Against Barbarians 0826208045

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AGAINST THE BARBARIANS

and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes

M.E. BRADFORD _ University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright© 1992 by T he Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 96 95 94 93 92 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bradford, M. E. (Melvin E.), 1934Against the barbarians, and other reflections on familiar themes/ M. E. Bradford p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8262-0804-5 1. United States-Politics and government. 2. United States-Constitution-Signers-Biography. 3. Statesmen-United States-Biography. 4. Political science-United States-History. 5. American literature-History and criticism. I. Title. E183.B8 1992 973'. 0992-dc20 91-36259 CIP

et,A T his paper meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, 239.48, 1984.

Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: Connell-Zeko Type & Graphics Printer and Binder: T homson-Shore, Inc.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

IX

Introduction: All the Old Songs

1

I. SING CREATION 1. Against the Barbarians

7

2. A View from the Top of the Ridge: On the Literature of the American West

17

3. Recovering Simms and Others: The Literature of the Antebellum South

26

4. A Studied Myopia: Faulkner and the New Literary History

34

5. Donald Davidson and the Great House Tradition: A Reading of "Woodlands, 1956-1960"

41

6. The Festive Spirit of Andrew Lytle

48

7. Addie Bundren and the Design of As I Lay Dying

51

II. THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY 8. The Authoritative Constitution: A Reading of the Ratification Debates

59

Ill. FATHERS 9. Patrick Henry: The Trumpet Voice of Freedom

83

10. Samuel Chase:_The Maryland Vesuvius

100

11. "Light Horse Harry" Lee: A Forgotten Forefather

114

Vll

Vlll

CONTENTS

12. Rawlins Lowndes: Southern Prophet

128

13. Thomas Sumter: The Gamecock of South Carolina

139

14. James Iredell: An Old Whig in Edenton

146

15. Benjamin Harrison: The Nabob as Antifederalist

155

16. Samuel Adams: The Baleful Comet of Boston

160

17. John Sullivan: New Hampshire Soldier-Statesman

176

18. Eliphalet Dyer: An Uncertain Trumpet

183

19. Josiah Bartlett: The Physician as Statesman

192

20. Theodore Sedgwick: Intrepid High Federalist

198

21. Samuel Livermore: The Sage of Holderness

206

22. James Duane: Conservative Peacemaker

209

IVG AND THE WAR CAME 23. A Long Farewell to Union: The Southern Valedictories of 1860-1861

215

24. Poisoned at the Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Myth of Southern Liberalism

222

25. Lincoln and the Language of Hate and Fear

229

Notes

247

Index

265

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ''Against the Barbarians" was delivered as an address at Macal­ ester College in St. Paul, Minnesota on March 15, 1989 and then published in Humanitas 1 (Summer 1989): 1-6. ''A View from the Top of the Ridge: On the Literature of the American West" appeared in Chronicles 13 (February 1989): 43-47. "The Literature of the Ante­ bellum South" came out in the Sewanee Review 99 (Summer 1991): 483-90. ''A Studied Myopia: Faulkner and the New Literary His­ tory" was given before The Society for the Study of Southern Liter­ ature April 21, 1990 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and then first published in the Sewanee Review 99 (Winter 1991): 77-85. "Donald Davidson and the Great House Tradition: A Reading of 'Wood­ lands, 1956-1960' " appeared in The Vanderbilt Tradition: Essays in Honor of T homas Daniel Young, Mark Royden Winchell, ed., (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), pp. 84-91. "The Festive Spirit of Andrew Lytle" was published in The Chattahoochee Review 8 (Summer 1988): 28-30. ''Addie Bundren and the Design of As I Lay Dying" first appeared in Southern Review 6 (Fall 1970): 1093-99. "The Authoritative Constitution: A ·Reading of the Ratification Debates" was first published in the Texas Tech Law Review 21 (Fall 1990): 2349-74. "The Trumpet Voice of Freedom: Patrick Henry and the Southern Political Tradition" first appeared in Southern Partisan 8 (Summer 1988): 16-22. "Forgotten Forefather: 'Light Horse Harry Lee' " was originally published in the Southern Partisan 6 (Spring 1986): 40-45. "The Maryland Vesuvius: The Politics of Samuel Chase" first came out in the Southern Partisan 6 (Spring 1986): 40-45. "With No Love for Innovation: The Prophetic Politics of Rawlins Lowndes" was published in Southern Partisan 7 (Spring, 1987): 33-37. "The 'Game­ cock' of South Carolina," was originally issued by the Southern Partisan 6 (Fall 1986) and 7 (Winter 1987): 41-44. ''An Old Whig in Edenton: The Transformation of James Iredell," first appeared in lX

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Southern Partisan 9 (Fall 1989): 39-43. "The Nabob as Antifederalist: Benjamin Harrison of Virginia" was first printed in the Southern Partisan 7 (Summer 1987): 38-39. "The Baleful Comet of Boston: Samuel Adams and the Puritan Republic" was first published in Intercollegiate Review 22 (Spring 1987): 47-57. 'J\t the Center of the Storm: John Sullivan of New Hampshire" came out in Intercollegiate Review 26 (Spring 1991): 3539. "Free But Not Equal: James Duane of New York" was first pub­ lished in Continuity 15 (Spring/Fall 1991). "High Federalist Teaching: Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts" first appeared in Intercollegiate Review 25 (Spring 1990): 31-37. 'J\ Long Farewell to Union: The Southern Valedictories, 18601861" was given as an address on June 3, 1986 at Arlington Ceme­ tery on the occasion of President Jefferson Davis's birthday and then was published in Southern Partisan 8 (Winter 1989): 19-23. "Poisoned at the Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Myth of Southern Liberalism" was first published in Chronicles 14 (July 1990): 31-34. "Lincoln and the Language of Hate and Fear" first appeared in Continuity Number 9 (Fall 1984): 87-108. Each of these essays is reprinted in this book with permission of the magazine in which it first appeared. The essays here included from the Sewanee Revie1v, Volume 99, were copyrighted by the University of the South and are reprinted vvith permission of the editor. Further, the author acknowledges the advice and assistance of many of the librarians of the University of Dallas, the Maryland Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Cecilia Rodriguez, Chilton Williamson, Tom Landess, Greg Wolfe, Mark Winchell, Michael Kreyling, George Core, Tom Fleming, Andrew Lytle, Rus Walton, Charles Hamel, Jim McClellan, Clyde Wilson, my son, Douglas, and my wife, Marie. The author also wishes to acknowledge the encouragement of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the officers of Garvon, Inc.

AGAINST THE BARBARIANS

INTRODUCTION ALL THE OLD SONGS These twenty-five essays emphasize what are, for those ac­ quainted with my work, familiar questions-issues which have been the reiterative focus of my intellectual energy since I began to write seriously about American literature, political theory, and pub­ lic life. In this book I return to a long-standing preoccupation with the distinctive qualities of an endemic American rhetoric and to the way that rhetoric has shaped our common relations. For how we speak about our corporate identity, the way we organize and em­ ploy the imaginative evidence we generate together, is one measure of what we have become. By the hallmarks of this rhetoric, the truth about our collective cultural purposes, our will-to-be, is rendered in discursive terms, drawn out of myth and the strategies of an indi­ rect, ambiguous language. Or at least some of these creative inten­ tions are made visible. In these pages I also discourse on Southern letters in general and on the work of specific Southern writers-Simms, Poe, Timrod, Faulkner, Davidson, and Lytle; in addition, I have vented my on­ going concern with the deplorable ignorance and undervaluation of the literature of the American West. A project which began with the composition of brief political biographies of the Framers of the United States Constitution-the creation of a composite image of that group-has now been expanded to include sketches of the lead­ ing figures in the state ratification conventions that gave to the document the force of law. This emphasis on the origins of the Constitution and the imagining of an American future led to a study of a very different, Southern rhetoric, and a related focus on the public persona of President Lyndon Johnson. W hat I think about Lincoln-and his Southern opposition-has, of course, been a recurrent theme in my writing since 1975. Lest anyone imagine that I have changed my mind about the Great Emancipator and the 1

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art which he employed to remake the Republic into something other than what the Framers left to the keeping of their posterity, I con­ clude this book with a commentary on one segment of Lincoln's oratorical achievement. How, even in the last five years, these old and well-tested themes have continued to be my subjects, and why they have worked together to reinforce one another in the concrete and deliberate unfolding of reflections on particular texts and authors might be questions for any interested observer. Considered separately, both my materials and their treatment may appear only remotely con­ nected. But a confirmed resistance to the besetting delusions of our time links these writings. In any case, my impatience with such nostrums has certainly not abated. Therefore I persist. Most of these essays have been written since 1985 though, apart from a certain relaxation of manner, they resemble earlier work. Even so, in the creation of this book, I reject all merely circumstan­ tial explanations of my handiwork. Instead, I prefer to believe that I have returned to established concerns out of a kind of principle­ though not as philosophes use that term: I do so because my early impressions of which disputes are intellectually important have been confirmed and reinforced. The biographical sketches which are the backbone of this volume are additions to the set of brief political biographies gathered in A Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitu­ tion. I offer here sections of a work still in progress. Like the earlier ones, many of these recent sketches examine figures who illuminate an essentially customary culture at the beginning of our national experience: men who rejected a priori generalizations concerning politics; who questioned also the "positive good" of revolution; and who were suspicious of attempts to renovate society through the application of natural rights theory by a vigorous national power. Instead, they illustrate the uniqueness of the America that achieved independence in 1783, the extent to which our liberties are rooted in our history, place, and time, and secured at a price, paid for in the blood and suffering of the Revolution and in the colonial struggle to establish a civilized community on these shores. In view of my long-standing reservations about all notions of generic human equal­ ity and ideologically motivated political experimentation, it is not surprising that I should write about these exemplary men. Some, however, are negative examples, interesting on the same theoretical grounds as are their less opportunistic, less statist or populist ad­ versaries. Another persistent theme in these sketches is that of

INTRODUCTION

3

judgment balanced by intrepid resolve, the determination to live free and to secure that freedom to an always vulnerable posterity. This quality of character is rendered in the lives of most of the Framers. The language of such politics as spoken by these men is always of protection for what is, not of creation of what, as yet, is not. My conclusion (which grows stronger as I continue to work on the series) is that the discourse of ancestral virtue in the old patriotic orations was not exaggerated or mistaken. Going beyond biogra­ ph y, other proof of such preservative rectitude appears in the his­ tory of the ratification debates themselves and in the rhetoric which informed these deliberations. My commentary on the total process of ratification is an extension of earlier published work on the rhet­ oric of the Great Convention and on various state ratification con­ ventions. It is also related to readings of Lincoln's orations, of the Declara­ tion of Independence and of assorted laws and addresses. The same is true of the discussion of the farewell speeches of Southern leaders who left Washington in the winter of 1860-1861, included in this volume and linked with concluding remarks on the shift in Lin­ coln's language as he gave up his identity as cautious Whig. I interpret these texts as a rhetorician, with a sense of what was given and axiomatic in the context of their first appearance: read them as I read the career of Lyndon Johnson. By what the Framers spoke of as experience (as opposed to disembodied, detached reason) the growth of our culture can be explained. This is as true of its literary character as of its political-or of its legal or economic, religious or social self-realization. I argue to that effect in the opening essay and in the discussions of Southern and Western literature. Four of these essays concern literary �istor y, which in these days is fiercely disputed territory; only two are, in the strict sense, liter­ ary criticism. The brief comment on Andrew Lytle is a familiar essay. The emphasis here reflects the contemporary preoccupation with theory. It is a shift with which I am obviously out of sympathy. But I also discuss particular writers, some of whom have occupied my attention over the years. Furthermore, my commitment to the ancient tradition of liberal learning has been visible in the practice of my vocation since 1957. That I should defend that commitment with reference to the contemporary passion for canon revision, the anach­ ronistic rejection of literature as tradition because of the gender, race, and social role, of its authors, is a natural development. Wide­ spread indifference to antebellum Southern writing and to the liter­ ature of the American West proceeded from the same assumptions

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and habits of mind that led to the misinterpretation and willful distortion of the later poetry of Davidson, or of Faulkner's nar­ ratives of chivalric perseverance, and to the politicized conception of action as the determinant of form in poetry-the concept of form as a tool of bourgeois aggression in the study of serious letters. Marxist literary history, when tested against specific literary texts with unmistakable generic, structural characteristics, continues to be little more than an effort to "give to airy nothings a local habita­ tion and a name." I will think better of it only when I am shown better results qua practical criticism. What these pages maintain with some insistence is that a serious malady now infects the standard approaches to most of the subjects confronted here and that by attempting to produce specifics for such an epidemic infection, I have written of seemingly various but closely connected things. A general view of the world not wide­ spread in 1800-an attitude including scientism, positivism, melior­ ism, and irreligion-is now established among us as an orthodoxy. As a stipulated antagonist, this view has the merit of lending shape and proportion, order and force to what I have to say concerning the best and oldest authorities, in behalf of traditions literary, politi­ cal, and other. For it is the rhetorician's sense of which subjects are closed ( or closing) questions that persuades him to raise those sub­ jects only by indirection-and to use all of his arts to prevent such closure, especially when error is to be dignified with the status of axiom should he fail. The hope of con£ ranting this confusion wher­ ever I encounter its manifestations has been sufficient cause to make me write, and shall continue to be, as God permits.

I. SING CREATION (Bede, 4.25)

1 AGAINST THE BARBARIANS My concern on this occasion is with the relentless attack now being made within the academy on the long and well-established role of humane letters-the humanities, understood broadly-in attending to the intellectual formation and instruction of young American men and women. This attack is designed to discredit among us all the forms of nurturing customarily associated with humane learning. Below the college level, it is reflected in the choice of texts and the planning of curricula for the secondary schools. At the college level, it involves these choices and many others. It is nihilistic in method and (at least to begin with) nihilistic in purpose, animated by a virulent hatred for the regime which inexplicably tolerates its tendentious excesses and patiently considers its few legitimate suggestions. In sum, it is a root-and-branch critique of Western culture in all of its manifestations: a critique which looks primarily to discredit the means by which contemporary custo­ dians of that culture set out to perpetu�te it and the sedimentary process by which it was formed. With such purposes it is difficult for representatives of that culture to compromise, make armistice, or even coexist. My awareness of this drift toward confrontation comes primarily from years of paying close attention to the conversation within my own discipline, an exchange concerning which texts are a necessary part of any reputable version of a liberal education. But this discus­ sion of the canon of time-tested and well-respected books, ques­ tions, and approaches is replicated in all of the fields customarily associated with the study of literature, and therefore is definitive of what we mean by the creation of fully educated persons"-by the transmission of civilization" as a habit of thought embodied in a durable curiosity and a set of texts: what we ordinarily contrast to II

11

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mere training in various skills. It is a vital issue in the field of pedagogy, in exchanges between prescriptive teachers and aspiring reformers, in the study of "cultural self-perpetuation" and "cultural repression" by the sociologists. It has power over what is fashion­ able in history, political science, and classics, and is even more influential in the rationalization of contemporary literary theory at its outermost fringes. We read about the subject in the press, learn of its impact on the meeting of editorial boards and the making of appointments to faculty, and observe its purchase on the architects of cultural policy. In all of these manifestations of cultural rebellion, anarchy holds sway, confusion of terms and of ends: and especially theoretical confusion about the nature of the educational process, the extent to which it embodies the experience of an entire civiliza­ tion and its natural impulse to sustain itself through the generations by reproducing its finest products, literate men and women. For those who reject that civilization as hostile to their dream of self­ realization, as conducive to the perpetuation of a wicked world, one in which talk of merit and achievement, of intelligence and rational distinction means primarily an indifference to the pure doctrine of equality, disrespect for ordinary humanity and the pretensions of class, race, and sex, the canon is a hostile structure, to be pulled down as soon as possible. Within the academy the number of those thus disposed is large and growing. Yet few outside the university recognize where this development is tending or how swiftly it makes its way. The source of most of this upheaval is essentially political in character, and emerges directly from the preoccupations of public persons, writers, and other authorities who follow an agenda which puts other concerns ahead of the integrity of the various disciplines which are a part of the humanities. Since the 1960s, the "new wave" figures in all of these fields-the social historian, the specialist in linguistics, the feminist professor of Greek, the Marxist literary historian, and the director of programs in black studies-have had in common an interest in revisionist or ostensibly neglected texts central to their idee fixe, books which have a purely instrumental potential: a usefulness in promoting causes which are more impor­ tant to them than the proper understanding of French agricultural history or the lives of the poets, Greek drama or the generic origins of the free ode. A postulate of their argument is, of course, that history can be abstracted from any notion of a "usable past, " that political traditions are a scam, that (in the language of Frank Len­ tricchia) "Literature is inherently nothing; or it is a body of rhe-

AGAINST THE BARBARIANS

9

torical strategies waiting to be seized." Or that whatever literature might be, the criticism of it is a matter of personal perception rationalized after-the-fact in the creation of a theory to account for an act of judgment. Moreover, the language of criticism itself, like all other evaluative speech-indeed, like all communication-in retain­ ing its problematical character, is in1precise in its capacity to carry the meanings we customarily attach to it. Lentricchia is a Marxist litterateur. Like Frederic Jameson, Robert Weimann, Richard Ohmann, and Terry Eagleton, he has great diffi­ culty in distinguishing serious literature from rhetoric and a pro­ found hatred for everything that cannot be made to work toward the creation of the "new man" of the familiar Marxist mythology. It is his assumption that "form is a relationship of manipulation be­ tween a text and its audience-a relationship in which power is, in the same moment, given both its birth and its point of application." Since great literature has "no inherent meaning, no universal sig­ nificance, " it is also the task of the new school academics "to appro­ priate the traditional text for the goals of revolutionary change, to bring out its politically activist material." To something like this thesis, many feminist and black scholars, without necessarily em­ bracing the rest of Marxist teaching, give assent: accept it out of concern for their own group's social and political agenda, but not out of respect for the integrity of cultural history, political thought or literary criticism-all of which are, in their view, varieties of inquiry important primarily in their partisan potentiality, and not in their own right. Aesthetic definitions and talk of intellectual stan­ dards are "nostalgic gestures toward that long [ago] dissolved con­ sensus about what an educated person should know." As a young professor at Duke has approvingly observed, "Students are not taught there is such a thing as literary excellence . . . [We] are throwing o�t the notion of good and bad [art or scholarship], or ignoring it." Or rather, replacing it with another, social conception of those issues. In the process the long-accepted standard reading lists are reexamined as instances of a "much broader social strategy on the part of a professional-managerial class": in the idiom of Michael Foucalt, as "powergrabs" by the bourgeoisie; in so far as they can be understood by the New Historicism, as "acts of oppres­ sion" which serve "to conceal the real workings of society from those most hurt by it." At the center of this movement to credential a new list of "classics" with the "right political implications, " in the phrase of David Brooks in T he Wall Street Journal, "to open the curriculum without regard to literary quality, " is the endless task of

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"canon revision"-a process initiated by an equally interminable labor of "canon criticism, " what the French call ressentiment-a radi­ cal rejection of the world as it is, one brought on by anger at what is "given" in both the historical and ontological sense of that term. When the fashionable new style of discourse concerning cultural and literary theory is not, as with the arguments just summarized, directly political in its origin, it is at least prepolitical in its effects: deconstructive of what Yeats calls "monuments of unaging intel­ lect, " such icons of culture as cart be expected to shape the future of a civilization as they define its past. The machinery for this solip­ sistic and self-reflective analysis is linguistic and anthropological­ from De Saussure, Jacobson and Levi-Strauss. The post-structur­ alists who practice deconstruction are critics of consciousness, fol­ lowers of the philosophers of language who now dominate that discipline. For them any construct of words is a self-enclosed sys­ tem, and speculative criticism set in motion by inhabiting such a system is the highest form of creativity. In denying the validity of a distinction between literature and other kinds of writing intended only to inform or persuade they thunder, "There is nothing but the text!", a statement meaning just the opposite of what it says. But the substance of their labor is only theory piled upon theory, the criti­ cism of criticism, a subjective activity which cannot reach beyond the conclusion that the role which it attempts to perform in society is an impossible one: out beyond glib ingenuity joined to arrogance and the glorification of ignorance, mere nihilism of a very elaborate kind. As a way of knowing, this critical method is obfuscatory, insisting that, in the tentative creation of meaning where nothing of the kind has existed, it is more important than the documents which it refuses to treat with ordinary expository modesty. Obfus­ catory, as is the critique of historical analysis, and the culture of cultural history. In these exercises there is nothing but opinion and fatuous irrationalism, an infinite regression perversely contrived on principle, plunging into the abyss of the imperial self, where bright Alice sits behind the looking glass and knows. To all such trendy nonsense, practiced humanists should be able to respond that they recognize the rootedness of discursive lan­ guage, the problem of how subject relates to object, the link be­ tween perception and projection. In particular, rhetoricians know that most human choices are made on balance, without anything more than a reasonable preponderance of evidence to support going in one direction and refusing to go in another. In their company, to prove uncertainty is to prove nothing. Most of them (and most

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expository critics of literature) would concede that no critical de­ scription of the form of any serious imaginative creation is commen­ surate with the experience which it attempts to render.This much may be granted. The form, the achieved design, the interior action of any text is also an argument, as are its verbal texture, its style­ and our account of both. Granted, once again. But to make such concessions is not to agree that no one account of structure-and therefore of meaning-is, in reason, more persuasive and valuable than any other; or to give way to a willful and arbitrary spirit which insists that the critic must have complete liberty qua license and that his only obligation is not "to mean" but merely "to be": the spirit summarized by Geoffrey Hartman when he asserts that "literary humanism is dead" and then expands upon that judgment by insist­ ing that "given our present sense of the momentum in science, in politics, in the psyche-totalitarian terror, atomic terror, and Freud's hypothesis of an instinctual drive into death-given all these types of holocaust, it is hard to maintain the humanist's faith in the per­ son...." Or his faith in the efficacy of choice. Post-structuralism and social determinism create terrible prob­ lems for those who would defend the value of literary, historical, and philosophical studies in a post-industrial, democratic society. These formulations generate an "artificial reality" which stands between the student or scholar and the open experience of a subject. But Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J.Hillis Miller, Roland Barthes, and Jonathan Culler have not produced a calculus more distortive or abstract in its misunderstanding of the imitation of nature or the operations of creativity than what has also flourished by their side in theories of the repression of the artist by his inherited cul­ ture or of the "anxiety of influence." From Edmund Wilson to Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling to Harold Bloom, psychological reductionism has searched for the grain of discontent in the poet as oyster and oversimplified all of the literature it touched in the process-just as psychobiography reduces to behavioral explanations the lives it examines and social history makes something automatic and imper­ sonal out of the records of nations.And this is to say nothing of the "straitjackets" of gender and race-which resemble nothing so much as bygone religious zealotry in their impact on the world of letters. Alienation is a self-defeating formula in the study of any high cul­ ture, one which precludes taking seriously the idea of human re­ sponsibility which defines Western civilization. To contend that there is no truth to be maintained about literature (and no truth rendered by it), or that poetry is merely a reflection of

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compulsion or mania or economic forces is to propose a system in the study of the humanities that is, in our time, difficult to answer. Furthermore, the same may be said about deterministic schema for the reading of history as a mass phenomena, and of politics as mere manipulation. For there can be no rational response to the errors of judgment and analysis made by persons who have absolutely no respect for the evidence of reason. Young people who have been taught to distrust all authority as a deception recently exposed­ who have experienced too much change to believe in permanence­ agree easily that nothing can be taught or learned. They gravitate naturally toward responses to reading and information that search only after relevance-often an anachronistic or far-fetched connec­ tion to the tendentious and/ or topical concerns of a particular politi­ cal subculture. For them reading and interpretation are merely private acts about which almost nothing can be communicated-a communion in rejection of their culture as it has been and of its would­ be preservers, a rejection of legitimate authority. The nature, mean­ ing, and purpose of education in the humanities cannot be under­ stood on the basis of these presuppositions. To confront the impasse created by this explosion of cultural theory requires the creation of a better account of how the contents of the canon came to be included there, of the reasons for adding to or demoting within the canonical list, for interpreting these compo­ nents on their own terms, in relation to one another and against a background of the milieu in which they were generated, requires also that such components be considered in their relation to the revealed truths of a religion. That the canon is a living force which has a history of its own and a capacity to impact upon what is said and written today-even if it is against the canon-must also be recalled, as it was half a century ago in Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To indulge discussion of the canon by its ene­ mies while ignoring such evidence is to neglect the educators' his­ toric task of communicating to posterity a society's understanding of itself, both as it is and as it would like to be. It is to be guilty of what Allen Tate called "provincialism in time." The grounds upon which we refuse to make such a mistake need now forcefully and without compromise to be declared, regardless of the antagonistic spirit of the age: so asserted unless we are prepared to retreat into the barbarism where as children we all begin. The Western tradition in humane letters, in political theory, his­ tory, and literature avoids the vanity of glorifying the judgment of one particular generation, and most especially if that contemporary judgment instructs the educator that his task is not transmission but

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rather animadversion upon the present order of things.To relearn, on grounds that are universal and topical (presently persuasive) that our culture is a universe of discourse which conditionally vali­ dates a set of assumptions or questions in company with the best available answers about man's permanent nature and place in the creation, is to be free of the merely political, manipulative view of education.It is further to see in our intellectual patrimony an iden­ tity with the best of human effort-an aristocracy of judgment and discriminating choice, of liberty in the power of languages of which our country will always have need if (as Mr.Jefferson insisted) our institutions as a free society are to be preserved.This inheritance, of course, can be communicated only to those who will receive it, and only on the condition that the honored dead who formed and shaped that legacy continue to be given a vote where questions of preservation are at issue: or rather, where the issue is either whether it shall continue or what it shall contain. Within these limits we should acknowledge that the canon is flexible.But not otherwise. Within these limits, out of a history of its accomplishments and origins, out of the very different history of its adversaries, we must restate the case in its behalf, especially to those young people who have not yet made alienation into a matter of principle. First of all, the argument employed to discredit the process by which liberal learning has come down to us from Erasmus, Colet, and More must be disinterestedly reported and its incidental merits recognized; then it must be criticized without timidity and compro­ mised defensiveness where it is inaccurate, unreasonable, beside the question, and theoretically shallow.Finally an alternative the­ ory, illustrated out of persuasive working examples, must be con­ structed: a theory which functions well inside the verbal context created by all of this negative commen'tary on canon formation, confronting it honestly but without conceding so much to its ideo­ logical sources and justification as have recent apologies for the "funded wisdom" of the tradition.We can recognize a lack of so­ phistication and intellectual rigor on the part of many of these timid defenders of our inheritance in what Burke called "the bank and capital of the ages." Now is the time for confronting and rejecting the motives behind the generic, root-and-branch attacks on the canon and the cultural tradition embodied there.For if all canons are "the epiphenomena of a critical theory, " we should be able to state a theory of our own, given the record our version of the tradition has made in the history of civilized man, and the pedigree it can display. Of course in philosophy there are traditional courses defined by

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the subdivisions of the subject. And from rhetoric and history we learn to examine in context all discourse concerning the perennial questions, realizing that the particular evidence we are considering reaches toward universal significance out of a firm grounding in the concrete, "messy" details of human experience. We reason at our best when we keep dialectics to a minimum and treat no artifact made of words as if it were a dish served up to the gods. Even so, in the long intellectual history of Western man we have, in a corporate way, by trial and error (and by brilliant flashes of individual insight), discovered that certain documents speak more persistently to dura­ ble human concerns, issues important to us because we are human beings, than do any others. From the time of Homer, Hesiod, and the Greek historians, the canon of Western classics has been dis­ covered in the same way that old-fashioned British judges "found the law." Aeschylus asks us why men presume against the gods, and at what cost. Homer asks why men will risk their lives, and what home means to mortal men and women who wish to fulfill their nature. Moreover, along with Herodotus, Homer asks what it means to be Greek and a man of the West, as opposed to Trojan (Persian) and Asiatic, as does Xenophon in T he Anabasis. This is why the little book of the march of the 10,000 was cherished-why it was the first reading in Greek for schoolboys down to the time of my father's education in a small academy in Tennessee. W hat the boys learned of Cicero and Xenophon at Hall Moody's school would have made sense to the Renaissance hun1anists; and not only in classics, but also in British literature and British and American history, civics or government, and Friday "declamations." Each of the great texts considered in this tradition was a locus of meanings gathered in upon it by usage and also part of a great conversation going on between itself and other texts of equivalent importance-a conversation which became as much a part of the tradition as the text itself: a conversation of interest to all manner of men by reason of their generic humanity, regardless of their lesser identities-even though these are also part of us, by nature. And what I say of Greeks (who are not so much my favorites as Romans) might also be said of those who came after them, and after the sons of Abraham­ and about others who stood on those mighty shoulders. Thus, in conclusion I maintain that, regardless of how we re­ spond to it, the great tradition of Western learning is. Our presence here in considering its merits and shortcomings, friends and ene­ mies, specifies that it exists. Indeed, it is the only imaginable con­ text for that deliberation, as conducted on civil and disinterested

AGAINST THE BARBARIANS

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terms. The alternative approach, as set in action by the essentially political spirit of canon reformation, is the dismemberment of the university as we have known it into a set of professional courses supplemented by a set of mutually exclusive cultural curricula, each designed to reinforce some "group identity"-with "group" here signifying providential distinctions such as age, race, and gender, or certain cultural boundaries brought into being by history, lan­ guage, and lifestyle. This approach seems to be a species of affirma­ tive action conducted by reference to origin in the handling of books and ideas-respectful toward a few items from each source, regard­ less of intrinsic merit. On the principle advanced by the most mind­ less of curriculum reformers such as insist on "quota" representa­ tion of texts, approaches, and issues of particular interest to their subculture, flattering to its self-importance apart from any question of achievement, the life of the mind as we have known it for 2,500 years disperses into little sectarian seminaries: establishments like those frequented by the disciples of the Ayatollah near Qom. Soon thereafter, all conversation comes to a conclusion, leaving intact only a little scope for shouting, imprecations, and threats. Beyond these gestures, as Allen Tate observed, "there is more in killing than in commentary." At this point we confront a paradox. If the peoples of Northern Europe in the time of Charlemagne had said (as do now the ingrate beneficiaries of a rich and established culture not made by their own forebears), "W hat have I to do with Rome and Athens and Jerusa­ lem?"; if they had asked, "W hy should I consider the handiwork, the thoughts, of these swarthy fellows who resemble me in almost nothing?" , then the modern history of Europe would have been a very different matter than what we have seen, and the power of societies organized by persons of North ·European descent a thing of no importance. The framework of patient interest in and atten­ tion to seemingly outrageous opinions which gives a hearing to the would-be reformer of curricula, the reviser of canons made up of intellectually unavoidable and universally valued texts-and of the larger network of commentary gathered around and between them­ is one created by those texts, those questions, that commentary. If we assumed that nothing but power counted, in the end we, the sensible majority of educated men and women, would not allow the proponents of radical cultural theory a place in our fragile univer­ sities. But we are pqtient. And we also agree with the old theory that frontier wars with the aborigines and punitive expeditions against savages are necessary to the preparation of warriors before

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the great contest comes, giving them a sense of their vocation, an awareness of the dangers faced by and the value of what they agree to in theory and stand ready to defend and perform by custom, out of respect for ancient authority. But once the agenda of the enemy is identified as a plan to destroy our civilization within its citadels, once the implacability of their hostility to the permanent things is recognized for what it is, the time for patience is at an end. At that moment our duty is to expel those enemies, to leave them in a context of their own making, there to vex one another without any more "darkening counsel" within "the precincts of light."

2 A VIEW FROM THE TOP OF THE RIDGE On the Literature of the American West For the last several weeks, working at a leisurely pace, I have been reading through the new and extremely ambitious Columbia Literary History of the United States. 1 This is a huge work, one which has many merits and aspires to be inclusive. Indeed, it is a conscious attempt to practice all the multifaceted techniques associated with the "new literary history"-a generous mix of interpretive strategies. But in one respect it offers nothing more than a slight modification of a familiar sectional myopia, the tendency of the Northeast to confuse itself with the rest of the country-to take its own peculiar taste too seriously. For in the 1, 263 pages of this history, nothing is said about the literature of the American West. All that we find to break such silence is a chapter on Mexican-American writers (included for the sake of ethnic diversity) and a little praise for the Kiowa poet and novelist, M. Scott Momaday-these concessions to group sensitivity, with the brief comment that the West is '� not a region" but rather an expectation, "all future and mobility." Such a turning away from the overwhelming proof that a corpus of serious literature, distinguished both by subject and by relation to a specific scene, exists and makes fair to flourish, sustaining its own traditions, is difficult to explain. That is, unless we remember the arrogance of the New YorJ< -:ultural establishment: a blindness found even beyond the Metrupolis in its academic outposts-in the accounts of fashionable historians and critics who reluctantly ac­ knowledge the regional particularity of a Southern literature or the distinctive inheritance of New England authors performing in a con­ scious sequence over the course of more than three hundred years, but doubt that anything Western should command their attention. 17

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All of this omission functions as if to say that there is something wrong with the Western milieu itself, that it is essentially melodra­ matic or vulgar, suitable only to cinematic, stylized treatment but not a context for serious imaginative creation as defined in most literate communities. However, the scholars who have assembled the Columbia Literary History do nothing that their predecessors in explaining the cultural record of the United States have not done before them-going back even to the beginnings, to narratives of early exploration and settlement which evade or distort these- expe­ riences by seeing them through European eyes. For a literature of pure and unmixed possibility, one which assumes as axiomatic the significance of individual human free agency while at the same time unfolding its characteristic action within a framework which posits the force and value of nature as a reality independent of man, has always been a literature which made the inheritors of European Enlightenment culture very uneasy. Spokesmen for either the highly refined or the deracinated versions of the "Republic of Letters" do not easily perceive the essentially American events, those which embody the archetype of going outward and then returning: a pattern of hard pastoral which includes in homecoming a distillation of the truth-to-self experienced while far away. The explanation of this estrangement of interpreters from their subject matter, of Cam­ bridge, Morningside Heights, and New Haven from Durango, Chey­ enne, and Salt Lake City, is an appropriate point of departure for any contemporary commentary on Western American literature. The primal difficulty in commenting upon the literature of wester­ ing out of a background in other British and American writing is that a corporate myth informs most of the texts which locate their central action either in a European setting or in the American settlements east of the frontier. Western American literature contains no such corporate myth, no sense of collective purpose beyond a desire to continue in the Western setting, to define oneself (even if that definition is part familial or communal) outside the social bond, in a context where institutions do not completely mediate one's inter­ change with a Creation that is beyond one's control, antecedent to one's relation to it-a priori, numinous and "other." New England as such had no beckoning West, only a dark forest to be cut down and subdued, according to a mythos derived from the Old Testament and conveniently summarized in Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." The New England sense of mission rests on a myth of covenant and of a special relation to the Deity. The region's sense of itself as a "second Israel," of its redemptive

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errand into the wilderness by means of which human history might be transformed, of the zealous labors of God's elect, has been well and thoroughly described in a body of distinguished scholarship, beginning with the studies of Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Mil­ ler and reaching fulfillment in the most recent writings of Edmund Morgan, Ernest Lee Tuveson, and Sacvan Bercovitch. The typology involved in contemplating the prospect of " a city on the hill" is well known and requires no supplemental interpretation on this occasion. The Southern corporate myth is another matter­ one I have attempted to describe in the opening chapters of my Generations of the Faithful Heart. 2 For the South was an England transplanted, not a Protestant Zion-a relocation and modification on these shores of a beloved but mortal inheritance, not an attempt to leap backward or forward into "sacred time." Southern writers (from T he Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia and Michael Drayton to Donald Davidson and Allen Tate) often specify their commitment to this version of the American enterprise with allu­ sions to Virgil's vision of Rome as a second Troy. The myth of the middle colonies, of Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York-a prem­ ise or ground epitomized in the genial figure (and Autobiography) of Benjamin Franklin, and in the stories of that busy young fellow, Horatio Alger-also has its collective characteristics: f asters these as an inherited "way," even though that habitus implies in its essence a vision of unrestrained private ambition. It envisages a world held together by trade, sustained by commercial law-and by the kind of amity that is generated by mutually profitable commercial exchange. This is the dream of Adam Smith and of the Scottish Enlighten­ ment, broadly understood-though Federalists/Whigs/Republicans may give to it a slightly more mercantilist, centralizing flavor. The point to be made out of these alternative American models is that the characteristic action of westering (which is now subsumed in the literature of our Western states, where westering has been institutionalized in an established way of life) is distinguished be­ cause it is accomplished without the support of any such inclusive image of group purpose. Though it may presuppose recollections/ expectations of a corporate framework, of a Dixie to go home to "when the work's all done next fall" (as in the old cowboy ballad), or of a desire to create and embody such a locus, one which will leave truculent Western integrity intact yet still locate for the wanderer a place of repose, the journey in the literature of the West is not (except with the Mormons) undertaken in order to nourish such an ambitious matrix. In spirit, Western American literature affirms a

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measure of civilization as an end in itself but refuses to attach to that commitment a larger telos, one which would require an attempt to "conquer" or subdue the setting within which such enclaves of civilization are contained. From Ticonderoga (Kenneth Roberts), Cooperstown (James Feni­ more Cooper), Watauga Old Fields (Caroline Gordon), and the Natchez Trace (Madison Jones, Robert Penn Warren), the setting of the literature of the frontier has drifted beyond settled boundaries to the Ohio of Conrad Richter, to St. Joseph and the anchor of Parkman's Oregon Trail, and to the open spaces of North Dakota described in Theodore Roosevelt's Ranch Life and remembered in the writing of T he Winning of the West. Through all of this unfolding, the setting shifted but the subject did not change . And when finally connected to the deserts, plains, and mountains of what is now the West, when a little "domesticated" by settlement of the last empty spaces, by the coming of a "bride" to Yellow Sky ( as in Crane's classic story), Western literature did not give up the identity it had achieved as a chronicle of men and women finding their way out­ side what Leo Marx has called "the cultivated garden." Internaliz­ ing the sense of sacred space, of search and encounter in and with wilderness (wild places and wild men), preserving in memory a heritage of westering which resolves finally into many different genres (romance, heroic narrative, comedy, meditation/memoir, lyric celebration, and other forms), affirming the value of individual choice and of a certain peace with providential things not to be remade, avoided or pushed to the edge of consciousness, the makers of this literature have found a path of their own. They tell of local inhabita­ tion without any loss of the capacity for self-rejuvenation just be­ yond the limits; of a civil life on a dramatic scale, a life that is conducted with a zest no longer possible in the crowded places where such memories no longer function in individual experience . This is of course a broad synthetic statement about a considerable volume of American writing, one which can be disputed easily with reference to specific features of specific Western books . But it is also generally supported by the fiction of the major Western novelists, by some poetr y, prose pastoral, Plutarchian biography, old-fash­ ioned "narrative histor y, " and a special sort of travel literature . I make my case here out of the handiwork of the novelists because their achievement is at the center of any Western canon we might devise : because they have been so numerous, so closely related and successful . Furthermore, I focus on the fiction of the West as it stands and not on the literature of the moving frontier. For Western

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American literature is composed of works informed by the memory of first possession as combined with reaction to the continuing presence of "unimproved" nature, a power which shaped its after­ math-keeping the frontier experience somehow both past and pres­ ent for the Western writer. A good place to begin is with A. B. Guthrie of Montana and with his novels of early exploration and settlement. Guthrie has written a series of six novels which, when taken together ( as he expects them to be), constitute a history of his state from the coming of the white man to the foothills of the Tetons through the late 1950s. The most famous of these books treat of the earliest visits to and travel into Guthrie's home country by assorted hunters and settlers-of lonely wanderings in search of beaver and of wagon trains going on through the mountains to the Pacific coast. In the first three novels in this series, the tone is lofty, hieratic, and spacious, as befits the chronicles of an heroic age. T he Big Sky (1947), The Way West (1949), and Fair Land, Fair Land (1982) make up the Dick Summers trilogy and tell the story of those great "loners" who come to know the wilderness as one would learn a holy book. Their names and stories keep alive in memory the sense of the numinous which had, in the first place, inspired them to search " high and deep" into the hidden places "up the Missouri." Summers is less the mad prophet than some of the mountain men, less committed to that absolute, uncir­ cumstanced freedom which is possible only in what political philos­ ophers speak of as " a state of nature." However, though he likes a little "society, " like Vardis Fisher's Sam Minard in Mountain Man (1965), Frederick Manfred's Hugh Glass in Lord Grizzly (1954), and J. Frank Dobie's Ben Lilly in T he Ben Lilly Legend (1950), he is difficult to imagine in town. Summers at times has property-more than a gun, traps, a horse, and a buffalo knife. For a while he farms in Missouri. Later he offers his energy and skill to lead a company along the Oregon Trail. But finally he cannot live at ease among the "civilizers, " seeking instead for a refuge among the Shoshone and neighboring tribes. There he remarries, gets a son and is killed by soldiers-amidst what remains of "clear air and bright waters, " the unchanged handiwork of God. Summers' antitype is the self-made primitive Boone Caudill who is, despite the more admirable side-effects of his absolute liberty, all restlessness and violence. Summers embodies a principle not so extreme-nothing more than a reaction to the beauty of the un­ touched West and to the destructive, herdlike ways of his own people. Even so, the books in the Dick Summers trilogy project an

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uneasy attitude toward corporate life, except of the most uncompli­ cated variety. That uneasiness is only partially modified in Guth­ rie's three novels of Montana settlement. These Thousand Hills (1956), Arfive (1971), and The Last Valley (1975) are concerned with the history of the "cattle kingdom" in that part of the Big Sky Country on the high plains, just below the front range of the Rockies. Even more than that of the cowboy, fictional images of ranchers and stockmen are at the heart of what we can say about the literature of the American West. Their relation to a given natural order is easy and respectful, balanced and tentative. Yet though they rest lightly upon the land (unless their herds are too large), glory in their own self-sufficiency, and accept the costs of a gamble with contingency, these cattlemen create a kind of society. As a culture, they live out of what is "given" without attempting to control more than a little of it. And they have no patience with the remote and arbitrary powers of the state: powers which would interfere with their "private business"-their individual transactions with nature. The test and exhilarating discipline of hard pastoral are part of their self-definition; but they also "lie in possession" of significant hold­ ings and are stewards of a garden (or meadow) with boundaries. Moreover, they make a tradition out of the virtues they attempt to practice-one which resists the modern manipulative and Prome­ thean spirit much more effectively than do the champions of splen­ did isolation. These Thousand Hills treats the beginnings of the most familiar West, "the day of the cattleman" as described in Ernest S. Osgood's old book of that title, the transition from open range to fencing, with the pushing back to "beyond the wire" and "over the ridge" of the wild creatures and people who lack an adequate sense of "what is thine and mine." Lot Evans moves from feckless youth as a cowboy to being a paragon and political protector of the order he helps to create. But he accomplishes this by acknowledging what he has been. There is no better image of this part of American history­ except in J. Evetts Haley's magisterial biography, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1936). Arfive and The Last Valley are closely related novels of Montana in n1odern times-a place where progress and its characteristic strat­ egies have been overdone. Fresh memories of the "old order of things" and the close proximity of still-surviving wilderness put these mistakes quickly in perspective. In this most recent Montana, nature takes revenge on those who abuse her. Man's estate in the context of Creation is, Guthrie reaffirms, that of a tenant by suf­ ferance, or steward for a nonresident proprietor, not a master. The

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instruments of this reaffirmation are Tom Ewing, a rancher who keeps "development" at an ironic distance; Benton "Prof" Col­ lingsworth, the local high school principal; and their younger friend, Ben Tate, who publishes the local newspaper. Together they deny the premise that "progress leaves no retreat." Which is what can most readily be said about the protagonist in many other Western novels that treat the place of the cattlemen in a world impatient with the disciplines, pieties and restrictions of his way of life : Conrad Richter's Sea of Grass (1937), Harvey Fergusson's Grant of Kingdom (1950), Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By (1961) and Leaving Cheyenne (1963), Ben Capps' Sam Chance (1965), and Elmer Kelton's T he Time It Never Rained (1973). The thrust of this literature is elegiac. Often it laments what is passing, as do its counterparts in the fiction of the Western solitary: of Natty Bumpo as cowboy, lawman, gunslinger, prospector/scout, or their equiv­ alent. The great positive instance of this subspecies is the hero of Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949). But there are also many negative ver­ sions of the same model, overreachers or supermen like Guthrie's explosive Boone Caudill. Nature's revenge against presumptions committed in violation of her authority has, in Western American literature, its most powerful rendering in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's evocative T he Track of the Cat (1949). In this fiction the three Bridges brothers, with their elderly par­ ents, have a ranch in the Washoe Valley of Nevada where, with the coming of winter, they and their cattle are terrorized by a myste­ rious mountain lion which attacks both man and beast for the mere joy of killing. The brothers are in no way alike . Arthur, the eldest, dreams pastoral dreams of natural benevolence. Curt, who holds Arthur in contempt, acts out of an unmitigated will to power and plans to use the ranch as a way to get money to go to San Francisco. He has no piety for the given order of Creation. Neither does he admit to any fear of the invisible and ubiquitous "black painter" conjured up by the old Indian, Joe Sam, who is a fixture on the ranch . In his own skill, nerve, and intellect Curt finds security. The lion kills the passive Arthur, and a dream of the lion, the fear of the power it represents, destroys the self-isolated Curt. In hunting it alone he had refused to recognize that, as Arthur once told him, "nature . . . comes back on you in time." With the help of Joe Sam, Harold, the youngest and most sensible of his clan, kills the offend­ ing lion and buries his brothers. The novel ends with promise of a future as Harold prepares to marry and acknowledges it was not the real "black painter" that he shot, that "we'll never get that one."

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Harold knows that the genus loci, the resident spirit of his valley, cannot be subdued. He will not drift off in poetic reverie like Arthur or imagine like Curt that he can deal with the mystery of Being on his own, absolutely, whenever he wishes. An examination of radical independence which is altogether differ­ ent from what appears in T he Track of the Cat is rendered in Edward Abbey's T he Brave Cowboy (1956). The book is rightfully subtitled An Old Tale in a New Tzme. In it there is no tolerance for the spirit of domination which is reshaping the West, which (in the language of Clark's Arthur Bridges) lives only for "burning and butchering and cutting down and plowing under." Jack Burns, Abbey's hero, is an anachronism: a loyal, stubborn, cheerful throwback to a time when character and personal rectitude were everything and the nearest federal marshal was four hundred miles away. Jack Burns gets into trouble trying to free a draft-resisting friend from jail. Failing in that effort, he escapes on his own, to be pursued by a posse through a wilderness where he is as much at home as he is out of place in the haunts of men. Jack has no objection to private property or ranchers, to moderate forms of social and economic order, or indeed any real quarrel with ordinary law enforcement. But he refuses to be merely a number on one of a thousand official lists. He is not judged by nature or troubled by visions of a totem "which is as good . . . as any to mean the end of things." Instead he is crushed by modernity, hit by a truck on a rain-slick highway because his mare has been frightened by the glare of the headlights and the roar of many engines. The High Sheriff of Bernal County, New Mexico couldn' t catch and bend Jack Burns. Larger and more impersonal agencies bring him down, though not until Edward Abbey has given us an uncomfortable re­ minder of how much like other American places Jack's New Mexico has become. But not entirely, not so long as any of his kind survive to remind us of "the lost America our forefathers knew." I might usefully extend this discussion of characteristic Western writing, especially if I examined closely the lyric celebration of the natural order of things ( or complaint at its violation) which is em­ bodied in the conservationist or naturalist writings of so many gifted Western authors. In this connection I think of Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968), of Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow (1962), Joseph Wood Krutch's T he Voice of the Desert (1954), Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949), J. Frank Dobie's T he Longhorns (1941) and T he Mus­ tangs (1952), Roy Bedichek's Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947), and John Graves' Goodbye to a River (1960), Hard Scrabble: Observa­ tions on a Patch of Land (1974), and From a Limestone Ledge (1980). Making such a list is to single out my own favorites from a vast and

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25

impressive literature. To expand it would be an easy task. But to speak of this material both religious (in its ontology) and pastoral would not alter the primary point of my observations. I am also tempted to add in reinforcement commentary on Mari Sandoz's Old Jules (1935) or John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932); or to make a place for remarks on the significant fiction about the American In­ dian written by his white countrymen-stories by Manfred, Waters, Schaefer, Capps and others which tell us as much about the culture of their authors and their kindred as about Indian life and values. But to do so would only blur the focus, not change the argument concerning Western American literature which I have offered . Given the evidence gathered monumentally in A Literary History of the American West, a volume of 1, 353 pages published last year by the Texas Christian University Press, that this literature already exists and has become, on its own terms, a national treasure, what then is likely to be added to this homogenous and self-contained literary canon? 3 To begin, future contributions to the corpus will not be, I believe, much more urban in spirit than the texts which pres­ ently have a place within it. Therefore I suspect that they will not issue from or be concerned with California or the coastal West, which is, though closely related, another country. Moreover, except for its unwillingness to treat the modern city as more than a neces­ sary evil, this is not a tradition of artistic alienation. Instead, as I said earlier, it is a literature of memory, one which will continue to react to wilderness and wild creatures nearby-will thus continue, or dissolve and disappear into postures understood and appreci­ ated by the authors of the Columbia Literary History. But though nature in its most dramatic mode is informative of Western liter­ ature, though the Western writer when he contemplates the land­ scape does not dream of "cultivated gardens, " he will not, under the pressure of modern industrial civilization, revert to confusing the "New Eden" of his most hopeful vision with the merely primi­ tive . For his individualism contains in its memory of westering a critique of its own potential excesses. Looking down from his post of observation, from the top of the ridge where the "high country" begins, the great peaks towering above and the plains spread out below him, with his enemies visible as small figures marching in search of their quarry, the Western artist is like Abbey's Jack Burns. But in practicing his craft upon his subject, he will, I suspect, prefer to make a stand instead of retiring into the "timber, " or some other country of the mind. If we wait and watch his performance, we should enjoy the " ruckus" which is bound to occur.

