Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  As late as the 1830s, the United States of America looked and behaved more like a league or a compact of states than a single country, and its Constitution was still regarded as something of an experiment, embraced mostly for its practicality. “Asking a State to surrender a part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity,” declared the eccentric Virginia politician John Randolph of Roanoke, who even on the floor of Congress made his loyalties clear by insisting that “when I speak of my country, I mean the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The English travel writer George Featherstonhaugh was confounded to hear a South Carolinian declare: “If you ask me if I am an American, my answer is, No, sir, I am a South Carolinian.” The framers of the Constitution, fearing the possibility that state antagonisms, economic competition, and political corruption would easily derail the national system, appealed to the spirit of union or the virtue of political compromise to defuse the threat of divisive issues, but did not appeal to some elusive national authority.6

  This is not to say, though, that Americans were not becoming a nation in other ways. No matter how jealously the states regarded and defended their individual political privileges and identities, it would have been hard for a people who spoke the same language, read the same books, heard the same music, and voted in the same elections not to develop some sort of fellow-feeling, irrespective of state boundaries. This was especially true for those Americans who had actually borne the brunt of the fighting in the Revolutionary War, and who carried out of the Revolution a highly different perspective on the unity of the American republic. In the snows of Valley Forge and in the heat of the Carolinas, in victory and in defeat, soldiers from Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and all the other states had undergone so many hardships together that their different backgrounds faded to unimportance.

  One of these soldiers, John Marshall, began the Revolution as a Virginia militiaman, then enlisted in the Continental army, and endured the army’s winter at Valley Forge. He remembered later, “I was confirmed in the habit of considering America as my country and Congress as my government,” not Virginia.7 And Marshall would later rise, as chief justice of the Supreme Court, to shape a system of national jurisprudence that transcended state boundaries and loyalties. A South Carolinian (turned Tennessean) named Andrew Jackson lost two brothers and his mother to the Revolution. Captured by the British, he refused a British officer’s order to clean the officer’s boots and was rewarded with a blow from the officer’s sword. It left a scar Jackson carried with him for the rest of his life, and it also left a burning hatred of all enemies of his country, whether they were British invaders or (as it turned out later) fellow Southerners trying to nullify congressional legislation.8

  By the end of the 1830s, the Union, crisscrossed by “mystic chords of memory,” had ascended to the level of a national faith. The belligerent Tennessee parson and newspaper editor William G. Brownlow attacked the notion that the Constitution was merely a temporary political umbrella put up by the individual states to protect their state interests. “The Constitution,” insisted Brownlow, was the political creation of the American people as a single nation, and it “was formed by the people to govern the people, and no single individual State was called upon as a separate ‘sovereignty’ to sign or ratify that Constitution.” Alexander Stephens, who one day would serve as the vice president of the Confederate States, said that for Abraham Lincoln the Union “rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism,” and even a perfectly straightforward politician such as William H. Bissell of Illinois felt no embarrassment in claiming that whenever anyone in the West carelessly broached the idea of “destroying this Union,” there would not be “a man throughout that vast region who will not raise his hand and swear by the Eternal God, as I do now, that it shall never be done, if our arms can save it.” When, as it turned out, other members of the Union did just that and asked the Lincolns and Bissells to choose between state or local interests and the Union, the answer would more and more be the Union.9

  The experience of the Revolution and the development of political maturity were only the first steps away from disunity and suspicion. The new political generation of Americans in the 1830s found two other important cultural paths by which to rise above their divisions. One of these was the embrace of a common religion. Although the Constitution forbade Congress from singling out any particular religion or religious denomination as a national “established” church, it was nevertheless clear that Americans in all parts of the country overwhelmingly favored Protestant, evangelical Christianity. The overall number of Christian congregations rose from 2,500 in 1780 to 52,000 in 1860. Along with the new congregations came new publication agencies, such as the American Bible Society and American Tract Society, which spun off a million Bibles and 6 million religious books and pamphlets each year, and a constellation of inter-locked social reform and missionary agencies. Evangelical Protestant churches claimed approximately 15 percent of the American population as full members, and as much as 40 percent of all Americans as “attenders” or “hearers.”10 There were many differences between various groups of evangelical Protestants, and they organized themselves into more separate and subdivided denominations—Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and so on—than there were states. But one thing they had in common was a commitment to the basic outlines of evangelical piety—a direct appeal to the person of Jesus Christ as God, the experience of conversion from unbelief or half belief to fervent piety, reverence for the authority of the Bible, and an ambition to promote the conversion of others for their own good and the good of the larger society.

