the weak will burn, leaving heroes behind.

This flippancy toward material facts—this disregard for the manifest and manifold physical suffering that necessarily attends the business of warfighting—is of a piece with Emerson’s broader corpus. It underlies Emerson’s reluctance to embrace

126 E&L, 187

158 abolitionism (because the truly self-reliant man is never unfree, regardless of his material condition), and it underlies Emerson’s antipathy to democracy, which he consistently dismisses as a foolish goal and an obstacle to the development of self- reliance. It makes no sense to Emerson to talk about the liberty of individuals whose minds are in thrall to the judgment of others or to external sources of validation, and any concern with mass opinion, which must occupy the thoughts of anyone who wishes to participate in democratic politics, will be at best a distraction from following one’s own inner lights.

Emerson is concerned with the development of individuals, with self-reliant individualism, but he is only interested in individuals of a particular sort. “I wish to speak with respect of persons,” he confesses, “but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake, and pursue due decorum. They melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals.”127 Individuals were

Emerson’s interest, and the grouping of individuals into masses occluded whatever interesting elements might exist within each member of the group.

There has developed a tendency to construe Emerson’s interest in individual self-reliance and self-cultivation with an interest in democracy. This is, at best, confused. More often, it obfuscates the serious doubts Emerson has about the desirability and viability of democracy. A recently published article in Philosophy and

Rhetoric is a case in point. The article sets out to clarify recent arguments about

Platonism and “Emerson’s attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy.”

The article proposes to illuminate the ways in which Emerson is “involved in a project

127 E&L, 580

159 not only to democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of truth seeking [sic] and idealism,” in ways that propound to clarify “how

Emerson understands the power of rhetoric to shape and enact democracy.”128

Perhaps I’m missing something, but it occurs to me that it’s quite easily demonstrable that Emerson was never trying to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy, that Emerson’s project was not about reconciling democracy with Plato or

Platonic themes, and that Emerson was not in the least interested in resolving the problem of the duality of Platonic idealism and discursive realism in the American public sphere. To put it another way, the authors of this and similar studies are barking up the wrong tree. Even if we can extract lessons for democracy out of Emerson, it is ludicrous to suggest that Emerson himself was interested in advancing the cause of democracy.

At best, he accepted democratic governance as the form best suited to the place and time in which he lived. That is where his enthusiasm for democracy ended because, for

Emerson, any further enthusiasm would be nonsense.

128 Thompson (2015), 117-138 160

CHAPTER 5 AMERICANS IN THE FULLEST SENSE OF THE IDEA: FREDERICK DOUGLASS, DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future —Frederick Douglass “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”1

Frederick Douglass publicized in his newspaper, The North Star, a change of heart in the spring of 1851. Breaking with his friends in the American Anti-Slavery

Society (AAS) and with his own previously stated opinion, Douglass announced that he had arrived “at the firm conviction that the Constitution” of the United States “might be made consistent in its details with the noble purposes announced in its preamble; and that hereafter we should insist…that it be wielded in behalf of emancipation.”2 It followed, he continued, that it was the duty of every abolitionist, “to use his moral as well as his political power” to accomplish the destruction of slavery and, ultimately, to realize the goal of racial equality.3 Neither the intentions of its authors nor the compromises with and accommodation of slavery should be allowed to trump the Constitution’s stated commitment to creating a more perfect union, promoting the general welfare, and securing liberty, none of which purposes, Douglass reasoned, could be made harmonious with the continued existence of chattel slavery. From this point on, for the rest of his life, Douglass fought not only for abolition, but for the full democratization of the United States.

1 LW II, 185 2 LW II, 155 3 LW II, 156; emphasis in original

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This was a momentous shift in Douglass’s thinking, and in his allegiances.

Whatever prologue it might have had privately, this was Douglass’s public announcement that he was stepping out from under the umbrella of the AAS and striking out on his own as not only an anti-slavery agitator but also as a political thinker in his own right. “I had rather my right hand should wither by my side,” he had written only a few years earlier, “than cast a ballot under the Constitution of the United States.”4

Though he admitted to his friend and benefactor, Gerrit Smith—one of the founders of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, three-time presidential candidate, and Free

Soil member of the House of Representatives—that he was “sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholders’ side” of the question of the constitutionality of slavery, Douglass could not get past the fact that the pro-slavery forces “are doubtless right so far as the intentions of the framers of the Constitution are concerned.”5 In light of this fact, an anti- slavery reading of the Constitution would be disingenuous at best, dangerous at worst.

Even as anti-slavery political parties rose, and gained traction in the Northern states, Douglass inveighed against political participation. If successful, anti-slavery representatives to the national government would have to swear an oath to uphold the

Constitution. The Constitution contained both liberty, proclaimed in the preamble, and slavery, articulated and accommodated in the details, swearing an oath to support it meant “vowing allegiance to two masters—so opposite, that fidelity to the one is, necessarily, treachery to the other.”6 No honest man could take such a vow. As such,

4 LW I, 271 5 LW II, 149 6 LW II, 118

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Douglass reasoned, no honest abolitionist could engage in politics without likewise committing a fatal act of dissimulation and moral compromise.

All of this was more-or-less orthodoxy among the most radical American abolitionists. Until the early 1850s, Douglass was, by his own admission, “a faithful disciple of William Lloyd Garrison.”7 Garrison was the founder of the American Anti-

Slavery Society (AAS) and among the most vociferous advocates of immediate emancipation in the United States. He and his followers in the AAS were “self-defined fanatics” for abolition.8 The Garrisonians “broke up church services, denounced the

Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with Hell,’ defied laws that enforced segregation, and called for a breakup of the Union.”9 Christian morality and natural law condemned slavery and slaveholders. Until slavery was abolished, unless the scales fell from the slaveholders’ eyes, the union was an abomination, one that encouraged the slave states to continue in sin and stained the free states with the blood of the enslaved.

Garrison and other members of the AAS believed in immediate emancipation and racial equality, and they also believed that nothing short of revolution could accomplish the goal of abolition. They hoped to sever the union between the slave states of the

South and the free states of the North, in the hope of founding a new republic based on

7 MBMF 291 8 Olson 2007, 686 9 Olson 2007, 686. While I certainly agree with Olson’s characterization of the Garrisonians as proud zealots, I am dubious about his claim that they “were also passionate democrats,” (686). Inasmuch as democracy entails democratic politics, the rigidly anti-political stance of the Garrisonians is good reason to doubt their commitment to democracy. It might be more accurate to call them passionate egalitarians, but their zealous egalitarianism consisted primarily of their belief that all human beings were of an equally fallen nature, and equally subject to God’s law, which is not the same as the democratic claim that all human beings are equally entitled to a share in the governance of a polity. 163 true principles of right and justice. The Garrisonians were radical, and they were brave.

They were subjected to ridicule, beatings, and even murder. Their meetings were frequently broken up by mobs, the distribution of their pamphlets through the mail was outlawed by Congress, and pro-slavery vandals destroyed their presses more than once.10

Garrison and the membership of the AAS were also pacifists. Their object was abolition, and their target was the conscience of the nation. They believed the proper way to reach the nation’s conscience was moral suasion—speaking moral truth, whatever the consequences, of slavery’s myriad horrors. Engaging in politics under the

Constitution was tantamount to accommodation, and violent resistance, even in self- defense, entailed abandoning the moral high ground. Neither tactic was permissible.

Moral suasion relied on the power of moral demonstration, of speaking God’s truth regardless of the consequences, and the inducement of a national epiphany was the only means by which slavery could be defeated. As Douglass himself had put it back in

1848, “nothing but God’s truth and love can cleanse the land” of slavery’s sin and stain.”11 The abolitionist’s task was not unlike the missionary’s, wandering calling in the wilderness in hopes of gaining converts.

So, when he announced his change of opinion on the Constitution, Douglass was not only indicating a change in what he thought of as the proper rules for Constitutional interpretation. He was announcing his apostasy. He was no longer a Garrisonian. He would no longer reject political participation as a legitimate part of anti-slavery action.

10 LW I, 270 11 LW I, 278

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Neither would he categorically reject violence. He would, henceforward, dedicate himself to proving to Americans that their stated ideals, announced not only in the preamble to the Constitution but also in the Declaration of Independence, were fundamentally as incompatible with slavery as they were with the racism that did so much to enable slavery in the South and discrimination in the North.

As he wrote in a letter to his British friends, Douglass had decided on a course

“of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the

Government—not over its ruins.”12 In so doing, however, Douglass would not leave that government unchanged. It, and the society over which its authority was exercised, would have to be fundamentally altered—pushed, prodded, and shoved in the direction of democracy.

Douglass was a political theorist, but he was always an activist first. His primary concern was not with philosophical coherence, but rather with results—first the abolition of slavery, and then an end to discrimination and legally enforced racial, and gendered and class-based, hierarchy. In articulating these positions, Douglass makes liberal use of the Lockean language and logic of the American Revolution and Founding. Douglass was “at least indirectly” familiar with Locke’s political philosophy, and he “deeply admired” it.13

This makes sense. Locke’s political philosophy not only offered an account of natural rights that were equally distributed among all people. It also offered a logic for resistance, or even a duty to resist, when those rights were not protected, or were

12 LW II, 480 13 Myers (2010), 216 165 trampled upon, by governments and men. To a certain extent here, Douglass found himself on the horns of a dilemma. “The American revolution” and the Lockean language that at least partially underwrote it, “left a twinned legacy: a call to freedom linked to a duty to resist.”14 It was the latter part that posed the problem. So long as enslaved people remained enslaved and relatively docile, they could be construed as, at least tacitly, consenting to their enslaved status.

Much has been made of the compatibility of republican political theory and slavery, and rightly so. There is nothing inherently opposed to slavery in a theory that takes as its starting point the notion that people are qualitatively distinct from one another and accepts the notion that such qualitative distinctions may, and often are, drawn in the context of a social hierarchy in which some are expected to cultivate virtue in their leisure time and, by virtue of this, to lead, while others are expected to be too busy to engage in such leisurely cultivation and are, as such, expected, with more-or- less docility, to accept the leadership of their betters. As an ex-slave, Douglass was in a unique position to know that there is likewise nothing inherently opposed to slavery in

Lockean or liberal political theory.

That is, “while republican theory was historically compatible with slavery, the liberal components of the liberal-republican ideology were just as powerful in authorizing slavery,” by virtue of the notion of non-resistance as tacit consent. On this theory, “the only incontrovertible proof of virtue in a slave,” the only incontrovertible proof of non- consent, “was death.”15 The Lockean notions that the legitimacy of a government

14 Furstenberg (2003), 1299 15 Furstenberg (2003), 1309; 1315 166 derives from the consent of the governed and that violations of one’s natural rights triggered not only the right but also the responsibility to resist put enslaved people and those who, like Douglass, urged their emancipation in something of a bind. The extent to which enslaved people did not, en masse, reject their condition indicated, prima facie, their acquiescence, and possibly also their consent, to their enslavement.

Rogers Smith has argued that understanding American political thought entails an appreciation of the multiple ideological traditions that have formed and shaped its development.16 The first two have already been mentioned: first, the liberal tradition, which focuses on rights and insists on the consent of the governed as the primary basis of political legitimacy; and second, republicanism, which focuses on citizenship, virtue, and participation in lawmaking. Third in order but not in importance is what Smith calls

“ascriptive Americanism,” the various and myriad exceptions to liberal rights and exclusions from republican citizenship that have obtained for most of the history of the

United States on the basis of things like gender, race and ethnicity. In his Civic Ideals,

Smith traces the interactions of these three traditions over time. Among the questions he at least tacitly addresses is, what about American political ideology has inhibited what seem to be the obviously universalizing tendencies of liberalism from finding expression in practice? Why and how have at least two centuries of American history witnessed the denial of liberal rights to a majority of America’s inhabitants?

In answering these questions, Smith primarily implicates the combined power of the republican and ascriptive traditions, and insists, against other theorists, that the internal logic of liberalism is as universalistic as a cursory reading of the phrase “all men

16 Smith (1997) 167 are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are included the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would suggest, notwithstanding the demonstrable fact that the eighteenth-century authors of such phrases, by and large, quite clearly meant to circumscribe the meaning of “men” such that not only women, but also “savages” and other not-quite-human-in-the-fullest-sense people would be excluded.17 If not for the easy capacity of ascriptive Americanism to give texture to republicanism’s nebulous notion of citizen virtue, “all men are created equal” might more easily have been read to say “all people are created equal,” and our history of enforced patriarchy and white-supremacy might have been avoided.

With due deference, this seems to me at least a little bit optimistic about the universalistic velocity of liberal ideas. After all, it is demonstrable that liberal contract theory arose around the time of Europe’s first sustained encounters with non-European peoples, and the original contrast between “men” and “savages,” while only sometimes explicit, as it was in the Declaration of Independence, is almost always at least implied.18 This being the case, something more than linguistic fiat would likely be required to expand the circumscribed notion of equally created men to a more capacious conception of equally created people. Indeed, doing so would likely require

17 Smith (1997, 29-30) argues explicitly against Carole Pateman’s (1988) contention in that liberal contract theory’s universalism and neutrality are tactical dross covering an intrinsically exclusive conception of membership in the group called “men” in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. It seems safe to assume that he would similarly reject Charles Mills’s (1997) argument about the fundamental links between racial exclusion and liberal “universalism.” It seems equally clear that Smith is not quite right in so doing. Consider, for example, that one of the architects of the American Declaration of Independence explained to his wife, Abigail, who had entreated him to “remember the ladies” when drawing up plans for a new government, that women would be excluded from political power. Having thrown off the yoke of British oppression, Americans were not about to submit themselves to “the despotism of the petticoat.” Furthermore, the logic that would extend political rights to women could just as easily include “children and apprentices…Indians…and Negroes.” The idea, to Mr. Adams, was laughable. 18 Mills (1999), 122 168 active intervention on behalf of expansion. Determining the proper nature and extent of such intervention occupied a great deal of Douglass’s time and energy through the

1850s.

Douglass knew as well as anyone that the “classic contractarians” who authored the founding documents of the United States “were really expounding a racial contractarianism, where racial exclusion is not a matter of contingent prejudice but part of the architecture of the theory.”19 Indeed, he had said as much as late as 1849, when he lamented that he would “readily, gladly, and zealously” work within the Constitutional framework to abolish slavery, if not for the fact that “the original intent and meaning of the Constitution (the one given to it by the men who formed it, those who adopted, and the one given to it by the Supreme Court of the United States) makes it a pro-slavery instrument.”20 Furthermore, he argued, if the government created by the Constitution were to abolish slavery, it would, in so doing, exceed the powers granted to it. Such a precedent would be dangerous. If the government “can abolish slavery in violation of the

Constitution because it conflicts with the moral sentiments of the majority, then the same may be done in other cases for the same reason.”21 On this score, Douglass, his friends among the radical abolitionists, and the defenders of slavery were in agreement, in the middle 1840s.

A decade later, Chief Justice Taney, writing for the majority in the case of Dred

Scott v. Sandford, used precisely this logic. Taney and the Court held that whether

19 Mills 1999, 122 20 LW II, 149 21 LW I, 376. This should be kept in mind anytime anybody argues about “original intent” when they’re talking about Constitutional interpretation. 169 slave or free, a “negro of the African race...is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the

Constitution of the United States.” Not being citizens, “the special rights and immunities guaranteed to citizens,” including access to federal courts of law, “do not apply to them.”

Even if a state chooses to recognize black people as citizens within its boundaries, it remains impossible for a black person to be considered a citizen of the United States, because changes in state laws, or of public opinion after the ratification of the

Constitution, have no bearing on the “construction and meaning” of the Constitution, which “must be construed and administered now according to its true meaning and intention when it was formed and adopted.” And, according to the Chief Justice, when the Constitution was formed and adopted, black people “were not regarded in any of the states as members of the community which constituted the State, and were not numbered among its ‘people or citizens.’”22 The nation and its Constitution were founded of, by, and for white people in general and white men in particular. Others might live here, but they can never be citizens.

Though his opinion was particularly consequential, Taney was not breaking new ground with this argument. Two decades earlier, in the case of Crandall v. State of

Connecticut, in which a Quaker teacher sued to assert her right to teach a class of free black students and the right of those free black children to be educated, attorneys for the state of Connecticut argued that “blacks were not parties to the original compact”

22 Full text of Chief Justice Taney’s decision was retrieved via the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project , accessed 8/23/2012. The Chief Justice was incorrect when he asserted that no states, at the time of the Constitution’s ratification, construed “negroes” as full citizens. In 1790, fewer than half the states in the Union used race as a legal (dis)qualification when determining suffrage rights. By 1855, however, all but five states (Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island) explicitly discriminated against African-Americans (see Keyssar 2000, 55-60). 170 that founded the state, could not, as such, be considered citizens, and were not, ipso facto, entitled to the protection of the law.23 This line of argumentation, that membership in the American nation required purely European heritage, was echoed in courts, in pulpits, and on soapboxes across the country, and from the pens of men as different as

Roger Taney and Martin Delany.

In spite of his recognition that “original intent” of “the men who formed” the

Constitution entailed at least forbearance, and even endorsement, of slavery, Douglass eventually rejected the suggestion that this original exclusion of black people had lasting consequences for Constitutional interpretation. Neither its original authors nor its official interpreters ought be allowed to monopolize the meaning of the nation’s founding documents. Instead, Douglass argued, “every American citizen has a right to from an opinion of the constitution, propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one. Without this right, the liberty of an American would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman.”24 If the Constitution could be plausibly construed as an anti-slavery instrument, as Douglass thought it could, it was not only his right but also his responsibility to convert the majority to his side.

That is to say, even though he well was aware that people like him, with dark skin and African ancestry, had been excluded from the original compact that founded the nation and remained beyond the purview of the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of

Independence and the general welfare that was the purported goal of the Constitution,

Douglass refused to concede the sentiments of either document. When the Declaration

23 Smith (1997), 255-257 24 LW II, 202

171 says “all men,” it ought to read “all people,” and when the preamble to the Constitution speaks of the creation of a more perfect union and the promotion of the general welfare, all inhabitants of the United States ought to be included on an equal basis when we consider the meanings of such authoritative phrases. Indeed, Douglass argued, democratic equality implies that each individual ought to be free to interpret the

Constitution as he or she sees fit.

To argue that Douglass’s conception of rights was Lockean is not to agree with

Nicholas Buccola that Douglass was, in essence, a “classical liberal” who tempered his individualistic, contractarian worldview with a notion of “moral obligation.”25 It is, instead, to agree with Richard Ashcraft that Locke’s theory, designed as it was to “provide a justification for the political activity of those who have decided to resist, on the grounds of self-defense…the actions of a tyrant,” and to assert that Lockean language was politically useful to Douglass, particularly after he had decided to urge resistance to the forces of slavery through political action, including violent self-defense, in addition to moral suasion. It is also to echo Isaac Kramnick, who points out that the “real threat” posed by Lockean ideas “was their leveling tendencies.”26 Few antebellum American thinkers were as aware of the distance between the universalistic and revolutionary ideals upon which the United States was founded and the realities of American life as

Frederick Douglass. None were as attuned to the extent to which this gap provided an

25 Buccola 2013, 6-10 26 Ashcraft 1980, 499; Kramnick 1982, 653 172 opportunity for a transformative politics. Though Douglass’s understanding of rights clearly influence by Locke, it is at best a mistake to call Douglass a classical liberal.27

Instead of calling Douglass a classical liberal, we might do better to call him a liberal-democrat, or, still better, a democratic Lockean. These descriptions get us closer to the actual contours of Douglass’s thought, because they highlight, simultaneously, the importance of rights, which were, for Douglass, individual and naturally given, as well as community, participation, and the embodiedness of personality and experience.

As a political theorist, Douglass clearly owes a debt to the Lockean notion that “the people do not simply claim their own rights,” but rather, in pressing claims against the actions of governments and men, “they reclaim what has been held in trust for them by the government since its original,” including, among other things, “the right to judge” the extent to which their rights are being adequately protected and, relatedly, whether or not they are willing to continue to consent to be governed.28

But Douglass also insists upon the importance of recognition. Specifically,

Douglass insists upon equality as a goal, and he insists that equality cannot be achieved until it is seen and experienced as a fact by, if not all, at least a majority of the population. To put it another way, equality must be an experiential fact for all members

27 For all his insistence on individual rights, Douglass did not understand human society as a mere agglomeration of individuals. He did not give economic rights primacy over political ones, nor was he opposed to government interference in the operation of the economy. A final reason why Douglass was not a classical liberal is that the constellation of ideas generally understood to constitute “classical liberalism” did not coalesce until the end of his life. William Graham Sumner, the first American who could be plausibly described as a “classical liberal,” did publish his seminal What Social Classes Owe Each Other until 1883. During most of Douglass’s life, the constellation of ideas nowadays understood to constitute “classical liberalism” were referred to under the label “social Darwinism.” Douglass, who spent his life fighting for democracy and equality, who sympathized with the Chartists, who characterized both the lend-lease sharecropping system and Gilded Age factory labor as “wage-slavery,” who had been an active proponent of Reconstruction and involved with the Freedmen’s Bank, was not a social Darwinist and, therefore, not a classical liberal. 28 Dienstag (1997), 69 173 of the political community if it is to have real vitality and relevance. Mere procedural or de jure equality is not enough. To paraphrase Pocock here, although there are good

Lockean reasons for Douglass to insist upon rights, there are no good Lockean reasons for Douglass to insist upon political participation and the primacy of embodied experience.

The vision of liberal-democracy presented by Douglass is more robust, more participatory, and more worthy of apprehension than the juridical, rights-based, procedural conception with which political theorists will be familiar and against which a fair number of theorists have reacted. Douglass’s liberal and democratic vision is transformative. More importantly, Douglass is a theorist of the means and methods by which it might be possible to get from here to there. The assertion of rights for people who do not have them, or are not recognized as having them, must be backed up by a willingness to engage in tactical, political violence to prove the case. That is to say, if inclusion within the ambit of American politics is the goal, violent means may, and probably will, be necessary.