3 RECOVERING SIMMS AND OTHERS The Literature of the Antebellu m South The systematic study of American literature is a matter of three and a half generations. And the study of Southern writing per se a development coming mostly in the last thirty-five years-within the compass of my own career. Before the graduate teaching of Spiller, Williams, Matthiessen, Thorp, Smith, Blair, Stovall, Jones, and Hub­ bell, there was little but American Literature, the American Literature Group within the Modern Language Association, and the achieve­ ments of such elders as Barrett Wendell, C. Alfonso Smith, Moses Coit Tyler, and William P. Trent. Indeed, prior to 1930 there were only a few incidental appointments. With respect to the study of Southern writing, after the 1954 publication of T he South in American Literature, 1 607-1900 there were important seminars taught by Rich­ mond Croom Beatty, Richard Beale Davis, Charles Anderson·, and Randall Stewart, with a few others doing at least a Faulkner class or some "special studies" in Poe: otherwise, not much. But the volume of work now being done in Southern literature would be impressive even if it had behind it a tradition of commentary like that of Milton studies. In so far as we are aware of that exfoliation we must there­ fore be a little astonished by it, and perhaps also disarmed, even as we rejoice to see authors long neglected by reason of their regional origin receive the attention that they deserve. At the very heart of this explosion in Southern Studies is the unavoidable figure of Professor Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Since the first publication of Southern Renascence (which Rubin co-edited with Rob­ ert D. Jacobs), through a long series of essays on specific writers or groups of writers (Wolfe, Glasgow, Cabell, Twain, the Fugitives, Cable), to general interpretations of Southern literature (The Far26

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27

away Country, William Elliot Shoots a Bear, T he Writer in the South) to the editorship of T he History of Southern Literature and T he Bibliographical Guide to Southern Literature, and to the writing of two novels, a history of Virginia, various other books of criticism, and a com­ posite regional portrait, A Gallery of Southerners, Rubin has focused his considerable energies on sustaining and defining the enter­ prise-upon gathering, classifying, and explaining all kinds of in­ formation necessary to the practice of an adequate criticism of Southern literature. Indeed Rubin has done almost enough to de­ fine the special task of the critic of Southern texts. One cannot imagine the present state of such studies without Rubin's career. The same might be said of Lewis Simpson and of Allen Tate, but of no one else. Even for those of us who sometimes quarrel with his dicta or his conclusions, Rubin's work is frequently the place where we begin in making our own inquiries; and a measure of what may be said sensibly on a particular subject, given Rubin's point of view. His new book, T he Edge of the Swamp, is no exception to this rule, and is perhaps the best that he has written on Southern literature, though continuous with what he had done earlier in both its merits and its occasional shortcomings. In reaction to many elaborate and ambitious theories explaining what in 1860 made Southerners different from the rest of their countrymen, Louis Rubin counters with wholesome skepticism and common sense about the degree of feudalism to be found in the leadership class of the antebellum South. Before discussing South­ ern writers individually he offers a considerable essay on the "mind" of the region as a background for his own criticism. Rubin is de­ voted to the argument that antebellum Southerners were ordinary nineteenth-century Americans who just happened to own slaves. And who, incidentally, dreamed of owning great houses. "For the plantation ideal, as a goal powerfully coveted and ungained, is a middle-class affair representing a normally acquisitive society's hopes." Acquisitiveness, not the stirring of proprietary passion, is Rubin's explanation of all traditional arrangements and customs which appear to be patriarchal and matriarchal. And any idea of the Slavocracy as a "redemptive salvific society of order and permanent social gradation, " a community put together in hope of effecting a beneficent conclusion to human hunger and povert y, seems to him altogether delusory. But, what really provokes Professor Rubin are theories which postulate the existence of a Southern aristocracy-as in the essays of Tate and/ or Eugene Genovese. To these axioms he adds one other: that Southerners were never

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really comfortable with the morality of their situation as the owners of slaves and were therefore at bottom equivocal about their own decision to leave the Union and start a new country. Rubin's resis­ tance to a strict medieval analogy to the Old South embodies a point well taken; also his reluctance to take for an introduction to the opinions of his neighbors the lucubrations of George Fitzhugh whose Sociology for the South is a work of farfetched political specula­ tion. However, arguments about antiquity are beside the point in questions concerning the status, legitimacy, and authority of an established ruling class. Some idea of the proprietary roles of ladies and gentlemen was ubiquitous in almost everything Southerners wrote before 1915. And has remained a commonplace since. This much from conversation with Southerners born in the 1870s and before. Furthermore the South has tended-at least until about 1960-to take the agricultural life as normative, even when many Southerners were no longer tangent to it. Anytime a whole nation affirms an ideal like that of the plantation, their choice brings with it a suggestion of something more than economic considerations. Fi­ nally, with reference to Rubin's adoption of the overview embodied in Why the South Lost the Civil War by Beringer, Hattaway, Jones, and Still, it is anachronistic in a way that follows directly from his own good sense of just how little from certain norms Americans of any origin are likely to deviate. For if Southern will to victory is com­ pared to Northern, if the sacrifice of Southerners made in the field defending so small a population is compared with what the War cost the North, if the South's willingness to continue after most of its hope was gone is compared to the Northern vote for armistice and General McClellan in 1864, then the argument of the four historians that the South doubted its own cause falls swiftly to the ground. And as to the worthlessness of the ideological apologia for slavery in understanding the society defended in this literature, Professor Rubin should read through the ordinary Southern reli­ gious literature of 1840-1860 before he decides that such teachings were only rationalizations and that the audience knew better than to be encouraged and reassured of their own rectitude by the argu­ ments contained there. Even so, Rubin is not mistaken in insisting that Southerners were more like other nineteenth-century Ameri­ cans than different from them. Though the centrifugal impulse was not all in one direction-as is now the case. In this book Louis Rubin is at his best on Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Timrod. I had expected that nothing of importance could be

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said about one of these, and nothing new about the other. I was mistaken. Concerning Poe and the wellsprings of his imagination, Rubin psychologizes a little. Perhaps growing up in a slaveholding state influenced Poe to write "Hop-Frog." And perhaps it did not. Decid­ ing on which view is correct is, however, not so important as is making an accurate description of what is to be found in the Poe canon and of how that material affects us as we read it today. In the end Poe is not so much alienated from Southern society as he is from all society, an orphan in fact who became an orphan in spirit. Professor Rubin does very well to emphasize the impact on Poe of the great fire in Richmond's principal theater, which occurred only a few days after his mother's death. Everything for the Virginia poet was personal. Most events were threatening, bringing the prospect of some monstrous ruin or disease-dissolution of the reason or that ultimate horror, loss of breath. When faced with such problems there is no possibility of political preoccupation. Edgar Poe writes disinterestedly of art and of the manipulative potential of tech­ nique. He is also sometimes concerned with the "unalienable will of the self." But his major works, as Rubin recognizes, concern ruin and catastrophe. I regret that Rubin spends so much time on the possible influence of the subject of slavery on Poe. But there is nothing about Rubin's essay on Poe in his role as romantic artist to which I can object. It is a masterpiece of measured judgment and the summary of what can now be said on this subject. Rubin on Timrod is an insider's exposition: of Charleston and by Charleston. Henry Timrod is rightfully remembered as the poet laureate of the Confederacy, deserving of this appellation by reason of his lovely "Ode Sung on the Occasion of the Decorating of the Graves of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charles­ ton, S. C., 1866." Yet Rubin reads Timrod not only as a fellow Carolinian but also as a poet whose work can command an interest of its own apart from the context in which it appears: Timrod as artist and cosmopolitan who was nevertheless a loyal Southerner, who chose to suffer with his people. The particular implications that Rubin discovers in some of Timrod's verse, in his public poetry, is not so obvious or politically ambiguous as he imagines. We must not project into Southerners of another generation our own anx­ ieties or internal divisions. Even so, Rubin is quite correct in insist­ ing on Timrod's preference for generic themes. For when Timrod is topical, he nonetheless reaches in that direction, fallowing after Ben

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Jonson in "To Penshurst" and Andrew Marvell in his great ode "Upon Appleton House." Largesse and plentitude are, unlike the legal grounds for secession, universal themes; and the way great poets have always dealt with the particulars of their situation or their time has been by lifting their contemplation of these above the level of immediate contentions. But not so far above as to result in deracination. The distinction which I am making brings us back to Timrod's "Ode." In the poem what is important at the moment is that these dead belong to those who mourn them, not to the particu­ lars of the cause for which they gave their lives. Timrod is attempt­ ing the same sort of thing in "Ethnogenesis," "The Cotton Boll," and other early poems. But he was too much of a poet to write propaganda and too honest about the military situation of the South to pretend cheerfulness when he felt none. The mixture of the elements which go into the making of his poetic voice Louis Rubin formulates for us in what I believe will be a fashion lastingly per­ suasive. Moreover, Rubin has rescued Timrod the artist from near­ oblivion. He has a feeling for Henry Timrod to which I must defer, even when I wish to modify in small ways his readings of particular poems. Rubin on Simms is a more complicated matter than Rubin on Timrod or Poe-one that presents this reviewer with serious diffi­ culties, but not in his chapter on The Yemassee. In comparing this 1835 novel with T he Last of the Mahicans (1825), Professor Rubin discovers an interest and importance in both books which few people have recognized. Simms's story of Indian war in colonial South Carolina and of the Lord Palatine of that mutiny, Governor Charles Craven, is clearly related to his political and moral outlook as a Jacksonian Democrat. His hero is one of nature's aristocrats, without which no American community can survive. Leveling is a lot of nonsense. But Lord Craven earns the respect of South Carolin­ ians for what he can accomplish in their context as a frontiersman; and he marries an American girl. All this notwithstanding, it is (as Rubin suggests) important that Simms writes of the frontier only as a stage in history to be transcended-a moment, however charm­ ing, which points toward fulfillment in society and history, not to freedom in the forest or the "territory." What is troubling in the broader treatment of Simms included in this book is the aesthetic premise at its core: that the artist must somehow stand dramatically apart from the "social and economic community in which he exists." The poetics of alienation are, I believe, only one of many possible explanations of the genesis of

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great literature. Virgil and Dostoevski, the Shakespeare of the his­ tory plays, and much of the Irish Renaissance are incomprehensible on such a presumption. Which is to say nothing of most Southern literature, early and late. One need not be hostile or critical in order to be detached or judicious. Much American literature, Southern and Northern, was damaged by the choleric spirit which resulted in the War Between the States. But Simms did not need to doubt the rightness of the established regime in South Carolina in order to write better than he did. Though too much politics is not good for any of them, many great writers have been impenitent reaction­ aries. And as to the injury to his feelings done by the neglect of Charleston, I find nothing more in Simms's mild Byronic posturing than I read in Hawthorne's grumblings against Boston: the usual "complaint of the poet against his empty purse." Because he was the artist as "insider, " because he had worried about acceptance since boyhood, Simms was perhaps-though I doubt it-somewhat more the poete maudit when writing to his New York friends than were other American novelists in similar circumstances. But at the bottom of his problem was something more universal than Irish self-denigration. For like any other possessor of a craft or skill, any architect, soldier, river pilot, engineer, or doctor, he was set apart from his neighbors by a special ability-which at times seemed mysterious to them-until brought back within the accepting circle by the inescapable human difficulties and preoccupations. Concerning the Trent thesis ( of conservative mistreatment of Simms) and the best explanation of the Revolutionary War novels, Professor Rubin and I disagree. But on these subjects I insist on very little. For reasons best explained by the variety contained in these texts, there are as many views of Simms as there are critics of his fiction. What signifies, though, is that Simms is once more finding an audience, a niche on our literary shelves. As witness the new edition of the Cassique of Kiazv ah recently published by the Magnolia Press; and the impressive collection of papers, Long Years of Neglect: T he Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, put to­ gether for the University of Arkansas Press by Professor John C. Guilds. The Guilds collection contains a rich and various approach to the "writing man of South Carolina"-for instance a fine essay on Simms's biography by John McCardell, who is himself writing a life of Simms; Rayburn S. Moore on Simms's South Carolina circle; James E. Kibler on the poetry; David Moltke-Hansen on the novel­ ist's philosophy of history; Louis Rubin once more, on Simms and Charleston; Nicholas Meriwether on The Lily and the Totem; and his

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father, James B. Meriwether on the theme of freedom in Woodcraft. There is instruction in all of these essays-especially in the last, which comes down not so much from C. Hugh Holman as from Donald Davidson's classic commentary on the "heroic age" de­ picted in Simms's novels of the American Revolution. But even more instruction is carried in their impact as a set, suggesting not so much a process almost completed as a report on work in progress, full of the excitement which comes of thinking of all that remains to be done, not from reflection upon a completed act. Guilds's intro­ duction to the book gives to it a particularly hopeful temper, and unites it as collections are rarely united. Nothing so rhetorically artful is needed to give character to Mary Ann Wimsatt's T he Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, a book which achieves a judicious and sensible overview of the entire Simms corpus. Mrs. Wimsatt's principal point is that we misunderstand Simms first of all because he wrote in the romance tradition and not the kind of novel treated as normative by the admirers of Henry James. She also says quite frankly that Simms was as good a writer as Cooper, and probably better. There is no doubt that her primary explanation for this neglect is a sound one: regional animosity, aggravated by Simms's Southern intransigence. W hatever harm Charleston did to Simms's psyche, it was nothing compared to the practical damage to his career effected by Northern magazines, publishers, and reviewers. Simms as a humorous writer has re­ ceived somewhat better treatment. Professor Wimsatt on the com­ edy of manners in his fiction and on frontier humor is most insight­ ful and makes us wish to reread certain of Simms's tales and stories. However, as she acknowledges, it is still true that Simms's reputa­ tion is finally going to stand or fall on what is made of his Revolu­ tionary War romances, eight novels identified some years ago by Donald Davidson (in this following Paul Hamilton Hayne) as the heart of Simms's achievement. For what resonates and reaches to­ ward mythic truth in the canon of Simms's work, what penetrates to the core of the American and Southern experience, is contained in books like T he Partisan, Woodcraft, Mellichampe, T he Foragers, Kath­ erine Walton, T he Scout and Eutaw. T he Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, in handling these books and their interrelations, is a per­ suasive and necessary book, one which those who teach or study Simms should be delighted to have. It is both a primer on its subject and temperate introduction to the critical problems created by indi­ vidual Simms compositions. Curiously, Professor Wimsatt's discus­ sion of Simms's short fiction appears in the Guilds collection; but

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book and essay together map out the territory of Simms studies, organizing the subject as no one has heretofore. It is a landmark achievement, clearly conceived and executed against the larger background of American literary history. That these volumes concerning Simms and other antebellum Southern writers should be published more or less at the same time is proof positive that Southern literary studies have matured, have come very near to transcending the dialectic of which Louis Rubin complained in beginning his new book: the alternatives of either converting literary documents into a context for performing a ritual of cultural loyalty or a chance of enacting the opposite of such piety, the opportunity of posturing by proving to an "enlightened world" that we have personally outgrown the simplistic errors of our grand­ fathers. The dialectic of which I speak is, of course, not literary by origin. Even so, in my opinion it has even now a certain cultural authority among us, rooted as it is in an inherited Manichean rhet­ oric. But at present it is more likely to result in our being told that early Southern writers did not mean what they seemed to say, that they were devoted in some intense, subterranean fashion to the most familiar modern values-the illusions which allow us to attrib­ ute to divine agency all of the dilemmas for which we have made a place in our life. Such is a theory very easily corrected by the common sense which Professor Rubin recommends, a reluctance to discover in the handiwork of certain authors an ingenuity not to be believed of other human beings. Which, as Rubin also asserts, will still leave those of us who teach Southern literature like Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! : as both creators of a certain kind of narrative, and players acting a role in another kind. The critics and literary historians examined in this essay acted well their parts in the com­ mon narrative of our literary history, making for us an account of things which is not autobiography or melodrama. They have reached beyond praise and blame, and have made an honest account. of certain things, an account which can be read by itself. From their several stories those of us interested in Southern literature can learn more and better why the various versions of the Southern identity reduce more memorably to poetry and fiction than they do to social commentary and the dialectics of class. And how we have to allow all of these instances of that variety to operate in what they have chosen as their own forms, whatever it is that we wished them to mean. 1

4 A STUDIED MYOPIA Faulkner and the New Literary History It is now not at all unusual for students and close observers of William Faulkner's total artistic performance to maintain that there is a division at the center of his career, a turning point in the development of the artist: a shift in his angle of vision and creative purpose. As one Marxist scholar describes this consensus, it ac­ counts for a movement from "great to late, " explaining "loss of artistic power and the emergence of . . . reactionary political con­ sciousness." And there are many less absurd formulations of the same declension. According to most theories of transition, this watershed occurs soon after ( or while) Faulkner completed work on what is perhaps his finest novel, Absalom, Absalom! It affects most directly T he Unvanquished, Go Down, Moses, Knight's Gambit, In­ truder in the Dust, and T he Reivers. Such a shift is also visible in many of the short stories, most obviously the World War II stories and "Race at Morning." Furthermore it is present by implication in the fictions which do not share in the narrative pattern of all of the titles just mentioned but were nonetheless published after 1936. T he Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! are modernist masterpieces, written to invert our established expectations, out of a theory of fiction which says that the subject of the artist is consciousness-or detached images, or the way in which worlds are invented : art itself. I agree with Freder­ ick R. Karl (in this, but in little else) that Faulkner's use of modernist techniques never clearly signifies that he accepted what intellectual historians describe as modernism. And when Faulkner put away those techniques, he moved even further away from that definition: in art, from the dream of aesthetic transcendence summarized in 34

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the figure of Joyce's Stephen; in politics, from the Nietzschean liberation of self from all limits, the triumph of the will, either individual or collective. In some cases, as in T he Wild Palms, Requiem for a Nun, and Pylon, Faulkner seems to focus on the modernist preoccupation with self­ understanding and self-realization: to concentrate on that familiar mentality, but only in order to expose its vulnerability and, when pushed to the extreme, its fateful potential for the youthful convert who wishes to be himself or herself at whatever cost. In Sanctuary we see only a realist expose of sentiment and stereotype, a nightmare of corruption finally hidden by hypocrisy. Southern girls are no longer like Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Yet always, as with Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, he takes the truly romantic personality seriously, and with a balance of sympathy and understanding: what we would expect of a "failed poet" who becomes first uncle and then grand£ather-the artist as patriarch. In my opinion, the evi­ dence of T he Hamlet, T he Town, and T he Mansion functions in coun­ terpoint-as a foil-to the characteristic fiction which Faulkner pro­ duced in these years. And by and large, I would say the same of the evidence from A Fable, though as the rendering of an a priori idea, this book is a special case: with the exception of its Southern race­ horse section, abstract as nothing else in Faulkner is abstract; dis­ cursive about problems which are in his other novels made con­ crete. And a dreadful failure. This allegory is as close to being modern as anything Faulkner ever wrote, an instance of windy deracination in a lifetime largely free of cant. For it presumes that the world might be remade by abstractions. Like Requiem for a Nun, however, it does contain the subjects of his more characteristic works, that of personal responsibility and the importance of indi­ vidual rectitude in a world where there- are younger brothers and elder brothers, uncles and nephews, but no equals. And does so without dragging in abandoned women to make its case. The implicit subject of the Snopes trilogy is the absence from its central action, Flem's progress to the seat of power, of an opponent to this bland malevolence qua protagonist who embodies all of those qualities which wo�ld enable him to protect Yoknapatawpha. Only partial illustrations of male virtue are visible in this distressing chronicle. Surrounding Eula and Linda we discover a vacuum, a situation which argues the importance of the gentleman to the preservation of society: the gentleman as steward, a proprietary spirit who has empathic fellow-and-proprietary feeling for all those around him; the gentleman who (in the language of Andrew Lytle)

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"holds in fee simple the body of the world" and is not afraid of it, even though he is not always equal to the obligation. But the gen­ tleman, in company with others of his responsible kind-with women who support, define, supplant and yet, in their archetypical counterpoint, necessitate his enterprise; and with all sorts of other people who, though their own station is more restricted by nature, choice, or accident, act on the same principle-does all that he can. Courageously or lovingly, he makes an effort, with or without a horse. He enacts the role of bringer of justice, peace, protection, comfort, and compassion; and of enemy to whatever threatens the outreach of these values. W hat is out of joint he restores, though not always in the preferred way. He may take as many forms as there are cultures. But in every case he is the one who recognizes the neces­ sity of stewardship, of responsibility, and for more than himself: who senses the mesh of history surrounding him, regardless of how freely others speak of liberty or equality or of the irrelevance of old authority. In design, the novel which treats the education of the gentleman, the conduct book as fiction, depicts an action familiar to all students of and scholars in the literature of the Western World since in the 4th century B. c. Xenophon wrote his T he Education of Cyrus-what H. J. Rose had called "the earliest historical romance." In Castiglione's T he Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot's T he Book Named the Governor, Henry Peacham's T he Complete Gentleman, and Edmund Spenser's T he Faerie Queene, versions of the prototype are explored and reaf­ firmed. And this list could be expanded, going back through Henry IV, Part One, T he Mirror for Magistrates, to Homer, and forward from Dr. Johnson and Fielding to Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Tom Brown's School Days, Kipling, and Conrad. W hich is to be only minimally suggestive, not inclusive. But the purest version of this normative, injunctive, and potentially instructive pattern concerns how the young man learns to become a gentleman, not through direct teach­ ing but through painful experience. In T he Unvanquished we are presented with the adequate male symbol; the paterfamilias, the knight-errant while still in training; a figure which in Faulkner's great modernist masterpieces is defined chiefly by the effects of his absence. At the end of the novel, young Bayard Sartoris has grown into his inherited and inescapable pro­ prietary responsibilities. He is both head of the family and pre­ server of the work of his grandmother, father, and cousin in restor­ ing their Mississippi to something like self-sufficiency, self-respect, and function. W hether someone like Bayard is to merge with and

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hold together a social, economic, and moral situation which he faces is the central question in the series of books which follow directly from T he Unvanquished. Moreover, this series of novels (from T he Unvanquished to T he Reivers) is not only a counterpoint to what we find in the fables of Faulkner's other mature or vatic novels. It is also, by refraction, a commentary on Thomas Sutpen and Quentin Comp­ son; and on why Addie Bundren refuses to die until the disap­ pointing men in her life have buried her properly. The image of the chevalier is at the imaginative center of Faulkner's universe, even when the knight is missing or fails to do what his "place" requires, even when his primary duty is to make some improvements in the regime, to acknowledge that some of the beneficiaries of his pres­ ence are capable of a little liberty and responsibility on their own. Such fiction is neither modernist in the literary tradition of Joyce and Pound nor in the political sense of the term summarized for us in Orwell's Animal Farm. Or even in the philosophical sense epito­ mized in Sartre's passion for an absolutely liberated self-with no past, no future, no family or friends. Go Down, Moses is perhaps Faulkner's most frequently misun­ derstood book because so many of its readers have been modernists in their own passion for a restrictively private life, for disengage­ ment and aloofness as forms of moral superiority. The difficulty with this reaction to the book is that Faulkner himself warned us against it. As David Minter has observed, "It is clearly wrong­ headed to regard Ike McCaslin as Faulkner's spokesman. Ike's ide­ alism is not only disputed by other characters, most effectively by Cass Edmonds; it is undercut by 'Delta Autumn.' " And I would add that it is undercut further in the title story, "Go Down, Moses, " where an adequate avatar of the patriarc�1al principle appears and puts the community back together. Go Down, Moses concerns the education of the gentleman gone awry, with a hollow space left at the center by this defection and no one possessing the combination of authority and humane concern which is needed to keep the world of McCaslin running while the aftereffects of injustice are sorted out. Go Down, Moses rep,.inds us of A Fable in what is missing from the dramatic center of that book. The suite of detective stories and the novel which Faulkner wrote while he struggled with his massive allegory, Knight's Gambit and Intruder in the Dust, are not at all troubled by such a vacuum. For in Knight's Gambit, Gavin Stevens learns how to be county attorney, holding in his keep all of Yok­ napatawpha, and ends up finally marrying his childhood sweet-

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heart-in order to protect her from a wicked world. In Intruder in the Dust we discover Charles "Chick" Mallison, who is everything a boy-hero should be inside the Faulknerian milieu. The issue of the book is the preservation of the inherited order by preventing the murder of Yoknapatawpha's most impressive black citizen. It is, however, most important that Chick develop into what Sam Fathers in Go Down, Moses calls "the Man." He is helped by a youthful black friend and an aristocratic older woman-in this recalling the circum­ stances of Bayard Sartoris in T he Unvanquished. Also as in the earlier novel, the question at issue is whether Yoknapatawpha will be destroyed from within, ruined by coming to resemble its enemies while it resists them. What is new in the book is the possibility that the patria may lose its own finest sons, that such desertions may be induced by disgust at its moral failings. But, as we learn, that was not about to happen: not when the central character could still imagine being there himself to save the day at Gettysburg. Even more overt in its focus on the figure of the gentleman and the pattern of the conduct book which tells us how such paragons may be educated to perform their special role is Faulkner's last novel, T he Reivers. As I have argued elsewhere, the narrative pattern of the novel is itself derivative of the literature of chivalric adven­ ture. Young Lucius Priest is forced to grow up in a hurry by the necessity of defending a woman's honor, of extricating her from degradation and, at the same time, returning himself and his grand­ father's automobile to Jefferson by riding a horse, overcoming fear, and winning a desperate contest. The conclusion of T he Reivers summarizes the action of the novel as being about what is expected of a gentleman, including not only rectitude but the ability to live with the knowledge of his own shortcomings and the experience of momentary shame. These are the words of the narrator-grand­ father-speaking of his boyhood to grandsons living in the 1960s. The unmistakable implication of such a dramatized situation is that such stories are worth the telling, worth preserving through the generations, and that the idea of the gentleman deserves to be perpetuated. It is an idea built into the form of T he Reivers, regardless of whatever supportive or contrary things Faulkner said about it outside of his fiction. And no literary critic or literary historian, unless he or she persists in sharing with Frank Lentricchia the absurd myopic notion that literature has "no inherent meaning," can afford to ignore it in making an estimation of the Mississippi novelist's career. For if the composition of penitential psalms pre­ supposes that prayer is in some sense efficacious, then fiction which

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concerns the coming of the knight-errant, unless ironic or comic, presumes that the gentleman will always be needed in any civilized order. Thus, I insist that the text of Faulkner is not infinitely malleable, not even when confronted with the highest degree of interpretive ingenuity. In its rendering of a particular narrative structure or pattern of action long associated with an appeal to propriety norms of conduct, it takes as given a certain political culture, one greatly at variance with modern democratic teaching. And does not leave open the prospect of root-and-branch reconstitution of that cul­ ture. However, even though the figure or trope of education for stewardship in a society where some are always given five talents, some three, and some only one is central to Faulkner's artistic achievement, that trope is not employed by him in innocence of its potential for irony. His use of this narrative pattern contains its own criticism of the archetype and indicates how difficult it is to repro­ duce. Moreover, it specifies that the effort to educate the gentleman does not often result in what was intended and can readily induce defeatist or megalomaniacal attitudes in its product. Furthermore, Faulkner's practice acknowledges that knightly conduct in the char­ acters of his fiction is usually prescriptive, historical, rather than an affirmation of some universal, a priori teaching. In addition, it is frequently nuanced to private ends not directly political or directly injunctive. Yet the metaphor of the chevalier is everywhere in the metaphoric texture of Faulkner's fiction, deriving perhaps from a lifetime preoccupation with his great-grandfather and grandfather and perhaps from the general impetus of Southern culture, its dis­ position to define in such a figure the male role for young men of fan1ily. It is also true that Faulkner was constantly uneasy when in the presence of lofty narratives, full of fear about living up to the model, which was to be both ethically and psychologically endured. The lyrical side of his nature tended in another direction and under­ stood the Dionysian impulse, fauns, poets, etc. . . . His narratives are not at all simplistic about what the gentleman may accomplish or the problems which µe creates if there is no lyrical selfhood in his nature ( Gavin Stevens). W hat signifies is that, at some point be­ tween 1936 and 1940, Faulkner learned how to reconcile artist, paterfamilias, and man on horseback in his image of himself. And what further signifies is that the action of the story of the educa­ tion of the gentleman cannot be, without an application of irony, stretched beyond those limits which make its burden: "Send us

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more knights." It is not merely (again in the phrase of Professor Lentricchia) "a body of rhetorical strategies, waiting to be seized." For like most literary structures or patterns of action, it presupposes the basic validity of the world to which it is addressed-as love lyrics presuppose that a given human nature is romantic; and psalms, that God will attend our prayers: that He exists in part by doing so. And that, therefore, religious activity is a valid exercise of the spirit. Or as comedy predicates the authority of a set of social rules for acceptable behavior by urging that we laugh at the violator of those rules. Form is demonstrably more than "a relationship of manipula­ tion between a text and its audience-a relationship in which power is, at the same moment, given both its birth and its point of applica­ tion." For the power of literary forms is antecedent to its use, rooted as it is in some sense of the nature of things, in what Trilling calls an "ineradicable conviction of primordial might, " in an "efficacious but largely unfathomed background of human experience." I make no suggestion here of a systematically idealist view of this subject, but any literary analysis written out of contempt for the notion that all texts are somehow imitations of an action, a temporal or causal sequence, are finally exercises in futility. What is constant is human nature. The Faulkner narrative of the gentleman's educa­ tion presupposes a rich social reality as one of the "givens," that no one is "free" because it is impossible to separate selfhood from context. And in that same sense no critic is ever "free," even though the radical literary historian may imagine that he or she is going to "appropriate the traditional texts for the goals of revolutionary change." As I have tried to indicate, there is a kind of cultural evidence that is implicit in legitimate literary study, critical or histor­ ical. But the great questions about literature, if they do not lead to that kind of reading which is a submission to form, carry with them the assumption that the critic is primarily motivated by extraliterary concerns. To those who insist on such "theft by appropriation, " the serious critic must say, "Find some other fuel for your fires, some other headquarters for your 'Ministry of Truth' -and leave literature to those who have no hidden agenda."

5 DONALD DAVIDSON AND THE GREAT HOUSE TRADITION A Reading of "Woodlands , 1 956-1 960" Although it is the conventional wisdom concerning his career to say of Donald Davidson that, as a poet, he was "an anachronism" and a belated romantic, merely a voice of nostalgia with no irony and no sense of the "proper strategy of poetry, " a "comfortable traditionalist" who wrote only in a programmatic vein, much of his work belies such invidious description. 1 And especially is this true of the poems he wrote after 1950-works of great formal sophistica­ tion, craftsmanship, and control of tone and texture, qualities which bespeak not nineteenth-century antecedents but rather indebted­ ness to classical, Renaissance, and modern poetry of a decidedly "unromantic" variety. One of these poems is "Woodlands, 19561960," a composition in two parts, which Davidson originally in­ tended to be a whole series of poems. 2 The occasion of this making by the Tennessean was a sequence of visits to Woodlands Planta­ tion, near Bamberg, South Carolina-the home of William Gilmore Simms and, in Davidson's time, of Simms's granddaughter, Mrs. Mary Chevillette Simms Oliphant. In the process of working with Davidson on a new edition of her grandfather's writings, Mrs. Oliphant invited Professor and Mrs. Davidson to reside at Wood­ lands, a house twice 'burned but partially rebuilt by the South Car­ olina novelist in the years immediately preceding his death in June of 1870. 3 Out of these visits Davidson, starting in the fall of 1956, fashioned a poem honoring Woodlands, its master, and the heroic literature made in that place, by that man; and the work which he constructed to these ends was itself in a well-established tradition of 41

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public poetr y, following the example of Ben Jonson's "To Pens­ hurst," Thomas Carew's "To Saxham," Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," William Butler Yeats's " Coale Park, 1929," John Crowe Ransom's "Old Mansion," and many other "country house" or "great house" poems. 4 The topos of the virtuous country house or villa is, of course, as old as T he Georgics, Horace's Second Epode, and the epigrams of Martial (especially Book 3, No. 63). Furthermore, it continues as a powerful symbol in much modern fiction-for instance, in works by Henry James, E. M . Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, and many others. For those who, at Vanderbilt or Breadloaf, studied the origins of the lyric or modern poetry with Donald Davidson, there can be no question concerning his awareness of the poetic utility of the symbol or the subgenre of panegyric which organizes around it. In my notes I find a 1959 suggestion that graduate students interested in the relation of form and purpose in "To Penshurst" and "To Sir Robert Wroth" examine G. R. Hibbard's groundbreak­ ing essay "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century." 5 And I recall that he returned the next semester to the same form and pattern in discussing a series of poems by Yeats, concluding with a "Prayer for My Daughter." 6 Davidson as teacher took the genre of poems very seriously, the role of convention in the accommodation of poetic purpose to the priorities of design. And the same may be said of Davidson as poet. In writing "Woodlands, 1956-1960" he did not forget that in such creations as "Coale Parke, 1929" or "To Penshurst," the manor of the title which served the author as point du depart was "the chosen emblem of . . . humane order and endur­ ing values," of stewardship and the kind of life that make for "true community." 7 For he recognized, in the idiom of his own poetics, that the great house poem structured by an architectural emblem was a way of discussing the past in order to speak about the present. The formal pattern of this work opens with the invocation to his "host" by the guest at Woodlands, come there "late, by a hundred years . . . to light again the flame. And bid it bear your name." Davidson speaks here in his capacity as a scholar who has written an inclusive general essay on the South Carolina novelist as pro­ logue to an edition of Simms's letters and who was then editing some of the handiwork of Simms's last years as part of a complete edition of the fiction. 8 As are the houses in the poems Davidson emulates, Woodlands is a working plantation, where there are "mule­ wagons" and "hound voices" along the Edisto. The "merciless flow"

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of the modern world is a "fell scene" up along a nearby highway. But trees form a screen between it and the house Simms rebuilt. There the visitor hopes to reestablish the communal memory, the folkchain. While by these glowing coals remembrance Knits up its fitful present with the past, And of its future measures what will last In the crazy skein of our new circumstances .

In contrast with the continuity summarized by a rekindled hearth and its glowing coals, the source of the fable without which life is meaningless, there is the "modern relief" of electric lights. The aegis which has given us "rational slumber" has also ushered in a "century of no belief, " for which "history is fabulous no longer." Under its authority, says the speaker, one "cannot read your stories, Gilmore Simms." To be thus deprived of "deepest remembrance, " of a "present continuous with the past, " which draws from and feeds into the life of the imagination, is, in the language of this poet, a form of "death." From his "unseen host" he asks for protection against any such possibility. In "Woodlands, 1956-1960" this anti­ thesis is the ominous music of "Evening" (the title given the first half of the poem) and arrival. "Morning" and the remainder of the poem will bring another song-an answer to problems established in its opening section. Historic empathy, remembrance, rooted in "affection, kinship, piety and above all religious belief" is often at the center of a David­ son poem. 9 But this time it is someone else's memory that occasions his recollection and response. Before the f�ame of Simms's imagina­ tion, if the spirit of the author is with us, recollection may make us one with what is preserved in fable, connect us to the past which Simms's novels of the American Revolution made into the "praise" and "glory" of his home. And as his characters are made visible to us, we become one with them; and one with the partisan of this darker time who makes war to the knife against an enemy even more deadly than S�mms's Tories: an enemy with a capacity for malevolence far beyond "chains to fetter, fire to burn." This equiv­ alence is what the "footstep" heard by the visitor at Woodlands refers to in observing that "a hundred years can measure only time." Where tradition infarms the poet's narrative-the "moss1nantled Druid" of which Simms spoke often in accounting for his novels of South Carolina history-nothing is ever merely "past." 10

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What brought praise to Colonus and glory to Athens belongs to South Carolina through Simms-the living word of the fable, in which each soul has a name and individual deeds count for everything. In the "Morning" section of this poem, Davidson includes a list of some of Simms's most memorable characters drawn from his novels of the Revolution. These he calls "children of Homer" because they live inside and inform an epic action as majestic as the war fought on the plains of Troy: Porgy, Will Sinclair, or Mellichampe : Even the wildest breathed Olympian air: Blonay, Mad Archy Campbell, Supple Jack, Nell on her "tacky, " Ballou, Hellfire Dick. Colonus' praise and seed of Attic glory Were theirs and Carolina's in your story; And ours at Woodlands still this later year. 1 1

The list anchors Davidson's admiration for the particularities of Simms's most significant achievement as an artist-a set of eight romances of the frontier which provides for his South "an epic state­ ment of its ideals and its purposes and a gallant defense of the role it had played in the making of the nation." 12 South Carolina, through its own exertions, had preserved its own regime, hearth, and roof­ tree, an "established order." And the theme of Simms's narrative of conflict between "patriot and loyalist" was therefore of conservative persistence: in keeping with the theme of Davidson's poem. In "Morning" it becomes clear that both writers have the same subject. Moreover, it is also clear that both take what the warrior achieves in one situation to be not fundamentally different from what the heroic poet attempts in another. The only point of differ­ entiation is that Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the Great Dragoon, has been replaced by an adversary even more formidable: an adversary to "this rooted tree, this house, this storied field ." Davidson follows the conventions of the great house poem closely in specifying what was ( and is) threatened along with the order of life identified with Woodlands and the Carolina Low Country of the 1780s. The meaning which he attaches to trees is an integral part of the allusive texture of the poem and reminds us directly of Yeats, in particular of "Coale Park and Bally Lee, 1931 " : A spot whereon the founders lived and died Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,

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Or gardens rich in memory glorified Marriages, alliances and families. . . . 13

At Woodlands there is a "Church Oak, " a "Marriage Tree, " and an "Eldest Oak, " where the plantation bell waits to ring out alarm-or the more ordinary offices of the day, followed by the community with such respect that they acquire the status of sacrament. Of these activities Davidson mentions household worship and marriage, certainly reflecting his knowledge of the actual history and usage of Woodlands, but also recalling another Yeats poem, ''A Prayer for My Daughter, " in which the Irish poet envisages the marriage of his child and imagines her as a "flourishing hidden tree." The plantation is a place of peace, of "mossy oaks" and "kitchen­ smoke, " where the sound of acorns on the roof, "the squirrel's muted bark and the hawk's cry" are preludes to the morning prayer of an Angelus and other stages of "redemption" which "make pure the heart" and prepare the way for recognition of the full range of implications (including the religious and the ontological) at stake in the prospect of a zero hour, the coming of an invader who has points of reference in "abstraction" or " infinity" and "flies the flag of death." 14 In "Woodlands, 1956-1960, " as in all great house poetry, such contrast is argument. " Practicing our redemption, " merging with a life in which all is (in Yeats's phrase) "accustomed, ceremonious, " is a way of winning admission into sacred space, helping the sup­ pliant " exile" to understand the virtue routinely practiced there. Set over against the changeless images of plantation life are the sym­ bols of modernity-once more a commonplace feature of the genre. Hearth and rooftree are opposed by "the cold voice of the world­ city's dream, " used here in place of court or town life as these tropes function in the English prototypes of Davidson's creation. The norm of civil life is best and most positively displayed in opposition to some " rough beast" or "blood-dimmed tide"-Yeats's "storm . . . howling . . . the future years." 15 Against the Tarletons of our horse­ less century, "the center cannot hold" because their squadrons, following "unearthly logic, " exercise power for its own sake and (worse even than General Sherman's plantation burners), release the "bomber's levin" (lightning) to "dragoon heaven." Because in guarding "rational slumber . . . they guard naught" and follow "no belief, " there is no limit on their choice of action. Or so it seems. But the "outcast heart" can learn reasons for better hope-and at Wood­ lands will, in part by reading Simms in the setting which stimulates

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the imagination to be full of recollections and to recover from them inspiriting, heroic precedents of "shapes mounting, hand to bridle, as of old . " The poem closes with a question and an assertion for which all that came before was preparation: How could we doubt that they are Marion's men? And surely, we are, too, when your tale is told .

As was Lady Gregory's Coale Park for Yeats, Woodlands for Donald Davidson became a place of retreat and a source of moral and artistic rejuvenation. His poem about this combination of mo­ tives therefore concerns the relation of the poet to both private and public virtues-each, to some extent, derivative of the other. The liberty and character of stewardship of place are both the subject of poetry as tradition and the achievement of the vatic poet as mem­ ory-keeper or "vessel of remembrance." Modern poetry as a "highly personal and subjective interpretation of experience" is the antith­ esis of "poetry as tradition"-the title of the Davidson essay illus­ trated by the relation of his persona to the image of Simms in "Woodlands, 1956-1960." 16 In his "Introduction" to the edition of Simms's letters, Donald Davidson says that even though the South Carolina novelist was " farced to con£orm to a technique determined by the pemands of urban readers, " his "traditional, more or less heroical subject 1' and his relation to it, to "voices in the blood, " made the author of the Border romances "the ' saga-man' of that age-the bard, in prose fiction of the frontier South." 17 Davidson compares Simms (and with him other novelists such as Scott and Hardy) to the oral mem­ ory preserved from early settlement of that Old Norse frontier that was Iceland. The poet as memory-keeper, as steward and distrib­ utor of that "legend and story" that are the "continuity of society, " is the spiritual kinsman of these prose narrators, " shaping the long continuities of time and place into transcendent memory." 18 According to the perceptive commentary of Lewis Simpson, such remembering is "both experience of past experience and the antic­ ipation of future experience" -something like what Paul Fussell has called "elegiac action." 19 A sense of personal worth, of identity and history, is encouraged by its embodiment in a public, vatic art. And to connect such art with a particular place only reinforces its pre­ dictable thrust toward communal celebration. Simpson observes that " as nearly as the South had a center in the Republic of Letters following the age when Monticello was such a place, Simms's plan­ tation (called Woodlands) was it." 20

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It is evident in such fully achieved and masterful productions as

"Old Sailor's Choice, " ''A Touch of Snow, " "Ninth Part of Speech, " and "Gradual of the Northern Summer" that Donald Davidson as poet saw modernity as "the total negation of existence resulting from the . . . quest, undertaken in fulfillment of the scientific world view, for a totally rational society." 21 For Davidson, Simms's home bespoke an antecedent sensibility, the submissive, customary ethos of an earlier world. Indeed, the place is so full of the past that ghosts there seem alive not as specters but as the men they were-just as his poem about Woodlands is so full of echoes of earlier poetry that the allusions are an integral part of it: "Colonus' praise, " from the title of a poem by Yeats; ''Attic glory" from Matthew Arnold on Sophocles; the image of the "rooted tree" from the entire great house tradition; and the larger invitation to emulation that is the thrust of the complete poem-once more recalling Yeats in "Coale Park, 1929." Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand When all those rooms and passages are gone . . . .

These words honor places which promote piety and reverence for song. And so goes the action/example of Davidson's poem. The artistic effect of such proceeding, when rendered in a stately mea­ sure, is not emotionally direct. Indeed we can understand why Louis Rubin describes this and other late poems of Davidson as "less ideological" than the earlier poetry. 22 But the poem is nonethe­ less reflectively and profoundly conservative-according to the nat­ ural bias of its form: shaped by an awareness of what is to be conserved and the different order of life which may be imposed in its place. It is in its design a work perfectly suited to its purpose, which is to reinforce what Davidson calls the "fable" and to include the poet among the images of loyalty carried by it. In "Woodlands, 1956-1960, " he proceeds by indirection, by analogy, and moves in the context of an inclusive cultural analysis which states and implies why a certain variety of images both command belief and deserve the honor they have received. By them is explained what Davidson means when he writes of Myth that is truest memory, Prophecy that is poetry. 23

6 THE FESTIVE SPIRIT OF ANDREW LYTLE The number and variety of Andrew Lytle's gifts are astonish­ ing. They reflect the wide range of his experience of the world and also his sense of decorum, of the relation of style to occasion, office to performance, which has remained intact regardless of the role he is engaged in. For he learned his manners according to the old regu­ lation and has never ceased to observe the difference between the public and private things-the family, the world or res publica, and the kingdom of God . Yet from having absorbed and embodied these distinctions concerning status and function, from distinguished service as critic, teacher, editor, and historian, he emerges as some­ times the most gleeful and mischievous of men, a festive spirit in any company, living out the Christian high comedy of which he is so eloquent and persuasive an interpreter: simultaneously sober and cheerful, serious and amused. He is by turns sage and patriarch, actor and "dancing man, " churchman, raconteur, and farmer-with the artist bringing all of the parts into unison. Though I first read Andrew Lytle some years before I met him, my impressions of him are indissolubly linked with the beginnings of our personal acquaintance, with places, people, and times that shaped those occasions. In his essays and the biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Andrew Lytle is a definite presence, an author­ ity for what the work maintains. The same can be said of his craft as a maker of fictions, which imparts a sense of mastery and com­ mand that grows upon the reader once the complete design of a story or novel has been apprehended in all of its parts. But in particular I think of the special, immediate quality of Andrew Lytle as it is transferred to the printed page in A Wake For T he Living, the chronicle of his family and meditation upon that portion of Southern history which interests him most directly. W hat makes 48

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real and gives general importance to the characters in this col­ lective memoir is that Andrew Lytle is indeed a commentary on what he has written, a special supplement to our admiration of his handiwork. One way of measuring Lytle's personal impact is through the devotion he inspires in his students. About the phenomenon there can be no doubt. I understand it by way of a 1974 summer seminar for which we were both part of the faculty. I recall the evening when Lytle arrived, lighting up a room full of young people who had eagerly awaited his coming. W hat followed included music and stories, banjo and guitar playing, some country dancing and rendi­ tions of "Old 97" and ''Amazing Grace." This mixture worked to­ ward establishing a community of interests which Lytle invoked when he delivered a formal talk the next morning. Clearly the students knew they would hear from a different sort of authority, a lecturer who could distinguish the essential from the ephemeral: one who wished to do so, as a courtesy. They already felt that way before Andrew Lytle rose to speak his first proprietary word. After the previous evening, no one expected mere information. What came instead was prescriptive truth remembered in concrete in­ stances-eloquence set over against the regnant follies of our day. Given the purposes he serves in such performances, there is no better orator than Andrew Lytle. Nor is there any doubt that the argumentum ad hominem is a central component of his purchase on an audience. Be£ore that week of summer school was finished, a new group had been added to the long roll of Lytle's devoted fol­ lowing. What Lytle brings in person to any setting, and especially to a collective enterprise, was made clear during an Agrarian reunion held at the University of Dallas in April ·of 1968. For two days of taped exchanges between the old comrades-in-arms and a little more "unofficial" visiting, Andrew Lytle kept the flow of conversa­ tion going, restoring among his brethren the social bond which was for most of them anterior to their intellectual cooperation in con­ fronting the crisis of the 1930s. His memory of events that had occurred when he was still a young man remained, like his princi­ ples, unaltered by the filtering influence of more recent occupa­ tions. Moreover, despite the handicap of Davidson's unexpected absence and the fact that the reunion came after a week of public functions, that memory helped to re-create with Tate, Warren, and Ransom some of the interactive magic which had years before made possible the achievement of I'll Take My Stand and other writings.

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W hen Andrew Lytle called his fellow Agrarians "brothers, " he meant what he said. Another instance of Andrew Lytle at the top of his bent I cherish especially because I had a hand in arranging it. In 1979 Lytle spoke before the Philadelphia Society at its regional meeting in New Or­ leans. About half of the audience was Southern, and not surprised. But the significant encounter took place between Andrew Lytle and the remaining half-Yankee intellectuals, conservatives all, who could not imagine that any such person might still exist. The title of his address was "They Took Their Stand: The Agrarian View After Fifty Years." But before Lytle read, he gave us an impromptu ver­ sion of " Hog Drovers, " the old song of the frontier, in response to Forrest McDonald's address on the Southerner as stockman. Sing­ ing in a clear tenor voice that belied his years, he called up the America of freeholders and herdsmen, of interconnected families living off the land. Other stories followed: driving from New York to Alabama with Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon; visiting the back country near Tupelo, Mississippi. The Agrarians, Lytle concluded, had not communicated their sense of urgency to the audience that they addressed in the 1930s because very few then "could imagine the world they were born in, had lived in, and were still living in could disappear." He observed ruefully that the Agrarians were "better prophets" than they knew. Of course, as Southerners could remember in 1930, there had been a time before the country betrayed itself out of the delusion of prog­ ress and the dream of the protective state; a time when men and women knew who and what they were through long tenure in a fixed place and through common recollections. They belonged to a corporate order we once called Christendom. Lytle lives there now. W hich is why he referred to himself in New Orleans as a " ghostly presence, " or at least one reason for that self­ description. But he was very real to my Northern friends who heard him that day-a whole man, speaking cheerfully that Word which will in the end prevail. W hen I find it hard to call up the world my fathers knew, the ancestral things and the bygone connection between this common­ wealth and the City of God, I think of Andrew Lytle and his work. His presence among us, both as a man and creative artist, is a continuing joy and blessing.

7 ADDIE BUNDREN AND THE DESIGN OF AS I LAY DYING The construction of no other Faulkner novel has been such a puzzle to its generally admiring readers as has that of As I Lay Dying. No formal center, organizing principle, or "point of view" seems to link in unity its component parts. Yet the alternative theory, that in the random shifting of perspectives, the author stands without, searching through "thirteen ways of considering the blackbird, " is on its face unsatisfactory: for the inspiration animating Faulkner at this stage in his career was the example of symbolic naturalism, his newfound awareness of all the difference Joyce, James, Flaubert, and Woolf had made in the technical instruments available to the writer of fiction. The discovery that consciousness and not occur­ rence is a proper subject for the modern novelist spurred Faulkner into a great creative surge which persisted for almost a decade. And the lesson was not forgotten even in the retrospective, or bardic, phase that followed. If the sources of the dilemma thus detailed are obvious, reasons for its persistence are not far to seek. First, there is the popular (Modern Library) reprint edition of the original text, which also contains T he Sound and the Fury. Since the Bundrens' odyssey is made up of fifty-nine interior (or almost inte­ rior) monologues, its conjunction with its immediate predecessor appeared doubly logical. For three-quarters of the earlier narrative (the monologues of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) forecasts the char­ acter of the latter. But the final (Dilsey) section of T he Sound and the Fury, plus the total movement of that work-from rendering to reportage or from "closed" to "open eye"-give to its completed whole a very different character. An overview emerges in the 1929 novel that is nowhere detectable in its 1930 successor. 51

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A second occasion for misinterpretation is the ease with which a conventional action may be reconstituted from the As I Lay Dying monologue sequence. It is reasonable that any reader consider the problem of what happens before he asks, "How?" and "How known"-reasonable and dangerous. Such is true in as much as quick results in this synthetic labor divert critical attention from seriously intended design: design implicit in the novel's very title. My counter to all of this confusion is the obvious one: the "I" who is still dying until the narrative concludes is the auditor of all the reveries which go into that account of her decline, death, funeral journey, and related events-all, including her own, which we should note is placed after the report of her decease. Watching and penetrat­ ing every object, place, and person in her orbit, as she had done when alive, Addie in her coffin will not turn inward until her will is enacted and she reposes "saved" and "free" of Bundren with kin­ dred in Jefferson. Because her will is so strong, she can know (hear, without speaking, "without words" [p. 26]) what occurs to each member of her immediate family and to her close associates beyond that circle while she awaits the performance of their last obligations in a peripatetic box. 1 Both the commonplaces of regional folklore and evidence directly presented in As I Lay Dying support this interpretation of Addie's role. Ghosts, according to their close observers, are usually trou­ bled spirits who cannot find quietude until something occurs among the living to put them at their ease. Anse says of Addie dead, "Her mind is set on it" (i.e., burial in the county seat); and he adds elsewhere that "she is counting on it" (pp. 109 and 133). Vernon Tull, echoing Anse, without surprise agrees that "she'll want it so" (p. 87). Such present-tense but postmortem descriptions of the first Mrs. Bundren are scattered throughout her story. She speaks to her sons Darl and Vardaman from the coffin (pp. 202-205); waits and listens for each stroke of Cash's charnel carpentry (p. 49); and is expected to "be grateful to ere a one" of those who help her brood along their way (p. 174). Of course, Dewey Dell is too busy to "allow" her mother to be dead and Vardaman for some time is convinced that she is in the river as a fish-or otherwise relocated. Doc Peabody's observation, made out of over sixty years' practice in rural Mississippi, sums up the situation: "Death [is] a function of the mind [ or spirit] . . . " and not "a phenomenon of the body"­ especially in Yoknapatawpha, where "everything . . . hangs on too long" (pp. 42 and 44). Indeed, Addie is more alive once dead than she had seemed

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before, more a pressure upon her family and world. Some of those she "overhears" play a choric part and in the process add a comic or ironic flavor to the entire work; for they are not so firmly under Addie's spell as those in her family and can therefore judge or serve as counterpoint to the action proper: the Bundrens in motion. She attends their thoughts and reactions because they prove what she has always believed concerning the trauma of living. And they help her to keep perspective on that blood-connected group while get­ ting "ready to stay dead a long time" (p. 161). In addition, these "outsiders" have a strictly formal function in dramatically validat­ ing much of what the Bundrens say and speculate. Furthermore, they document the force of Addie's will as a power even beyond the natural perimeter of her influence. To repeat, as Addie focuses on her relations (or they on her), no words are necessary to an interchange. For they all (even Anse) are prescient (pp. 26, 34, 38, 51, etc.). Therefore, once Addie is assumed to have an afterlife among the Bundrens, there is no strain in the correlative presupposition that she reads (and "interprets") the minds of husband and children. Anse's sections are few, settled, and colloquial. The same is more or less true of Cash's (though his settled qualities are admirable, not despicable). On the other hand, Darl, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell n1ake many appearances and often in them shade off toward free association. This technique is obviously in keeping with Addie's disregard for conscious thought and rhetorically calculated "communication" (and it is in accor­ dance with the aforementioned Bundren prescience). In no case is Addie able ( or probably inclined) to divert her immediate subject completely from his or her own pressing concerns. But with the three most troubled of her children she comes close to "taking over." Hence, she stays with them more than with their relatively self-contained companions. Cash and Anse are most remote from her unspeakable truth of the heart that "terribly . . . goes along the earth" (p. 165). Or maybe it is true that Cash is like Anse ( and also like Jewel with his single monologue) only because his frame of reference is exceedingly restrictive: and his language for thought and feeling thus homogenized into a boring and predictable sim­ plicity-a simplicity that could satisfy Addie's curiosity in a few "visits." Until his final meditation, he has nothing to reveal to his mother. Jewel and Anse have even less. In any case, Addie (once decisions have been made and acted out) enters those states of consciousness that meet her prescriptions for truth-telling and in­ formation-giving. And it is such states which most directly and

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powerfully render her person and presence to the novel's readers­ with a little heightening effect from her superior resources of lan­ guage to help the process along: a little more of her point of view made concrete through the gift of words to the voiceless. And now to look directly at Addie's monologue (pp. 161-68). It is without question the center of the novel's linear dynamic and the key to its thematic unfolding. Just be£ore this section stand the episode of the river-crossing and Cora Tull's recollection of "woman­ talk" on sin and redemption, children, and pride; just after is the Reverend W hitfield's out-of-order rejoicing that he need not confess his part in Jewel. Apart from this monologue, the conduct of the still-living Bundrens and the nature of their bond in Addie are both incomprehensible. The protagonist's song here is selfhood: its abso­ lute value and the difficulty of sustaining either the fact or value of self in the midst of "civilized" deceptions. Addie's paradox is that she must touch others to be herself: must, yet leaves them (Jewel excepted) anonymous or "dead" after such contact takes place. Hence her talk of whipping the children in her school and the disappoint­ ment she finds in the beds of marriage and childbearing. Addie is like certain other Faulkner female characters in imagining that there is somewhere another in whom she can "be" by losing her selfhood in them-imagining while at the same time remaining determined to accept nothing less than the forceful absorption which her iron purpose makes impossible. Hers is, by her own specification, an aloneness which requires daily ( or even more frequent) violation. At first, giving life answers her needs; yet it fails of durability. Then adultery is tested to the same end. This too falls short. Addie, it is true, loves Jewel, always and especially-she even breaks her own announced code against deception to hold him (p. 123). But she does so only because she continues to affirm the moment of his engendering long after she has given up on its cause: affirms it in that W hitfield, as she loved him, had a splendor for her that issued from his role as the surrogate of "God's love and His beauty and His Sin" (p. 166). No one but God could meet the measure of this woman. Even His anointed agent would do for only an interlude of proxy. Yet the interlude calls for the exception. Addie's confusion is not a peculiar one. For in the postbellum South only a few male authority figures remained to match the genuinely spirited woman. Preachers were in that number. Not a peculiar confusion, as I have said; but, even so, an exceptionally virulent one. Addie's sexual-cum-religious hunger for completion/confirmation is the locus toward which gather all such tensions as inform the

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sections attributed to members of her family. Vardaman and Darl dwell with tiresome iteration on Being and Non-Being. Their dis­ course of "was" and "is"-fish, horses, and mother-is a reflex of their metaphysical uncertainty. Anse's equivalent (though he is sounding nothing with the figure) is the antithesis of upright and horizontal, stasis and motion (pp. 34-35). Dewey Dell is taken with the difference between "could" and "will" (pp. 56-58 and 115), Cash with "ill" and "well made" (p. 224), and Jewel (p. 15) simply with "them" vs. "us"-an appropriate simplification of this network in a boy who rides spotted horses and seems alive only from the waist down. In addition, even Cora Tull and Whitfield reinforce the significance of these juxtapositions in belaboring the opposition of intent and action (pp. 158-60 and 169-71). Substantially, all of these polarities are subdivisions of Addie's informing principle: a knowl­ edge that there is other and self, death-in-life and life-in-death, word and deed, lie and truth-and a knowledge that all these pairs are set apart by a great gulf, even where both halves of them seem to be coessential. In turn, the same dialectic binds As I Lay Dying back into the total body of Faulkner's fiction. The question decided in that corpus and in its component parts is always whether man is able to "endure": to balance "pride" and "humility" or will and piety in the face of a given combination of circumstances (i.e., all that is bespoken in death, fire, and flood along the road to Jeffer­ son). Anse is one antipode, awaiting whatever fortune and charity bestow. Addie, in refusing a plot in New Hope cemetery (and thus dying as she had lived), is the other. Addie Bundren stands between the reader and the fable of As I Lay Dying. In one light, the action of that book occurs within her (though less vividly than within Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom!, her nearest analogue): occurs there while she is "hearing the dark land [ and all that is in it] talking the voiceless speech" (p. 167). And by reason of the nature/order of that listening-to say nothing of other evidence rehearsed above-the burden of the novel is as familiar and uncomplicated (to the experienced Faulknerian) as its presentation is subtle and oblique. Each of the Bundrens ad­ dresses Addie's dilemma, making private answers that point back to her centrality. Since Addie cannot have certaint y, God, or abso­ lute faith in and control of another equally vital person, her final answer to the "red bitter blood boiling through the land," to the life principle as she understands it, is a ritual "No!" After Jewel, she will not reach out again. For that reason she speaks of "cleaning her house" and "paying her debts": any other actions would mean

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being "beholden"-i. e., submissive, implicated in a frame of things which will not allow for movement at the top of her bent, like "the wild geese going north" in the night (p. 162). That is what is meant by descriptions others give of her as too particular" and private" a woman. That is why she listens all the way until her family begins a new, apart-from-her life-one that is presided over by the gram­ ophone and the duck-shaped woman; listens until then and at precisely that time, stops to die. The family, in varying degrees, will answer "yes"-was answering "yes" even as they put behind the person who had armed them to do so. For, burying Addie, they matched word and deed " along the ground, terribly." When Faulkner spoke of As I Lay Dying in his Charlottesville interviews, he summarized the book as follows: "I took this family and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer, flood and fire. . . . " A death, the ultimate ruin, makes pos­ sible that subjection. With an implacable revenant as filter, we are tolled into confrontations, faced down with the contingencies which define human limitation, and are thus compelled to sense what is at stake in the arrangement: tolled and pushed into the book as we could be in no other way. And all of this, thanks to Addie-content, order, and selection of section/ingredients that are disarray and unity at once. The advantages of both epic and lyric are thus se­ cured for the author, and the nobility/perversity of the species made unmistakably plain. Both stoic and heroic postures are given a fair hearing, and even fatalism a little justice. Yet no one of these al­ ternatives escapes criticism or implicit qualification. As I Lay Dying contains some "lengthwise" and some vertical business: some ex­ cesses of humility and some of pride; enough of both to preserve plausibility, but not so much of either as to leave us free to see ourselves defined in one or the other alone. II

II

I I . THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY

8 THE AUTHORITATIVE CONSTITUTION A Reading of the Ratification Debates As Americans of the present generation rarely acknowledge, when the Framers emerged on September 17, 1787, from Indepen­ dence Hall and their four months of self-imposed seclusion, it was not at all certain that the instrument which they had made there would be approved by majorities in at least nine states-the propor­ tion required under Article 7 of the proposed Constitution to bring a new general government into being. In other words, the ratifica­ tion of the original United States Constitution was an uncertain prospect, a goal to be achieved against formidable opposition. That is, if it could be achieved at all. Though most Americans wished to see a modest strengthening of the Articles of Confederation, there is reason to doubt that a major­ ity of the citizens who had a role in judging its replacement were comfortable with what the Philadelphia Convention had produced. For the entire country had only recently emerged from a prolonged and desperate war against a remote and arbitrary government: a power which announced benevolent intentions towards George Ill's subjects in North America while identifying the same "overseas Englishmen" as, if not willing to be subservient, beyond the protec­ tions of the law. 1 Reflecting this profound and historically grounded distrust of remote authority, there had been stubborn opposition to the proposed Constitution within the Philadelphia assembly itself: Luther Martin and John Francis Mercer of Maryland, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, John Lansing and Robert Yates of New York, Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia. And this list says nothing of always recalcitrant, always absent Rhode Island, which voted a loud and consistent "no" through its nonparticipa59

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tion; and nothing of those who were almost Antifederalists. Indeed, most of the Antifederalists went home before the business was finished. Mason, Randolph, and Gerry stayed until the end-in order to vote "no" to what their colleagues had fashioned for a new fundamental law. Others who voted "yes" professed a measure of uneasiness about their handiwork. But nevertheless, after concerted effort and a long struggle against fierce but ill-organized opposition, the proponents of the Constitu­ tion were, on May 29, 1790, finally successful in securing -for it a complete ratification by all of the (then existing) United States of America. The story of this process is not only politically instructive but also of immediate contemporary importance. Given the force of our constitutional law, it is of far more than antiquarian interest­ that is, if we believe, with interpretivist jurisprudence, that "the intent of the lawgiver is the law" and that true precedent is princi­ ple. As James Madison observed, the "meaning" of the Constitu­ tion is to be "sought . . . not in the opinions or intentions" of the "body which planned and proposed" it, but in those of the "state conventions where it received all [the validity] and Authority which it possesses." 2 And in the same vein he added, "[If] the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation . . . be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for . . . a faithful exercise of its powers." 3 Furthermore, despite our fore­ fathers' failure to preserve "all of the evidence of the original inten­ tion" implicit in their Constitution, despite the use they made of records, it is not, as (for an instance) Justice William J. Brennan argues, "arrogant to pretend that from our vantage we can gauge accurately" the central meaning of the Constitution, the purpose behind it, for those Framers. W hat the members of the ratifying conventions thought to be the central issues fought out in their exchanges can be described explicitly, and also those elements of the Constitution of which they all approved. We can determine with confidence some of what the Framers did intend, and a lot about what they never meant to sanction: that is, if we are mindful of what these Framers say, and not so concerned with what we think

the Constitution should be.

