CHAPTER XXII.

THE ALLIANCE OF NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN PRODUCERS.

In the foregoing chapter it has been shown how “slavery,” or the presence of the negro element in our midst, has given origin to the American idea of democracy—to more expanded and truthful conceptions of our true relations to each other—to mental habits which led Mr. Jefferson to promulgate the grand idea of equality in 1776—to make that great movement a revolution of ideas as well as a war of independence—to render the latter a mere preliminary for ushering in a new political system based on the equal rights of citizenship and the starting-point of a new civilization widely and radically different in its fundamental idea from anything ever before known in the political experience of mankind. It has been shown that Hamilton and Jefferson, the respective leaders and exponents of the opposing ideas and tendencies of the time, merely reflected the mental habits that belonged to the different social conditions then existing, or of the different constituencies which they represented, and after the great contest for independence which they passed through harmoniously was closed and a new system of government was to be created, that the ideas of Jefferson generally prevailed and the present government embodying these ideas was established.

It has been shown, moreover, that both of these great men and those who acted with them were equally honest and equally patriotic; that neither, nor any of them could rise above the level of opinion in their respective sections, for then they would no longer have been representative men or able to influence the people; that the opinions of Hamilton reflected the mental habits of the North which clung to the forms and spirit of the British system founded on artificial distinctions, while Jefferson, reflecting with equal fidelity the mental habits that originate in a different social condition—where a subordinate race is in juxtaposition—advocated a democratic system resting on the fixed and indestructible laws of nature. And in view of all these historical facts and inductive facts the conclusion was deemed irresistible that the presence of the negro element in our midst, the existence of a natural substratum in the social elements which thus secured the liberty of our own race—the legal and political equality of white men—was the happiest event or conjunction of circumstances that has ever happened in the history of mankind. But while the great northern leaders thus consented to the establishment of a democratic system they were driven on by their own tendencies as well as the mental habits of their people to neutralize its forces and to pervert its spirit. At that period suffrage was extremely limited, while the agricultural class in the Northern States—compared with the present—may be said to have been extremely ignorant.

The northern or federal party were thus enabled to get possession of the new government and to give it such direction as their opinions and interests doubtless seemed to demand. The President himself—the illustrious Washington—was without decided political convictions. His instincts and his family traditions, it is believed, inclined him in the direction of the northern party, while the local tendencies of opinion—the general mental habits of the Virginians to regard the distinctions of race as the legitimate basis of political order—generally restrained him, and in the mighty conflict of opinion kept him in a neutral position. He formed his cabinet out of wholly incongruous materials, made Jefferson Secretary of State, and Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury, and selecting other exponents of the conflicting opinions, sought to neutralize the contending forces by an equal selection of subordinates from the hostile camps.

The public credit, the restoration of commercial confidence was the first and most pressing want of the country as well as of the new government, and in this Hamilton found a pretext for adopting the British system of finance which he foresaw would enable his party to recover to a great extent the ground lost in the creation of the government, and in practice, whatever might be the theory entertained, restore it or closely approximate it to his darling model—that favorite British system which he and his associates believed to be an embodiment of political wisdom. The idea of the British aristocracy that government is an instrument designed for their benefit was deeply implanted in the northern mind, and is so still.

In England it is a practice which the idea has simply originated in. Official employments, pensions and special legislation or monopolies in England, embrace all or nearly all the ruling class, and therefore, the idea that government is established for their benefit necessarily follows. This idea of government is generally embraced by the northern mind even in our own times, and the habit of looking to this vast and beneficent power as the source of pecuniary benefits to the people, if not to a class, is almost universal among the northern people.

Hamilton, brought up under the British system, was deeply imbued with it, and, placed in power, it was natural enough that he and his associates should construe the Constitution in a way to give it effect. The state debts that were contracted for carrying on the war were assumed by the new government and formed a basis for a national bank which was soon established, and the rapid restoration of public credit that followed the restoration of public order and a settled society in a young and vigorous country was claimed by the federal writers as a proof of the wisdom of their policy and the extraordinary ability of their leader.

Mr. Jefferson opposed this policy from the beginning in all its aspects—the adoption of the British system of finance, the assumption of state debts, the creation of a national bank, in short, the entire programme of federal policy. He held with the state-rights democracy of our day, that the central government was a factitious and limited government, whose powers were derived, not from the collective people but from the people of the several or _United States_, that the Constitution should be literally construed, and the practice under it strictly confined to the plainly enumerated objects, and, therefore, that the creation of a national bank, assumption of state debts, etc., were unconstitutional in principle and dangerous in practice.