Even if a sharp line could be drawn between those who would countenance slavery and those who would not among antebellum Americans, significant differences of opinion would easily be found on either side. Such was certainly the case among abolitionists. The most moderate among the “immediatists” hoped to find a way to indemnify slaveholders for the loss of their peculiar property, and hoped to send the freed people somewhere safely beyond the borders of the United States. Even William

Lloyd Garrison himself, the leader of the radical American Anti-Slavery Society, flirted with colonization early in his career as an abolitionist, and some black leaders, like

174

Martin Delany, proposed voluntary emigration. Even among the most radical abolitionists, sharp differences existed over issues ranging from tactics to expectations about what was to come after slavery. So, calling someone an abolitionist, an immediatist or even a radical abolitionist is inadequate, if what is wanted is an explanation of her or his politics.

William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was one of the most influential and most radical abolitionists in the United States. Garrisonian abolitionism “was a movement of self-defined fanatics with an unyielding commitment to the emancipation of the enslaved. They broke up church services, denounced the

Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell,’ defied laws that enforced racial segregation, and called for a breakup of the Union twenty years before the Civil War.”29 Indeed, the Garrisonians began advocating separation in the middle

1840s under the banner “No Union with Slaveholders,” in hopes that by so doing they could simultaneously force a clean bifurcation of the slavery issue (into abolitionists and defenders of slavery; at the time, there were too many shades of grey between the two positions) and deprive the slaveholding South of the myriad benefits provided by their easy access to the markets and products of northern industry.30 The Garrisonians were

29 Olson, Joel. 2007. “The Freshness of Fanaticism, The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry.” Perspectives on Politics. Vol 5(4). 685-701, 686. While I certainly agree with Olson’s characterization of the Garrisonians as proud zealots and fanatics, I am dubious of his claim that they “were also passionate democrats,” (686). Inasmuch as democracy entails democratic politics, the rigidly anti-political stance of the Garrisonians is a good reason to doubt their commitment to democracy. It might be more accurate to call them passionate egalitarians, but their zealous egalitarianism consisted primarily of their belief that all human beings were of equally fallen nature, and equally subject to God’s law, which is not the same as the democratic claim that people are equally entitled to share in the rule of a polity. 30 A short article titled “No Union with Slaveholders!” appeared in the September 20, 1844, edition of Garrison’s Liberator. Olson (2007, 692-693) provides a detailed consideration of the abolitionists’ disunionist position. 175 revolutionaries, but they were also, for the most part, pacifists. Slavery was to be resisted vociferously and fearlessly, but never with violence.

By his own account, Douglass had been “a faithful disciple of William Lloyd

Garrison” through most of his career up to 1850.31 Douglass’s change of opinion, then, was something of an admission of apostasy, an act of ingratitude and a betrayal of abolitionist principles. It was treated as such.32 In publicly breaking with the

Garrisonians of the AAS on matters of Constitutional interpretation, Douglass simultaneously indicated his willingness to embrace both political participation, on the one hand, and, at least implicitly, the deployment of (at the minimum) defensive violence on the other. He had moved “from the posture of a non-violent revolutionary toward that of a reformer accepting the need for violence.”33 There is, I contend, an intrinsic link between Douglass’s decision to embrace the Constitution as an anti-slavery instrument, his willingness to engage in electoral politics, and his rejection of the pacifism entailed in the “moral suasion” approach to abolitionism.

As he rejected the Garrisonian disunionist, pacifistic, anti-political position,

Douglass also rejected both black nationalism and voluntary emigration, both of which

31 MBMF, 291. It is worth noting, however, that Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Bailey. He took the surname “Douglass” at the suggestion of a friend he made when he settled among the militantly anti-slavery black community in New Bedford, MA. The name is a reference to John Douglas, “he of the stout hand,” one of the central figures in the fourteenth-century Scottish wars for independence (MBMF, 253). 32 In Douglass’s words, “What they held to be a great and important truth, I now looked upon as a dangerous error. A very painful, and yet a very natural thing now happened. Those who could not see any honest reasons for changing their views, as I had done, could not easily see any such reasons for my change, and the common punishment of apostates was mine,” (MBMF 292). Garrison himself, writing in his newspaper The Liberator, would accuse Douglass being an ingrate who was attempting to “hide the blackness of his treachery” beneath “the blackness of his skin,” (1853, 196). 33 Goldstein (1984), 610 176 he characterized as “misanthropic.”34 The most forceful, and most famous, proponent of these positions was Martin Delany. Douglass and Delany had met when the former, along with Garrison, stopped in Pittsburgh on a speaking tour. The two developed a relationship, and for the first eighteen months of the North Star, Douglass and Delany worked together as co-editors.

Though they were never in full agreement with one another—Delany always chaffed at Douglass’s Garrisonian pacifism, for example, and believed that his darker skin, evidence of his less adulterated African ancestry, was an argument in favor of him, over Douglass, as lead representative of the American black community—they had a good working relationship, and when it ended, it ended amicably.35 The conflict between

Douglass and Delany grew sharper, and more public, in the 1850s.

Delany published his book-length pamphlet, “The Condition, Elevation,

Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,” in 1852. In it, he stresses the connection between race on the one hand, and nationhood on the other. It is an observable fact in many nations, Delany argues, that racial and ethnic minority groups find themselves oppressed by and at the mercy of dominant groups. Witness the

Roma in Italy, the Irish in Britain, or the Jews throughout Europe. Such also is the condition of black people in the United States.

“We have speculated and moralized much about equality,” he argued, “claiming to be as good as our neighbors and everybody else—all of which may do very well in ethics—but not in politics.”36 Ethical debate, exhortation, and reflection might lead some

34 LW I, 348 35 Levine (2003), 69-71 36 Delany (1966), 52 177 of the more enlightened of the white citizens of the United States to support, on principle at least, abolition. Political equality among the black and white inhabitants of the United

States was, simply and demonstrably, not possible.

He and other black people, whether free or enslaved, and notwithstanding their plausible claim to citizenship in the land of their birth, “are aliens to the laws and political privileges of the country” whose African “descent, by the laws of this country, stamps us with inferiority.”37 As he was writing in aftermath of the passage of the 1850 Fugitive

Slave Law, which threatened every black person in the United States, slave or free,

North or South, with enslavement for life on little more than the word of a white person willing to testify in a court of law, it was hard to argue with him. It would be even harder to do so after the Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott decision. The interconnection of race and membership in the nation was, he argued, fundamental and inescapable: to be an American, one had to be white. As such, the best course of action for black people was voluntary removal.

Black people, Delany argued, should leave the United States and establish a nation of their own somewhere in the Americas. He was unsure of the right location.

Canada and Mexico were too likely to be annexed by the United States. Liberia was

“not an independent nation at all” but rather “a pitiful dependency on the American

Colonization Society,” and while Central and South America and the West Indies were attractive, they presented their own difficulties.38 Nevertheless, it was clear to Delany

37 Delany (1966), 72 38 Delany (1966), 73-95; emphasis in original. 178 that the black people of the United States were among those for whom emigration was

“absolutely necessary for their political elevation.”39

Douglass dismissed such talk as folly. For starters, it was “misanthropic” to think

“that we have attained all that is attainable for us in this country, and that our condition is a hopeless one.”40 Efforts at overcoming slavery in the South and racial prejudice in the North were still young enough that it was too early to give up on them. After all,

Douglass had lived through efforts at integrating railroad cars in Massachusetts. Though he had been personally removed from first-class railcars—at considerable expense to the railroad company, as Douglass clung so tenaciously to his seat that it came with him when the porters pulled him up—he knew from experience that policies, and attitudes, could change. The business of changing attitudes and policies was, naturally, precisely what democratic politics about. Douglass was “inclined to think that pride and fashion have much to do with the treatment commonly extended to colored people in the United

States.”41 Pride and fashion are more than nothing, of course, but they are not as immune to change as the notion of inexorable racial categories might suggest.

Douglass made at least three key arguments in favor of the mutability of racial attitudes and the prospects for black peoples’ inclusion within a fully democratic

America. First, he insisted, “it is not our color which makes our proximity to white men disagreeable. The evil lies deeper.” Black people are not discriminated against, are not treated with revulsion by whites, “because we are colored, but simply because that color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery

39 Delany (1966), 72 40 LW I, 348 41 MBMF 289-299

179 and servitude.” Black people meet with discriminatory treatment not because they are black, but because of the association that has obtained between blackness and slavery.

“In these conditions,” Douglass argued, “we are thought to be in our place; and to aspire above them, is to contradict the established views of the community.”42 The politics and economics entailed in race-based chattel slavery was the root cause of the social degradation of black people in the United States. Remove the former and, it stood to reason, the latter would fade away, too.

Second, Douglass not only rejected the notion that race and status within the nation were fundamentally connected. He rejected altogether the idea that race was a static category. “I am,” he said in 1866, “not a propagandist, but a prophet” in predicting the rise—or, more accurately, the recognition—of “a blended race.”43 This would not mean the annihilation of black people, but rather their absorption in, and transformation of, an American nation that would become non-racial in the process.44 Given political and economic equality, the alleged differences between the races will be rendered nugatory. To those who argued that there was a natural revulsion toward race-mixing,

Douglass riposted, with a reference to anti-miscegenation laws, “that there is no need of the passage of laws, or the adoption of other devices, to prevent what is, in itself, impossible.”45 The conduct of life in the South, Douglass’s own conception included,

42 LW II, 129; emphases in original. 43 LW IV, 195 44 That is to say, Douglass did not take “the [American] polity to be essentially non-racial,” (Mills 1999, 127). Rather, Douglass believed that it could, eventually, become non-racial. The means by which he believed this transformation could be enacted are the subject of the next section of this chapter. 45 LW IV, 195

180 provided ample, if morally dubious, evidence against the notion that there existed some kind of natural antipathy between black and white people.

Third, and of equal importance, Douglass argued that emigration and black- nationalism were, essentially, suicidal. “We have seen,” he cautioned, “the fate of the

Indians,” and there was no reason to think that a black nation in the vicinity of an Anglo-

Saxon America would fare any better than the nations of the Cherokee, Sioux, Iroquois,

Huron, Mohawk, Oneida, and so on.46 That is to say, if American blacks were to establish a nation of their own in the Americas, “we shall become the mere game of

American trappers and other adventurers, and there is no reason to believe that our fate will be in any respect better than the noble Seminoles and other Indians who have perished by the perfidy and rapacity of the proud Anglo-Saxon race.”47 Black people in

America would need to defend themselves, but they’d have a better chance of doing so within, rather than outside of, the American political nation.

If the historical and empirical evidence at hand provided any guide, Douglass reasoned, the formation of a black nation anywhere near white America’s path of development would result in the destruction of the former at the hands of the latter.

Separation, then, was not only unnecessary, but also, on a longer timeline, impossible.

“Nothing,” Douglass urged, “seems more evident to us that our destiny is sealed up with that of the white people of this country, and we believe that we must fall or flourish with them.”48 This was, for Douglass, not an entirely pleasant proposition, but he could see no other plausible way forward.

46 LW IV, 370 47 LW I, 349 48 LW I, 349

181

In May of 1851, in the wake of the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law as a key component of the ill-fated Compromise of 1850, amid growing unrest in the country and ongoing efforts at organizing a successful abolitionist political party to contest elections at both the state and national levels, the AAS announced a resolution to deny its support to any organization that failed to denounce the Constitution of the United States as a fundamentally pro-slavery document.

By way of response, Douglass published in the North Star, an announcement of his recent arrival “at the firm conviction that the Constitution, construed in light of well- established rules of legal interpretation, might be made consistent in its details with the noble purposes avowed in its preamble,” namely the call for a more perfect union founded on the basis of justice in the interest of the general welfare, and, furthermore, his intention to “insist upon the application of such rules to that instrument, and demand that it be wielded in behalf of emancipation.” Continuing, Douglass argued that because slavery was “a system of lawless violence,” it was “never lawful, and can never be made so,” and, as such, “it is the first duty of every American citizen...to use his political as well as his moral power for its overthrow.”49

A successful end not only to slavery, but also to the social, political and economic degradation that attended it and manifested in the denial of full civic status even to free blacks, required membership in an American nation remained racially circumscribed. If inclusion among the Declaration’s equally created men and the Constitution’s “we the people” required white skin and European blood, then an important question arises for political abolitionists like Douglass. How can the meaning of “American” be expanded?

49 LW II, 155, 156; emphasis in original.

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How could the historical and, increasingly through the 1850s, juridical exclusion of non- white people in general and black people in particular be overcome?

Douglass adopted the position that the Constitution of the United States ought to be interpreted as an anti-slavery document, and, as such, that political participation was not only possible but necessary for abolitionists. We have taken stock of two radical positions advocated by men who were, at least through the 1840s, Douglass’s friends.

Garrison and his followers were dedicated abolitionists, revolutionaries, and pacifists.

Delany urged black nationalism, voluntary emigration, and the deployment, as necessary, of defensive violence.

Douglass rejected parts of both positions. He would not join Garrison in advocating withdrawal from a Union that included slaveholders. Instead, he would work to end slave-holding within the Union. He could not join Delany in advocating emigration. Born in the United States, he would make his stand on his native soil, believing that there was no other place for him or the people for whom he intended to speak. The goal was not the replacement of the “white republic” of the United States with either a morally pure and racially egalitarian coalition of northern states nor an independent black republic. Instead, Douglass insisted on the creation of a non-racial democracy throughout the United States. Such a thing could only be brought into existence by struggle. Douglass most memorably and eloquently elaborates this position in his Fourth of July oration.

On Monday, the fifth of July 1852, Douglass rose to deliver the keynote address at the Fourth of July celebration at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY. His topic was “The

Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” and the oration that he gave remains among the

183 most remarkable occasional speeches in the history of American oratory. Douglass proceeds in three parts. He begins with cautious praise for the Founding Generation, moves on to decry the unworthiness of the present generation, an ends by admonishing his audience to force the American republic live up to the promise of its beginnings.

Anyone in the audience who’d expected a boilerplate abolitionist lecture on the evils of slavery would’ve been sorely disappointed.

In spite of the unfortunate fact that he, like all other black people in the United

States, found himself excluded from the nation whose birth the Fourth of July commemorated, Douglass nevertheless held the Declaration of Independence to be

“the very ringbolt in the chain” of the nation’s “as yet undeveloped destiny.” It, and its principles, “are saving principles” to which citizens of the United States ought to cling

“with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.”50 The Declaration of

Independence was worthy of annual remembrance for at least this reason.

There was, Douglass argued, a great deal to be admired about the Declaration of

Independence, and there were good reasons for celebrating its anniversary. “This

Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You” he told his mostly white audience, “may rejoice; I must mourn.”51 Douglass, as a black man, knew well that he and others like him were outsiders in the land of their birth, marked by the color of their skin for slavery in the

South and inferiority in the North. In answer to the rhetorical question that forms the title of the oration, Douglass answered, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”52 There is

50 LW II, 185 51 LW II, 189 52 LW II, 192

184 nothing like a declaration of universal equality among men to remind those people who are systematically treated as subordinates and inferiors of the tragic absurdity of their position.

While Americans of the revolutionary generation were willing to “bear [their] bosom[s] to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea,”

Americans in the 1850s were unwilling to intervene in the ongoing, and expanding, power and practice of chattel slavery.53 Hence Douglass’s unfavorable comparison of the “solid manhood” of “the fathers of this republic” to the Americans of “these degenerate times.”54 “You have,” he admonished his audience, “no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers” and “no right to wear out and waste [their] hard-earned fame...to cover your indolence.”55

As long as Americans continue to echo their ancestors’ cries for liberty, equality, justice and independence, the fact that “there is neither law nor justice” for black people branded America’s “republic politics, not less than your republican religion...flagrantly inconsistent.”56 The American revolutionaries were willing to risk all in defense of the principles announced in the Declaration of Independence. Americans a generation later were unwilling to risk temporary discomfort to bring an end to a practice most, at least in the North, understood as morally abhorrent and politically dangerous.

In the end, however, there is hope. For starters, the United States of America is a young country. Douglass and his audience were celebrating the 76th anniversary, and,

53 LW II, 200 54 LW II, 186 55 LW II, 189 56 LW II, 196, 199-200

185

Douglass hoped, the promise of the nation’s beginnings might yet overshadow the failures of its actual existence.57 Additionally, Douglass argued, the notion that slavery was written into and protected by America’s founding documents, a notion that had been “so ruinously imposed” upon northern sentiment by abolitionists and the defenders of slavery alike, was simply untrue, a point that he felt fully authorized, as an American, to make, promulgate and propagate throughout the land. Add to that “the obvious tendencies of the age,” by which Douglass meant the spread of radical republican ideas throughout at least the European world (more on which, below), meant that Douglass would “not despair of this country,” but rather hope that its falsehoods and inconsistencies could, and would, be transformed.58 The means by which this transformation might be affected, however, are not entirely clear.

Philip Foner held the above the most moving passage in all of Douglass’s impressive corpus could be found in the Fourth of July oration, and more recently Jason

Frank devoted a chapter of his book, Constituent Moments, to a consideration of the speech.59 Frank’s attention to the “underauthorized performativity” of Douglass’s rhetoric in the oration points up the contradiction inherent in Douglass’s socio-political position “as a subject who lacked the rights that he had (his division between you and me) and one who had the rights that he lacked (in his very speaking of these claims).”60

That is to say, it highlights the fact that while Douglass spoke as though he was one of the men who had been created equal and endowed by his creator with certain

57 LW II, 182 58 LW II, 202-203 59 Foner (1975), in LW II, 39; Frank (2010), 209-236 60 Frank (2010), 218, 219 186 inalienable rights, he was, as a black man, something less than a full citizen of the

United States.

Those for whom he spoke were considered, for most non-punitive legal purposes, chattels rather than persons. After all, if not for the intervention of his British friends, who purchased his freedom from his former master, Douglass would not only be liable to capture and return to slavery, but anyone who refused to refused to turn him over to slave-catchers was, after the Compromise of 1850, liable to be charged with treason against the United States. There was indeed some incongruity, something subversive, about an escaped slave addressing an audience gathered to commemorate the seventy-sixth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

This emphasis on “underauthorized performativity” is proper as far as it goes, and it certainly serves to make Douglass’s speech exemplary of the kind of “constituent moment” with which Frank is primarily concerned. When someone who is officially excluded from consideration among “the people” speaks in the people’s name, a constituent moment occurs. Such moments “enact felicitous claims to speak in the people’s name, even though those claims explicitly break from the authorized procedures or norms for representing popular voice.”61 Put another way, a constituent moment occurs “when the underauthorized...seize the mantle of authorization, changing the inherited rules of authorization in the process.”62 Inasmuch as Douglass does indeed use the example, the language, and the instruments of the Founders in his July

Fourth oration, Frank’s construal of it as a constituent moment is plausible.

61 Frank (2010), 210 62 Frank (2010), 8 187

However, in calling attention to the performative aspect of Douglass’s address,

Frank expressly calls the reader away from the textual substance of Douglass’s argument, which Frank dismisses as mere “immanent critique.”63 This is misleading in a way that is pernicious rather than merely irritating. Frank correctly notes that Douglass

“explicitly thematized” the distance between himself and his audience at several times and in multiple ways throughout the oration, as when Douglass notes “the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped” and the

“immeasurable distance” between himself and his mostly white audience.64 The need to overcome that distance, and the means by which such overcoming might be accomplished, are also important themes in the oration.

Douglass never suggests that speechification, however well meaning, writing, however stridently abolitionist, or performance, however underauthorized, would be adequate to the goal of destroying slavery and incorporating free black people on equal footing into the American nation. Instead, Douglass insists, “it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake”65 By analogizing the abolitionists’ struggle against slavery to the

Revolutionary struggle against Britain, Douglass was not only performing the part of an outsider who makes claims as though he were an insider. He was inciting his audience, most of whom were abolitionists already, to act.

The “underauthorized performativity” of Douglass’s appearance on the dais at a

Fourth of July oration might have been the most jarring thing about the speech if

63 Frank (2010), 217; LW II, 183, 189 64 Frank 2010, 218 65 LW II, 192

188

Douglass had been speaking in, say, Charleston or Richmond, but he wasn’t. He was the invited keynote speaker at the Independence Day meeting organized by the

Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. His audience expected an anti-slavery address.

They knew, going in, that the topic was “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” and they knew that the man who would deliver the address was black and had been enslaved. It is likely that nobody, or nearly nobody, expected the sort of paean to the

Founding Generation that was, and still is, typical of Independence Day celebrations.

In fact, if any portion of the speech surprised the audience, it would likely have been either Douglass’s praise for the Founders, the Declaration, and the Constitution— after all, the American Anti-Slavery Society officially reviled all three—or his suggestion that resistance to slavery should look more like American resistance to the British during the Revolutionary War. The most jarring thing about Douglass’s speech was not his opposition to slavery, but his call to political action and, if need be, to arms.

By focusing on performance and performativity instead of (rather than in addition to) content and context, Frank occludes one of the primary points that Douglass was trying to make. The time for talking about why and how slavery was wrong had passed.

“To drag a man in fetters to the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery,” Douglass intoned. “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?”66 What, he wondered, was left to be proved about the injustice of slavery?

The basic humanity of the enslaved people was admitted on all sides. Should he then argue that human beings are, as such, entitled to rights? “You,” he admonished,

66 LW II, 189 189

“have already declared it.” Is slavery, then, fundamentally wrong? “Is that,” Douglass asked, rhetorically, “a question for Republicans?”67 Clearly, Douglass implied, it was not. As to the question of whether or not to waste any more breath on such things,

Douglass exclaimed “No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.”68 The arguments had already been adduced; the orations had already been performed, to little avail. Something more was needed.

The time for moral and ethical argument had passed. It was time for political action. Instead of obeying the “lords, nobles, and ecclesiastics” of the United States, it was, Douglass urged, high time Americans took a page from their fathers’ book and stood stalwartly and resolutely against slavery, even if so doing entailed a call not only to action, but to arms.69 The deployment of at least defensive violence was not only justifiable. It was a necessary component of a broader political strategy. Nothing less,

Douglass argued, was required from those who would do honor to the example of the men and women of the founding generation.

Douglass explains this position further in a short piece titled “Is it Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper.”70 By “kidnapper,” Douglass meant any agent attempting to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and his answer to first the question he posed himself was an unqualified “yes.” It is, indeed, quite right to kill a kidnapper.

