Those who produce every thing enjoy nothing, while those who produce nothing enjoy every thing! A political economist of great eminence has made an estimate of the present wealth of England, and declared that, if equally divided, every man, woman, and child in England would have ten thousand pounds, or fifty thousand dollars, and yet supposes that there are ten millions of people who never own a dollar beyond their daily support! The land is owned by some thirty-five thousand proprietors, many of whom have large parks containing many thousand acres, filled with game and left untilled, while millions of men and women of their own race—their own kind—are without a single foot of that which God designed for the common sustenance and comfort of all! Education, moral development, and happiness must go hand in hand with these things, of course; indeed, it is a truth that should always be recognized when estimating the well-being of masses of men, that their moral and physical well-being are necessarily inseparable.
No one, however ignorant or prejudiced in favor of Britishism, or “British liberty,” can suppose for a moment that such stupendous results as these, or that such a social condition as that of England, could ever be brought about by natural causes. They are all of the same race, with the same natural capacities as well as wants, and if there be any difference, or any natural inferiority, it is within the governing class, whose intermarriage among the landed aristocracy has deteriorated their blood, and reduced them below the normal standard.
It is the government, therefore—the contrivance or political machine which has worked out these tremendous results—that has dug this mighty chasm between beings whom the Almighty has created alike, and therefore forbidden any governmental distinction.
The notion that government should benefit their condition, therefore—should make them richer and happier—originates in the fact itself in England, and those who, like the federalists, formed all their ideas of government after the British model, sought naturally enough to wield it for these supposed beneficent purposes. There was the same social conflict, in a degree, at the North as in England. It was the interest of the capitalist or employer to get all the labor possible with as little expense as might be, while the laborer would naturally seek to get as high wages as possible, and in return give as little labor as possible.
The capitalists, the men of wealth, the professional classes, merchants, indeed all classes of Northern society, except the agricultural class, were attracted to the federal party, and, in addition, speculators and projectors of every kind were naturally drawn in the same direction. These classes, embracing all the wealth, and cultivation, and social influence of the day, rallied in support of the federal party, which, with the government in its hands, with the prestige of power, and nearly all of the intellectual men of the time on its side, was irresistible, so far as the North was concerned. The producing classes, the farmers and laborers—those only that were naturally opposed to its policy, or whose real interests were in conflict with its policy—were then comparatively helpless. The right of suffrage was exceedingly limited, and though the agricultural class largely outnumbered the others, they were ignorant, without guides, and indeed quite helpless in the grasp of the federal leaders. The federal party, as has been stated, had, by so construing the constitution, usurped power that rendered the government substantially such as they originally desired to establish, and the masses, without intelligent leaders, were powerless to resist. And any one intelligently contemplating the condition of things in the Northern States during the administration of the elder Adams, must be irresistibly forced to the conclusion that the masses—the laboring and producing classes—were wholly unable to relieve themselves from the oppressions of this party, short of a physical revolution and an appeal to arms. They were largely in the majority, but the right of suffrage being mainly confined to property-holders, laborers, mechanics, artisans, etc., were, as in England, disfranchised; while the agricultural classes, though greatly advanced, no doubt, beyond the same classes in the Old World, were yet extremely illiterate and ignorant, and therefore powerless. The policy of the federalists was absolutely the same as in England—that is, the government was a machine or instrument through which the few who produce nothing were to enjoy every thing, and the many, who produce every thing, were to enjoy nothing. In a new country, with cheap lands and virgin soils, it might be many centuries before the awful results now manifested in England could be worked out, but the process was the same—the same causes were in operation, and the same results would surely follow—differing only in degree.
Nor, had the Union been confined to the Northern States, was there any reasonable prospect before the masses of overthrowing the oppression foisted on them, by a resort to revolution and physical force. They were the immense majority, it is true, but without leaders, without education or intelligence, or prestige of any kind, their doom was sealed, their subjection certain, their slavery inevitable. It would have been the old story over again—the revolt of the people against their oppressors in 1776 to be again subjected to other oppressions in 1796—a change from one master to another; though, doubtless, as all the efforts of the race have been in the direction of progress, a certain advance towards a better condition. But, fortunately for mankind and the cause of free institutions, a widely different state of things existed in Virginia and other States in the South.
As fully considered in another place, the negro element was here stationary, and in numbers so considerable that rules and regulations were necessary in regard to it. It had to be provided for; its capacities, its wants, its necessities, in short, harmonized with the wants and well-being of the dominant race. The colonial legislatures, as the State legislatures of the present day, were constantly called on to enact laws and establish regulations for this subordinate social element, as well as for themselves, and therefore habits of thought grew up that gave them widely different notions of government from those of the people in the North.
There was no social conflict; all had the same interests, and if one man inherited wealth, and another had nothing but his labor to depend on, they never came in conflict, for the former never sought the aid of the government to benefit himself at the expense of his less fortunate neighbor. In the North, if a citizen inherited ten thousand dollars, he invested it in some special corporation—a bank, a manufacturing company, or something else—that had its origin in special legislation, and perhaps doubly increased his income, which, of course, was drawn from the laborer, the producer, the class that creates all wealth.
In Virginia, on the contrary, if a citizen inherited ten thousand dollars, he invested it in lands, in the industrial capacities of negroes, in short, in labor; and though he may never have labored an hour with his own hands himself, he became of necessity a producer, with the same common, universal, and indivisible interests of all other producers and laborers, and therefore never sought the aid of government. Indeed, the government could not nor can not at this time legislate for the benefit—special benefit—of the planter of the South, or the farmer or producer at the North; and from the day it was created to this moment, there has never been an act of Congress or of the federal government that specifically benefited the South. Congress might, it is true, “protect” cotton or wheat, or other of the great staples which the producers of both sections furnish, but it would be a “protection” quite as useless to the parties interested as it would be harmless in its results to other classes and interests among us.
The clear mind of Jefferson grasped these bonds of industrial interest between the southern planter and northern farmer—the slaveholder of the South and the laborer of the North—at a very early period, and declared them “natural allies” in the great conflict then pending. The planter or “slaveholder” of the South asked nothing from government but its protection. He had grown up under a condition of things where there was no social conflict of any kind. There were no opposing interests—no class distinctions—nothing to appeal to his selfishness or to blind his judgment. Society was naturally divided, not into the rich and poor as elsewhere, but into whites and negroes, and, as the latter was owned by the former there was no contradiction, no motive or possible inducement to employ the government as an instrument for the special benefit of any body. The old European notion of government, therefore, that clung and still clings to the northern mind, that government should regulate the religion, the commerce, the industry, etc., of the country, was exploded, and the modern and true American idea that it should simply protect all alike and give favor to none became the general idea of the populations of the South; and, indeed, of the great agricultural populations of the Central States so far as it then could find expression. And, when this was the general notion of Virginia and other States at the South as regards their own legitimate government, of course they would not permit the federal and factitious government resting on delegated and strictly defined limitations of power, to be perverted in its spirit and transformed by its practice into a machine, as in England, to benefit others at their expense. The Southern States, therefore, especially Virginia and Kentucky, met in their legislatures, consulted with other States, and, in the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, made a declaration of principles, and pledged themselves to a policy that will always serve as the true landmarks of our State and federative systems so long as the republic, or, indeed, American freedom itself lasts to bless the world and illuminate mankind.