Hamilton and his party, on the contrary, held that the financial policy they adopted was not only the wisest that was possible under the circumstances, but that the consequences likely to follow—the consolidation of power and prestige of the central government—would be of the greatest possible value to the people. Indeed, the old contest between Massachusetts and Virginia—the conflict of ideas—the warfare of widely different mental habits which preceded and ushered in the government were renewed and accompanied by a bitterness of spirit quite unknown in the former case. Hamilton, impelled by the opinions of the North, assumed in practice, if not in theory always, that the central government sprung from the collective or the American people instead of the people of the States, and was almost unlimited in its powers, and he doubtless believed that the more extended its powers, the safer and more stable would become the country and the more prosperous the people. He had failed to obtain such a government as he especially desired—a government after the English model—republican in form but aristocratic in fact, a government based on those artificial distinctions which the mental habits of the North were accustomed to regard as the only safe foundation, and now in power, with the prestige of the great name of Washington to support his policy, he doubtless believed himself a patriot, and as performing vital service to his country and to posterity, when he thus construed the Constitution and consolidated the powers of the federal system.

Indeed, the fear of the people—of a reckless and disorderly multitude—was the abiding sentiment of the great northern leaders, and the consolidation, power, and grandeur of a central government that should restrain them was the object of all their efforts. Thus, the very objects the federalists aimed at—doubtless from patriotic motives, for there being no laws of primogeniture there was no permanent class to be benefited by their policy—were the very things that Mr. Jefferson and his friends contemplated as the greatest danger to the country. Hamilton desired to construe the Constitution in a way to build up an enormous central power that should hold in check the tendencies to disruption and disorder, while Jefferson believed that the greater the assumption and the consolidation of power in the federal system the greater the danger to the freedom of the States and to the people.

Or, in other words, the federalists believed that the more the central power was enlarged the greater the scope and strength of the federal government—the more certain were the States to be kept from disunion and the restless multitudes from anarchy, while Jefferson and his party believed that this assumption of power in the central government would result in the overthrow of the government itself if there was no other way of obtaining redress and of preserving on the part of the States and the people of the States the liberties which they fought for in 1776. Such was the great civil contest that sprung up under the administration of Washington, but which was constantly restrained by the presence of that great man, who, without any very decided leanings as regarded the parties to it, was, moreover, eminently practical and earnestly disposed to favor conciliation and peace rather than commit himself to the abstract opinions of either side. It was only, therefore, during the succeeding administration of Adams that this fundamental conflict of ideas—this conflict which involved the very foundations of government itself, and which, back of the immediate actors that figured in the scene, originated in the different mental habits that spring of necessity from different social conditions, reached its culmination and prepared the way for that final solution which the great civil revolution of 1800 afterwards accomplished.

The federalists, or, more properly, the centralists, had construed the Constitution in a way to make the government in practice substantially what they believed it should have been in theory. They had adopted the British system of finance, had created a national debt and a national bank, which, as in England, was to be the agency for the deposit and disbursement of the public revenue, and, from the necessities of the case, a vast and overshadowing monopoly which was to hold the credit of the States, and of every individual in the States, at its mercy. In fact, the States were rapidly sinking into mere dependencies and subject provinces of the vast and overshadowing power of the central government, which, not content with its usurpations over the States—tending, in practice, to almost obliterate the lines of State sovereignty—even sought to strike down the liberty of the individual citizen, and in its alien and sedition laws to exercise absolute powers. These laws authorized the president to imprison and punish citizens and others as his fears or caprices might dictate, with few, if any, greater safeguards for the citizen than in absolute governments of the Old World.

The federal party embodied the British idea of government, and their notions of liberty differed little, if any, from those of the mother country. _Liberty_ in England consists in the equal protection of person and property in an ordinary sense, but, as liberty, in fact, consists in an equal citizenship or an equal voice in the creation of laws that all are called on to obey, of course those who have no vote or voice in these laws are, to that extent, slaves. It was the policy of the federalists to limit this great natural right of suffrage, and in all the States where they were in the ascendency they sought to do so, as indeed was legitimate and consistent with their fundamental idea of government. Equally consistent and legitimate was their habit of expecting pecuniary benefits from government, for this, as has been said, was the practice in England, and the idea or theory that sprung from it was deeply engraved on the northern mind. While the federalists, therefore, sought to consolidate power in the hands of the federal government and to weaken the States, all the selfish and mercenary interests of the day were naturally attracted to a party whose public policy thus favored and invited their coöperation.