67 LW II, 190-192 68 LW II, 192 69 LW II, 195 70SSW, 277-280

190

Here, Douglass’s argument is essentially Lockean.71 Life, though valuable, is a contingent gift from God, and one is entitled to keep one’s life only as long as one lives in obedience to natural law, whether physical or moral:

When a man flings himself from the top of some lofty monument, against a granite pavement, in that act he forfeits his right to live. He dies according to law, and however shocking may be the spectacle he presents, it is no argument against the beneficence of the law of gravitation, the suspension of whose operation must work ruin to the well-being of mankind.72

As with gravity, so too with slavery: one man cannot attempt to enslave another without violating natural law and, more immediately, the natural rights of the one whom he seeks to enslave, and, in so doing, the violator of natural law and natural rights may, ipso facto, be destroyed in the process of perpetrating his illegal acts. When, as was the case in the United States in the 1850s, society affords no protection to an individual whose rights are so threatened, the “individual is flung, by his untoward circumstances, upon his original right of self-defense.”73 The slave-hunter has forfeited his life, whether at the hands of the one he’s hunting or some other right-minded enforcer of laws of nature, just as surely and certainly as has the jumper described above. As such,

Douglass argues, it is right to kill a kidnapper.

71 Locke famously argued, in his Second Treatise, that anyone who violates the natural laws of self- preservation and the preservation of mankind “declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men...and so he becomes dangerous to mankind.” Upon encountering such a danger to the species, “every man upon this score, by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them.” Furthermore, he insists that “he who attempts to get another man into his absolute power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him” and that “one may destroy a man who makes war upon him...for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion,” (See Locke 1997, Chapter II, Section 8 through Chapter III, Section 18). It is easy enough to see why such language would be attractive to Douglass. 72 SSW 278 73 SSW 279

191

So far, so good. This is a Lockean case for self-defense. The violator of the laws of nature may be treated like a tiger or any other wild beast. He may be, that is, destroyed within the dictates of natural law.74 But Douglass is not only concerned with rights.

The second question, concerning the wisdom of the enforcement of the right to kill kidnappers, is a bit thornier, and a bit less straightforward from a Lockean perspective. Many, at the time, urged acquiescence to the law until such a time as it could be overturned. Douglass did not categorically reject the notion of forbearance, but, he insisted, “submission is valuable only so long as it has some chance of being recognized as a virtue. While it has this chance, it is well enough to practice it, as it may then have some moral effect in restraining crime and shaming aggression,” which was, of course, the course urged by Garrison and other advocates of moral suasion, “but no longer.”75

Put another way, while Douglass did not turn his back on moral suasion as a tactic, he recognized its limitations. There was, Douglass saw, danger in the pacific and stoical stance urged by the moral suasion camp. It required black people to present themselves as the powerless victims of powerful masters, and the sympathetic feelings that might thusly be awakened have a tendency to devolve from pity to contempt. Such, indeed, Douglass feared was already happening.

The “patient and unresisting disposition” of black people in the United States, enslaved and otherwise,

74 Locke (1997), 137 75 SSW 279

192

their unwillingness to peril their own lives, by shooting down their pursuers, is already quoted against them, as marking them as an inferior race. This reproach must be wiped out, and nothing short of resistance on the part of colored men, can wipe it out. Every slave-hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business, is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.”76

Americans celebrate their revolution against Britain and the boldness of their ancestors’ preference of a call to arms over submission to tyranny. They glory in the revolutionaries’ willingness “to drench the soil and crimson the sea with blood, to escape the payment of a three-penny tax on tea,” even as they equivocate on the justice of the enslavement of millions of black people in the South, discrimination against black people in the North, while simultaneously urging black people to acquiesce in their position and questioning their manhood for their failure to rebel against it. “Resistance,” Douglass concluded, “is, therefore, wise as well as just.”77 Only resistance could demonstrate that blacks, as well as whites, would have liberty, or death.

Douglass’s embrace of violence as a political tactic was, at least in part, a consequence of his embrace of the inclusion of black people within the ambit of

American democracy as a primary goal of his activism. Securing the opinion of at least a significant portion of the white population of the United States for abolition and political equality would be necessary. Doing so would require demonstrating not only the capacity of black people to suffer from oppression, but also their capacity, and willingness, to assert their humanity and their equality. To prove their equality with their countrymen, whose forbearers had risked life, liberty, and their sacred honor in defense

76 SSW 279, emphasis added. 77 SSW 279

193 of their rights against British oppression, would require a demonstration of the willingness of black people to do the same against those who would enslave them.

It is worth pausing here to take note of the fact that while Douglass only came to embrace violent resistance as a potentially efficacious political tactic in the 1850s, violence had played an important role in his thinking about slavery from the beginning.

He chose the surname Douglass at the encouragement of a friend in the militantly anti- slavery black community of New Bedford, MA. It is a reference to James Douglas, “he of the stout hand,” one of the leaders of the thirteenth-century wars for Scottish independence.78 Violence, and the threat of it, characterized the life of a slave from the cradle to the grave, as Douglass detailed in all of his autobiographies from the first, in

1845, to the last, the final revision of which was published in 1892. In fact, a particular violent episode was the climactic moment in all of Douglass’s narratives of his life as a slave.

When he was in his late teens, Douglass was hired out by his owner to a slave- breaker named Covey. While working for Covey, Douglass attempted an escape, and, when the escape failed, he knew that the attempt would earn him a beating when he returned to Covey’s farm. He was right; Covey attempted to corner Douglass in a barn, away from most of the other slaves, but Douglass resisted. He fought Covey to a stalemate, though he knew that, in so doing, he risked punishment, even death. The fight, Douglass recounted in his first autobiography, induced

a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not

78 MBMF 253

194

hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.79

Though several years passed between the fight with Covey and Douglass’s eventual escape to freedom, he calls this incident the turning point in his career as a slave. After that, he was a slave in name only.

Douglass penned these words, somewhat surprisingly, while he was still a stalwart Garrisonian. They suggest that even early in his career, Douglass had a sense

“that the fight for ascendency over an adversary can facilitate a psychological liberation, which is as powerful as physical freedom.”80 The notion that deciding to risk death rather than submit to bondage, a decision that is “not a matter of following natural desire but of triumphing over it,” inasmuch as one tends naturally to prefer the continuation of one’s life over death, whatever the means by which one’s life is secured, is surely present in Douglass’s work from the beginning.81 And this psychological defense of violent resistance to slavery, on account of its transformative and liberatory effects on the resistor, are clearly as important to Douglass as they are contrary to the pacifism espoused by the Garrisonians to whom Douglass owed his early success.

Rifts had been growing between Douglass and the Garrisonians for years, and events following the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law seem to have increased their

79 NLFD, 67-68. 80 Kohn (2005), 500 81 Kohn 2005, 504 195 salience.8283 The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law functionally nationalized slavery by requiring all law-enforcement officials, state and federal, to directly assist in returning people accused of escaping from slavery to their erstwhile masters.84 Resistance began almost immediately. In Syracuse, New York, not far from Douglass’s adopted hometown of

Rochester, a group of citizens freed Jerry McHenry from the local courthouse and spirited him away to Canada. Federal officials had meant to demonstrate their seriousness of purpose in executing the new Fugitive Slave Law in Syracuse, known as a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. They chose their moment poorly, however, as the anti-slavery Liberty Party was holding its annual meeting just outside of town at the time. Liberty Party members and local abolitionists were instrumental in freeing

McHenry and delivering him to safety.85

82 After he published his first autobiography, in 1845, Douglass attained national recognition as an anti- slavery activist. This put him in a difficult position, as he was, legally, a fugitive slave and subject to recapture and re-enslavement. With this in mind, his friends in the AAS arranged for him to tour England, Scotland and Ireland. On his nearly two-year sojourn, Douglass made many allies. They put together the funds to purchase his freedom, and over the objections of Garrison and the AAS, who thought buying a slave’s freedom was tantamount to admitting the legitimacy of the idea of human chattel, Douglass consented to his own compensated emancipation. When he returned to the United States a free man with a little bit of extra money in his pocket, Douglass decided to start up his own paper, The North Star, over the objections of Garrison and other members of the AAS, who feared Douglass would over-saturate the subscription market and doubted Douglass’s ability to do more than narrate his own experience with slavery (MBMF 296) 83 The law passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus series of bills intended to mollify sectional differences over the admission of new states from the western territories that had been won in the recent war with Mexico. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 updated and reinforced extant legislation, passed in 1793, that was meant to enact the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping to another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labour shall be due.” Put succinctly, the Constitution demanded that those who escaped enslavement in the southern states to the North be remitted to their masters. From 1793 through 1850, many northern states had contravened the Constitution by local ordinances preventing local law-enforcement from administering the law. After 1850, this was no longer legally possible. 84 Nothing more than a white man’s sworn testimony to ownership of an accused escapee was necessary for attaining an order for arrest, and the accused slave was barred from testifying on his or her own behalf. 85 The incident became known as the “Jerry Rescue.” For a more detailed account, see Sokolow (1982). 196

Just a month earlier, members of a free black community outside of Christiana,

PA, had demonstrated their willingness to resist the Fugitive Slave Law by firing on

Edward Gorsuch, his sons, and the federal marshals that had arrived at the home of

William Parker to demand the return of three men who were living with Parker and whom Gorsuch insisted were rightfully his property. In the ensuing fight, Gorsuch was killed, his sons wounded, and the accused fugitives successfully defended. They, and

Parker, made their way North to Canada.86 Although the records are unclear, they may have spent a night in Rochester at the home of Frederick Douglass.87 Quite clear, however, is Douglass’s estimation of the nature and worth of these acts of resistance.

“Parker and his noble band,” Douglass wrote a few years later, “are entitled to the honor of making the first successful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Bill,” and the

Battle of Christiana, alongside the rescue of Jerry McHale, are the primary reason why that bill had largely failed to enable slaveholders and their allies to hunt “our hills and valleys here with the same freedom with which they now hunt their own dismal swamps.”88 It is worth noting, here, that Douglass was praising both vigilante violence and the actions of members of a political party. Parker opened fire on a group of men who were, after all, executing a law with clear Constitutional and Congressional authorization, and McHale’s rescue was accomplished by an assault on the courthouse in Syracuse by a mob of local abolitionists and Liberty Party men. The future of abolitionism, Douglass decided, was in politics and in resistance.

86 For a detailed account of the “Battle of Christiana, see Nash (1861), 24-31. See also Parker (1866). 87 Douglass wrote a letter to a friend, Samuel Porter, stating that “there are three men at my house who are in great peril,” and requesting assistance (LW II, 163). The timing suggests the men in question may have been related to the Christiana battle, but the documentary evidence is not conclusive. 88 LW II, 438

197

We have here a suggestion that violent resistance of attempted violations of one’s rights as a person, or at least an acknowledged capacity to successfully defend oneself, is an essential prerequisite for citizenship in the United States. It gives one a sense of self-reliance and self-worth, to one’s fundamental personhood, even as it alerts others to the dangers to which they would expose themselves if they should decide to violate one’s fundamental rights as a person. What we have here is not a rational story about the distribution and adjudication of abstract rights by a neutral arbiter called the state. Instead, we have a “micro-political” story about the political economy of violence and fear, and the capacity of both to serve the interests of humanity in the context of a democratic republic. Douglass wrote that, by fighting Covey, he let it be known that anyone who would whip him must also kill him, and, he argued, a slave that cannot be whipped is no longer a slave.89

So, Douglass’s turn toward advocacy of violent resistance to slavery is inseparable from his acceptance of the Constitution and his commitment to political engagement, because, he believed, that “a person without force is without the essential dignity of humanity,” and that there was no way for black people to become full citizens of the United States, which was Douglass’s ultimate goal, without demonstrating their willingness not only to risk their lives in the attempt at attaining that goal, but also, like the revolutionary founders of the nation, to destroy those who would impede their progress towards it.90 In this sense, Douglass directly confronts the Enlightened, contractarian principles upon which American national identity is built not on the terms

89 MBMF, 181 90 Boxill (1999), 38 198 of reason and consensus, but in terms of the “brutality and conflict” that underlie them.91

Only in such a confrontation could Douglass’s goal, “not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice,” be reached.92 Democracy, inasmuch as it entails the recognition of the rights of citizens, entails a political economy of violence.

Practically speaking, Douglass was focused on a single set of issues: the destruction of slavery and the end of discrimination against black people in particular and non-whites in general. His understanding of the trajectory of the times, and of the applicability of the equality announced in the Declaration of Independence, was considerably more expansive. Douglass’s North Star, for example, was among the first papers to carry the Seneca Falls Declaration. Alongside it, Douglass announced his opinion that “all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for woman. All that distinguishes a man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman,” and that “there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land.”93 Douglass’s understanding of the equality announced in the

Declaration of Independence was, in fact, every bit as expansive as men like John

Adams and John C. Calhoun had feared: the equality of all men was taken to mean the equality of all people of sound mind, be they black or white, male or female, propertied or poor.94

91 Kohn (2005), 505. While I borrow from Kohn’s argument here, it should be noted that her piece is of significantly greater value for those who are interested in teaching Hegel to undergraduates than it is for students of Douglass. 92 LW IV, 164, emphasis in original. 93 LW I, 321 94 See Adams’s response to his wife Abigail’s appeal that he and his fellow framers “Remember the Ladies” when they wrote the nation’s fundamental laws, and see chapter one of this dissertation. 199

Furthermore, Douglass was not immune to the general enthusiasm for the expansion of republican politics that attended the revolutions of 1848. “Steam, skill, and lighting have brought the ends of the earth together,” he wrote, and old “prejudices are vanishing. The magic power of human sympathy is rapidly healing national divisions and bringing mankind into the harmonious bonds of a common brotherhood.”95 Neither, of course, did he overlook the fact that the most vociferous American supporters of the republicanism in France, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere were also, in the main, racist Democrats who were, if not supporters and defenders of southern slavery, only tepid abolitionists.

“There is,” he told them in Lockean terms, “a state of war in the South at this moment. The slaveholder is waging a war of aggression,” that was every bit as dire as that waged by the monarchists against the republicans in Europe. While the Americans

“welcomed the intelligence from France that Louis Philippe had been barricaded at

Paris...and joined heartily in the watchword of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’” they nevertheless would not “hail, with equal pleasure, the tidings from the South that the slaves had risen, and achieved for themselves, against the iron-hearted slaveholder, what the republicans of France achieved against the royalists.”96 His point, here, is that the expansion of citizenship abroad ought to have a concomitant expansion of the same at home.

This ought to include the emancipation of the slaves and the incorporation of freedmen and women as equal citizens in the United States. It ought also include full

95 LW I, 323 96 LW I, 398

200 citizenship for women, as any “effort to promote the progress and welfare of mankind” are assisted by any “movement for...equal rights.”97 Freedom for all people would always be of a piece: a victory against tyranny is a victory for humanity.

Douglass always insisted that, in the end, “the main work” of democratic equality

“must be commenced, carried on, and concluded by ourselves.”98 While this passage, from a piece entitled “What are the Colored People Doing for Themselves,” is often taken to be merely an argument for economic self-reliance and boot-strapping individual effort, or, just as often, as evidence of Douglass’s commitment to liberalism. However, when read in the light of his understanding of the importance of self-defense and resistance, it can just as easily be read as a defense of the actions of William Parker and his neighbors outside of Christiana, PA or an argument in favor of the “policing the police” actions of the Black Panther Party. While procedural and ideological commitments to equality are a starting point, finding ways of making good on such commitments in practice are crucial to democratic politics.

As long as black people are defined for civic purposes by the color of their skin and marked, in the process, for inferiority, it would be up to them to organize themselves politically, economically, and militantly, if need be. Without the capacity, and the willingness, to defend themselves, they could never be citizens, could never prove their equality with the white people of the United States. One can easily imagine

Douglass assenting to Malcolm X’s admonition to his audience that, by all means, they

97 LW IV, 453 98 LW I, 314

201 should die for what they believe in, but that they should not do so alone. “Let your dying be reciprocal,” X urged his audience. “This is what is meant by equality.”99

Furthermore, Douglass rejects the original intent of the authors of the

Constitution as a standard for interpretation for reasons that were as good then as they are now. After all, it’s quite clear that even the most liberal and radical of those who attended the 1787 convention would have been, at best, deeply uncomfortable with the idea of universal suffrage, and they would have been even more upset to learn that after a mere two and a quarter centuries a black man would become president of the United

States (though it’s not clear that they’d be more upset about Obama’s blackness than they would’ve been about Kennedy’s Catholicism). The notion that every American has a right to form, expound, and spread to the best of her ability her own opinion about the meaning of the Constitution remains radical, and this expansive interpretation of the

Constitution is among the handful of reasons why groups that are, and have been, excluded from full membership in the American polity decide, and should decide, to keep working toward American democracy, in the full sense of the word.

Finally, while the promotion of a just cause must require extremism, it also requires coalition-building if intends to actually matter. This entails coalition-building and the kind of sausage-making compromises for which mere true-believers tend to be poorly suited. Douglass is a good example of one who managed to shoot the gap between the purity of the agitator and the compromise of the statesman.

Though he recognized that “principles are eternal,” he also understood that the business of American politics was conducted by political parties and through political

99 X (1965), 34 202 participation, and that a “party without voters is among the most worthless of all worthless things.”100 There is no sense in standing on principles when doing so is self- defeating. Attaching one’s goals to the practical compromises necessary for their achievement is the essence of democratic politics.

Douglass put this point most eloquently, perhaps, in a speech he gave at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, DC. The monument shows

Lincoln, holding the Emancipation Proclamation standing over a kneeling slave whose chains have been broken. It is, undoubtedly, a condescending monument, and many in the black community objected.

Yet Douglass intervened on behalf of Lincoln and others who might be construed as mealy-mouthed appeasers:

Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to the rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.101

That is to say, those who would rather be right than win are likely to get their wish. In a democratic country, even when guns are drawn and fired, one must have allies, and having allies means meeting people where they are rather than demanding they come over to your side. Sometimes this entails demonstrations of force. Other times, it means orchestrating public displays of aggrieved forbearance. Withal, it means adapting means to ends.

100 LW IV, 209, 207 101 LW IV, 316

203

The mixture of hope and despair, promise and outrage, so prominent in

Douglass’s work would be echoed half a century later by Langston Hughes: “America was never America to me / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” American democracy was, during Douglass’s lifetime, the name of an unfinished project. So it remains, but it is as true now as it was then that movement toward an American democracy is driven by those who are willing to engage the project in good faith, with strong will and concerted effort. We have few models in our history more applicable than Douglass for what democratic statesman- and citizenship ought to be.

What was needed, Douglass held, was something akin to a revolution, a transformation of the political society of the United States. But, for Douglass, this revolution would not replace the prevailing values by which America purported to be governed. Rather, Douglass’s revolution would force Americans to actually behave as though they had faith in the values—equality, human rights, majority rule—they espoused. The conclusion of the revolution would be an America that was truly democratic.102

102Myers (2013), 142-144 204

CHAPTER 6 DEMOCRACY AND PROPHECY: WALT WHITMAN’S COMPOUND “I” AND THE POLITICAL FORCE OF DEMOCRATIC CULTURE

I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, to leap from their seats and contend for their lives.

I am he who goes through the streets with a barbed tongue, questioning every one I meet—ques- tioning you up there now: Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense? —Walt Whitman “Chants Democratic and Native American”1

Walt Whitman’s star has risen considerably, over the past few decades, among political theorists. He is celebrated as a theorist of democratic individualism, of democratic culture, of the relationship between aesthetics and democracy, the prophet of a great democratic future, and the articulator of a sort of national, democratic faith that, once believed, could save us all. The trouble with such fêtes, however, is that it is not at all clear what any them mean. It’s generally agreed that Whitman was a democratic thinker, an individualist, and a theorist of the relationship between culture, aesthetics, and politics, but it’s not at all clear what it means to be such a thinker or theorist. What’s democratic about individualism or culture? What, exactly, does culture or aesthetics have to do with politics? There’s no shortage of literature about Whitman’s literature, but none of it answers these questions satisfactorily. I aim to rectify this in the following pages.

1 LG III, 110

205

The easiest mistake to rectify is the tendency to read Whitman as an

Emersonian. He is figured as a “disciple of Emerson,”2 Emerson’s “spiritual heir,”3 and one of Emerson’s “protégés.”4 Such interpretations tend to point to Whitman’s claim, recounted by his friend John Trowbridge many decades later, that he had been

“simmering, simmering,” until Emerson brought him “to a boil.”5 This is usually taken as evidence that Whitman was thinking this way and that, wondering what to do, until

Emerson turned up his fire. However, we might just as easily read this differently.

One sometimes goes from simmer to boil when one is inspired. One also sometimes does so when one is angry, and there is some evidence that Whitman found at least some of Emerson’s works and affectations maddening. For example, Whitman wrote in an unpublished notebook sometime in after 1870, “Of Emerson, (& the New

England set)” that they “teach, and maintain in their writings, a proper demeanor, & seriously condemn laughing. They secretly, (and not always secretly) despise the idea of patriotism.”6 Elsewhere in his notebooks, Whitman complains that Emerson’s writings, “good as they are, and welcome & appropriate to certain stages and ages of development…it is certain that we pass beyond them, & they become not only useless, but, rather an annoyance.” Emerson’s works suffer, according to Whitman, from an excess of “intellection—which even his sweetness & manliness cannot make entirely satisfactory.”7 This is not to say that Emerson was not an influence on Whitman; quite

2 Beer (1984), 373 3 Button (2015), 313 4 Turner (2008), 656 5 Trowbridge (1902) 6 NUPM 1719 7 NUPM 1715

206 clearly, he was. But Whitman’s relationship to Emerson is ambivalent, and fundamentally misunderstood as one of discipleship, tutelage, or inheritance.

Neither Whitman’s individualism nor his notion of democratic culture can be described in any meaningful or articulate way as “Emersonian.” Emersonian individualism entails the annihilation of the individual’s particularity. Emerson’s ideal individual is “a transparent eyeball,” who can say, with a straight face, “I am nothing; I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of

God.”8 Whitman’s individualism is, emphatically, embodied and particular. It entails not only solitary self-creation, but also participation in political and communal life. Where

Emerson would “shun father and mother, wife and brother,” and “write upon the lintels of the doorpost ‘Whim,’” Whitman exults, “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” and declares, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their / counterpart of on the same terms.”9 While Emerson spent most of the Civil War years penning his final book, English Traits, about the unique Anglo-Saxon characteristics of the American people and extolling the salutatory influence of military service on the American people, Whitman spent the years in Washington, DC, as a volunteer nurse in the military hospitals.