W here records survive, and however they have been editorially "improved, " these arguments, positive and negative, recur with unvarying iteration: arguments against any assumption of implied, unstated, or unspecified powers; arguments against any shift in the balance of federalism toward an ever-growing, omnicompetent na­ tional government and a related acceptance of protective authority

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in that government sufficient to impose on all Americans some operative version of the idea that men have ( and may at any time assert) a set of presocial, aboriginal rights. 4 To that matter of a priori rights is attached most of our difficulty in understanding the ratifi­ cation debates. Modern scholars, jurists, and legal historians-such as are chiefly interested in what the Constitution ough t to say-are often surprised by its general silence on the generic rights of man, and at its procedural, customary, nomocratic character. Like Wilson Carey McWilliams in his afterword to a new book on the ratification conventions, they are frequently disturbed at not finding such an emphasis in our fundamental law or in the context which originally gave it force and authority. 5 But if generally in search of the truth of things, they can do no other than agree with McWilliams that "the Constitution made no explicit appeal to natural right" and that this omission was purposive and functional since, as Edmund Ran­ dolph maintained ( on May 29, 1787) just before proposing what we now know as the Virginia Plan for replacing the Articles of Con­ federation, the subject before the Great Convention was not "human rights" but how to ensure "requisitions for men and money." 6 Randolph in Philadelphia said he was against "such a display of theory . . . since we are not working on the natural rights of men not gathered into society but upon those rights modified by society and interwoven with what we call the rights of the States." 7 Accord­ ing to this teaching, " Natural right may be dangerous [to the entire social and political fabric of American life] . . . since the Constitu­ tion presumed the existence of and seeks to protect [i. e., secure] conventional right." 8 In the same spirit spoke Colonel Joseph R. Varnum of Massachusetts who, in that state's ratification conven­ tion, insisted that Congress, under the Constitution, had "no right to alter the internal relations of a state" ; 9 and Theophilus Parsons, famous attorney and judge from the same state, who "demonstrated the impracticability of forming a bill in a national constitution for securing . . . individual right." 10 So also spoke Alexander Hamilton in the New York ratifying convention: "Were the laws of the Union to new-model the internal police of any state [or to] penetrate the recesses of domestic life, and control, in all respects, the private conduct of individuals-there might be more force in the objection [made against that Constitution]." 11 And so spoke George Cham­ plin of Rhode Island as a delegate in the March 1790 ratifying con­ vention of his state: "This Constitution has no influence on the laws of the states." 12 And according to Justice James Iredell in Calder v. Bull, the Constitution cannot be assumed to enact natural rights

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since these were meant to be protected under the police power of the states and localities. 13 In the phrase of Edmund Pendleton, "our dearest rights are in the hands of our state legislatures." 14 On that subject Justice Iredell assumed that, since the purest of men could not agree, lesser (but patriotic) men who made the Constitution went forward on some other basis, and left in our keeping a funda­ mental law to be valued because it got around such difficulty: a law to be followed to the letter, where assignment of powers is con­ cerned, since it contains no antecedent principle to which artful men might appeal in circumventing the intent of its makers. Seen in this way, Iredell's Constitution is a compromise between funda­ mental principles (since good men would not forget them utterly) and circumstantial modifications. And Iredell's views were not, in his generation, extraordinary. 15 One of the distinctive properties of the United States Constitu­ tion, as Willmoore Kendall insisted, is that it cannot be satisfactorily filtered back and forth through the Declaration of Independence. 16 Granted, a few Federalists and Antifederalists misunderstood the Constitution's broader provisions while they served in the ratifica­ tion debates. Their errors were a reason for the hyperbole of certain still-current mischaracterizations of our fundamental law. This Con­ stitution was sometimes further misunderstood when its text first acquired the force of law, in the era of the early Republic-after adoption of the Bill of Rights. And this is to say nothing of many other misrepresentations which have had an influence over Ameri­ can public life and political thought after these times of national beginning had concluded. For some Americans, when they have a political "investment" in the teaching, have always maintained that there is a somehow binding commitment within the Constitution to realize a "promise" in the second sentence of the Declaration. Their doctrine (which ignores the ratification debates) is described usu­ ally as "Abolitionist jurisprudence." However, it has twentieth-cen­ tury implications, and late twentieth-century advocates. In this connection consider Mortimer J. Adler's book on the Constitution­ We Hold T hese Truths-with a title from the Declaration of Indepen­ dence, as if the two documents could be conflated into one. 17 What signifies is that Dr. Adler's mistake has become a commonplace one among educated Americans who do not know the records of the Great Convention and of the state ratification conventions-or who do not wish to know what these documents would teach them about their obligations under a sovereign, fundamental law. The same interested and anachronistic interpreters who bother

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themselves to discover a teaching on natural rights ( or a security for them) in the Constitution are also puzzled by Antifederalist per­ sistence in demanding an explicit written restriction on growth in the ambitions of the new government. To persuade such cautious souls to take the risks of ratification, Federalists were politically compelled to promise that the Constitution by its very nature could not create or sustain anything more than a very limited power, one able to be whatever modest instrument the electorate wanted-but no more than that. W hat we must recognize as a predicate for all future study of the ratification is that this passion for restriction and narrowing of scope-what we see now in the ninth and tenth amendments-was at the heart of the Antifederalist position in the ratification conven­ tions of every state. Indeed most mild Federalists understood the attitude because it represented part of their own feeling. The strength of this demand is visible in all of the recorded ratification debates and is also the key to the way in which Federalists argued for the Constitution. Therefore, it is important to how we read the Bill of Rights, which was a correction of the Constitution, one made to confine the federal government, not primarily to define or secure the rights of individuals within their states and local communities. For to protect the rights of citizens against federal abuse, if no protections against state and local infringement are added, is pri­ marily to restrain government, and was so intended-even though such restriction had the effect of simultaneously constitutionalizing his­ toric, common-law rights. On no other premise can we explain why James Madison grounded his pleading for ratification in Virginia by describing the new Constitution as having mostly "external ob­ jects" which "are but few." The national bond defended by the Federalists in Richmond is almost what the Antifederalists would have proposed, had they controlled the process. In no other way can we account for why James Wilson of Pennsylvania, a passionate centralizer, opened the entire discussion of the Constitution in his "State House Yard Speech" of October 6, 1787, by declaring that "everything which is not given, is restricted." 18 A sample of these "first-of-all" amendments comes from New Hampshire which, following the lead of Massachusetts, suggested "that all powers not expressly and particularly delegated [to the general government] by the aforesaid Constitution are reserved to the several States to be, by them, exercised." 19 In the seven states where amendments were proposed, this was the primary recom­ mendation. It is noteworthy that friends of the Constitution sup-

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ported most of the amendments which Antifederalists offered as improvements to it. Many of these Federalists thought that these amendments changed nothing. But the Antifederalists read the orig­ inal Constitution in a more cautious, suspicious way, as men pri­ marily guarding against the prospect or possibility of tyranny. In such an atmosphere of accommodation, James Iredell of North Carolina insisted that "no man would be more against this Con­ stitution than myself" if it implied that "what is not expressed is given up" [i.e., surrendered to federal supervision]; 20 elsewhere he added that "no power can be exercised but what is expressly given." 21 In the same spirit, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in the South Car­ olina legislative debates of January 1788, held that the "general government has no powers but what are expressly granted to it, " adding elsewhere, "we certainly reserve to ourselves every power and right not mentioned in the Constitution." 22 Supporting Gover­ nor John I-Iancock (who had been, with Adams, counted for a time as an Antifederalist), Samuel Adams made way for the Federalists in maintaining that "all powers" not expressly delegated to Congress are reserved to the several states to be by them exercised ." Finally, even James Madison, the most important apologist for the Con­ stitution, joined other, more ambiguous advocates of ratification by declaring that "every thing not granted is reserved" and by adding that there was no delegation by silence. 23 In these ratification conventions the friends of the Constitution minimized its scope, and its enemies exaggerated its usefulness to putative tyrants. This dichotomy is the rhetorical given of these documents. W hat both strategies suggest is that implied powers are not tolerable, that the narrowest views of what was achieved in Philadelphia are politically the most acceptable, and that future judges ( or even legislators) would only at great peril discover them in a vague but "growing" Constitution-one without much specific content, yet full of "principle." In other words, their expressed intention (if they were honorable men and ready to be bound by what they said) was to avoid being governed or manipulated by someone like Justice Brennan. Hovvever, with this expressed consensus as a limit restricting the Framers' aspirations and intentions-put down here as an inter­ pretive predicate for reading their handiwork-there remain other surprises in the public ratification which teach us more about what it meant . For one thing, Antifederalism and Federalism are not true political parties and are easily misrepresented through an analogy to the American party politics visible after 1800. The then1e of both

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coalitions was an attitude toward the Constitution, toward what it should contain. In 1787 Federalism had a different rationale in every state. And wherever Antifederalism appeared (almost everywhere but Delaware), it took on a local coloring, producing larger dif­ ferences than those found among Federalists. Finally, in most states, local and partisan politics had an influence on the struggle over the Constitution: that some favored approval was enough to make cer­ tain that others did not. All of this variety produced thirteen very distinctive ratifications­ and a composite approval of a Constitution with some rough edges, such as we must interpret on balance. Which is not to say that those who finally assented to the United States Constitution had no val­ ues or purposes in common. By either amendment or replacement, they did wish to improve on the Articles of Confederation. They meant what they said about the "blessings of liberty, " about pre­ serving such to themselves and their "posterity." And when Roger Sherman made a list of objectives embodied in the proposed instru­ ment of government, he spoke for its supporters: defense against .foreign danger; control of internal disputes and disorders; treaties; foreign commerce and a revenue to be derived from it. 24 Add to these a plan for the establishment of a trustworthy currency, for financial stability and good commercial treaties, and finally for a commitment to keeping our contractual obligations under law, and we can recognize most of the basis for consensus in support of a replacement for the unsuccessful Articles of Confederation. The Constitution clearly provided certain guarantees supporting a few discrete rights; it embodied certain general protections for all-protections in the form of the government itself; and it outlawed certain practices. But it was also true, as the Preamble suggests in the use of the word "secure" (which can·not be stretched beyond "preserve" to mean "create"), that the original Constitution was a way of protecting a known felicity, not a way of inventing a new one: an effort to engender stabilit y, continuity, and co-existence, not a program for root-and-branch reform or "continuing revolu­ tion." The strategies of the Framers in that conservative unfolding moved toward a "more perfect Union, " but not toward too much Union in social, political, or economic homogeneity. Even so, there is evidence of a perennial American conflict bub­ bling to the surface throughout these debates, of a spirit somewhat contradictory to the general thrust of the nation-making enterprise: namely, the divisive impulses in many Americans to ask that the government intrude upon the civil life in order to "promote good

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causes" and the even stronger demand alive among us from the beginning of our history that it leave us alone. General Joseph Stanton of Charlestown manifested that contradiction in the Rhode Island ratification convention when, after angry observations on the prospect of federal intervention in the internal affairs of his commu­ nity and after insisting that the new government have no more powers than were allowed by the Articles, he complained about the failure of the proposed regime to contemplate a method of attacking the institution of slavery where it stood. Benjamin Bourne of Provi­ dence made sport of this obvious inconsistency and drove Stanton into an angry but volatile silence. Likewise in Massachusetts, Gen­ eral William Heath and the spirited Benjamin Randall of Sharon mocked Bay State abolitionists for imagining that a constitution touching slavery in the South had a chance of being written and ratified in 178Z Randall says Southerners overhearing such talk "would call us pumpkins" for the failure to understand the limits of Union. Pious men in New England also complained about omission of a religious test for officeholders under the new government . These were answered by defenders of the Constitution such as the Rever­ end Samuel Langdon in New Hampshire and Theophilus Parsons or Dr. Charles Jarvis in Massachusetts; answered with appeals to religious freedom-and by reminders that religion was a question for the states, to be resolved as they wished. The same sort of charges were made in North Carolina, and were suggested by a question from Patrick Calhoun, the father of John C. Calhoun, in the January 1788 South Carolina legislative debates which called for a ratifying convention . Henry Abbott and David Caldwell of North Carolina, Antifederalists, were answered in their outspoken con­ cern for a public orthodoxy by James Iredell, later a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Out of an argument from British history, Iredell demonstrated that nothing was implied in the exclu­ sion of religious tests but a hope of keeping the national govern­ ment within the necessary boundaries of restraint and away from the bad example of British-style establishment. It is his summary that "had Congress undertaken to guaranty religious freedom, or any particular species of it, they would have had a pretence to interfere in a subject they have nothing to do with. Each state, so far as the clause in question does not interfere, must be left to the operation of its own principles." 25 In another vein, in Rhode Island were heard complaints that no constitutional provision has been made to enforce tolerance within the states-complaints of the pious

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James Sheldon answered by the observation that real moral free­ dom had gained ground without recourse to coercion, and by the opinion that, as the country had changed, no state had set out to impose its own special values on the entire Republic. These quarrels take us to the heart of the Bill of Rights, its origins in the fears expressed in the ratifying conventions, what Antifeder­ alists (or most of them) wanted, and what they got through its addition to the Constitution . On the one hand, provisions in nine of the twelve amendments proposed by the First Congress promised an enlarged concern for what happens to individuals-concern with how much the central government can do to disarm them, to reg­ iment their spiritual and political lives, to examine their property or intrude upon their homes; to deny them trial by their peers, due process of law, assistance of counsel, or protections against arbi­ trary taking of property. But to mention the possibility of such abuses being performed by the central government is to make the point which I have in mind at this juncture. For at bottom the Bill of Rights is much more a restraint on government than a general protection of personal rights or lever for enlarging their scope: a traditional feature of our constitutional inheritance coming directly out of British history, reflecting the Framers' overall concern for the danger of tyranny; a check upon what the federal government may attempt, especially the chief magistrate. Americans were accustomed to living under such protections. They wished ( apart from a few radicals) to adopt as fundamental law, language that secured them against certain excesses issuing from the executive. Such securities they had enjoyed as "overseas" Englishmen under the Great Charter, the 1628 Petition of Right and the 1689 Bill of Rights. These securities spoke of what a general government would not do, and said nothing about how local au­ thorities or their neighbors might behave against particular cit­ izens. In other words, it said nothing about what we usually mean by rights, as we speak of such today. It is foolish to examine this evidence as if the Fourteenth Amendment were a part of the 1791 United States Constitution, and the ruling of the Supreme Court in Gitlow v. New York (1925) had always been a part of the fundamental law. 26 To read the ratification debates as a gloss upon the United States Constitution, it is necessary that we recognize the conflicting im­ pulses behind the outcry for a bill of rights in most of these warm exchanges-as well as in the text which answered this insistence when on December 15, 1791, it became part of that Constitution.

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Such evidence is, with what I have said in prologue about the status of equality and of the doctrine of implied powers in these conven­ tions, a necessary preliminary to interpretation because of what has been made of the Constitution out of one understanding of its fourteenth amendment, as combined with a complete indifference to the ninth and tenth amendments-for the reluctant ratifiers, the heart of that Bill of Rights. The original, unincorporated Bill of Rights made no attempt to take away from the states their right to administer such questions according to their several understand­ ings of who should get what-no effort to reach a new level of justice through a new process for oversight and intrusion by the national judiciary, even though at one point (concerning the first amendment) Madison had urged them to make the attempt by insisting that "no state shall infringe the rights of conscience." The point is that in this view he found little support. Indeed, by not applying the Bill of Rights to the states, the Fram­ ers responded to the best wisdom of both Federalists and Anti­ federalists, avoiding both too many rights and too much enforce­ ment of them, and thus resolving the Antifederalist impulse to desire contradictory things. No one was disturbed by the resolution since most agreed with Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts that "had the national government undertaken to guaranty the several rights of citizenship contained in their [state] declaratory bills, it would have given a right of interference which would naturally tend to check, circumscribe and finally annihilate all state power." 27 Americans have always had a tendency to wish some good thing done without being willing to create the power to accomplish such worthwhile ambitions. The grumpy Stockbridge arch-Federalist knew ,vhere that temper would lead. So also did Antifederalist State Senator John Williams of New York, who in the convention of his state observed, "The constitution should be so formed as not to swallow up the state governments: the general government should be confined to certain natural objects; and the states should retain such powers as concern their own internal police." 28 As did, fur­ thermore, former Governor James Bowdoin of the Bay State, who insisted, "The whole Constitution is a declaration of rights, which primarily and principally respect the general government intended to be formed by it. The rights of particular states and private cit­ izens not being the object or subject of the Constitution, they are only incidentally mentioned." 29 For these men, the only tolerable bill of rights would be one free of any tendency to centralize. Which

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is also what the ratification conventions said-except for a few W hig radicals in each . 30 As I suggested earlier, Federalism and Antifederalism had, from their beginnings, a dialectical relationship.After proposed changes in the Articles of Con£ederation and the last big effort to raise a revenue (the Impost) under those Articles failed in 1785-1786, a nucleus of Federalists (known as nationalists or continentalists at this time) gathered in the cause of replacing that form of govern­ ment. Several of these reformers had served in the Continental Congress or in the American army during the Revolution. They were agreed even before the Annapolis Conference of 1786 on what changes in the national government would be required.Antifeder­ alism, on the other hand, came into being as cautious men, jealous of local political autonomy and their liberties, listened to advocates who put a case for Federalism. Only after the Constitution was ratified and the new government put in place did Antifederalism get beyond the status of a negative reflex and assume, slightly changed, the proportions of an internally consistent political teach­ ing. For thinking about the preservation of a local and "beloved way" does not foster a truly national politics-at least not for a long time. Contrary to what the late Professor Herbert Storing has led us to believe, what the Antifederalists wanted is in many cases not clear in their pamphlet literature-documents too often the product of intelligent oppositional eccentricity.3 1 Moreover, it is not always revealed in the public oratory of their great champions, even though Melancton Smith, George Mason, Rawlins Lowndes, John Lan- _ sing, and (especially) Patrick Henry give us a better indication of what that doctrine contained than do the outrageous scribblings of assorted radicals and speculative men. But the best and most de­ pendable view of their purpose comes from the questions which they put to their adversaries: clear evidence of the concerns they shared with them in considering the potentially negative conse­ quences of ratification.Finally, Antifederalism became a position on how a ratified Constitution is to be understood.In that guise the teaching of the Antifederalists is a living force each time a judge remembers his oath not to practice or countenance "construction." The process by means of which this dialectic emerged has, of course, its deepest roots in the experience of the Revolution, the fallures of the Continental Congress, and in the debates of the Con­ stitutional Convention itself.Telling all of that story is not the pur-

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pose here. But I will mention these roots from time to time in making a narrative of the ratification. In this dramatic segment of history we look first to the delivery of the proposed Constitution to the Continental Congress in New York on September 20, 1787. The Philadelphia Convention had met pursuant to a call sent out by the Continental Congress which voted to communicate the proposed replacement of the Articles to the sovereign powers (the States) represented by that assembly, to transmit said instrument without comment on the substance of the Constitution, but to include with the text sent along a suggestion that it be voted on in each state by special conventions of separately elected delegates-as the Phila­ delphia Framers had specified. The Antifederalists in the Continental Congress (Richard Henry Lee, Nathan Dane, Elbridge Gerry) had made an attempt to attach a Bill of Rights and a list of other potentially valuable amendments to their resolution of transmission, thus giving a negative inertia to the entire process at its outset. The Federalists, on the other hand, wished the Congress to urge unconditional ratification by the states. After three days of stalemate, the Congress agreed to take neither side, but to deliver the proposed Constitution to the states to be judged by thirteen different, distinctive majorities, each acting solus, since what they (collectively) thought to make was an improved union of the states, not a "consolidated" government. Only at this point, with the prospect of ratification before them, did the Antifederalists pull themselves together and begin to speak frequently across state lines. For, even without agreement on an alternative plan of government, they could now achieve a unanim­ ity on what they were against: a negative consensus, reflecting an unspoken unity of temper and purpose. Before considering the implications of this disposition we should remember certain facts about their situation and their collective character as American pa­ triots of a certain kind: patriots devoted to an identity for which they had fought a great war against a consolidating, multifaceted, dis­ tant authority, and therefore not eager to create a new one. It is not surprising that a company of public men bent upon the preserva­ tion both of liberty as they have known it and of a recognized felicity in their way of life should, when acting politically, in concert, come together in that large cause only in the negative-only when their loyalties and other, very different loyalties are threatened together, by a power unfriendly to all such devotion. It is also not surprising that they should have difficulty in forming a national alliance to protect such local liberty, to defend once more the proposition that the

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American agenda should not come down from Whitehall or any equivalent, should not be "poured in at the top"-that our politics should not be generated at some central point and then spread through the country but rather come into being the other way around, originating in the communities, states and regions, rising slowly to inform deliberations at the national level. Despite these probabilities, it is a matter of record that Anti­ £ederalism did become a national American politics, bent on seeing the Constitution interpreted in a certain way because its spokesmen had originally feared that Constitution and sought to prevent its adoption. With ratification, Antifederalism simply became the most minimal form of Federalism-just as Federalism had rhetorically disguised itself as "almost Antifederalism" in those states where ratification was in doubt. But these rhetorical distinctions were not always obvious when the struggle over ratification was in progress. They emerged seriatim, out of the melange defined above: emerged dramatically, not philosophically, as an action and a politics shaped by already " given" political roles. It is a paradox that the Federalists were in a hurry to get conven­ tions called and states voting on the United States Constitution, while the Antifederalists fought to delay the proceedings, with their leaders in each state hoping that a negative from some powerful commonwealth would induce a groundswell against ratification and relieve them of the obligation of fighting with local Federalists on the grounds of utility, history, and principle. Had either side been fully successful in achieving its purpose in the scheduling or man­ agement of these conventions, it would, in the process, have in­ jured its cause. Federalism was not victorious because it hurried the business in Pennsylvania, or because it knew how to exploit the lack of leadership among the Antifederalists in Massachusetts but rather by reason of the failure of the Antifederalists to bring forward an alternative view of the Union that would better preserve and per­ fect it. Said another way, Federalists won by default. Because they had no doctrine, the Antifederalists had no concerted plan for defending their liberties-for that reason, and because they were Antifederalists, inclined to concentrate on local political struggles and local adver­ saries, not on what might happen to them all, together, as one species of American politician. That as men committed to the sur­ vival of some kind of Union they were obliged to create a national party in order to avoid being nationalized had not occurred to them. Otherwise they were going to be devoured by an enveloping action

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beyond the restricted scope of their imaginations . Their habitual localism prevented them from recognizing their situation. Outside of Patrick Henry's organization in Virginia, Governor Clinton's New York machine, and Willie Jones's little army in North Carolina, nothing like a network for communicating their views between states or even throughout a state could be found on the Antifederalist side . Sporadic corresponding, much of it passing through John Lamb of New York, was the best that they achieved­ with only a little exchange of pamphlet literature . 32 Moreover, the kind of natural suspicion about centralizing innovations left behind by the Revolution was more likely to affect voters in the states than Hamilton's dreams of the power and glory of an American empire. Had North Carolina and Virginia voted early, and voted no, espe­ cially if either New Hampshire or Massachusetts had joined them, then, as all serious scholars recognize, the victories of the Federal­ ists in Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, and Pennsyl­ vania would have had no importance. 33 Everyone would have gone back to Philadelphia to remove offensive language and correct vague implications: to obliterate every opportunity for "construction" by legislature, Congress or Supreme Court. The aforementioned early ratifications are a Federalist set, an overture to a more ambitious political music which comes later, when other themes predominate and are then answered in a rich counterpoint. Delaware (December 7, 1787), New Jersey (December 18, 1787), and Connecticut ( January 9, 1788) were compelled by geographical and economic circumstances: by a need to retire debt and to escape tariffs imposed upon them by neighboring "repub­ lics"-to be enthusiastic for the improvements proposed in a struc­ ture which fostered unity and created authority while still leaving plurality intact. Thus in these easy decisions there was some "com­ mercial Federalism" (especially in Connecticut) and a touch of what I call "the Federalism of Fear." Pennsylvania's ratification (December 12, 1787) was sold heavily as a key to commercial prosperity-Union as a cornucopia. James Wilson, who dominated the convention in that state, talked much of "vast prospects" before his countrymen and of the agency of government in arranging to "enrich the dominions of the United States ." Georgia ( January 2, 1788) is an unmixed illustration of the "Federalism of Fear"-with the rush to ratify the action of a mob of land speculators, frontiersmen, and (near Savannah) planters, sur­ rounded by angry Creek and Cherokee Indians and a hostile for­ eign power in Florida and Alabama (the Spanish). Delaware and

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New Jersey had come away from the Great Convention with as good a bargain vis-a-vis their survival as independent communities with real power as they were likely to arrange. John Dickinson and William Paterson had done their best for the home folks. And Penn­ sylvania stood to make money as the site of America's most impor­ tant trading city, once commercial treaties were in place, and to make more money as the home of American banking and the na­ tion's capital. Very little of this Federalism is explicable by recourse to pure abstract principle. But the Federalist victories set the tone for the remainder of the ratification process, pushed the business for­ ward and made its prospects seem hopeful, even though the refusal of Rhode Island to move one step toward Union-to attend the Constitutional Convention or react to its handiwork-hung over these easy triumphs like a pall. In the dramatic pattern of ratification, the movement toward reso­ lution begins in a sequence of five conventions held between Febru­ ary and June of 1788-conventions in which (Maryland excepted) the Antifederalists had a serious opportunity of winning the fight and a high level of popular support behind them-usually more support than was visible in the division of the house within a particular convention. Yet their efforts came to nothing. This part of the history of ratification begins on Feb. 22, 1788, in Exeter, New Hampshire when that state's ratification convention, caught in art­ ful Federalist hands, voted to adjourn because so many Antifederal­ ist delegates were, once subjected to the pressure and persuasion of "national" arguments, unwilling to follow their electorate's instruc­ tions to reject the Constitution as proposed. Had Nathaniel Pea­ body or Joshua Atherton maintained a discipline on their side of the struggle and called the question before _President James Sullivan outmaneuvered them (and thus forestalled the popular will), the Antifederalists would have gone into the South Carolina, Virginia, and New York conventions with a better sense of Antifederal possi­ bilities. But the approval of the Constitution in Massachusetts (Febru­ ary 6, 1788) was more important than all of its difficulties in New Hampshire. Indeed, that victory may have persuaded some Granite State delegates who had been instructed to vote against the Con­ stitution to make their decision for delay and additional consulta­ tion with their constituents. Defeat would probably have brought on an Antifederalist triumph in the entire ratification conflict-with a demand for a new constitutional convention. Despite an embar­ rassing connection with Captain Shays's "rebellion" of the previous

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year, the Antifederalists had a majority of at least fifty votes when they first faced the Brahmin aristocracy in the old meeting house on Milk Street. Yet because they had no leadership, no organization, no skill in law, rhetoric, or political theory, they could not maintain, against gifted Federalist opponents, their version of ordered liberty and the common good. Furthermore, they lost confidence when betrayed (for the sake of ambition) by Governor John Hancock­ their "champion," who had failed them so frequently in other days­ and when neglected by their natural spokesman, the aging Samuel Adams, who fell silent in grief at the death of his son . Federalists Theophilus Parsons and Rufus King had made a splendid deal (for his reelection) with Hancock; and Adams's district in Boston had held a meeting in support of ratification. These events, as combined with the inability of major Antifederalist leaders to win elections from their home communities (they were called disloyal" to the ancient inheritance of the old Puritan commonwealth), gave an advantage to the advocates of ratification. In Massachusetts the Federalists put forward one of the compelling versions of the Ameri­ can corporate enterprise, a doctrine which sees in government, state and national, a precondition of liberty; and in Union a security for the cherished, local "way"-to say nothing of the opportunity to do great things beyond the boundaries of Zion. Yet as attractive as was its presentation in Massachusetts, the Federalism of Theophi­ lus Parsons, Rufus King, James Bowdoin, General William Heath, Theodore Sedgwick, and Fisher Ames could not be exported out­ side of New England. For, like the republicanism from which it derives, this doctrine envisages a government both united and instrumental, one which comes too close to being both sanctimo­ nious and merely" democratic. 34 A much more important conse­ quence of this convention was its decision to recommend amend­ ments to go along with its official (February 6, 1788) approval of the Constitution. This strategy made it much easier for the Federalists to be finally successful in other disputed conventions. Maryland (April 28, 1788) and South Carolina (May 23, 1788) both ratified the Constitution by large margins. For though these states contained many Antifederalists, they were not (except for three counties in Maryland) well organized. Moreover, thanks to Federalist newspapers, the people were brought to understand clearly the circumstantial case for Federalism without learning the valid set of objections to that case. In Maryland hostility to the political organization of Samuel Chase (when joined to a profound respect for General Washington and the beginnings of a commercial II

II

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interest) played into the hands of a group of younger Federalists headed by James McHenry, Daniel Carroll, Alexander Contee Han­ son, and George Gale, who sold the idea of a revised national bond in terms of all the Federalist arguments, including a share in the opening, settlement and trade of the Western territories. In Bal­ timore they spoke of shipping and the need for commercial agree­ ments, of the necessity of haste in ratifying and of subsequent amendments which might then be attached to protect and improve the Constitution. The South Carolina Federalists were even more gifted and advan­ taged than their counterparts in Annapolis. Although it is probable that outside the Low Country the Antifederalists outnumbered their opponents so heavily as to give them a numerical advantage in the state as a whole, they lacked spokesmen. Rawlins Lowndes deliv­ ered a powerful sectional appeal against ratification during the Jan­ uary 1788 legislative debates which were a prologue to calling for the election of delegates to a ratifying convention. Lowndes made essentially the Antifederal argument of Patrick Henry-though more directly on pro-slavery grounds: ratification was a surrender of the Southern interest. The Federalists, because people of South Car­ olina were accustomed to giving trust to the natural and acknowl­ edged leaders of their society, did as expected once the Pinckneys, Rutledges, Pierce Butler, General William Moultrie, and other na­ bobs had assured them that this change would protect the regime: did so on May 23, 1788, after perfunctory debate and an attempt by General Thom.as Sumter to persuade them to wait upon a decision in Virginia; voted by a margin of 149 to 73 to trust a little to the "good will" of their "Northern brethren" and the great "experi­ ment." But they did not vote to add a bill_ of rights to the Constitu­ tion because, as General Pinckney reminded them, they could take part in declarations concerning human rights only "with a very bad grace" as long as such documents began by announcing "all men are born free." If South Carolina had delayed and Virginia then had voted no, " there would have been no vote for the Constitution in South Carolina. The general tendency of Antifederalism and the grounds of its expression are summarized in the Richmond oratory of that ne­ glected American giant, Patrick Henry. In the speech of Henry, an alternate vision of unity and plurality is embodied, different from that of Madison and of Fisher Ames. In the conflict between Henry, William Grayson, George Mason, James Monroe, and other dis­ tinguished Antifederalists on one side and Madison, Henry Lee, p

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Edmund Randolph, and such elders as Edmund Pendleton and George Wythe on the other, the future status of the proposed United States Constitution was determined. And particularly in the ex­ changes of Henry and Madison did the entire conflict come to a head. If Virginia ratified, everyone knew that the Constitution would be adopted. If Virginia refused, the Federalists were defeated. And Virginia had much difficulty in deciding not to refuse, after Henry had spoken to its own historic past and role in the achievement of independence. In other words, it felt itself free to vote "no" on ratification-even though Washington had endorsed it, and his neighbors rarely refused his advice. In order to defeat the Constitution, Henry had to identify it as both a practical threat to Virginia, a way of treating neighbors as a mere "herd" of men, and also a contradiction of the OId Dominion's highest values, its still-English version of liberty-an inherited lib­ erty, belonging to Virginians because of their history: the "genius of the people, " embodied in society, where questions of value and normative estimation had their proper locus. For even Federalists in Virginia refused to think of government as instrumental in promot­ ing causes outside or above itself: American "empire/' national moral reformation, national wealth, liberty among the nations, sci­ ence and knowledge-all of the "good" causes which might prosper through an application of federal power. 35 Madison, on the other hand, was obliged to argue that the proposed Constitution was not the product of "speculative theory" and "illuminated ideas" (as Antifederalists insisted) but was instead just what Patrick Henry said he wanted: an "invigoration" of the powers of government granted under the Articles; as he had specified in Federalist No. 45, with " [delegated] powers . . . few and defined, " such "as will be exercised principally on external objects"-war, peace, maritime regulation, foreign commerce, etc. . . . 36 To preserve Virginia and national unity no "second convention" such as Henry recommended was needed, though Madison would give his personal promise to attach recommended amendments, once the new government was in place. In this confrontation occurs the climax of the ratification struggle. It is one of the most important moments in our nation's political history, one in which the Constitution was approved by the nation-approved on conditions understood in a specific way. After Virginia ratified on June 25, 1788, the ratification conven­ tions still to be held were certain to be only epilogues-a three-part, pro forma coda to the great business just settled. Actually, New Hampshire had reconvened and on June 21 ratified before Virginia

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made its decision. New Hampshire had given way to a tide already in motion-and to the idea of becoming the ninth state to ratify, the state which closed the subject. Of course, this would not have been the result had Virginia and then New York joined North Carolina and Rhode Island in refusing to say "yes." New York (on July 26, 1788) ratified because it had no choice-and despite a large Anti­ federalist majority in its convention. North Carolina (November 21, 1789) and then Rhode Island (May 29, 1790) added their controlled reluctance to that which was expressed at Poughkeepsie. All three states approached their decision to ratify in the spirit of Antifederal­ ism-so as to establish what the new government would not attempt. And like the Virginians, the men of New Hampshire and New York joined the Union while recommending amendments, full of the prospects for a second convention. But the maneuvering room of these Antifederalists was gone once Virginia had ratified-and all the advantage they might have had from early decisions was forfeit. However, they could take some consolation from the way Federalists interpreted what they had all done together, thirteen voices speak­ ing in a certain series to one question. With the narrative history of ratification understood as an ac­ tion-a drama with causes, climax and resolution-what might be said in addition concerning its value in constructing an authorita­ tive version of the Constitution is, either with respect to particular concerns which are sounded throughout these debates (the prob­ lems of the courts, taxes, control of elections, slavery, representa­ tion, religion, the power to create a board of placemen or, curiously, of the Federal district as an independent base for Federal aggres­ sion) or, in contribution to some summary of the theory of Constitu­ tion-making, not separable from the rhetoric heard in the ratifying conventions themselves. The analytic truth replicates the chrono­ logical, as modified by a few special concerns important in a single state, or in one section of the country but not in another. In matters of religion and race and with reference to judicial practices, the ordinary citizens were concerned primarily with preserving what they had known best and longest-what they knew to be func­ tional, even if imperfect. The High Court (for whatever reasons that animate it) has misun­ derstood the evidence on religion since Everson v. T he Board of Educa­ tion. 37 The truth about the limits marked off by the Establishment Clause and the exclusion of religious tests for officeholders in Arti­ cle 6 is that they raise no wall of separation, only a check upon sectarian passions. The public orthodoxy is left in place by the first

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amendment-as witness the legislation which followed its adop­ tion. Oliver Wolcott in the Connecticut ratification convention notes that "the Constitution enjoins an oath upon all officers of the United States" which is "a direct appeal to that God who is the avenger of perjury." 38 Other discussions of the status of this subject in the various ratification debates I have examined earlier in these remarks. Concerning slavery, Antifederalists in some states (New York, V irginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina) are defenders, but enemies in others (Massachusetts, Rhode Island [except for George Hazard], Connecticut, and Pennsylvania). The subject (as opposed to the slave trade) was not, to the astonishment of modern scholars, a major one for the Framers-was instead, with respect to the fun­ damental law of the nation, a closed subject, with few but Quakers interested in it. Otherwise no Union could be created . As I men­ tioned earlier, there were brief allusions to the "peculiar institution" in many of the ratifying conventions. And serious expressions of abolitionist feeling in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Yet with all of this variety crossing "party lines, " only Captain James Neal of Kittery in Maine insisted that the Constitution could contain "a proposition that the negroes shall ever be free." 39 To Neal and other opponents of slavery in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsyl­ vania the answer of the ratification conventions is the one made by General William Heath: "I apprehend that it is not in our power to do anything for or against those who are in slavery in the Southern states." 40 With reference to the federal courts, what is visible in the conven­ tion process conforms easily to what I have said about implied powers-and is material I would urge Justice Brennan and all of those who agree with him to reread every two or three weeks. No

one in these records insists that the judicial branch be made more powerful.

But there are brief suggestions of anxiety that, because of an abbre­ viated and incomplete treatment of their powers, the courts may reach beyond their intended function in either original or appellate jurisdiction, particularly by interfering with what are supposed to be state, local, or private concerns. The Federalists answered these anxieties with the most unconditional guarantees of limits on judi­ cial power. In North Carolina, William Richardson Davie answered claims that the laws of the states would be destroyed once a federal power was in place: "There is [in the Constitution] not one instance of a power given to the United States, whereby the internal admin­ istration of the states is affected. There is no instance pointed out

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wherein the internal policy of the state can be affected by the judici­ ary of the United States." 41 He is in this conviction supported by his Carolina colleague William Maclaine, who agrees that the federal courts cannot "intermeddle" ; 42 and by James Iredell, also of North Carolina, who assures his neighbors that federal justice is within their reach, and that judicial excesses can be corrected. 43 The same assurance is made by President James Sullivan of New Hampshire, who insisted, against general grumbling about the danger of judi­ cial tyranny, that under Article 3, section 2, the power to limit the jurisdiction of the United States Supreme Court was sufficient to protect the states and their citizens against unlawful intrusion. 44 Some Federalists, like Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, spoke of the advantages of a judicial branch in our federal system: a power able to channel energy and prevent anarchy. But to argue thus was unusual, even with Federalists, because of the accepted distinction between "the nature of federal and state government." Most Feder­ alists believed that the judicial role reserved to the states corre­ sponded roughly to the powers reserved to the states elsewhere in the Constitution. 45 But Antifederalists were alarmed by Article 3 because of what was not in the authorizing language. New York spoke to this concern by urging a specific definition of the scope of these new courts: a definition to be achieved through amendments attached to ratification. And so did the future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall, when he observed that the High Court had jurisdiction only "as the legislature [might] think proper for the interest and liberty of the people." 46 W hat is certain is that neither Federalists nor Antifederalists said anything to encourage or sanction justices of the United States Supreme Court to believe that time changes the �eaning of their oath of office, or that they have a right to follow a larger constitutional duty "to an evolving timeless vision, " a concept which releases them from "anachronistic views"-and the text of the law. It is not diffi­ cult to imagine what the Framers would have said about Justice Brennan and his counterparts, both liberal and not. The struggle over ratification had to do with how binding, how inclusive in scope, and how powerful the new national bond would be. It did not speak to the remote possibility of disunion but to the "imbecility of government" under the Articles, and to the fear of the Antifederalists that they might, by rashness and neglect, betray the achievements of the Revolution into a well-meaning, lawful tyranny. Both sides of the quarrel denied that liberty-loving Ameri­ cans could endure such a "purposeful" regime. The Federalists

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were thus, technically speaking, successful, but only on certain terms-conditions explored thoroughly in the several ratification debates-and with the widespread understanding that a bill of rights would be a necessary addition to a ratified Philadelphia Con­ stitution. Beyond religion, slavery, and the courts, we might con­ sider other topics treated throughout these debates; but the implica­ tions of the overarching narrative here constructed would not change once expanded if the predicates for interpretation of the ratification asserted in the prologue to this essay were observed in the unfold­ ing of its argument proper. The Antifederalists had their great vic­ tory in the way they forced the Federalists to present the Constitu­ tion. For theirs is the version of the fundamental law which should legally bind us-the one which gathered a supporting consensus. They are one side of the perennial exchange at the heart of Ameri­ can politics and law, part of a conversation which continues still, wherever there is respect for the Constitution.

I l l . FATH ERS

g PATRICK HENRY The Tru mpet Voice of Freedom Patrick Henry (May 29, 1736-June 6, 1799). Lawyer, planter, soldier, lawgiver, governor, and American statesman. The great moral engine of the American Revolution. A William Wallace bred up on the frontier. The rhetorician as hero, on the antique model of Demosthenes. A tireless champion of liberty as understood in the Piedmont by the farm folk who called him their chieftain. The most formidable of all the Americans who opposed ratification of the Constitution made in Philadelphia during the summer of 178Z In his standing among members of the revolutionary generation, sec­ ond only to George Washington-and even there by no more than a narrow margin. The point of reference among all the Antifederal­ ists. Assuredly the most undervalued among the great figures of his portion of our national history, hidden from us by misinterpreta­ tion, calculation, and malice because his conduct in opposing great concentrations of power teaches against the grain of our nation's subsequent development. Devoted to the notion of a freedom born, nurtured, and sustained within a specific community by a particu­ lar historic experience among an identifiable people. Suspicious of theories of human rights deduced from first principles, abstracted from all inheritance, as in the France of the Jacobins, yet in his way more democratic than those Federalists who saw in him no more than a "demagogue in a red cloak and caul-bare wig." For Madison, "the great adversary." For others, "that overwhelming torrent, " the trumpet voice which they feared as a natural force, however well they put a case against him. Populist and inveterate enemy of over­ government. Of an opinion concerning the American enterprise which he fully revealed only in the Richmond ratification debates of 83

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June, 1788. Possessed of an eloquence before which all men waited in near-breathless silence, as if struck dumb. The father of all that is characteristic in Southern politics. Patrick Henry was the second son of Colonel John Henr y, orig­ inally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and of Sarah Winston Syme Henry of Studley, in Hanover County, Virginia. The Winstons were a well-known family of dissenters. Sarah was the widow of John Syme and was a woman of means when she married John Henry ( John Syme's cousin), an educated man and Anglican whose brother, the Reverend Patrick Henr y, Sr., was the rector of the local Church of England parish. Patrick was one of the nine children born of this union and was surrounded by many close relations during his childhood. He was educated at home by his teacher-father and in a local common school. In the community where he grew to manhood, there were many like his father and his uncle, energetic Scots who were developing the potential of a new land . Colonel Henry had patented properties in the West. He bought and sold acres and managed both his farms and those of his wife. As Justice of the County Court, vestryman, surveyor, and commander of the local militia, he was clearly a respected citizen, in which status he continued until the day of his death. But to speak honestly, he made no great financial success in any work to which he put his hand . Therefore, as his children came to maturity, they had no prospect of formal education or fortune from their father. For such reasons it is not surprising that his son Patrick grew up as he did, almost completely inside the context of a lively provincial community, or that he defended it as if by second nature. For he was a social being whose knowledge was of "men and manners" as modified in Hanover, Goochland, and Louisa counties, a young fellow who "mixed in, " as able with a fiddle and a musket as he was with stories of first settlement in Virginia and of old sorrows "be­ yond the ocean sea. " Young Patrick Henry learned dancing from his cousins, politics from conversation at the stores and in the church­ yard, and oratory from the sermons of the Reverend Samuel Davies (the local Presbyterian leader) and the stump speeches of neigh­ borhood magnates. For a time his father apprenticed him to a Scots merchant. Then he set him up with his brother William to keep a small store. In 1754, at the age of eighteen, Patrick married Sarah Shelton, had promises from Colonel Henry about lands to the west and was given a small farm of 300 acres with six slaves to keep it by his father-in-law, John Shelton. But the farm was too small and the slaves too few. Another store brought in only a little additional

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profit. The Henrys' house burned. For a time he operated a tavern for Captain Shelton. He and his wife had three children and grow­ ing responsibilities. The young man who had listened and carefully considered the world around him measured his prospects and then, at the age of twenty-three, decided to read law and prepare for a life before the bar. After a few months study of the laws of Virginia and Sir Edward Coke's great compendium, in Williamsburg Henry pre­ sented himself to be examined by George Wythe, John Randolph and the other leading men. From them he obtained the license which he first presented at Goochland Court House on April 15, 1760. The young attorney was a quick and early success. In 1763 he earned about £200. In 1765-1766 that figure had been more than doubled. In addition, at least one of his early cases brought him fame. In Hanover County, with his father presiding on the bench, young Patrick replaced John Lewis, attorney for the collector of parish levies in a neighboring county, in the defense of a law allow­ ing debtors to pay in either ready money or tobacco, fixing the price of that Virginia staple at a very low rate. It was known as the "Two­ penny Act." The Anglican clergy, who by established practice had been paid in pounds of tobacco, reacted to this measure and per­ suaded the Board of Trade in London to repeal the statute. But they also asked further that it be declared null and void ab initio, from the moment of its adoption. To this request the English authorities did not agree, leaving that issue to Governor Fauquier, who left it to the Virginia courts. At this point many of the clergy brought suit, and the issue came to be called "the Parsons' Cause." Acting against the Reverend James Maury, pleading with the nervous passion and dramatic display of one who is himself affected by the issue, Patrick Henry took over this case after it had been, for all intents and purposes, lost. Only the size of the judgment for the plaintiff re­ mained to be settled when the youthful attorney rose to speak. Yet before he had finished, Henry had nullified the Reverend Maury's victory by persuading the jury to award that good man only a penny to redress his grievances. Those who had listened to the pathos of the young attorney's appeal to the conditions of life for the poor Virginia farmer carried him on their shoulders from the court­ while Colonel Henry wept with pride to have seen such a triumph for his son. The popular reports of this courtroom per£ormance launched the eloquent Mr. Henry in his political career. In May of 1765 he was sworn in as a member from Louisa County of the House of Bur-

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gesses-the oldest of American-elected assemblies. At that time Patrick Henry was twenty-nine years old. In the ordinary course of things he could expect to become a power in the Virginia legislature if he could continue to serve there for about twenty years. But this estimate does not take into account the unexpected influence of provocation from outside of Virginia-or a vigorous defense of the interests of the Old Dominion by a young man working from his post beyond the magic circle of established power and privilege, propelled by natural stages into a place of leadership within the commonwealth and pushed to the front rank in no more than a single term. Once more, Patrick Henry up and speaking made the difference in his life and, for the first time, earned the esteem of the Whig leadership in the entire colony. For this was an art which, as it made him friends, also made enemies. Moreover, such distinction as could be won with the Stamp Act Resolves could not be achieved without taking some risk of offending those in highest authority inside the established orbit: risk with respect to the royal governor; to Speaker John Robinson, who presided over the burgesses; to Attorney General Peyton Randolph and his brother John Randolph; to Richard Bland and Edmund Pendleton. Written by a group of young Whigs, these Resolves had thrown down the gauntlet-espe­ cially as they declared Parliament to be without a capacity to tax Americans. They were an alarm bell sounding throughout the colo­ nies. Furthermore, they gave to their advocate a continental reputa­ tion-especially when on May 30, 1765, he reached beyond mere resolutions to comment (speaking of the courage, self-respect, and determination of his neighbors) that "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell" and he could not doubt that "some Ameri­ can jealous of the liberties of his country would, in due course, appear." There is nothing of importance in the mature political doctrine of Patrick Henry that is not presented directly or by impli­ cation in the Stamp Act Resolves. Once news that the Stamp Act had been repealed reached Wil­ liamsburg on May 1, 1766, Henry entered into a period of consol­ idation in his career. Speaker John Robinson was dead and a new leadership had taken control of the House of Burgesses-a lead­ ership which ensured for Patrick Henry a place of lasting political influence. Moreover, Peyton Randolph, Robinson's successor, was closer in his political opinions to Henry and his party than Robin­ son had ever been . The Revenue Act passed by Parliament in Great Britain made clear what the English leaders had meant by the De­ claratory Act, a claim of power to legislate for Americans "in all

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cases whatsoever." The response of Henry and the new men in the Virginia legislature was a boycott on imported British merchan­ dise-the Association of 1769. In a special session in Williamsburg, Henry helped set up the machinery for resistance to tyranny. These provocative British measures (including the tax on tea) were, by their authors in Parliament, aimed more at producing subordina­ tion than at generating revenue. They accomplished neither pur­ pose. Instead, political tensions mounted, and the Grenville minis­ try was replaced by the less aggressive administration of Lord North. But all too late. For the Virginia House had, under external stim­ ulus, maintained its right to petition the Crown, its right to commu­ nicate with other American legislatures, the right of the overseas English to be tried by their own neighbors, and its exclusive right to tax the people of Virginia. Then in 1770 came another pause in the growing dispute between colonials and mother country as most provisions of the Revenue Act were repealed. But the damage had been done. In Parliament there was talk of bringing the American radicals to London for trial. In Massachusetts, British troops had fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. Henry's practice of law grew in these troubled times. His interest in Western lands and in the rights of conscience increased. He was often before the General Court. Henry supported a bill to guarantee a form of religious liberty; he bought Scotchtown Planta­ tion, with a holding of 1, 000 acres; and he gathered his moral and intellectual resources for the struggle which he knew was bound to come. The point of transition in the dialectic between Whitehall and the American legislatures came in 1773. For a time, everything seemed peaceful. But in June of 1772, in Rhode Island, Americans burned the revenue cutter Gaspee. A court of inquiry was convened to determine responsibility for this crime-a court with power to trans­ port Americans for trial in England. There was talk of trouble along the frontier, of a ring of counterfeiters caught and confined. Also there was a question of the authority of the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, to intrude upon the province of a local officer in enforc­ ing criminal justice. But none of these signified in comparison with the plan which proposed a standing committee of correspondence and inquiry " whose business it shall be, to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings of administration, as may . . . affect the British colonies in America . . . and keep up and maintain a communication with our sister colonies." Patrick Henry and his friends included in these emergency mea-

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sures a list of members for this committee. Such choosing put a machinery for revolution in place-one which functioned swiftly when, after tea was thrown into Boston harbor, the port of that city was closed to all commerce and a new garrison quartered upon it. Virginia's first response to letters from Zion urging assistance from the Old Dominion was a re-creation of the Association, with an embargo on imports from Great Britain. Suspension of the Mas­ sachusetts Charter and the establishment of a military government over that colony carried the mood in Williamsburg one step further. Massachusetts asked for support, for food, for concerted expres­ sion of outrage from other commonwealths which could see their own future in what transpired in Boston. Virginia was ready for something more than an exchange of frightening letters. Protest meetings occurred in most Old Dominion counties; the Association moved toward enlargement into an embargo on all trade and sus­ pension of payment on debts; and by the First Virginia Convention of August 1774 delegates were elected to serve in Philadelphia in a general Congress of all the colonies which were ready "to consider what is proper to be done." Patrick Henry received the second largest vote for a place in this delegation, coming second by 107 to 104 behind the honored Speaker Peyton Randolph. With the gathering of a Congress to arrange for reaction in concert to the policies of the ministers of George III, Patrick Henry rejoiced, believing as he did that anything short of a readiness to resist in arms could not protect the inherited liberties of his fellow Americans. The lesson of 1688 was that tyr­ anny is a festering sore, one which requires the lance a�d the heated iron. Only bloodshed could bring Americans vindication for their self-respect as a free people. Patrick Henry's reputation went before him to the great assembly in Philadelphia. Other members of the Virginia delegation (with the exception perhaps of Richard Henry Lee) had not recognized as a possibility the warfare that was, given American circumstances and British attitudes in September 1774, bound to come. Throughout the First Continental Congress, Henry rang the changes on the inev­ itability of war and the necessity for political and military prepared­ ness. Henry asked that his fellow delegates consider organizing at least a temporary representative government, a durable structure which could fight its way through a war and preserve the inherited liberties of their countrymen: their right to local self-government. Concerning the old familiar colonial structures, Henry declared, ''All Government is dissolved ." Later on, he added, ''All the Bul-

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warks of our safety, of our Constitution, are thrown down, and we are now in a State of Nature." Then, after much patience with reluctant revolutionaries who wished to do no more than proclaim and petition, he concluded, "The present measures lead to war. . . . Arms are a resource to which we shall be forced, [ one that is] afforded us by God & Nature." Many members of the Congress listened to Henry and admired his rhetorical powers. They had come to accept that the erstwhile colonies would have to act in concert to defend themselves against any outside threat-would be thus compelled since, reduced to a natural liberty unsupported by combination with the liberty of other American communities, they could not otherwise stand. Yet, for a time, they avoided hard truth. A poet of the time wrote, Say to what better end was Henry born? Why should persuasive speech his lips adorn? But that our most inveterate foes May learn, Virginia wants not Ciceroes .