The conflict of labor and capital—the frightful antagonism between those whose labor produces all wealth and those who own the wealth produced by past generations of laborers—is at the bottom of all the revolutions and civil commotions of modern times, for it involves the whole subject of government, as well as all those mighty social evils which so disfigure and deform European society. In England this conflict has, in one sense, reached its utmost limit—while in another respect it may be said to be least active or less palpable than anywhere else.

The few who own the wealth produced by past generations are the wealthiest in the world, while the many who produce all the wealth of the present are undoubtedly the poorest!

_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.

These resolutions offered a common platform for the agricultural States—for the producing classes of all sections—for the masses, the millions, in short, for all men who believed in the American idea of government and demanded equal rights for all and favors for none.

Thus the Middle States, the great agricultural populations of the North, who, unaided and alone were powerless in the grasp of the federal party, led as that party was by the intellect, and sustained by the wealth and social prestige of the North, found themselves naturally allied with the agricultural populations of the South who were led by men quite the equals in general attainments, and vastly the superiors in political knowledge, of the great northern leaders. These men—Jefferson, Madison, George Clinton, and their associates—had already conquered in the great intellectual contest that had preceded the creation of the government, and though in the great battle now pending, the centralists occupied vantage ground, for their banks, state debts, and consolidated federal powers, attracted to their standards all the selfish interests and mercenary influences in the country, the former again carried the day, and in the great civil revolution of 1800 restored the government, as Mr. Jefferson expressed it, to “the republican tack.” This restoration of the federal government to its original purposes was surely second only to the revolution of 1776 in importance, and without it it is obvious that the fruits of the former must measurably have been lost. As has been seen, the northern masses were at that time wholly unable to contend with the opposing minority which embraced within its ranks the wealth, talent, education, and social influence of the day. And though largely in the majority as regards numbers, it was powerless even as regards physical force, for it was without leaders to direct its energies or to cope successfully with that brilliant array of able and accomplished civilians and soldiers that gathered about the administration and directed the councils of the federal party. If the rule of the federalists in the course of time became personally oppressive—if that personal “freedom” which in England permits the _subject_ to enjoy locomotion as he pleases and protects his person from violence were stricken down, then it may be supposed that the northern masses would have resisted, and, perhaps, in the progress of the future have overthrown such government.

But the government actually established by the federalists—by the false construction of the Constitution, and the usurpations in practice which would have kept the producing classes—the toiling millions—in the same or similar subjection to a ruling oligarchy, as is now witnessed in England, and which, in the course of time, would render them equally abject, poverty-stricken, ignorant, and miserable, would seem to be, in view of all the circumstances then existing, beyond their power to change or reform by a civil revolution like that which did occur in 1800, or to overthrow by the strong hand of physical force. The great civil revolution, therefore, when able and accomplished statesmen of the South, the equals in talent, and vastly superior to any class in Christendom in political knowledge, led the northern producing classes through the great conflict then pending, and overthrowing the centralists restored the government to its original purity and simplicity, must be deemed, as has been said, only second in importance to the great event of 1776.

And the social condition in the South, the so-called slavery, which invariably renders the southern planter the natural ally of the northern farmer, must be considered, as it obviously is in fact, the sole, or at all events the leading cause for the successful working of democratic institutions, as it was originally the sole and unquestionable cause that originated the great American idea of government embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Nor are the consequences of that condition of so-called slavery—the existence of a subordinate social element at the South which has thus, with more or less directness, worked out the equality, freedom, and happiness of the laboring classes of the North—limited to our own land or to our own people. As has been observed, the conflict of capital and labor is the great question of the day—the question that is at the bottom of all the European revolutions of modern times, and its solution must, of necessity, involve the destruction of every government now in existence except our own. _Capital_ in the old world has the education and intelligence as well as the government on its side against the people, and the simple fact that, in half of the American States, capital and labor are united, inseparable, and indissoluble, is of transcendent importance to the future liberation of the laboring millions of Europe.

Here—for the first time in the experience of the race—wealth, cultivation, and intellectual power are arrayed on the side of production and in defence of the rights of labor, not by a warfare on northern capital, as it is sometimes charged, but by demanding that government shall not legislate for the latter at the expense of the former. Nor is the subordinate element—the inferior race in our midst, which, in the providence of God has thus been made the mediate or immediate cause of such vast and boundless benefit to the freedom, progress, and well-being of the superior race—without participation in these benefits. God has designed all His creatures for happiness, and this happiness is always secured when they are in their true position, and in natural relations to each other; and when the condition of the negro is compared with his African state—the existing population with their African progenitors—then it is seen that the progress and happiness of the inferior has matched _pari passu_ with those of the superior race.