Because Whitman emerged out of the workaday world of urban, cosmopolitan

New York City rather than “the study or pine woods” of Emerson’s Cambridge, Whitman

“may best be understood not in relation to Emerson and the Transcendentalists but in relation to the body of political and aesthetic thought that emerged from the American

8 E&L, 10 9 E&L, 262; P&P, 50

207

Revolution.”10 Emerson was born and raised at the edges of Boston’s Brahmin class.

His companions, though often religiously and ideologically heterodox, were well heeled and well educated. Although far from a partisan hack, Emerson’s sympathies were with the Whigs.11 His influences reflected his classical education at Harvard—he was particularly fond of the Neo-Platonists—and his training as a Congregationalist minister, from which he was particularly indebted to William Ellery Channing. Whitman’s companions were New York bohemians and mechanics, his partisan leanings squarely

Democratic, his audiences as an author and editor often of immigrant stock, and his influences as a political thinker drawn from religious radicals like the itinerant Quaker preacher Elias Hicks and political radicals Thomas Paine and Fanny Wright.12

That Whitman should cite the influence of two radically democratic thinkers,

Paine and Wright, should surprise no one. Neither should Whitman’s mention of Elias

Hicks, who preached the notion that each member of a true congregation must follow his or her own Inner Light, or conscience, and be allowed to speak from it. Elsewhere,

Whitman mentions Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, a work of fiction and Epicurean philosophy that presents itself as a manuscript discovered among the ruins of

Herculaneum, and Volney’s The Ruins, written by a French aristocrat during the

Revolution and translated into English by Thomas Jefferson in 1796, which imagines a series of dialogues between a visitor to a massive archeological ruin and a panel of

10 Erkkila (1989), 69 11 He was, as he put it in a letter to his brother, merely “an indifferent Whig” with no particular affection for William Henry Harrison, but he was enthusiastic about the opportunity to unseat Martin Van Buren (in Rusk 1939, 357). 12 For the influence of Hicks on Whitman, see Cummings (1998); Whitman counted Hicks, Paine (“the chiefest of the three”), and Wright as the thinkers to whom he “determined” that he “would bear witness,” (WWC, 206).

208 gods on the nature of man and civilization, as “the books on which I may be said to have been raised.”13 So, we see that Whitman was influenced directly by radical democratic theory, by (at least a version of) Greek philosophy, and by Enlightenment rationalism at least as much as he was by Emerson.

Yet the error persists. Perhaps the most influential Emersonian interpretation of

Whitman’s work comes from George Kateb. For Kateb, Whitman is, first and foremost, a theorist of “democratic individuality” and, secondarily, of “democratic culture.”14 Kateb’s privileging of individuality over culture calls into question the meaning of the word

“democratic” in his description of the upshot of Whitman’s work.

Kateb places Whitman squarely within an Emersonian ambit, and considers his poetry and prose as, more or less, a protracted working out of Emersonian themes such as self-reliance, receptivity, genius, and character, among others. On Kateb’s reading, then, Whitman’s “final lesson,” like Emerson’s, “is solitude.” Whitman’s democratic individualism, like Emerson’s self-reliant individualism, emphasizes the work of self- creation, which work can best be undertaken alone. This work is democratic only inasmuch and insofar as it is a kind of work that anybody might undertake if she or he decided it was worthwhile. Kateb’s Whitman, then, prefers the solitary work of self- creation over the collective work of creating and maintaining a democratic politics, society, or culture, or, as Kateb puts it, “the adventures of human connectedness.”

Whitman “would not,” Kateb insists, “be a defender of individuality if he taught otherwise.”15

13 WWC, 445 14 Kateb (1990), 570 15 Kateb (1990), 570 209

Kateb is half right here. Whitman would certainly not be a defender of

Emersonian individuality if he taught solitude over connectedness or privileged individualism over democracy. In the opening section of this chapter, I shall argue that

Whitman, indeed, does not teach solitude over connectedness, nor individualism over democracy, because he is not a defender of individuality as Kateb understands it. By understanding Whitman as an Emersonian, Kateb—and he’s not alone in this—misses the extent to which Whitman was reacted both positively and negatively to Emerson’s influence. Or, to put it another way, Whitman was a democrat before he read or heard

Emerson, and he remained a democrat after his encounter with the Sage of Concord.

On the primacy of democracy, Whitman and Emerson could hardly be more different.

To note that “Whitman’s is ultimately a more radically democratic vision than Kateb’s

Emersonian interpretation allows” is to understate the case significantly.16

For Kateb, Whitman’s vision of democratic culture is an enabling condition for the development of democratic individuality. It “opens the possibility for each to take himself or herself seriously as directly connected to that which is irreducible.”17 For Emerson, this encounter between the individual and “that which is irreducible” was, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, an encounter that necessarily occurs in solitude, because the irreducible “that” is precisely the ineffable Oneness that is the universe. For Whitman, on the other hand, the irreducible “that” is, precisely, other people, and the connections between irreducible individuals—and the resulting union, the paradoxical e pluribus

16 Frank (2007), 404 17 Kateb (1990), 570 210 unum presupposed by the notion of democratic culture, society, and politics—is the very core of Whitman’s poetry and his theory.

For Kateb, however, the notion of human connectedness as in Whitman’s work, his “comradely side” rather than his individualist one, “is not his most attractive because it is not the genuinely democratic one.” Indeed, Kateb sees in Whitman’s comradely side significant danger. Comradeship and adhesion threaten to “suffocate the very individualism Whitman is trying to promote,” and “does not go with the spirit of rights- based individualism.” Indeed, the notion of unity implicit (or explicit) in comradeship

“serves the sinister project of nationalism.”18

The word Whitman usually uses for affectionate human connection is

“adhesiveness.” Whitman borrowed the term from phrenology, in which discipline it denoted the faculty that causes human beings to become connected to one another. In his usage, adhesion often takes on sexual—and homosexual—overtones, and it is essential to Whitman’s notion of democratic culture and his ideas about democracy as such. Adhesiveness, or comradeship, is precisely the quality that makes democracy not only possible but necessary, as only democracy simultaneously honors both the individuality of each person and the connections among people, or what Whitman sometimes calls the en masse or ensemble character of the people. It is precisely this adhesiveness or comradeship that, added to individualism, makes Whitman’s work democratic, and it is this combination that animates Whitman’s “wide reverberating chants, / Chants of the Many In One.”19

18 Kateb (1990), 564 19 LG III, 8

211

One finds Whitman quite emphatic on the importance and desirability of the adventures of human connectedness. It’s quite easy to adduce multiple instances in

Whitman’s work in which precisely such adventures are dramatized and rendered poetically. He begins the second untitled poem of his first edition of Leaves of Grass, for example, by considering the distance imposed between author and reader by material objects and attempting, poetically, to overcome it, thereby enabling a direct exchange:

Come closer to me,

Push close my lovers and take the best I possess,

Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess.

This is unfinished business with me….how is it with you?

I was chilled with the cold types and cylinder and wet paper

between us.

I pass so poorly with paper and types….I must pass

with the contact of bodies and souls.

Quite clearly, the point here is the connection, and even reciprocity, between author and reader. Self-expression and utterance are incomplete, and perhaps meaningless, without reception. Interestingly, we might consider that the process of adjustment between author and reader, particularly in poetry, of understanding and attempts at being understood, are easily analogous to the work required by political democracy.

There is some evidence that Whitman flirted with the idea of withdrawing from public and into private considerations, but decided consciously against it. Instead, “and in some sense quite extraordinarily, he turned in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass

212 toward an effort to resolve the crisis of the Union—the paradox of liberty and union, the one and the many—on the level of the body, sex, and homosexual love.”20 The adhesive affection between and among men, for Whitman, was the force that could bind and sustain the union, and was the counterbalancing force that prevented individualism from splintering the community into so many atoms or devolving into mere egoism.

Whitman prefers the metaphor of comradeship or adhesiveness over, say, marital bonds, because “the historically patriarchal and unequal relationship between man and woman” rendered many friendship “a more appropriate, because more egalitarian, model.”21

Whitman uses sexual language to describe the relationship between himself and his readers in the fourth poem of his 1860 “Enfans D’Adam” cluster. It ends with several lines suggesting his procreative expectations:

Through you I drain the pent up rivers of myself,

In you I wrap a thousand onward years,

On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and

of America,

The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and

athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers,

The babes I beget upon you are to beget babies in

their turn,

I shall demand perfect men and women out of my

love-spendings,

20 Erkkila (2002), 125 21 Erkkila (2002), 130 213

I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I

and you interpenetrate now,

I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of

them, as I count on the fruits of the gushing

showers I give now,

I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,

immortality, I plant so lovingly now.22

The interaction between author and reader, then, literally bears fruit. By precisely the adventures of human connectedness described in this passage in physical and sexual terms, the interaction between author and reader create children, who will go on to have children of their own. What Whitman is doing, here, is dramatizing the notion that the impartation of an idea or a set of ideas from author to audience might bear fruit, in the sense that it induces a change in the readers, which change will go on to ramify through future generations.

The unattractiveness to Kateb of this aspect of Whitman’s thought does not reduce its centrality. It is precisely adhesiveness and comradeship that makes the

United States “not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations,” gives it its poetic nature, and, for Whitman, who wrote the first several editions of Leaves of Grass at a moment when the United States was plunging headlong toward the Civil War.23 It is, therefore, the power of adhesiveness or comradeship that makes Whitman’s poetic project both possible and necessary.

By great bards only can a series of peoples and States

22 LG III, 304 23 LG III, 111

214

be fused into the compact organism of one

nation.

To hold men together by paper and seal, or by com-

pulsion, is no account,

That only holds men together which is living prin-

ciples, as the hold of the limbs of the body, or

the fibres of plants.”24

Whitman is not only celebrating himself, not only announcing or articulating individualism or individuality. He is also, and just as importantly, announcing and articulating the modes and methods by which individuals can and should be knit together—poetically, politically, physically.

It is precisely this combination of individualism and connectedness, of one and many, that makes Whitman’s individualism, the culture he promotes, and the politics he urges, democratic. It may not “go with” rights-based individualism. However, given the absence of rights-based arguments in Whitman’s corpus, we might wonder whether or not this would trouble him. Likewise, although there are certainly sinister aspects of nationalism, Whitman’s attempt at poetically unifying “a teeming nation of nations,” composed of individuals en masse, was certainly a national one, dedicated, among other things, to the preservation of the Union. The nation Whitman imagines, and renders poetically, is one composed of extant American stuff that is reconfigured and presented to the people in hopes of awakening the latent democratic potentiality—

24 LG III, 115

215 participatory, connected, and firmly rooted in the hearts of the common people and laboring classes—among the people.

In this sense, then, Kateb not only misunderstands Whitman, but also misunderstands the relationship between Whitman and democracy. It is simply not possible to imagine a democratic individualism or democratic culture that did not include some measure of celebration for the adventures of human connectedness. Indeed,

Whitman’s own understanding of democracy, as we have seen, includes such adventures, and it also insists upon the importance of the body and the centrality of the laboring classes. This is what Whitman is after when he writes, in the first poem of his first edition of Leaves of Grass (later “Song of Myself”)

I speak the password primeval….I give the sign of

democracy,

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have

their counterpart of on the same terms.25

Democracy means, for Whitman, equality. Getting to equality means including, in the adventures of human connectedness and in the work of self-creation, those who have heretofore been excluded. Until all are allowed to participate, democracy does not really exist. In hopes of getting a grip on Whitman’s vision of democracy, I shall briefly describe its origins.

25 P&P, 50

216

Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819, the second son (and second child of seven—five boys and two girls) of Walter and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman.26 Religiously informed by Quakerism and politically loyal to the Democratic Party (among Walt

Whitman’s brothers were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson Whitman), the family was of middling economic status. The elder Walter Whitman was a carpenter, neither wealthy nor poor. In 1823 the Whitman family moved from West Hills to Brooklyn, which was then a town of some seven thousand souls and in which Walt Whitman would spend most of his life. By 1855, the 89th year of the United States and the 36th of Walt

Whitman’s, the year in which he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn had grown to become the fourth-largest city in the United States.27 The rapid expansion and urbanization of his hometown was only one facet of the massive social, economic, and political upheaval that characterized the years during which Whitman came of age.

During Whitman’s young adulthood, “the tide of political thought” in the United

States “was flowing in the direction of democracy.”28 It was also flowing toward conflict.

The old, class-based barriers to the suffrage were torn down in almost every state during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In New York, for example, the proportion of the adult, white male population eligible to vote ballooned by upwards of fifty percent between 1820 and 1850.29 Over the same period, ten states were added to the Union, and thus the expansion of the electorate was paced by the expansion of the

26 For details of Whitman’s early life, I have leaned heavily on Jerome Loving’s Walt Whitman, The Song of Himself and David S. Reynold’s Walt Whitman’s America and Roger Asselineau’s The Evolution of Walt Whitman. 27 Reynolds 2000, 17 28 Keyssar 2000, 42 29 Keyssar 2000, 52. It should be noted that even as unpropertied white men gained the right to vote, the exclusion of women and free blacks was codified in law. 217 population and geographic boundaries of the nation.30 These are the decades Arthur

Schlesinger dubbed the Age of Jackson.31

Although shot through with contradictions, Jacksonian Democracy was nevertheless among “the most egalitarian of Western political ideologies.”32 The

Democratic Party in the Age of Jackson cobbled together under their banner “workies” from the Northern cities—politically organized artisans and laborers in places like New

York and Philadelphia—recent immigrants—primarily from Ireland and Germany—the yeomanry of the Mid- Atlantic, and the dirt farmers of the piedmont South. These groups were not of one mind on much of anything other than the notion that the moneyed classes, including bankers, merchants, land-speculators, plantation-owners, and the like, were using their wealth to control politics in the United States and could only be effectively opposed by a political organization of members of the productive classes, including farmers, artisans, mechanics, and tradesmen.

The fundamental “key to Jacksonian politics” was “a belief that relatively small groups of self-interested men were out to destroy majority rule and, with it, the

Constitution.”33 The only way to defend majority rule, the argument went, from a takeover by well-heeled elites was to mobilize the masses. Although the Democratic

Party organized the first mass-based political machine in the modern world, rank-and- file Democrats did not regard themselves “as simply an electoral machine,” but rather

30 These new states were Maine (1820), Missouri (1821), Michigan (1837), Florida (1845), Texas (1845), Iowa (1846), Wisconsin (1848), and California (1850). 31 He did so in the eponymous title of his 1950 book on the subject. 32 O’Brien 1993, 44; the various and myriad contradictions in Jacksonian democracy lead Smith (1997, 197-242) to dub the Age of Jackson “High Noon of the White Republic.” 33 Wilentz 2005, 513 218

“believed that they were the constitutional party of the sovereign people” marshaled in opposition to a threatening cabal of politically and economically powerful would-be usurpers.34 The New York City and Brooklyn of Whitman’s youth was one of the epicenters of Jacksonian Democratic enthusiasm among both the working and the literary class. Whitman spent most of his young life with one foot in each world.

The New York City of Whitman’s youth in the 1830s and 1840s, during which time he cut his teeth as a printer, journalist, and newspaper editor, was ground zero for a political and literary movement know as Young America. Centered on the United

States Magazine and Democratic Review, the Young Americans included many figures associated with the what has been called the American Renaissance: Hawthorne,

Melville, Thoreau, and, of course, Whitman himself.35 The mission of the Young

Americans, and the Democratic Review, is nicely summarized by the review’s editor,

John O’Sullivan: “There is an immense field open to us, if we would but enter it boldly and cultivate it as our own. All history has to be re-written: political science and the whole scope of all moral truths have to be considered and illustrated in light of the democratic principle. All old subjects of thought and all new questions arising, connected more or less directly with human existence, have to be taken up again and re-examined in this point of view.”36 The aim was nothing short of cultural renovation and reappraisal “in the light of the democratic principle.” Nothing less was at stake than

34 Wilentz 2005, 526 35 The phrase “American Renaissance” comes from F.O. Matthiessen (1941). 36 Democratic Review (1838, 1), emphasis added

219

“the character of the demos and the identity of the arbiters of the mœurs and the means by which the desired habits would be transmitted.”37

The Young Americans were enthusiasts of democracy and partisans of the

Democrats. They promoted the cause of democracy at home and abroad, singing the praises of democratic and republican revolutions in Greece, France, Italy, and Ireland, while advocating democratic reforms and territorial expansion in America. In addition to advocating on behalf of party leaders and party principles in elections locally and nationally, they urged solidarity with anti-monarchical, republican movements around the world, an enthusiasm that is captured in the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” which was coined by O’Sullivan in 1845. Here, it must be admitted, we can clearly see the seeds of jingoism and imperialism, but we must remember that these, at the time, were merely seeds, the fruits of which were then uncertain. For many among the Young Americans,

Manifest Destiny “expressed the social and intellectual aspirations of a generation who felt poised at the threshold of a new historical era. For a fleeting moment, they dared to think it the culmination of world republicanism. The American revolution would happen all over again, on a global scale this time.”38 To put it another way, many Young

Americans understood Manifest Destiny less as a justificatory slogan for American empire and more as the name of a tendency, in evidence around the world, toward democratic-republican revolution. The destiny of the world, on this understanding, was manifestly to move in the direction of the democratic principle.

37 Wolin 2001, 285 38 Widmer (1999), 16. Widmer suggests that we think about Young America as a movement that passed through two stages, the first democratic, literary, and idealistic and the second nationalistic, jingoistic, and imperialist. Whitman was an adherent to the first, not the second. 220

Perhaps perversely, but probably inevitably, the territorial expansion for which

Whitman and other Young Americans advocated—including, crucially, the annexation of

Texas—had, once accomplished by the successful (if dubious) war with Mexico, the direct consequence of making the issue of chattel slavery unavoidable on the national political scene. Questions about the status of slavery in the recently acquired (or conquered) territories in the West splintered the Jacksonian Democratic Party along primarily, though not exclusively, sectional lines, and set in motion the series of events that would lead, a little more than a decade later, to the Civil War.39 This was the atmosphere into which Whitman would enter his poetry.

Prior to his career as a poet, Whitman worked as a newspaper editor, typesetter, and freelance journalist, working and publishing primarily in the Democratic Party- sponsored newspapers in and around New York. He often, though not always, found himself among the far-left fringe of the party, and his support for the Wilmot Proviso—a rider to a bill concerning the admission of the new western territories that would have outlawed slavery in all of them, named for the Pennsylvania Democrat who proposed it—got him fired from his post as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The owners of the

Eagle opposed the proviso, and the controversy within the Democratic Party in New

York over the proviso ultimately resulted in the factionalization of the party into

“Hunkers,” who preferred to duck and crouch when the issue of slavery arose, and

“Barnburners,” who were willing to set fire to the party rather than accommodate the pro-slavery forces within it.

39 Wilentz (2005), 390 221

After his firing, Whitman used his connections to secure himself a job at the

Crescent in New Orleans. The sojourn to the South did little to tone down Whitman’s radical streak. Along with his brother, Whitman spent a few months in New Orleans, but was back in Brooklyn by the late spring of 1848. This was a portentous time in the New

York Democracy. The simmering disputes between Hunkers and Barnburners came to a boil with the Free Soil revolt.

The Free Soil Party, composed in no small part of disaffected Barnburner, anti- slavery Democrats, knitted together with northern Whigs and ex-members of the even more radically anti-slavery Liberty Party, was preparing to hold its first national convention.40 The new party gained whatever ideological consistency it had from its opposition to the expansion of slavery into the new territories and its commitment to the ideals of “free soil, free labor, and free men.”41 Opposition to the expansion of slavery did not entail racial egalitarianism. Indeed, the Wilmot Proviso was described by its sponsor as the “white man’s proviso,” a description that was echoed by many of its proponents. The idea was that white workers could not hope to compete with slaves in the market for labor. Whitman was elected as one of fifteen delegates from Brooklyn to the national Free Soil convention in Buffalo, where some of the attendees, including

Frederick Douglass, were disappointed when the party rejected a more thoroughgoing opposition to slavery and appointed Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency.

Not one to sit on the sidelines, and intimately familiar with the hurly-burly of the party presses, shortly after the Buffalo convention Whitman established his own

40 Earle (2003), 159-168 41 Foner (1980) 222 newspaper, the Brooklyn Weekly Freeman, as a mouthpiece for the Free Soil Party. A fire destroyed the paper’s presses, and Whitman’s office, the day after its first issue was published, and the Freeman lasted only a year. In the election of 1848, Van Buren’s

Free Soil candidacy split the Democratic vote along sectional lines (he received only ten percent of the national vote, compared to conservative Democrat Lewis Cass, who received forty-two percent), which handed the election to the Whigs’ Zachary Taylor.

Taylor died shortly after taking office, putting his archconservative vice president, Millard

Fillmore, in the Oval Office.42

The Free Soil insurgency had been resoundingly defeated in the United States, resulting in the elevation of pro-slavery, nativist, and politically anti-democratic leaders, and, across the Atlantic, monarchical and aristocratic force crushed the previously promising republican revolutions in Europe. These events were disheartening. This

“American 1848” hearkened the demise of the Young America movement of which

Whitman had been a part, though the sobriquet remained and was increasingly associated with a particularly jingoistic, nativist, and imperialistic American nationalism.43

During these politically difficult and financially perilous times, Whitman retreated somewhat from activism, working as a carpenter and, more importantly for our purposes, spending much of his free time to poetry.44 Previously, Whitman had published journalism, criticism, short stories, and poems, but none of his works deviated in any noteworthy way from previously established forms. His work was elegiac,

42 See Wilentz (2005), chapters 19 and 20 43 see Rogin (1983), especially chapter 4, and Widmer (1999), especially chapter 6 44 Reynolds (2000), 15-42 223 pedantic, pedestrian. After the 1848 defeat of the Free Soil Party and the 1849 demise of the Freeman, Whitman’s poetry changed. He published, shortly after the passage of the Compromise of 1850, three poems (“Dough-Face Song,” “Blood-Money,” and “The

House of Friends”) in which he excoriated northern complicity in the expansion of slavery. Each of them is biting, but none is particularly excellent.45

Around this time, the first lines of verse that one might call “Whitmanesque” appear in Whitman’s journal:

I am the poet of slaves and of the masters of slaves…

I am the poet of the body

And I am the poet of the soul

45 Consider Whitman’s “Dough-Face Song.” Dough-face was the term then in vogue for northern Democrats who urged compromise with southern slavery, We are all docile dough-faces, They knead us with the fist, They, the dashing southern lords, We labor as they list; For them we speak—or hold our tongues, For them we turn and twist. Or, from “Wounded in the House of Friends,” consider the following, Virginia, mother of greatness, Blush not for being also mother of slaves; You might have borne deeper slaves— Doughfaces, crawlers, lice of humanity— Terrific screamers of freedom, Who roar and bawl, and get hot i’ the face, But were they not incapable of august crime, Would quench the hopes of ages for a drink— Muck-worms, creeping flat to the ground, A dollar dearer to them than Christ’s blessing, All loves, all hopes, less than the thought of gain, In life, walking in that as in a shroud 224

I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves46

These lines are Whitmanesque in that they both break from established rules of rhyme and meter, and because they contain the sort of union of opposites—master and slave, bod and soul—that is characteristic of Whitman’s mature work. The first of these lines would eventually be included in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published five years after this initial foray.