But only occupied Massachusetts was ready for the shedding of blood, such as the Roman analogy would require. It would be a little longer before other, more cautious Americans were prepared to listen to Henry's stern, Cato-like admonition and follow his warlike advice. Not unexpectedly, they began to do some of this listening first of all when the orator was at home in Virginia. After the adjournment of the First Continental Congress, Vir­ ginia counties began to form local committees of public safety or "inspection" (to enforce the Association) and to recognize and strengthen the militia. Slowly, as more ominous news came from England, reports that all Americans less than totally submissive had in a "Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition" been declared "without the law, " they gave up their hope of trans­ atlantic accommodation. Yet there was still a great desire for peace among Virginians, unattached as it was to any policy. In the Second Virginia Convention of March 1775, meeting in St. John's Church in Richmond, Henry kept this assembly fully aware of its military responsibilities. By the circumstances of that effort waged against such entrenched powers as Edmund Pendleton, Robert Carter Nicholas, and Benjamin Harrison, he was brought to the central moment in his career-the episode for which he is best remembered, which raised him to the level of mythic grandeur. Moved to anger even as he had been in Philadelphia by the delaying

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tactics of those who did not wish for complete independence, Pat­ rick Henry exploded in eloquence in calling for fresh support of a "well-regulated militia" made up of "Gentlemen and Yeomen," the "natural strength and only security of a free Government." Such action, he suggested, would force the Virginia Convention to as­ sume the responsibilities of government . "The clash of resounding arms," he predicted, would soon be heard in Boston. On March 23, Henry declared, "Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? I know not what course others may take, but as for me-give n1e liberty or give me death ! " Those who listened to these words were left speechless-awestruck at being in the presence of the old heroic virtue, Roman and austere. There­ after, everything Henry asked for was voted . And he was elected to the Second Continental Congress, an honor which he accepted with the provision that the declining physical condition of his wife might prevent his attendance. Before Patrick Henry went back to Philadelphia, he had one addi­ tional labor to per£orm-an act setting in motion the armed resis­ tance to British authority which he had called for. Lord Dunmore, on his own authority, had removed gunpowder from the magazine in Williamsburg . Henry roused the militia in Hanover and was joined in a march downriver by numerous men from' surrounding communities. Dunmore's receiver general was required by the Whigs to give them a bill of exchange for £330-" a compensation for the gunpowder lately taken" sufficient to allow leaders of the next pop­ ular convention in Virginia to purchase replacement supplies. On May 11, 1775, Henry rode out to take his seat in the Continen­ tal Congress. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he knew about the fighting between British troops and Massachusetts farmers at Lex­ ington and Concord . While present in Congress, reports came to him of the valiant stand at Bunker Hill-reports of Yankee courage which led many patriots to believe that independence might be achieved through American efforts alone . Yet Henry, ostensibly the incurable provincial, expected from the beginning to draw Europe into any war of independence. Indeed, he counted on such inter­ vention for America's ultimate success against the great power of the British Empire . Once certain that his countrymen were resolved to defend their liberty, he could tolerate one last petition to the King, one that spoke for "the undoubted rights and true interests of these colonies ." George Washington went out from the Congress as Commander-

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in-Chief to organize an army. Henry was pleased to see such a commitment and gathered and dispatched business for his friend. He was caught up in the mood of military preparation and yearned for a place of his own in the forefront. His neighbors offered him just such an assignment when the Third Virginia Convention elected him colonel of the First Virginia Regiment and commander of state forces. In that situation (which he clearly saw as an outlet for his highest ambitions), Henry continued from August 1775 until the following February, arranging for the defense of the Old Dominion's coastline while confronted with more military disrespect from the proteges of his old political enemies than from soldiers in red coats. But all such disappointment ended when on May 15, 1776, Virgin­ ians decided to form a government of their own, apart from all colonial dependency, and to draw up their own bill of rights. Henry had much to do with the drafting and passage of these instruments and was delighted when his colleagues prefaced them with the call for an act of separation to be issued by the Congress in Phila­ delphia, reaching toward all necessary composite authority (in an act of confederation), while leaving "the internal concerns of each colony" to supervision by their respective legislatures. The spirit of the times went even further in Henry's direction when on June 29 he was charged with translating the new political arrangement into public policy as his state's first elected governor. George Mason observed of Henry at this time that his "abilities as well as public virtues" would have put him in charge of the Roman Republic "during the first Punic war, when the Roman people had arrived at their meridian glory." Patrick Henry was an excellent wartime governor, keeping up the morale of his people, supporting American armies in the field with food and supplies, building ships and mining lead, recruiting men for militia or regular service, protecting and advancing Virginia's frontier settlements in the West. He served three terms, as long as the law permitted, and returned to his place in the legislature in 1779. As governor, Henry did as he had promised on accepting office: he gave "unwearied endeavours to secure the freedom and happiness of our common country. " He was modest and graceful while in power, a servant of the people who in many things followed "the known wisdom and virtue" of Virginia's leading citizens. Yet he was also careful of the dignity of the new government and therefore, in his official capacity, appeared in a fine black suit, scarlet cloak and dressed wig. Though mindful of usage and experi­ ence, he was also eager to venture a few measures on his own-the

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most important being the expedition of Virginia troops under George Rogers Clark which in the summer of 1778 extended Gover­ nor Henry's authority into Illinois and much of the Old Northwest; and the related 1779 expedition of Evan Shelby which subdued the Cherokees. Henry advised Kentuckians to make peace with the Indians, helped them organize their defenses and sent them a good supply of powder. He was active in every kind of public business and was given extraordinary powers to dispense money or create new offices. Yet later talk of how he almost became a dictator had no basis in fact. Sallie Henry had died in February of 1775. Before Henry left the governorship, on October 9, 1777, he married Dorothea Dandridge, the daughter of his old friend and ally, Colonel Nathaniel Dan­ dridge, and the granddaughter of Governor Spotswood. With his new wife and their daughter, his sisters, his married daughter and her child, his other children by Sallie Henr y, and about seventy slaves, Patrick Henry left the highest office in the gift of his fellow Virginians. Journeying south and west to new settlements in the Dan River country in Henry Count y, he built Leatherwood on the "new ground" of which he was forever dreaming. After the long struggle of political life in an age of transition, he rejoiced in being once more a private man. But his countrymen would not leave their matchless oracle "un­ der his vine and fig tree" for long. Though prematurely aged, Henry was at his best in the Upcountr y, away from the pressures toward heroic displays of "virtue," from the "great stage of pol­ itics." The ordinary activities of the planter's life, attached to a small practice of law, suited him very well, healing body and spirit. Yet even in the opinion of his old enemies, his voice was needed as a stabilizer in the legislature as the American Revolution moved into its climactic year. For with Henry silent or far away, Virginia politi­ cians sometimes forgot what the Revolution was all about. There were still troops to be called to service, intelligence to be gathered, horses and men to be fed and political leaders to be brought up to the mark-especially the somewhat casual Thomas Jefferson, who did very little to prepare his state for invasion by British forces commanded by General Benedict Arnold and that fearful dragoon, Colonel Banastre Tarleton. Henry dreaded political dispersal or the collapse of the regime under the circumstances Jefferson had al­ lowed to develop. Public records and property had been destroyed. It had become difficult to collect taxes. Men were refusing to serve in the regular forces or the militia. They had lost faith in their own

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government, chiefly by reason of its inertia and/or incapacity. Hu­ miliated-driven out of Williamsburg, Richmond, and Charlottes­ ville-the legislature recognized that Virginia's chief magistrate needed even greater powers than they had given him, and that they needed a better governor than Thomas Jefferson to use such powers. From 1780 on, when present as a sitting member, Patrick Henry "ruled" the Virginia legislature even more than he had as governor of the state. He raised troops for Nathanael Greene when that Rhode Island general faced Lord Cornwallis in North Carolina and issued a desperate cry for help. After the drawn battle of Guilford Court House and the full-scale British invasion of Virginia, when liberty itself was at stake, Henry appealed to a public spirit" he could no longer assume. Moreover, to clear the air, thick with dis­ trust of Virginia's leaders, he voted for an inquiry into the conduct of certain public officials, including Thomas Jefferson. By this deci­ sion, he made an enemy for life, one who had a large role in distort­ ing Henry's public reputation. After victory at Yorktown on Octo­ ber 19, 1781, Henry supported the enactment of laws restoring public finances, for reopening trade with Great Britain, for modest taxes, belated military pay, a moratorium on the collection of debts, a recall of paper currency, and for the return of Tories-those once disaffected" from the cause of American liberty whom he had, aforetimes, treated with great severity. By all reports of those on the scene in 1781 and 1783-1784, Henry "controlled the proceedings" of the Virginia legislature without facing any rival public champion or alternative state policy. Only in his efforts to bring tax support to a plural religious establishment, in which he was opposed by young James Madison, did Henry fail to have his way. In that labor he was forestalled more by Presbyterian jealousy· than by the artful "scare tactics" of Madison, who suggested that a plural establishment was bound to result in an "official" political theology. Henry had hoped to authorize a general assessment, the returns from which would be distributed to the various sectarian commu­ nities, with the portion for freethinkers set aside for local educa­ tional institutions. Patrick Henry won the first vote for plural estab­ lishment, but was defeated in 1784 after he had been returned to the governor's chair and could not in person collect his usual majority. He understood the close relation of absolute religious toleration and religious indifference, but not the motives of James Madison, who professed to be a religious man. Henry himself was a constant and enthusiastic witness to the Christian faith, both in office and out. Indeed, after reading a pamphlet by the Englishman Soames Jenyns II

11

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defending the rationality of Christian belief, Henry had it reprinted and distributed it everywhere he went. In his last two terms as governor (1784-1786), the "son of Thun­ der" ( as he was described by many of his contemporaries) enjoyed a comparably quiet time. Governor Henry had his own version of nationalism, one which reflected the attitudes of his neighbors. He supported regular contributions for the maintenance of the general government and approved of a tariff on imports to discourage the accumulation of foreign debt. He wanted to promote the dignity of the general government, while keeping a close check on its powers. Except in matters of national defense, however, the politics of Pat­ rick Henry began with Virginia-agrarian Virginia. His commercial theory was based on free trade, his economics laissez-faire, but without any affection for cities, banks, large industries, stock job­ bers, monopolies, or currency speculation. His idea of wealth was land. But even when he declared, in Congress, "I am not a Virginian but an American" and spoke of being in a "state of nature, " Henry still conducted himself as a "local-minded man." He was loyal to the Union because of what it could do for Virginia. In theory and practice, he objected to consolidated government as being contrary to the ideals of the Revolution; and because of what he had experienced in the Revolution, he was a sectionalist, suspicious of the intentions of Northern politicians and not at all surprised when they ignored the interests of West and South in voting for the 1786 Jay-Gardoqui Treaty, an agreement with Spain which would have prevented the growth of new states in the West by closing the Mississippi River to American trade. No other event so poisoned the atmosphere of national politics in the years following Patrick Henry's departure from the governor­ ship of his state as did the attempt by the leading men of the North to perpetuate the influence of their region at the expense of settlers hoping to build for themselves and their children a new life along the frontier, in Kentucky and Tennessee. However, even with the onset of interregional distrust, a contrasting trend toward strength­ ening the authority of government was under way before the Hen­ rys left Richmond for their new plantation in Prince Edward Coun­ ty, a place less remote than their previous home on Leatherwood Creek. It was a trend Henry had done nothing to encourage. And in the Virginia ratification convention, June 2-June 25 of 1788, it evoked the most sustained and inclusive statement of his way of thinking about American politics that he made in the course of his public life. Patrick Henry had ignored the trade conference in Annapolis

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which called for the states to appoint delegates to a meeting in Philadelphia in May 1787 for the announced purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. The Continental Congress agreed that such a convention was necessary; and the Virginia legislature elected Henry as one of its representatives to that convention. Full of anger and suspicion, he declined the appointment in February 1787, con­ fiding to a few friends that he "smelt a rat." He also made clear to his Federalist acquaintances that he wished to remain " unfettered, " which would be impossible if he were to serve as a delegate. Hen­ ry's attitude regarding the advantage of " a more perfect Union" was no doubt affected by the death of his sister's husband in Kentucky, at the hands of the Wabash Indians; and he blamed the Yankees in Congress for their refusal to act decisively in dealing with the Indi­ ana and Ohio tribes, as Southerners had done with the Cherokees. Coupled with the immediate frustration and anger brought to the surface by his brother-in-law's death and the Spanish treaty, Henry, along with many other Southerners, still harbored a general uneasi­ ness carried over from the fall of Charleston in 1780. As the war had moved to the South, no armies from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut had come to assist those confronted with the great force of Lord Cornwallis, or at least not until the Yorktown cam­ paign. Out of the experience of his entire public life and based on an emotional ground shaped by the long struggle in breaking free of one remote and arbitrary power only to see what could well be another power of the same kind looming on the horizon, Henry delivered the most eloquent and inclusive critique of the United States Constitution made by any of the Framers. From the debates which took place in the large theater on Shockoe Hill came the assurance that the Constitution would have attached to it a bill of rights and that future readings of its text would be as restrained and modest as the construction given to its provisions by James Mad­ ison and other leading Federalists who acted under the pressure of Henry's rhetoric. Patrick Henry had the assistance of George Mason, Benjamin Harrison, William Grayson, John Tyler the Elder, James Monroe, and Theodorick Bland in his opposition to ratification in Virginia. The Antifederalists made an unprecedented, nonpareil effort to dominate the V irginia convention. Or rather they made the effort where they had leaders to make it for them. In the Kentucky settle­ ments, the Shenandoah Valley, and in the back country or " South side, " they were successful. Clearly, despite the Federalism of George

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Washington, the skilled advocacy of Edmund Pendleton and Ed­ mund Randolph and the quiet rationality of James Madison, the battle would be a close fight, with the results not at all certain. Henry's first strategy was to call for a new convention to revise the document made in Philadelphia. As a backup to that proposal he recommended previous amendments "be referred by this Conven­ tion to the other states in the American confederacy for their consid­ eration." For the most part Henry was on the attack, holding the floor during almost one-fourth of the time through the entire de­ bate. In the process he forever gave the lie to those who believed his thought to be a simple, uninformed mixture of prejudice and emo­ tion. But chiefly he accused the Federalists of acting contrary to the spirit and prescription of the American Revolution, the point of which had been that Americans did not intend to be ruled by a remote, arbitrary and potentially unfriendly power which rational­ ized its agency with claims of benevolent intention and superior knowledge of how to convert that intention into action: superior knowledge of what would be best, whether Americans thought so or not. In contrast to this theory rooted both in Roman law and in the speculations of the savants who were soon to disrupt the peace of Europe, Henry offered a political schema in keeping with what he called "the genius of the people, " a spirit which included the "ge­ nius" of their ancestors. There was nothing a priori about his repub­ licanism, or, indeed, anything in direct conflict with the best of constitutional monarchy as instituted in both the colonies and Great Britain before the time of George III. Concerning the latter, he declared, I am free to own that, if you cannot love a republican government, you may love the British monarchy; for, although the King is not sufficiently responsible, the responsibility of his agents, and the efficient checks imposed by the British Constitution, render it less dangerous than other monarchies, or oppressive, tyrannical aris­ tocracies.

Throughout his life Henry was devoted to a government of laws and not of men, to the system of restraints on the authority of any central government epitomized in the Whiggery of the Glorious Revolu­ tion. Such a government produced corporate liberty in a union of free societies; and corporate liberty made possible the freedom of the individual, as opposed to a "herd."

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Henry talked about this British prototype of a healthy regime incessantly throughout the Virginia ratifying convention. For in­ stance, he observed, "We entertained from our earliest infancy the most sincere regard and reverence for the mother country. Our partiality extended to a predilection for her customs, habits, man­ ners and laws." And he added elsewhere, We are descended from a people whose government was founded on liberty; our glorious forefathers of Great Britain made liberty the foundation of everything. That country is become a great, mighty, and splendid nation; not because their government is strong and energetic, but, sir, because liberty is its direct end and foundation . We drew the spirit of liberty from our British ances­ tors; by that spirit we have triumphed over every difficulty.

The British system was a product of experience, not of "political speculation" or "illuminated ideas" of the "visionary" variety. And, as Henry said of himself, "I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience." The new Constitution as explained by James Madison and Gover­ nor Randolph was, in contrast, the product of "speculative theory" and of extrinsic design, as in Randolph's insistence on an ideal model of justice which would prevent the people of Virginia from executing summary judgment on bushwhackers like Josiah Philips. (Virginia's Judge Spencer Roane, Henry's son-in-law, reported after his death that the orator "detested the projects of theorists.") Henry focused attention on specific drawbacks of the proposed Constitu­ tion-its relation to the corporate liberty of Virginia, the state's ability to protect its particular interests and the interests of those who constituted it by occupying their specific places in society. Abolition of slavery, which would have "dreadful and ruinous con­ sequences, " could be accomplished by a consolidated government, or the enslavement of free white men-which made all of the "good works" it might attempt unimportant. Touching on most of its features, Patrick Henry conjured up an image of the Constitution as it might become. Much of his prophecy has been confirmed. But Madison and his friends spoke for what it was in the eyes of those who had made it. Many Virginians wanted to believe what Madison told them and others were persuaded to go along with that view. Madison prevailed by five votes-out of 168. Pressed to the wall, he described the Constitution as the Antifederal­ ists wished it to be, and thus (with the assistance of Pendleton, Lee,

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Wythe, Randolph, Marshall, and others) secured ratification in spite of Antifederalist warnings, ho,,vever eloquent . But Henry took the defeat gracefully, in some good humor, and prepared to hold the Federalists to their Richmond construction of the document and to the amendments which they promised to support . Despite the dis­ advantage of a Federalist trend running throughout the country, he had kept his enemies at bay for almost three weeks and was only then "overcome in a good cause ." Federalists breathed a great sigh of relief. For their entire effort was in danger until they had forced a vote . As Madison observed, ''A silence or a mere look from Henry could ruin the effect of a day's worth of careful exposition." And, in proportion, Henry's language was even more devastating. Truly, as Jefferson maintained, he " spoke as Homer wrote, " and that art was almost enough to pull down James Madison's "house made of words ." After ratification Patrick Henry served in the Virginia assembly until 1791, keeping that body in Antifederalist hands until the Bill of Rights was adopted, sending Antifederalist United States senators to open the new Congress, and holding down the number of Feder­ alist congressmen. There were also a few more famous cases at law, especially Jones v. Walker, concerning American debts to British mer­ chants, and the defense of Richard Randolph against a charge in­ volving infanticide . Henry was not altogether satisfied with Madison's proposal of twelve amendments; they were far short of the list of forty he had proposed in the ratifying convention and did too little to forestall the development of implied powers . Henry opposed the assump­ tion of state debts, Jay's Treaty, and the excesses of the High Court in its early decisions . Even when out of politics and reconciled with George Washington, he continued to advocate the doctrine he had put forward in Richmond in June of 1788. But the role of Madison and Jefferson in leading the opposition to the new government pushed Henry in the opposite direction, as did the enthusiasm of Jeffersonians for the 1789 French Revolution-in the eyes of Patrick Henry, an event very different from the American Revolution. What Henry thought of Jacobin France is an indication of what he wanted in the way of an American national government. The French, he said, "have a liberal and destructive spirit, " one of "infidelity" which "under the name of philosophy" worked its evil will so that " everything that ought to be dear to man is covertly but success­ fully assailed." French democracy was "a bloody horror." For the sake of " strange fruit, " Jeffersonians were "abjuring native vie-

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tuals." They thought to bring about a new kind of revolution. Not so Patrick Henry. Although given many opportunities, he refused to return to pub­ lic life-except to be reelected to the legislature ( at George Wash­ ington's behest) a few weeks before his death. The conclusion of his life, at Red Hill in the Staunton River Valley, was appropriate to all that had gone be£ore. Henry died as he had lived, with a touch of drama. To "the voice of tradition" he entrusted his fame, and his soul to the Son of God. He summoned his family and close friends to share in his departure and asked his skeptical physician to ob­ serve that the Christian faith made it easier for a man to die. Then, having practiced the ars moriendi, he smiled and gave up the ghost. Even at the distance of almost two hundred years, we can hear echoes of the power of his speaking, the trumpet resonance of his moral authority. 1

10 SAMUEL CHASE The Maryland Vesuvius Samuel Chase (April 17, 1741-June 19, 1811), lawyer, jurist, and Maryland political leader both during and after the American Revolution. A Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Associate Justice of the United States Suprem_e Court. For his florid and vehement oratory, his power of denunciation, called "the Maryland Demosthenes." Yet elsewhere (and with some reason) described as "a busy restless incendiary, " a turbulent "foul-mouthed and inflam­ ing son of discord." An Antifederalist in 1787-1788. Later, for rea­ sons consistent with his earlier position, a full convert to the Feder­ alist cause, acting in behalf of ordered liberty with all the fervor that comes with a difficult change of commitment. In the Maryland ratification convention openly fearful that the new Union designed in Philadelphia would "swallow up State governments and · state legislatures." But throughout his long career an Old Whig with "country party" leanings. The antitype of both Jonathan Boucher and Thomas Paine, whom he despised. Always suspicious of place­ men-of the connection between unrestrained power and exploita­ tion. By turns, a man of the people and an enemy of mobs. For many years, the spokesman of the popular cause in his state, the defender of the ordinary citizen against the exactions of privilege. At times hated by the Maryland gentry . But never a leveller or a theoretical revolutionary. From the beginning of his public life, a man of law and limitations. A slaveholder, with aspirations to the status of a landed gentleman. A devout Episcopalian. In the lan­ guage of his authoritative modern biographers, Haw, Beirne, Beirne, and Jett, inclined in "his own political thought" to rely "heavily on the common law, precedent and the English tradition, " not on "nat100

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ural rights philosophy." An occasion of conflict and vituperation throughout his long career. Justice Samuel Chase was born near Princess Anne in Somerset County, Maryland . His father was the Reverend Thomas Chase, graduate of Eton and Cambridge and, after immigration to these shores, rector of Somerset Parish and other Maryland churches. His mother was Matilda Walker Chase, daughter of a Maryland planter, who died giving life to her son. Young Samuel spent some of his early years in the home of an aunt but, while still a child, returned to live with his widowed father and to receive a classical education from that practical instructor-a former member of the faculty at Eton. In 1759, at the age of eighteen, Samuel Chase entered upon the study of law in the Annapolis chambers of Hammond and Hall, two capable attorneys. In 1761 he was admitted to practice in the local Mayor's Court and, two years later, to chancery and county courts in the same region. With industry, eloquence, a sonorous voice, and imposing stature (six feet, three inches and over two hundred forty pounds) he, early on, made a powerful impression on his Maryland contemporaries and, in consequence, in 1764 was elected to an Annapolis seat in the Maryland General Assembly. At the time he was only twenty-three years old but already a power in local city politics and successful as a lawyer, with a large practice among ordinary citizens. During the next twenty years Chase be­ came the man of all business in that legislature and a weather vane, measuring the political trends affecting the life of his colony and state . From the time of his first appearance in the Maryland Assembly, Samuel Chase was in opposition to the closed system of Crown­ appointed governors and proprietors' favorites-what scholars now refer to as the "court party." The Stamp ·Act was the only subject before the house when Chase first took his place there in September of 1765. The young lawyer was a W hig like his father. And like the parson of St. Paul's, Baltimore, he was a member of the Sons of Liberty. Close to his constituents and experienced in actions for recovery of debt, he knew the feelings of his neighbors on almost every issue . He served on the legislative committee which drew up a remonstrance defending the "constitutional rights and privileges" of the citizens of Maryland under their 1632 charter. To be taxed without representation was, in his view, a violation of ordered liberty under law. Even worse was the fleecing of citizens under the pretext of enforcing the statute. W hen the Annapolis Common Council and certain aldermen failed to uphold local laws protecting

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inhabitants of the city against misrepresentation and incompetence, Chase wrote a remonstrance, speaking for the party of reform and city charter enforcement . This composition appeared in the Mary­ land Gazette and was answered there in an outpouring of abuse issuing from high places. In his turn Chase gave the city fathers back as good as he got. In response to the charge that he was "a common disturber of the public tranquility" and a "Demagogue, " Chase replied with a set of sketches of his adversaries as "pimps" and "tools of power," mere "dependents" rightfully held '!in Uni­ versal Odium." In the face of such fury, mayor and aldermen fell silent-intimidated, as was the Maryland distributor of the hated stamps when Chase led a mob pulling a cart carrying his effigy through the streets. With his image flogged, placed in the pillory, hanged and burned, Zachariah Hood fled from Annapolis. Beaten on the hustings in 1766, the Dulany family gave up opposing the Chase organization in local Annapolis elections. And a reputation was made. Early in his tenure in the Assembly, Chase became a master of creating coalitions, of drafting and passing bills. Sometimes he served on as many as twenty committees in one session. And through steady application he came to master details concerning the social, economic, and political life of most sections of the colony. Thus, with energy, thoroughness, and oratorical skill, he became the legislative leader of the country party in Maryland-the party of limited government and local control. In response to the complaints of his constituents, in 1770, in a time of economic distress, Samuel Chase introduced legislation to reduce the fees paid to colonial officers and clergymen, income which was derived from the inspec­ tion of tobacco. For a time Chase naturally avoided being in the forefront of this struggle. He was reluctant to quarrel with Thomas Chase, who would himself lose money with the reduction. But thereafter Samuel came to recognize in the excesses of the fee struc­ ture a design to use patronage to undermine the liberties of the province and of its citizens. For the system bought docility and created a class of drones whose interests were in direct conflict with those of the most substantial members of the community . In 1773 these fees were, by a compromise, reduced and separated from tobacco inspection. But concern with placemen and their unearned privileges continued to animate Maryland politics until the Revolu­ tion finally destroyed proprietary government . However, all at­ tempts by appointed governors to act out of the prerogative of their prince strengthened the party organized to prevent rule by procla-

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mation, and thus created a group of Whig leaders accustomed to working together, a nucleus for the struggles of years to come. Of these emerging figures Samuel Chase was to be the most impor­ tant, especially in the proceedings of the Maryland legislature. In May of 1774 Maryland received news of the passage in Parlia­ ment of the Boston Port Act, and soon thereafter reports of the other Intolerable Acts. Within a month of their first angry reaction to the punitive legislation aimed at a sister colony up the coast, delegates from every county in this very conservative province met, bringing messages from the local conventions which they represented, call­ ing for nonimportation, nonexportation (the Association), and a general congress of delegates from every British colony in North America. Samuel Chase was one of the five sent by Maryland to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He was joined there by Matthew Tilghman, Thomas Johnson, William Paca, and Robert Goldsborough. Of the Maryland leaders, Charles Carroll, of Car­ rollton, and Chase were the first to decide for independence-not long after King George III declared that all Americans organized to resist his ministers were "without the law" and began to recruit mercenaries to fill out the ranks of his army of suppression. At the prospect of Hessian invaders, Chase was furious but kept his head, recognizing his own choleric disposition: "I may censure too vastly. I am too violent." He urged Patriots of Annapolis and Baltimore to be moderate in handling their undecided neighbors or closet Tories, suggesting they "refrain from Personal outrage." And, with the other leaders of his commonwealth, he was afraid of what the Revo­ lution might do to the internal order of Maryland and a new legal connection between the liberated states even as he persuaded the cautious ad hoc Maryland Convention government in Annapolis to accept the necessity of the Declaration of Independence. Samuel Chase was, of course, in many ways himself reluctant to sever all connections with the mother country. Throughout the years of conflict between his community and a stubborn Parliament over the sea, Chase had (in the phrase of his biographers) "sought to preserve traditional English liberties for the colonists who were being denied equal rights and equal justice in the British Empire." In the First Continental Congress, Chase sided with the conser­ vatives who hoped to restrain Great Britain with trade policy. He dreaded a root-and-branch reformation of the regime he represented. When the Reverend Joachim Zubly of Georgia opposed the Asso­ ciation as imprudent and likely to irritate the Crown, Chase drove him from the hall with the fury of his rhetoric. But he determined,

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sometime in December of 1775, that reconciliation would not be possible. Therefore, "to safeguard English liberties" a confederated republic would be required, and a new fundamental law for a free Maryland-a law protecting both liberty and order, implemented by the natural aristocracy of the state, restraining the tendency of democracy to vote itself the property of its most capable citizens and of oligarchy to reserve freedom of opportunity to its members, their families and friends. Hence in the drafting of a constitution for Maryland, he struggled to restrict the franchise and access to im­ portant offices to men of a certain means, and embraced the notion of political rights only so far as to cover the goods and personal liberty of those inside the social condition. And he struggled also to preserve a kind of plural religious establishment that could dis­ courage the workings of pride, from above or below. In the Congress, Chase was once again a man for every task, serving on as many as thirty committees in a single year. He showed an early interest in foreign relations and was (with Benjamin Frank­ lin and Charles Carroll of Carrollton) part of a commission sent to Canada to persuade the French Canadians to join in a continental union of free American communities. This commission failed in its task, but Chase threw himself into other work, fostering the devel­ opment of an American navy, working out compromises on repre­ sentation, urging inclusion in the Articles of Confederation of a provision for access to western lands for citizens of those states without historic claims beyond the mountains. Although to some contemporaries only "old Bacon Face" or "the greatest carthorse I ever knew," Samuel Chase in middle life was a lively figure as a delegate to the Continental Congress. And though a fierce partisan, not quite a predictable ingredient. For his dis­ course was rich, copious, and full of illustration, sometimes devel­ oped almost for its own sake on such subjects as Mary, Queen of Scots, and the beauty of black eyes (as opposed to blue). Chase wrote satire, mock praise of George III, to answer the propaganda of the brothers Howe-and got his printer in trouble with the un­ sophisticated Whigs of Baltimore. He rode one hundred fifty miles in little more than two days to cast his vote for the Declaration. Later, he favored the Impost, with a power to collect attached. He was a great supporter of General Washington in his time of troubles and (with Thomas Johnson) a gatherer of supplies for the army. But the conflation of his personal business with his political functions as leader of the Revolution brought him into difficulty in 1778, and

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finally resulted in his departure from the Congress, with grave injury to his reputation. The scandal which caused Alexander Hamilton to attack Chase in the New York Journal as one immortalized in infamy" and univer­ sally despised" concerned the efforts of Chase and his partners in the Baltimore firm of John Dorsey and Company to buy all the flour they could find and sell it in New England. Chase was accused of using privileged information of a secret resolution passed by the Congress, a plan to purchase twenty thousand barrels of flour in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, for shipment to New England. Chase answered these charges some years later, pointing up that the wheat shortage in New England was common knowledge long before the Congress drew up plans to correct the situation. Furthermore, the Dorseys eventually sold their wheat to government agents without much profit, once they entered the market and explained their needs. Confusion over Chase's role in all of this complication continued to bedevil him for years to come. No amount of explanation ever satisfied certain of his enemies. Hence he was not reelected to the Congress for 1779 and spent the next decade of his political career attempting to preserve and refur­ bish his reputation and influence as the first man in Maryland politics. Chase was briefly out of the political arena in 1778, but could rightfully be identified as the man who set the agenda in the Mary­ land legislature from 1776 through 1789. Immediately following the Revolution he brought forward a series of bills to put the state on a footing for war-measures which finally became a militia act, a test act (to root out "secret enemies"), and a tender law. Chase arranged for the confiscation of Tory property-over the opposition of the Patriot gentry-and then began to purchase some of that land to serve his own place in society: tracts valued at more than £6,000 by 1786. He handled the affairs of the Potomac Company before the House of Delegates, bought shares, and speculated in frontier land in Ohio. Once returned to his seat in 1779, Chase recovered most of his temporarily diminished influence in the lower chamber of the Maryland legislature. And, in 1782, following an official inquiry by the entire house, he was formally vindicated by a vote of 36 to 2 of all charges of wrongdoing in the matter of the flour shortage. Indeed, he was soon once again so well-trusted a public man as to be chosen by his political associates to negotiate for Maryland (in 1783-1784) the recovery of its stock in the Bank of England. II

II

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From this London work toward what was finally a settlement of £140,000 Chase earned eventually £6,500 . But not immediately upon his return to the United States. Therefore, as a result of his long concentration upon the political life, he began to experience some financial difficulties. His personal obligations were considerable, and always growing . With the onset of depression in the mid1780s, his trading partnership with John and Thomas Dorsey col­ lapsed, and the burden of his outstanding obligations became al­ most intolerable. Efforts to persuade state government to cover "black list" debts to English creditors temporarily resolved by "soft" American currency during the Revolution (1780) and to legalize purchase of Tory property with depreciated bills failed to win ma­ jority support. Neither could he persuade both houses of his state's legislature to allow for debt relief with a new emission of paper money, even though he labored to do so from 1785 through 178Z Only a small provision for payment in kind, with appointed asses­ sors determining "true" value, finally got by the fiscal conservatives who controlled the Maryland state senate. Chase cut his way free from all of this tangle only when the legislature, in 1789, passed a private bill which gathered in all of his property, including debts he had not collected, a gift from a friend, an advance on claims against the state, certain notes of hand and a large mortgage and waited for him to practice enough law to avoid debtors' prison . It was in the atmosphere created by harsh economic circum­ stances and the struggle over paper money that Samuel Chase and his leading adversaries in Maryland politics refused to accept places in the Great Convention and divided up on opposing sides of the question when that capable assembly produced the United States Constitution and sent it out for evaluation by the people of the states. Like his friend Luther Martin (who represented Chase and his party in Philadelphia), he was not frightened by Shays's Rebel­ lion . For it had been caused by the kind of policies he was opposing in Maryland . But he did fear that the Constitution would favor the interests of creditors and restrict the power of state legislatures to protect their people from a shortage of money needed for purposes of exchange . Indeed, it contained provisions against state issues of paper money and against laws impairing the obligations of contract . Therefore Chase advised his constituents to take great care in ap­ proaching the new instrument of government and asked them if they wished to "alter" or "abolish" their familiar form of govern­ ment in Maryland or cancel their own "Bill of Rights." Under the name of "Caution" he wrote a public letter to this effect in the

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Maryland Journal. But (because of Federalist sentiment in Baltimore,

where he had recently moved) he did not show all of his hand until an Antifederalist effort had been organized in his state. Chase, Paca, Martin, and their friends made a solid campaign to defeat the Constitution in many of the counties of Maryland, but were not generally successful, except in Anne Arundel, Baltimore, and Hartford counties. But many Maryland Federalists such as Thomas Johnson favored the Constitution with amendments attached. The strategy of Samuel Chase was to play upon divisions among the Federalists to prevent a ratification which they could use. In the Maryland ratification convention of April 21-26, 1788, Samuel Chase, John Francis Mercer, and Luther Martin had only twelve votes on which they could depend in their maneuvers, while the Federalists, led by Alexander Contee Hanson, had as many as sixty-two, and a hard core of thirty-five who were opposed to any form of conciliation. Samuel Chase arrived late, but spoke at length. In his reading of the Constitution he found no real limits on the power of the national government, "no Bill of Rights to restrain the Congress." In the instrument proposed, the federal union was de­ stroyed, along with the Maryland state constitution, and its compo­ nent parts "melted down" to form a strictly national power. "The whole Constitution, " he maintained, "breathes a jealousy of the states." The tenure of presidents in office, he believed, would be better restricted by a number of years or sequence of terms. The jurisdiction of the courts was too broad and allowed for augmenta­ tion by "construction." In a truly federal system there would be "no [national] power over the individual citizens of any of the states, " or any national authority over "internal police." A change in the Arti­ cles of Confederation was indeed necessa�y, including a power to tax and (if restricted) collect and a power to make and enforce treaties. But the Philadelphia Framers had gone too far, had violated the character of their mandate in preparing a document which be­ gins, "We the People." Better if the Articles had been merely re­ vised, and with modesty. "There is no injury for which our present laws do not provide a remedy." Moreover, much of what had been proposed for the new fundamental law served only "a few rich and ambitious men. " The authoritative biographers of Justice Chase observe, "It was not the leadership of a socio-economic elite per se to which Chase objected, but rather what he perceived as the Maryland elite's unre­ sponsiveness to the electorate and abuse of power in the paper money contest." This feeling about the leading Federalists flowed

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over into his opposition to the United States Constitution during the ratification debates in Annapolis and flavored the report of the Antifederalist minority in the Maryland convention, a pleading prepared by Chase after the Federalists refused even to consider the idea of recommending subsequent amendments once ratification had been achieved. But in Maryland the leaders of the popular party accepted the Constitution, once the Bill of Rights was added. In contrast, high-handed behavior on the part of the Federalists continued into the early years of the Republic, and produced a sharp reaction on the part of the rest of the state's population. Inspired by a sense of injured merit and/or by the example of the French Revolution, most Antifederalists became Jeffersonians, ad­ vocates of a kind of class struggle. This transformation, of course, shifted the balance of liberty and order, offended against the corpo­ rate spirit of interdependence as much as had the nabobs of the Maryland state senate. In reaction to a change in the definition of the common good, in outrage at the effort to import French atheism and French equality to these shores, Samuel Chase fallowed the example of his English friend Edmund Burke and "crossed the aisle"-changed party. The result of his decision was the final and most colorful phase of his career, his service as a judge. Never a democrat even when a defender of the "middling sort" against all potential exploiters, Samuel Chase as a jurist in an era of democratic upheaval became one of the foremost adversaries of democratic dogma and excess to be found in the American context. Recognizing the difficulty of his financial circumstances, in 1788 Governor William Smallwood made Chase (an old friend) head judge of the Baltimore Court of Oyer and Terminer and Gaol Deliv­ ery. From this assignment he moved to a place as one of Baltimore's municipal commissioners in August of 1791, to appointment as chief judge of the Maryland General Court and in the following fall, once again to the chief justiceship of the Baltimore County criminal court. Chase was becoming a pillar of the community-admirable in the eyes of his onetime opponents. He was elected to the state senate, but was obliged to decline the office in accepting his places on the Maryland bench. As a judge Chase was confronted by the prevalence of radicalism and a mob spirit in certain neighborhoods of Baltimore. In August of 1794, Chase delivered a charge to the Baltimore grand jury, censuring them for going outside of their function: for claiming "by natural law, a right to complain of all grievances" and for adopting " pernicious French doctrines." There were riots and Chase brought justice to those responsible. Jeffer-

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sonians in the Maryland legislature sought to remove him from the bench. James McHenry and Charles Carroll were impressed by the combination of right principle and political courage in their old enemy, and advised President Washington to promote his faithful supporter in wartime to some high post. First his name was men­ tioned for the office of Attorney General. But with the resignation of Justice John Blair, Washington decided to give Chase a seat on the United States Supreme Court, in which he was confirmed on Janu­ ary 27, 1796. As Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase made a record not duplicated before or since his time. During his fifteen years on the High Court he was often a bully or a partisan- "Bold, impetuous, overbearing and decisive." There was something over­ done about the perfervid intensity of his manner, once roused to action. Contemporaries spoke of it often, and with irritation. More­ over, the effect of a Chase performance was reinforced by the im­ pressions made by the bulk of his person and the ring of his voice­ a hyperbole in every sense. It is no wonder that many attorneys were reluctant to bring an action before the Middle Circuit while Samuel Chase presided over its business. The explanation for his abrasive conduct made by many authorities that, though born a gentleman, he was not taught to behave like one, is not sufficient to the case. For all of public life in the colonial South was a school in manners. It is a better theory to speak of temperament, and of the irritation of the times to a man of Chase's convictions. When Judge Peters of Pennsylvania reported, "I never sat with him [Chase] without pain, as he was forever getting into some intemperate and unnecessary squabble, " he is pointing to qualities of character in his famous contemporary-fiery, dogmatic, and high-handed. It is not surprising that Samuel Chase is the only Justice of the United States Supreme Court to have been, thus far, impeached. Once on the Supreme Court, Chase began to assert himself al­ most from the first. In his opinion in the matter of Ware v. Hilton (1796), Chase ruled against the pleading of John Marshall, who defended "the sovereignty of Virginia" against the binding force of treaties. In the case of Calder v. Bull (1798), he achieved a definition of ex post facto law and an interpretation of its meaning which stands to this day. In United States v. Worrall (1798), he denied the jurisdiction of the federal courts over crimes at common law-and thus reinforced his standing as a champion of limited government. The states possessed all authority given to them by the state con­ stitutions and "not expressly taken away" by the United States

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Constitution. There were, he insisted, no implied powers, and no "constructive power" in the Supreme Court. Only Congress should "judge the justice of its laws." But while performing distinguished service as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Samuel Chase also did more than a little campaigning for John Adams. In addition he urged friends in Con­ gress to support the Alien and Sedition Acts, gathering to himself in the process larger and larger numbers of enemies. And once those hard laws were on the statute books, Chase applied them with a rigor that made him almost part of the prosecution when radical essayists appeared before his court. W hen one John Fries rebelled against paying taxes to prepare for a war against France, Chase condemned him to death. Libelers he fined and locked away. Finally he added to his enforcement of these laws and others a new series of charges to federal grand juries which were expressive of a political doctrine antithetical to that of many Jeffersonians, and some Federalists. Among other things, in these addresses Chase denied directly the doctrine of natural rights. For the equality in a state of nature commonly postulated in social contract theory concerning the ori­ gins of government, he had only contempt. To begin, the state of nature in that theory was merely imaginary in that it was incon­ ceivable "that any number of men ever existed . . . without some . . . chief" whom they obeyed. At any rate, "there could be no liberty and no rights of man in a state of nature." For, as he con­ tinued, "It seems to me that personal Liberty, and rights can only be acquired by becoming a member of a Community, which gives the protection of the whole to every individual. " Men gather into com­ monwealths to secure their persons and property from violence . From hence I concluded Liberty and rights (and also property) must spring out of Civil Society, and must be forever subject to the modification of particular governments . I hold this position clear and safe, that all the rights of man can be derived only from the conventions of society; and may with propriety be called social rights .

Chase denounced as fanciful and pernicious what he saw of the popular theory that men, in a state of society, were "entitled to exercise" all the rights they allegedly possessed in a state of nature. For, among other things, that theory led to perpetual revolution and frequent libel. Democracy, he predicted, would "rapidly destroy all

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protection to property and all security to personal liberty and our Republican Constitution will sink into mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments, " if persons with no stake in society were allowed to vote and the spirit of envy was thus fostered among the people. "The modern doctrines by our late reformers, that all men in a state of society are entitled to enjoy equal rights, have brought this mighty mischief upon us, and I fear that it will rapidly destroy progress, until peace and order, freedom and property shall be destroyed . " On May 2, 1803, Justice Chase charged a United States grand jury meeting with the federal circuit court in Baltimore, at­ tacking universal manhood suffrage and the repeal by President Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Congress of the Judiciary act of 1801. On January 6, 1804, the House of Representatives named a committee to inquire into Chase's judicial conduct and determine whether it required "the interposition of the constitutional power of the House. " This committee decided for impeachment. On March 12, 1804, by a vote of 73 to 32 the House supported its report and, on the basis of seven charges, ordered that another committee draw up Articles of Impeachment for formal presentation before the United States Senate. Eight Articles were presented to the next session of the House the fallowing November 30, and were pre­ sented to the Senate on December 7. Chase was brought to trial there, after some legal delay, on February 4, 1805. Histories of the United States Supreme Court attach great impor­ tance to the impeachment trial and ultimate vindication of Justice Chase. For if Chase was sometimes an interested, partisan figure while on the bench, the attempt to remove him from office was even more political than the worst of his indiscretions. Furthermore, it was a threat to the future of judicial independence within the Amer­ ican political system. Had the impeachment of Chase been a suc­ cess, the impeachments of William Paterson and John Marshall would have followed swiftly, with dire consequences in the future prospects of justice before any of our federal courts at any subse­ quent date. John Randolph of Roanoke, William Branch Giles and company had had enough of Federalist judicial activism and, in their leadership of the Congress, were not worrying about the separation of powers. For reasons connected with these facts and possibilities, a variety of honorable men-Federalists and Jeffersonians-refused to vote for conviction. The charges against Justice Samuel Chase interpreted the mean­ ing of the language of the Constitution concerning "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" through the conduct of the defendant in two

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trials and in his handling of two grand juries. Two other charges having to do with breaches of Virginia procedure, Articles 5 and 6, weakened the impact of the six serious Articles and received no support whatsoever. One was refused unanimously and the other failed by a vote of 30 to 4. Article 1 attacked Chase for denying John Fries his right of counsel and for " arbitrar y, oppressive and unjust" treatment of this early champion of civil disobedience. Articles 2, 3, and 4, along with the two procedural changes, grew out of the Virginia trial of James Callender, a radical journalist, and complained of Chase's failure to excuse a prejudiced juror, to hear an important witness and to be temperate and impartial in his conduct toward the accused and his attorneys. Article 7 concerned a Newcastle, Dela­ ware grand jury which Chase kept in session by urging it to inspect a local newspaper for evidence of sedition. Article 8 covered his charge to the Baltimore grand jury and his libel against the party in power and the laws of Maryland-the "seditious" idea that Jeffer­ sonians misread the relation of the United States Constitution to the Declaration of Independence. The prosecution, led by Randolph, George Washington Campbell, and Peter Early, did not make its case. Moreover, the evidence that was presented favored Chase, and the use made of it by the old firebrand and his counsel, Luther Martin, Robert Goodloe Harper, Philip Barton Key, and Joseph Hopkins, was much superior to the performance of the Democratic­ Republicans. Only on Articles 1 and 7 was Chase in any difficulty; for they concerned genuine questions, and had some basis in his misconduct. But his sins were not serious enough to justify an attainder, which, as some of the Jeffersonians admitted, was the nature of the business concluded on March 1, when the Senate refused to convict. According to Senator Giles of Virginia, "Re­ moval by impeachment was nothing more than a declaration of Congress to this effect: You hold dangerous opinions . . . . We want your offices, for the purpose of giving them to men who will fill them better." That the Congress rejected such a theory of impeach­ ment has had wholesome consequences which reach down to the present time and forestall the baneful spirit of party whenever it attempts to politicize the law in this way. In the moment when a generation of Americans decided they should not remove an officer of government merely because they disliked his opinions, Samuel Chase stands at the center of the national stage. However, the impeachment trial of 1805 was not only the most important chapter in his political histor y, it was also the last. Even though he lived for another six years, held his seat on

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the Court, attended the councils of his church, prospered and ad­ vised younger members of the bar on their education, this portion of the career of Samuel Chase almost disappears from the record. Much of this time he was beset by gout and the problems of his children. But when in better health he advised Chief Justice Mar­ shall on the definition of treason and functioned behind the scenes in deciding other cases, even though Marshall handed down the opinions. He also received many visitors, who wished to sift his memory concerning the origins of state and nation. In private and public he continued as he had begun-a puzzle to many of his contemporaries, but consistent at the core. Judge Joseph Story, who was to follow him to the High Court, went to see Chase in Baltimore in 1807 and "liked him hugely." He saw in Chase an American version of Dr. Samuel Johnson. The crusty exterior he penetrated to find the warmth, good humor, and intellectual power. Samuel Chase accepted death with composure, armed with the consolations of a firm religious faith in which he had continued throughout his days. We are, in our perception of his achievement, too much diverted by the colorful elements of his personality as the Maryland Vesuvius­ what John Quincy Adams spoke of as "Strong mind" joined to "ardent passions" and a "domineering temper"-to pay proper at­ tention to the quality of his thought. For his was a mind to which we must devote close analysis if we are to correct the stereotypes of fashionable interpretation which dominate our political history. 1

11 "LIGHT HORSE HARRY" LEE A Forgotten Forefather Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee (January 29, 1756-March 25, 1818), soldier, statesman, historian, and land speculator. The defini­ tive military Federalist. A central figure in the Virginia ratifica­ tion debates. With Edmund Pendleton and George Wythe, able to bring a reputation for disinterested patriotism to resist the over­ whelming persona of Patrick Henry. As lieutenant colonel in com­ mand of his own independent force, Lee's Legion, and as a dashing leader of cavalry, rightfully identified by his most complete biog­ rapher, Thomas Templin, as "the foremost soldier of his years in the entire Revolutionary army, " a man "who never counted the costs" of any risk to himself. Yet more than a beau sabreur, the man on horseback, "wedded to his sword." A fine tactician, a master of maneuver, deployment, surprise, and bluff. A raider par excellence. Upon his retirement from the American army at the age of tvventy­ six, a bona fide hero. In the June 1788 deliberations in Richmond, one of the first citizens of his state, a member of the Continental Congress, an accomplished orator, the proprietor of Stratford (one of its great houses), and thirty-two years old. The warrior as politi­ cian who brought the aura of what he had achieved under arms in defending American liberty to answer Antifederalist charges that the proponents of the Constitution were indifferent to such consid­ erations.Having finished service in the last Continental Congress, elected governor of Virginia, in which office he continued for three terms (1791-1794). A young man of unlimited promise, yet even­ tually a tragic figure, both in his public and his private life. "Light Horse Harry" Lee was the son of Harry Lee II, of Prince William County, and of Lucy Grymes Lee.Born at Dumfries in the 114

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Northern Neck, this third Henry Lee was the great-great-grandson of the American founder of the dynasty, Richard Lee "The Immi­ grant, " and the cousin of those gifted brothers, Richard Henry Lee, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Arthur and William Lee, and Philip Ludwell Lee. By blood and marriage he was connected to many of the great families of his state. After tutoring at home and matriculation in the College of New Jersey in 1770, young Lee was forced into maturity in a great rush. For the years of his boyhood and youth had as a backdrop momentous events which had a great impact on his in­ tensely political family and eventually turned the direction of his own life away from the path of peace originally mapped out for him by his father. Henry Lee II was a conventional aristocratic Whig, devoted to the settlement of 1688, noblesse oblige, rule by the squires, and the corporate liberty. After seven sessions as a member of the House of Burgesses and long tenure as County Lieutenant, Justice of the Peace and His Majesty's Attorney for Prince William, he sat as representative of his neighbors in the First and Second Virginia Conventions. And, in 1777, he gladly sent his son to defend inherited liberty against British usurpations as a captain in a reg­ iment being formed and commanded by his kinsman, Colonel The­ odorick Bland. When Patrick Henry signed his original commission, young Henry Lee was twenty-one years old. Though originally prepared at the time of his graduation and departure from Princeton to fallow the family pattern and study law with a few years at the Inns of Court, he was not much disappointed when war intervened. For though he had been a good scholar under Dr. Witherspoon and his other professors, the focus of his reading had concentrated on those an­ cient public virtues honored by the poets but proved up with more than words-the Roman virtues. All who khew him agreed from his earliest months in uniform that he had been born to be a soldier, whatever his military laurels (or, in his phrase, "reputation") made possible for him in the time of peace. In council even his eloquence belonged to the universe of discourse where the final test of patriotism comes with the risk of life in combat. By that measure Lee's loyalty to the Republic-in-the-making was greater than that of all but a few. "Light Horse Harry" Lee's first achievements came in scouting, raiding, gathering intelligence and supplies, screening and observ­ ing the movements of British units like his own. From the mistreat­ ment of Washington's army by the Congress and the people it attempted to defend, young Lee learned political lessons. From

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strictly military victories and defeats he learned the importance of discipline, organization, forethought, and mobility. And through feats of daring (bluffing his way out of a trap at Spread Eagle Tavern, riding his way out of another at Schuylkill Mills), he began to ac­ quire a name. General Washington offered him a place on his staff, but Lee declined the honor, declaring, "I am wedded to my sword"­ and thus grew in the regard of his commander-in-chief, who in 1778 recommended him for promotion and for the command of an inde­ pendent mounted corps. This unit was originally a force of about one hundred light dragoons which grew and became "Lee's Legion" when two companies of infantry were added to it late in 1780, bringing its total strength to almost three hundred men. The achievements of Lee's Legion belong to General Nathanael Greene's campaign against Charles, Lord Cornwallis, in the South. But before Lee left Washington's army for the adventures he later recorded in his history of that segment of the Revolution, he won a memorable victory all his own-in the July 1779 raid on Paulus Hook, New Jersey, where, after careful planning and rapid marches, he captured a British post behind their lines, depriving the enemy of more than two hundred men at the cost of fewer than twenty. This triumph had a powerful influence on the morale of Wash­ ington's forces, was honored by a cash award from Congress to the soldiers involved (and a gold medal for Lee)-and was finally a cause of great jealousy and envy directed toward the proud young Virginian who had orchestrated every feature of its unfolding. Under Greene, Lee saw the kind of continuous service which had not come his way in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania­ sieges and pitched battles as well as screenings, foragings, and raids. His value to Greene was inestimable, as the judicious Rhode Islander acknowledged readily, calling him "one of the first Officers in the world." For as part of Greene's army "Light Horse Harry" Lee helped to turn around the American struggle for independence as fought out in the South. Moreover, for the remainder of his life he knew what he had accomplished, what honor belonged to him by right, and what other conclusions "these iliads" might have had without his inspiring presence. First Charleston fell and then came the humiliation of Horatio Gates. General Greene, with the as­ sumption of full authority over American troops south of Rich­ mond, took responsibility for their part of the war when their for­ tunes were at their lowest. This portly, cautious, and capable general, with the aid of Morgan, Lee (his "right eye"), and partisan command­ ers such as Marion, Sumter, and Pickens, first stalled a successful

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British army below the border of North Carolina; then destroyed large portions of it at King's Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Court House; and finally (at Lee's suggestion) marched around it to restore self-government in South Carolina and Georgia. Lee's Legion played a central role in this great effort. Acting often on his own, Harry Lee screened long marches, captured outposts, and confused British commanders until Greene's army was ready to fight. Then, with his valorous three hundred he faced the fury of frustrated British regulars in stand-up fights. At Guilford Court House, Lee's Legion anchored Greene's flank and held their ground until the close of the day. At Eutaw Springs they may have saved a careless American army from its alcoholic inclination to convert a victory into a terrible defeat. But despite these triumphs (or because of them) young Lee faced still the problems of resentment and jealousy which had so outraged him while he served under Wash­ ington . Lesser men would not acknowledge either his merit or his victories . Which was only an exaggeration of their attitudes to­ ward the Continental soldiers as a group. Instead they glorified the achievements of the militia-which Lee knew to be limited. As he now realized, the problems of the new Republic would be political and internal. In 1782 "Light Horse Harry" Lee resigned from the army, returned to Virginia, married his second cousin Matilda Lee, the "Queen of Stratford," and prepared to display in council the public virtue he had exemplified in the field. But for the remainder of his life the purposes which he embodied in wartime, to "vindi­ cate and maintain the dignity and rights of our society," would be the measure of what he sought to achieve in the political arena, and in the world of business. There was nothing very complicated about the politics of "Light Horse Harry" Lee . They were the product ·of prescription and edu­ cation, as modified by the frustration of waging war without the support of a responsible civil authority-an authority able to fund the campaigns toward which it sent officers who held its commis­ sions. In 1785 Lee was· elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and in the same year was dispatched by his legislative associates to be one of the representatives of his state in the Continental Con­ gress. There, with one month's interruption, he continued until the end of the Confederation and the beginnings of government under the new Constitution . Lee came to his place in the Congress with very decided opinions concerning the need for structural reforms to make the union of the states effective: strong enough to defend itself. As a soldier he had learned how much the nation needed a

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government with the power to raise a revenue, conduct a foreign policy, recruit and support a capable staff, and conduct all other unmistakably national business . To that effect he wrote his cousin, Governor Thomas Sims Lee of Maryland: Unless a sovereign power equal to the drawing into action the ability of the confederated states is soon established, I plainly foresee that the best position allotted for America is a choice of nations in a dependent connexion. [We need] wisdom & vigor in a supreme power, created by the whole .

And to his father, in April of 1786, he advanced his opinion, "We have very gloomy prospects with respect to national faith, dignity & importance ." During his years as a soldier, "Light Horse Harry" Lee had come to believe that the country could be safe only so long as the people possessed enough virtue to voluntarily subjugate their private in­ terests to some conception of the public good. He had hoped that Americans would be inspired to emulate the patriotism of the early Romans by what they had accomplished in the Revolution. With Shays's Rebellion these hopes began to fade . To friends Lee pre­ dicted that the Confederation would have " a mob government for a time, which will terminate in despotism among ourselves or from abroad." Too much talk about the "exuberantly false and abores­ cently fallacious preamble" to the Declaration of Independence would transform democracy into mere levelling, with which "the reign of violence and anarchy would return." Demagogues might with political profit ring the changes upon the theme of equality. But (according to a paraphrase preserved by his eldest son, Henry Lee IV), he was convinced that institutions founded on such gener­ alities and abstractions were "like a splendid edifice built on kegs of gunpowder." Democracy when flavored by envy would strangle the I{epublic . Which is what his youngest son, Robert E . Lee, meant when he observed in disgust, at the election of Abraham Lincoln, that the country was "doomed to run the full length of democracy. To what a fearful pass it has brought us ." As a correction to the evident lack of public spirit in the popula­ tion of his newly independent country, Henry Lee hoped for an energetic government resting upon the authority of a fundamental law and administered by a cadre of disinterested patriots who had proven up their character in war. Professor Charles Royster, the closest student of Lee's thought, writes of the young soldier/politi­ cian from Virginia as he sat in the Continental Congress that he had

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by 1787 "concluded that the survival of liberty depended on the superior virtue of a few men who, because of their patriotism, had a paramount claim to wield authority for the public good." Lee agreed with his comrades in the Society of the Cincinnati. Too much selfish individualism-license-had, during the Revolution, threatened the general independence to which we, as a people, aspired. Lee wel­ comed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a step in the right direction. For it might produce a means of restraining the nation's drift toward disorder and disunion-the greatest threats to the public liberty. From the time when he first examined it, Lee supported the revision of fundamental law proposed by the Great Convention. Indeed, he attempted to get the Continental Congress to transmit the document with an endorsement recommending it to the favor of the states. Yet even in these activities Lee "made its [the Revolution's] history the text by which to judge the orthodoxy of American peacetime conduct." "Light Horse Harry" Lee was eager to serve in the Virginia ratifi­ cation convention and campaigned vigorously for his place repre­ senting Westmoreland County. In the Richmond debates he made an important contribution to the Federalist cause. For Lee, like Edmund Pendleton, John Marshall, George Nicholas, and Edmund Randolph, had the stomach to confront the rhetorical magic of Virginia's most popular politician, Patrick Henry-a man almost as respected (and more often followed) than General George Wash­ ington. James Madison had information, but no power as a speaker. Lee had both reputation and eloquence. Soon after the convention opened, Patrick Henry began his assault on the new plan of govern­ ment. He answered George Nicholas and was supported by George Mason. Pendleton and Randolph replied to certain popular objec­ tions to the Constitution, representing the Federalist cause as a recognition of necessities. But the battle was not truly and finally joined until on June 5, 1788, Henry Lee III rose to attack directly but politely the arguments upon which Patrick Henry based his highly emotional pleadings in indictment. Lee was followed by large dis­ plays of information and self-assurance from such significant fig­ ures as James Madison. But the old lion was not so easily silenced. Therefore, again, on June 9, after Henry had almost driven the opposition from the field, Harry Lee answered the orator's apoc­ alyptic vision of tyranny under law with a seriatim reply, reproach­ ing the great man point by point, promising that strict construction of the Constitution would be practiced by its advocates, once its provisions were in force.

