The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny

by Orestes Augustus Brownson

The humanitarian is carried away by a vague generality, and loses men in humanity, sacrifices the rights of men in a vain endeavor to secure the rights of man, as your Calvinist or his brother Jansenist sacrifices the rights of nature in order to secure the freedom of grace. Yesterday he agitated for the abolition of slavery, to-day he agitates for negro suffrage, negro equality, and announces that when he has secured that he will agitate for female suffrage and the equality of the sexes, forgetting or ignorant that the relation of equality subsists only between individuals of the same sex; that God made the man the head of the woman, and the woman for the man, not the man for the woman. Having obliterated all distinction of sex in politics, in social, industrial, and domestic arrangements, he must go farther, and agitate for equality of property. But since property, if recognized at all, will be unequally acquired and distributed, he must go farther still, and agitate for the total abolition of property, as an injustice, a grievous wrong, a theft, with M. Proudhon, or the Englishman Godwin. It is unjust that one should have what another wants, or even more than another. What right have you to ride in your coach or astride your spirited barb while I am forced to trudge on foot? Nor can our humanitarian stop there. Individuals are, and as long as there are individuals will be, unequal: some are handsomer and some are uglier, some wiser or sillier, more or less gifted, stronger or weaker, taller or shorter, stouter or thinner than others, and therefore some have natural advantages which others have not. There is inequality, therefore injustice, which can be remedied only by the abolition of all individualities, and the reduction of all individuals to the race, or humanity, man in general. He can find no limit to his agitation this side of vague generality, which is no reality, but a pure nullity, for he respects no territorial or individual circumscriptions, and must regard creation itself as a blunder. This is not fancy, for he has gone very nearly as far as it is here shown, if logical, he must go.

The danger now is that the Union victory will, at home and abroad, be interpreted as a victory won in the interest of social or humanitarian democracy. It was because they regarded the war waged on the side of the Union as waged in the interest of this terrible democracy, that our bishops and clergy sympathized so little with the Government in prosecuting it; not, as some imagined, because they were disloyal, hostile to American or territorial democracy, or not heartily in favor of freedom for all men, whatever their race or complexion. They had no wish to see slavery prolonged, the evils of which they, better than any other class of men, knew, and more deeply deplored; none would have regretted more than they to have seen the Union broken up; but they held the socialistic or humanitarian democracy represented by Northern abolitionists as hostile alike to the Church and to civilization. For the same reason that they were backward or reserved in their sympathy, all the humanitarian sects at home and abroad were forward and even ostentatious in theirs. The Catholics feared the war might result in encouraging La Republiques democratique et sociale; the humanitarian sects trusted that it would. If the victory of the Union should turn out to be a victory for the humanitarian democracy, the civilized world will have no reason to applaud it.

That there is some danger that for a time the victory will be taken as a victory for humanitarianism or socialism, it would be idle to deny. It is so taken now, and the humanitarian party throughout the world are in ecstasies over it. The party claim it. The European Socialists and Red Republicans applaud it, and the Mazzinis and the Garibaldis inflict on us the deep humiliation of their congratulations. A cause that can be approved by the revolutionary leaders of European Liberals must be strangely misunderstood, or have in it some infamous element. It is no compliment to a nation to receive the congratulations of men who assert not only people-king, but people-God; and those Americans who are delighted with them are worse enemies to the American democracy than ever were Jefferson Davis and his fellow conspirators, and more contemptible, as the swindler is more contemptible than the highwayman.

But it is probable the humanitarians have reckoned without their host. Not they are the real victors. When the smoke of battle has cleared away, the victory, it will be seen, has been won by the Republic, and that that alone has triumphed. The abolitionists, in so far as they asserted the unity of the race and opposed slavery as a denial of that unity, have also won; but in so far as they denied the reality or authority of territorial and individual circumscriptions, followed a purely socialistic tendency, and sought to dissolve patriotism into a watery sentimentality called philanthropy, have in reality been crushingly defeated, as they will find when the late insurrectionary States are fully reconstructed. The Southern or egoistical democrats, so far as they denied the unity and solidarity of the race, the rights of society over individuals, and the equal rights of each and every individual in face of the state, or the obligations of society to protect the weak and help the helpless, have been also defeated; but so far as they asserted personal or individual rights which society neither gives nor can take away, and so far as they asserted, not State sovereignty, but State rights, held independently of the General government, and which limit its authority and sphere of action, they share in the victory, as the future will prove.

European Jacobins, revolutionists, conspiring openly or secretly against all legitimate authority, whether in Church or State, have no lot or part in the victory of the American people: not for them nor for men with their nefarious designs or mad dreams, have our brave soldiers fought, suffered and bled for four years of the most terrible war in modern times, and against troops as brave and as well led as themselves; not for them has the country sacrificed a million of lives, and contracted a debt of four thousand millions of dollars, besides the waste and destruction that it will take years of peaceful industry to repair. They and their barbaric democracy have been defeated, and civilization has won its most brilliant victory in all history. The American democracy has crushed, actually or potentially, every species of barbarism in the New World, asserted victoriously the state, and placed the government definitively on the side of legitimate authority, and made its natural association henceforth with all civilized governments—not with the revolutionary movements to overthrow them. The American people will always be progressive as well as conservative; but they have learned a lesson, which they much needed against false democracy: civil war has taught them that "the sacred right of insurrection" is as much out of place in a democratic state as in an aristocratic or a monarchical state; and that the government should always be clothed with ample authority to arrest and punish whoever plots its destruction. They must never be delighted again to have their government send a national ship to bring hither a noted traitor to his own sovereign as the nation's guest. The people of the Northern States are hardly less responsible for the late rebellion than the people of the Southern States. Their press had taught them to call every government a tyranny that refused to remain quiet while the traitor was cutting its throat or assassinating the nation, and they had nothing but mad denunciations of the Papal, the Austrian, and the Neapolitan governments for their severity against conspirators and traitors. But their own government has found it necessary for the public safety to be equally arbitrary, prompt, and severe, and they will most likely require it hereafter to co-operate with the governments of the Old World in advancing civilization, instead of lending all its moral support, as heretofore, to the Jacobins, revolutionists, socialists, and humanitarians, to bring back the reign of barbarism.

