[DO] I have already said, that when the Puritans landed in New England they wished above all things to found a religious society. They organised themselves by the laws of Moses. Political society did not exist in fact, although there was a nominal governor to represent the temporal authority, or was swallowed up in the church; the town was merged in the congregation. Thus in a short time, their government came to resemble that of the Jesuits in Paraguay, with only this difference, that each one here had his share in the tyranny. The Blue Laws of Connecticut are a monument of this state of things, in which the common acts of life were subjected to the most vexatious restrictions. The New Englanders were soon obliged to renounce their Mosaic system of government, and without perfectly separating politics from religion, they gave to each of the two powers an independent existence. They did not establish the political power firmly beyond the town; but the municipal constitution was solid and firm, sometimes even to excess, for the very reason that it started from the religious organisation.
[LETTER XXX.]
SYMPTOMS OF REVOLUTION.
Baltimore, September 25, 1835.
Two years ago Mr Clay began a speech in the Senate, with these words, which have become celebrated on this side of the Atlantic: "We are in the midst of a revolution." It was at the time, when by an act of authority before unheard of in American history, General Jackson had just settled the bank question, which his friends in Congress and even his own ministers had refused to decide. These words have often been repeated by others. More recently, since the scenes of murder, outrage, and destruction which have been exhibited through the United States, both in the slave-holding States, and in those in which slavery does not exist, in the country as well as in the towns, at Boston, the republican city par excellence, as as well as at Baltimore, for which the bloody excesses of which it was the theatre in 1812, have gained the title of the Mob Town, good citizens have repeated with grief; "We are in the midst of a revolution."
It must be granted to the honour of the English race, that it is, more deeply than any other, imbued with a feeling of reverence for the law. Until lately, the Americans have shown themselves in this respect, as well as in others, to be double-distilled Englishmen. There are nations, who conceive of law under a living form, that is, only so far as it is personified in a man. They know how to obey a leader, but they cannot learn to respect a dead letter. With them the glory and prosperity of a State depend little on the character of the laws, but much on that of the men who are their organs. In their view, the empire rises and falls by turns, according as the sovereign, whatever may be his title, is a superior man or an ordinary personage. Such appears to be, in general, the character of the Asiatics. The Englishman is formed in a different mould; he willingly bows to the authority of a text; but he stoops to man with reluctance. He does not need that obedience to law should be inculcated by the voice of man, he obeys it without an effort and by instinct. In a word the Englishman has in himself the principle of self-government. This fact accounts for the success of his political system in the United States, where the native character of the English race is fairly developed.
Unfortunately the reverence for the laws seems to be wearing out with the Americans. This people, eminently practical in every thing else, have allowed themselves to be pushed into the excess of theory in politics, and have here taken up the quand même logic; they have shrunk from none of the consequences of popular sovereignty, at least while those consequences were flattering to their pride; as if there were a single principle in the world, not excepting Christian charity itself, which could be carried to its extreme logical consequences without resulting in absolute absurdity. They have, therefore, been driven in the United States to deny that there is any principle true in and by itself, and to assert that the will of the people is, always and necessarily, justice; the infallibility of the people in every thing and at all times, has, in fact, become the received doctrine, and thus a door has been opened to the tyranny of a turbulent minority, which always calls itself the people.[DP]
The appearance of this miscalled popular justice, administered by the hands of a few desperate or furious men, who call themselves the successors of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, is a great calamity in the bosom of a country, where there is no other guarantee of the public peace than a reverence of the laws, and where the legislator, taking for granted the prevalence of order, has made no provisions against disorder. This popular justice has the greater condemnation of being for the most part grossly unjust. Most of the men who have been atrociously hanged, or flogged, or tortured in twenty other ways in the South,[DQ] as abolitionists, that is as guilty of instigating the slaves to rise against their masters, were, according to all appearances, merely guilty of having expressed