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"Light Horse Harry" Lee spoke later in the convention in re­ sponse to George Mason's charge that the new government would be too undemocratic, and in explanation of circumstances surround­ ing the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations toward a treaty with Spain. But his important work had been done earlier, in deflating Henry's dire predictions, in countering his application of the diaboli, the rhetoric of fear. The intellectual substance of Lee's two major addresses marks him as a moderate Southern Federalist, devoted to Union as a condition of liberty but (in the phrase of Templin) "highly _averse to the concentration of economic and fiscal power at the national level." His support for ratification of the Constitution derived from his disgust with the "imbecility" of the Confederation. To the charge that the proposed government was "consolidated," he responded with reference to the method being followed in the ratification pro­ cess. If this were a consolidated government, ought it not to be ratified by a majority of the people as individuals, and not as states. . . . " He was not a partisan of "the 'centralizing nationalism' of such figures as Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton." Harry Lee had of course his own bugbear to weigh against the dark prophecies of Henry . Shays's Rebellion was his doleful text, concerning what would have happened "had Shays been possessed of abilities." To have made a revolution in Massachusetts "nothing was wanting but a great man." America was showing a tendency to unravel. Such disturbances would be fostered by disunion; and complete disunion, he believed, would follow from rejection of the Constitution by Virginia. That the new government would be capa­ ble of encouraging commerce and trade, of redeeming Continental paper held by ordinary patriotic citizens, and of preventing corrup­ tion of the currency was a part of his appeal. Also constitutional literalism: an insistence that "only overtly enumerated powers" would belong to the federal authority, once in place and in opera­ tion. But the kind of danger to civil order and personal freedom which comes of ignoring "the fallibility of man"-from such non­ sense as glorifying the militia and the tender law while refusing to pay a direct tax-was his most durable theme. On it he rang the changes. What he had seen and risked (including £8000 in gold) was part of his identity. He used this argument from an established public character for all that it was worth. War had made "Light Horse Harry" Lee a nationalist. In the Virginia ratifying convention he announced, "I love the people of the north, not because they have adopted the Constitution but because I fought with them as countrymen." But if war had made

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him a nationalist, experience of life within "a more perfect union" soon turned him back into being a mere Virginian. That there could be conflict between these loyalties he soon came to believe in re­ sponse to Secretary Hamilton's talk of "implied powers" and the great financial system of the Federalists. It was as an Antifederalist that Lee was elected Governor of Virginia in November of 1791; that he opposed creation of the Bank of the United States, the assump­ tion of state debts by the central government, and the ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Chisholm v. Georgia. He distrusted the Federalist Congress: "No policy will be adopted by Congress which does not more or less tend to depress the south and exalt the north." And to this grim prediction he added later, "I had rather myself submit to all the hazard of war & the loss of every­ thing that is dear to me in life than to live under a fixed insolent northern majority." In 1789-1791 Lee served in the Virginia assem­ bly, where he supported the Bill of Rights and joined Patrick Henry to remonstrate against Federalist legislation, reminding some cen­ tralizers how they had promised "that every power not granted" to the federal authority was "retained" by the states and their citizens. Finally the logic of his position pushed him to consider secession from the Union, a need to "cut the Gordian Knot at once." To James Madison he wrote (April 3, 1790), "To disunite is dreadful to my mind, but dreadful as it is, I consider it a lesser evil than union on the present conditions." And to Davis Stuart he grumbled of the impracticality of "union with States where interests are so dis­ similar to those of Virginia." Only perils worse than Federalist abuses of the South could have driven this Harry Lee back into the party government. And by 1794 those dangers were apparent. Harry Lee's return to the Federalist fold came as a result of the transformation of Antifederalism into the· Democratic-Republican Party. Patrick Henry embodied the Antifederalism which Lee first understood and then supported; and for him Lee had always a large measure of respect-even when they labored on opposite sides of a question. But the Democratic-Republicans followed Thomas Jef­ ferson, flattered the "lower orders," and identified themselves with the philosophical radicalism of France's new egalitarian revolution. Like Henr y, Lee had hoped for the best from the moderate republi­ cans or Girondians in France-men like his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. Indeed, in the sorrow of his bereavement following the 1790 death of Matilda Lee, he had even thought of offering a mildly republican France his sword. But with the Reign of Terror, the appearance of the sans-culottes and the coming to power of the

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Jacobins, he drew back. And when the French (and their American admirers) began to speak of "finishing" the American Revolution­ of reasons to export European "isms" to these shores-Lee came to regard them as enemies. For one thing, they had fostered a servile insurrection in Santo Domingo, a development which has resulted in restlessness among Virginia's three hundred thousand slaves. One hundred fifty blacks marched with whites in salute to a French frigate in Norfolk. In response, Lee mobilized the militia and ob­ served of the situation, "The precedent is replete with dc1nger." He warned Edmond Genet to respect the neutrality of Washington's government. And after watching the conduct of the Democratic Societies in the period preceding the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, he finally concluded that there was a plot to prepare "the American people for the reaction of the French and Santo Domingo tragedies." W hen President Washington asked Governor Lee to command a force sent toward Pittsburgh to restore order among the opponents of the excise living in that region, Major General Lee accepted the assignment with enthusiasm. Harry Lee naturally connected the W hiskey Rebellion with the 1786 misconduct of Captain Daniel Shays of Massachusetts. Once again, he feared "the reign of violence and anarchy, " followed by "despotism in some shape or other." He was on return from this show of force persuaded that "the late wicked insurrection . . . may be fairly traced to the principles and sentiments delivered by mem­ bers of Congress on and off the floor." This "frenzy" was Jeffer­ sonian, squinting toward separation, civil war, French alliances, and the recruitment of an army of runaway slaves. With the back country outrage at the excise on spirits, Lee was patient. He dis­ liked it himself-in particular, because of its disruptive social con­ sequences. Therefore he dealt gently with those who deplored the measure but did not challenge the authority of government. But when mixed with the "unextinguished fire" of ideology, "a flame which threatened to consume all reason, temper, and reflection, " such aggravated popular causes might, he was convinced, drive the country toward . . . "the French condition." To prevent that devel­ opment, Lee was prepared to soldier against his countrymen, what­ ever the personal or political results of his choice. "Light Horse Harry" Lee's tenure as governor of Virginia con­ cluded while he was marching through Pennsylvania. From this termination forward, all that remained of his public life was one term in the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States (1799-1801), some small service in the Virginia House of

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Delegates (1795-1798), and a brief return to uniform during the "quasi-war" with France (1798-1800). These were Federalist years for Lee, a time for supporting the Adams wing of the party. For his side in Virginia's debates on the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lee wrote a pamphlet, T he Address of the Minority in the Virginia Legislature to the

People of T hat State, Containing a Vindication of the Constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Laws. He followed this composition with an­ other, Plain Truth: Addressed to the People of Virginia, in which he disavowed his own earlier sentiments concerning secession. While attacking the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, he generalized that there is "perhaps, no good more essential than Union: no ill, which must be attended by a longer train of calamities than dis­ memberment." Congressman Lee preferred Burr to Jefferson, as he had Adams to Hamilton. He was glad of peace with France and pleased to see his brother Charles made Attorney General of the United States. Yet he still opposed the notion of "implied powers" and the vague additions to the authority of the general government hidden behind such a notion. Moreover, he was outraged when Abolitionists pre­ sented an antislavery petition to a Congress which, in Lee's opin­ ion, "had no right to intermeddle." When George Washington died, Lee drafted his eulogy for the House of Representatives and then delivered it, for the entire Congress, on December 26, 1799, in the German Lutheran Church of Philadelphia. In the process Lee came to share a little of the fame of his subject by describing him as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. " After his single term in Congress, it was clear that Harry Lee had lost the confidence of many of his fellow Virginians-as he had ceased to trust them. The Democratic-Republicans did not approve of his command of the Pennsylvania expedition, of his partisan use of the military power. Harry Lee, they said, showed no "love of equality" and seemed to favor a standing army. He had accused the Jeffersonians of having a system suited "to undermining the gov­ ernment"-of disrespect to his friend, patron, and hero, President Washington. But problems of greater consequence than declining political popularity occupied his mind in these chaotic years. For bad investments had begun to accomplish his ruin soon after he married his second wife, Ann Hill Carter of Shirley. Part of her property was protected from her husband's land speculations by the terms of her nuptial contract with the farmer governor and military hero. Most of what remained from the property of Matilda Lee went soon thereafter to her son, Henry Lee IV "Light Horse

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Harry" Lee had, when he returned from action in the Revolution, 4,600 acres and 47 slaves. From his own property, from Matilda's and then Ann's, he plunged, investing perhaps $200,000 in various schemes of development. He had ventures in ore fields, coal mines, and currency fluctuation . He had shares in the Potomac Company and in the confiscated Fairfax properties. He bought the land through which the proposed Potomac Canal was to be built. And he loaned money to other investors . All of this activity is summed up by his shares in the Great Dismal Swamp Company-a financial sinkhole as bad as its name . Most of his distinguished contemporaries ex­ pected the value of lands in the West to rise rapidly after the Revolu­ tion . Wars and treaties, low rates of immigration, and conditions in Europe frustrated their hopes . Some of these men were "ruined." But, among the great planters, not on the absolute scale to be observed in the career of Harry Lee. On April 24, 1809, to save and control a little of his property (and after a long siege by his cred­ itors), he was by his own choice confined for debt in the West­ moreland County Jail . He had thought it his duty as a Framer and Father of the Republic to run a financial risk in order to build up the country-a risk like those he had taken in combat . But in patterns both inexorable and depressing, the patriot as heroic speculator degenerated into what the Jeffersonians called "the Swindling Harry Lee ." There is no honor in a failure to pay debts . After a time in the Westmoreland jail, Harry Lee was moved by the suit of different creditors to confinement in Spotsylvania County, where he continued until March 20, 1810. Lee was not, however, idle while locked away. In debtors' prison his mind returned to the past-to the causes of his original success and eventual ruin . First he produced the philippic, A Cursory Sketch of the Motives and Pro­ ceedings of the Party Which Sways the Affairs of the Union (1809), a fierce ad hominem attack on the conduct of Thomas Jefferson . Lee was impatient with the influence of "visionary theory" on Jefferson's "wildest projects ." In this treatise, he assails the outgoing Presi­ dent's character, and is more than incidentally concerned with his effect on the prosperity of the country. Indeed, he blames much of his own financial difficulty on Jefferson's policies . But the worst Major General Lee could say about Jefferson went beyond dema­ gogy and economics . For he also touched the honor of the Sage of Monticello-injured him as few men could, by raising the question of his physical courage. In Lee's view, Jefferson had no feeling for war. As governor of Virginia he had not prepared to defend the state. And he had fled to the mountains when sought by British

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raiders under Arnold. Nations, Lee implied, are not made or pre­ served by such men of words. True virtue belongs to men capable of action, who hunger for the honor which comes only to the brave. On that theme, valor qua public virtue, Harry Lee composed his most important work, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States (1812). Lee's memoir is not, in the narrow, modern sense, pure history. For his intention is exemplary, and his theme moral. The proper analogues are classical-to Livy, Xenophon, Polybius, the Pharsalia of Lucan and (perhaps) Thucydides. His focus is on the fore­ shadowing of the future problems of the Republic visible in the struggles of the Revolution; and also on the qualities in the best of our people which made it possible for us to achieve independence­ the same qualities which should define our national future. It is the book of a man disappointed with the consequences of what he had taken to be his Revolution; but also the book of one still loyal to the original promise of the War for Independence. Following his release from jail and the publication of his memoir, the career of "Light Horse Harry" Lee moved swiftly toward its symbolically appropriate denouement on July 28, 1812. In the eve­ ning of that day, Lee and a group of his fellow Federalists, having been disarmed by the militia after defending against a mob a Bal­ timore house where a newspaper of their party had its office, were savagely beaten by the same radicals they had fought off earlier that day. Lee was disfigured and left for dead in the melee. Baltimore authorities were complicit in this violence. And they were not Fed­ eralist authorities. Lee never fully recovered from the harm done to him by this political riot. He had gone up to Baltimore because there were rumors predicting attacks on a Federalist newspaper by the "friends of freedom" and Napoleon's France: a mob made up of "foreigners, recent immigrants and atheists." He wished to defend editor Alexander C. Hanson as he had defended order under law while wearing "buff and blue." But in this new wave of revolution, preserving a continuity with the colonial dream of freedom under mild restraint was not the fashion. The rhetoric had shifted. Indi­ vidualism would be given rein. In 1812 Lee opposed the war with England; and he had by then come to regret that the Revolution had not ended with an armistice in 1777, our independence, and the "renewal of amity" with our brethren. The United States and Great Britain were "the only two nations of the many in the world who understand the meaning of liberty." The British, in confronting Bonaparte, had been defending

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Christian civilization: acting "for the safety of Europe, of the inde­ pendence of most of its nations, in short for the maintenance of all those rights dear to civilized man ." To war with England was to take a side with the enemy of all Christendom, France, and to guarantee that "the bloody and wicked scenes of Europe will be re-enacted on this side of the Atlantic." In the end, Lee was caught up in the fulfillment of his own dark prophecy. After a partial recuperation from his injuries, in early May of 1813 Lee left his home in Alexandria, Virginia (literally, his wife's home) for the West Indies and a final five-year search for health . Yet, as Professor Royster has suggested, it is certain that these last wander­ ings were "more than ease to . . . physical pain." For they took Lee away from political enemies he could no longer defeat, a war he deplored, and a country in which "he could never again prosper." Furthermore, in the Indies there were no actions for recovery for debt on his horizon. "Light Horse Harry" Lee wandered from is­ land to island, writing admonitory letters to his sons, directing their education, urging them to put their trust in the promises of the Christian faith, and, though Episcopalian, to honor the convictions of other good people. To his wife he wrote usually of returning home, once mended and stronger. As the end came closer, he at­ tempted to close the circle and started back toward Virginia and the shelter of his family. He got as far as Cumberland Island, Georgia, and the plantation home of his already deceased comrade Nathanael Greene, whose daughter cared for him until his death on March 25, 1818. "Light Horse Harry" Lee, in his eulogy for Washington, quoted from Horace's Odes, Book 3, the description of a man of justice and firmness who is unshaken when confronted by either the tyrant or the mob: Justum et tenacem proposti virum Non civium ardor prava jubentium, Non vultus instantis tyranni Mente quatit sol ida. The man who is just and solid in purpose is from his firm resolution shaken neither by the clamor of fellow citizens nor by the sight of the angry tyrant.

The passage applies to the brave horseman who employed it as much as it did to his beloved commander. Lee was a proud man,

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sensitive and restless. He was driven by a passion for honor achieved through acts of patriotism, promising in the Virginia ratification convention, "I shall brave all storms." Truly, "he counted not the cost." Yet in politics he avoided giving his support to special inter­ ests in conflict with the common good. In his personification of the spirit of noblesse oblige, his aristocratic republicanism, he belongs to the almost-Roman generation of heroes who accomplished the Revolution and established government in its aftermath. It is no surprise for us to learn that he cherished among his most prized possessions the signet ring of a Roman consul. His monuments are his memoir-and his youngest son. 1

12 RAWLINS LOWNDES Southern Prophet Rawlins Lowndes (January 1721-August 24, 1800), provost marshal, jurist, planter, and political leader of South Carolina be­ fore and during the American Revolution. The prototypical South­ ern conservative in his fifty years of 9pposition to remote, arbitrary and unfriendly concentrations of power. Yet very English in his lifetime of devotion to the Old Whig dream of corporate life under the authority of a law both sovereign and limited in scope. Though self-made in his fortune, eventually a man of great wealth and a popular figure during the years in which he achieved both status and financial success. President of an independent South Carolina from March 6, 1778, until January 9, 1779. Then briefly under a cloud of disrepute for having accepted the protection of the Crown following the May 12, 1780 fall of Charleston. Yet a dependable source of supplies for patriot forces even when caught behind Brit­ ish lines and forced, by the situation of his family, to pretend a docility belied by his huge investment in the cause of American independence. In 1787 so well recovered in reputation as to be the leading Antifederalist in his state. The spokesman for his party in the January 1788 debates on the merits of the Constitution which occurred in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Opposed to adoption of the instrument in question, but not to a ratification convention, to which the exchanges in the legislature were a pro­ logue. Doubtful of the future advantage to the South of being more thoroughly and unequally yoked together" with our Northern brethren"-men who are governed by prejudices and ideas ex­ tremely different from ours." An impenitent sectionalist confirmed in his opinions by the experience of South Carolina during the II

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Revolution and by the derivative conviction that "the security of a republic is jealousy" of those in authority. At sixty-eight able to confront the gathered splendor of Charleston Federalism and re­ spond to its best on equal terms. The Jeremiah of the Low Country who proclaimed against the Izards, Rutledges, and Pinckneys that "when the new Constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern states would set, never to rise again." Though called forward in this conflict as a spokesman for the yeomanry and "man of the people, " also a protector of what remained after the Revolu­ tion of the old regime in his state, one who "wished no other epitaph than to have inscribed on his tomb, 'Here lies the man who opposed the Constitution, because it was ruinous to the liberty of America.' " Rawlins Lowndes was the son of Charles Lowndes the younger, of Cheshire, a "gentleman of family" descended from the "Loundes of Legh Hall, " related to Thomas Lowndes, the Carolina landgrave, and to various members of Parliament or officers of the government in Whitehall, and of Ruth Rawlins Lowndes, the daughter of a wealthy planter. The third son of his parents, he was born on the Caribbean island of St. Christopher (St. Kitts), a part of the Lee­ ward chain to which his father had come out in order to marry and make a place for himself. But Charles Lowndes (in the language of his prudent son Rawlins) "embarrassed his property by free living" and did not prosper among the sugar planters. Therefore, in the spring of 1730, he pulled up stakes in the West Indies, resigned his seat on the local governor's council, and immigrated to South Car­ olina, where he attempted to make a fresh start. In the midst of an economic boom (and despite powerful connections), he failed once more, losing a plantation on Goose Creek, slaves, and most of his other property, until there was nothing left to answer his notes of hand and he was (in 1736) arrested for debt. In the toils of his distress Charles Lowndes struggled, but could find no way out. His behavior became erratic. Eventually his wife left him and brought suit for separate maintenance, which he refused to provide. Incar­ ceration followed. On May 22, 1736, Lowndes took his own life, leaving two of his sons, Charles and Rawlins, all but orphans, once their mother had returned to St. Kitts with the rest of their family. These boys found a protector in South Carolina Provost Marshal Robert Hall, who was probably influenced to assume the responsi­ bility of fostering them by his patrons, various members and friends of the Lowndes family still residing in the United Kingdom. Raw­ lins was fifteen at the time of his father's death. From that grim

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instance (and from careful observation of the feckless spirits inhab­ iting the Charleston jail) the young man learned, by negation, the importance of patient industry and the danger of mere experiment or rash plunging after what is merely possible, but not likely. Rein­ forcing the burden of such personal history and prescription was the thorough legal and historical education given to the two Lowndes boys by Provost Hall, himself a trained attorney. English order and liberty, they learned further, were like the prosperity of sensible men, the result of slow and careful accretion, of preservative culti­ vation, stewardship, and husbandry. These presumptions Lowndes carried throughout his public life-a career which began soon after Robert Hall died and his precocious ward succeeded him in office. Rawlins Lowndes served as Deputy Provost Marshal of South Carolina from 1745 to 1752, and may have actually begun to carry out the duties of that office even earlier. Like most of his predeces­ sors in enforcing the orders of Carolina courts, he acted for a patent holder who remained in England. But as an authorized substitute, he exercised great powers, and was introduced to almost every phase of the social, economic, and political life of his community. Lowndes made powerful friends. Moreover, he made cash money out of his fees-money he invested in real property. Although he never practiced in the courts, he also qualified as an attorney and performed various kinds of legal work. In 1749 he was elected to the Commons House of Assembly for St. Paul's Parish. But from 1751 until the onset of the Revolution he_sat almost continuously for St. Bartholomew's Parish in the same Royal Assembly. There he was a man for every kind of business and soon became one of the leading figures in the house. From 1763 to 1765 and again from 1772 to 1775 he was its Speaker. And even when out of that chair he headed the most important committees, handling problems of finance, frontier defense, and relations with the officers of the Crown, both on this side of the ocean and back in England. After 1765 no man in the colony of South Carolina had a more significant role in the admin­ istration, under law and charter, of this particular portion of British North America. Out of his long and faithful service to it, Rawlins Lowndes came to love the old regime in South Carolina: to embody in his own person a demonstration of its character and worth. Over it he became one of the ruling elders, older by a generation than most of the Carolina Patriots who were leaders of the Revolution. It was therefore with difficulty and great reluctance that he put away that hard-won and carefully preserved identity. But give it up he

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did-when subjection to tyranny was the only alternative, and every­ thing in the tradition said that tyranny was not to be endured. Lowndes shared the attitude of his neighbors toward the Stamp Act, and was always firm in his resistance to any encroachment by appointed governors, members of the Royal Council or other mere placemen upon the privileges of the elected representatives of the freemen of South Carolina. But all of this he could do without compromising his fundamental loyalty to the English constitution, as modified by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the proprietary Charter of 1663. For, as the 1774 House of Assembly argued through its London agent, The Rights and Privileges of the Commons House spring from the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects, and are coeval with the Constitution. They were neither created, nor can they be abolished by the Crown. . . . What has prevailed from the Beginning of the Colony, without Question or Controul, is Part of the Constitution.

Rawlins Lowndes was, on such principles, a faithful subject of George III. Hence he found it easy to vote funds to erect a statue to that great friend of British America and defender of liberty, William Pitt, and then eat the bread of Pitt's adversary and prince by accept­ ing appointment as judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Gen­ eral Sessions, where he continued in the Crown's employ from 1766 to 1772. As a loyal W hig he could serve the king by defending the constitution, which provided for and limited the royal authority. On the bench Rawlins Lowndes acted the part of an Old W hig, one who saw in "Prescription and Usage" the basis for law and "the best of titles" for claims of authority. Against Chief Justice Charles Skinner, he ruled that, contrary to the lette·r of the Stamp Act, South Carolina's courts of law should be opened, despite their lack of stamped paper. For the alternative was to delay or deny the justice swift and sure promised by the Great Charter. And the guarantees of the constitution might not, he maintained, be subverted by the provisions of positive law. Lowndes acted as judge "in defence of the common and inalienable rights peculiar to Englishmen." In his determination to protect local self-government against "ministerial encroachments, " he went so far as to deny that the Royal Council might sit as an upper house of the South Carolina legislature . His opinion was finally sustained by the House of Lords. But of course by that time Lowndes had been removed from the King's Bench-

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and caught up in the flow of events which finally produced an American secession. It is difficult to imagine a more reluctant revolutionary than Raw­ lins Lowndes. Though he was an "overseas Englishman, " a true colonial who spent only eighteen months of his life in the United Kingdom, though he had at the onset of troubles already spent twenty-five years as a champion of local self-government, and though he had (in 1760) refused a place on the South Carolina Royal Council as too much of a gesture toward a remote and indifferent power, Lowndes was (in the language of the 1775 apology for the Provincial Congress) animated by "no love of innovation-no desire for altering the constitution of government . . . no lust of indepen­ dence." Years after the event Lowndes reminded his colleagues in the South Carolina General Assembly that, when the crisis came, he had been "very much, originally, against a declaration of indepen­ dence." Indeed, he had wanted South Carolina's delegates to the Continental Congress to be instructed not to deny "the superin­ tending power of Parliament" or to otherwise agree with New En­ gland radicals. The Continental Association was, in his opinion, a sufficient response to provocation. And a proper one. For "Parlia­ ment had, " in his view, "no right to take money out of the pockets of the colonists." Hence the Americans were "impelled to adopt cer­ tain measures . . . not warranted by any of the written laws." The Coercive Acts raised the stakes. "Unmerited persecution" produced the "unavoidable necessity" of taking up arms. ''Arbitrary imposi­ tions from a wicked and despotic ministry" brought into play "the first law of nature, " the impulse toward self-defense. From this proposition Lowndes inferred that ( speaking for his compatriots in disobedience) "we shall be justified before God, and man, in resist­ ing force with force." But almost to the moment of independence he continued to regard military preparations and appeals to the sword as strategies, looking toward the day when "reconciliation shall take place . . . on constitutional principles." No man in South Carolina hated more ( or more openly) the writings and principles of Thomas Paine: the theory that a people might change their government at their pleasure, like an old suit of clothes, thus forfeiting their "rich inheritance" of earned liberty. Yet when Arthur Lee wrote the South Carolina leaders that the British proposed to arm Indians and liber­ ated slaves to release them upon the obdurate colonists, when proof of such designs was made available in captured correspondence, when fleets arrived to assault the city and be£ore them reports that George III had declared the American W higs to be "without the

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law, " Lowndes accepted the inevitability of independence and did not again look back toward bygone felicity. Rawlins Lowndes as the current Speaker of Commons House of Assembly brought colonial government to its 1775 conclusion in South Carolina. At the same time he was a member of the Commit­ tee of 99, which brought together the First Provincial Congresses, which in turn elected him to the First (1775) and Second (1775-1776) Councils of Safety. W hen the Continental Congress asked the com­ monwealths which it represented to draw up new constitutions making no concessions to the Crown's authority, Lowndes served on a committee of eleven who acted as lawgivers for South Car­ olina. He was a member of the First (1776) General Assembly, and also of the Second (1776-1778). W hen South Carolina once more revised its constitution, Lowndes was, as before, in the midst of the debates, opposing disestablishment of Anglicanism (to which he was devoted throughout his life) but agreeing with the reformers concerning increased legislative representation for the Up Coun­ try-as he had agreed with them on other questions, such as unifor­ mity in the enforcement of the ban on exports provided for under the Association. Indeed. Lowndes went so far as to support the elimination of the privy council, direct election of state senators, and the removal of the presidential veto. He had become a spokes­ man for all sections of South Carolina. Therefore, when John Rut­ ledge vetoed this new 1778 Constitution and then resigned his office as president, and when Arthur Middleton refused to succeed Rutledge, Rawlins Lowndes became the President of the commu­ nity to which he had already loaned £60,000-and for which he would now risk life and reputation. For he saw in the proposed changes in the fundamental law a method for bringing together on one principle as many South Carolinians as possible-an oppor­ tunity for needed unity which might not come again. His course was thus that of the statesman-£allowed to good purpose while many of his youthful rivals for influence postured about in their efforts to sustain the privileges of Charleston. As President of South Carolina, Lowndes was perhaps too cau­ tious and too much the provincial in his approach to the exigencies of civil war and prospective invasion. He was blamed by many for the fall of Savannah, which he might have prevented, and was reluctant to release the military resources of his state even when French troops were available to assist American forces in expelling a threatening British garrison from its Georgia stronghold. Lowndes was ill during much of his year in authority, troubled by the gout

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and by the loss of two sons. He was also criticized for his unwilling­ ness to confiscate Tory property and for his failure to enforce the American oath of loyalty. But with the help of his old friend, Vice­ President Christopher Gadsden, he made the necessary prepara­ tions for an expected British attack, healed divisions in the Carolina population, and ( despite the earlier criticism) received the thanks of the legislature when he declined the opportunity of reelection and retired to his plantations. Rawlins Lowndes lost slaves, livestock, and the contents of his storehouse during the British occupation of the Low Country. But he accepted the protection of the Crown-not to secure his property but rather to protect his family, which had been divided during the British conquest of South Carolina and could not be durably re­ united on other terms. By reason of this concession, Lowndes lost some of the standing in the eyes of Carolina Patriots that he had previously enjoyed. Yet after General Greene besieged and then expelled the Redcoats frm Charleston, Lowndes was in no way penalized for his temporary defection. However, though accepted b his community as a member in good standing, Lowndes did not return once more to public life until several years had passed-time in which he devoted himself to the repair and improvement of his holdings, and to a program of investments which made him very rich. But though Lowndes made money by loaning his own reserves to state and national government, he made no objection to a mor­ atorium on payment of debts, if such delay were needed to revive the South Carolina economy-agreed to it even though his own interests called for another approach . Lowndes's valedictory to South Carolina politics, and his most important contribution to the dialectic of American constitutional theory, came as part of his service in the post-war legislature, where he sat for St. Philip and St. Michael parishes from 1787 to 1790, the Seventh and also the Eighth General assemblies. His firm stand against ratification was in one respect surprising. For he repre­ sented in the South Carolina legislature a Charleston district which, by his own admission, disagreed with his vigorous Antifederalism. Indeed, as an explanation of the copious detail of his criticism of the Constitution, Lowndes acknowledged that he did not expect to be elected to a place in the forthcoming ratification convention. He would therefore speak when he could, and respond to the request of his countrymen from the Up Country that the case for their position be made. His theme was an old and familiar one, the dangers of tyranny "brought on by encroachments" : of gullibly

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worshipping the Constitution as if it were a heathen "golden image, " while not knowing what future such credulity might introduce. And the exhortation toward which he was carried by his motif was predictably the danger of rash speculation to the welfare of that larger family which is community: "It has been said that this new government was to be considered as an experiment. . . . An experi­ ment! W hat, risk the loss of political existence on experiment! No sir; if we are to make experiments, rather let them be such as may do good, but which cannot possibly do any injury to us or our pos­ terity." By this calculus the Federalists who confronted Lowndes in a " phalanx" were transformed into mere projectors, men careless with ( or indifferent to) the means and welfare of those for whom they are ostensibly responsible. Rawlins Lowndes is almost unique among the leading figures in the state ratification debates in the vigor of his praise for the Articles of Confederation. "Let us compare what we already possess, " he argued, " with what we are offered for it." The great merit of Con­ federation as opposed to the "proffered system" was that it provided basic safeguards which protected the South against the promotion of Northeastern sectional interests at the expense of its own. The "gen­ tlemen who had signed the old Confederation were eminent for patriotism, virtue and wisdom . . . in the care which they had taken sacredly to guaranty the sovereignty of each state." He worried that in the proposed United States Constitution no such securities of self­ government were provided, not even so much as Scotland retained when joined to England, or as were offered to Americans by Lord North after the colonists proved difficult to subdue. Concerning the prospective benevolence of "our kind friends to the north" Lowndes is sharply sarcastic. The disproportionate bur­ den carried by the South in fighting through the Revolution had made him suspicious. " Some gentlemen have advanced a set of assertions to prove that the Eastern States had greatly suffered in the war. Pray, how had they suffered? " From the behavior of North­ ern leaders in question relating to the tariff, to their regulation of commerce or in connection with the slave trade, it was easy for him to infer " what we may expect in the future." Once Southern legisla­ tures and courts have "dwindled down to the confined powers of a corporation, " all complaints against the operations of an unlimited Northern power will be answered with something like, " Go; you are totally incapable of managing for yourselves. Go; mind your private affairs; trouble not yourselves with public concerns-Mind your business! " In such imagined passages we cannot mistake

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Lowndes's skill in using the tools of rhetoric, conjuring up a specter feared by most of his audience and also dramatizing it so as to implicate the Federalists by association. But in the long run his foresight is more impressive than his mastery of the diaboli. For as the historian George Rogers has observed, Lowndes "saw the logic of the period from Jefferson's embargo to the Civil War"-most particularly with reference to future disputes over the standing of Negro slavery under the Constitution. No Framer of the Constitution is more certain of the advantages to regional development of the South's "peculiar institution" than is Rawlins Lowndes. Concerning the importation of slaves to replace those lost during the ·Revolution, "he thought this trade could be jus­ tified on the principles of religion, humanity and justice; for certainly to translate a set of human beings from a bad country to a better, was fulfilling every part of these principles." In contending for the view of slavery as a "positive good" for both bondsman and master, he paraphrased a statement made earlier by his principal adversary, General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney-thus belying a commonplace of the scholarship, that Southerners for another forty years never did anything stronger than make a circumstantial argument. Pinckney had acknowledged that a Constitution which did not protect slavery could not be approved. Northerners, once the ratified Constitution established their right to interdict the slave trade at a certain point in time, would, Lowndes maintained, find in that power a precedent for their "jealousy": would then "tie up our hands," and "exclude us from this great advantage" of "our only natural resource." In the future "the interest of the Northern States would so predominate as to divest us of any pretension to the title of a republic." Given all of these intrusive probabilities, it seemed best to Raw­ lins Lowndes that the confederation of the states be continued as it had been, under a government of the most excellent constitution, one that has stood the test of time and carried us through difficulties generally supposed to be insurmountable; one that has raised us high in the eyes of all nations and given to us the enviable blessings of liberty and independence; a constitution sent like a blessing from Heaven; yet we are impatient to change it . . . to pull down that fabric, which we had raised at the expense of our blood .

There was a sanctity in such a contract, an authority taken all too lightly in the Philadelphia Convention. Better to revise it with inclu-

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sion of a power to collect a tax than to make it over utterly. And certainly better for the South, which ( contrary to the then popular belief) could not be expected to grow as rapidly as other sections. Rawlins Lowndes was offered a place in the South Carolina ratifi­ cation convention by St. Bartholomew's Parish . But because he had expressed himself already, because there was no doubt about how the vote would go (and because the leaders of his own class had, as he predicted, refused to elect him from Charleston), he declined to serve. The subject had been closed when he failed to persuade the Low Country members in the legislative debates that his vision of the South's future was more plausible than that of the Pinckneys, Rutledges and other spokesmen for the ruling gentry. Yet when James Lincoln of Old Ninety-Six and Colonel James Mason of the Little River District thanked him for having fought the question out from their point of view, they voiced an admiration for Lowndes's achievement in the January sessions of the General Assembly felt by most of those present on that occasion. One additional honor was given to Rawlins Lowndes before his political career came to an end . In 1789 he was chosen to preside over the meeting of the South Carolina Electoral College, which gave its votes in support of George Washington to be the first President of the United States. He left the legislature in 1790 and held no other office of trust in his last decade. After leaving politics, Lowndes applied himself to his personal business, to his family, his plantations and his investments: over $100,000 in United States securities, and other money in canals, mercantile ventures, and underdeveloped lands. He gave generous support to his church (Episcopalian) and to the cultural life of his city. He lies buried in St . Philip's Churchyard surrounded by many of the Charleston Feder­ alists who so labored to contain his political heresy of 1788. At the time of his death, he had accomplished a remarkable (and unmis­ takably American) change in the situation of his family, leaving them firmly ensconced within the aristocratic establishment which had seen in him only "a Parish Orphan Boy" who, in the language of a contemporary observer, was "taken from the dunghill by our late Provost Marshal" and worked his way up from that unearned good fortune. But if Rawlins Lowndes had fought his way to social and eco­ nomic prominence before his death, it was another generation or more before he acquired the reputation as a political prophet for which a later South Carolina would honor him. His Federalist con­ temporary, the historian David Ramsay, could dismiss Lowndes

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with, "He had not one continental or Federal idea in his head." But for South Carolina political leaders who came into their own during and after the struggle over the admission of the state of Missouri into the Union, he was the "sagacious Lowndes" who had not miscalculated the "fidelity" of Northern allies, even though most of his peers had been sanguine about the Constitution and had "al­ most regarded as an enemy to Carolina . . . those who opposed the Union" to be created by that fundamental law. Of this obscurantism Henry Laurens Pinckney declared in an address for July 4, 1833, "Even the warnings of the sagacious Lowndes, though they have been as literally verified as the predictions of Cassandra, were still treated like hers, as the idle visions of fatuity." After 1820 Charles­ ton thought better of the political judgment of Rawlins Lowndes, recognizing that he was the same cautious man throughout his long public career: uneasy at the prospect of "experiment" or radical change; doubtful of the advantage of submission before a remote, indifferent, and arbitrary sovereign will. The importance of his teaching for modern interpreters of the Constitution is that-along with Benjamin Harrison, John Tyler the Elder, Patrick Henry, Joshua Atherton, and Samuel Chase-he belies the popular theory that the Antifederalists were a collection of perfervid democrats, held to­ gether by envy and a passion for the abstract "Rights of man." Most properly he is, however, to be understood as (in the language of his modern biographer, Carl J. Vipperman) one who "defended what he believed to be the interests of his state and section of the country, " even when they didn't want to be defended according to the princi­ ple of Rawlins Lowndes. 1

13 THOMAS SUMTER The Gamecock of South Carolina Thomas Sumter (August 14, 1734-June 1, 1832), soldier, planter, frontiersman, land developer, and political voice of rural South Carolina during and after the American Revolution. Antifederalist and Old Republican of the variety of John Taylor of Caroline, Na­ thaniel Macon and John Randolph of Roanoke. Hero of the partisan resistance to British rule of his state during the two years following the May 12, 1780, fall of Charleston to the siege of Sir Henry Clin­ ton. Already part of a myth when elected by his neighbors in the High Hills of the Santee to oppose the Constitution being recom­ mended by the "great men" of the Low Country. Speaking for the farmers who had followed him in war when he shouted "No! " in registering his vote against ratification. A small, energetic, and fearless warrior, careful of his honor in every circumstance and always ready to put it to the test. Like any fiery spirit, never without enemies, but known affectionately as "the Gamecock" by the state troops under his command. After the state's isolation in 1780, al­ ways of the opinion that South Carolina would have to guarantee its own independence and survival. The kind of general officer who is found always in the forefront, who relished the idea of a price on his head. To the day of his death at the age of ninety-eight, a man on horseback: a figure of reference in many of the great events of his time and a living legend in his old age. Born on the frontier near Charlottesville, Virginia, in Hanover County. Son of William Sum­ ter, (probably a redemptioner), a Welshman, and a miller for that neighborhood settled along Preddy's Creek, and of Patience Sum­ ter, whose parents are not known. Educated in the common schools of that community. After herding sheep and working in his father's 139

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mill, a volunteer in the Virginia militia, serving first under Braddock (1756) and then under Colonel William Byrd in Forbes's expedition (1758). In the fall of 1761 enlisted as sergeant in an expedition against the Cherokees. Thomas Sumter in his encounters with the Indian nations enters the pages of recorded history . He had probably been present at the fall of Fort Duquesne and in the campaign across the Ohio River and had learned something of the red man during this early service. In any case, he was chosen to accompany Lieutenant Henry Tim­ berlake to treat with the Over Hill Cherokees after they sought peace rather than face, from Byrd's troops, more of what they had just received at the · hands of Colonel James Grant and his mixed force of regulars and South Carolina militia. The embassy was a great adventure for the young Virginian as he suffered the hard­ ships of the wilderness, hunted to survive, swam rivers, visited Echota and other Cherokee towns, and competed with the braves in their own games and contests. Finally, with a peace concluded, several of the Cherokee chiefs accompanied their diplomatic visitors to Williamsburg. There the Indians_ asked that their new white friends com.e with them as companions and interpreters on a voy­ age to England, for an interview between Chiefs Ostenaco, Conne Shote and Wooc and "the King their father." Lieutenant Governor Fauquier agreed, and Thomas Sumter was soon on his way to England . The combined party arrived at Plymouth on June 16, 1762, and continued in England (where they made a sensation) for over three months. Twice they met with the youthful George III. The principal interpreter attached to the expedition had died, but Sumter (with only a little stuttering) facilitated a polite conversation of prince and heathen potentates. The English monarch was pleased, as were his aboriginal subjects. The entire party of North Americans was lion­ ized throughout the town, and Sumter acquired invaluable experi­ ence of the world. On his return to the colonies October 28, 1762, the Virginia sergeant escorted his Indian charges to their homes, captured a French spy, made a full report to Governor Thomas Boone and his Council, and only then returned to Freddy's Creek. There he was harassed and abused over old debts contracted before his peace mission to the Cherokees. He was imprisoned but man­ aged to escape with the help of old comrades. Under these circum­ stances Thomas Sumter migrated to South Carolina, where he had seen open land that he liked, and where £700 from Lord Egremont and a grateful sovereign awaited his arrival.

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In his early South Carolina years, Thomas Sumter purchased land near Eutaw Springs, opened Mary Sumter's plantation, his own at St. John's, a sawmill, a grist mill, and a new and larger store on Great Savannah . There is also some evidence that he had a part in the Regulator movement which demanded representation for the Up Country in the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly. In these years he also began to resent "usurped power, and uncon­ stitutional abuses of power" by the representatives of his erstwhile patron, George III. In 1773 Sumter was appointed Justice of the Peace and served on the local Grand Jury for the Camden District. In 1774 speculation and theft by a clerk in his employ brought him close to bankruptcy and another relocation, but his creditors per­ suaded him to stay where he was established. And his neighbors, also troubled by economic circumstance, sent him as their represen­ tative in the First Provincial Congress, which met in Charleston, January 11, 1775. For the District Eastward of Wateree River, he was reelected to the Second Provincial Congress (1775-1776) and then elected to the First (1776), Second (1776-1778), and Third (1779-1780) General assemblies. In these legislative contexts he said little, but soon earned the respect of the state's leading men who entrusted him with major military responsibilities. In these martial offices he spoke eloquently in the language which he best understood-that of deeds and actions. First, Sumter helped to enforce the Articles of Conti­ nental Association in a region where many "disaffected" persons resided . As elected captain of the local militia, he functioned as adjutant general to Colonel Richard Richardson in the December 1775 Snow Campaign against Loyalists who had organized a force in the Up Country. In February of 1776, he was appointed lieuten­ ant colonel of the Second South Carolina regiment of riflemen­ later the Sixth Regiment of the Continental Line. Sumter's com­ mand fought at Fort Moultrie (June 28, 1776), in the Cherokee uprising ( July-October 1776), and in various Georgia campaigns (1777-1778). But as their colonel he grew restive under the strain of indecisive conflicts, long and fruitless marches, and confusion in his business affairs brought on by long absence from home. The war in the South had become a relatively placid business. Therefore, Sumter resigned his commission as of September 19, 1778, and returned to the High Hills of the Santee. Thomas Sumter was surprised when Charleston was surrendered to Clinton's besieging host by General Benjamin Lincoln. But he was not about to surrender himself. Neither did he find the prospect

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of guerilla warfare, with everything at stake, in any way tedious or uninteresting. Therefore, when Tarleton's patrols approached his home, he put back on his uniform, fled to North Carolina, and began to raise men among the frontier folk and old soldiers whose homes were being burned and property stolen along with his own. These men elected him their general and on October 6, 1780, his commission as brigadier-in-command was made official. But by that time he was already in the field with a price of 500 guineas on his head. Sumter smote the king's men at Hanging Rock, Fishdam Ford, and Blackstock's Hill, where he was severely wounded. At Fishing Creek he was caught unprepared, but escaped into the wilderness with most of his force. Soon his regiments were once more up to strength and deployed to ambush supply and relief columns, to attack isolated forts, discourage Tory recruiting and scout the enemy for General Nathanael Greene's regulars. Eventually Sumter settled much of his brigade on the South Car­ olina establishment, promising to pay them for ten-month terms with slaves and plunder confiscated from obdurate Loyalists. Yet in order to have the effect he intended to achieve, he kept his com­ mand separate from other American units, even after the British abandoned all of their rural outposts and retired within the de­ fenses of Charleston. Governor Rutledge called for the election of a new legislature and Sumter was chosen for a place in it. After this election and the dismounting of most of the militia, in February of 1782 Sumter resigned once more, this time ending his military career. As a soldier the "Gamecock" fought always for victory, no matter the danger or the cost in blood. Yet he asked no more of his men than he demanded of himself. And though proud and sensitive concerning his achievements under arms and often caught up in disputes with Rutledge, Greene, or Francis Marion, he was a com­ pletely heroic figure for those who fought with him. The British in offering a reward for his assassination implied their awareness of who it was that prevented the subjugation of the South. As a par­ tisan leader he defines much of the meaning of the Revolution for his section of the country. Rightfully, "Light Horse Harry" Lee compared him to Homer's Ajax. Thomas Sumter sat as senator for the district eastward of Wateree River in the Jacksonboro Assembly which restored regular state government. In the Fifth General Assembly (1783-1784) he returned to his accustomed place in the House. These sessions of the legisla­ ture vindicated Sumter's policy in offering slaves and booty as salary. They authorized Sumter to settle accounts with his own

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men, and provided him with the means he needed to close the books. Moreover, they forbade state courts from entertaining suits for recovery of property applied to the course of these obligations made under "Sumter's Law." Finally, they voted the high-spirited little general a gold medal to honor his record in the field-thus reinforcing the commendation he had earlier received (1781) from the Continental Congress. Sumter continued to hold his place in the South Carolina legislature until 1790, serving in the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth General assemblies. He declined an appoint­ ment to Congress but did assist in writing the 1790 state constitu­ tion-a process which strengthened the representation of the Up Country in the government and moved the capital to Columbia. At home, he bred and raced horses, experimented in scientific agri­ culture (cotton and tobacco), reopened his store, and founded a town. He bought and sold thousands of acres, sat on the vestry of the local Episcopal parish, and promoted a Baptist academy. With the appearance of a movement to replace the Articles of Confedera­ tion with a new and firmer bond of Union he was drawn back to full-time public service and into a larger political arena. In the South Carolina ratification convention held in Charleston in May of 1788, Sumter moved that South Carolina postpone its decision until Virginia had made its choice. After hot debate the motion failed, 135 to 89. But South Carolina's Federalists wanted no simple victory over the opponents of the Constitution made in Philadelphia. Instead, they hoped for at least a tentative consensus in their own community. To specify that they understood the mis­ givings of Thomas Sumter and his friends regarding their fears for the South, the gentry of the Low Country added to the instrument of ratification, in interpretation of their act, a declaration that "no section or paragraph of the said Constitution warrants a construc­ tion that the states do not retain every power, not expressly relin­ quished by them and vested in the General Government of the Union." At the insistence of his old comrades-in-arms who feared what the new government might mean for their lives, Thomas Sumter agreed to be a candidate for the First Congress of the United States. He was easily elected; and once the House of Representatives was orga­ nized, Sumter was quick to insist that his colleagues move rapidly to adopt a Bill of Rights in order to relieve those anxieties which had brought him to sit in their midst. His point in this impressive address was that confidence in the new government might depend upon their attention to changes in the Constitution requested by

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the people of the states in the ratification conventions. Sumter resisted Hamilton's economic plan and opposed an expansive sys­ tem of federal courts and broad Supreme Court jurisdiction; and he was hostile to plans for a large standing arrrty. Sumter was returned to the Second Congress (1791-1793), but was defeated as a result of calumny at the end of that term. Return­ ing home to South Carolina, he reorganized his business affairs and then, for the first and only time in his long career, conducted a personal campaign to recover the legislative office he had� lost and, in the process, to restore his reputation. His 1797 effort was suc­ cessful, and he continued as Representative from the Camden Dis­ trict until Decembe"r 1801, when he was chosen by the legislature to be United States Senator from South Carolina. Sumter did not retire from the Congress until December 16, 1810, when he re­ signed from his seat in the Senate. In these final years of public service he saw the triumph of his political principles in the election of Thomas Jefferson and the exoneration from abusive charges which his honor required. Sumter's South Carolina critics had accused him of making a profit in indents from his foreknowledge of the treasury system and of taking advantage of the ignorance of his fellow veterans. Actually, he had joined Madison in insisting that the redemption of debt go to the original holders of government paper. Sumter was so far from taking advantage of his situation that he opposed even a modest raise in salary for the Congress. Econ­ omy was the motif in most of his speeches-economy and restric­ tion of the federal power. Sumter voted to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, voted against government funds for internal improvement (though he supported the Santee Canal as a private venture), and voted in support of the articles of impeachment brought against Federalist judges who had exceeded their authority. He supported the claims of veterans and of the widows of veterans, but stood against the tariff and the excise on salt. Predictably, he was outraged by antislavery petitions which invited legislation forbidden in the Constitution. In every sense he represented the yeomen and planters of Up Country South Carolina. He personified "the genius of his people." Then, with his party firmly in power and his son well established in the American diplo­ matic service, he withdrew from politics at the age of 76-a recog­ nized and venerable Father of the Republic, of whom John Ran­ dolph of Roanoke had declared, "If I were allowed to vote by proxy, and on that vote depended the welfare of the Republic, I would make Thomas Sumter my proxy." After resuming permanent residence in South Carolina, Thomas

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Sumter lived another twenty-two years. The astonishing energy, which had at sixty made him the first man on the roof of Indepen­ dence Hall when it was endangered by fire, did not abate. At sixty­ five he sharpened his swords and called at the door of a Federalist half his age (a man who had insulted him in a theater). Nor did the spirit behind that vigor flag as he moved into his eighth and ninth decades. It was the same old soldier who at eighty-six was sued for assault by an insolent carpenter in his thirties. At the amazing age of ninety-eight, Sumter rose each day and mounted gracefully to ride over his lands and direct his slaves. To the end he spoke his mind on the great political issues of the day, supporting John C. Calhoun in his first quarrel with Northern centralizers and urging the people in 1831 "to endeavor to change a system of usurpation no longer in harmony with the spirit of our Constitution. " After he had been misrepresented as a critic of the Nullifiers, Sumter sent the following toast for the members of an anti-tariff convention to which he had been elected but could not attend: "The year 1832The period when the character of the State of South Carolina and her inhabitants shall be fixed forever; when no middle course shall be open to them, and when every individual will either rank among the enemies of the liberties of his country or else among those who have honored it." In this valedictory admonition can be recognized an echo of the Sumter who in 1780 told those prepared to join under his leadership in resisting their would-be conquerors, "I am under the same promise with you . . . our interest and fates are and must be identical; with me as with you it is liberty, or death ! " There were difficulties in his last years. The economy was hard on the Southern planters; Sumter was hounded by creditors and pulled down by the problems of his son. The South Carolina legislature relieved some of the pressure by restraining the State Bank from calling Sumter's notes while he lived. But there were also honors. In the small Baptist church where he worshipped, the congregation rose when he entered. Other tributes and gestures of appreciation continued to shower upon his white head, even to the month of his death. But Sumter expected none of this and was, as the last surviv­ ing American general of the Revolution, a model of modesty. His posture was unchanged from what it had been in 1782 when he returned his commission to the people he had so well defended: "If I have contributed to the relief of this lately oppressed state, the approbation of my country is full and ample reward . . . I never expected . . . I wish no other." The concluding inscription on his monument at Statesburg is well chosen: Tanto Nomini Nullum Par Elogium-"Eulogy can add nothing to so great a name." 1

14 JAMES IREDELL An Old Whig in Edenton James Iredell (October 5, 1751-October 20, 1799). Lawyer, jur­ ist, and political leader of North Carolina during and after the War for American Independence.Even while still in the service of King George III, a Patriot and gifted apologist for the American cause. Yet an Old W hig of the strict variety, a man of the prescription, deriving his arguments for resistance to British tyranny and for a self-gov­ erning America from the narrowest possible reading of the various colonial charters and of the history which made them.�A. reluctant revolutionary, finally pushed by the policies of the English Parlia­ ment and king to call for a complete break with Great Britain. In­ spired in this decision by historic instances of W hig rectitude, great examples at the time of the [1688] Revolution, " of men who accepted an earlier royal abdication when it was forced upon them.A consti­ tutionalist at every stage in his career, a man of the fundamental law" which stands above the power of legislatures and magistrates as what is truly sovereign.Hence a mild Federalist and a leading spokesman for that position in the North Carolina ratification de­ bates, acting out of alarm at the democratic excesses of the various state assemblies-and out of hope for a rule of law, not men.Slave­ holder and pious Episcopalian.An American devotee of Edmund Burke, so particularly partial" to that English statesman that he asked his brother in England to collect for him everything of [Burke's] that has been published." Though clearly aware of the need for government as a check upon anarchy, of no inclination to blur the distinction between the reserved powers of Sovereign states, " and the legitimate, specified powers of the general govern­ ment. Committed from the earliest moment in his career to the 11

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country party" view of the freeman's right to defend himself against what threatens to destroy him, to take away his specific chartered rights" transmitted to him by inheritance-and committed also to the natural" right to survive, to stay out of the state of nature." Saw in the United States Constitution an improvement on its Brit­ ish prototype, a better arrangement in the ability of the American judiciary to protect that Constitution against usurpations. Accord­ ing to Julius Goebel, Jr., an authority on the early constitutional history of the Republic, identified by "his continuing interest in maintaining watch and ward over the rights of the states." One of the earliest American exponents of judicial review as a way of avoiding both legislative tyranny and the despotism of a "man on horseback." Asso­ ciate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1790-1799). James Iredell was born at Lewes, Sussex County, England. He was the eldest of the five sons of Francis Iredell, a Bristol mer­ chant, and Margaret McCulloh Iredell, originally of Dublin. Young James came to the New World in 1768 because, after his father suffered a stroke in the mid-1760s, it was necessary for the boy to leave school and accept an appointment arranged for him by his Irish cousins who owned a considerable property in North Car­ olina. James's salary of £30 as Comptroller of the Customs in Port Roanoke (Edenton) went directly to his parents. The boy himself lived off port fees (about £100 per annum). After presenting his credentials to the Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston, this ambitious stripling journeyed southward swiftly. There, if he had no fortune, he soon began to make one, moving in a circle of gifted friends to whom he was soon firmly attached. This circle stood with him for the remainder of his life and defined his place in Southern society, the political life of his state and (finally) American politics at large. In Edenton, Iredell read law with Samuel Johnston-nephew of a former royal governor, the town's most prestigious citizen and later himself governor of the state of North Carolina. In 1773 Iredell married Hannah Johnston, the sister of his mentor. In 1770 he had received a license to practice law in the lower courts of the colony. In 1771 his application to practice in the superior courts was approved. In 1774 he became Collector of the Port at Edenton. By that time he was already serving as Deputy King's Attorney for Hertford, Per­ quimans, and Tyrrel counties. Furthermore, because of his social skill, energy, and cheerful application to business (to say nothing of his Johnston and McCulloh family connections), he had prospects of other preferment. Yet even as early as 1774, along with his 11

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brother-in-law, he had begun to drift with the rest of the Albemarle community toward a decision for resistance to abuses of British authority over the North American colonies and, finally, toward independence.Iredell understood government in North Carolina to rest on the charter given to that commonwealth by the Crown. The colony was thus under the ancient English constitution by way of George III, by the extent to which the entire English tradition was subsumed in its charter and in the operation of the common law on these shores, but not through its submission to Parliament for the direction of its internal affairs . With the Albemarle society, Samuel Johnston and his gifted friends (Joseph Hewes, Archibald Maclaine, Hugh Williamson, John Johnston, vVilliam Hooper, Richard Caswell, and then later, Thomas Burke and William Richardson Davie), young Iredell was carried toward being self-consciously American by a process which seems, in retrospect, inexorable. Out of the service of George III (April 1776) he rose steadily toward that climactic moment in his career when, in July 1788, it fell to him to argue the principal case for the ratification of the proposed Constitution of the United States: to speak in North Carolina for that "more perfect Union" which would replace the British imperial system-as Americans under­ stood that volatile combination in the moment of their struggle to escape from it. Before he undertook to shape its meaning, James Iredell paid a great price for his American citizenship. He was disowned by a wealthy uncle in the West Indies-an uncle whose heir he had been. Also he lost his powerful patrons in England and Ireland. More­ over, he was cut off from his closet relations, left for many years with only a tenuous connection through the mails.Finally, he was separated from a total culture which, as he wrote the king in 1777, he continued to cherish, feeling, even in self-imposed exile, "a strong attachment to my native country." Edenton, his family and friends there, the regard for him which they expressed, made good Iredell's losses, and transformed the young attorney, as he participated fully in the public life of North Carolina, into one of the representative Southerners of his time. Iredell's careful apologia for the American cause-a teaching which he developed in a series of essays and public letters written from 1773-1778-clearly contains a foreshadowing of what he thought should be in a constitution for the United States. In response to the Declaratory Act (1766), the Coercive Acts (1774) and the "Declara­ tion for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition" (1775), the young

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lawyer from Edenton backed slowly toward the conclusion that Crown and Parliament would never agree to any restraint upon their powers of supervision over the colonies, and that, therefore, they had forfeited all the authority over Americans they had once enjoyed. And while he was withdrawing from the king's no-longer­ paternal protection, the entire Tidewater section of North Carolina, a very conservative community, was inwardly, often unknowingly, quietly, doing the same. As Professor Don Higginbotham has main­ tained, James Iredell wrote originally of his politics in the hope of preserving a connection with Great Britain, and also the liberty of his neighbors under the British constitution. In his "Essay on the Law Court Controversy, " his "To the Inhabitants of Great Britain, " "The Principles of an American Whig, " " Causes of the American Revolu­ tion, " "To His Majesty George the Third, King of Great Britain, " and "To the Commissioners of the King of Great Britain for Restor­ ing Peace, etc . . . , " he envisaged an empire of equal parts, like what came later with the British Commonwealth of Nations. Only a small change in the colonial pattern before 1763 was needed, but no less would serve. As early as September 1773 he had written, "I have always been taught and, till I am better informed, will con­ tinue to believe, that the Constitution of this country [North Car­ olina] is founded on the Provincial Charter, which may be consid­ ered the original contract between King and inhabitants." In the same spirit, looking back on relations between colonies and mother country since the first English settlement on this continent, he later informed King George III (as he withdrew his allegiance from that prince) that there would have been no Revolution "if your Majesty had disliked innovation as much as we did." The great failing of the British system, according to James Iredell, was that it did not include a judiciary powerful enough to protect its constitution from the . abusive acts of Crown and Parliament. Divided sovereignty, enforced by a judiciary speaking for an antecedent (and truly sovereign) fundamental law provided a formula for preserving both liberty and civil order. Such an argument Iredell may have learned from his friend William Hooper, who in 1774 wrote to the young immigrant from Bristol of a hope for setting up on these shores "a British constitution purged of its impurities." But whatever its source, it is in keeping with the point of view which he affirmed throughout his public life. For well before most Ameri­ cans, James Iredell came to believe that what we now call judicial review is essential to any hope for a government of laws. Function­ ing as a private attorney, he established the doctrine in North Car-

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olina in the 1787 case of Baynard v. Singleton, and affirmed it again at every opportunity . Looking back on a war fought more against the "700 or 800 Tyrants" of the House of Commons than the despotism of a mon­ arch, Iredell in ''An Address to the Public" wrote: We had not only been sickened and disgusted for years with the high and almost impious language from Great Britain, of the omnipotent power of the British Parliament, but had severely smarted under the effects . We felt, in all its rigor, the mischiefs of an absolute and unbounded authority, claimed by so weak a creature as man, and should have been guilty of the basest breach of trust, as well as the grossest folly, if in the same moment, when we spurned at the insolent despotism of Great Britain, we had established a despotic power among ourselves .

Because of what he had learned as an Englishman in America, he wished no system of legislative supremacy on these shores. In­ stead, even with respect to North Carolina, he insisted that it has ever been my opinion that an act inconsistent with the [state] Constitution was void, and that the judges, consistently with their duties, could not carry it into effect . The Constitution appears to me to be a fundamental law, limiting the powers of the legislature, and with which every exercise of those powers must, necessarily, be compared.