Whitman wrote and published two more poems in the early 1850s, “Resurgemus” and “A Boston Ballad,” in response to the destruction of the republican movements in

Europe and the enforcement of the new Fugitive Slave Law in Boston, respectively. The former asserts that the blood of the revolutionaries will so the seeds of a future, successful, revolution, while the latter portrays a Gothic procession of reanimated

Revolutionary War corpses forced to watch, impotently, as the bones of King George are set up and crowned in the center of Boston. Both would end up in the first edition of

Leaves of Grass.

As he was developing his poetic style and earning money as a builder, Whitman continued to advocate for Free Soil. He wrote a letter, in 1852, to John Hale, a senator from New Hampshire who was weighing whether or not to accept the Free Soil Party’s nomination as a candidate to president. In it, Whitman urged Hale to take the nomination, in hopes that under the Free Soil banner, “a real live Democratic Party is destined to come forth, which, from small beginnings, ridicule, and odium…will gradually

46 NUPM, I, 67

225 win the hearts of the people.”47 It is clear, here, that Whitman held onto his hope that the conflicts and contradictions in American politics could be salved and rectified by partisan political action. “[U]nder and behind the bosh of the regular politicians,”

Whitman continued in his letter to Hale, “there burns the divine fire which more or less, during all ages, has only awaited a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of tyrants, hunkers, and all their tribe.”48 Hale accepted the nomination, but in the election of 1852, he fared even worse than Van Buren had four years earlier, and the presidency went to the dough-faced Democrat, Franklin Pierce.

After the resounding political defeats of 1848 and 1852, Whitman was no longer engaged as a partisan activist. His participation in politics did not cease, however, but merely shifted. He had long sought to influence politics through writing, primarily in the partisan press. In the early 1850s, he considered alternative approaches. One of these was oratory, a series of “strong live addresses directly to the people…North and South,

East and West…promulgating the grand ideas of American ensemble liberty, concentrativeness, individuality, spirituality, &c &c.”49 For reasons that are not entirely identifiable, these lectures never materialized. Another of Whitman’s writerly projects did, namely the poetic project for which we know him today: Leaves of Grass.

It has been correctly claimed of Leaves of Grass that it was “an act of revolution, an assault on the institutions of old-world culture that was as experimental and far- reaching in the artistic sphere as the American revolt against England had been in the

47 Correspondence 39 48 Correspondence 40 49 WWW, 35

226 political sphere.”50 The only objection I have to this characterization—and it’s an objection I can imagine Whitman himself having—is the distinction between the aesthetic sphere and the political sphere. Whitman saw no distinction between democratic politics and democratic culture, and, from the perspective of political theory, is probably better understood as a theorist of the relationship or reciprocity between democratic politics, culture, and individualism than a theorist of democratic culture or individualism as such.

In the next section, I shall give a detailed account of the vision Whitman presents of democratic politics, individualism, and culture. Although this vision is given its widest expression in Whitman’s poetry—particularly in the first three editions of Leaves of

Grass—it is presented with its greatest precision and depth in Whitman’s prose essay,

Democratic Vistas.

Democratic Vistas is Whitman’s greatest prose piece, and it presents a complex, triadic theory of the relationship between individualism, culture, and political democracy.

It also contains what is probably the least Emersonian phrase in the entirety of

Whitman’s corpus, in which is presented what we might call the theme of the essay:

“The average man of a land at last only is important.”51 This is a good place to start, not only because it puts distance between Whitman and Emerson, but also because it highlights what is peculiarly democratic about Whitman’s way of thinking. Unlike

Emerson, whose primary concern is with heroes, geniuses, and representatives,

50 Erkkila (1989), 3 51 P&P, 978

227

Whitman’s interest is in the average, because democracy is about the average, and not the great.

The trouble, Whitman argues, is that average people, if they are noted at all, are treated with distain in the great works of literature that inform the background assumptions that, taken as a whole, are indicated by the word “culture.” Unfortunately,

Whitman writes, no American writer yet has “really spoken to this people, created a single image-making work for them, or obsorb’d the central spirit and the idiosyncrasies which are theirs—and which, thus, in its highest ranges, so far remain entirely uncelebrated, unexpress’d.” This, clearly, is a void that Whitman, at the time he penned these words, was actively trying to fill with his Leaves. He was doing so with a sense of urgency, however, not only in response to the national calamities of slavery and civil war, but also because the lack of an “image-making” work celebrating the average people of the United States makes them reliant upon literature, and culture, that is

“poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people,” who are “the life- blood of democracy.”52

The proximate impetus for Whitman’s authorship of what would become

Democratic Vistas was the publication of Thomas Carlyle’s essay, “Shooting Niagara:

And After?” in 1867. In that essay, Carlyle decries in purple prose the progress of democracy in the United States and England. Democracy, for Carlyle, means swarmery, the “Gathering of Men in Swarms.” Once gathered into swarms, “any commonplace stupidest bee,” by which he means any common person, “if he can happen, by noise or otherwise, to be chosen for the function, will straightaway get fatted and inflated into

52 P&P, 979

228 bulk.” Such a human swarm, with some bulky, inflated bee at its head “finds itself impelled to action, as with one heart and mind. Singular, in the case of human swarms, with what perfection of unanimity and quasi-religious conviction the stupidest absurdities can be received as axioms of Euclid, nay as articles of faith.”53

Democratic swarmery, for Carlyle, is a disaster for at least three reasons, both of which are implied above. First, it suggests that the people have despaired of their current leadership and, instead of doing what they ought to do (namely looking for better leaders), they’ve decided to cast off leadership entirely and give up any hope of locating those who are truly their betters. Instead, they assert that nobody is better than anybody else; that is, they insist upon equality. The swarm calls “any man equal to any other;

Quashee Nigger to Socrates or Shakespeare; Judas Iscariot to Jesus Christ—and

Bedlam and Gehenna equal to the New Jerusalem, shall we say?”54 In addition to the pointed racism of this passage—and it was pointed precisely to needle both American abolitionists and British supporters of the recent emancipation of the West Indies—its invocation of religion, philosophy, and poetry intends to indicate the impossibility of believing in egalitarianism. If we allow for racial, religious, or aesthetic hierarchy, then it is nonsensical to insist upon equality in politics or society. To do so would be, in effect, to engage in a kind of performative contradiction.

The second problem with democratic swarmery is that it leads to disastrous results, the “notablest” of which was the American Civil War. “America,” Carlyle writes,

“had gotten into Swarmery” upon the idea of abolition and political equality among the

53 Carlyle (1867), 674 54 Carlyle (1867), 674 229 races.55 As a result, a “continent of the earth has been submerged” in war and blood, and “half a million…excellent White Men, full of gifts and faculty, have slit one another into horrid death, which will leave remembrance fierce enough; and three million Blacks, men and brothers (of a sort), are completely ‘emancipated;’ launched into a career of improvement—likely to be ‘improved off the face of the earth’ in a generation or two.”56

Such calamities and misguided adventures are inevitable results of swarmery.

Third, and perhaps even more importantly, for Carlyle, this swarmish enthusiasm for democracy is itself an attempt at solving a problem—namely, a lack of political leadership or the notable absence of what Carlyle would call a true aristocracy—in such a way as to exacerbate a symptom while preventing a cure. In response to finding themselves improperly governed, the democratic swarms have evidently decided to throw off government entirely and take the reins of power for themselves. The egalitarian logic of democracy precludes the possibility of achieving Carlyle’s preferred solution to the problem of government in the mid-nineteenth century: the identification of a ruling class that is both capable of ruling and deserving of power. The logic of democracy is, for Carlyle, fundamentally egalitarian, and egalitarianism is the logic of slaves.57 It is, therefore, incapable of nobility.

What hope Carlyle has is for the rise of a new nobility: the industrial heroes. The captains of industry are already in charge of our economies, Carlyle argues, and need only recognize the fact of their position and seize the initiative. An industrial hero can

55 Carlyle (1867), 675. I should note that Carlyle’s language here is disturbingly racist, and was likely designedly so even at the time it was written. 56 Carlyle (1867), 676 57 Carlyle (1867), 682 230

“be a complete king; and he may, if he strenuously try, mould and manage everything, till both his people and his dominion correspond gradually to the ideal he has formed.”58

This requires that “our Noble by rank be a Noble by nature,” that the industrial hero recognize that the business in which he is already engaged, of commanding and receiving obedience, is “the basis of all human culture.”59 Until the happy day when the industrial hero takes his proper place, Carlyle glumly conjectures, the old world and the new shall burn in democracy’s crucible.

One could easily understand Carlyle’s criticism of democracy as merely a cri de coeur for the ancien régime and think that he was “grasping, trying to conserve an ‘old order’ which he believe[d] to be good and deserving,” but such would be a profound misunderstanding.60 Carlyle decried democracy, to be sure, but he also looked to a future beyond democracy, and Whitman’s response is about this as much as anything.

This attack on democracy, and on America, spurred Whitman to write not only a defense of both, but a detailed account of how both should be properly understood.

Shortly after the publication of “Shooting Niagara” in the United States, Whitman penned the following in his journal:

The final meaning of Democracy through many transmigrations is to press on through all failures ridicules and, arguments, and ostensible failures, to put in practice the idea of the sovereignty, license, sacredness of the individual. This idea isolates, for reasons. for identities and perf freedom’s sake each separate man and woman in the world;— while the idea of

58 Carlyle (1867), 684 59 Carlyle (1867), 686 60 Henkel (2007), 40. Henkel’s otherwise excellent discussion of Carlyle and Whitman is marred by this mistake. The difference between Carlyle and Whitman is not that the former is backward looking while the latter looks, with hope, to the future. The difference is, rather, that for Whitman, democracy names the coming of a new civilization, one that will recognize the worth of the individuals of which it is composed, while for Carlyle, democracy is for civilization what the fire is to the phoenix—a destructive transition that clears the way for a rebirth. 231

Love fuses and combines the whole. Out of the fusing of these twain, opposite as they are, I seek to make a homogeneous Song.61

We have here the kernel at the center of Whitman’s thought. Every democrat has had to deal with a number of reasonable arguments in defense of tradition, order, property rights, and the dangers inherent in any attempt at empowering masses of people, particularly when and if those masses have long been degraded and downtrodden. From the pulpit and the stump, from the lyceum and the critical press, one hears declamations of democratic disasters past, present, and future, and we hear religion, order, good taste, great men, and manners proposed as antiseptics and antidotes. Many of those arguments are fair enough. The world is not short on problems, and never has been. Neither has humanity found itself short of scoundrels or knaves. Democracy requires not that we deny these facts, but rather that we reevaluate their causes and consequences in light of “the idea of that Something a man is…divine in his own right, and a woman in hers.”62 “Democracy” is the name Whitman gives to the social and political expression of that “Something.”

Unlike Emerson, Whitman’s embrace of democracy as a goal and a good—of democratic politics, culture, and individualism—is full-throated. It is likely that Whitman recognized in Carlyle’s screed the logical conclusion one could just as easily draw from

Emerson: that America’s problems, and the world’s, could be solved if only some genius or hero, or some group of them, would only rise up and take control. In Democratic

Vistas, Whitman repudiates such valorization of the great, insisting, instead, as we have

61 NUPM, 1449 62 Whitman (1867), 919. That Whitman had Carlyle’s “Shooting Niagara” in mind here is shown in a letter he wrote to Ellen M. O’Connor, in which he describes his work-in-progress as “some sort of counterblast or rejoinder to Carlyle’s late piece, Shooting Niagara, which you must have read.” (Whitman 2007, 342)

232 seen, on the importance and centrality of the average to the future. In the process, he articulates a theory of democracy that is remarkably thoroughgoing and woefully misunderstood.

Though Whitman agrees with Carlyle about democracy’s inevitability, he disagrees about the immanence of its arrival. The democracy that Whitman extols “is not yet…anywhere the fervid or absolute faith,” and thus, democracy “on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.”63 Like Carlyle, Whitman looks to a future in which present errors and problems are dealt with, or at least mitigated, but where

Carlyle sees democracy as a transitional state—a hideous, misbegotten, and lamentable one—Whitman sees democracy as the hope for a future civilization worthy of the humanity of which it is composed.

Whitman sketches and develops a sort of triadic relationship between individualism (which he also sometimes calls “personalism”), adhesion (which he sometimes calls “love” or “Union”), and culture (which Whitman usually calls “the religious element”). All three together, rightly construed and organized, are what

Whitman means by “democracy.” Prior to gathering his forces to create the much longer and more thorough Democratic Vistas, which he published as part of the fourth (1871) edition of Leaves, Whitman quickly brought two essays to press as a rejoinder to

Carlyle. The first was called “Democracy,” and the second, “Personalism.” The opening paragraph of the latter indicates the relationship between the two:

To Democracy, the leveler, the unyielding first principle of the average, is surely joined another principle, closely tracking the first, indispensable to it, opposite, and whose existence, coequal, confronting and ever modifying the other, often clashing, even defiant, paradoxical, yet neither

63 Whitman (1867), 932 233

of the highest avail without the other, plainly supplies to these grand cosmic politics of ours, and to the launched forth mortal dangers of Republicanism, the analogic counterpart and offset, whereby Nature restrains the deadly original relentlessness of all her first-class laws.64

Democratic politics and society centers on the average, and the importance of the average is both accentuated and communicated by the political power of the majority. But, in order to thrive—in order, really, to amount to anything, the individuals who participate in democratic politics must be truly individual. They must be willing and able to express themselves rather than merely conforming to the expectations of the group or rehearsing some previously defined role. According to Whitman, the first piece, political democracy, is (now that the Union has prevailed in the war) more-or-less in place. It remains, then, to establish the second piece on firmer footing.

“What we are WE ARE—nativity is answer enough / to objections; / We wield ourselves as a weapon is wielded,” Whitman writes in the first poem in his “Chants

Democratic” cluster from the third edition of Leaves.65 Wielding ourselves as weapons is what we do when we participate in democratic politics and democratic culture. This is what Whitman is getting at when he refers to political democracy “as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils,” as a “training-school for making first-class men” and as “life’s gymnasium…fit for freedom’s athletes.”66 That is to say, the development of individualism is facilitated by participation in the hurly-burly argy-bargy of democratic politics.

64 Whitman (1868), 540 65 LG 1860, 109 66 P&P, 976

234

Participation in democratic politics is essential, but it is not everything. “To be a voter with the rest is not so much,” Whitman writes, “and this, like every institute, will have its imperfections.” That is to say, the casting of ballots and the outcomes of elections are only part of the story, and not really a primary one. However, “to become an enfranchised man, and now, impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest; to commence, or have the road clear’d to commence, the grand experiment of development…that is something.”67 That is to say, the important thing is not the voting as such, nor is it the election that results from it. The crucial thing is, rather, the lesson taught by egalitarian political institutions: that any and all may stand on their own, equal to the rest, and begin without humiliation to be themselves.

It is worth lingering for a moment over Whitman’s commitment to egalitarian democracy as an organizing principle, because although he acknowledges the

“appaling [sic] dangers of universal suffrage” and other such workings out of the principle, he nevertheless insists upon its extension. That is to say, in spite of his own prejudices—which were real and myriad—Whitman was committed to the principle of democratic egalitarianism and equality beyond the scope of his own comfort. It is foolishness to imagine that “democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name,” though a casual observer may be forgiven for the error. For Whitman,

“democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interactions between man, and their beliefs.” This meant not only political democracy, but “democracy in all public and private life,”

67 P&P, 971-972

235 including “the army and navy.”68 Every aspect of life requires reevaluation in light of the democratic principle.

People, democratic persons, are made, not found, and they are made, in part, by participating in democratic institutions. As such, democratic political institutions, and participation in them, is essential to what we might call character- or identity-formation.

To become the kinds of people Whitman urges us to become, to become democratic individuals, we must have access to, and make use of, democratic political institutions.

This is not, it should be added, a rights-based argument. Whitman is explicit on this point. When he insists on universal suffrage, by which he means the enfranchisement of all men and women, he does argues neither “on the ground of their rights,” nor on any conviction of their innate goodness. Rather, he insists “that good or bad, rights or no rights, the democratic formula is the only safe and preservative one for coming times.

We endow the masses with the suffrage for their own sake, no doubt; then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for community’s sake.”69 Whitman’s aim, then, is not political democracy, merely, nor individualism alone, but rather the formation of democratic communities.

There is reciprocity, then, between democratic politics and democratic individualism, though Whitman’s emphasis is on the latter more than the former.

“Produce great persons,” as Whitman puts it in the first poem in the 1860 “Chants

Democratic” cluster, “the rest follows.”70 This is the point of democratic culture and democratic politics: the production of great persons, persons who will go on to beget

68 P&P, 980 69 P&P, 972 70 LG 1860, 109

236 great persons, and so on. The trouble is, it is not clear how one does this. It is clear, for

Whitman, that merely installing democratic institutions, and expanding access to them, is not enough. Indeed,

not only is it not enough that the new blood, new frame of democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislation, &c., but it is clear to me that, unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions, and belief, as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism, and inaugurates its own perennial sources, welling from the centre forever, its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful, and its main charm wanting.71

Building up this democratic faith in the hearts of men and women is the task

Whitman sets himself when he describes the role of “really original American poets.”

These, from “eminence, fusing contributions, races, far localities, &c.,” are to “give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed,) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic enterprises.”72 That is to say, the poet’s task is the spiritualization of democracy, the elevation of democratic faith in democracy to a central place in the hearts and souls of democratic citizens. Only a citizenry animated by such a faith is capable of creating a democratic community.

Whitman has been, from time to time, dismissed as a jingoist, due in part to his valorization of democracy and his insistence on treating “the words America and democracy as convertible terms.”73 But even as he celebrated American democracy, he insisted that its “fruition…on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.”74

71 P&P 959 72 P&P 959; emphasis added 73 P&P, 954; on Whitman’s jingoism, see Allen (1970), 15 74 P&P, 980

237

In the present, however, Whitman identifies a number of problems, impediments to the development of the future democracy he envisions. One is what Whitman calls the

“depravity of the business classes of our country,” which, he writes, “is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater.”75 By “the business classes,” Whitman means the wealthy, and here he is deploying language that would be familiar to those among his countrymen who had lived through the Jacksonian Era.76 It would also be familiar to anyone familiar with the language of republicanism, as Whitman describes the business classes, and through them the political institutions of the United States, as “saturated with corruption,” by which he meant that their “sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.”77

This mania for pecuniary gain is corrupt. There needs be some corrective to the general tendency of America toward materialism. Otherwise, democracy is doomed, as materialism corrodes democratic culture. “Genuine belief” in democratic institutions, and in that “Something” that is their animating principle, “seems to have left us.”78 The solution to this is twofold. One response is, as we have seen and as we shall explore below, the poetic re-spiritualization of American democracy. Another, one that is often overlooked, is “a more universal ownership of property.”79 That is, the solution to the problem of the pecuniary obsessions of the business classes is, at least in part, an

75 P&P, 961 76 Schlesinger (1945); Foner (1980) 77 P&P, 961 78 P&P, 961 79 P&P, 974

238 equalization, or broader distribution of, property. But this is not enough, for “at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element.”80

In Democratic Vistas, then, we see Whitman establishing a “triadic model of democratic selfhood” that is “impossible to imagine outside the context of a fully democratic society.”81 The pillars upon which both democratic selfhood and the democratic society such selfhood requires are, first, as we have seen, democratic political institutions, by which Whitman means, at the very least, fully universal suffrage and broadly participatory politics. Second, there is a material foundation built upon broad-based material prosperity of the average citizens. Democracy, according to

Whitman, looks askance at great poverty and great wealth alike, as both—the former through deprivation and the latter through avarice—are corrosive to the independence of democratic institutions and democratic selfhood.82 Third, and arising from the previous two, is what Whitman calls “the religious element.”83 More recent theorists have tended to call this “democratic culture,” “democratic aesthetics,” or “democratic literary culture.”84 By the religious element, or democratic religion, Whitman seems to have had in mind “a practice, a set of beliefs, an arrangement of social relationships, and a mode of feeling that, taken together, function to reconcile the public and private

80 P&P, 973 81 Mack (2002), 150 82 See, for example P&P 961-963; 974-975; and 1000-1001. Whitman places his emphasis on “the aggregate of [America’s] middling property owners,” (974). In this, he echoes the likes of Paine and Jefferson, whose democratic-republicanism emphasized the independence and virtue of artisans, mechanics, and small farmers. On the latter, see Matthews (1984), and on the former, see Foner (1976). Also see Erkkila (2007). 83 P&P, 973 84 Kateb (1992), 240; Frank (2007), 402; Mack (2002), 150 239 self.”85 That is to say, the religious element of democracy entails the elevation of the democratic ideals of equality, individuality, liberty, and comradeship to the status of articles of faith, first principles by which all socio-political relationships are to be understood and evaluated. Whitman clearly took very much to heart John O’Sullivan’s call to reevaluate “the whole scope of all moral truths…in light of the democratic principle.”86

Whitman’s tone in poetry and in prose is much more often celebratory and enthusiastic than critical or ironical, yet he recognizes that the America he inhabited was not the America he envisioned. Political democracy, for example, as practiced in

America, is full of “faults and dangers” and “threatening evils,” and even as he urges his readers “to enter more strongly yet into politics,” he finds the “savage, wolfish parties” of his day alarming.87 Widening the portals of political participation is one route towards rectifying these evils, as is time. The educative or gymnastic function of democratic politics will not be realized immediately, and its lessons will never be final. Furthermore, democracy needs broader application. Whitman calls for “democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy.” This is why “the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future,” a future in which democracy will

“come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction…in religion, literature, colleges, and schools.”88 These three pillars—political democracy, material prosperity, and democratic religion—must do their mutually reinforcing work to carry the

85 Mack (2002), 156 86 Democratic Review (1838, 1), emphasis added 87 P&P, 968; 976; 990 88 P&P, 980

240 seeds of democracy as they currently exist into a maturity that does not actually exist…yet.