their abhorrence of slavery with too little caution. It is even doubtful whether the pretended plots, for being engaged in which whites and blacks have been summarily executed, had a real existence. At least no proof of their reality has yet been brought forward, which would be admitted by a court of justice. During the outrages last month at Baltimore, which were continued for four days, this self-styled justice was most stupidly unjust. The mob gave out that it wished to punish those knaves who had shamefully abused the credulity of the poor in the affair of the Bank of Maryland. It is a matter of public notoriety, that the bankruptcy of the bank was fraudulent; that just before it stopped payment, it had offered a high rate of interest on deposits of any amount, in order to attract to its counter the savings of the labouring classes; but it was also a matter of notoriety, that the criminal acts of the bank were wholly the work of one Evan Poultney, who alone was, in fact, the bank. Instead of going to take vengeance for the ruin of the artisan, the widow, and the orphan, on the author of it, the mob went to call to account the bankruptcy commissioners, appointed by the court. It was not till the third day that it bethought itself to make a visit to Poultney, who, without being at all disconcerted, began to cry out that he was a sinner, that he had been guilty of wronging his neighbour. He beat his breast in sign of repentance, and in a puritanical slang accused himself more loudly than the rioters had done. Blinded, like Orgon, by so much sanctity, they excused themselves to Tartufe like him, carefully swept the hall and the marble door-steps which they had soiled, and hastened to sack the house of the mayor, because a small detachment of militia, spontaneously assembled, had fired upon them in self-defence, after having stood patient for some time under a shower of stones.
These disorders are alarming from their general prevalence, and from their frequent repetitions, and they are the more so, the less their importance is realised. They meet with few voices to condemn them, but they find many to excuse them. One of the defects of democracy is that it is forgetful of the past, and careless of the future. A riot, which in France would put a stop to business, prevents no one here from going to the Exchange, speculating, turning over the dollars, and making money. On meeting in the morning, each one asks and tells the news; here a negro has been hanged, there a white man has been flogged; at Philadelphia, ten houses have been demolished; at Buffalo, at Utica, some people of colour have been scourged. Then they go on to the price of cotton and coffee, the arrivals of flour, lumber, and tobacco, and become absorbed in calculations the rest of the day. I am surprised to see how dead the word equality falls, when a good citizen pronounces it; the reign of law seems to be at an end; we have fallen under that of expediency. Farewell to justice, farewell to the great principles of 1776 and 1789! All hail to the interest of the moment, interpreted by nobody knows who, for the success of some petty intrigue of politics or business!
Five men, five white men, have been hanged at Vicksburg in Mississippi, without even the form of a trial; they were gamblers, you are told, the scourge of the country. The most respectable citizens of Vicksburg assisted in their execution. But the law which guaranties to all your fellow-citizens the trial by a jury of peers; but that old Saxon justice of which you boast! What is become of them? No tribunal would have been able to rid us of the rogues; morality and religion condemn them, and their decree, for want of others, we have executed; it was necessary. Expediency! In Virginia, travellers from the Northern States, on the slightest pretences, for some tavern gossip, or some conversation in the coach, have been dragged before the self-styled Committees of Vigilance, beaten, tarred, and feathered. Others, whose crime consisted in inadvertently having in their pocket, some papers which the slave-holder has been pleased to pronounce abolition writings, have been seized by these fanatics, and hanged as emissaries of insurrection. What is become of that article of the constitution, which secures to the citizens of each State the protection of the laws in every other State? If we were to insist on these points, we should endanger our union with the South. Expediency! Merchants of New York! The planters of one of the parishes of Louisiana have set a price on the head of one of your number, because, as they say, he is an abolitionist, an amalgamator. Will not your national sensibility, so lively in regard to France, be touched by this act of audacity? Our commerce with the South constitutes half the prosperity of New York. Expediency! Men of New England! Citizens of the cradle of American liberty! Sons of the pilgrims, self-exiled first to Holland, and then to the sandy shores of Massachusetts, rather than bow their opinions to the will of the Stuarts! You, so proud of your liberties, how can you abandon the dearest of all, the liberty of the press, to the hands of a postmaster? Always the same reply: Expediency!