In 1783 he observed, "In a Republic . . . the Law is superior to any or all Individuals, and the Constitution superior even to the Legis­ lature, of which the Judges are the guardians and protectors ." Leg­ islative supremacy was an idea of democratic, doctrinaire egalitar­ ians. And Iredell was assuredly not of that company. What Iredell thought of the "back country men" and ordinary fellows who, with the Revolution, injected themselves into North Carolina politics and, once there, failed to show the deference to the local gentry which had been customary he suggested in his satiric "Creed of a Rioter." Like the Regulators of 1774 (called by Iredell a "parcel of banditti" because they attacked the rule of law itself, and not just the misuse of the courts), "rioters" could best be identified by their aversion to gentlemen and preference for the natural man, by their discovery of something positive in ignorance, disreputable origin, bad manners, selfishness, and resentment of every legiti­ mate form of merit and distinction. The worst of this radical spirit

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was to be found "at the North" in "masses" with a "tendency . . to an unmixed democracy." To the contrary, in the South there was "conservatism" in "an attachment to representative republican­ ism"-a view which, in those territories, "is more manifest and confirmed every day." As a follower of Edmund Burke, what fully provoked Iredell was not revolutionary practice but a "philosophy of revolution"-a the­ ory of revolution as a positive good, such as in 1789 flowered in France. At the end of his life, Iredell told a Philadelphia grand jury that, if released to move without a check among the people, such a doctrine would destroy their country: would work to dehumanize them as did with George III the belief in his own prerogative in releasing an anger toward Americans which allowed him to arm Indians and slaves and to summon mercenaries to kill his colonial "children." These remarks remind us of the conservatism and dis­ tance from general propositions or Jacobin enthusiasms in his con­ tributions to the revision of the laws of North Carolina-a minimal revision, which emphasized continuity, not the changes that might come; which, with the new North Carolina constitution, restricted the meaning of revolution there. In them we recognize the Iredell who spoke against a priori politics in the ratifying convention in Hillsborough . Moreover, they recall Iredell's impatience with the Reverend David Caldwell's suggestion in the same convention that his colleagues first draft a general statement concerning the aborig­ inal rights of man ("fundamental principles") and then measure the Constitution against these philosophical postulates. As a Federalist spokesman, Iredell insisted that this was not the proper method for lawgiving. In Iredell's view, to begin such deliberations with argu­ ments from definition concerning the rights of man and then at­ tempt to decide on the particulars of federal policy by measuring them against the generic distinctions on which delegates might agree at a higher level was to go against "the very principle that we are now met to consider of the Constitution before us." From a passionate admirer of Edmund Burke we might expect such doc­ trine. From Iredell one heard nothing else. While attempting to make the old inherited law into a functioning reality in his state and to implement the conservative state constitu­ tion made to support it by his brother-in-law and their friends, James Iredell accepted several offices from the government of North Carolina not long after it came into being as a free commonwealth . In 1777, Iredell became State's Attorney for Chowan County. In 1777-1778, he was briefly Judge of the State Superior Court. From

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1779-1781 he accepted from Governor Richard Caswell an appoint­ ment as North Carolina Attorney General-in which labor he was obliged to confront the problems of Loyalism, invasion, and spec­ ulation, while at the same time being kept away from most of his lucrative private practice. Iredell left politics behind in 1781, but continued to write and speak in behalf of stability in the public life: against the blandishments of British authorities, against violations of the treaty of peace, fiat money, suspensions of contract by law, failure to support the Continental Congress, and indifference to the inability of the general government to defend our shores. Though he liked the high spirits of the people of his state, by what he saw of political life in North Carolina he grew to be more and more sus­ picious of democracy and convinced that "there must be some re­ striction on the right of voting." "Poverty, " said he, "tempts ordi­ nary men" to vote themselves the property of their neighbors. By 1788 Iredell was a trusted figure. In that year he was selected to be President of the Council of State. Out of the same authority, and from his experience in state government, he performed at the top of his bent in defending the handiwork of the Great Convention. Before Iredell moved to the front among the Federalist orators urging ratification at Hillsborough-a talented group who knew they were going to lose the vote and therefore set out to make a record and lay down a teaching, a bit of political drama which would perhaps be useful in influencing another North Carolina convention-he wrote, under the name of "Marcus, " another politi­ cal essay, ''Answers to Mr. Mason's Objections to the New Constitu­ tion Recommended by the Late Convention of Philadelphia." This piece was very well received for describing the Constitution as a moderate document presenting no danger to the South : a docu­ ment promising chiefly what the Antifederalists said suited them well enough. In the debates proper, Iredell argued as he does in answering Mason's eleven points. But in the debates he seemed always to remember that his audience was not simply the surly Antifederalists, but rather the whole people of North Carolina who had to be given reasons before they would agree to a federal bond stronger than what the Articles of Confederation could supply. Iredell's rhetorical task in the July 21-August 4, 1788 conven­ tion-the first of two gathered in North Carolina "for the purpose of deliberating and determining on the proposed Plan of Federal Gov­ ernment"-was to put the Antifederalists between the horns of a dilemma where they must either surrender their position or admit that they anticipated a complete separation of their state from the

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other twelve connected to them by the Articles. There would be only one chance for admission into the Union. Of course, the Feder­ alists always exaggerated when they employed this "all or nothing" argument, a reading of the situation which presupposed the desire for a continuing connection of some kind still to be found in each of the states. Moreover, they were of course correct in this assumption since, after defeating the Constitution in July and August of 1788, North Carolina voted for it in Fayetteville on November 21, 1789. But to insist that there were only two choices in Hillsborough was a way of cutting through all of the trivial criticism of the Great Con­ vention and its product. The rest (and most conservative part) of his appeal was calculated to calm Antifederalist fears of over-govern­ ment: that the Constitution . might be much more of a threat to American liberties than the machinations of Whitehall; that silence concerning the restrictions upon the national authority might lead to a discovery of implied powers. Iredell as defender of the Con­ stitution affirmed that "no power can be exercised but what is expressly given." "What is not enumerated is not granted." Any citizen with "the Constitution in his hands . . . may see if a power claimed is enumerated. If it is not, he will know it to be a usurpa­ tion." In a "confederation" of "thirteen governments" joined "upon a republican principle, " Iredell had confidence that a separation of powers could be compatible with a modest increase in federal au­ thority and the continuing "sovereignty of the states." But if "any­ thing in the Constitution tended to the annihilation of the states . . . it ought to excite resentment and . . . execration." Once he was Justice Iredell, his opinions on these issues did not change-which made him a very difficult Federalist. James Iredell was appointed to the High Court on February 10, 1790 . The published transcript of his performance in the first North Carolina ratification debates, along with his pamphlet reply to Ma­ son, had given him a fallowing among Federalists throughout the country. Yet, once seated, Justice Iredell, though a great student of the law, was nothing like Chief Justice Jay of New York or Justice Wilson of Pennsylvania; and from this distinction we learn a good deal about Southern Federalism and why it disappeared so rapidly, once President Washington left office. In specific, Iredell proved himself to be very different from his Yankee colleagues on the original court. He insisted that no judicial power over "the internal policy or administration of the states" can be "pointed out" in the Constitution. In the case of Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 Dall 419 (1793)­ the first important reconsideration of the meaning of the federal

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system made by the judiciary after the Constitution had been adopted-Iredell stood alone. The issue in this matter was the de­ sire of a South Carolina citizen to sue the state of Georgia. The other justices answered that Mr. Alexander Chisholm had a protected federal right to have his case heard. Iredell, speaking before his colleagues, denied that there were implied powers to cover such a claim and concluded "every state in the Union in every instance where its sovereignty has not been delegated to the United States, I consider to be as completely sovereign, as the United States are in respect to powers surrendered [since] each state in the Union is sovereign as to all the powers reserved." To this language Iredell added that it was the function of Congress to set limits to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court-an issue much debated in our day. He was the first of the great judicial defenders of the strict view of our Constitution. In his last years, James Iredell warned his young kinsmen against the temptations of deism, labored to help his family, put his house in order, and reflected on that moment when "we shall be examined into a place where one day kings and subjects" shall be considered together on the basis of a single moral _law. In quiet and without "dread, " he met his death at Edenton, in the house he had built for his wife, and was buried with the Johnstons at their home, Hayes plantation. In his rectitude, caution, and firmness he resembles the Southern Whigs of the 1860s who, after doing what they could to sustain the Union, joined their neighbors in secession when Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand troops and promised an invasion of the "rebellious" South. 1

15 BENJAMIN HARRISON The Nabob as Antifederalist Benjamin Harrison (March, 1726-April 24, 1791), planter, mer­ chant, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and political leader of colonial anq Revolutionary Virginia. A mild Antifederalist, by reason of sectional feeling. Persuaded by experience with national government that (as he wrote his old friend George Washington), "The States south of the Potomac will be little more than appen­ dages to those to the northward of it" if the Constitution should be adopted. A "nabob" and wealthy James River Valley aristocrat whose disinterested opposition to ratification refutes the theory that Anti­ federalism was the party of the poor and the radicals who had no stake in society as they knew it. An Episcopalian, and a lover of old ways who once blamed the onset of gout upon the replacement of Madeira, a potation tried and true, by the "newfangled" light French wines. A huge, strong and jovial man, and a person of political importance in Virginia for more than forty years. Made uneasy by the dream of American empire which had sponsored innovations "unwarranted, precipitate and dangerously impolitic. " At sixty­ two, one of the great conservatives in the Virginia ratification con­ vention. Convinced that wholesome changes "must not be forced" by ideology but must come "by gradual steps, " with quiet inev­ itability, "like the course of rivers, gently going on." Many times speaker of the House of Burgesses or House of Delegates, and almost always chosen to preside over any assembly in which he had a part. Three times elected governor of his state. Father and great­ grandfather of the ninth and twenty-third presidents of the United States, William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison. Benjamin Harrison the Signer was born at Berkeley (later called 155

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Harrison's Landing) in Charles City County, Virginia. He was the son of Benjamin Harrison and Anne Carter Harrison, daughter of Robert "King" Carter of Corotoman. After education at the College of William and Mary, this Benjamin in 1749 became the fifth in a line of planter/politicians of the same name to sit in the House of Bur­ gesses, following the example of his ancestor the first Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, who had come to the colony March 15, 1634. To this place he was reelected successively until 1775. In 1764 Harrison was named to the committee called upon by his fellow burgesses to draft a protest against the Stamp Act. Yet in the next year Harrison was also one of the conservatives who refused to reach so far as Patrick Henry's Stamp Act Resolves in calling for civil disobedience as a response to the offending activity of Parliament. Harrison continued to act within this cautious mold throughout most of his public career; but, starting in 1773 with his participation in Vir­ ginia's Committee of Correspondence, he went with his neighbors, slowly, toward independence. Benjamin Harrison V joined with a majority of his fellow bur­ gesses in 1774 in sending out a call for a general congress of the British North American colonies and was chosen by the ad hoc provincial convention of that August to be one of the seven mem­ bers for Virginia in the First Continental Congress. He understood the importance of the Congress and told John Adams that "he would have come on foot rather than not come" to attend the ses­ sions. For a time he opposed complete independence and hoped to change British policy in the colonies through economic coercion. But he surrendered this position once it ceased to make good sense. He continued to hold a seat in the Congress until 1777, speaking little but playing an important role on committees responsible for finance, foreign policy, military preparedness, and marine affairs. In these years Harrison's port and table, his hospitality and ample proportions, earned him the designation of "the Falstaff of Con­ gress." While serving at the national level he did his job but was no fanatic and lived graciously, according to his custom, even when far from home. A man of commercial interests and a shipbuilder as well as a planter, he worked often in comfortable alliance with the great financier Robert Morris of Pennsylvania. And, as chairman of the Committee of the Whole (1776-1777), he presided over the delibera­ tions leading to the adoption of the Declaration and to early discus­ sions of the Articles of Confederation. But while serving in the Congress, Harrison acquired a poor opinion of his countrymen from the North-so poor that on one occasion he wrote General

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Washington at Boston, "Your fatigue and various kinds of trouble I dare say are great, but they are not more than I expected, knowing the people you have to deal with by the sample we have here." Nothing that happened to Harrison fallowing his return to the Virginia political scene modified these sectional animosities. In­ deed, most of his subsequent experience aggravated them. From 1778 to 1781 Benjamin Harrison was member and speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.Then, following the incomplete term of Thomas Nelson, he was elected Governor of Virginia, in which office he continued until 1784. For his remaining seven years, he returned to the lower house of the legislature of his state vvhere, for a time, he was once again the presiding officer.Governor Har­ rison was responsible for the cession of Virginia's lands north and west of the Ohio. At first Harrison accepted the Impost of 1781 as a military necessity; then, after Yorktown and prospects of American victory, he lost his enthusiasm for measures strengthening the hand of the Continental Congress and worried over creation of trade monopolies by way of the treaty-making power.He deplored paper money but agreed to a moratorium on debts. Yet Harrison was an efficient governor in his support of troops in the field.However, once the peace was signed in September of 1783, he refused to observe its terms with reference to collection of debts by British merchants until the frontier was no longer troubled by the influence of British forts, and stolen slaves were returned or replaced.And when an excise was proposed in place of the Impost he fought against it as a Yankee plot, and brought to bear upon the struggle all of his resources. In 1774 Benjamin Harrison owned (without problems of con­ science) eight plantations and hundreds of slaves. His commercial interests involved both importation and shipping, up and down the coast and across the ocean. All of this plenty he gladly put at risk to preserve in Virginia the regime his family had done so much to create.Indeed he accepted the looting of his great house at Berkeley by British troops as part of the fortunes of war and was generous of his own means in providing supply to Washington's army.But in the fashioning of a larger patria to contain and modify his identity with Virginia, Harrison was much less venturesome.With Patrick Henry, he defended the conduct of the Virginia legislature in the attainder of the barbarous outlaw, Josiah P hilips, and denied the advantage of a security for individual civil rights under the provi­ sions of federal law.W hen a criminal such as Philips placed himself outside the protection of their laws by murder and theft performed

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as an act of war, Virginians would decide his fate. And it would be Virginians who decided who belonged to their community and \Vhat Virginians believed went with such membership. Josiah Phil­ ips had clearly (in the old phrase) "needed killing. " So reasoned Benjamin Harrison. In the ratification convention in Richmond, Harrison was astonished that Edmund Randolph would argue for intrusion of the national authorities into such questions of local police and felt that such intrusion could not be restrained-once it had begun. Benjamin Harrison served in the Virginia ratification convention as chairman of a committee on privileges and elections. His early commitment to the Antifederalist cause surprised few public figures in his state, but it did lend respectability to his side of the debate. Any attempt by the Virginia Federalists to invoke the politics of deference was doomed from the beginning with such men of family as John Tyler, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Theodorick Bland, and former Governor Harrison opposed to ratification. Harrison spoke only twice during the Virginia debates : first on the attainder of Philips and then, on June 25, the last day of the convention, in a general address on his basic objections to the document under consideration. In these summary remarks Harrison rejected the scare tactics of the Federalist orators when they declaimed that the Union itself would be in danger if the Constitution were not ap­ proved . ''A vast majority, from every calculation, are attached to it." But Union was one thing and a powerful central government an­ other. To convert the state into an engine for sectional aggrandize­ ment would be harmful to the national unity fostered among the people of the states by the Revolution. He doubted that there was any protection for the South in a stronger connection with New England. "W hen we were invaded, did any gentlemen from the Northern States come to relieve us? No, sir, we were left to be buffeted. General Washington, in the greatness of his soul, came with the French auxiliaries and relieved us opportunely. Were it not for this, we should have been ruined." Harrison was prepared to accept a revision of the national compact, with previous amend­ ments. Otherwise, "I should resist with the fortitude of a man." For the master of Berkeley the triumph of the Federalists in the Virginia ratification convention was a disappointment but not a disaster. He was puzzled by their centralizing disposition, but not outraged, having had an earlier nationalist phase himself. Harrison was a member of the committee appointed to "prepare and report" subsequent amendments. He discouraged the publication of a sour

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Antifederalist minority report such as had been produced in other states. Resolving against resistance and for a fair test of the new form of government, he joined Henry, after ratification, in preserv­ ing Antifederalist control of the Virginia House of Delegates and helped to pass the Bill of Rights through the chamber, once it was presented there by the Congress of the United States. Benjamin Harrison, in his prudence, caution, and length of ser­ vice to the state which commanded his primary loyalty, in his un­ troubled affirmation of the values of his fathers and the culture which they had brought to its maturity, was a symbol of continuity with Virginia's "Golden Age" as the Old Dominion entered upon its great experiment with political life inside the federal Union, a mas­ sive figure in high black boots and elegant blue coat, with full white locks tied in queue. No public man of his time kept better society, or was more often consulted in the business of his state. Yet his own favorite companions were his sons-and his special counsellors, a large cat and a small dog who, before their master, played well together and kept the peace. At the age of sixty-five, Benjamin Harrison ended where he be­ gan and died at Berkeley-a man sometimes alarmed by the up­ heavals of his time, but never driven beyond the boundaries of his composure by what occurred. 1

16 SAMUEL ADAMS The Baleful Comet of Boston Samuel Adams (September 17, 1722-October 2, 1803), polit­ ical boss of the Boston town meeting, maltster, tax collector, es­ sayist, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation, leader of the Continental Congress, and a great influence over the public life of Massachusetts during the early years of the Republic. Called by Thomas Jefferson "the Man of the Revolution. " On the other hand, described by a Tory as "the would­ be Cromwell of America." A source of amazement to British authorities attempting to prevent a rebellion, one of whom wrote, "Would you believe it, that this immense continent, from New England to Georgia, is moved and directed by one man !-a man of ordinary birth and desperate fortune who, by his ability and talent for factious intrigue, has made himself of some consequence; whose political existence depends upon the continuance of the present disputes . . . ." A cross between Hawthorne's Gray Champion and the village malcontent, who always "loved turmoil, and desired a continuance of troubles . . . . " In his affected righteousness almost a humbug, but a master politician when in opposition. Anti­ federalist, but restrained in his attacks on the proposed Constitu­ tion by the warm and open Federalism of the mechanics and trades­ men of his city, the old Sons of Liberty, who felt a stronger government might better protect the commerce of New England. A Puritan born after his time, a violent Whig both by birth and by conviction. A prophet who lived inside the typology implied by his given name, recalling his neighbors to "the noble spirit of our renowned ancestors." One who hoped to see the old " New England Way" become the basis for converting a free America into a "Chris160

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tian Sparta. " In most respects, unlike his first cousin, President John Adams. A democrat and a man of the Covenant. The classic Roundhead revolutionary, who (in the words of a colleague), "eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects. " Yet capable of tact and patience, when these qualities were necessary if he hoped to draw men after him. A strange kind of Yankee, with no practical ability, one who, according to Clifford Shipton, never "in his life earned a proper living from any business or profession, " was supported by his wife and his friends, and interested only in politics. A man who testified of himself, "I was led to believe in early life that jealousy is a political virtue. It has long been an aphorism with me that it is one of the greatest securities of public liberty." Difficult in debate because of his penchant for treating all contrary opinion as not only wrong but wicked . According to many of his biographers, a figure of envy, distrustful of all those in authority and hostile to "everyone who achieved prominence in business or public life." Indifferent to the truth in matters political-and not otherwise scrupulous of his means, once he had settled on the righteousness of his cause. Ever ready to hurl (in the phrase of Yeats) "the little streets upon the great." However, also the man who accomplished more than any other to inspire the English colonies in North America to seek their independence. Samuel Adams was born in Boston, in a small house on Purchase Street. He was the son of Deacon Samuel Adams, Selectman, Jus­ tice of the Peace, and member of the General Court; and Mary Fifield Adams. Young Sam was educated at the South Grammar School and at Harvard, where he graduated in 1740 and then con­ tinued for the M.A. in 1743. For the latter degree he offered the affirmative on the question "W hether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved." He had gone to Harvard to read for the ministry, but before he had finished with Harrington and Locke, was better pre­ pared for political contention than for pastoral repose. Probably Deacon Adams was due as much of the blame for this bias in the mind of his son as were the troublesome doctors of W hig theory. For the pious maltster was himself something of a radical for the Good Old Cause, a disciple of the anachronistic Elisha Cooke, leader of the Massachusetts Country Party who struggled to isolate the Bay Colony against the encroachments of time and commerce and who had with his Caucus Club so dominated Boston politics that he kept the great aristocratic merchants of Zion in fear of their dominion.

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W hile the younger Samuel failed as apprentice in the counting house of Thomas Cushing, and then failed in a venture of his own, his prosperous father was brought low by the application of the Bubble Act of 1720 to his affairs as a director of the W hig Land Bank. In 1741, at the urging of the Court Party, the friends of government in Boston, Parliament had declared the Land Bank illegal ab initio and the directors liable for all the paper it had issued. In conse­ quence of this legislation, Deacon Adams and his son spent twenty years in private rebellion against the Massachusetts L_and Bank Commissioner who at law had a responsibility to seize their prop­ erty. This fight, like others that were to come, they won through their skill in politics, finally forcing the General Court to reduce the obligation. But the hostility of Samuel Adams to the officers of the Crown in the process acquired a momentum not expended until independence was achieved. Young Sam Adams made his first appearance as a political es­ sayist in 1748 in the Boston Independent Advertiser. These anony­ mous forebodings of tyranny lurking just over the horizon fore­ shadowed the rhetoric of Adams's later struggles with Francis Ber­ nard, Thomas Hutchinson, and General Thomas Gage. W hen his father died in 1748, Adams (with the help of his slaves and his wife) kept the malt house in operation and speculated in land. But when not singing at Mr. Checkley's meetinghouse, his favorite diversion was to haunt the taverns of North Boston, drink flip, and recruit political supporters. Eventually the Green Dragon Tavern became his headquarters, the seat of the Caucus Club and "nursery of legislators." In 1746, Adams was elected a Clerk of the Market; in 1753, Scavenger and in 1756, tax collector. The last of these offices almost ruined his public career. By 1765 he was £8000 behind in his accounts. Naturally his enemies attempted to secure an indictment of this malfeasance in office. Adams and his allies simply packed the town meeting and got the suit dropped. The will of king was not law in Boston, but the will of Samuel Adams was the next thing to it. The struggle for power between Sam Adams and a series of royal governors began in earnest with the passage of the Sugar Act in 1764. Prior to that time, Adams had written against the role of placemen in Massachusetts public life, of special privilege, and of designs to make beasts of the people and deprive them of their liberties through manipulation of the General Court and the law. In a finished version of the "paranoid style" he had "shrieked tyr­ anny" against the royal government-except during the brief ten­ ure of Governor Thomas Powell (1757-1760). He had earned credit

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within that "black regiment of sedition," the Congregational clergy (by favoring their traditions and interests)-and learned how to assemble a mob. He had sought out promising young men-John Hancock, Joseph Warren, Benjamin Church, and Josiah Quincy, Jr.­ and trained these proteges to recognize in the smallest acts of the opposing party evidences of a grand design to deprive New England of its natural and inherited rights. And when not exciting the town meeting or House of Representatives with a charge of his own, he had followed and supported the leadership of equally troublesome James Otis, a young man of good family and education who was the mortal enemy of the Court Party-of Thomas Hutchinson, Peter Oliver, et al. The Seven Years' War with France delayed and muted the confrontation of Otis and Adams with the full range of govern­ mental authority. But the Sugar Act brought this conflict to a head­ and enabled Sam Adams to sound for the first time the tocsin of "no taxation without representation." During the first half of his career as a gadfly and agitator, Sam Adams had (in his own language) learned the rule of "put your adversary in the wrong and keep him there." But that strategy was difficult to implement so long as it went up against patriotic feel­ ings engendered by war. Grenville's preamble to the Sugar Act, more than the tax itself, changed these circumstances, speaking as it did of "improving the revenues of this kingdom ! " This language, in the analysis of Sam Adams, made the bill more important as precedent-one which could lead to routine taxes on land and prop­ erty. Certainly it justified a nonimportation agreement with respect to British products. The Stamp Act of 1765, again part of George Grenville's scheme for raising revenue in the colonies, transformed "Sam the Publican" into quite a good prophet; and also made resistance to a British ministry a popular cause throughout Mas­ sachusetts and in other North American colonies. "What a blessing to us has the Stamp Act eventually . . . prov'd," exclaimed Sam Adams: "when the Colonys saw the Common Danger they at the same time saw their mutual dependence." But creating this unity of sentiment and action linking together many varieties of Ameri­ cans took some time. Even in 1765 Sam Adams had resolved to work for independence. But most Americans remained moderate in their opposition to the Stamp Act. An intercolonial conference held in New York produced only petitions for redress of grievance. Moreover, there were disturbances in Rhode Island and New York, damage to property and street demonstrations. Also, the distri­ bution and sale of stamps was everywhere prevented in all Brit-

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ish America. Boston, however, set the example for the rest of the Sons of Liberty. Starting August 14, 1765, the intemperate citizens of that "city on a hill" rioted for five days out of the following fifteen. According to the best evidence, Sam Adams orchestrated their misconduct and then, in their defense, drew as a moral the responsibility of officers of the Crown in so greatly provoking "loyal" W higs with their collusion in the terrible tyranny of obe­ dience to Parliament and prince. A contemporary wrote this of the riots: Every succeeding night witnessed the rage of an infatuated popu­ lace, and no man in any office whatever was safe in his habitation. If a man had any pique against his neighbors it was only to call him a few hard names, and his property would certainly be destroyed, his house pulled down and his life would be in jeopardy.

Adams called these tumults "the diversion of a few boys in the street" or "the common amusement of children" as "the only means of securing" the rights of property. But he had only begun . Within a few years his trained mobs went so far as to disrupt the funerals of persons of whom they had disapproved. Not even the dead were safe from their rage. In September 1765, Samuel Adams was elected to a Boston seat in the House of Representatives in the place of the recently deceased Oxenbridge Thacher, and was soon thereafter ( early 1776) chosen to be Clerk of the House, from which office he drew most of his living until 1774, when he was selected to be a delegate to the First Conti­ nental Congress. As a member of the General Court he found scope for his talents. For as clerk, with the responsibility for all records and official communications (to England, and to t�e governors), he had status and the authority to increase the pressure on colonial officials and W hitehall which commenced with town meetings, newspaper diatribes, and mob violence. Adams in attacking the Crown "was not like Otis, tormented by the troublesome facts of constitutional law." In the legislature he was tireless, had always a set of petitions and resolves in his pocket, and knew the trick of introducing motions when the House was almost empty, but his loyal followers were still in their chairs. Then Adams would write the official gloss on the meaning of his own measures. And the mob was always there to back him up. Soon the members of the administration party were terrified .

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Stamps or not, the port of Boston was open. Courts of common law and even the Admiralty Court transacted business. Whig lawyers thundered that Acts of Parliament against the British constitution were null and void, and that therefore the people of Massachusetts might do as they wished. W hen news of repeal of the Stamp Act arrived on May 16, 1766, there were general celebrations on both sides of the conflict. Throughout British America, Loyalists hoped for a breathing space. But Sam Adams had no such plan. The Massachusetts Resolves of 1765 passed during Adams's first term as a member of the House of Representatives, foreshadowed the Dec­ laration of Independence and put down a predicate for the Ameri­ can position in the years which led up to that fateful decision. Adams had written, "The leading principles of the British constitu­ tion have their foundation in the Laws of Nature and universal Reason. Hence . . . British Rights are in great measure, unalienably the Rights of the Colonists, and of all Men else." The next stage in the quarrel between the old Puritan Common­ wealth and the British government came with the 1767 Townshend Acts. The appointment of Customs Commissioners, and the pro­ posal to create a Massachusetts civil list independent of the General Court, fueled (with the help of Adams's newspaper jeremiads) the public fear that there was something to the theory of a design against the liberties of Englishmen on the part of the ministers of George III: a sequence beginning in the colonies and working from them inward, toward the "decadent" population of the homeland. In February of 1768, a rump session of the Massachusetts House carried a resolution to send out a circular letter to other colonial legislatures. The new duties, Adams argued once more, were an entering wedge for tyranny, not merely a better method for regulat­ ing commerce. Placing colonial governors and judges out of the reach of assemblies was not a strategy for protecting the liberty of the subject. The Commissioners of Customs played into Adams's hands. They lived well, were poor politicians and haughty in the exercise of their authority. Between 1766 and 1768, the Sons of Liberty had lost a little ground. But the mobs returned in March of 1768, restrained by W hig leadership, but threatening in their aspect, circling the houses of the king's servants with howling and beating of drums. Finally, as a result of the seizure of John Hancock's sloop Liberty and the application of writs of assistance, there was an explosion in June of 1768. The officers of His Majesty's government called for troops, and four regiments of regulars were dispatched. This decision on the part of W hitehall pushed Massachusetts much

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further down the road Adams hoped it would follow and brought to the Sons of Liberty the rural support they had not previously enjoyed . Samuel Adams took advantage of the interval between the report the troops were coming and their arrival to press his opportunities and propose other incendiary measures. For one thing, he per­ suaded the docile Selectmen of the New Jerusalem to summon an ad hoc Massachusetts Convention, with delegates elected by all of the towns in the colony or by local committees. There is some evidence that Adams had hoped this assembly would fire the flames of armed resistance. But as he was careful not to allow the Boston Mohawks to alienate the tepid W higs of the Middle Colonies and the South, so was he careful not to advocate open treason. His rhetoric spoke of France as well as honorable self-defense against violations of the constitution. Adams invoked "the ancestorial spirit of Liberty" which had built the Puritan Commonwealth and con­ nected the nonimportation agreements with the "Good Old Cause." Politics and religion, he knew by instinct, were a potent mixture. The boycott was soon in force. And if the Massachusetts Convention did not adopt the incendiary resolves he had hoped for, it was nonetheless a step toward self-government. Certainly it was not a sign of retreat-most particularly in view of the House's refusal, just before the Convention was called, to withdraw the Circular Letter as Lord Hillsborough insisted. Samuel Adams's 1768 position on American rights was more advanced than it had been in 1764-1765. W hen the Redcoats marched ashore on October 1, 1768, they did so against Adams's contention that the king's ministry had no constitutional authority to quarter troops on the people of Massachusetts without an invita­ tion from the General Court. Furthermore, they were there to intim­ idate a free people. This much he maintained against the letter of the hateful Quartering Act of 1765. He held further that colonial legislatures were subordinate, but not subject to Parliament; that the ancestral constitution authorized all of these assemblies, and restrained them all in their own proper spheres of activity. Colonial legislatures were therefore called upon to guarantee the rights of Americans. If either Parliament or the American legislatures got beyond their authority, they would encounter the constitution, thus "destroying their own foundations." Furthermore, the constitution, "fixed in the Law of Nature and God, " was not subject to any legislative authority. Out of this theory, supported by the conviction that the ends justify the means, Adams made his own leadership

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position stronger; and by writing and complaining about the con­ duct of the garrison (standing army), made the lives of the soldiers miserable and increased the prospect of violence between them and the citizens of Boston. In the papers, in England, in other American towns and in his own community, he distorted the truth concerning the plight of Boston. He took children to the Boston Commons to teach them to hate British soldiers, and even his dog, Queue, was trained to bite "Lobster Backs." Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts in the spring of 1770. By then it was too late. For on March 5, 1770, British troops fired on an unruly Boston crowd which was harassing them. Five men were killed in the episode, known since in history as the "Boston Massacre." In the gathering of forces and emotions which made for the American Revolution there was a deceptive pause between the fall of 1770 and spring of 1773. Troops were withdrawn from Boston and commerce with England was resumed. Sam Adams was in his glory in arranging for the first of these developments, but dis­ tressed by the second. Furthermore, there were quarrels between Adams and other Whig leaders who were not absolutely bent on independence. But the principal revolutionary of Boston did not relent. With the freethinking Thomas Young, he founded the most radical newspaper in North America, the Massachusetts Spy. And they together, Puritan and Deist, kept up the flow of propaganda that followed from the town's version of what had happened in the massacre-all ninety-six depositions, with unequalled fabrication and hatred beyond measure as standard components. Governor Thomas Hutchinson knew whereof he spoke in saying of Adams, "I doubt whether there is a greater incendiary in the King's dominion or a man of greater malignity of heart, who less scruples any mea­ sure ever so criminal to accomplish his purposes." Believing that there was no danger issuing from England, Adams contended, was the greatest possible threat to American freedom. With tales of atrocity, of trials following the massacre and of the aftermaths of these trials of British soldiers, of relocations of the settings of the General Court, of Crown officers paid out of customs duties, and of bishops to act over Zion, such laxity could be forestalled. For men are, he assumed, ruled more by fear or other emotions than by reason. And Sam Adams knew how to generate anger and fear. During this period of hesitation, Adams did more than stoke the fires and wait. He continued to build and experiment with political structures spun off from his control of the Boston town meetings and his influence in the House of Representatives. The former body,

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on November 2, 1772 (and, once again, late in a session), gave him a strong Committee of Correspondence to "state the rights" of colo­ nials "as men, as Christians, and as subjects; and to communi­ cate the same to the several towns and to the world." These commit­ tees on a limited basis had already functioned during the Stamp Act crisis and thereafter. Other colonies had experimented with them. But Adams had in mind something more like a political party than an information network. The 1772 committee was therefore different from its counterparts of November 1770 and June 1771, which were authorized by the Massachusetts General Court. On November 20, it adopted "The State of the Rights of the Colo­ nists"-"life, liberty and property, " all "branches" of the "Duty of self-preservation, commonly called the First Law of Nature." His appeal to "the law of nature" over constitution and Charter took separation from one society and combinations in another as a mat­ ter of course. These resolutions were adopted by most of the Mas­ sachusetts towns; and thus, the machinery and the theoretical grounds for revolution in part of America were put in place. Only a few additional provocations were needed to translate their combina­ tion into action. Thomas Hutchinson and Lord North provided several. In January of 1773, Governor Hutchinson made a speech on constitutional questions to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay. In replying to the doctrine of Adams and the town meeting (and also to more conservative Old W higs) Hutchinson insisted that there was no position between acceptance of " the supremacy of Parliament" and full commitment to American independence. Many moderate men were persuaded by his presentation that they were in better agreement with Sam Adams than they had thought. Later in the same year, Governor Hutchinson's 1767-1768 letters to a friend in England (letters which had come by accident into the hands of Benjamin Franklin) were read aloud in the General Court and then published. The W higs (led by Sam Adams and John Hancock) discovered a plan for tyranny in every line, a determina­ tion to "subvert the constitution." Then, in the spring of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act. The Boston Tea Party followed on December 16, 1773; and, during the same period, related distur­ bances occurred in other American ports. Adams, of course, spurred on the mob in Boston, concluding a speech in Faneuil Hall the night the " Mohawks" struck with the admonitory peroration, "This meet­ ing can do nothing more to save the country." The Coercive Acts (especially the 1774 Boston Port Bill) brought the business to its completion. W hen the Massachusetts Charter was suspended and

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General Gage's garrison was settled in full control of Boston; when the Association was in force, the "Solemn League and Covenant, " Sam Adams's career as a revolutionary was complete-except for a little persuasion in the Continental Congress. With the door of the House of Representatives locked against Gage's messenger, thus preventing a premature conclusion of what was clearly to be its last session, Sam Adams was chosen in that June 17, 1774, meeting to be one of Massachusetts's representatives in the new intercolonial leg­ islature scheduled to convene in Philadelphia. To protect his dignity as leader of the delegation, his friends bought him the clothes of a gentleman, gave him a good purse, and then sent him with his colleagues "in a coach and four, preceded by two white servants who were mounted and arm' d, with four blacks in livery, two on horseback and two footmen." The problem of Sam Adams, his cousin John Adams, young Mr. Hancock, and the other New England delegates who called for decisive action was that most of Congress still hoped to avoid a complete break with England. Furthermore, the delegates from New York, Pennsylvania, and the Southern commonwealths did not trust their Yankee counterparts. Even Bostonians agreed that Sam Adams had "too great an Idea of the Virtue of the State of Massachusetts Bay." Of the Northern members as a group, one adversary observed that they were "a parcel of canting, Hypo­ critical, peculating Knaves" who planned to replace the tyranny of the British government with a tyranny of their own. In this context Sam Adams was mindful of his own reputation as a violent demo­ crat and did not push matters too far. Instead he got to know the Philadelphia radicals, kept quiet, encouraged the adoption of another embargo on trade, and seconded a motion that the Con­ gress call for prayer by a well-known Episcopalian clergyman: "He was no bigot [which the Southerners thought that he was] and could hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety and virtue, who was at the same time a friend to his country." The Tory who had spoken of him as "possessing a great deal of caution and court cunning" knew his man well. Adams did not press for independence when he knew the effort would fail. Instead, back at home he arranged for and then in Philadelphia got approved the powerful Suffolk Resolves, which bespoke the mood of his community and put the colonies in a posture for defending themselves in war, should British forces do anything aggressive beyond the confines of Boston. On April 18, 1775, when firing began at Lexington, he cried out, "Oh, what a glorious morning is this." The Suffolk Resolves, written by Adams's young friend Joseph

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Warren, had spoken of military preparation for the gathering of an American army (if needed) and the necessity for cooperation with other Patriots in other colonies if Massachusetts W higs were to survive as free men. The idea of cousin John Adams for ensuring such mutuality, an adoption of the New England army around Boston by the Continental Congress, won Sam Adams's reluctant concurrence. George Washington was no Cromwell, not part of "the company of the saints." But the Southern general in command of the siege of Boston made the army surrounding the city a national force. John Hancock, presiding officer of the Congress, was offended at not being preferred to the Virginian, with an anger that was finally to cost Sam Adams much of his political influence. But, as we should remember, he was an ideologue only about Amer­ ican independence and, even about making that official, he could wait. "We cannot make Events, " he observed . "Our business is wisely to improve them." The Olive Branch Petition upset John Adams more than it did Samuel. The latter busied himself in searching for a Loyalist spy in their midst and in urging his new Philadelphia friends to muzzle Joseph Galloway, the leader of con­ servatives in his state. But he knew that a declaration of indepen­ dence would come . He voted for and signed it with a joy which ordinarily belongs only to authorship, and then played a part in the drafting and adoption of the Articles of Confederation. But at that point Sam Adams lost his way-his vocation. As one historian remarked, he was "expert at overturning governments" and knew little about rebuilding or operating them. In consequence there is very little pattern in his career after 1776. Samuel Adams continued in the Continental Congress until 1781, though not as a great influence. Always suspicious of any concentration of power, he opposed building a large standing army and the granting of pensions to regular army officers. He was also against the creation of Departments of Finance, War, and Foreign Affairs. Above all else, he feared the creation of a Caesar and wished to leave the militia outside of Washington's command until a national legislature had been approved by the states. An authority on that period is of the opinion that "his caution in the organization of the revolutionary government was a drag on the prosecution of the war." Much of his time in Philadelphia, Sam Adams found tedious. He was outraged by the balls, fetes, theatricals, and horse races, at luxury and profiteering-but he sometimes appeared ridiculous in communicating his strictures to the rest of the Congress.

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In the winter of 1779-1780, Samuel Adams joined with John Adams and James Bowdoin in drafting an instrument of govern­ ment for the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention. Adams and Bowdoin deferred to the thoughtful John and allowed him to retain in the new law the fundamental principles of the old Charter gov­ ernment. But Samuel Adams wrote Article 3 of John's constitution concerning the relations of the Congregational Church to other religions in the Godly Commonwealth. Samuel Adams's modern biographer, John C. Miller, calls Article 3 "notably reactionary." But it is perhaps better to read it as an effort at preserving the compro­ mise of "plural" establishment-an arrangement which would con­ tinue to work rather well for another forty years. It is probably more surprising that Samuel Adams would accept so "undemocratic" a constitution than that he refused to equate "Freedom of religion with freedom from religion." Property qualifications for the fran­ chise and an upper house, with powers for a governor, did not offend against Adams's version of the "rights of man." For contrary to Tory propaganda, he was never an egalitarian, always spoke of "subordination" as "necessary to the purposes of government, " and thought "Utopian schemes of levelling and a community of goods" as bad as the tyranny of wicked monarchs. To a visitor from France he praised the new document as necessary "to check the human passions, and control them from rushing into exorbitance." About most things political, except destroying British authority, he was a reasonable man-especially when what Massachusetts wanted was not precisely what he had originally proposed. Under the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Sam Adams continued to have poor success in his effort to check the ambitions of his onetime disciple, John Hancock. The younger man was easily elected governor of Massachusetts, and _continued in that office from 1781 to 1785. But Adams was elected to a place in the Mas­ sachusetts Senate, and then chosen to be president of that chamber and/ or member of the Council through 1788. As President of the Senate, Sam Adams became a jealous defender of the special powers of that body-to the general distress of Bay State radicals. He wrote to one of his relations that luxury and easy wealth were "confounding every distinction between the poor and the rich ." He attacked the gathering of local ad hoc assemblies-the kind which had made him a power. And he declared of equality that he favored no more of it than was "consistent with the true design of govern­ ment. " Adams promoted the conservative James Bowdoin in his 1785 campaign for the governorship. But when Bowdoin in 1787

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went soft on the Shaysites, Samuel Adams complained, insisting that "the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death . " Professor John Miller observes in his life of the old troublemaker that "he disapproved of revolutions when they were begun by other people." W hen the movement to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new and stronger bond between the states gathered serious momentum, Samuel Adams was hesitant. "He never ceased to doubt that the United States was too vast in extent and too divided by local differences to form a successful national government." The attempt would result in "Mistrust, Disaffection to Government and Frequent insurrections, which will require standing armies to sup­ press them, " if not wars between the sections. Adams wanted an American policy on commerce to protect the trade of Mas­ sachusetts. But it was his settled opinion that "the population of the United States living in different climates, of different Education and Manners and possest of different Habits and Feelings under one consolidated government can not long remain free, or indeed remain under any kind of Government but despotism." However, until after he had been elected delegate to the Massachusetts ratification convention, to be held in Boston starting January 9, 1788, he concealed his Antifederalist inclinations from the political leaders of the state. Then he revealed his mind concerning the proposed United States Constitution: "As I enter the building I stumble on the threshold . I meet with National Government, instead of a Federal Union of Sovereign States." But the Federalists outmaneuvered the aging firebrand, almost silencing Adams's cam­ paign for previous amendments before it began. The means by which probable defeat for the Constitution in Mas­ sachusetts was converted into a narrow victory were several. First of all, Governor John Hancock (also an Antifederalist by disposi­ tion) was persuaded to avoid sitting in the ratification convention until he was certain of the outcome. He stayed home with a fit of gout. Then Elbridge Gerry, Massachusetts's Antifederalist delegate to the Great Convention, was brought into the ratification debates only to provide "information, " and was not allowed to speak to the question before the house. Finally a great caucus of mechanics and tradesmen which voted unanimously for Paul Revere's resolution urging ratification was held at the Green Dragon. Adams, under such political restraint, raised only a few questions in the debates; and the Antifederalists, therefore, floundered, even though they had enjoyed a large majority when the sessions began. Hancock

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was flattered by a delegation which mentioned his prospects for a presidential nomination and induced him to decide for ratification, with recommended amendments attached. Then (with no alter­ native available) Samuel Adams was persuaded to second Han­ cock's motion. Resistance collapsed; and on February 7, Mas­ sachusetts voted in the affirmative. Old Samuel, though he was weary and saddened by the recent death of his son, had, however, one trick left before defeat came. Late in the proceedings, on Wednesday, February 6, he offered a motion for even more amend­ ments than "those reported by the committee." This motion was in violation of what had been agreed in a secret meeting that followed Hancock's capitulation. When it failed to pick up enough support to shift "the balance of power, " he withdrew his extra amendments designed to safeguard personal liberty and diminish the power of government. But as one bright young Federalist recognized, Adams had "almost overset the apple-cart." His strategy had been to tell the confused delegates in the convention what was wrong with the Constitution by telling them what changes were needed. But it came too late, and under unfavorable circumstances. Nevertheless, the men of "energetic government" knew how close they had come to defeat. With the new government in place, Samuel Adams made a race for a Boston seat in the House of Representatives against young Fisher Ames, the most formidable spokesman for Massachusetts Federalism in the just concluded ratification convention. Adams was painted by the Federalists as a spoiler, not a reformer-as one bent on injuring the new Union before it had been fairly tested. Although his own posture was as a defender of the republicanism of the Revolution, he was beaten badly. The old dividing lines were reforming. Soon Hancock left the Feder_alist camp and reunited with his original mentor to promote him for the office of Lieutenant Governor. This time (1789) Sam Adams as Antifederalist was elected, and served in his state's second-highest office until October 8, 1793, when Governor Hancock died and Samuel Adams, at 71, inherited the job which he had made difficult for so many other men. Adams's final years in the political arena as part of the old-fash­ ioned republican organization built by Hancock threw him once more into sharp opposition with the "friends of authority, " the members of the centralizing party in charge of the young republic. Inside that dialectic Adams announced himself a friend to the French Revolution and attended dinners honoring French achieve-

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ments. He was elected governor o.f Massachusetts in 1794, 1795 and 1796. W henever English arms suffered a reverse, Adams called for a parade. He anticipated a league of "Tyrant Kings [organized] to exterminate those rights and liberties which the gracious Crea­ tor has granted to Man." But his own life, finally (thanks to his son's estate) was comfortable. Yet he was plain, and as governor kept to the company of plain men, old comrades from the South End, with a few young Jacobins thrown in for spice. Of course, he scandalized the Federalists, who finally used French atheism and egalitarianism to discredit in Boston the view that 1776' and 1789 amounted to the same thing. W hen Boston mobs rioted for six days against Jay's treaty, protesting its pro-British bias, Governor Adams refused to protect order and property since these tumults were "only boys water melon frolics." Governor Adams, in 1796, ran as a presidential elector opposed to his cautious "Cousin John"-and was easily defeated. Once and for all he was out of step with the new commercial and conservative spirit of all classes of men in his city. Hence he decided not to run for office again. Now the problem of his people was "what to do with liberty, and not with how to acquire it." To grim solitude, palsy, and frustration he there­ fore returned and, after six troubled years, died at the age of eighty­ one in his ordinary little house on Winter Street. There were play­ houses and private schools in Boston; and he could do nothing about them. Despite his central role in bringing our nation into being, Samuel Adams has had the worst reputation of any of the major figures of the era of the American Revolution. He was (and is) so little praised because, in the words of a recent biographer, he "preached and practiced hate to a degree without rival, and in turn . . . was sus­ pected and hated like no others, and by his former W hig associates more than by Tories." In his old age one bright Boston lawyer spoke of Adams as the "baleful comet" of Massachusetts politics. The flaming image is appropriate. For the austere Samuel Adams was the preceptor of those American politicians who, in subsequent generations, could not put their opponent in the wrong without consigning him to hell. Even Melville's Ahab, that other great monomaniac, had "his humanities." But not the Yankee Cato, the first great Son of Liberty. Yet it is also to be remembered that, unlike most of the sour revolutionaries of history, Samuel Adams sought nothing for himself when his victory was achieved. Most of his adult earnings had come from public service-as Justice of the

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Peace, Clerk of the House of Representatives, and Secretary of the General Assembly. W hen he died, he left an estate of only $17,000. Neither was there any vanity hidden in this fierce heart. It is there­ fore proper that he was buried in the Granary Burying Ground, among the Saints, close by where "old Endicott lies." 1

17 JOHN SULLIVAN New Hampshire Soldier-Statesman John Sullivan (February 17, 1740-January 23, 1795), lawyer, en­ trepreneur, soldier, and political leader of New Hampshire during and after the American Revolution. Both a commercial and mili­ tary Federalist, who had learned in the Continental Congress and in the American army to loathe everything in state and national government that was "disorganized and diffuse." A proud, fierce, and pompous man, driven (according to his modern biographer) by "an ambition that soared beyond his abilities" : a desire to be an even greater man than he was. Born in the town of Somersworth, New Hampshire, in the township of Rollinsford, just across the Salmon Falls River from Berwick, Maine. Son of John (Owen) Sul­ livan of County Limerick, Ireland, and of Margery Browne Sullivan of County Cork, who came to New England as redemptioners. As reported in family tradition, grandson of Major Philip O' Sullivan of Ardea, a Jacobite officer who died in the service of James II. Edu­ cated by his father, a schoolmaster, and in the chambers of Samuel Livermore. By 1760 married and established in Durham, New Hampshire. A great success, worth (according to John Adams) at least £10,000 by 1774, with six mills (for grist, batting, fulling, and grinding of scythes), a fine house, and a number of slaves to row his personal barge. But in the midst of a pattern of contention and abuse even in these early years, litigious and hated by many for his prosecutions for debt. Twice almost killed by mobs determined to take either his life or his papers. The target of a petition to the General Court of the colony which charged that he conducted his business " with a view of making his Fortune out of the Ruin of the poor harmless people. . . . " Nevertheless, a respected, often pop176

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ular figure, a leader of the New Hampshire bar and major in the colonial militia. Always a conservative, but a Whig-a violent Irish Protestant, with no inherited reverence for English authority. Elected by Durham to be a member of New Hampshire's First Provincial Congress, which met at Exeter on July 21, 1774. Chosen by that body to be one of the two delegates from his commonwealth to the First Continental Congress, where he quickly aligned himself with John and Samuel Adams, the most prominent advocates of national independence . Propelled by these events to play a large role on the national stage-a role to which he gave himself without reservation. John Sullivan, his eyes opened to the meaning of the rapidly unfolding conflict with England by his experience in the Congress, returned to New Hampshire and, upon receipt of a warning that British troops were on their way, led a raid on Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth harbor in December of 1774. Powder and guns were carried away for concealment in the countryside-and the authority of the royal governor, John Wentworth, forever destroyed. The Second Provincial Congress of New Hampshire returned John Sullivan to be their representative in the Continental Congress. They signed the Association, which required them not to import British goods, recommended to them as the reflection of a new national will and were proud when the Second Continental Con­ gress on June 22, 1775, appointed their spokesman to be a brig­ adier-general in the newly organized American army-besieging the British garrison in Boston. Sullivan threw himself into his new military responsibilities as if he had been a soldier all of his life. After good service in a number of minor actions around Boston and brief duty in organizing the defenses of Portsmouth, he was dispatched to Canada, where, fol­ lowing the death of General John Thomas: he assumed command. Sullivan did a fine job in retiring before a stronger British force but was relieved by Horatio Gates in July 1776. Here his disposition to be sensitive to slights and to take offense at criticism took over. He attempted to resign but was dissuaded by the leaders of the Con­ gress and promoted to the rank of major-general. In the Long Island campaign of that summer, Sullivan's command, on Washington's left, was overrun, and the New Hampshire general captured: iso­ lated in a cornfield by Hessians, brought to bay with a pistol in each hand. Sullivan was treated with respect by his enemies and an ex­ change with a British officer was soon arranged. But first Lord

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Howe attempted to use his American prisoner to open negotiations with the Congress. After this brief venture in diplomacy, Sulli­ van returned to the field for the final stages of the New York cam­ paign, participated in the retreat across New Jersey, and then distin­ guished himself for valor and leadership under fire at Trenton and Princeton . In the opinion of contemporaries he seemed "brave al­ most to the extent of folly" but possessed by "a certain arrogant manner" which "led him to take on duities which tact would have left in other hands." Hence, he was frequently involved in quarrels concerning rank and precedence and was a target of censure for those members of Congress who were uneasy at the prospect of military rule. General Sullivan, after an interlude in New Hampshire (where he influenced the formation of a viable state government), led an expe­ dition against British posts on Staten Island. The results of this raid were indeterminate, and a military inquiry into the conduct of its commander was demanded by political critics such as Thomas Burke of North Carolina. But before this investigation could be arranged, the American army had to face an invasion of Pennsylva­ nia and major battles with Lord Howe at Brandywine and German­ town . Sullivan had an important part in both of these engagements . He was almost killed in the first when his division, caught while moving, collapsed around him and his horse was shot from under him while he rallied green troops . In the second he commanded the American spearhead in an eastward thrust against Howe's camp outside Philadelphia . Fog disorganized the assault and Sullivan was forced to withdraw and regroup. But not before he had been at the center of more furious fighting-for which he was commended by soldiers on both sides of the line. Exoneration before a military court followed Germantown. But the pressures of months of bicker­ ing with his critics had disoriented the excitable and mercurial soldier from New England . In the words of William Plumer, John Sullivan was as "greedy of flattery" as any man he had ever known. He was not only vain of his person, but also moody; and, when in distress, fond of the bottle . He required more praise and less cen­ sure. Therefore, in the spring and summer, fall and winter of 1777, Sullivan drank, suffered from his ulcer, and poured out his sorrows in letters of complaint to his commander. Washington replied, "No other officer of rank, in the whole army, has so often conceived himself to be neglected, slighted and ill-treated, as you have done, and none I am sure has had less cause than yourself to entertain such Ideas ."

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In the spring of 1778, General Sullivan was given an independent command in Rhode Island with orders to cooperate with a French expedition under the Comte d'Estaing in driving the British from the state. Because a storm damaged the French fleet, Sullivan was exposed near Newport but fought the British garrison of the island to a standstill when they attempted to take advantage of their numerical superiority. Frustrated, Sullivan then withdrew in good order. His reflections on the conduct of his allies produced another chapter in the turbulent history of his struggle against "Disappoint­ ment and injustice." But before this tension could develop into a drama of its own, John Sullivan was once again transferred, this time to fight the Iroquois and their Tory allies in Pennsylvania and Western New York. This independent campaign was a success. Sullivan's troops defeated the Indians near what is now Elmira, burned all of their towns and their food supplies. However, once the campaign was over, there was the usual carping from Sullivan's political enemies-talk of how he moved his troops as slowly as the "Duke de Sully, " and of the self-serving fustian of his reports to Congress. Moreover, the General made some attacks of his own, particularly on the Board of War, which was supposed to supply his legions in the field. Words flew back and forth. Sullivan fell ill. On November 9, 1779, he offered to resign. To his surprise, this time the offer was accepted. His military career had been honorable, but exasperating. It had also shaped his political thought. Major-General John Sullivan returned to New Hampshire a mili­ tary hero to his own people. His presence brought celebrations and an honorary M.A. from Harvard. Predictably, adulation drew him back to public life. His original plan was to practice law and reno­ vate his mills. But the elders of the commonwealth insisted that a figure of stature was needed to represent lt in the controversy over Vermont. Sullivan played an influential role during his 1780-1781 tenure in the Continental Congress. He prevented the annexation of Vermont by New York, prevented action by Congress to judge claims of authority in the disputed territories, and then moved for the acceptance of the organized community west of the Connecticut River as an independent state. Sullivan as a member of Congress made friends in the Vermont Grants-connections which sustained him in the rest of his career. And he also cooperated with the French minister, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, in preventing foolish innova­ tions in American foreign policy. He even accepted a small loan from the French diplomat-a gratuity which greatly injured his reputation. Sullivan grew to be more and more contemptuous of

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his colleagues in the national government during this period of service. He called the Congress "a Body without power & the States the Several Component parts of a Monster with Thirteen Heads." In this spirit he was to support the Constitution of 1787 and foster its ratification in New Hampshire. In 1782 Sullivan returned to his state to serve in its constitutional convention and to begin a four-year term as its attorney-general. In the latter office he reconciled the western counties on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River to the authority of the state government by traveling through their communities. Sullivan represented his state in a jurisdictional dispute with admiralty courts established by the Congress. He commanded the state militia, attending musters throughout New Hampshire and displaying the very image of legitimate authority in his resplendent uniform ( on the general theory that "if we mean to keep our neighbor's sword in its scabbard, we must whet our own"). His law practice flourished. He stuffed a moose for Jefferson's French friends. He promoted domestic manufactures. And he was chosen to be Speaker of the House and one of the five councilors to the chief magistrate of his state. But the climax of his career was yet to come-his three terms as president of New Hampshire: terms in office during which his state experienced a crisis in its political character and achieved stability within the Union. New Hampshire politics in the years 1785-1790 was, at the top, a rivalry between General Sullivan and John Langdon, the state's spokesman in the Great Convention. Their struggle was serious but factional, not philosophical. The most important issues of these years of economic distress were paper money and debt relief. On these issues Langdon and Sullivan were agreed-in the negative. The latter was first elected president in 1786, after a vigorous can­ vass of the state and a newspaper war. Langdon had been victorious in 1785 and won again in 1788. Sullivan was reelected in 1787 and returned for a third term in 1789. In September of 1789 he was appointed United States District Judge for New Hampshire, a post in which he continued until his death. This appointment removed him from the arena of state politics. But not before he had put down a rebellion which threatened the future of his state and managed the campaign for the adoption of the U. S. Constitution by his people. In Sullivan's first term as president, during the summer of 1786, petitions from the towns poured down upon the General Court. Conventions were assembled, demanding (in whole or in part)

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"paper money ..., equal distribution of property ..., annihila­ tion of debts, freedom from taxes, the abolition of lawyers, the destruction of the Inferior Courts [ and repeal of the law] authoriz­ ing the return of the [Tory] Refugees." Plumer's summary of the temper of the mob of hundreds which brought this message to an Exeter meeting of the legislature on September 20, 1786, was that they were "against law and government." Sullivan endured the armed siege of the Meeting House where the General Court was assembled and, once outside the hall, called up the militia, arrested and tried the miscreants under military circumstances and then paraded through the state asserting legitimate authority.With New Hampshire headed toward its own version of Shays's Rebellion and its experiment in self-rule almost at an end, its warrior-patriot dealt summarily with the insurrection.In the words of a contemporary who undervalued the service of John Sullivan in this crisis, "We could not have had a better military governor." Unfortunately a military governor was what his state needed at the time. There would be no mutiny under John Sullivan's flamboyant hand.And no breaking of the ranks. Neither would levellers be condoned where he was of the con1pany. In the spirit of such a commitment against whatever seemed "disorganized or diffuse" President Sullivan presided over the first session of New Hampshire's ratification convention at Exeter, Feb­ ruary 13-February 22, 1788, and supported his successor, John Langdon, in the second session at Concord, June 18-June 21 of the same year.The Constitution was a check upon anarchy and popular excess-deserving of energetic support, even of a "popular" vari­ ety.Sullivan urged approval upon his neighbors.The Constitution was the best that could be devised.He answered Joshua Atherton on the provision for judicial authority in Article 3, Section 2, that Congress had the power necessary to limit jurisdiction of the U.S. Supreme Court.He supported the move for adjournment when (in February) it was clear that the Federalists were in a minority.More­ over, his reputation in western New Hampshire helped sway some delegates from that region to consider voting to ratify, calmed in them the fear of remote authority which the Revolution had engen­ dered in all Americans.Finally, in Concord in the second session,. Sullivan is credited with arranging alcoholic civilities which kept a few Antifederalists away from the hall and with other political arts that gathered a vote here and a vote there.That New Hampshire (with a recommendation of subsequent amendments) accepted the Constitution was due chiefly to the exertions of John Sullivan,

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Samuel Livermore, Josiah Bartlett, John Langdon, and the brothers John Taylor and Nicholas Gilman. The explanation of their actions lies chiefly in New Hampshire state politics, not in broad theories concerning the national destiny. In his last term as president of New Hampshire, John Sullivan had the pleasure of entertaining the president of the United States, George Washington, in a great ball at Portsmouth. He was honored with a Doctor of Laws degree from Dartmouth. Thereafter, decline came swiftly. The General's mills burned. He fell under a burden of debt, was forced to sell his property and to endure undeserved calumny from the children of former friends. In 1795 he rapidly deteriorated into senility brought on by a "nervous disease." To the end his enemies pursued him, even to the brink of his grave, as General Cilley with a brace of pistols had to protect his burial from interference by creditors. To this day controversy surrounds the story of his life. Yet he is among the representative Americans of his time-generous to a fault, jealous of his personal honor, optimistic, gregarious, a gifted politician, ambitious, venturesome, and (though never so often as he would have liked) "larger than life." 1

18 ELIPHALET DYER An Uncertain Tru mpet Eliphalet Dyer (September 14, 1721-May 13, 1807), lawyer, farmer, merchant, colonizer, diplomat, jurist, and Connecticut po­ litical leader. A mild Antifederalist, fearful of innovation and of threats to the cultural and moral integrity of his world posed by the prospective adoption of the United States Constitution. Yet also a man of the future, greatly concerned with national expansion west­ ward. Compelled to vote for ratification by ominous suggestions concerning the political future of those who refused to do so. Also impressed by the moderately Federalist arguments of Roger Sher­ man, the recognized spokesman for Connecticut's insularity, who saw in the proposed instrument no threat to local self-control. And further persuaded by the commitment of the nationalists to provide a frontier "outlet" for Connecticut in the Western Reserve of Ohio. Either in the arena of debate or in the midst of legislative delibera­ tions a pompous, florid, tedious, and sometimes comical figure. Called by John Adams (who liked him) ulong-winded and round­ about, obscure and cloudy." For his loquacity in the sessions at Hartford described by a younger contemporary as one who "spoke to show his wisdom and importance, and to show that other men did not know as much as [he did] " . . . : one who "talked till, I believe, he disgusted every single soul who heard him." Yet, despite an inclination to hold forth at least "20 times a day" without submitting "to order" or finishing "one sentence completely, " a major influence on the public life of his native commonwealth for almost forty years. One of the ruling elders in that closed commu­ nion of godly and practical men. The first citizen of Windham, Connecticut. An extreme social conservative (who suggested "birth" 183

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as a qualification for appointment of foreign officers serving in the Continental Line), a slaveholder and a leader of the New Light party within the Congregational establishment of Connecticut. Appointed Chief Justice of his state. Finally willing to support the Constitution because he could regard it as "a brave experiment to cope with the wickedness of mankind." Eliphalet Dyer was the only son of Colonel Thomas Dyer and Lydia Backhus Dyer. He was born at Windham, where his father had moved from Weymouth, Massachusetts, the home of his ancestors for almost a hundred years. Thomas Dyer prospered rapidly once arrived in Connecticut and was a respected and wealthy figure during the years when his son grew to maturity. Colonel Dyer was a full n1ember of the First Society Church in Windham, a member of the General Assembly and a Selectman, as well as commander of the local militia. His landholdings were considerable, his house large and his servants numerous. Therefore, though he had once been only a shoemaker by trade, he was able to provide his son with social standing, the best available local tutoring, and an education at Yale, where the boy graduated ninth in the class of 1740, and from which he received the M. A. in 1743. Young Dyer had joined the church in 1736; he cultivated an acquaintance with the Reverend Thomas Clap, the local minister who rose later to be rector at Yale and who arranged a Harvard M. A. for Dyer in 1744. Once done with formal schooling, Eliphalet worked for his father, read the law, and was in 1746 admitted to practice before the Connecticut courts. But even before that date he had begun to learn some of the duties belonging to his station in life by holding local offices which were, by custom, part of the apprenticeship which a young gen­ tleman of any ambition or fortune was expected to experience be­ fore being offered larger responsibilities by his cautious and pru­ dent neighbors. In 1746 the colonial legislature appointed Eliphalet Dyer to be Justice of the Peace. In 1743 he had become tax assessor in Wind­ ham. He married well and built a fine house on Windham Green. His practice of the law was busy and successful. In 1745 he was promoted to be town clerk and captain of militia. In 1747 he was chosen to represent his township in the General Assembly. He became Selectman in 1752 and Moderator of the town meeting in 1754, militia major in 1753 and lieutenant colonel in 1755. From that time until his retirement from active politics in 1783, Dyer stood in the midst of colonial, state and continental affairs as they involved Connecticut and New England. But, as the summary above indi-

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cates, he came to achieve such dignities only by slow stages. For though a deferential society, his Connecticut liked to test its pro­ spective leaders before it burdened them with the highest offices of government. These Puritans-turned-Yankees admired well-proven accountabilit y, and, once it had been identified, left such demon­ strated virtue in power-or continued with it until their trust was in some way violated. But, as Eliphalet Dyer learned, the good citizens of Connecticut were respectful only v1ithin limits, and tested with regularity even their most trusted public servants. Eliphalet Dyer was reelected to his seat in the Connecticut Gen­ eral Assembly in 1749, 1752, 1753, 1756, 1758, 1759, and 1762. There­ after, with only small interruptions caused by absences from his post, he served from 1762-1784 as Assistant on the Governor's Council-a measure of his importance as one of the most distin­ guished citizens of the colony or state. He had a retail business in Windham and traded in land. But most significantly, he was one of the original organizers of that great "bubble," the Susquehannah Company, formed at Windham in 1753 to claim and settle the north­ ern third of Pennsylvania in the name of the Connecticut Charter of 1662, which contained conventional language about reaching "from sea to shining sea." Dyer served on a committee which went out to Albany and there, during negotiations with the Iroquois, purchased the Wyoming Valley lands from retreating tribes. He was from Oc­ tober 5, 1763-0ctober of 1764 London agent for the company in seeking sanction for its activities from authorities in England. Fur­ thermore, he persisted for more than a decade in the effort to enlist Connecticut as official sponsor to its self-constituted colony in the West. The question of how far the commonwealth should go in extending official recognition to its outlet/promotion was the occa­ sion for political division in several Conn�cticut general elections held before the Revolution. There were strong feelings both for and against the attempt to drain population westward-fears of loss of land value in settled regions and of trouble with English authorities that might compromise already established liberties under the Char­ ter. But by stages the hunger for a way up and out of crowded, rocky Connecticut grew in every corner of the colony and finally pro­ duced a political leadership which responded to it in the persons of Governors William Pitkin (1766-1769) and Jonathan Trumbull, Sr. (1769-1784). Eliphalet Dyer himself had some reasonable aspirations to the office of governor. He was of the New Light part y, elevated with Pitkin, and had with Trumbull made a good impression with the

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electorate through his firm (if somewhat belated) opposition to the Stamp Act. He was from the populous eastern section of the colony. As a churchman he had discouraged Separatist excesses and written moderate pamphlets against schism spawned by overreaction to the Great Awakening. He represented Connecticut at the Stamp Act Congress held in New York in October of 1765. On one dramatic occasion (November 1, 1765), when Old Light Governor Fitch had proposed to administer to his assistants the oath to enforce the Stamp Act, Dyer "immediately arose" and, in his own words, "took my hat, and declared openly and publicly, that the oath about to be administered was in my opinion directly contrary to the oath the Governor and Council had before taken to maintain the rights and privileges of the people." Dyer gathered credit among most of his neighbors by withdrawing from that ceremony. In May 1771 the legis­ lature voted to support the claims of the Susquehannah Company under the Connecticut Charter. And in January, 1774, the colony es­ tablished formal jurisdiction over the growing settlements by incor­ porating them into the town of Westmoreland. In all of this business Eliphalet Dyer did well. But, for the purpose of his ambitions, not well enough. Therefore, in 1766, with the triumph of his party, he be­ came one of the four justices of the Connecticut Superior Court. He continued in that office until 1793 and was, for the last four years of that tenure, Chief Justice. But he was never governor of Connecticut. There were many reasons why in middle life Eliphalet Dyer gave pause to the ruling elders and patriarchs of colonial Connecticut. Many of these close observers noted that, for one thing, he was "too fond of popularity." Old Light Benjamin Gale spoke of the Susque­ hannah project as Dyer's "Hobby Horse by which he rose"-sug­ gesting political calculation and demagogy behind what purported to be public spirit and desire for profit. Many members of the company noted that Dyer during his agency in England seemed to serve himself while ostensibly serving the settlements-enjoying "Comedys and Tragedies, Operas, Oratories, Burlettas, Balls and Ridottoes, " and arranging for a customs appointment which he was obliged to surrender when disputes with the mother country sharp­ ened: to serve King George III as Comptroller for the Port of New London. Clearly he loved the life of promoter, developer and politi­ cal manipulator-so much so that knowing wags made a song about his enthusiasm: Canaan of old, as we are told Where it did rain down Manna

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W'a'n't half so good for heavenly food As Dyer makes Susqu'hanna.