It is worth pausing here to consider Whitman’s notion of democratic religion or culture, because it is simultaneously critical to his corpus and poorly understood by subsequent theorists. Frank, for example, argues that Whitman’s primary value to theorists of democracy in the present is his “understanding of the transformative poetics of citizenship, where the quotidian and embodied dimensions of democratic life, its ethical organization, are essential to democracy’s ‘real gist’ and meaning.” 89 This is correct, though incomplete. It fails to come to grips with the relationship between

Whitman’s descriptive and proscriptive works, or, to put it another way, this characterization ignores the fact that Whitman was not merely announcing or explaining his own views, but rather outlining a program for political and cultural change, even renovation. Frank’s characterization of Whitman’s work should, but does not, lead to this question: given Whitman’s understanding of the transformative politics of citizenship, the essential importance of quotidian and embodied experience, and given that

Whitman was not merely a neutral observer of these things, what was Whitman doing when he chose poetry and literature as his preferred mode of political intervention?

Frank argues that Whitman is at his most interesting, and potentially useful for theorists of democracy in the present, when he departs “from the inherited ideological divisions of nineteenth century American politics, and from the attachments of American political institutions.”90 As I hope the foregoing discussion of Whitman’s thought

89 Frank (2007), 405 90 Frank (2007), 419 241 demonstrates, it is difficult to make sense of Whitman if we shear from him his attachment to American political institutions, as only by and through them (or similar institutions) is the development of the democratic individuality, citizenship, and culture of

Whitman’s vision possible or, frankly, thinkable.

Moreover, Frank’s claim that Whitman is at his most interesting when he departs from the ideological divisions of the nineteenth century is true, if by that Frank means to indicate that the immediate political controversies to which Whitman most directly responded—slavery, abolitionism, secession, and the preservation of the Union—are no longer particularly live issues. If, however, Frank means to indicate the ideological divisions over the scope of political participation, the eligibility of all persons for full citizenship, the antagonisms between classes, the antagonisms between individuality and community, or the applicability of notions of political equality or political liberty to other areas of communal life, this seems to me badly mistaken. Perhaps the problem lies with Frank’s understanding of nineteenth century American politics.

If Whitman is, as he often is, construed as an Emersonian singer of the atomistic self, then perhaps Frank is correct to say that the more interesting aspects of Whitman’s work are to be found elsewhere. Such a reading of Whitman as Kateb’s, for example, places him squarely within the ambit of rights-based liberal democracy. Whitman, here, is understood as the best or most articulate singer of the possibilities of individual self- creation. This is Whitman read through the Cold War, “curiously clipped of his political and working-class roots, his homoeroticism, and his communal vision: Whitman the individualist, the singer of ‘Myself,’ the glorious embodiment of liberal individualism, the

242 possibilities of the self, and American freedom.” 91 Shorn off are Whitman’s engagements with the “economic, political and social tensions” inherent in the coexistence of “the promise of boundless space for self-creation and individual liberty on the one hand, [and] the overwhelming pressures of class antagonism and the threatened dissolution of the Union on the other.” 92 Although Whitman’s poetry is recognized as political, the meaning and importance of his choice of poetry as the form his intervention in American politics would take usually goes peculiarly unremarked upon.

And yet, as has already been discussed, culture (or religion) is central to

Whitman’s thinking about democracy. His engagement with the relationship between culture, praxis, and politics is, it seems to me, what Frank intends to highlight by divorcing Whitman from nineteenth-century politics and American institutions, but, again, this is misguided. We can more easily see this if we consider the fact that the political traditions in and through which Whitman was working are not only liberal- democratic, but also democratic-republican. While liberal political thought is usually content to leave people as it finds them, demanding only that in the pursuit of their own

(usually self-interested) plans they avoid stepping on others, republican political thought more often insists that the maintenance of a self-governing polity requires that a citizen be a particular kind of person, namely one who, whatever else she or he might like to do, is committed to the maintenance of his or her political community. Whitman’s concern for democratic religion or political culture is clearly legible through this lens, and

91 Erkkila (2007), 35 92 Lawson (2006), 35 243 represents less a departure from extant forms of thinking than a return to, and working out of, an older strain that was under threat at the time.

When talk turns to culture, Whitman writes, defenders and proponents of democracy “find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy.” Excessive reliance on forms and tropes imported from England and the Continent, and adherence to such forms by the wealthy and educated classes, has caused “the processes of culture” to create “a class of supercilious infidels, who believe in nothing” other than their own pecuniary gain and claims to power. This, Whitman argues, needs to change.

He insists “on a radical change of the category, in the distribution of precedence.” He demands

a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata, and with reference to the perfect equality of women, and of a grand and powerful motherhood. I should demand of this programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical personality or character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men—and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses.93

The purpose of such a program for culture, once “permanent law and order” and

“cohesion, (ensemble-Individuality)” were secured, would be “at all hazards, to vitalize man’s free play of special Personalism,” by which Whitman means the expression of individuality, “recognizing in it something that calls ever more to be consider’d, fed, and adopted as the substratum for the best that belongs to us, (government indeed is for it,) including the new esthetics of our future.”94

93 P&P, 986 94 P&P, 987

244

Such a cultural program is necessary because without it, those who rise in politics, economics, and society will find themselves confronted by tropes and characters—with models for understanding themselves and their fellow countrymen— that are ineligible to the masses, that promise privilege to the wealthy and the educated, and that are, therefore, antithetical to democracy. If our culture is antithetical to our institutions, one or the other must give way. In this, interestingly, Carlyle and Whitman are agreed. Rather than doubling down on the notion of revivifying old fashioned heroism, however, Whitman hopes instead to create a culture that valorizes the average, that seeks its elevation in the elevation of the average, that extends democratic notions of equality, liberty, and individuality as far as they can go. Such a culture is not only desirable but necessary from a democratic perspective, because culture exerts a formative influence on the formation of individual selves. If our democracy does not produce democratic individuals, it will not remain a democracy.

American material prosperity, as we have seen, exerts, within bounds, a salutatory influence on the formation of democratic individuals. Some level of material security is necessary for democratic individuality and democratic politics, as such is not the business of beggars or nobles. However, Whitman urges that the

tremendous and dominant play of solely materialistic bearing upon current life in the United States…must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness—or else our modern civilization, with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned.95

95 P&P, 1016

245

That is to say, if Americans fail to address the issue of culture, or spiritualization, or democracy’s religious element, they will be cast, as it were, out of Eden. They will have wasted the opportunity presented by the post-bellum triumph of the principle of equality.

The American democratic-republic would, as Whitman put it in a passage quoted earlier, be sunk by its own corruption.

The prevention of such corruption, the renovation of American political culture, is precisely the task Whitman sets himself. It has been noted, not inaptly, that Whitman’s turn away from party politics and toward poetry was less an abandonment of his prior political commitments but a continuation of them by other means. What it meant for

Whitman to turn from stump-oratory and the partisan press and to poetry, however, is less clear. Certainly, part of it is summarized by Whitman himself, who makes something of a theme of the ability of juxtaposition and confrontation to convince better than mere argument.

That is to say, Whitman presents to his readers practices and principles present already but poetically rendered, in hopes thereby of convincing them, without argument, of their merit. In this mode, Whitman engages in something like eminent critique. His poetically rendered American democracy bears some resemblance to Habermas or

Rawls, then, though where these latter schematize what they take to be background assumptions in order to present them philosophically, Whitman places paradoxes and aporias in close proximity to one another in order to transcend them poetically.96

96 See Habermas (1981) and Rawls (1999). For Whitman, consider, in this regard, the quick transmigration of the “I” of the first edition of Leaves from I bridegroom to a wife to a defender of slaves along the underground railroad to an enslaved person to a fireman crushed by falling debris (P&P, 64-65), or, at the end of the poem that would eventually become his “Song for Occupations,” his insistence that the products of learning and wealth (such as “psalms,” “sermons,” “a university course,” or “the minted gold in the vault” are less convincing than “the singer,” “the preacher,” “a slumbering woman and child,” or “the nightwatchman’s daughter,” (P&P, 98-99), or, finally, the quick transition in the poem that would 246

More fundamentally, however, what Whitman is attempting here is an assertion of himself in a role that bears more similarity than some would like to admit to the role of the Legislator in Rousseau’s Social Contract. Whitman was clearly familiar with

Rousseau’s work, and though in one unpublished manuscript he describes Rousseau as “sensitive, Frenchy, frivolous, keen, proud, unhappy, restless, contemplative,” he held Rousseau in sufficient esteem to imagine “Thomas Jefferson,” sitting in Virginia,

“reading Rousseau, the Swiss, and then compiling the Declaration of Independence, the

American compact.”97 In 1856, Whitman sketched an outline of Rousseau’s Social

Contract, which was presumably intended to become part of a public lecture on the topic.98 Whitman does not provide any commentary on Rousseau’s concept of the

Legislator nor his thoughts on civil religion. Nevertheless, we have very good reason to believe that Whitman had read them. Even if he was not intentionally performing the role of the Legislator or attempting to inaugurate a civil religion in a Rousseauan mode, we can be confident that such notions were, at the very least, somewhere in Whitman’s mind (even if they were not foremost).99

become “I Sing the Body Electric” from a celebration of the sacredness of the human body to a depiction of a slave auction (P&P, 122-124). 97 NUPM 1844; 1304 98 NUPM 1846-1852 99 Rousseau (2012), 42; I do not intend here to provide a detailed investigation or exploration of Rousseau’s concept of the Legislator. Suffice it to say that there is considerable disagreement concerning the concept’s proper interpretation and its place within Rousseau’s broader corpus (see, for example, Hanley 2008 and Kelly 1987). I merely posit one plausible interpretation—of the Legislator as the founder of a civil religion—as a way of getting a handle on what Whitman was doing with his poetry. Rousseau writes “In order to discover the best social rules appropriate for Nations, a superior intelligence would be necessary, which would live all the passions of men but experience none of them; which would know it through and through; whose happiness would be independent of us, yet which would be willing to concern itself with us; which finally, storing up a distant glory for itself over the course of time, would be able to work in one century and find enjoyment in another” 247

Whitman was an autodidact, and was always cagy about his influences.

However, his concern with democratic culture, understood as a kind of democratic religion, put him at least in proximity with republican theorists, for whom liberty and self- government depended, fundamentally, upon the willingness of citizens to “discharge

[their] public obligations as wholeheartedly as possible.” For republican theorists, as for

Whitman, simply leaving each individual to set his or her own watch by her or his own lights, without demanding that they first attend to their public duties could only ever end in the destruction of the very self-government that makes meaningful liberty possible.100

The existence of such a sense of duty and commitment in the breast of each citizen is too important to be left to chance, and people are generally so self-interested in their day-to-day lives, that “the chain of practical reasoning we need to follow out in the case of acting to uphold our own liberty is so complex, and so unwelcome to citizens of corrupt disposition, that we find it all too easy to lose our way in the argument.”101 It is necessary, then, to secure commitment prior to argument. That, fundamentally, is what

Whitman is trying to do with his poetry.

To put it another way, we must not imagine Whitman as enamored of poetry, or of aesthetic innovation, for its own sake. As he put it late in his life, “I feel about literature what Grant did about war. He hated war. I hate literature.” Literature is “a means to an end, that is all there is to it.”102 Whitman may have had several ends in mind at this point, the maintenance of himself not least among them. But it is quite clear that at least one of the ends Whitman had in view is the renovation of America and of

100 Skinner (1995), 37 101 Skinner (1995), 35 102 WWC, 58

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American democracy. “I am,” he reminisced, “not looking to politics to renovate politics: I am looking to forces outside—the great moral, spiritual forces—and these stick to their work.”103 In other words, “the real work of democracy is done underneath its politics.”104

Similarly, for “Rousseau, a legitimate state must rest upon an affective cultural basis: a community of shared mores, customs, and opinions.”105

We might reasonably, therefore, take Whitman’s turn from normal politics toward the grand project of his Leaves of Grass as at least tacit admission from him that

Rousseau and Machiavelli were right about the role of religion in politics: to function as it ought, a free state requires virtuous citizens, and, to be virtuous, citizens need a strong commitment to the maintenance of the state, a commitment that precedes their individual self-interests and informs their apprehension of their interests. To put it another way, because democratic politics requires democratic citizens, a democratic civil religion is needed. And this is precisely what Whitman sought to supply with his

Leaves.106 The third (1860) edition in particular is quite clearly intended as something like a new American bible, a quasi-religious text intended to establish the background assumptions upon which the future of American political and social development would be based. As he puts it in a footnote to Democratic Vistas,

It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it) that I look

103 WWC, 14-15 104 WWC, 14 105 Scott (1997), 803 106 As Rogers (2014), 20-22, puts it, Whitman asks himself, “What language is required for America to understand that which democracy takes to be the case, its communal existence? What, we might ask, would bring democracy into existence?” and, as he correctly continues, this “is democracy understood at the level of ethos,” as “both the site of the world-making power of self and society…as well as the place where self and society are most susceptible to development.” 249

for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown—not only giving tone to individual character and making it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.107

That is to say, Americans must believe in democracy, and must feel it in the form of adhesive comradeship, Kateb’s discomfort with the notion notwithstanding. To move toward democracy is to “travel by maps yet unmade” through political democracy, individual self-development, and human connectedness.108 Such adventures, directed by individuals in communal contexts are inevitably uncertain.

Whitman believed that American democracy—and, by extension, democracy itself—could not be placed upon firm footing unless it had as a foundation something like an adhesive, comradely love, and strong faith in the worth of each and every individual, at its core. Such faith and foundation would not, Whitman insisted, be possible absent the kind of cultural work he was undertaking. Certainly in the third

(1860) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman was quite clearly imitating biblical structures. The third edition, after the addition of nearly 150 poems to the thirty-two that appeared in the first two editions gave the book a “thickness rivaling the bible,” and

Whitman “divided it in a manner that allowed [it] to be demarcated into separate

‘clusters’ as a part of a theological whole. He numbered the poems and verses within

107 P&P 1005-1006 108 P&P 981

250 these clusters in a fashion that mimicked the typography in Bibles and invited citations similar to scripture.”109

There remains, of course, something of a paradox here, and we can, in a way, witness an evolution of Whitman’s thought about democracy by paying attention to the evolution of Leaves of Grass. The first two editions emphasize both individuality and comradeship by juxtaposing various persons and pursuits and thematizing his own adhesiveness. On the frontispiece to the first edition, Whitman presents a portrait of himself dressed and posed like a workingman. His emphasis is on the dignity of labor, the diversity of the nation, and the paradox of e pluribus unum. The primary difference between the first (1855) and second (1856) edition is the inclusion of a number of poems in the latter that place particular emphasis on sex and the body, but this is only a further working out of themes already present.

The third (1860) edition, by contrast, presents Whitman on the frontispiece “in ministerial fashion.” In it, “Whitman tried to sell the paradoxical idea of a new religion that was no religion; through familiar tropes and republican rhetoric, he uncoupled religious and political practices from their traditional moorings and offered new testimony to the universal Many in One that made the Union a reflection of the cosmos.”110 By this point, then, Whitman was at least tacitly admitting a contradiction at the heart of democracy (or, at least, democratic-republicanism). In order to function as it ought, in order to be realized on aught like a grand scale, democracy requires its citizens to buy in, a priori, to the principles upon which democracy is based. To do so,

109 Stacy (2010), xx 110 Stacy (2010), xxi 251 democratic citizens require inculcation in democratic culture that is not entirely unlike that which previous generations received in ecclesiastical and feudal culture. Absent democratic religion, democratic politics could not but fail.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUDING REMARKS: AMERICAN APPREHENSION OF DEMOCRACY

Americans have, for as long as there has been a United States, evinced various and myriad apprehensions of democracy. They have understood it as a goal to be attained, a state of affairs to be endured but kept at a safe distance, and as a threat that needs to be confronted. They have identified several problems with it, as well. Some point to the conforming pressures exerted upon individuals by friends, neighbors, and fellow-countrymen under conditions of rough material and political equality. Such conforming pressure can be an obstacle to individual self-development and self- reliance. Others worry that the material inequality that is both produced by and productive of material progress is threatened by democratic political equality.

Democracy empowers majorities, and if the majority finds itself less materially well-off than the few, democracy allows the majority to transform its economic situation by political means. Both conditions are indicated by the phrase “tyranny of the majority.”

On the other hand, many have apprehended the extent to which our nominally democratic polity has been willing to countenance multiple violations of the principle of equality. Some have hoped to retain such exclusions, and fretted that the egalitarian logic of democracy sits uncomfortably alongside hierarchies ascriptive and otherwise.

Others have endeavored to eliminate such exclusions and hierarchies, in hopes thereby of making democracy a reality rather than a goal to be attained in the future.

How, or whether, to address these and related problems might be fairly said to constitute the fundamental problem of democracy. That democracy is a problem, or presents a set of problems, will be admitted on all sides. This is the issue at the heart of this dissertation. What is, or ought to be, American democracy?

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Taking a cue from John Dewey’s suggestion, that the old saw “that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy” is poorly said unless it is taken to indicate “the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it,” and then “employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations,” I have endeavored to examine the idea of democracy in late- antebellum America.1 This period presents a unique opportunity to return to the idea of democracy itself, because this was the first, and last, moment in American history when democracy was something an American with serious political or professional ambitions could plausibly be for or against. Go much further back, and you’ll find democracy deployed almost exclusively as a pejorative. Look much later, and democracy is ubiquitously deployed as an honorific without much specific content. In the late- antebellum period, however, one finds a number of forthright arguments presented on several sides of the question of democracy’s meaning, plausibility, and desirability.

I began this dissertation by arguing, among other things, that the notion that

Americans in the nineteenth century were either liberals or republicans was wrong- headed, and that, instead, Americans were often—without any sense of embarrassment or internal contradiction—both, or neither, in response to the situations in which they found themselves. This assertion has been borne out by our investigation of four nineteenth century American thinkers—John C. Calhoun, Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman—none of whose work fits tidily into either category. The scramble among political theorists to claim this or that thinker for one or the other political language or framework or ideology is, therefore, both wrong-headed

1 Dewey (1927), 144

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and obfuscatory. If it cannot be demonstrated that any thinker in the history of American political thought considered him- or herself a liberal, but not a republican, or a republican, but not a liberal, then it would probably make sense to abandon the attempt at imposing such classifications. That none of the mid-nineteenth century thinkers we have examined is amenable to such classification has been, I hope, amply demonstrated.

Calhoun, for example, rejects liberal notions of the social contract and natural equality, insisting, instead, that society, including its political and economic hierarchies, always and everywhere antedates the individuals born into it. And, as he further argues, the basic contours of political society are therefore not up for debate. It is, instead, up to everyone to play his role to the best of his or her ability. This gets Calhoun close to what republican theorists mean by “virtue,” though that word does not feature prominently in

Calhoun’s writings.

And yet, Calhoun insists on the priority of civil (rather than natural) rights, particularly as they adhere to property, and the inescapability of self-interest as a driving force in political affairs. This commitment underpins both his valorization of the plantation master and his theory of the concurrent majority. Let’s address the latter first.

The concurrent majority gives veto power to each group within a political society.

Calhoun had the American states particularly in mind here, of course, but he intended his theory to apply more broadly. In the Union, concurrency would justify Calhoun’s notion of nullification. It would give the states the power to veto, to refuse to enforce, national legislation. The proximate issues at stake were the protective tariff and slavery, both of which did, or would, damage the southern economy. To put it another way, the

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rights of the southern states to pursue their own economic self-interest was threatened, and, Calhoun argued, they ought to have a power to enforce, or insist upon, their rights.

At the level of theory, Calhoun is a republican, but when it comes time to consider institutions, Calhoun is a liberal, even as his institutionalism serves decidedly illiberal ends.

To address the former issue, Calhoun’s ideal citizen is the master of a plantation, in part because the master of a plantation embodies the interests of both labor and capital. In the early-mid nineteenth-century, conflicts between labor and capital were just beginning to roil the political waters in the United States, particularly in the North, but serious conflicts were already underway in Europe. Aware of this, Calhoun believed that the American South was in a unique position to preserve republican liberty. The planter was, simultaneously, the owner of labor and the owner of capital. His slaves were part of his household. He fed and housed them in sickness and in health. He gained from their labor, to be sure, but he also bore the cost of their reproduction. As such, he harmonized what was becoming a disconcertingly hostile relationship between the two elsewhere. By his example and his influence (whether through statesmanship or through the exercise of the veto conferred upon him by a political system based upon the concurrent majority), Calhoun hoped, the planter was in a position both to preserve the peace in a world that seemed to be rapidly bifurcating between laborers and owners, and to resist that bifurcation in such a way as to preserve the notion of the natural aristocrat. So, again, liberal institutionalism, for Calhoun, serves illiberal and anti-democratic, but republican, ends.

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Calhoun, like most of his fellow southerners, is largely ignored by modern political theorists, but those who do address his ideas seem inclined to classify him as either a “post-Madisonian republican” or as a liberal institutionalist who was, sadly, blinkered by his commitment to racial hierarchy. As I hope my chapter has made clear, it is unnecessary to make this choice, as Calhoun was both of these things. The upshot is, among other things, that liberal institutionalism can be made to serve decidedly illiberal ends, that one can be simultaneously committed to an institutional structure based upon rights and on a social hierarchy based upon the qualitative distinctions among people that makes aristocratic republican virtue possible. This is not exactly news, but it’s important to illustrate that some liberal institutionalists were, in the nineteenth century, fairly explicit about the illiberal consequences of their institutionalism. They were not trying to pull a fast one. They were, instead, forthright in their arguments.

