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University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting 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. 4 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 5 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 6 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 7 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. 8 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
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