And he loved also his salary and expense account from the company which to some degree relieved him from the burdens of the "slavish practice" of law. Yet, as his detractors failed to realize, Eliphalet Dyer was absolutely serious about most of his popular causes, including (eventually) that of American independence. The formation of Eliphalet Dyer into an American Patriot began with his service during the Seven Years War. During that conflict he saw active duty in 1755 at Crown Point, attended an intercolonial conference to plan the campaign of 1757 and took part on a commit­ tee investigating the surrender of Fort William Henry. His poor impression of English attitudes toward North American colonials formed at this time in his life was later reinforced by his frustrations as agent for the Susquehannah Company-especially his year as its agent in London. The 1763 Order in Council issued by George III evicting all settlers from the Susquehannah territory until a com­ prehensive Indian policy had been developed by his ministers added to Dyer's uneasiness concerning the future of America under British authority. All of his dealings with Crown authorities disap­ pointed him. But while in England these negative impressions hardened into a determination to oppose innovations in British policy, plans to quarter troops upon the colonial population and to raise a revenue upon these shores: the first "a rod and a check over us, " the second a threat to Connecticut's cherished self-govern­ ment. For "if taxes are once begun . . . our Charter goes next." Dyer returned from his London adventure a revolutionary-in-the-mak­ ing, in this like so many Americans of his generation. W hen the Coercive Acts brought troubles to a head it was therefore quite natural that he be selected one of Connecticut's three delegates to the First Continental Congress. For, in everything, Dyer was from Windham. And Windham was almost ready for revolution in Sep­ tember of 1774, when its delegate arrived in Philadelphia. Certainly it was prepared to approve of a Declaration of Independence long before the Congress could agree to promulgate such a document. As noted above, Eliphalet Dyer was not a great success as a member of the Congress. Immediately following his arrival in Phil­ adelphia there were complaints that "Dyer and Sherman speak often and long, but very heavily and clumsily." And on one occa­ sion, when business took Dyer back to Windham, Thomas Nelson spoke for most of the House when he wrote to an absent colleague,

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"You would be surprised to see with how much dispatch we have done business since Dyer and Gaddesden left us." The Chevalier de la Luzerne, a French diplomat, reported of Dyer that he was "the most boring speaker" he had heard-so bad that "his harangues introduced the custom of reading newspapers in Congress." More­ over, in these disquisitions Dyer was not only inchoate but also perfervid: in his own phrase, "warm, impetuous and persevering. " Yet he got work done, arranged for appointments to government service, brought men and supplies out of his state, encouraged his friend General Washington and kept up the morale of his neighbors and constituents with his own enthusiasm for the cause of liberty. Thus if his career as a national figure had a comic beginning when, in 1754, Windham's frogs had marched on the town by night crying (Windhamites thought) "Colonel Dyer, Colonel Dyer, " after twenty years his W hig countrymen had ceased to think of him as a plump, laughable fellow and had accepted Dyer's right to sit among the mighty men and the captains. Moreover, to sport with his dignity during official travels, they had done nothing more than to attach a great bullfrog to the back of the coach in which he rode to join Roger Sherman and Silas Deane in attending the First Continental Con­ gress-teasing him only a little, lest he forget that he was the ser­ vant of a high-spirited, democratic people. Eliphalet Dyer served in the original of all our national legisla­ tures from September 1774 through its adjournment on October 26. He also served in the Second Continental Congress, beginning in May of 1775 and continuing through adjournment the following August 2. Dyer returned to finish out this term the following Sep­ tember 12, completing it in January. But he was not reelected in October of 1775; and therefore, though an early advocate of com­ plete repudiation of all British authority, he was not present to sign the Declaration of Independence. In view of Dyer's importance to the Patriot cause in Connecticut, there is a degree of distortion implicit in his absence from Philadelphia. And he had also offended the Susquehannah Company people by urging them to be moderate so long as their cause was still pending before the recognized authorities. Moreover, there had also been a little matter of rhubarb which resulted in the public thrashing (by Dyer's relations and supporters) of John Avery of Lebanon, an official messenger of Congress. The elder Dyer had sent rhubarb from Pennsylvania to be carried with Avery's dispatches to his son Thomas for use in the young man's new drug store but had instructed Tom to "pay him nothing

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for the bringing as he will be paid by the public besides he owes me." Avery got to see these instructions when he was refused money and thereafter made away with the letter in which they were contained. Later he printed the document in a newspaper. The beating followed-with Justice Dyer a delighted, uninterfering wit­ ness. Then came comic publicity for the entire altercation. The people of Windham were irritated by this new absurdity and abuse of authority by Dyer. Furthermore, they believed that "liberty" would be more secure with frequent change of delegates." To say nothing of the public purse. For Dyer's son Thomas was already brigade-major for Washington's forces and his son-in-law, Joseph Trumbull, commissary general. Another son and a nephew held military commissions, as did the other Trumbull boys. Yet such nepotism was accepted practice of the times. Fretful and peevish misuse of his authority as magistrate was not. Hence, out of pique and a preoccupation with personal business-a feature of even his best service in Congress-Eliphalet Dyer forfeited an opportunity to achieve immortality. In October of 1776 Dyer was again elected to Congress but refused the honor, resigning with references to poor health. He was appointed brigadier-in-command of the Fifth Brigade of Connecti­ cut militia, but again resigned when sent once more to Congress in May 177Z The death of two sons took him away from the public business in the spring of 1779; but in January of 1780, he was once more dispatched to Philadelphia. In that year he was, however, more often occupied with the needs of the French forces quartered in Connecticut and with his duties on the Council of Safety, where he held a seat from 1775-1777, from 1779-1780 and from 1782-1783, in which time he returned to the issue of the Wyoming lands and Connecticut's claim against them. His negative vote on the issue of commutation pay for discharged Continental officers irritated a good many of his constituents. He equivocated. He delayed. He complained that state government did not send his salary and spoke of penury and want. That the states would ever consent to the collection of taxes by Congress or the people to the establish­ ment of a truly national government he could not believe. To Con­ necticut's leaders he reported, the low state of our finances and the loss of public credit are truly alarming. " Price fixing was employed as a stop upon inflation in New England. But nothing short of a revenue for the general government could, Dyer believed, check the trend. He tired of service in Philadelphia, and doubted the future of the Union. Yet he had grown to be less and less provincial during II

11

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his long struggle with the nation's problems. And he consistently supported the application of reasonable methods to retire the com­ mon debt. In 1784, Eliphalet Dyer served for Windham one final term in the Connecticut Assembly and was chosen to be Speaker of that body. Then he returned to his judicial duties, to a little teaching of the law in Tappin Reeve's Litchfield Law School, and to his big house on Windham Green . The business of the Superior Court consumed much of his time, but was not so demanding upon his patience or emotional composure as had been his earlier, elective respon­ sibilities. But, though out of politics, it was natural that the Wind­ ham town meeting picked Eliphalet Dyer and Jedidiah Elderkin, its other ruling elder, to be uninstructed delegates to Connecticut's ratification convention . That Dyer went not as an Antifederalist but as an uninstructed delegate demonstrated at what a disadvantage the opponents of ratification labored in the convention at Hartford . For had their cause any hope of success, Dyer would have been one of its natural leaders. According to the best reports, Eliphalet Dyer did speak at length in the ratification debates of his objections to the Constitution and then, briefly, of his reasons for approving its ratification, nonetheless. Of the latter remarks we have the central passage, words often quoted with respect in other states: We have the concurrent opinion of the civilized part of mankind, that (considering the depraved state of the human species) for the security of the persons and properties of each, and the comfort and happiness of the whole, civil government becomes absolutely necessary. Such are the inordinate lusts and unruly passions of the human race . . . the hearts of many are set upon them to do evil.

The argument here is close to that of Fisher Ames, that government makes liberty, and derivative of the Calvinism of Dyer's New Light religious upbringing. Memories of Separatist enthusiasms and more recent experiences with the spreading doctrines of Captain Shays and the Rhode Island radicals disposed many local-minded Connecticut men like Eliphalet Dyer and William Williams to accept the arguments of the Federalists that ratification was a self-protec­ tive necessity for the regin1e they wished to preserve. As he grew older and, from a distance, contemplated the French Revolution and its impact on its admirers on these shores, Dyer and the other reluctant Federalists often became full converts to the

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cause of order and rightful authority. The last we hear of Dyer's politics demonstrates that he is a case in point of how this process operated. For, well beyond his seventieth birthday, a contemporary reported of him, "Colonel Dyer, now far advanced in years, was still hale and hearty, and . . . keenly interested in all that was passing. A gentleman of the old school, Punctilious in dress and manners, his familiar form was often seen on Windham street, and his voice often heard in earnest deprecation of the alarming growth of radi­ calism, Jacobinism, infidelity and immorality." Dyer retired from the Superior Court in 1793 but survived another eleven years after this retreat to private occupations, administering his considerable properties, providing for his family and advising the oncoming generation of Federalist leaders. In the end as at the beginning, he was, with Roger Sherman and William Williams, a barometer of what might be expected of his people. His entire career is a window on the pattern of life in the Connecticut of his time. 1

19 JOSIAH BARTLETT Th.e Physician as Statesman Josiah Bartlett (November 21, 1729-May 19, 1795), physician, militia officer, jurist, and New Hampshire statesman. A Signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the Articles of Confedera­ tion. First president and then governor of his state. Unlike many of the other Old Revolutionaries, the men who valued liberty more than life, a mild Federalist. Driven to play a part in the public business by an honest concern for the common good, a commit­ ment to the established "way" of his community. In his lifetime one of the most respected men in New England. Tall, dignified in man­ ner and very formal in his dress, with ruffles at his wrists and silver buckles on his shoes. Devoted throughout his career to economy, the meeting of legitimate obligations, reform in law, internal im­ provements (roads, canals), and the promotion of agriculture, man­ ufacturing, and commerce. Eager for any opportunity to encourage character and patriotism in the young. Pious, but so tolerant in religion that some contemporaries thought him to be a Deis't. In reality a Congregationalist, but closer in persuasion to the Uni­ tarians than were most of his kind. A slaveholder and a social conservative. Curious, full of energy, industrious and exceptionally intelligent. Very popular with the inhabitants of the small towns and remote settlements of New Hampshire's frontier, to some de­ gree in consequence of his long service to the ordinary citizens of his region. The son of a shoemaker, Deacon Stephen Bartlett, and of Hannah Webster Bartlett. Born in Essex County, Massachusetts, at Amesbury. Educated in the common schools of that township. Ap­ prenticed in 1747 to Dr. Nehemiah Ordway, a relative residing in

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Amesbury. Entered into the practice of medicine in 1750 in the frontier town of Kingston, New Hampshire . By gradual, unobtrusive stages, over a period of twenty-five years, Josiah Bartlett acquired a fine personal reputation which, when the crisis came, gave him an opportunity to shape the history of his state . The process which thrust Bartlett forward was not dramatic but incremental, with an impetus from his growing skill as a physi­ cian and in the consequent size of his practice. Bartlett bought land and a farm, married a cousin, dealt in timber and built a good house. In 1757 he became a selectman of Kingston. Soon thereafter he began to speculate in frontier property. His neighbors picked him to be their representative in the 1765 Provincial Assembly; and to that post he was reelected as long as royal government survived. Also in 1765 Bartlett was appointed justice of the peace by Governor Benning Wentworth . In 1770 Governor John Wentworth made him lieutenant colonel of the local (7th) militia regiment. However, though Bartlett prospered under the regime of George III, he dis­ liked the Declaratory Act and its sequels as "calculated to destroy the fundamental Principles of our happy [English] Constitution" and took the W hig side in the quarrel between Parliament and the colonial subjects of the Crown. In 1774 he accepted election to the Patriot Provincial Congress, and was three times reelected to subse­ quent sessions of that ad hoc assembly. Tories burned Bartlett's house in February of 1774, and he was therefore unable to occupy a seat in the First Continental Congress. When elected to the same office in August 1775, he accepted the assignment and met with the Congress from September through the follovving March . Bartlett was also a member of the New Hampshire Committee of Corre­ spondence and Committee of Safety, on which he served until 1784. As a member of the upper house (Council) he sat in the General Court after it was first assembled in 1776. In these capacities he performed with courage and determination. When removed from his offices under the royal government he was reappointed to them by the Provincial Congress and was thus active in making prepara­ tions for war and the administration of their own laws by the people of New Hampshire . Josiah Bartlett was a member of many committees in the Second Continental Congress and served there from September 1775 until March 18, 1776. He then returned home but, because of his reelec­ tion, did not have long in Kingston . He arrived in Philadelphia in time to be part of the deliberations which led to the Declaration of

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Independence, for which he voted July 2, 1776, and concerning which he entertained no doubts whatsoever. In August of that year Bartlett signed the instrument. In November of the same year he mustered his regiment for service in Rhode Island, but because of poor health declined the honor of another term in the Congress. However, after much labor in defending, organizing and governing New Hampshire, he agreed to return to Philadelphia in May of 1778-when American fortunes had reached their nadir. Bartlett's letters reveal his determination in these times of trial: "We have . nothing to hope for, if conquered, and our misfortune in the war ought to animate us the more to diligence, firmness and resolution; to conquer is better than life, to be subdued infinitely worse than death . " Bartlett in early 1776 had been angry with the cautious spirit of Philadelphia: "I find the town is very much afraid of that Frightful word Independence. " He had foreseen, as early as May of 1776, the difficulties to come: I have great reason to think we shall have a severe trial this summer with Britons, Hessians, Hanoverians, Indians, negroes and every other butcher the gracious king of Britain can hire against us . If we can stand it out this year (and I have no doubt, we can, by divine assistance) I think there will be a final end of British Tyranny and this country enjoy peace, liberty and safety.

At times he wondered why Americans, like "Israelites" of old, were "a crooked and perverse generation, longing for the firmness and folly of their Egyptian task masters from whom we have so lately freed ourselves . . . . " He was ashamed of every failure by New England troops, proud of every success. He expressed admiration for the eloquence of "our Southern Brethren, " and was alarmed at Lord Dunmore's plan to free and arm slaves. But only rarely did his confidence waver, and not at all so long as "all orders and degrees of men" within the population of his country could be trusted to do their duty and leave the results to God: "I know that troubles and Disappointments are the common lot of all men, and that the Su­ preme Disposer of all Events, can, and I really believe, will over rule all things for the best. " Bartlett's 1778 tenure in the Congress was for six months (May­ November). During that interval he was greatly occupied with ma­ rine affairs, munitions, diplomacy and British triumphs in the South, but found time to participate in deliberations concerning the Arti-

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cles of Confederation with which he had originally been involved in 1776, and which he signed for New Hampshire in July 1778. But in this portion of his life, both be£ore and after his last service in the Congress at York and Philadelphia, Bartlett's most significant work was in sustaining the political life and public order of a free New Hampshire. He was called as a physician to attend those wounded in the battle at Bennington, Vermont, summoned to regulate taxes and accounts, to dispense justice, to represent New Hampshire in border disputes, to calm the western counties and to attend re­ gional conferences on the state of the economy. He was present at the 1779 state constitutional convention, to which he had been elected in absentia. Moreover, when at home he was almost omni­ present at Exeter gatherings of the Executive Council, at sessions of the Court of Common Pleas and Court of Judicature and in 1789 nominated to be Chief Justice, in which office he served briefly in 1790. During all of this judicial service Bartlett is an illustration of the early American custom of calling upon the most distinguished public men (most of whom, like Bartlett, were well read in the law) to serve on the bench. Bartlett was, in these years, an honored judge, practical but learned in the application of the law, much of which he had helped n1odify to suit the new conditions. In New Hampshire's two-part ratification convention Bartlett had an important role to play. For the first session at Concord (February 13-22, 1788) Bartlett was chosen temporary chairman. It was ad­ journed by the Federalists to avoid rejection of the Constitution. During the second session (June 18-21, 1788), as in the interval between official deliberations, Bartlett worked quietly and unob­ trusively. Contemporary observers credited his supportive exposi­ tion of the document with persuading many cautious Antifederalist delegates from the back country to give_ up their preference for things as they had been and risk a firmer connection with other states. Yet New Hampshire's political physician was no orator and, according to a historian of the period, "preferred discussions to debate." He did, in support of the choleric John Pickering, suggest that examination of the Articles of Confederation be joined to dis­ cussion of the proposed Constitution. His fellow Federalists did not believe that so much care and contrast were necessary to persuade the rustics to be docile and practice deference. Hence they almost failed; but the delay helped. In the June second session, when the leaders recognized that a majority was available, one which would vote to approve the document as written, a committee to recom­ mend amendments was appointed. Naturally, it included Bartlett.

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They suggested jurisdictional restraints on the Federal courts, res­ ervation of powers by the states, protections for freedom of reli­ gion, trial by jury, the right to bear arms and other corrections first adopted by the Massachusetts ratification convention. These pro­ posed amendments are a measure of the mildness of New Hamp­ shire's Federalism-and of the Federalism of Josiah Bartlett. In his years on the Committee of Safety and the Executive Coun­ cil Bartlett grumbled frequently at the folly of attempting to operate a government without an executive branch. To the like-minded John Langdon he wrote, "No state in the Union is without some . . . executive officer . . . and I am persuaded no state can long exist with any tolerable degree of order and dignity without it. Some supreme executive power must be somewhere lodged separate from the legislature. . . . " New Hampshire would need a strong gover­ nor, not (as provided in the 1779 constitution) a president sitting within the General Court. Though he refused a seat in the original United States Senate, for three terms (1790-1793) Bartlett accepted the weak executive office of whose insufficiency he had complained. Then in 1792 a new state constitution strengthened the office, changed its name, and called a 1793 election in vvhich the people of New Hampshire, by a vote of 7,388 out of 9,854, selected Josiah Bartlett to be the first governor of their state. In 1794 Bartlett's health began to fail and in January he notified the General Court of his intention to retire to private life. Bartlett lived only twelve months beyond the conclusion of his final term in office. He died at his home in Kingston, where he is buried in the local churchyard. Josiah Bartlett epitomizes the disinterested civic spirit which ani­ mated the leaders of New Hampshire during and after the American Revolution. This quiet Patriot entered the political arena not so much from ambition but because his neighbors urged him forward into the midst of the public business. Though severe with the lukewarm and outraged at "Machiavellian [Tory] plots and schemes, " he asked more of himself than of others. No man paid his tax more readily. No citizen of the Granite State had a greater hatred of tyrants. Yet he was a surprisingly private person. He made contributions to the science of medicine by introducing a new treatment for controlling diphtheria. In 1791 he formalized the practice of his profession in his state by creating the New Hampshire Medical Society and by serving as its first presi­ dent. Bartlett accepted inoculation for smallpox when the treatment was introduced in America. His support for education was consistent and was acknowledged by Dartmouth College, which gave him the honorary A. M. degree in 1790 and the honorary M. D. in 1792. In 1888

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Amesbury raised a bronze statue in his honor. John Greenleaf Whit­ tier wrote verses for the occasion, a poem which, in its tribute to the local illustration of the public virtue, concluded: And Thou, 0 land he loved, rejoice That in the countless years to come Whenever Freedom needs a voice These sculptured lips shall not be dumb ! 1

20 THEODORE SEDGWICK Intrepid High Federalist Theodore Sedgwick (May 9, 1746-January 24, 1813), lawyer, jurist, entrepreneur and political leader of Massachusetts during the Revolution and early years of the Republic. A very "High" Federalist indeed. Of the opinion throughout his career that "energy in government" was necessary "to render [the] revolution truly beneficial." The mortal enemy of all democratic demagogues, who were for him "Jacobins" and "men prowling in the dark, " deserving of "gibbets and racks." From January 1788 and the Massachusetts ratification convention until the hour of his death, one of the ruling elders of that American Zion; one of those New England supporters of the Constitution and the administration of George Washington who thought of themselves as being "by nature" or "divine elec­ tion" the proper custodians of the nation's political future. A fear­ less partisan, large in person, pompous, highhanded and intolerant. A relentless enemy of all rabble-rousers, the politics of "philos­ ophy and theories" and "so much talk of equality." Committed to order and degree. Of the opinion that ". . . there are grades in society which are necessary to [its] existence. T his is a self-evident proposition." Marked in his mature thought by a traumatic experi­ ence with Shays's Rebellion and the 1786 collapse of government in his part of Massachusetts-Berkshire and other counties west of Springfield. A decisive person who once remarked, "I never like half measures . . . I think them disgraceful and dangerous." Theodore Sedgwick was born at West Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Benjamin and Ann Thompson Sedgwick and great-great­ grandson of General Robert Sedgwick of Bedfordshire, a soldier and sober Puritan who went forth to Charleston in New England in 198

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1635 and so well served the Massachusetts Bay Colony that in 1653 the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, gave him a commission to attack the Dutch on the Hudson and to campaign in the Caribbean. After keeping store in West Hartford, Benjamin Sedgwick moved to Corn­ wallis. Shortly thereafter he died, leaving young Theodore depen­ dent upon his brother, John, for education and support. After irreg­ ular schooling on the frontier, Theodore went up to Yale in the winter of 1761-1762. There he studied for three years and consid­ ered the possibility of a lifework in the ministry. Then, because of some mysterious offense against the discipline of the school, The­ odore was forced to leave Yale without his degree-which he did not receive until 1772. Not long after his departure from Yale, Sedgwick turned from theology to the study of law. After a year with his kinsman, Colonel Mark Hopkins, one of the best lawyers in west­ ern Massachusetts, Theodore was admitted to practice in Berkshire County in the Court of Common Pleas and General Sessions. Following a short stay in Great Barrington, he moved to Sheffield and prospered. From the beginning of his career he was a scholar in the law, a man of citations and precedents, powerful in his plead­ ings. Soon he was an established member of the local gentry. W hen some of these were indecisive in their response to New England's conflict with British authority, Theodore Sedgwick drafted his com­ munity's official comment on such events as the Boston Massacre of March 1770 and resulting acts of Parliament. His handiwork came to be known as the Sheffield Resolves. Issued on January 12, 1773, these are his first important political pronouncements. The Sheffield Resolves appeared very early in the series of co­ lonial protests and proclamations which preceded ( and fed into) the armed conflict of the American Revolution but are not well known. In them Selectman Sedgwick continued to profess loyalty to George III, in which commitment he persisted until the Mas­ sachusetts Charter was abrogated in 1774. He could (indeed, as a conservative, he had no choice) be content with "invaluable rights and privileges which were transmitted to us by our worthy and independent ancestors" and he conflated his appeals to the English constitution with references to "privileges wherewith God and Na­ ture have made us free": namely, the rights of life, liberty, and property. Or rather, could do so "until �he bond be broken." But when the protections of the law were removed and replaced by the fiat of an appointed royal governor, Theodore Sedgwick labeled these actions of the Crown and Parliament "illegal . . . and uncon­ stitutional" and went over to the Massachusetts radicals in making

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ready for resistance, "whatever the issue might be. " Such commit­ ment was in keeping with his understanding of the purpose of all law and government. Even so, until April of 1776 he hoped for a peaceful settlement of the quarrels: a settlement without indepen­ dence. For he dreaded the internal effects of revolution on the social order of the community. Even in 1776 he feared the "tyranny of the mob. " Theodore Sedgwick served as secretary to a Berkshire County protest convention in 1774. He was military secretary to General John Thomas (with the rank of major) during that unfortunate sol­ dier's 1775 expedition into Canada. After the death of General Thomas, Sedgwick -resigned in disgust and returned to arms only briefly-in the campaign which concluded with victory at Saratoga, and at Peekskill in the summer of 1776. As Commissioner of Supply for the Northern Department of the Continental Forces, 1775-1778, Sedgwick performed an indispensable role in collecting for the Commissary. But his primary occupation in these years was in preventing abuses by the local Massachusetts safety committees, actions he regarded as organized torment of "the friends of order, " misconduct which would foment internal revolution by the "mob­ ish, ungovernable, refractory people." Sedgwick protected moder­ ate men of property from confiscation and arrest as "Tories." That the effort to "establish a free and equal government on the ruins of tyranny . . . [should not] introduce a state of total anarchy and licentiousness, on the ruins of all government whatever" was his determination. Until Massachusetts adopted its 1780 constitution there was very little government in Berkshire County. In the ab­ sence of law every man of merit might expect to face a "popular malignant malice." Theodcre Sedgwick was, under the new Mas­ sachusetts constitution, elected to the General Court in 1780, 1782, 1783, 1787, and 1788. In 1784 and 1785 he served as senator for his section of the state. In 1781 the "rabble" temporarily revived and turned Sedgwick out of office. But he held the field from that time until 1801. In these years in state politics Sedgwick labored to defend the currency, to ensure economy and the operation of the courts, and to insist that taxes be collected and the terms of con­ tracts observed . Yet he wished to be generous to returning Loyalist refugees and reasonable with communities in economic distress. Even while in the state legislature Sedgwick often voted as a nation­ alist, urging that Massachusetts pay its share into the treasury of the Continental Congress. Though from a back country district, he supported the commercial interests of the seacoast towns; and,

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once in the Massachusetts state senate, he was greatly occupied with questions of budget, the impost and special duties as repre­ sentative from the legislature in a boundary negotiation with New York. In general, his conduct in these years foreshadowed the Fed­ eralist that he was to become. In June of 1785, Theodore Sedgwick was elected as delegate to the Continental Congress, where he continued until August of 1786. In June of 1787 he was once more elected to the Congress. In 1788 he was selected to be the Speaker of the Massachusetts House. In these years Sedgwick continued to be involved with many of the ques­ tions which had concerned him be£ ore his initial experience with national politics. But in Congress he discovered the new problem of divergence of interests dividing the sections of the United States on many issues: the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty with Spain (a choice between commerce for New England or navigation rights on the Missis­ sippi); troubles on the frontier (with Massachusetts slow to finance military support for the settlers); and a preference for an agri­ cultural economy on the part of Southern members. However, in the midst of these activities and this education in a broader Ameri­ can politics, Sedgwick's chief preoccupation was with the problems of popular " frenzy and insurrection." Sedgwick himself played a role in the tumult of Shays's Rebellion. His life was threatened frequently. On one occasion, after rushing ahead of other vigilan­ tes, he rode down on a mob at West Stockbridge and dispersed singlehandedly a sullen host of envious egalitarians. He had orga­ nized his own militia; but on February 27, 1787, while he was absent from his fine new home at Stockbridge, the "rabble" had its revenge on Judge Sedgwick, broke up his furniture, insulted his servants, abused his apprentices, made free with his liquor and tossed his best clothes out a window. Sedgwick never got over this indignity, even though the offending malcontents were caught and punished. By it he was dissuaded from an earlier idea of secession by New England-"contracting the limits of the confederacy to such as are natural and reasonable." His support for the proposed United States Constitution was motivated directly by the hope of preventing up­ heavals like the one that tore apart Berkshire County. Western Massachusetts was one of the few places in the United States where the struggle for independence was sometimes under­ stood as an attempt to create a society of equals, economic and social as well as political. There the " ferment" of democracy went beyond what the leaders of American society intended, or could accommodate. Though he had brought a case to end Negro slavery

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in Massachusetts, and in that cause had employed a strict reading of the Bill of Rights in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, The­ odore Sedgwick hoped to get from the proposed federal Constitu­ tion, above all else, a check on the leveling spirit some of his neigh­ bors had inherited with their Puritanism from the English radicals of the 1640s: "Every man of information is convinced that the end of government cannot be attained by the exercise of principles founded on Democratic equality. A war is now actually levied on the virtue, property, and distinctions in the community and howeyer there may be an appearance of temporary cessation of hostilities, yet the flame will again and again break out." After he had been selected by the electors of Stockbridge to be their representative in the exam­ ination of the document made in Philadelphia, Sedgwick labored with great energy to produce Federalist delegates to the Massachu­ setts ratification convention from the other communities in his area. Indeed, he built a complete Federalist organization in Berkshire County-a network which would eventually dominate Massachu­ setts politics west of the Connecticut River, and which made of its creator a national power. As he reported to his friends, this victory was not easily achieved: "[The Antifederalists] are very industrious, endeavoring to keep their forces in the field . . . with the temper described by Milton of his devils . . . . " However, Sedgwick in this labor had help from like-minded men all across his state: " . . . on the other side the friends of order, of government and the constitu­ tion possess such a superiority not only in their cause but in their talents as gives the most pleasing prospect of success." The Massachusetts ratification convention met in Boston from January 9,1788, until February 6. Sedgwick operated as one of the Federalist leaders in that gathering, functioning in concert with Fisher Ames, Rufus King, former Governor James Bowdoin, Na­ thaniel Gorham, Theophilus Parsons, General Benjamin Lincoln, and Caleb Strong. He was appointed to the committee called upon to draw up the rules and regulations governing the meeting. He also sat on the committee asked to prepare a list of subsequent amendments to be recommended with an unconditional ratifica­ tion. Moreover, he spoke frequently in the debates of the conven­ tion proper, belittling Massachusetts's distrust of its own elected representatives (as if they were "devils"), responding with feigned democratic scruples at complaints concerning the omission of a property qualification for membership in the Congress of the United States, insisting that the new government have the power to tax individual citizens directly. The choice facing the delegates was, in

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the calculus of Theodore Sedgwick, either to affirm the Constitu­ tion "or dissolve all government and live as savages." But his strongest work was done against the claim that the Constitution would produce a "consolidation" and destroy the independence and sovereignty of individual states. With the house narrowly di­ vided, Sedgwick was cautious in this exchange. Writing to a friend he insisted, "The whole business of internal police is left in the hands of State Government. Had the national government under­ taken to guaranty the several rights of citizenship contained in their declaratory bills, it would have given a right of interference which would naturally tend to check, circumscribe and finally annihilate all state power." What Sedgwick defended in the Massachusetts convention was a "mixed," not a national government, with a divi­ sion of sovereignty which made unreasonable the common fear of tyranny and a standing army. No horns of the dilemma for so important an exchange, no canting and no rant. In 1787-1788 there were limits, even with "High" Federalism. A Bill of Rights might violate such limits. Once Massachusetts had voted by a majority of 187-168 to accept the new Constitution, Theodore Sedgwick set about being elected from his district to the First Congress of the United States. To be sure, there was opposition to his campaign; for Berkshire con­ tinued to be a divided community, full of extreme democrats, men who hated courts and law and tax collectors and who understood the necessity for deference not at all. Theodore Sedgwick was there­ fore a negative figure to such men-"the disaffected." Yet after five elections, they were subdued and overawed. To accomplish this end, newspapers had to be established and distributed at little expense to the subscribers. The lie that the orthodox Sedgwick was a Deist had to be confronted and put down with authoritative tes­ timony. And the candidate was required to speak lovingly of the agricultural life and of his hatred of taxes on land. In the end he won by seven votes. But once Sedgwick was elected for Congress he began to play an important role immediately. For one thing, Congressman Sedgwick helped to prevent James Madison from extending the Bill of Rights to compel the states to respect basic individual civil liberties. They disagreed on what such liberties should be. But he did join with Madison and other Federal­ ists in fighting amendments which would have restricted the gen­ eral government inside its own sphere of supremacy. In contrast to what he had said when recommending ratification, Sedgwick de­ fended the notion that there were certain unspecified, "implied"

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powers. In the process he marked out for himself a course he was to pursue throughout his legislative career-£our terms in the House (1789-1796), followed by a portion of one term in the Senate (17961799), and one final term as United States Representative and Speaker of the House (1799-1801). In the Congress Theodore Sedgwick was the constant advocate of frugality: ". . . it was a principle from which he professed himself determined never to depart, not to dissipate [government] property in idle or visionary projects of generosity." On frontier defense and Jay's Treaty he was the New Englander-as on tariff and the receipt of antislavery petitions. But most of the time while in Congress he labored consistently to establish and consolidate the power of the central government. He defended the authority of the President to select and replace his own cabinet officers, and to conduct foreign policy without interference from the House of Representatives. Of­ ten Theodore Sedgwick acted as a mouthpiece for Alexander I-Iam­ ilton, spoke for his system and was considered for his place as Secretary of the Treasury when Hamilton resigned. In November of 1791 he authored the original Fugitive Slave Law, maintaining that abolition throughout the country "would be the height of mad­ ness." He was also instrumental in the adoption of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Sedgvvick was involved in most of the important legislative ini­ tiatives of his party. In many cases he pushed for stronger legisla­ tion than what was approved. But in connection with no other issue is the self-righteous, passionate, perfervid nature of his politics better revealed than in his reaction to the impact of the French Revolution on America. Admirers of egalitarian France and Citizen Genet were, in Sedgwick's lexicon, "fools, " "Jacobins, " and "sans­ culottes" -all one and the same. All notions of "rights" were, in his view, nodified by the needs of society . In the Federalist attack on the "Democratic Societies, " he thundered, " . . . there is no one less desirous of checking a fair discussion on public issues" than him­ self; but ". . . these clubs which had made so much talk of equality had assumed a fanaticism and an intolerance of the opinions of others completely antagonistic to true republicanism." Hence a law to keep French radicals out of the United States was obviously a measure of prudence, along with military appropriations prepara­ tory to a war with the new European republic. Furthermore, a big army could be employed to put "Virginia to the test" -subdue the "wicked" so numerous in that place. With Hamilton and Pickering, Sedgwick broke with John Adams because the latter's Federalism

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was of a softer variety-because he had made peace with France and couldn' t bring himself to hate V irginia all of the time. This division, with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, brought an end to all of their careers in national politics. Sedgwick did his best to move Federalist votes to Burr when the election was thrown into the House. With the failure of this strategy, he resigned and withdrew to Massachusetts in disgust, concluding his congressional tenure with an extended apology to the electors of his district, Sedgwick's

Farewell.

In 1802 Theodore Sedgwick was appointed Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in which office he served until his death. He had once asked John Adams for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, and for a time he hoped to be Chief Justice in Massachusetts. In both of these ambitions he was disappointed. Yet he was a distinguished judge, and a real help to his erstwhile rival, Chief Justice Theophilus Parson, in reforming and professionalizing the Massachusetts bar and legal system. In his final years he also played the role of Jeremiah for the slowly dying Federalist Party. Sedgwick continued to inveigh against pol­ iticians who pretended to a high view of human nature and who flattered the worst instincts in the electorate. After Jefferson im­ posed his Embargo on foreign trade, Sedgwick came to be of the opinion that "it will probably become impossible" to preserve the Union. "Submission is not, then, to be expected, " he declared. His mood in these moments is an explanation of the temper of New En­ gland as expressed in the Hartford Convention of 1814. Throughout his public life Sedgwick was this kind of Federalist weathervane, and his surviving correspondence offers a window on a forgotten world . Sedgwick speculated in lands and railroads. He was a friend to education ( especially Williams College), a pillar of the Congrega­ tional Church (sworn enemy of atheists), and a distinguished mem­ ber of his profession. He left behind him a considerable and impor­ tant progeny who, over the years, came to rest around him in Stockbridge in the pattern of a great pie. Though often hated, he was held in contempt by very few. Moreover, for those interested in the special motives of Massachusetts in adopting the Constitution in 1788, he is a source of wholesome and much-needed instruction. Of his public spirit and important influence in the early history of the Republic there can be no question. 1

21 SAMUEL LIVERMORE The Sage of Holderness Samuel Livermore (May 25, 1732-May 15, 1803), lawyer, coun­ try squire, jurist, and New Hampshire political leader. A cautious, moderate man, but also a friend of order. Hence a Federalist of the local-minded variety who, almost by inadvertence, became, in the early sessions of the Congress of the United States, a national figure. During the last years of the colonial period an associate of Governor John Wentworth and King's Attorney for his province from 1769 until John Wentworth's departure with the outbreak of hostilities. Also, in the same years, Judge-Advocate of New Hamp­ shire's Admiralty Court. Played no role in the agitation leading up to the American Revolution. But no Tory, having withdrawn to the vastness of his estates at Holderness, on the frontier, when royal authority began to disappear. A rural magnate who kept a fine table and took care to get on with his neighbors. Therefore in 1788 only a very temperate Federalist, popular among the rural folk of the back country of his state even though he had been a part of the old regime, was a lawyer, an Anglican and a man of property. Suc­ cessful in using this influence to secure the ratification of the Con­ stitution in New Hampshire. In his state's convention called to consider the merits of the proposed compact, made the motion which resulted in the approval of that instrument. Samuel Livermore was the son of Deacon Samuel and Hannah Browne Livermore and the great-great-grandson of John Livermore who had, in or before 1635, emigrated to Watertown, Massachusetts to become a freeman of that township. John Livermore's descen­ dants prospered . When young Samuel was born in 1732, his par­ ents enjoyed comfortable circumstances in Waltham, Massachu206

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setts. The boy was educated there and at the College of New Jersey, from which he was graduated B.A. in 1752. Samuel then taught school and read the law with Judge Edmund Trowbridge of Cam­ bridge, Massachusetts, in his time the most learned member of the bar in that Puritan commonwealth. Samuel was in 1756 admitted to practice before the Middlesex County Court of Common Pleas. For a season he was situated at Waltham, but then relocated to Ports­ mouth, New Hampshire, where he quickly established a reputation for competence. Later he moved to Londonderry, a Scotch-Irish settlement, and built his manor house at Holderness, further to the north. He served a term in the General Assembly (1768-1770), and held the appointive offices mentioned above . His retirement during the period of crisis left him with friends in every camp across the full spectrum of New Hampshire politics. He had been an attorney to many plain men and had won their confidence with his common­ sense approach to the law. By marriage to the daughter of the state's first Anglican clergyman he was also linked to the old ruling gentry . When in 1776 he was selected to be the first attorney general for an independent New Hampshire no one was surprised. In 1779 he sat quietly for Holderness in the General Court. However, he attempted nothing of importance in a public capacity for the new government until he was dispatched by the legislature in January of 1780 as a commissioner to the Continental Congress in the dispute over Ver­ mont and the New Hampshire Grants. Livermore also served as a regular delegate to the Congress of the Confederation in 1781-1782 and from 1785 to 1787. From 1782 to 1790 he was Chief Justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire and there£ore he brought con­ siderable authority to his service in the New Hampshire ratification convention. In 1789 Samuel Livermore was elected to a seat in the First Con­ gress of the United States. He was reelected in 1791 and then served as United States Senator for his state from 1793 to 1801. From 1795 to 1799 he was President Pro Tempore of that body. And also pre­ sided over the New Hampshire state constitutional convention of 1791. In all of these roles Livermore was the same man he had been in avoiding partisan extremes at the outbreak of the Revolution-a very mild "friend of Government" who opposed the assumption of state debts as "aggrandizement of the Federal power, " supported the right of state legislatures to "instruct" members of Congress, yet voted to accept Jay's Treaty. As he had on the New Hampshire bench and in the convention at Exeter, Congressman and Senator Livermore eschewed the abstract and the doctrinaire. He had no

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interest in fostering the "liberty of savages, " aboriginal and socially unconfined, among his countrymen. Furthermore, he doubted the validity of "natural rights" theory, connecting it with the relinquish­ ment of "all law that contradicted or thwarted [the] passions and desires [of its] advocates." American liberty, in his view, was an inherited liberty: it "arose from law and justice" as experienced in an habitual context and derived its force from the social bonds linking together a people who "boasted of having always been free . " In a debate concerning pictures or images to be placed on the currency, George Washington was his choice for a symbol of pre­ scriptive liberty, not "a wild animal breaking chains" such as more advanced spirits proposed. Yet he wished to see freedom and order reconciled by local authorities and, in the House of Representatives debate on the Judiciary Act of 1789, voted to restrict the number and jurisdiction of the federal courts to a minimum, lest they become "a government within a government." Samuel Livermore retired from public life two years before his death . At the end he had become a New Hampshire institution, homely and rough of speech, shrewd and forceful but a good patri­ arch : a great host who ran the local mill, settled claims, fixed the roads and supported his church. He is a summary figure for New Hampshire Federalism. And his family continued to produce rep­ lications of the species in subsequent generations. 1

22 JAMES DUAN E Conservative Peacemaker James Duane (February 6, 1733-February 1, 1797), lawyer, jur­ ist, land developer, and New York political leader. A High Federalist and one of the most conservative public figures in his state. Ever at odds with the "leveling [ and] vile factious spirit" of New England's democratic spokesmen. Frustrated by them in his claims to Vermont lands. One who, according to his biographer, Edward P. Alexander, "worked diligently to prevent independence from Britain [from] becoming synonymous with equality for the common man." Decid­ edly a legalist and an Old Whig who, in September 1774, opposed arguing the American position from the appeal to natural rights. A pillar of the old order in New York politics and "hardly a political enthusiast." Yet, according to Dixon Ryan Fox, possessed of "such confidence in the solid, fundamental English institutions [ of New York] that he did not for a moment think that the upheavals in the seventeen eighties would endanger them.". Episcopalian and slave­ holder. Convinced that most men are in need of being "governed thoroughly, " yet well appreciated for his amiable disposition, his Christian piety, and conciliatory skill in accommodation. The son of Anthony Duane, a prosperous merchant, and Althea Kettleton Duane, Anthony's second wife (the daughter of a wealthy mer­ chant). Born in New York City, to which his father had emigrated from Ireland ca. 1700. Raised in an atmosphere of privilege, edu­ cated privately, and trained at law in the chambers of James Alex­ ander. After the completion of his studies, admitted to the bar in August 1754. During the next two decades one of the most suc­ cessful attorneys in the American colonies, with a law practice dealing with all manner of cases. 209

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Though he was a firm defender of the title of his neighbors in New York to all the rights enjoyed by Englishmen in England and helped draw up a remonstrance against the Stamp Act, James Duane, like other powerful members of his community, was propelled with great reluctance toward separation from Great Britain and viewed the prospect of the internal domestic consequences of that sever­ ance with great trepidation. In 1768 he took part in the non-impor­ tation campaign in his city but still could write as late as 1770, "God forbid that we should ever be so miserable as to sink into a Republic ! Rather let us hope, with the Encrease of Numbers and opulence, to rise in time, to a perfect copy of that bright Original [the English constitution] which is the envy of the world ! " Nonetheless, he was present as a delegate from New York for at least a portion of every session of the Continental Congress from 1774-1783. In May 1774, Duane was elected to the Committee of Corre­ spondence for New York, which in turn swiftly dispatched him to be one of its representatives in Philadelphia. After some dispute, he was reelected to this post by later sessions of the Provincial Conven­ tion and the state legislature. As a member of the Provincial Con­ vention, Duane had a role in the drafting of New York's original 1777 state constitution. In all of this political activity he complained of injury to his professional life and threatened, at regular intervals, to withdraw from the public business. Yet as he backed his way into politics (like Gouverneur Morris, accepting the offices to which he was elected in order to keep "dangerous men" out of them), so he also backed toward independence. In Congress he attacked the tendency of some of his colleagues to make loud speeches on the rights of man and in 1774 he supported the plan of Pennsylvania's Joseph Galloway to create a new imperial legislature for British North America: an arrangement which would have left the regime in New York intact. The theory of human equality he called "a feeble support" for the American cause, and suggested instead a position that looked to history, "grounding our rights on the laws and con­ stitution of the country from whence we sprung." Duane continued to concede the power of George III to call upon his American subjects for "supply" to maintain his overseas establishment, and of Parliament to regulate colonial commerce. Whitehall's indiffer­ ence to the Olive Branch Petition reconciled Duane to American independence, though he took no hand in the business of making it official. As a member for New York, Duane signed the Association (which blocked trade with Great Britain), agreed to raise an army and to

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spend money in its support. Yet even at this early moment of preparation for the disorders of civil war, he urged his friends, "we must think in time of the means of asserting the Reins of Gov' t when these commotions shall subside. " As to the positive social consequences which should follow from a judicious selection of the commanders of American forces in the field, the prospects for pre­ venting a revolution within the Revolution, Duane wrote Robert Livingston, "Licentiousness is the natural effect of civil discord and it can only be guarded against by placing the command of the troops in the hands of men of property and Rank who, by that means, will preserve the same authority over the minds of the people which they have enjoyed in the hour of tranquility. " The cautious lawyer from New York dealt with Indian problems and finance. He protected the claims of his state to lands in Vermont. In that frontier community he was so unpopular that its citizens put a price of £15 on his head, though in his view he did no more than defend good order and the rights of property. According to Alfred Fabian Young, Duane became the "near boss" of the Continental Congress, and sat on almost every impor­ tant committee. For subtle speech he had a wide reputation, and he chose to exercise that power and influence to promote the creation of a compact of general government linking the cooperating free commonwealths into a new nation. Duane had a hand in the final draft of the Articles of Confederation. In May and June of 1781, the radical press published attacks on his loyalty which were answered by a vote of confidence from the New York legislature. From 1782 until 1790, he was a member of Governor George Clinton's Council . In February of 1784, he was appointed mayor of New York, in which office he served until 1789; and he was a member of the New York Senate from 1782 through 1790. After the restoration of American authority in New York City at the end of the war with England, he was the principal citizen of his community and one of the most respected men in his state. In the New York ratification convention at Poughkeepsie, James Duane was one of the Federalist leaders. In his role as conciliator he had an important part in the victory of his party over what was originally a large Antifederalist majority. Unlike Alexander Hamil­ ton and Chancellor Robert Livingston, Duane was not abrasive in manner or highhanded in his dealings with delegates from rural counties. He also spoke frequently, reminding his audience that government by the Continental Congress "had almost been de­ feated by lack of power, " warning them against any complaints ad-

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dressed to the local practices and domestic institutions of other states. Attempts at forcing a decision were delayed, awaiting ratifi­ cation in Virginia. The Antifederalists were allowed to grumble at length, and an agreeable committee on amendments was formed. Bit by bit the cautious Antifederalists were detached from their more stubborn friends; and finally there were enough votes to ratify without conditions-nothing more significant than a few "recom­ mended" amendments. James Duane had a calming influence over the cours� of these events, and served on the committee authorized to draft amend­ ments. In debate he urged that "the melancholy experience of our country ought to have more influence on our conduct than all the speculations and elaborate reasoning of the ablest men." For Duane the "sophists and calculators" were the advanced democrats who did not see that political authority and religion were necessary to keep men "from running wild"-and the Antifederalists who con­ jured up fearful images of what the Constitution might bring. He was delighted to see it approved in New York, pleased to watch it unfold into a new government which first functioned in his city, and honored to accept a 1790 appointment to the federal bench from his old friend and frequent companion, President Washington. With the dangers of popular excess, which began with the Revolu­ tion, averted by checks more formidable than the virtue of the people, he was in 1794 free to retire to private life and his estate in the Mohawk Valley. James Duane in his later years gave much of his attention to the needs of his denomination and to the revival of King's College as Columbia. As judge he had struggled to preserve the common law and to protect Tories who wished to rejoin the communities of which they had once been members. Duanesburg, near Schenec­ tady, is a community which he created by selling and renting farms on easy terms, and is his lasting monument. He is buried beneath the church which he built there, resting in the midst of his descen­ dants. 1

IV. AND THE WAR CAME

23 A LONG FAREWELL TO UNION The Southern Valedictories of 1 860-1 861 As we come toward the conclusion of the bicentennial of the drafting and adoption of the Constitution of the United States in an atmosphere dramatically colored by exchanges and disputes con­ cerning the origins, true meaning, and continuing authority of that fundamental law, it may be hoped that we have finally arrived at the right time for looking back and appreciating the importance of those even more heated discussions of the Constitution which oc­ curred in the nation's capital during the "great secession winter" of 1860-1861. For the relation between the current arguments and those of one hundred twenty-five years ago is direct and unmistak­ able. And it is a connection which reminds this generation of the special status of the Constitution as symbol and sovereign authority over us: as the structure/process/compact to which all Americans swear allegiance in place of king or people. With Southerners the moment for this retrospection is even more propitious in that we come now to a time when our countrymen from North and West are better prepared to penetrate the curtain of their inherited mythol­ ogy, what Robert Penn Warren calls the "treasury of virtue, " and discover there how prescient the Southern forefathers were in pre­ dicting what would happen once they had departed from the pro­ tections of "the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is." The paradox which I here explore (as significant now as it was in 1860) is the one defined that year by Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, when he declared to his fellow senators that it would be "treason to the Constitution" to maintain a political connection between the sections once the basis and predicate of that connection had been "annulled" or "overthrown." What, we must ask, are the present 215

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implications of this position vis-a-vis the Constitution which the South, through the official statements of its public men, assumed in the very act of separating itself from its sister commonwealths above the Old Surveyors' Line? For contrary to what we are taught by the most recent generation of radical historians, secession was about the Constitution, a positive commentary or reading. And as Southerners took pains to specify, not a rejection of it. We can read the valedictory orations of the South's spokesmen in the old Congressional Globe: Toombs, on January 7, 1861, th�n several almost forgotten addresses from D. L. Y ulee and Stephen R. Mal­ lory of Florida, C. C. Clay and Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama; then later, at the end of the series on January 21, 1861, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I will return to Davis's summary performance in concluding these remarks. There were, of course, other speeches given in this series, some of them in the Senate and some elsewhere. For instance, Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas, on March 7, 1861, gave an address answering, on its eleventh anniver­ sary, Daniel Webster's famous salute to the spirit of nationalism. Closely related were a number of apologies for secession prepared by the state secession conventions. Or in the Southern legislatures. But the January series from the United States Senate is sufficient for our purposes on this occasion. For no more characteristic Southern speech has survived for our examination from those times-no speech more definitive of the watershed Southerners crossed when they surrendered an identity which they felt had been stolen from them: no speech that embodied better the continuity of that cross­ ing with their devotion to a federal conception of a law which limits law, and of the liberty of the citizen secured by it. The farewells to Union delivered by the Southern senators who had been called home by the withdrawal of their states from the plural oneness invented by the Framers, from the ostensible protec­ tions of the federal compact, are in every case reluctant perfor­ mances. Not embarrassed or half-hearted, but ever so reluctant! They suggest no gleeful separation, nor even any rancor at its neces­ sity. Neither do they repent of the decades spent within the Union by the communities for which they speak. To the contrary, they recall those happy days gone by with affection and nostalgic emotions compounded by their recollection of the preconditions of such coop­ erative, untroubled felicity. Indeed, they lament the abrogation of such fraternity. Senator Y ulee speaks of a grateful memory" of past connection and of a just Southern pride in the continued develop­ ment" of the nation left behind. To this his colleague from Florida, II

II

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Stephen Mallory, added, "from the Union governed by the Con­ stitution as our Fathers made it, there breathes not a secessionist on [Florida's] soil" and that "we leave, with profound regret, those whom we will cherish in our hearts, and whose names will be hallowed by our children" as "true friends of the Constitution." C. C. Clay of Alabama is less ingratiating. But Benjamin Fitzpatrick of the same state is quiet and pleasant in his departure. And Davis insists that he carries with him "no hostile remembrance." Yet no one is more emphatic than Davis about secession, or the link be­ tween that momentous decision and the South's belated determina­ tion to "recur to the principles upon which our government was founded": its observation of the original American bond of unity. Another ingredient in these elaborate farewells is less concil­ iatory, but part of the same rhetoric of reasonable constitutionalism. What I refer to now is the regular iteration of Southern objections to gratuitous verbal abuse-abuse which reaches outside the Constitu­ tion for its authority, appealing to a "higher law"; and the relation of such abuse to the possibility of a constitutional morality which will preserve the Union. Toombs had made the theme of rhetorical good manners (as opposed to righteous self-aggrandizement) his own for more than a decade when he touched upon it again in his farewell. Moreover, his friend Alexander Stephens, soon to be vice­ president of the Southern Confederacy, had long identified vituper­ ative excess as the primary stimulant to disunion. In his view, to "put the institutions of nearly one-half of the states under the ban of public opinion and condemnation" was, as a "general principle" of political behavior, "quite enough of itself to arouse a spirit not only of general indignation but a revolt on the part of the proscribed." In 1861 his analysis of the inevitable consequence of Yankee miscon­ duct seemed especially cogent to most Southerners, since all of the high-flown outrage at Southern modes and orders expressed be­ tween 1819 and 1860 might legitimately have come into play during the deliberations which produced and approved of our national Constitution. Once disapproved in 1787, the South might have gone its own way. But nothing of the kind occurred at that time. The compromises with respect to slavery written into the political fabric of the United States were put into their place with men from all sections standing on both sides of every disputed point. Yet acrimony toward slaveholders per se had no place in the Framers' discussions, either in Philadelphia or in the ratifying conventions. To draw the South into the Union on one set of terms and then, on the basis of subsequent personal illumination, berate it for insisting

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on self-determination concerning its domestic institutions, even though this was the approach agreed to by that original Union, and in those original terms; to then insist on a right to interpret the bond of Union on the basis of a sectional moral superiority; and finally to invoke the "religious mysticism" of Union to prevent Southerners from acting according to human nature in withdrawing their offen­ sive presence from those affronted by it-all of this dynamic in the conduct of Northern politicians seemed outrageous and intolerable to a generation of Southern leaders who could not believe in the advantage of preserving the Constitution within that kind of Union, and who therefore attempted to do it the other way. As they specified in leaving Washington City. Y ulee of Florida grounds his apology for secession in Northern "indulgence of unregulated moments of moral duty." Meaning, of course, that such moments in a healthy political atmosphere should be regulated ( or self-regulated) for the sake of the common good. Given the animosity of recent disputes between the sections and the self-assurance of Northern spokesmen, Y ulee wonders if the South could agree to a federal policy concerning any aspect of its conduct not covered by the original federal covenant and stop the process there, without facing the imposition of an unending series of such reformative innovations, inspired by ideological commit­ ment or fanatical enthusiasm, requiring an ever-growing central government. Could any community in the position of the South in January of 1861 run that risk? Clay of Alabama is more expansive than his colleague from Flor­ ida. He describes as a "declaration of war" the "libel" on Southern ways gathered in the rhetoric of the Republican platforms of 1856 and 1860. For, as Clay recognizes, to label your adversary a barbar­ ian is in some measure to release yourself from the obligation to treat him in a civilized fashion, to respect his life and property, to say nothing of his opinions. Clay sees the Northern offense against constitutionalism as being primarily linguistic, not historical or in­ terpretive : the exertion of "all the moral and physical agencies that human ingenuity can devise or diabolical malice can employ to heap odium and infamy upon us." The implicit expectation in these attacks on the virtue (as opposed to the judgment) of the Southern people-exercises in what rhetoricians call the diaboli-is that the people of the South are willing to live within the Union as "outlaws, branded with ignominy, consigned to execration and ultimate de­ struction." To which effrontery, in the person of its great champion, Clay responds, "Sir, are we looked upon as more or less than men?"