Having recognized a particular admixture of republican and liberal ideas in his thought, we should now reiterate the fact that Calhoun is among the most adamant and steadfast opponents of democracy one can find in the history of American political thought, and he opposes democracy on both liberal and republican grounds. Arguments for democracy hinge on the notion that “all men are created equal,” a doctrine, according to Calhoun, “than which nothing can be more unfounded or false.”2 The obvious reason for the falsehood and unfoundedness of this doctrine, for Calhoun, is racial. Peoples of African descent, though men of a sort, are for Calhoun naturally and ineradicably inferior to peoples of European descent. The notion of natural equality is

2 Calhoun (1992), 44

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mistaken, and disastrously so, as regards the ranks of white people as well. The able, the wise, and the industrious are manifestly better than the inept, unwise, and lazy, and the only spur for the latter to improve themselves is their desire for the political and pecuniary privileges accorded the former. Absent such encouragement, everybody would sink into a general mass of mediocrity. Calhoun goes so far as to praise inequality as the driving force behind social and economic progress, as the upper ranks work to maintain their position against the strivings of the lower orders. For Calhoun, one must have hope of advancement, but one’s security must not be guaranteed. Only in such a condition can human society be expected to continue its forward march.

Democracy threatens progress in at least two ways. First, politically, it values majority rule. In any advanced commercial society, or any prosperous economy, according to Calhoun, the poor can be expected to outnumber the wealthy. The poor, then, are, to borrow a phrase form Madison, a natural majority faction. Their interests, or at least their apprehension of their interests, are antithetical to the interests of the wealthy. One can see precisely this sort of conflict playing out in Calhoun’s own South

Carolina, where the upcountry yeomen were actively challenging the political dominance of the tidewater planters. Granted political power, the lower orders would,

Calhoun had no doubt, use that power to attack the economic power of the wealthy. The result would be, in the short term, the equalization of property and, in the long run, the destruction of social and economic progress.

Second, and of at least equal importance, arguments from natural equality posed an existential danger to the South’s peculiar institution, chattel slavery. Were enslaved people to get ahold of such arguments, it would become impossible to maintain them in

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their places. This would be a disaster, according to Calhoun, not only for the southern economy, not only because it would, in his estimation (which he either shared with or borrowed from Jefferson) result in a race-war, but also because it would remove from the world the shining example of the southern alternative to the increasingly unstable free-labor democracy of the North. That is, as the world began to industrialize and democratize, only the American South held on, among civilized nations, to its pre- modern institutions. Only in the South were labor and capital harmonized in the person of the planter. Only in the South were the laboring classes racially identified and entirely disenfranchised. Such, Calhoun argued, was the only safe basis upon which to build free institutions. The destruction of the South’s unique socio-economic and political system would ultimately, inevitably, lead to the destruction of free institutions everywhere.

Calhoun saw the rise of abolitionism, democracy, and what we’d nowadays call socialism as all of a piece. Dangerous ideas about equality and majority rule had found a home in the hearts of many Americans. The result, if such impulses could not be effectively countered, would be destructive not only to the Union, not only to the free institutions of the United States, but to civilization itself. The South’s secession, for which Calhoun provided both theory and rationale a decade before it became a reality, would be a last-ditch effort at preserving not only the South, but the progress America was meant to embody. It was a desperate act, but these were, Calhoun reasoned, desperate times.

Emerson shared Calhoun’s doubts about equality, and he shared Calhoun’s doubts about democracy. They were ultimately on opposite sides of the Civil War, and

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they disagreed about slavery, but their disagreements on such matters mask their many similarities. Such an assertion may be alarming to those familiar with the portrait painted of Emerson by those who consider him the “cow from which” later democratic individualists “drew their milk.”3 Be that as it may, it is quite clear that, while he valorized individual self-reliance and did not entirely deny the accessibility of self-reliant individualism to any person or group of persons, to call Emerson a democratic thinker is both misleading and mistaken.

Although Emerson accepted political democracy as it practically operated in the

United States as a system well suited to the level of development of the American people, he rejected the idea that democracy, political or otherwise, should be valued on its own terms. Indeed, in many ways Emerson saw democracy as an impediment to the development of individual self-reliance. Democracy, Emerson argues, empowers the masses, and the masses demand conformity to their own standards. Echoing

Tocqueville’s concerns about the “tyranny of the majority” as a form of domination over the minds of men, Emerson seeks to inure his readers to the conforming pressures of social expectations. Tradition, learning, and good manners are all dangers, but,

Emerson argues, such pressures tend to come from the educated and cultivated classes. They are relatively easy to resist, as their ire tends to be measured. The consequence of irritating such people is, at worst, social opprobrium. When the uneducated masses are aroused, however, when the dumb brute forces at the bottom of society begin to growl and mewl, it requires something godlike to stand above it, unaffected.

3 Matthiessen 1941, xii

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The masses in the United States are, for Emerson, the primary obstacle preventing the full development of American individualism. As such, those who would develop their own individual capacities must, as far as they are capable, ignore the masses. Any participation in, or valuation of, political democracy requires concession to the masses. Political democracy, then, inasmuch as it calls for or requires participation, is fundamentally bad for the development of self-reliant individuals.

The trouble, for Emerson, with democracy goes further. For those who treat democracy as a priority for its own sake are liable to abandon consideration of their own development and turn towards concern for the capacity of others to develop themselves. This is, for Emerson, a mistake. Changing laws to allow those who have been prevented from participation in the work of self-reliant individualism is liable to be

“a rope of sand that perishes in the twisting.” That is to say, people prove their capacity for self-cultivation regardless of their situation, and no grant of legal freedom can prepare them to take advantage of the opportunity. For this reason, though Emerson was no fan of slavery, neither was he an abolitionist. He had “quite other slaves to free than these Negroes,” namely “enslaved minds,” specifically those among the educated classes of New England.

To put it another way, Emerson was not only an elitist personally, not only personally attracted to the well-educated and well-heeled. His philosophy of self- reliance was specifically directed at the young scions of the elite classes of New

England. He was quite aware of the fact that he was not speaking, for example, to the unwashed yeomanry of the South or the masses of Irish and German immigrants in the

Mid-Atlantic states. He said as much when he predicted a great deal of “guano” in the

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future of such people.4 Emerson’s aim was not the elevation of the people. He hoped, instead, to clear the way for the development of first-class individuals, for the rise of people who, a generation earlier, would have been called natural aristocrats.

Although Emerson is an individualistic thinker, he is not a liberal if, by that, we mean to indicate belief in a sort of rights-based, atomistic individualism. For starters,

Emerson does not particularly believe in rights. “Nature,” as he puts it, “suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself.”5 Rights, absent power, do not avail.

They are, to borrow a phrase from Madison, mere parchment barriers. To assert a right without the capacity to guarantee its enforcement is, for Emerson, to howl into the wind.

Neither are individuals atoms. When they are truly in touch with their souls, individuals will recognize themselves as phenomenal instances of universal divinity. That is to say,

Emerson’s individualism and self-reliance is less a method by which individuals become or express themselves and more a method by which individuals acquaint themselves with the simultaneous finitude of their particular embodied selves and the infinitude of the divine kernel that is the soul within them. The truly self-reliant self is, as Emerson put it, “a transparent eye-ball” that is “nothing” but “see[s] all.”6 Through self-reliance, one transcends oneself and connects with the infinite.

In a sense that is explicable within the classical, republican tradition, Emerson held that, for most of us, most of the time, the infinite “could be known only through the works of particular men in particular times and places,” such that universal truth is conceived “as somehow immanent in the words and deeds of men, to be known through

4 E&L, 950 5 E&L, 272 6 E&L, 10

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creative knowledge of and engagement in these.”7 Emerson’s notion of immanence comes, primarily, through his reading of classical authors—Plato and Plotinus chief among them—and he, like many of his fellow transcendentalists, deployed this notion of immanence against the Lockean empiricism that dominated the academy in early- nineteenth century New England.8

Deployed in the context of his philosophy of self-reliance, Emerson’s reliance on classical sources is visible, for example, in his insistence that the self-reliant thinker will proceed up a chain of intellection, beginning with a consideration of good things and culminating with consideration of goodness itself. This course mirrors the one described by Plato’s Socrates in the Symposium.

This is a difficult philosophical commitment to deploy politically, however, without reducing politics to ethics. Emerson admits, for example, that of the two parties roiling the political waters of his day, one (the Democratic Party) has the best cause, and the other (the Whigs) the best men. Rather surprisingly, given his idealism, Emerson’s tends to prefer the latter to the former. The Democrats, whom Emerson identifies as

“the Bad party” and with whom Emerson identifies both immigrants and the working poor, pushes for broad suffrage, equality and liberty, but it does so for selfish reasons. It is the party of those who are not, but who wish to be, rich. The Whigs, on the other hand, have the best men, but they are conservative primarily because they are rich, and wish to remain so. A pox, Emerson seems to say, on both their houses, yet he hopes to

7 Pocock, JGA. (2003), 63 8 Thompson (1962)

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urge the best men to adopt the best ideas out of a sense of generosity, if only to prevent the bad men from winning it as a concession or by the exercise of power.

Emerson has a tendency to reduce politics to ethics, to insist that all political problems would be solved if only people would take up the challenge of self-reliance.

Any political participation along any non-self-reliant lines is necessarily corrupting, because it requires things like compromise, persuasion, and electioneering, none of which are proper activities for self-reliant individuals. This is one of the reasons why

Emerson, if not exactly an opponent of democracy, is mislabeled and misunderstood if he is considered a democratic theorist.

Emerson has a strong preference for moral exhortation over legislation, for individual greatness over institutional design. As such, his political works, like “every treatise on politics which could not transcend the limitations of this style,” all tend “to end, not only in moral exhortation, but in the suggestion that virtue as a quality of the personality was the only agency likely to cure corruption.”9 All hope for salvation rests with individual self-reliance, and nothing short of the intervention of someone(s) truly heroic—some true genius or representative—is likely to save democracy from the corruption inherent in its materialistic strivings. If Emerson has a political project, it is not democracy, but rather an effort to clear the way and provide the necessary nutriment for the development of a true, natural aristocracy. He abandoned the institutional republicanism of his New England predecessors, but retained their faith in the transformative power of a virtuous few.

9 Pocock 2003, 484

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Toward the end of the moral purification of the republic, Emerson was, like

Calhoun, perfectly willing to countenance disunion and war, because Emerson, like

Calhoun, was unwilling to make a polity out of the human materials near at hand. While much is made of Emerson’s conversion to abolitionism, and while he deserves praise for lending his voice to the movement, his commitment came late, after the Compromise of 1850 set the nation on the course that would lead to secession, and the expression of his abolitionism came in the form of a handful of speeches delivered in the 1850s and early 1860s in favor of abolition, in defense of John Brown, and in favor of an understanding of the Civil War not as a fight for the Union, but as a fight for the principles of liberty and equality. These are salutary, but it should not be forgotten that, at this time, the bulk of Emerson’s energies were consumed with his works English

Traits and The Conduct of Life, both of which argue, in various ways, for primacy of the

Anglo-Saxon race and the value of aristocratic manners. That is to say, Emerson’s support for the Union cause, and for the Civil War generally, was based upon his hope that the war would be a sort of crucible that would burn away the chaff and cant, leaving behind a nation composed of purer souls.

We turn, now, from opponents of democracy toward proponents of it. Douglass fought to hold Americans to their propounded ideals, and worked to make a place in

American political society for himself and the people whom he sought to represent.

Whitman hoped to take the immanent materials of American ideals and practices and transform them into a grand vision for the future of democratic politics and culture.

Having escaped from enslavement in Maryland to freedom first in New York, and later in New England, Frederick Douglass embarked upon a career as an abolitionist.

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Originally encouraged to tell the story of his bondage and his freedom by members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass broke with the Garrisonians in the middle

1840s for at least two reasons. First, Douglass rejected the Garrisonians’ commitment to non-violence, and, second, he rejected their refusal to engage in politics under the

Constitution, which document and politics they regarded as fundamentally and irreducibly pro-slavery. On the one hand, Douglass recognized that the kinds of rights- claims made by enslaved people, and those made on their behalf, required action to back them up. That is, for Douglass, rights-claims involve less hat-in-hand requests for a redress of grievances than positive assertions of already self-evident facts that must be defended if they are to be made good. If this entails, as it often did, a struggle to the death between those who would assert their rights and those who would deny them, so be it. One must, Douglass argues, not only be willing to die, but also to kill, in accordance with the law of nature, in defense of one’s rights. Excessive meekness only encourages a sort of paternalism that ends in degradation.

On the other hand, Douglass believed that there could be no future for enslaved people or for the United States unless racial hierarchies were dismantled, and, he believed, such dismantlement could be most efficaciously pursued within, and not outside, the ambit of constitutional politics. Rather than rip up the Constitution and start over again, Douglass would have the forces of abolitionism and racial equality fight, on the basis of the righteousness of their views, within the system of party politics. The alternative seemed to be waiting around for a sea change in public opinion or an awakening of the national conscience, and Douglass had a dim view of the likelihood of either. Instead, he sought to confront his fellow countrymen with the barbarity of their

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practices, the humanity of the enslaved and degraded people whom he sought to represent, and the consequences of white Americans’ continued insistence on denying the humanity of millions of their fellows.

Important, here, is the fact that Douglass, whose work was mostly conducted through words published in his paper and uttered in his orations, was less concerned with felicitous invocations of the name of the people than he was with action. The moral, philosophic, or theoretical truth of the abolitionists’ case was already proved beyond a reasonable doubt. All that was left was to prove it in fact, and this proof would only come if people acted as though they truly believed what they said in arguments and editorials and orations. If enslavement is a crime against humanity and against natural law, then the master or slave-catcher is, therefore, subject to death in the conduct of his business. Douglass is concerned not only with the enforcement of rights, but also with the educative effects such enforcement might have.

Douglass, again, is not only concerned with the educative effects of the self- enforcement of the natural law, but also with the extent to which demonstrations of strength and determination will help the opponents of slavery and racial hierarchies to win in the political arena. In an American world that valorizes strength and power, it is a mistake for enslaved people and their representatives to emphasize the weakness and powerlessness of the enslaved. Such can only, at best, make them objects of pity. If the goal is not only abolition, but also equality, this must be avoided. The proof of one’s rights and one’s humanity is borne out by one’s refusal to be treated as though one was less than human, or that one was not a possessor of rights.

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Much more than Emerson, Douglass deploys the languages of natural law and natural right. He frequently invokes the Declaration of Independence, and his arguments about the execution of natural law have clear antecedents in Locke. It would be a mistake, however, to call Douglass a liberal. For starters, after the Civil War, Douglass was an enthusiastic proponent of expropriating the South’s erstwhile masters, of seizing their plantations and parceling out control over their lands to the formerly enslaved people who had been working them for the past few hundred years. If liberalism entails respect for property rights, this is a decidedly illiberal position. Furthermore, Douglass insists upon the importance of political participation. Active assertion and defense of one rights is one form of participation, but Douglass also insisted that all men and women, including the freed people of the South after the war, must not only have access to political rights, but also the means to make good on them. In this sense,

Douglass is less a liberal democrat than he is a democratic-republican. His commitment to advancing the political power and participation of the men and women at the lower orders of America’s political economy characterized his career from the mid-1840s until his death in 1895.

Finally, we turn to Walt Whitman, whose vision for American democracy remains, perhaps, the broadest and deepest ever proposed. To put it another way, if one were to look for the most expansive expression of the meaning of American democracy, one would find it in Whitman. Having spent the early years of his maturity involved in

Democratic Party politics and the partisan press, Whitman turned to the poetic project for which we know him now, Leaves of Grass, in the early 1850s. Whitman’s entire life had been spent in the hurly burly of white, working class life in and around New York

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City. Committed early on to the Young America vision of democracy, Whitman’s partisan enthusiasm peaked in 1848, during which year revolutions in Europe and the

Free Soil Party in America seemed on the verge of bringing democracy to its fruition. In the aftermath of the defeat of the European revolutions and the drubbing of the Free

Soil Party, alongside a number of personal setbacks, Whitman retreated, temporarily, into private life.

It has often been remarked that Whitman’s turn to poetry was less an abandonment of his prior commitment to democratic politics and more a continuation of that commitment by other means. Less clear, however, has been any sense of what it means to do politics through poetry. As we have seen, Whitman held that there was a sort of reciprocal, triadic relationship between democratic political institutions, democratic individualism, and what is sometimes called democratic culture, or, in

Whitman’s terms, the “religious element” of democracy. Institutions, individualism, and religion (or culture) are mutually dependent, and each is necessary. Whitman seems to have decided that the one that most wanted reinforcement was the last, as that is where he aims his poetical arguments.

Whitman celebrates individualism, and he celebrates democratic institutions, but his aim seems to be, at least in his pre-Civil War poetry, the inculcation in his readers of a thoroughgoing faith in democracy. His shift from partisan editorializing and stump- speaking to poetry reflects his belief that poetic (re)description of the American milieu would be more likely to win the hearts of his countrymen, and that winning hearts was more important than winning minds.

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Whitman was committed to the idea of democracy, understood as a political system based on the power of the average man or woman and as a social system based on the idea of equality. A democratic system cannot, a priori, determine anyone to be ineligible to participate. Furthermore, participation in democratic political institutions serves a crucial educative function. By winning and losing elections, people learn how to be democratic citizens. This learning only takes place, however, when all participants are already committed to the idea that all ought to be allowed to participate.

That is to say, absent prior commitment to the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and participation, the formative influence that democratic institutions ought to exert on the formation of democratic individuals fails.

Once again, we see elements of liberal thought and elements of republicanism.

Whitman clearly believes rights are important, and he gives primacy to liberty. But he also insists that these things have meaning only in communal contexts. That is, one’s right to participate in an election, for example, is less meaningful in the sense of casting a ballot—your candidate, after all, might lose, and your own ballot is unlikely to be the deciding vote—but one’s participation in the process, the recognition that your opinion matters just as much, or as little, as anybody else’s, that is, as Whitman puts it, something. It’s recognition that each person is as much a person as anybody else. This is an important first lesson. It remains, Whitman argues, to continue the expansion of that political lesson, and to take it beyond politics.

Something is lost when we rename Whitman’s notion of democracy’s “religious element” things like “democratic culture” or “democratic aesthetics.” Perhaps more-or- less the same thing is intended, that the mores and categories for understanding

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peoples and events are read through a democratic lens, but it seems clear that the word

“religion” entails something stronger than “culture.” Whitman was, at least in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass, attempted to influence not only the contingent cultural commitments of his countrymen, but also, and more importantly, the bedrock faith upon which they might base their understandings of themselves and others. The tenets of that faith could be identified in embryonic form—political equality, moderate material prosperity, general liberty—but its full articulation lay in the future. Nobody, Whitman argued, had ever yet been a democratic individual participating in democratic politics in the context of a democratic society. The kernels of all were visible, and it was for

Whitman and those of his generation to bring those seeds to flower.

Once again, we can identify both liberal and republican aspects to Whitman’s thought. He asserted that political liberty, and political rights, were of crucial importance, and he placed great value on the capacity of individuals for self-creation. That said, he was at least as emphatic that the primary purpose of political liberty and political rights was, simultaneously, the formation of the kinds of individuals that would be fit for democratic citizenship and the extension of political rights and liberties into realms previously left to their own logics: the family, the economy, and even the military.

Democracy, for Whitman, has a crucial beginning in politics. Its true meaning, and its true efflorescence, must be found elsewhere.

Whitman’s attempt at instigating and/or articulating democracy’s “religious element” perhaps has roots in a romantic notion of the poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world or the Rousseauan notion of the Legislator as the source of a people’s civic religion, the background mores and roles and assumptions that guide not

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only their behavior, but their assessment of what is good or bad. It is clear that Whitman had something along these lines when he chose poetry as his mode of political intervention. Having failed to persuade his countrymen with arguments and harangues, he sought to change their hearts, first, in hopes that their minds would follow.

Beyond his enthusiasm for Fanny Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, it is not clear that Whitman had much, if any, contact with classical republican literature. Wright argued, in Athens and elsewhere, that Americans needed to develop a cultural or quasi- religious commitment to democracy and democratic institutions in order to make their political democracy work along its broadest and most promising lines. She went so far as to argue in favor of a system of public schooling that would take all children away from their families and place them in common schools, preventing them, thereby, from inheriting their parents’ prejudices, advantages, or disadvantages.10 Though Whitman did not go quite so far as Wright, who he nevertheless celebrated as one of the great writers to whom he sought to do justice with his poetry, he may have, through her, inherited a classical or republican sense of the importance of the nature of citizenship that is clearly distinct from the liberal, laissez-faire approach. That is to say, Whitman clearly believed that democratic politics required a particular kind of commitment from its citizen-participants, a particular sort of ethos. His poetry can, and should, be read as an attempt at inculcating or fostering such an ethos. Whitman is, or attempts to be, a sort of Rousseauan Legislator or classical lawgiver, defining and describing the contours of political morality.

10 Wright (2004), 197-220

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Whitman’s vision of democracy is the most thoroughgoing of those I’ve considered in the foregoing pages, and perhaps the most thoroughgoing in the history of American political thought. It is not, however, the most broadly influential. Part of the reason for this, I submit, lies in Whitman’s approach. Like Emerson, Whitman is concerned primarily with the development of what we might call an ethos. When

Whitman writes of democracy’s “religious element,” he indicates the importance of a faith in equality, in the value of political participation, in not only one’s own liberty, but in the liberty of others to develop and express themselves. Until, and unless, these are articles of faith for most Americans, American democracy is on unsteady ground.

