The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

And thus it was that a generation later the patriotic Otis, of Boston, the man “who dared to love his country and be poor,” spoke so boldly in reply to Hutchinson, who summed up his aristocratic preferences in the odious Horatian maxim, Odi profanum vulgus, and who avowed his dissatisfaction that “liberty and property should be enjoyed by the vulgar.”

“God made all men naturally equal,” said Otis. “The ideas of earthly grandeur are acquired, not innate. No government has a right to make a slave of the subject.” And again, “to bring the powers of all into the hands of one or some few, and to make them hereditary, is the interested work of the weak and wicked.”

Such was the philosophy that was daily preached among the burghers of Boston. Such was the doctrine that Patrick Henry came from the Virginia backwoods to voice with his burning eloquence. Such was the spirit that was everywhere animating the colonies, while Parliament enacted one unjust and oppressive law after another. “The sun of American liberty has set,” Ben Franklin wrote from Europe to a friend in America, when he heard of the enactment of the ill-fated Stamp Act; “now we must light the torches of industry and economy.” “Be assured that we shall light torches of another sort,” replied his friend.

The torches were lit; they blazed forth in the shots fired at Lexington, and on Bunker Hill, and in the Declaration of Independence, at Philadelphia; and they were not put out until Parliamentary oppression had been forever ended, and a new nation—a plebeian democracy—took its place by the side of the proudest of earth’s empires.

The war was fought and won by the “Common People,” in the face of the armed force of the foreigner, and the treachery, active or passive, of not a few colonists, whose aristocratic connections or pretensions held them aloof from the movement for liberty. Even in the darkest days of the struggle, when Washington, driven from New York, was retreating before Howe’s advance, and many men of prominence were giving up the patriotic cause as hopeless—Joseph Galloway and Andrew Allen, of Pennsylvania, Samuel Tucker, of New Jersey, John Dickinson, of Delaware, and others—even then the Commander’s wonderful faith and courage was reflected in the fidelity of the populace. That alone made possible the final triumph.

“When the war of independence was terminated,” remarks DeTocqueville, in his famous study of “Democracy in America,” “and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions—two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met with under different forms and various names, in all free communities—the one tending to limit, the other to extend, indefinitely, the power of the people. The conflict between these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in America which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. Both parties were agreed on the most essential points, and neither of them had to destroy an old constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order to triumph. In neither of them, consequently, were a great number of private interests affected by success or defeat; but moral principles of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence, were concerned in the struggle, and these sufficed to kindle violent passions.”

The party that sought to limit the power of the people was that of the Federalists; its opponents took the name of Republican, which afterwards became Democratic-Republican, and finally, under Andrew Jackson, Democratic. In view of the fixed bent of the American national character, it is not difficult to discern the inevitable result of the conflict between them. The Federalists were certain to be ultimately overcome. America is the land of democracy, and the anti-democratic partisans were always in a minority.

Thus for the brief period succeeding the Civil War, while the wounds of the conflict were still fresh upon the body politic, the party of the aristocracy—for such had the Republican party become—utilizing the soreness still existing as the result of the conflict, succeeded, by the clamor of sectionalism, in diverting the attention of the masses from the tendency towards social superiority and “caste,” which the continuance of the Republican party in power was creating.

This brief ascendency during the first twelve years of the republic was due to several temporary causes. Most of the great leaders of the war for independence believed in a strong, centralized government, and therefore ranked themselves with the Federalists. The failure of the first attempt at federal control—the Continental Congress—and the local disorders that arose after the war, had inspired the people with a dread of anarchy. They were willing to accept, for a time, restrictive political theories, which it soon became safe to throw off.

The Federalist leaders were more than suspected of aristocratic tendencies. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, declared in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that “the ills of the country come from an excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue,” he added, as if in apology, “but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”