  This broadly embraced Protestant evangelicalism was heightened by the control these denominations exercised over American higher education. Almost all of the seventy-eight American colleges founded by 1840 were church-related, with clergymen serving on the boards and the faculties. Most possessed as president a prominent clergyman, who capped off the senior year of his students with a major course in moral philosophy, based on a handful of Protestant ethics textbooks (the runaway favorite being Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science) that were used across the country. In this way, not only American religion but also the development of American ethics and philosophy were shaped by a common Protestant evangelicalism.11

  Just as powerful a common bond as evangelical Christianity was the political ideology that Americans embraced in the Revolution. However much the structure of American politics was compromised and frustrated by state demands and state loyalties, Americans in all the states agreed that the states and the federal government alike were to be a republic and follow a republican form of government. Republicanism in the eighteenth century was the political fruit of the Enlightenment, that sea-change intellectual movement whose principal mission was to overthrow authority’s chokehold on European intellectual life and replace it with what was natural, as discovered by reason and experiment. The Enlightenment began in the 1600s when Newton and Galileo overturned the principles of physical science that had been based on Aristotle’s writings and replaced them with a new mechanical physics based on observable patterns of motion. By the 1700s, the philosophes of the Enlightenment had extended the reach of nature, reason, and experiment to the realms of politics and society, and proposed to overturn any form of political organization built on such nonrational factors as monarchy or aristocracy. Enlightenment thought was the principal impulse behind the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and it had its gospel in the writings of Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and above all John Locke, as well as in the classical examples of ancient Greece and Rome.12

  But a more practical source of republicanism in America came simply from the governments the Americans had been compelled to improvise in their infancy as British colonies. The British government had taken a hands-off (and no-investment) stance toward the colonies founded in its name on the North American eastern seaboard, allowing the tasks of creation and maint
enance to be left to corporate entrepreneurs (such as the Virginia Company) or to religious dissidents (such as the Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics) whom the British crown was only too happy to see disappear westward across the ocean. Not until much later did the British government awaken to (and begin demanding oversight of) the extraordinarily productive successes that three or four generations of this onetime riffraff had created for themselves in America. By 1750, the American colonies had developed in practice what looked for all the world like what Locke and his coadjutors had described on paper—little self-governing commonwealths. The Revolution was in large measure the response of the Americans to a British ultimatum to surrender that self-government.

  Self-government meant that political sovereignty originated in the people, who possessed all the competence required for governing, and who should be free from having to cringe before aristocrats or beg their bread from wealthy landowners. Not that Americans ever felt that they needed to, since America possessed no domestic aristocracy to start with and, apart from the great manors of the Hudson River Valley and the plantations of the Virginia tidewater, no vast château-bred landlords. During the Revolution the Whigs proceeded to expel the Tory loyalists who had represented the wealthiest segment of the old colonial society. The new republic was able to begin its life with more than 90 percent of its citizens owning their own property and producing their own sustenance. In the Treaty of Paris the United States also acquired the wilderness beyond the Appalachians, where landowning could be thrown open to new generations; these lands would be organized as federal territories and eventually admitted to the Union as states.13

  Every new territory wanted to move as swiftly as possible toward statehood, and to do that, they had to meet requirements for minimum numbers of voters. That, in turn, created pressure in the West to lower the eligibility requirements for voting because the more voters who could be counted, the faster a territory could advance to the privileges of statehood. For that reason, the United States would be a republic, but it would be driven to become a more and more democratic republic. Republics, after all, are simply governments that dispense with kings and aristocrats; the definition of who can be a citizen is what makes a republic more or less democratic. The classical republics of the ancient world were actually very narrow in their definitions of who could be a citizen. The American republic, by contrast, started off on a much more democratic footing than almost any other republic in history, and in its first half century of existence it became increasingly more so, to the point where Americans would use the terms democracy, republic, republican, and democratic almost as synonyms.

  A common religion and a highly democratic republicanism were cultural tools that helped Americans transcend narrow state loyalties. But there were also forces at work that were just as likely to push in the other direction and increase rather than diminish the instability of the American union.