Whitman, then, intends his poetry as a sort of religious intervention. He attempts to translate his countrymen’s implicit beliefs into an explicit faith, and hopes, by his poetic descriptions and juxtapositions, to convince at a level both below and beyond cognition. He does not argue; he presents, in hopes that his presentation is attractive enough to induce adhesion. To succeed in this, Whitman believed, he must avoid explicitly taking sides on this or that issue, and avoid urging one institutional arrangement over another. Once he’d embarked upon his poetical-religious mission, anything that seemed like explicit partisanship ran the risk of derailing the project, because any whiff of partisanship would frighten off folks who might otherwise read and absorb his works with open minds and become, thereby, converts to the faith. Whitman had to remain, therefore, the “poet of slaves, and the masters of slaves,” of the body and soul, rich and poor alike. To get Americans where he thought they needed to be,

Whitman needed friends and enemies alike to buy into his project.

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The historical situation of these thinkers having been established, we now turn to a consideration of the import of the foregoing observations for politics in the present.

The first point is not new, but it can never be too often reiterated. The works of Calhoun are ample evidence that nominally liberal institutionalism can be used to defend extremely illiberal ends. Calhoun’s articulation of his notion of the concurrent majority does not directly reference his defense of slavery, but the two are so thoroughly interrelated that it is impossible to consider one without the other. The purpose of his liberal institutionalism is the empowerment of local elites to defend their status against those who, through majoritarian political institutions or by egalitarian political ideology, presented a clear and present threat. In this sense, Calhoun’s rights-based, liberal institutionalism illustrates the extent to which the decentralization of power does not entail a diminution of power. Rather, it entails the multiplication of masters, and that is precisely its purpose.

Emerson illustrates the extent to which projects for individual self-creation are not necessarily democratic. Emersonian self-reliance is, hypothetically, available to everyone, but it’s also true that anyone self-reliant in an Emersonian sense will be satisfied with their extant social position. That is, self-reliance in the Emersonian sense is no less available to masters than it is to slaves, and neither a master nor a slave would trade his position if he were truly self-reliant. It is, above all, as Emerson put it, a philosophy of optimism and acquiescence. One hopes for the best, and tries to be the best one can be given one’s circumstances. If one has broader latitude to one’s plans in the world, then it is incumbent upon one to do so to the best of one’s ability. If one’s capacity to execute one’s plans in the world is restricted by enslavement, one’s

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freedom, rightly understood, is not thereby diminished. One can still do one’s duties as one sees fit, and inasmuch as one’s station conflicts with one’s duties, one is always free to choose to die.

Wendy Brown, among others, has suggested that those seeking transformative change ought to abandon rights-claims, as such claims always entail the presence and persistence of some kind of wound. That is, one claims one’s rights have been violated, and, as such, one must demonstrate that violation publicly in order to make good on the claim.11 Douglass provides a different, and, I would argue, useful, way of thinking about rights. Rather than claims of grievances to be redressed, rights-claims are assertions.

To assert a right is to insist upon how one expects to be treated. Certainly, insisting upon one’s rights implies that they have not yet been recognized, but, as Douglass attempts to demonstrate, recognition need not be begged. Indeed, if they are to be recognized by one’s fellow countrymen, rights claims ought not be begged. They should, instead, be asserted and defended. Only then do they stand a chance of being recognized.

Of all the thinkers we’ve here considered, only Douglass urges political action as a primary good. Whitman, who, like Douglass, is committed to a project of democratization, hopes for change via culture. Whitman’s refusal to engage in practical politics after 1850 is both understandable, given his project, and damnable, given the actual events through which he lived during the post-Civil War era. Whitman sat by, with his cultural project, as the federal government abandoned Reconstruction, as Gilded

Age monopolies dominated the economy and politics, and he said and did nothing as

11 Brown (1993)

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workers fought, struck, and were crushed by the post-Reconstruction governments of the United States. That is to say, Whitman stuck to his poetical universalism even as events in his country moved further and further away from his democratic ideals.

Perhaps this is understandable. It is certainly legible in his shift from political poetry toward personal, romantic, and elegiac work. Nevertheless, one might reasonable argue that a project like Whitman’s, that requires cultural and spiritual renovation before, or as a precondition to, institutional change, will always be self-serving in the sense that it posits an impossible ideal whose realization is always not…yet.

Democracy is not the name of a dead end philosophy of an ever-vanishing futurity designed to defer responsibility for the present.12 It is not merely an honorific applied to any form of governance approved by the capitalist West. At least, it is not necessarily these things. In the nineteenth century, Americans understood democracy as the political power of the working or middling classes. It was the name for the conflict between numbers and wealth, persons and property.13 Immediately prior to the Civil

War, democracy was something serious-minded Americans with political or national aspirations could plausibly be for, or against. As we’ve seen, Calhoun was a self- conscious and active opponent of democracy. Emerson was a bit more cagey, but while he did not join his friend Carlyle in denouncing democracy outright, he nevertheless saw it as, at best, a necessary component of the world in which he lived and, more frequently, as an obstacle to the world he sought to create.

12 Dean (2009) 13 E&L, 560-665

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Whitman followed Emerson in few things other than his insistence on an ethical or cultural renovation of the people as, if not a precondition, at least a necessary corollary and likely covariate of institutional change. Certainly, Whitman, after 1855, was an enthusiastic reformer not of American institutions but of American culture. He clearly hoped that salutatory institutional changes, such as abolition and universal suffrage, would interact harmoniously with his attempted renovation of American political culture, or, as he put it and as we might better conceive of it, American democratic religion. But, because of the position required of a giver of the fundamental laws of things, because of the position required of a Legislator, Whitman spent most of his mature adulthood eschewing engagement in the actual political controversies of his day. In a sense, we might argue that Emersonian non-democracy enters into Whitman through the back door, impacting less the development and climax of his work, but clearly characterizing its denouement.

In an interesting way, one might argue that Calhoun and Douglass, unlike

Emerson and Whitman, are institutionalists before they are idealists.14 They believed that human beings, and the development of human selves, follow and do not lead the formation of the institutions that structure and govern human lives. This is one of the reasons why Calhoun responded with horror to the development of democratic, understood as egalitarian and majoritarian, political institutions in the United States, particularly among the states of the North. This is also why Douglass was so emphatic

14 Whitman’s triadic understanding of the relationship between institutions, individuals, and culture (or religion) is an important caveat, but we might treat his decision to direct his energy toward the renovation of individualism and religion (or culture) as a sort of “revealed preference.” He was increasingly uncomfortable with democratic institutions as they became increasingly inclusive, which is illustrated in his shift, in the 1870s, away from enthusiastically political poetry and toward naturalistic themes and elegy.

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that the full slate of rights and privileges accorded to citizens ought to be extended to people of color in the United States, free, enslaved, and recently emancipated, prior to any indication of capacity on their part. Responsibility, wherewithal, and wisdom would follow, Douglass argued, power, and not vice-versa.

To keep a group of people in bondage or abeyance would be to ensure that they never reached their rightful status as fully free and equal citizens. And yet, it’s difficult to deny the idea that, for democratic citizenship to work, the citizens must be a particular sort of people—namely people who are committed to the exercise of independent judgment, the expression of their own unique selves, who are likewise committed to the idea of submitting themselves and their judgment to the will or judgment of the majority of their fellow citizens. To find such people among the enslaved or abused, or among those very recently enslaved or abused, would be remarkable.

Whitman once asserted that if the United States fails to operate in adherence to its core principles of liberty and equality—if it fails to behave as though it is serious about democracy—the extent of its failure will have its corollary in the failure of the

United States to live up to its massive promise and potential. Here is a country, spanning a continent, a teeming nation of nations, composed not of people bound by blood but rather peoples bound by a common desire for progress and a common commitment to a set of ideas. Whitman, Like Douglass, and following many enthusiasts of the wide open world of possibilities opened up by the French and American revolutions, understood the as yet incomplete movement of the world toward democracy as the first lights of “the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name.”15

15 O’Neill (2007), 257

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The brevity of America’s post-war experiment with racial equality, in the 1860s and 1870s, speaks to the disjuncture between institutionalists and idealists. The latter were only too willing to take the failure of this or that instance of political malfeasance or misjudgment among the South’s newly enfranchised freedmen as evidence that the whole business of institutional reform was a mistake. Emerson was right.

Enfranchisement had been too hasty. It had been foolish, and such foolish legislation proved to be a rope of sand that perished in the twisting. Not so for other ropes that hung strange fruits from southern trees. Idealist democrats who were unwilling to be institutionalists ceded the ground to anti-democrats who knew how to use institutions to restore the status quo ante.

There’s an old saying that goes as follows: wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which fills up first. It is no surprise that cultural transformationists tend to lose to institutionalist, and likewise that those who would transform institutions in a democratic direction tend to lose to those who either resist such transformation or work, assiduously, to transform institutions in anti-democratic directions. The erstwhile allies of democratic institutionalists are too busy wishing and hoping for people to be better than they are to waste time worrying about institutions. Institutions, after all, are temporary; ideas are eternal. Work for the former, not the latter, the thinking goes, and the truth will out in the end.

The 1871 in which Whitman wrote his Democratic Vistas may be the high water mark for American democratic enthusiasm. Reconstruction was abandoned a few years later. Jim Crow followed, as did the rise of the trusts, the “narrowing of the portals” of political participation in the form of stricter voter registration requirements and, by the

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end of the nineteenth century, highly restrictive immigration laws. Democracy, in the meantime, ceased to name a transformative politics of a future that would be characterized by strong commitment to social and political equality for all persons, in which a preponderance of political power would be in the hands of the average people of the country, and became what it tends to be today: a ubiquitous, but mostly empty, honorific, applied willy-nilly to notions and situations that may or may not have anything to do with democracy as it had been understood, or apprehended, in the 1850s.

I make no claim, however, to have exhausted the field of things that might be said about late-antebellum American democracy. Indeed, there are at least a handful of obvious gaps in the analysis I have presented. The one I feel most strongly is gender.

Women were among the groups of people generally excluded from American democracy, even, and often, by those who were otherwise proponents of it.

Consider Walt Whitman. Although he is probably the profoundest enthusiast of democracy considered here, and perhaps in the history of American political thought, although he gestures at gender equality, and although his work was evidently read with enthusiastic approval by many women’s rights activists in the nineteenth century,16

Whitman describes the adhesiveness underpinning his ideal democracy as “manly love.” Douglass, though he noted his sympathy with the Seneca Falls Declaration, insisted upon the priority of racial to gender equality. Emerson held that women ought, if they desired to do so, be allowed to participate equally with men in the political and economic life of the nation, though, for reasons we have discussed, he hoped they would not wish to do so. Calhoun has very little to say on the subject, but given his

16 Ceniza (1992), 145

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valorization of the plantation master, we might reasonably assume that while the mistress of the plantation would certainly have duties to perform and virtues to embody, political leadership and economic independence were probably not among them. I hope, in future research, to address the role of gender in ideas about democracy in late- antebellum America.

My effort at placing the works of the four thinkers I have considered will, I hope, be of use to scholars of American political thought and American political development.

It should go without saying that I believe this work is of more than merely antiquarian interest (though I hope it is that, too). In the final few pages, I would like to address what

I take to be a few important takeaway points.

First, Rogers Smith is incorrect to identify liberalism with the overcoming of ascriptive hierarchies and republicanism with their maintenance. Both theories of politics were perfectly capable of being made amenable with, or turned to the defense of, ascriptive hierarchies, and both could be turned against them. Smith can perhaps be forgiven for this error, because, drawing on scholarship from both liberal-consensus scholars and republican revisionists, he does not consider democracy as a separate strand. And so it isn’t. It is, like almost all American political ideologies, an amalgam, entailing appropriation and modification of various elements. Democratic-republicanism and liberal-democracy are hostile to hierarchies to a far greater extent than republicanism or liberalism as such. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that hostility to hierarchy is a core component of the meaning of democracy.

Second, understanding that Calhoun was not merely a defender of slavery and race-based hierarchy, but also a steadfast opponent of democracy in general, is

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important. Calhoun was among the most astute and systematic American political theorists of his or any generation. That he directed his efforts towards ends of which we now disapprove ought not cloud our estimation of his abilities. He was the intellectual architect who laid the groundwork upon which the Confederacy would be built, and, though the Confederacy was, happily, crushed, the groundwork was never dug up.

Without much digging, one can still find Calhoun’s ideas animating the works of southern conservatives in particular, and American conservatives in general: in the writings of the Southern Agrarians, in Russell Kirk’s praise for the South’s hardihood in resisting the “iron new order” of free-labor democracy, in the rhetoric of politicians like

Rick Perry and others who raise the specter of nullification to prevent the recognition of the rights of LGBTQ citizens, and in the ideology of the so-called Patriot Movement.

Though the rhetoric makes strong claims on behalf of the rights of organic communities and the sovereignty of local, rather than federal, administrators, the animating theory behind such claims remains, as it was in its inception, deeply anti-democratic.

Third, and related, the survival of aristocratic republican political ideas in nineteenth-century American politics is quite clearly visible, if one cares to look, in the political philosophy of the slaveholding South. In the South, one finds, as late as 1860, arguments in favor of qualitative distinctions among the people, and concomitant arguments about the distinct virtues that flow from such distinctions. To put it another way, the idea of natural aristocracy was not abandoned when the Constitution was ratified. The natural aristocracy survived, and was quite lively, in the southern states.

That their aristocracy was at least in part racial is undisputed, and nothing about that is in anyway incompatible with republican political language or thought. One suspects, I

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almost hesitate to add, that the distastefulness—or atrocity—of the South is among the reasons why theorists and historians of American republicanism have, for the most part, ignored the South.

Fourth, the continuing relevance of the republican tradition of natural aristocracy can also be clearly seen in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There is a tendency in the classical tradition to turn, in corrupt times, away from politics and toward ethics. The hope is, typically, that if politics has become inescapably and ineradicably corrupt—by materialism, self-interest, dependency, or the like—the polity might be rescued by first- class individuals who so embody the virtue that is needed, but eclipsed, that their example awakens the spirits of their countrymen, radiating, as it were, through the clouds. Such is Emerson’s hope for self-reliance. It ought to be understood by as, among other things, a method by which virtuous natural aristocrats might be cultivated.

It ought not be understood, as it often is nowadays, as a philosophy of democratic self- invention.17

Fifth, the republican idea that free government requires a certain sort of citizenry quite clearly informs the work of every author addressed in the foregoing. In various ways, and to differing extents, Calhoun, Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass are all concerned with the kinds of people Americans are made to be. There are differences in emphasis and upshot, to be sure, but all four are concerned, broadly, with the formation

17 Emerson has been taken up by contemporary theorists who are interested in the aversive and individualistic philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, in part because these theorists lack either the courage or the willingness to follow the anti-democratic implications of such notions, which are all too clear in the works of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Unlike Heidegger, Emerson was never a Nazi, and unlike Nietzsche, Emerson was never publicly deployed as an ideological prop for fascism. Emerson is, we might say, a friendlier thinker than the others toward democracy. This, however, does not make Emerson a democrat, nor does it make his ideas, without substantial modification, democratic.

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of social and political identities, and with the extent to which identity-formation can serve or undermine political institutions. This, it must be said, is a republican concern, as liberalism tends to insist upon taking people as they are, and contents itself with channeling their energies in some direction or other. All four authors, then, are republicans inasmuch as they do not share the liberal aversion to engaging in engineering the formation of identities.

Sixth, and finally, democracy is quite clearly understood by all four authors in class terms. Democracy means the political power of the many, who are, by one definition or another, poor, and is opposed, by definition, to the political power of the wealthy. The kinds of policies we tend to call socialistic are, by this older definition, democratic.

Whitman’s enthusiasm for the working classes, Douglass’s insistence upon the political rights of people of color and of the freedmen, like Calhoun’s abhorrence of the political power of the laboring classes and Emerson’s fear of the masses all share the same assumption about what democracy means. It is, fundamentally, for all four, the political power of the lower orders, and deserves praise or blame or fear for precisely that reason. If we have high hopes for the high average of the people, if we hope that the inclusion of people heretofore excluded from that average will conduce toward improvement of the body politic, then we may be democrats. If we are afraid of the deleterious and conforming pressure that the mass of people applies to those who might otherwise become extraordinary, if we are afraid that the political power of those at the lower end of the economic ladder is likely to prevent them from striving to climb, then we are likely not democrats.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps our nation’s best active public intellectual, considered a conundrum in the study of American history. Are we, he asks, looking for truth, or are we looking for hope, in our examination of the past? These two commitments

can’t occupy the same place at the same time. If writing must be hopeful, then there’s only room for the kind of evidence which verifies your premise. The practice of history can’t help there. Thus writers who commit themselves to writing only hopeful things, are committing themselves to the ahistorical, to the mythical, to the hagiography of humanity itself. I can’t write that way—because I can’t study that way. I have to be open to things falling apart. Indeed, much of our history is the story of things just not working out.18

So, for Coates, if we would tell a true story about our past, we must not try to make it hopeful. There is certainly some merit to this. Clearly, the history of American democracy is very much the story of “things just not working out,” from Shays Rebellion and the Philadelphia Line Mutiny to the workers parties of the 1790s to the Whiskey

Rebellion to Nat Turner and John Brown to the brief shimmer of hope during

Reconstruction to Jim Crow to Civil Rights to our current, ambivalently democratic age.

And yet, just as every successful move toward democracy is liable to backsliding, so every defeat is, potentially, only temporary. The swinging pendulum is not an inapt metaphor for democratic politics. We need not look to history for hope, though we may find there fortitude, or we might merely look at it for strategic advice. This would be historical inquiry in the genealogical sense suggested by Foucault, a search for the seams and fault-lines in current political and ideological structures. Democracy became a powerful word in the American lexicon in the late-antebellum period. If particular

18 Coates (2015)

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attitudes and actions are demonstrably anti-democratic in their provenance, we might demonstrate, too, that they remain anti-democratic in their present operation.

I have not been interested, in the pages above, in painting a triumphalist picture.

Nor do I believe I have satisfactorily answered the question I set out for myself, what is or ought to be American democracy. But I have, I think, got the beginnings of a response. If democracy is the goal, then there are many battles still to be fought, because as long as equality and inclusion, participation, and the inculcation of equality, inclusion, and participation as primary values are not the fundamental bases upon which citizenship in the United States is based, then American democracy is incomplete.

If we are democrats, and if we would work for democracy, then we should recognize that doing so commits us not only to the business of fostering democratic culture and aesthetics. This is crucial, and it entails granting the idea of equality a status akin to an article of faith. When the Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” we ought, first, to read “all persons” for “all men.” Second, we ought not see tension between the two clauses in that opening statement. The self- evidence of the truths does not devalue the announcement that we hold them, because this is a confession of faith. It is an announcement that we have decided that human equality is a principle upon which we shall, irrespective of countervailing evidence, insist. Such platitudes are relatively easy, though, as Whitman found, it is another thing to get them really and truly believed. But, as Whitman and Douglass well knew, matters of faith, aesthetics, and culture are only one aspect of a larger structure.

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If we are democrats, we must insist upon participation. This means not only that all citizens be eligible to vote, not only that they be eligible to run for and hold office, but also that we ensure that citizens are willing and able to use these rights, because democratic political institutions and democratic culture are not mutually reinforcing otherwise. Similarly, as Douglass spent a significant portion of the 1850s arguing, vociferously, participation means actually getting engaged in the messy business of democratic politics. This means electioneering, party-forming, coalition-building, legislating, logrolling, and the like. Though we might insist upon democratic culture, we must be willing to get our hands dirty. Otherwise, we concede the political-institutional fields to anti-democratic forces, and our cultural work, like Whitman’s, runs the risk of coming to naught (or, at least, underperforming its potential).

If we would be democrats, we must not decry the notions of mass-culture and middle class mores, because that culture and those mores are the deciding force of democracy. If there are bad things about the culture and mores of the masses, the proper democratic response is to work to change them. It is a fundamentally anti- democratic move to supplant, supersede, or stifle the influence of the masses. To put it another way, if we would have a democratic Left, we should put away our Horkheimers,

Adornos, Marcuses, and Arendts. Anti-democratic thinkers have always feared and lamented the influence of the masses and the middling sorts on culture and politics.19

Democrats ought not join their voices to these.

To quote another of America’s greatest public intellectuals, “This is your home, my friend. Do not be driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will

19 See, for example, O’Neill (2004)

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again, and we can make America what America must become.”20 The hope expressed by Baldwin is not naïve, but is resolute. The history of the failure of egalitarian, democratic efforts to make America what America ought to be, in the eyes of Coates,

Baldwin, Douglass, or Whitman, ought not convince us of the futility of such efforts, but only of the difficulty we face if we seek to extend them. We would do better if we recognized the impossibility of winning democratic politics. One never wins or loses.

Everything is always provisional. The only option is to fight. The alternative is acquiescence, optimism, and concession of the field.

“Hopelessness,” Richard Rorty argued a couple decades ago, “has become fashionable on the Left—principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness. The

Whitmanesque hope” for an actual American democracy worthy of the promise of its premises, “is now thought to have been a symptom of a naïve ‘humanism.’”21 This is unfortunate, because hope that the future might be better than the present is precisely the animating spirit behind any effort at improving our politics. Despair, or dismissal of hope, typically leads toward Emerson, toward a retreat from politics into ethics and the cultivation of individuality. Though there is much to be celebrated in difference and diversity, if we are looking to build a democratic project for the future, it must not come at the expense of solidarity. That is to say, a democratic project for individuality and difference must include both attention to institutions and some element that knits together the nodal points of identity and interest. To put it another way, democracy requires both solidarity and difference. If we would have a democratic project or work

20 Baldwin (1993), 12 21 Rorty (1998), 37

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toward a democratic polity, we must take both seriously to an extent that theorists who insist upon the ineffability of difference and the impossibility of sharing interests across lines of identity, and working together to achieve them, seem incapable.

My aim, in the foregoing, has been to increase, in Dewey’s sense, our apprehension of the history of the idea of American democracy. Apprehension, in this sense, implies both hope, or at least understanding, and fear. If we fail to apprehend our democracy, we will most certainly continue to enact its least attractive aspects, and drive toward worse.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dustin Fridkin was born in Missouri, but is from Florida. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Florida in 2016. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from New College of Florida with a dual major in environmental studies and political science. Primarily focused on American political thought and American political development, his interests include the relationships between political theories and political practices and the ways in which these relationships unfold over time. In addition to political history and normative theory, he is also interested in the empirical study of politics and policy, both within the United States and comparatively, particularly at the municipal and regional level, especially inasmuch as such empirical studies bear upon his apprehensions of, and normative commitments to, democracy.

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