The tendency to individualism has been sufficiently checked by the failure of the rebellion, and no danger from the disintegrating element, either in the particular State or in the United States, is henceforth to be apprehended. But the tendency in the opposite direction may give the American state some trouble. The tendency now is, as to the Union, consolidation, and as to the particular state, humanitarianism, socialism, or centralized democracy. Yet this tendency, though it may do much mischief, will hardly become exclusive. The States that seceded, when restored, will always, even in abandoning State sovereignty, resist it, and still assert State rights. When these States are restored to their normal position, they will always be able to protect themselves against any encroachments on their special rights by the General government. The constitution, in the distribution of the powers of government, provides the States severally with ample means to protect their individuality against the centralizing tendency of the General government, however strong it may be.

The war has, no doubt, had a tendency to strengthen the General government, and to cause the people, to a great extent, to look upon it as the supreme and exclusive national government, and to regard the several State governments as subordinate instead of co-ordinate governments. It is not improbable that the Executive, since the outbreak of the rebellion, has proceeded throughout on that supposition, and hence his extraordinary assumptions of power; but when once peace is fully re-established and the States have all resumed their normal position in the Union, every State will be found prompt enough to resist any attempt to encroach on its constitutional rights. Its instinct of self-preservation will lead it to resist, and it will be protected by both its own judiciary and that of the United States.

The danger that the General government will usurp the rights of the States is far less than the danger that the Executive will usurp all the powers of Congress and the judiciary. Congress, during the rebellion, clothed the President, as far as it could, with dictatorial powers, and these powers the Executive continues to exercise even after the rebellion is suppressed. They were given and held under the rights of war, and for war purposes only, and expired by natural limitation when the war ceased; but the Executive forgets this, and, instead of calling Congress together and submitting the work of reconstruction of the States that seceded to its wisdom and authority, undertakes to reconstruct them himself, as if he were an absolute sovereign; 372 and the people seem to like it. He might and should, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, govern them as military departments, by his lieutenants, till Congress could either create provisional civil governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity. His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them. Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained by public sentiment, and a deep wound is inflicted on the constitution, which will be long in healing.

The danger in this respect is all the greater because it did not originate with the rebellion, but had manifested itself for a long time before. There is a growing disposition on the part of Congress to throw as much of the business of government as possible into the hands of the Executive. The patronage the Executive wields, even in times of peace, is so large that he has indirectly an almost supreme control over the legislative branch of the government. For this, which is, and, if not checked will continue to be, a growing evil, there is no obvious remedy, unless the President is chosen for a longer term of office and made ineligible for a second term, and the mischievous doctrine of rotation in office is rejected as incompatible with the true interests of the public. Here is matter for the consideration of the American statesman. But as to the usurpations of the Executive in these unsettled times, they will be only temporary, and will cease when the States are all restored. They are abuses, but only temporary abuses, and the Southern States, when restored to the Union, will resume their rights in their own sphere, as self-governing communities, and legalize or undo the unwarrantable acts of the Federal Executive.

The socialistic and centralizing tendency in the bosom of the individual States is the most dangerous, but it will not be able to become predominant; for philanthropy, unlike charity, does not begin at home, and is powerless unless it operates at a distance. In the States in which the humanitarian tendency is the strongest, the territorial democracy has its most effective organization. Prior to the outbreak of the rebellion the American people had asserted popular sovereignty, but had never rendered an account to themselves in what sense the people are or are not sovereign. They had never distinguished the three sorts of democracy from one another, asked themselves which of the three is the distinctively American democracy. For them, democracy was democracy, and those who saw dangers ahead sought to avoid them either by exaggerating one or the other of the two exclusive tendencies, or else by restraining democracy itself through restrictions on suffrage. The latter class began to distrust universal suffrage, to lose faith in the people, and to dream of modifying the American constitution so as to make it conform more nearly to the English model. The war has proved that the were wrong, for nothing is more certain than that the people have saved the national unity and integrity almost in spite of their government. The General government either was not disposed or was afraid to take a decided stand against secession, till forced to do it by the people themselves. No wise American can henceforth distrust American democracy. The people may be trusted. So much is settled. But as the two extremes were equally democratic, as the secessionists acted in the name of popular sovereignty, and as the humanitarians were not unwilling to allow separation, and would not and did not engage in the war against secession for the sake of the Union and the integrity of the national domain, the conviction becomes irresistible that it was not democracy in the sense of either of the extremes that made the war and came out of it victorious; and hence the real American democracy must differ from them both, and is neither a personal nor a humanitarian, but a territorial democracy. The true idea of American democracy thus comes out, for the first time, freed from the two extreme democracies which have been identified with it, and henceforth enters into the understandings as well as the hearts of the people. The war has enlightened patriotism, and what was sentiment or instinct becomes reason—a well-defined, and clearly understood constitutional conviction.