  The most serious of these forces was economic. Enlightenment philosophes struggled to bring economics as much into conformity to the rule of nature and reason as physics and politics were, and the chief among these economists was the Scot Adam Smith. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (published, in a significant coincidence, in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence), Smith cast down the restraints on commerce and trade imposed by contemptuous aristocrats all across Europe in favor of allowing the instinctive human passion for competitiveness a free hand in determining economic outcomes. “Every individual,” wrote Smith, “intends only his own security; and … intends only his own gain, and he is in this … led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention,” in just the same way that Newton’s apple obeyed a law of gravity. Just as it would be absurd to ask governments to intervene in the laws of physics, it should be considered just as absurd for governments to intervene in the laws of the markets. “The obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” The irony of this, however, is that “by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually. …” 14

  Speaking of Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations means that it is also necessary to speak about capitalism, if only because capitalism has become synonymous with Smith’s description of a “natural liberty” in economics. Actually, capitalism represents at least four different ways of organizing a nation’s production and consumption of goods. Capitalism can be understood as shorthand for the pursuit of profits from the sale of goods or services, and in that sense, capitalism has been around since the dawn of history itself—hence Smith’s claim that it was “obvious and simple.” Capitalism might also be regarded as a system of economic organization where governments, eager to promote the prosperity of their nations, open a “level playing field” and do no more than wish that the best economic man win. However, it still remains government’s task to define the rules and police the boundaries of the playing field, since the great temptation of every competitor is to bribe the referees and kill the competition, literally or otherwise. Capitalists, in that respect, were the last people whom government should wish to entrust with the keys to the playing field’s maintenance locker, and Smith was certainly no exponent of removing government’s referee role. In the most complicated sense of the word, capitalism refers to a system by which the owners of productive mechanisms—whether the “mechanism” is a farm or a factory—employ laborers to whom they pay wages. The wages are never equivalent to the value the laborers put into the goods and services they produce. Because they do not own these mechanisms, laborers have no say in what price the real owners obtain for those goods and services. Hence, the owners sell the goods and services but only pay the producers a wage; the difference between the selling price and the wages (the “surplus value”) becomes the owners’ capital and is plowed back into the farm or factory to hire more wage laborers and produce more goods. This version—which is how Karl Marx defined capitalism—is also the most negative, as though capitalism were little more than systematic theft of the real value that exploited laborers imparted to goods. On the other hand, at its simplest the term capitalism can be used to describe any system in which an attitude of entrepreneurship and self-improvement is the key.

  Monarchies were never friendly to capitalism, any more than they were to republicanism. They preferred stability in their nations’ economic as well as political lives, and the more rigid the structure of a nation’s monarchy, the less favor with which it was likely to look upon the brash self-promotion of shopkeepers, shoemakers, and town burgesses (burgess being the term from which bourgeoisie developed to describe the class of people most friendly to capitalism). But this self-promotion, based on cleverness, talent, and a strict eye to the main chance rather than noble birth, is also why the Enlightenment, which was in the business of overthrowing irrational appeals to mere authority, found in capitalist entrepreneurs and an independent-minded bourgeoisie its favorite heroes. “I don’t know which is the more useful to the state,” Voltaire (the pen name of the French satirist François-Marie Arouet) speculated wickedly, “a well-powdered lord who knows precisely what time the king gets up in the morning and what time he goes to bed, and who gives himself airs of grandeur while playing the role of slave in a minister’s antechamber, or a great merchant who enriches his country, sends orders from his office to Surat and to Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world.” Joseph Addison was “wonderfully delighted” to see “the grand scene of business” among London’s merchants, “thriving in their own private fortunes, and at the same time promoting the public stock … by bringing into the country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous.” 15 The Enlightenment’s ideal social order would thus be a mix of mildly democratic republicanism
in the political realm and a free-market regime in the economic realm, a combination that became known through the early decades of the nineteenth century simply as liberalism.

  France liked to think of itself as the intellectual home of the Enlightenment, but (ironically, for American observers) enlightened French thinkers looked to Britain as their favorite model of a liberal society because there the monarchy’s reach was at its weakest in all of Europe, and its shopkeepers and entrepreneurs were at their most vigorous and unrestrained. “Commerce,” added Voltaire, “which has brought wealth to the citizenry of England, has helped to make them free, and freedom has developed commerce in its turn.” 16 British capitalists were also the most scientific, for it was the British who invented the technology (beginning with the steam engine) that turned the small-scale production of handmade goods and harvest-time services into industrial manufacturing.