So far were the political principles of the people from having united in a common understanding, that while the Supreme Court of the United States thus differed from the Virginia Court of Appeals in regard to the genius of the government and the spirit of the Constitution, Jefferson still publicly maintained that the national and state governments were “as independent, in fact, as different nations,” and that the function of one was foreign, while that of the other was domestic. Madison still declared that Congress could not build a road or clear a watercourse; while Congress believed itself authorized to do both, and in that belief passed a law which Madison vetoed. In politics as in theology, the practical system which resulted from sixteen years of experience seemed to rest on the agreement not to press principles to a conclusion.
No new idea was brought forward, and the old ideas, though apparently incapable of existing together, continued to exist in rivalry like that of the dogmas which perplexed the theological world; but between the political and religious movement a distinct difference could be seen. The Church showed no tendency to unite in any creed or dogma,—indeed, religious society rather tended to more divisions; but in politics public opinion slowly moved in a fixed direction. The movement could not easily be measured, and was subject to reaction; but its reality was shown by the protests of Jefferson, the veto of Madison, and the decisions of the Supreme Court. No one doubted that a change had occurred since 1798. The favorite States-rights dogma of that time had suffered irreparable injury. For sixteen years the national government in all its branches had acted, without listening to remonstrance, on the rule that it was the rightful interpreter of its own powers. In this assumption the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary had agreed. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as well as Virginia and Georgia, yielded. Louisiana had been bought and admitted into the Union; the Embargo had been enforced; one National Bank had been destroyed and another established; every essential function of a sovereignty had been performed, without an instance of failure, though not without question. However unwilling the minority might be to admit in theory the overthrow of their principles, every citizen assented in daily practice to the rule that the national government alone interpreted its own powers in the last resort. From the moment the whole people learned to accept the practice, the dispute over theory lost importance, and the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 marked only a stage in the development of a sovereignty.
The nature of the sovereignty that was to be the result of American political experiment, the amount of originality which could be infused into an idea so old, was a matter for future history to settle. Many years were likely to elapse before the admitted practice of the government and people could be fully adopted into the substance of their law, but the process thus far had been rapid. In the brief space of thirty years, between 1787 and 1817,—a short generation,—the Union had passed through astonishing stages. Probably no great people ever grew more rapidly and became more mature in so short a time. The ideas of 1787 were antiquated in 1815, and lingered only in districts remote from active movement. The subsidence of interest in political theories was a measure of the change, marking the general drift of society toward practical devices for popular use, within popular intelligence. The only work that could be said to represent a school of thought in politics was written by John Taylor of Caroline, and was probably never read,—or if read, certainly never understood,—north of Baltimore by any but curious and somewhat deep students, although to them it had value.
John Taylor of Caroline might without irreverence be described as a vox clamantis,—the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by Jefferson, Monroe, John Randolph, and the Virginia school, he admitted, with the geniality of the class to which he belonged, that his disciples invariably deserted in practice the rules they praised in his teaching; but he continued to teach, and the further his scholars drifted from him the more publicly and profusely he wrote. His first large volume, “An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States,” published in 1814, during the war, was in form an answer to John Adams’s “Defence of the Constitutions” published in London twenty-five years before. In 1787 John Adams, like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and other constitution-makers, might, without losing the interest of readers, indulge in speculations more or less visionary in regard to the future character of a nation yet in its cradle; but in 1814 the character of people and government was formed; the lines of their activity were fixed. A people which had in 1787 been indifferent or hostile to roads, banks, funded debt, and nationality, had become in 1815 habituated to ideas and machinery of the sort on a great scale. Monarchy or aristocracy no longer entered into the public mind as factors in future development. Yet Taylor resumed the discussions of 1787 as though the interval were a blank; and his only conclusion from the experience of thirty years was that both political parties were equally moving in a wrong direction.
“The two parties, called Republican and Federal,” he concluded, “have hitherto undergone but one revolution. Yet each when in power preached Filmer’s old doctrine of passive obedience in a new form, with considerable success; and each, out of power, strenuously controverted it. The party in power asserted that however absurd or slavish this doctrine was under other forms of the numerical analysis, the people under ours were identified (the new term to cog this old doctrine upon the United States) with the government; and that therefore an opposition to the government was an opposition to the nation itself.... This identifying doctrine ... puts an end to the idea of a responsibility of the government to the nation; ... it renders useless the freedom of speech and of the press; it converts the representative into the principal; it destroys the division of power between the people and the government, as being themselves indivisible; and in short it is inconsistent with every principle by which politicians and philosophers have hitherto defined a free government.”
The principle to which Taylor so strenuously objected was nevertheless the chief political result of national experience. Somewhere or another a point was always reached where opposition became treasonable,—as Virginia, like Massachusetts, had learned both when in power and when out. Taylor’s speculations ended only in an admission of their own practical sterility, and his suggestions for restraining the growth of authority assumed the possibility of returning to the conditions of 1787. Banks were his horror. Stocks and bonds, or paper evidences of indebtedness in any form, he thought destructive to sound principles of government. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 were his best resource for the preservation of civil liberty. However wellfounded his fears might be, his correctives could no longer be applied. Political philosophers of all ages were fond of devising systems for imaginary Republics, Utopias, and Oceanas, where practical difficulties could not stand in their way. Taylor was a political philosopher of the same school, and his Oceana on the banks of the Rappahannock was a reflection of his own virtues.
CHAPTER IX.
Society showed great interest in the statesmen or preachers who won its favor, and earnestly discussed the value of political or religious dogmas, without betraying a wish to subject itself ever again to the rigor of a strict creed in politics or religion. In a similar spirit it touched here and there, with a light hand, the wide circuit of what was called belles lettres, without showing severity either in taste or temper.
For the first four or five years of the century, Dennie’s “Portfolio” contained almost everything that was produced in the United States under the form of light literature. The volumes of the “Portfolio” for that period had the merit of representing the literary efforts of the time, for Philadelphia insisted on no standard of taste so exacting as to exclude merit, or even dulness, in any literary form. Jacobins, as Dennie called Democrats, were not admitted into the circle of the “Portfolio;” but Jacobins rarely troubled themselves with belles lettres.
The “Portfolio” reflected a small literary class scattered throughout the country, remarkable chiefly for close adhesion to established English ideas. The English standard was then extravagantly Tory, and the American standard was the same. At first sight the impression was strange. A few years later, no ordinary reader could remember that ideas so illiberal had seriously prevailed among educated Americans. By an effort, elderly men could, in the next generation, recall a time when they had been taught that Oliver Cromwell was a monster of wickedness and hypocrisy; but they could hardly believe that at any period an American critic coldly qualified “Paradise Lost,” and “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,” as good poetry, though written by a Republican and an enemy of established order. This was the tone of Dennie’s criticism, and so little was it confined to him that even young Buckminster, in his Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809, which was regarded as making almost an epoch in American literature, spoke of Milton’s eyes as “quenched in the service of a vulgar and usurping faction,” and of Milton’s life as “a memorable instance of the temporary degradation of learning.” Buckminster was then remonstrating against the influence of politics upon letters rather than expressing a political sentiment, but his illustration was colored by the general prejudices of British Toryism. Half a century before, Dr. Johnson had taken the tone of Tory patronage toward Milton’s genius, and Johnson and Burke were still received in America as final authorities for correct opinion in morals, literature, and politics. The “Portfolio” regarded Johnson not only as a “superlative” moralist and politician, but also as a “sublime” critic and a “transcendent” poet. Burke and Cicero stood on the same level, as masters before whose authority criticism must silently bow.