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One precondition of constitutional morality is thus rhetorical civility, as much endangered by the self-appointed censors of press, pulpit and rostrum of today as they were when the departing sen­ ator from Alabama threw down his gauntlet in defiance of their excesses. For, in a free society, the law cannot be maintained or interpreted against the will of a whole people, by compulsion and abuse: what Robert E. Lee meant when he spoke disparagingly of a Union held together by bayonets. And wherever we hear the lan­ guage suited to that strategy we must call it into account. I so insist because it is a strategy suited primarily to evading the restrictions of constitutional law and the narrow meaning of elections: a strategy for going against the Constitution of the United States or distorting its purpose by enlarging the scope of national authority. For if you attack your countryman as not merely mistaken but evil, you are not proceeding politically or at law. Instead you bespeak an author­ ity higher than statute or process and imply an intimacy with God's plan thusward. This strategy is called rhetorically oraculum-speak­ ing for the gods. It is incompatible with the rule of law. We must call it by its right name whenever it is brought against us. And concede nothing to its arrogance. Although at present we must, for the sake of the common good, shout it down where it stands, and not with­ draw quietly. But not only goodwill is necessary for the maintenance of a con­ tract between free men. Rigid observation of the terms agreed to is also required. And a clear awareness that one party to the connec­ tion cannot reserve the right to interpret it according to his views and still expect it to bind other parties offended by his construction. This is a simple proposition in logic and, I might also add, in ethics-since so much talk of morality surrounded the decision for secession. During the American Revolution spokesmen for the Pa­ triot cause reasoned that American obligations to the sovereign authority of King George III ended when he violated his constitu­ tional role as protector and defender under the British constitution of the inherited rights of Englishmen in America. In a word, he abdicated. And with him his ministers and subjects in the mother country who agreed with Crown and Parliament to bind the colo­ nies "in all cases whatsoever, " leaving the American residue of that constitutional identity with a group of rebels who invoked 1688, the Glorious Revolution, and the sovereignty of law. As viewed accord­ ing to this calculus, constitutions may be made and amended by regular process. But they cannot evolve or stretch into elastic sanc­ tions for calculated manipulation, subject to transformation by the

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exegetical legerdemain of skeptical theology or solipsistic literary criticism-the two sources of the formalist technique which is the most aggressive of the now fashionable methods of reshaping the law to radical purposes. Jefferson Davis, in his majestic farewell to years of service to the United States, refers directly to these ana­ logues. The major subject of his discourse is not, however, verbal abuse, but a misunderstanding of the relation of the Constitution to the language concerning equality which appears at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Davis's discussion of that lan­ guage is the other important component of the example left to us in these farewell addresses. For in our time, even more than in that of Senator Davis, there is an organized campaign set in motion by the highest levels of our political leadership, by the courts, the media and universities to swallow up the Constitution in a simplistic reading of the Declara­ tion, to conflate the two documents, confuse their purposes, and employ the combination to transform the meaning of Union into something instrumental in its promotion, through the agencies of government, of a wide variety of causes which seem, for the mo­ ment, worthy: the most cunning formula for political tyranny ever devised by the mind of man. Since the time when churches all across the North rang their bells to mourn the death of that murder­ ing fanatic, John Brown of Pottawatomie, we have been a nation threatened with any and every measure brought forward in the name of metaphysical equality. With the Union preserved (though changed) by war, we have departed further from the frame of gov­ ernment intended by the members of the Great Convention and leaders of the early Republic-most of this change coming down upon us in the name of the Fourteenth Amendment, as now usually misunderstood. Since 1860 the outer portal has been opened to malice and effrontery perfarmed in the cause of human rights-and we have been unable to close it, no matter how savage the prospect coming, in the name of said equality, toward our threatened gates. Whenever we speak reasonably and give the lie to partisan distor­ tion of its text, whenever we rise to protect the Constitution in its original, essentially procedural character, whenever we block the path against mad schemes threatening to the liberties of all Ameri­ cans, regardless of their announced purposes, we do, for our time, as Jefferson Davis did for his, "take the hazard, " against "destruc­ tive powers" and "tread in the path of our Fathers . . . , putting our trust in God, and in our own firm hearts." To submit to a distortion of the law, one made from authority, is

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not to agree to it. Nor should it be. Rather such submission is out of respect for the institution or office (as with a Supreme Court or President) and may readily coexist with open, forceful, and un­ feigned contempt for the ignorance, anachronism, and servile de­ votion to ideology which has for almost fifty years inf armed the deliberations of our High Court and much executive policy. If by means political and intellectual we make war with any success on the Justices who have offended, confront them wherever they have betrayed their obligations by imagining an equality that is more than equal treatment from a government with limited scope, then we may say with Alexander Stephens (speaking of other desperate remedies to the Virginia secession convention) that "we have res­ cued the Constitution from utter annihilation." It is labor worthy of our best efforts. And an especially important one in a period in our history when our countrymen are unusually conscious of their own obligations to do likewise. There would be a great propriety in having Southerners to serve as prototypes for what other good Americans achieve in preserving the Constitution . But to sit silent in the face of arrogant and impious distortion of our political and legal heritage, to lead the way toward obeisance to Leviathan out of a fear of what others will say if we object to traveling in that direc­ tion, would be to forfeit most of the inheritance which we are here gathered to celebrate in all its disinterested, untarnished splendor.

24 POISONED AT THE SOU RCE Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Myth of Southern Liberalism When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period which had begun when the Recon­ struction concluded. Similar events occurred in other Southern states, as when Harry Flood Byrd retired in Virginia, and Walter George no longer filled his seat from Georgia. In retrospect, the process, though it took thirty years, seems to have been an inexora­ ble one. Certainly, there are those who would have us think so. But such was not the experience of thoughtful men who stood in the midst of the tornado when the modern style of campaigning came to Southern politics; and nowhere was the storm greater or the destruction of the familiar political landmarks more widespread than when Lyndon Johnson ran against former governor Coke Ste­ venson in 1948-when the largest of the Southern states put aside the kind of leadership to which it had been attached since the time of its separate existence as an independent republic, sold its soul for a mess of pottage, and embraced as its hero a man whose chief distinction was not character but a capacity "to get things done." Robert A. Caro's T he Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent is the second volume of what will eventually be a four-part study. 1 When finished, his biography will, I suspect, turn out to be the most important work of its kind to be written in this decade. That the biography is by stages filling out the image of LBJ as a special kind of monster, the absolutely political creature, is already producing howls from amongst those politicians who have an investment in 222

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the myth of the reformed Southern conservative who took advan­ tage of the martyrdom of his predecessor in using the capacity of government to promote "good causes." But the reduction of that myth comes in a later volume and is only foreshadowed in these pages, chapters which tell instead of the middle years of Johnson's life following his 1941 defeat by Governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel and his return to the House of Representatives. The opportunism and ambition of this Lyndon Johnson corroborate the impression which readers of Caro's T he Years of Lyndon Johnson: T he Path to Power (1982) almost inevitably derived from that narrative of antecedents, boyhood, and early career. The heart of Caro's second volume is not just the race between LBJ and the old-fashioned governor from the Hill Country. Nor is it about how Johnson and his friends unquestionably stole this elec­ tion-with the assistance of Justice Hugo Black and the tacit sup­ port of a majority in the United States Supreme Court. Instead, Caro's focus is on the dramatic transformation of Johnson in that race from protege of Franklin D. Roosevelt into pragmatic conser­ vative and leader of the Southern bloc in the Congress. I have a friend here in Texas who, when Lyndon Johnson, once again a "national" Democrat, campaigned to be Vice President (1960) or President of the United States (1964), simply distributed to black clergymen, journalists, and honest liberal intellectuals copies of the candidate's early segregationist speeches and of the anti-union and Red-baiting oratory which Johnson had employed to discredit one of the most genuine conservatives ever to be part of the public life in the Lone Star State. Caro begins his book with the anomaly of President Johnson's actions in behalf of civil rights, and with the singing of an anti-war version of "We Shall Overcome" outside the White House while Johnson suffered within. His point in this early material is that the president toward whom these lyrics were di­ rected was never either a liberal or a conservative, but rather a man always hungry for power and interested in what might be done with it. As president of the United States, he misunderstood both of these enterprises, and discovered instead that power not connected firmly to an unshakable set of purposes and a traditional political rectitude, a Constitutional morality, provides only empty triumphs. There are never enough votes to shore up the self-respect of the politician who at bottom has no regard for himself-which seems much of the time to have been the case with Lyndon Johnson. But before rehearsing the 1948 Senate contest of Box 13 and the Duke of Duval, legendary moments in Texas and American history,

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Robert Caro tells us about Lyndon Johnson as a nondescript Demo­ cratic Congressman who introduced no legislation and made only ten recorded speeches during eleven years in the House of Repre­ sentatives. Here we read of Johnson's impatience with the slow process of advancement under the old regime of seniority domina­ tion-a system which gave to elderly Southern Democrats almost absolute legislative control of the business of the Republic. This Lyndon Johnson had made an early record in bringing electricity to his rural constituents. He had, for a time, raised money for_the party and had courted the favor of President Roosevelt. He was the ac­ knowledged disciple of Speaker Rayburn and, with the outbreak of World War II, became an ostensible "war hero, " winning the Silver Star by observing, under fire, an air raid over New Guinea. During these six terms Johnson introduced seven bills and arranged for the passage of two-both affecting only his district. Caro informs us that all of his evidence from those who could remember Represen­ tative Johnson from the Tenth Congressional District of Texas indi­ cates that he was cautious about taking sides in real controversies and reluctant to make enemies on either side of a question. Instead, he studied how to use his influence within the government and at the W hite House. For a time Johnson considered the possibility of launching his career toward new and greater heights by way of a major military appointment. Once he was certain that President Roosevelt had no such plans for him, he turned his attention to making money through his contacts in the Federal Communication Commission. The owners of a small radio station in Austin, KTBC, wished to sell it or get a better license. The FCC would let them do neither until Mrs. Lyndon Johnson rnade an offer. At that point the application for transfer, a better place on the dial and a proper license were, in sequence, swiftly approved. Lady Bird worked hard on this station, but it was Lyndon's ability to trade power for contacts and advertis­ ing that converted it into a gold mine, a business which made Lyndon Johnson a millionaire by 1948. There is much personal detail and psychologically revealing in­ formation in T he Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. What we learn about the operations of Congressman Johnson's office, about his vanity and misconduct, about his support for the Taft-Hartley Act, his opposition to FEPC (the Federal Employment Practices Commission), the anti-lynching bill, and every other proposal for improvements in civil rights demonstrates that he had not changed inwardly from what Caro showed us in the first volume of the

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biography, not even while he was turning his political coat in a conservative direction. His passionate oratory as an old-time segre­ gationist should be required reading for the mythologizers who wish him to be remembered as Southern liberal, a man of deep, progressive commitments. Said Johnson in 1947, "The proposed civil rights legislation is a farce and a sham-an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty." In 1949, in his first important speech as a United States Senator, he spoke to the same effect, arguing for an hour and a half in defense of the filibuster as a way of protecting Southern interests in preventing a civil rights law-inter­ ests which he identified as his own. As for lynching, it was the duty of the states to prosecute murderers. And if "a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom you cannot employ." Throughout this portion of his career in every vote and every public statement that he made concerning black hopes for a federally en­ forced uplifting of their race, the response of LBJ was, in effect, "They shall not overcome." Means of Ascent is full of interesting characters, rich in resources from the public record and the testimony of political figures, many of whom are still living. The narrative of the stealing of the 1948 election is complete and detailed and should close that question for all but the most fanatical partisans. And the story of how Texas's big business conservatives, oil men, contractors, developers, and man­ ufacturers, turned at the last minute to support Congressman John­ son against his independent and incorruptible adversary is as in­ structive to thoughtful conservatives now as it was to Texas politicians more than forty years ago. There is "conservatism"-and then conservatism. Men like Johnson, with a reputation for being "practical," often get the support of big business and big money. Not all the venality in public life comes from the politicians. But the heart of this book is the contrast between LBJ and Coke Robert Stevenson, the rancher from Junction, the classic Texas cat­ tleman/lawyer who by dint of hard work, intellect, and honesty had by 1946 become the most respected and admired public figure in the state . Caro has done well to rest the drama of his study in the contrast between the rectitude of Governor Stevenson, "Mr. Texas," and Lyndon Johnson's absolute opportunism, his seemingly bot­ tomless "capacity for deceit, deception and betrayal." With sy1nbolic propriety, Stevenson was named after Richard Coke, the "Redeemer" governor of Texas who, starting in 1873, had led his people out from underneath the shadow of occupation and Yankee despotism and into the bright light of reconstituted self-

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government. Throughout his adult life, Stevenson was an admirer and defender of the Texas Constitution written by the Confederate veterans who, once they regained control of their state, had had enough of being "refarmed" by the federal power, enough of law­ lessness, black militia, progressive rhetoric, and wasteful spend­ ing. As county judge and member of the state legislature, speaker of the house and lieutenant governor, his political life was continuous with the example of those heroic forebears. And from 1941-1946 Stevenson was the most successful of all Texas governor�, a sum­ mary figure for all the virtues once honored by his people: a man who brought improvements to the state while leaving a thirty-five million dollar surplus in the treasury; a man who was never bought or sold. Liberal reviewers of this biography have objected to Caro's focus on Stevenson either because they know too little of Texas history-or because they know too much. Down here Stevenson is still remembered, not in a vast library devoted to the protection of his reputation but in the continuing conservatism of his people. The contrast between Johnson and Stevenson is most directly visible in their styles of campaigning. Apart from the outright theft which brought him final victory, Johnson was the "packaged" can­ didate, sold by radio, newspapers, billboards, and mass mailings­ by endless repetition and a bottomless purse; while Governor Ste­ venson offered himself in a series of public appearances where he spoke on the issues and, until offended by him, was quiet about his opponent. Endorsements and an overwhelming statewide popu­ larity were Stevenson's assets, with a record of having tripled old age pensions, increased care for mental patients, instituted prison reform and augmented support for public welfare. Johnson on the other hand depended on the bloc vote, on San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and other communities that were for sale. W hen Stevenson spoke about Lyndon Johnson he told the truth, whereas Johnson described the Hill Country reactionary as a "communist" and a "tool of the labor unions." Repeated often enough to a gullible audience, the big lies created confusion. Lyndon had money enough to be on the radio three times a day during the last few weeks of the campaign. Stevenson's answers were given poor press coverage or completely ignored and his speeches on the radio were infrequent. Johnson stormed about, attacking the Truman civil rights bill, while Stevenson affirmed that the country was in need of a return to Constitutional values. He offered himself as a servant of the people while Johnson was repre­ sented as a worker of miracles, an extension of the appetites of the

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electorate. Writes Caro, "In the context of the politics that was his life Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win." Later he adds of his subject that his was "a morality in which nothing matters but victory and any maneuver that leads to victory is justified." Therefore, when Johnson's blitz of the Stevenson cam­ paign was not completely successful, when Stevenson was elected, it is not at all surprising that Johnson seized what he could not earn rightfully, acting with an "utter inability to comprehend questions of morality or ethics raised by his actions, an utter inability to feel that there was even a possibility that he had violated accepted standards of conduct and might be punished for that violation." It is most interesting that the massive outcry of liberal reviewers against this fine study (so large as to be itself a part of our intellec­ tual history) centers on a protest against Caro's treatment of Coke Stevenson. This reaction has been so perfervid as to make the biographer and not his book the subject of angry interviews and obiter dicta from Johnson's political allies, cronies and admirers and of uneasy commentary from the custodians of New South mythol­ ogy. Usually the complaint centers on the evidence that Stevenson failed to use the power of government while in office or on the charge that he was a segregationist. Such nonsense, of course, ignores the fact that conservatives do not agree to liberal assump­ tions about the value of "energy" in the governor of a state. More­ over, in 1948, any Texas politician who had hopes of being elected at least officially agreed to the inherited pattern of race relations in his state, the system of separation instituted to minimize tensions be­ tween whites and blacks. In 1948 Lyndon Johnson said more against plans for racial reform than did Coke Stevenson. But the younger candidate was attempting to establish for himself "a new, ultra-conservative image." Stevenson (who had encouraged resolu­ tions calling for better treatment of Mexican immigrants) had no such problem. The real trouble, however, that critics like Ronald Steel (writing March 11, 1990 in the New York Times Book Review) have with the Texas Cincinnatus from the falls of the Llano is that he undermines the moral melodrama of their version of Southern his­ tory. As does also Caro's book. It is certainly instructive that Steel goes so far as to insist that it was for the best that the 1948 Texas election was stolen. If we have had any sentimental faith about the devotion of most liberal intellec­ tuals to the regular operation of democratic institutions we should keep in mind Steel's casual observation, following an admission that theft triumphed with LBJ, that "it is hard to believe that the

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nation would have been better served with broad-shouldered Coke Stevenson in the Senate." W hat we hear in such language is the old proposition of Steel's kind : that "where the Left is served, any means will do." Caro's sin is that he is "nostalgic about the old Texas, " has learned to appreciate its virtues-which is a mistake no liberal reviewer will make. But alas for Professor Steel. The deed is done, the book written and published. And the "parallel lives" of Johnson and Stevenson are in place, raising the even deeper ques­ tion of what the great political changes, the statist onset of the 1960s signified; how they may best, in retrospect, be perceived. For if underneath the sleazy bombast of Lyndon Johnson's cam­ paigns there was nothing but corruption and more corruption, fathomless ambition, unattached to any recognizable principle of government or political morality; if it was all politics, just politics (a way of gaining and keeping pov1er for its own sake), then how can the causes which Johnson promoted as they functioned within the patterns of his manipulation, self-projection and opportunism es­ cape the taint of their origin. And what if fair housing and the War on Poverty, the Job Corps, and the Public Accommodations law amount to no more than any of the rest of Johnson's politics, can best be explained as strategies for restraining conflict within the Democratic Party. What if these measures differ from other Johnson maneuvers only in their artfulness, their after-the-fact usefulness in deceiving newsmen and opinion makers, politicians, and histo­ rians who never see beyond a noisy enthusiasm for ostensibly good causes: a posture which never quite deceived the electorate. W hy should we not resist attempts to separate certain measures from the circumstances of their origination by telling the purveyors of this mythology that they are guilty of an egregious version of the logical fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc: of using the result to identify the cause? W hy not maintain against them that, as the life of Lyndon Johnson demonstrates, the whole enterprise of liberal politics-effec­ tive liberal politics-tends in most instances to be poisoned at its source: tends to be about power and little else. No wonder Robert Caro has been in trouble with custodians of the received wisdom. His is more the "wicked Machiavel" than the malevolent subject of J. Evetts Haley's marvelous philippic, A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power. With so much laid down as a predicate, now let Caro give us the rest of the story, of the usurper legitimized and then enthroned.

25 LINCOLN AND THE LANGUAGE OF HATE AND FEAR A View from the South In 1854 we come to the central portion of Lincoln's career, and to the sequence of speeches which made of him a national figure and, finally, a President.To be specific, the watershed occurs after he had played a minor role in the campaign of Winfield Scott; after the deaths of Clay and Webster; after a brief (and maladroit) adven­ ture as the Sucker W hig in Congress; and (more important) after Stephen Douglas had returned from Washington to Illinois to an­ swer the objections made there among his neighbors to his part in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To the Little Giant's role in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the opening of the new territories west of Missouri and Iowa to their organization as either free or slave states there had been a general remonstrance in the Northwest. And, in the fall of 1854, Douglas went home to face the electorate which had raised him to a seat of power in the Senate of the United States and to account for the decisions that he had made in order to facilitate the development of the West. Douglas began this campaign of persuasion upstate, and then worked his way south. Outside of Chicago he was well received. But when he reached the Springfield area, Lincoln rose to give him answer.A few days later he repeated this reply to Douglas's set speech in Peoria, Illinois. It is with this second version of Lincoln's rejoinder (known since as the "Peoria Speech"), given October 16, 1854, that he puts behind him his identity as a disciple of Henry Clay.Though he does not officially leave the party until 1856-after many of its

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members have located themselves, with varying degrees of discom­ fort, under a heterogeneous Republican tent. 1 In considering what Lincoln now becomes it is extremely impor­ tant to remember what he had been in all the years before, how he has conducted himself as a man and an Illinois politician, and what shifts have occurred in the intellectual atmosphere in which he moves. For it is a consensus of all the scholarship that the "Peoria Speech" brings before us a "second Lincoln, " a figure greatly al­ tered from the moderate opportunist of the early years. �he usual explanation of this metamorphosis is that "devotion to a cause" has had a magic effect on the prairie lawyer. 2 Or that "the Kansas­ Nebraska Act transformed his thinking on the whole subject [ of slavery] . " 3 In the quiet years fallowing his return from the single ( and disastrous) term in the House of Representatives, Lincoln had probably thought of himself as a man with no political future. 4 Then, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he got another chance, but not as an orthodox Whig. He was not about to let it pass. With his 1854 reappearance in the political arena, we encounter suddenly (and without forewarning) an orator who suggests the character we have so often been encouraged to admire: encounter a foreshadowing of the man in the myth . And indeed Lincoln's change in manner is remarkable, but it is only a change in strategy. Know­ ing him as he was before Douglas left the opening on his flank, we find it difficult to believe that the human substance concealed within this altered persona is so very different from the clever, ruthless, and yet ordinary country politician who was a leader among Illinois W higs, from what one of his biographers describes as "an essen­ tially self-centered, small-town politician." 5 Such transformations, wrought from such materials, belong only to hagiography, and even with God's grace, the saints rarely come so far. There will always be, of course, a certain number who will believe Lincoln's statement that his only motive for returning to the cam­ paign trail was a desire to assist Richard Yates of Jacksonville in his candidacy for re-election as representative of the Seventh District of Illinois; and that, at that time, he had "no thought of a new political career for himself." 6 These credulous souls who accept on its face Lincoln's every word may also be persuaded that his newfound anxiety at the expansion of slavery, and his new rhetoric for treating of that prospect, issued from nothing more complex than his disin­ terested concern for the common good . Or that he was just an overgrown country boy, the vir bonus of the classical description: a "warm hearted and simple minded man, " as Herndon says in mock-

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ing summary of this view. 7 To convince these men of trust that the cause cannot interpret the man, that Lincoln should not be seen through the prism of his assassination, is to threaten something of themselves which is made specific in their attachment to the Lincoln myth. But the reading of these middle years, and of the language by which they are defined, which we will test in the fallowing discus­ sion is of another kind, resting on the theory that we should expli­ cate our Lincoln seriatim, from the beginning, forward; and that, as Herndon insisted, he was a "cool man," guided by "policy" in all things, by "profound calculation and logical precision." 8 It will be our argument that he proceeded and spoke as he did in order to get the way to the Senate open for himself. With his good friend, Senator Lyman Trumbull, we will assume that it is ". . . a popular mistake to suppose Mr. Lincoln free from ambition. A more ardent seeker after office never existed. From the time when, at the age of twenty-three, he announced himself a candidate for the legislature from Sangamon County, till his death, he was constantly either in office or struggling to obtain one." 9 Let us see how well this per­ spective accounts for what Lincoln said and did. While discussing Lincoln's earliest reactions to the Kansas-Ne­ braska Act and his effort to capture the Senate seat of his old adversary, James Shields, Donald W. Riddle has written, "Lincoln was not fighting for a cause. He was using the slavery issue, conve­ niently presented by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to advance his own political standing. He was using the Act to run for office; . . . [ without it] there was not the slightest likelihood of his election." A bit later, the Illinois historian adds, "Never before had Lincoln run for office on the slavery issue, but never afterward would he run on any other." 10 Riddle's reading of Lincoln's conduct in this period is sound enough, so far as it goes. But it might easily lead us to ignore the fact that Lincoln's true target is never slavery or even the regime of the South, but rather certain public men in the North who are skilled in working with the established powers below the Old Sur­ veyor's Line. Which is to say that his true target has not really changed at all. It is the Democratic party, and particularly the Illi­ nois Democrats. The Whigs had ceased to be a national force when Tyler and Fillmore disappointed the reasonable expectations of their "Old Federalist" wing. That party had died with Webster and Clay. In its place was left a vacuum, partially filled by two or three almost viable new organizations. But these almost-parties were apparently too narrow to grow. 1 1 To win against the hated Locos, a candidate at the national level would have to combine strength from most of

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these with what remained of the Whigs, and with the disaffected Democrats. And the same situation obtained in many state and local races. Irregular Democrats were especially important in this for­ mula. For the special synthesis achieved by Andrew Jackson was also on its way to dissolution and no equivalent catalyst was in sight. The year of 1854 was therefore a good time for a Midwestern politician to turn his coat-or at least retailor it with curious (and contradictory) additions. We must admit in fairness that Lincoln was not quick to change his political identity and did not i�vent the new persona which he adopted, though he finally got on with the new job of self-recreation and became the master of a new political style. All of which we can demonstrate from the text of his works. Lincoln's formula was simple: if the Whigs could lose their national following, so might the Democrats. The old spirit of sectional ac­ commodation could be easily discredited, particularly in the North­ west, a territory filling rapidly with new citizens who did not understand it, or its importance to the possibility of Union: a region rapidly developing a proud identity of its own. 12 With Illinois politi­ cians who spoke another language Lincoln was now prepared to deal, attacking with a great host already at his back. To understand how it came to be possible to divide the Democrats and create a Northern sectional party it is necessary for us to review what happened to change Illinois and the remainder of the North­ west between 1834, when Lincoln and Douglas first encountered one another in the old capitol in Vandalia, and the time of their exchange in Peoria, some twenty years later. For as the line of settlement moved westward and the empty lands were filled, the spirit of co1nity left by the Revolution and early years within the Union was subjected to periodic strains. Almost always the un­ stated issue was whether an additional state would lend its political support to the South or the Northeast; to the agricultural or the commercial interest, to limited or energetic government. Yet often the idiom in which these possibilities were explored, the framework for the distribution of power, was a dispute over the advantage and disadvantage of holding Negro slaves . Or at least it was safe to predict that slavery would be brought into the discussion. At times it seemed that neither side would agree to increase the voting strength of the other, even when geography and the movements of popula­ tion left them with little choice. 13 These problems of rightful dis­ tribution of power reached a climax after the conclusion of the Mexican War. The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act follow in this train . Expansion of the national boundaries to the

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Pacific, with the Oregon Treaty of 1846 and the Treaty of Guada­ lupe-Hidalgo, had brought matters to a head . The South was reluc­ tant to agree to any further admissions of ne\v states unless it could expect its share. It spoke of the example of its own generosity in surrendering the region above the Ohio to the Northern states as their outlet for growth. Indeed, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance is the datum for much of this dispute-and also the circumstances surrounding its adoption. For they play a major role in Lincoln's years as an affected or pseudo-Puritan-are the centerpieces of his jeremiad against Democratic innovation, his accusation that there is a plan to nationalize the Peculiar Institu tion, a plan designed by Northern politicians, though he understood the Ordinance and its 1787 meaning not at all, or else distorted both with conscious in­ tent. And as with Lincoln, so with many other "new breed" North­ ern politicians-spokesmen who practiced upon the paranoia of the Free States in speaking of a Slave Power and its dark designs, 14 when in fact nothing new to the operation of American politics was being attempted in the West. What Lincoln maintained with monotonous iteration throughout these middle years is that the nation's Fathers had specified their desire to put slavery "on the road to extinction" through the provi­ sions which they had made, while we were yet governed under the Articles, to preclude its spread into the lands north of the Ohio ceded into their care by Virginia; and that, with and by this instru­ ment of exclusion, they had established a fixed precedent for future restrictions. Which is to misconstrue this business altogether; and also to deny certain self-evident truths concerning human nature. For it is not to be believed that any society would self-consciously arrange for the possibility of its own destruction. The proper read­ ing for the almost total support given to �he Northwest Ordinance by the representatives of the Southern states voting in the Conti­ nental Congress is that the antislavery clause was put into the text to certify that these lands were to be reserved for settlers from New England and the Middle Atlantic states: to provide these Ameri­ cans, through a gesture both practical and symbolic, with a fresh incentive to loyalty toward a confederation of which many were afraid; and, incidentally, to prevent competition with established Southern agriculture . 15 It does not occur to Father Abraham that, in 1788, everyone expected the South to be the region of rapid growth. 16 Or that the South, out of generosit y, would provide for new states without slaver y, hoping thereby to make of many a Yankee a sound Union man, and still have absolutely no notion of

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giving up slavery itself. The spirit which perceived that a balance, half-slave, half-free, should be kept he did not comprehend, nor the truth that even the abolitionists recognized: that the South had, it believed, provided for its security against any external interference in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and felt that it could afford a little generosity. As to Federal encouragement or regulation of the spread of slav­ ery into the open territories, there is no consistent evidence that the Founders were of one mind concerning their legal authority and its limitation. 17 But Jefferson and Madison both counseled against such regulation, using arguments from law or precedent and argu­ ments from definition. 18 As did James Monroe and Henry Clay. They encouraged the expansion of slavery into the West. John C. Miller in summarizing Jefferson's "diffusionist theory" condenses the great Democrat's advice to a new generation of bondsmen as follows: "Go West, young slave, go West. There you will find kind treatment, more humane masters, a better chance of eventual emancipation." 19 And this irony could be applied just as well to statements concerning the "positive good" of such distribution made by a complete set of early American statesmen, champions of freedom and Founders, beginning in 1798 with those solid Jeffer­ sonians, William Giles and George Nicholas of V irginia. Lincoln, in treating of this question, of course always invokes his version of the Founders' intentions. But if Jefferson and Madison do not qualify as Founders, it is difficult to say who does. To the idea that section 9 of Article I in the Federal compact even "hinted . . . at a power . . . to prohibit an interior migration of any sort," the latter spoke directly: But whatever may have been intended by the term "migration" or the term "persons," it is most certain, that they referred, exclu­ sively to a migration or importation from other countries into the United States; and not to a removal, voluntary or involuntary, of Slaves or freemen, from one to another part of the United States . Nothing appears or is recollected that warrants this latter inten­ tion. Nothing in the proceedings of the State conventions indi­ cates such construction there .

Wrote Mr. Madison in 1819, "it is easy to imagine the figure [such a construction] would have made among the numerous amendments to it proposed by the state conventions, not one of which amend­ ments refers to the clause in question. . . ." 20 The rest of Lincoln's

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historical argument is as fragile as his comment on the Northwest Ordinance and his imagination of a 1787 Philadelphia plan to re­ strict the spread of slavery into the West. Its centerpieces were a notion that criticism of a simplistic view of the Declaration was an ominous innovation, unheard of in the early years of the Republic, and a highly selective narrative of various measures passed by Congress to interdict American participation in the international slave trade. But contrary to Lincoln's claim, outrage at misunderstanding or misuse of the equality clause was as old as the Declaration itself: and, as early as 1804-1805, a commonplace, not heresy, when the youthful John C. Calhoun learned it from Lincoln's intellectual fore­ bears while reading law in the Federalist citadel at Litchfield, Con­ necticut. Even earlier, Henry Lee called the broad view of the Decla­ ration "a splendid edifice built upon kegs of gunpowder." 21 In 1789 General James Jackson of Georgia developed the same theme in a speech before the House of Representatives. 22 By the time of the debates on Missouri, many legislators were calling the Declaration "a fanfaronade of metaphysical abstraction" with "No standing in American Law." 23 In a 1796 Independence Day oration, Congress­ man William L. Smith spoke in Charleston to the same effect. 24 As, at other times, spoke the younger John Tyler, William Pinkney, Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Randolph of Roanoke, John Taylor of Car­ oline, and Joseph Clay. The last of these, a representative from Pennsylvania, summarized moderate sentiment on the subject. In his opinion, "The Declaration of Independence is to be taken with great qualification." 25 Of this kind of evidence there is a plethora. Just as soon as American politicians began to read our instrument of separation as Lincoln was to read it in later years, other Americans said them nay; and, therefore, the interpretation of the document made by Douglas (and then by Chief Justice Taney) was nothing more than the forceful expression of a conventional view of the subject. Lincoln's explanation of laws passed to restrict the importation of slaves from overseas is equally artificial. He sees in the widely supported 1807 bill to end the trade from Africa and the West Indies a movement against the institution itself and supports this view with reference to earlier bills forbidding foreign importation into the territories. But the truth of things is very different. For many in the South saw in open importation a threat to the value of their property and also a threat of black overpopulation. Which is to say nothing of a general fear of difficult slaves, perhaps touched off by

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the spirit of the uprising in Santo Domingo-a fear which reached far beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding states. Other elements of Lincoln's theory of the Fathers' "ancient faith" in a plan for eventual abolition deserve some mention. For, like most of the elements already examined, these last components tell us 1nuch about the widespread confusion concerning slavery and the birth of the nation current in the Midwest when Lincoln an­ swered Douglas in 1854. One has to do with the refusal of the Framers to mention slavery by name. Some hostility to allowing the general government to speak of the institution in any way may be inferred from this silence, and also the desire of the authors, "so far as possible, to take [slavery] out of the national arena." 26 Another error concerns the meaning of the Mississippi Ordinance of 1798 and the policy of prohibiting slavery "except where it already existed," which is related to his ignorance of the Southwest Ordi­ nance of 1790 and the Louisiana Ordinance of 1804. Each of these bills was subject to debate and in the case of the first, opponents of slavery made specifically the point that slavery had not yet taken root in the Mississippi Territory any more than it was established in Iowa and Illinois. Congress refused, by a clear majority vote, to prevent such introduction, 27 and likewise refused to interfere in Louisiana, even though it was a "national acquisition." The absence of debate on the Southwest Ordinance identifies it as either a quid pro quo or the product of intersectional amity, in both cases reflect­ ing a connection with its companion ordinance for the Old North­ west. Kentucky and Tennessee came into the Union under its terms, and not a word about slavery in either case. 28 In each and every instance to which Lincoln refers, the policy which he recommends for the entire West has been rejected by his predecessors. For they recognized in such total exclusion a violation of the principle first followed in the allocation of unsettled lands to various spheres of influence: the principle of compromise and rough equity in divi. s1on. Concerning the Northwest Ordinance, Donald L. Robinson has written, "Perhaps the most important reason for Southern support for the ordinance was that its passage signaled the end of the at­ tempt to prohibit slavery south of the Ohio River." 29 We must re­ member that there were no "federal lands" be£ore the old states gave up their legitimate claims to Western lands. Virginia and North Carolina did not surrender Kentucky and Tennessee to federal con­ trol until they were certain that no question of slavery would be raised when they were ready for admission as states. 30 Indeed, they

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withdrew earlier offers of such cession during the sectional hostili­ ties surrounding Jay's Treaty; and the same pattern holds true with later cessions by Georgia and South Carolina. Robinson's detailed narrative of discussions of slavery in the early years of the Republic should be required reading with students of Lincoln and the years leading up to the War between the States. But most particularly the pages dealing with the 1819 ordinance for the territory of Arkansas. This law, passed by the very Congress that broke apart over Mis­ souri, came into being with the clear understanding of those who voted in its support that they were introducing "the smudge of slavery" upon a veritable "tabula rasa." 31 Taylor of New York moved to prohibit such an introduction in precisely these terms. His mo­ tion was rejected. Which proves that many Norther legislators "saw the issue strictly in terms of political power within the Union and felt that Arkansas belonged to the South." Even in the time of the debate over Missouri, many Northerners continued to acknowledge the "Compromise of 1787. " Missouri seemed to them a little far to the north but the idea of prohibiting slavery from all the new territo­ ries was not their plan. Usually, after push and pull, most Ameri­ cans were drawn back to the original formula, quid pro quo-Maine for Missouri-though tilted a little in favor of the North not tilted all the way. Hence the line of the Missouri Compromise. Says Robinson elsewhere, "Northerners were far more concerned to halt the spread of slavery's influence than to wrestle with the institution itself." 32 In other words, concerned with the Slave Power. Upon the basis of such fears, Lincoln worked his will, invoking always his myth of "those old-time men" who "hedged and hemmed" the inherited evil "to the narrowest limits of necessity." 33 Preserving both spirit and letter of the basic law that had first made us a country was not the task he had set for himself. To grasp the implications of the early Liberty party or Free Soil movement (as opposed to the honest abolitionists, who simply desired to divide the country or change the Constitution), it is necessary for us to learn the neglected truth about the attitude towards Negroes in the Old Northwest, plus the limited objectives of antislavery benevolence throughout the country. For this will tell us why the repeal of the Missouri Compromise so outraged the people who became Lincoln supporters and what the Slave Power signified to most of them. Antebellum Midwesterners were, to speak bluntly, more anti-Negro than the slaveholders themselves. Many of them opposed the spread of slavery simply because it meant the distribution of black men into places where whites, their

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kindred and friends, might come to live. Even those who could imagine a benefit to the country in the destruction of the Peculiar Institution included nothing in the way of additional liberties for the freedman to attach to the end of bondage per se. Lincoln, as I have argued frequently, was extremely careful not to offend against any of this sentiment--in part because he shared in much of it, and also because if he crossed the line it drew his political career would come to a sudden end. David Potter calls this kind of antislavery thinking empty and likely to engender an " ' equality' . . . some�here be­ tween freedom and slavery. " 34 Thereafter he adds that its "attenu­ ated" commitment to a technical freedom was easily "embarrassed" when set over against fierce claims of a moral superiority over those whose position appeared to deny that the Negro was a man. 35 Lincoln spoke well for the movement he later came to lead when he called for the open lands to be reserved for "the settlement of free white labor, " as an "outlet for free white people, everyzv here, the world over." 36 The advanced views of Negro rights promised by the oppo­ nents of slavery's extension, in 1820, 1850, and 1854 are well sum­ marized in the often analyzed Black Codes of Illinois-laws against which Lincoln never complained, cir which he helped to enact. 37 And in the one-way boat trip to Liberia which was (since Jefferson) always a corollary of the design to acknowledge the humanity hid­ den behind a sable complexion. The meaning of extinction, as Lin­ coln used the word, thus becomes clear in the original constitutions of Kansas and Oregon-excluding slavery and excluding Negroes. Antislavery meant, among other things, white, or as close to white as circumstances allowed : with a provision in most cases for a kind of control over the freedman, should he be around, that was morally inferior to slavery itself. But if the crusade to confine slavery was not really about the Negro himself, what was its impetus? The question takes us back to the explanation of Midwestern reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In Peoria, Lincoln could not hope to get the rhetorical effect to which he aspired from his support for the Wilmot Proviso or his efforts to forestall the spread of slavery into New Mexico or Utah or the other portions of the Mexican Cession. W hat gave him an edge was the general impression spreading across the North that Demo­ cratic politicians were going against the Compromise of 1787, the formula of quid pro quo, and opening the way to Southern develop­ ment and control of all the open lands under national jurisdiction. His best argument was against Democratic innovation, a cry of conspiracy. These are the central words of the Peoria Speech : "The

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declared indifference, but as I must think covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate." 38 In years to come, this imagi­ native construct grows to include the charge that an eventual ex­ pansion of slavery into free states is contemplated in the enemy's long-range plan-and a further charge that both black and white are to be bound. 39 I will return to this bugbear as it unfolds. But for the moment it is my point that Lincoln conflates opposition to the expansion of slavery into the New Northwest with opposition to slavery per se and both with opposition to Stephen Douglas and the Democrats-all the while swaddling around the innovations which he introduces as ostensible reverence for the established ways. What Lincoln ignores throughout his discourse is the reason be­ hind Douglas's support of a repeal of the Missouri Compromise-a reason well known. Douglas could not promote his favorite dream of a new empire reaching to the Pacific, of railroad building and land speculation, of farms for the immigrants pouring in from Europe, and of everlasting credit for the Democrats without Southern votes. He was the legislative leader of a party dominated by Southerners. To get a bill organizing new territories in Kansas and Nebraska (legislation necessary to his plan for a transcontinental railroad), he required the help of legislators who could gain nothing for their own constituents with his plan. 40 New senators from the free states were the only certain results, plus more immigration into the North and more Yankee votes. The Midwest had a genuine stake in these prospects. Lincoln is correct in asserting that "the public never demanded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise." 41 But they did demand the authorization that went with, and was tied to, that repeal. Professor Riddle is therefore correct in observing that Lin­ coln left out of his per£ormance in Peoria "a fair estimate of the purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, " and that he was "shrewd" to do so. 42 It is a powerful speech, sometimes lacking in logic; but the confusion it fosters is not by accident. 43 The structure of this address is a close study in itself. In design, it pretends to be deliberative; in fact, it is forensic. Its ostensible objective is to recommend restoration of the Compromise of 1820; but its actual burden is the necessity to distrust Stephen Douglas, his friends, and all their works. In truth, the restoration of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 would have been to Lincoln like the peaceable conclusion of the Civil War in 1863: politically fatal! With a brief exordium (247-48), claiming a horror of everything that is "narrow, sectional, and dangerous to the Union" and a clear dis­ claimer of any threat to slavery as an "existing institution, " Lincoln

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is ready to declare his good intentions and review the history of the Missouri Compromise. The historical blunders included in this ar­ gument from the record are indicated in my discussion just above; or rather, a representative selection of these blunders. Added to them is an account of events subsequent to the Missouri Compro­ mise, running on through the Compromise of 1850, the general election of 1852, and Douglas's introduction of a new bill to give Nebraska territorial government (248-55). To this point, Lincoln has said little that is outrageous. We can be irritated with the)nvention by the future emancipator of a bit of Virginia history, made up to suit his purposes, and also by his feigned surprise at the Democrats' claim to see in certain kinds of federal legislation, touted to be benevolent, a threat to the corporate liberty. But these errors are standard political fare and are couched in a tone consonant with W hig moderation. Not so the charge that follows. Lincoln's initial public reference to a "Slave Power Conspiracy, " noted above as the central passage of his speech, combines accusa­ tion with the word hate. It is an unusual term to appear in a Whig political discourse and marks an intensification in the tone of Lin­ coln's argument. True, it is covered up quickly with lofty references to the "republican example" of the United States in the world and by an invocation of the Declaration of Independence as the text of our political religion-both beside the point if one does not read the Declaration as Lincoln does. But he returns throughout the remain­ der of the speech to water the seed he has sown. The crucial paragraph (255) is followed by a full-page (255-56) of rhetorical concession: a digression on Lincoln's good feeling toward the South and his ambivalence about blacks. That it contains matter in contradiction to the general principle which he announces in his subsequent remarks is typical of Lincoln during these middle years. But that such doubts about what may be done if the slaves are freed might conflict in logic with his assumption of a moral advantage through loyalty to the Declaration as including Negroes in its gener­ alizations about "all men" Lincoln never stops to think. Or else denies. The conceding done, however, this rural Cicero returns to his prosecution. Lincoln takes some time to answer these arguments used to jus­ tify the repeal of the Missouri Compromise: that Nebraska needed a territorial government; that the public had demanded repeal; and that "repeal establishes a principle which is intrinsically right." Lincoln's responses to his own set of questions take up a major portion in his dispute with Douglas. These responses are on the

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surface plausible. If the Congress could be persuaded to vote for it, it was legal for Nebraska to be organized as a free territory. Lincoln omits to mention, however, that no such votes were available. That many Northern states wanted to facilitate developments in the West, possible only if Nebraska were organized as a territory, Lincoln does not acknowledge. And though in this portion of his speech he praises the principle of "equivalents" as that of the Missouri Com­ promise, the 1850 Compromise, and the original Constitution of 1787 (272), he denies that he had violated that principle when he himself voted not to extend the line of separation westward to the Pacific (257). To violate the principle of mutual concession in behalf of the higher principle, that slavery is a wicked thing, all men are equal, and Negroes are men in their "natural rights, '' is the formula he achieves. Or else he offers no logic at all . He reinforces his construction with attendant arguments concerning the side effects of slavery-the three-fifths clause, the South's attitude toward slave­ dealers, the size of the Negro population, both free and bond, and rumors of continued slave importation. But he has not asked these questions just in order to respond to them. Rather, he is concerned with other charges that those answers give him an opportunity to declare. For a moment he repeats the earlier concession, still insist­ ing that his position does not necessitate "political and social equal­ ity" for the freedman, and that it rests upon his veneration for those "old-time men" who defined the original American "SPIRIT OF COMPROMISE" (272). Yet he withdraws these reservations else­ where, contending that any extension of slavery is a threat to every American's liberties (270), and that the "ancient faith" of the Decla­ ration is violated by Douglas's doctrine of "popular sovereignty." He then returns swiftly to his charge that the friends of the South have no interest in compromise, and are bent upon the inculcation of a "NEW faith" (275). After some additional historical misinformation, Lincoln per­ orates. I will return to the tone of this passage in a moment. But it is proper to note that his own peculiar gloss upon the Declaration of Independence is at its heart: the idea that it contains serious and critical allusions to Negro slavery, and that to say about it anything to the contrary is an astonishing impiety toward the Fathers. The remainder of Lincoln's address is rather anticlimactic (276-83). It amounts to a reply to what he expects Douglas to offer in rejoinder. But he makes it clear that what he means by "re-adopt the Declara­ tion of Independence by restoring the Missouri Compromise" comes to something more than that. It is also a direct and personal re-

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proach to Senator Douglas and his kind: a reproach which marks Douglas as an enemy to popular sentiment in the North, particu­ larly with respect to his view of the black man's place in the future of America. This conclusion, however, is a more organic portion of the document than at first appears, for it enables Lincoln to leave his audience thinking about Stephen Douglas, and the charges brought against him. The basic rhetorical strategy of Lincoln's "Peoria Speech" is famil­ iar to us from his earlier work. In the effort to ruin Douglas with the Illinois electorate, he employs a version of the false dilemma. For though he pays lip service to the sacrosanct principle of the Found­ ers, Webster and Clay, that principle of accommodation is finally denied by the rest of his appeal and replaced by the argument which we ordinarily connect with the "House Divided Speech" of 1858. The difference between these two orations consists of the aforementioned lip service to equivalence or compromise and a more tentative view of how slavery can be extinguished through containment: a difference in 'tone. He is content with only the implication of what he states openly in the speeches to come : that legal confinement with reprobation will produce emancipation of some sort, at some undetermined time. In 1854 Lincoln still wishes to keep one foot in the Whig camp. But only one. He still pret�nds civility and claims not "to question the patriotism or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men." 44 But there is no doubt that with "covert real zeal" he is on his way to a larger objective, to a neo­ Puritan war on the powers of darkness: "Two universal armed camps, engaged in a death struggle against each other." 45 For the final burden of his remarks cannot be mistaken: either the North­ west Ordinance of 1787 will be applied throughout the West, and the balance of sections destroyed forever, or the bugbear of slavery expansion will be released to spread throughout the land, leaving, in the end, no free states-and few free men. We understand now what Lincoln meant when, later, he told his friends that his debat­ ing strategy would, finally, leave Stephen Douglas "a dead cock in the pit, " 46 and what combative, utterly partisan spirit-determined to "beat the Democrats," to "Fight the devil with fire; that is, with its own weapons . . . whether true or false, fair or foul"-was hid­ den beneath the rambling informality and apparent righteous in­ dignation of the surf ace of the speech, 47 or in the design of the seemingly artless oratory that followed-the oratory which made of Lincoln the American Caesar of his age. In the "Peoria Speech" Lincoln was doing precisely what his

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W hig mentors had taught that the patriotic statesman did not do. He congratulates the Free Soilers for lofty motives which he else­ where admits were less noble than they claimed. For his talk of conspiracies and trends threatens the identity of Midwestern soci­ ety-its sense of its own worth and hopes for its future. And this, in its turn, was calculated to drive a breach between it and the South, redounding to the disadvantage of the hated Northern Locos, who must be beaten "or the country will be ruined." 48 The reasoning went thus: with the distinctive Southern institution went other South­ ern modes and orders; and the exclusion from all roles of impor­ tance of those who were not, by birth and training, part of the Slaveocracy. Hatred of slavery was thus a logical corollary of Know­ Nothing hatred of Roman Catholic and free black immigration. Both excited the fear of the Yankee and immigrant that a familiar, ac­ cepted, and soon-to-be beloved way of life would not expand and, perhaps, would not even survive. W hich would explain the devel­ opment in the North of an attitude well described by David Potter, holding that "slavery was objectionable not because it gave pain to slaves but because it gave pleasure [and power] to slaveowners." 49 Henry Clay had mocked such attitudes as contradictory and hypo­ critical in Congress and during a visit to Indiana. so Daniel Webster had warned that disunion would result if American politicians were moralistic for effect and failed "to treat each other with respect." 51 But that was an older politics. It would not defeat the Democrats. It had not studied under William Seward and Salmon P. Chase, and would not move the Midwest to accept the necessity of a "new founding, " or of a "new founder, " operating with the authority of an expurgated version of our collective past. Here, in the already mentioned peroration, is Lincoln's summary of the case from precedent against the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY. But NOW it is to be transformed into a " sacred right ." Nebraska brings it forth, places it on the high road to extension and per­ petuity; and, with a pat on its back, says to it, " Go, and God speed you ." Henceforth it is to be the chief jewel of the nation-the very figure-head of the ship of State . Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith . Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave

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M . E . BRADFORD OTHERS is the " sacred right of self-government ." These princi­ ples can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence " a self-evident lie" he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do . Of the forty odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among Marion's men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was . If it had been said- in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street . Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter. 52

I have already examined the historical distortions behind these lines. From them Lincoln goes further to make of Douglas's refusal to read the Declaration as he does a threat to the liberties of white men, while neglecting to explain how the usual Midwestern view of the document came closer to conveying "a very vivid impression that the negro is a human." 53 But what distinguishes the passage is not its content but its tone, with its talk of hanging and throttling, and its allusion to Andre, the enemy spy, and his fate. We are, with such elements, drawn beyond debate and toward indictment. The appeal is to violent emotions, and in no way subtle. Despite its official piety toward the law, there is a violent edge to the new politics of this quondam Whig. Yet he follows it quickly with a reversion to his familiar claim of moral superiority. ·Echoes from the scripture are included. Suddenly, we are in the presence of Puritan rhetoric, with an unmistakable lineage going back to the Protector and the Holy Commonwealth. The new Lincoln is never without it. To that authority the South could not submit. By 1854, the Midwest was rapidly filling with people who did not understand American history, politics, or constitutional law and with people who had fewer ties with the South than the earlier settlers "down in Egypt" or in the central counties. 54 Many of these could see in the South only an analogy to the European societies from which they had fled. In 1854, Lincoln recognized these changes and Stephen Douglas did not. The repeal of the Missouri Compro-

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mise, when coupled with renewed Southern truculence concerning new states, railroads, internal improvements, tariffs, and the rest of the familiar "Federalist model, " gave a certain plausibility to charges that political innovation was underway. The difference between legal or political questions and moral questions in a nation in which basic law is sovereign and not a particular generation of men thus slipped from public perception while the role of slavery in the West was put in doubt. Lincoln rose in this inflamed atmosphere, keep­ ing always one step behind the "higher law" spokesmen and two behind the abolitionists per se. His trick, learned basically from Salmon P. Chase and his 'J\ppeal of the Independent Democrats, " was to combine efforts looking toward federally sponsored aboli­ tion and reverence for an imaginary American past: radicalism and antiradicalism, 55 all of the time being very careful not to suggest that the Negro had any natural rights apart from the right to be free at some very remote date and to be then returned to an Africa that would be even more unfriendly to him than were the prairies and hamlets of Illinois. That this kind of politics would destroy the Union did not worry Mr. Lincoln. Instead, he scrawled in envy little meditations on his own humble state ( due doubtless to principle) and the Little Giant's fame. 56 He burned with ambition to have a "name" and found in vilification his modus vivendi. In Peoria he had only begun, was still in transition-offering "equivalents" (concessions to the South) at one point, and drawing the line at another. 57 But once he was finished in his career, he had left behind him a trail of blood, an emancipation under the worst possible circumstances, and a politi­ cal example which continues to injure the Republic which he did so much to undermine. It is at our peril that we continue to reverence his name.

NOTES 2. A View From the Top of the Ridge 1 . Emory Elliott, et al ., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York : Columbia University Press, 1988). 2. M. E . Bradford, Generations of the Faithful Heart: On the Literature of the South (La Salle, Illinois : Sherwood Sugden & Co ., 1983). 3 . Thomas J. Lyon, et al ., A Literary History of the American West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987).

3. Recovering Simms and Others 1 . Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1989); John Guilds, ed ., "Long Years of Neglect ": The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms (Fayetteville : The University of Arkansas Press, 1988); Mary Ann Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1989); William Gilmore Simms, The Cassique of Kiawah, Introduction by David Aiken (Gainesville, Georgia : Magnolia Press, 1989).

5. Donald Davidson and the Great House Tradition 1. Opinions quoted in David A . Hallman, "Donald Davidson's 'Long Street' : An Agrarian's Conservative Testament, " Southern Literary Journal 16, no . 2 (Spring, 1984) : 63-64; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Wary Fugitives: Four Poets and the South (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1978), p. 182 . 2. Letter to Allen Tate, November 29, 1961, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, ed. John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1974), p. 382; Letter to Tate, October 19, 1958, p. 378 . For the text of Davidson's poem see Poems: 1 9221 961 (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1966), pp. 19-22 . 3 . Letter to Augustus Duyckinck, January 20, 1868, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell and 247

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NOTES TO PAGES 42-46

T. C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1956), 5 : 106. 4. A considerable body of scholarship has been devoted to the study of the " great house" poem. I mention here in illustration William A . McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Isabel Rivers, The Poetry of Conservatism, 1600-1745: A Study of Poets and Public Affairs from Jonson to Pope (Cambridge : Rivers Press, Ltd., 1973); and Virginia C. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in En­ glish Literature, 1688-1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984). 5. G . R. Hibbard, "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Cen­ tury, " Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 19 (1956): 159-74. 6. The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1958), pp. 185-87. 7. See pp. 7 and 227 of Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). 8. Donald Davidson, "Introduction" to The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 1 : pp. xxxi-lvii. 9. Donald Davidson, "The Center That Holds: Southern Literature and the Oldtime Religion, " Southern Partisan 4, no. 4 (Fall, 1984) : 18. 10. C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Liter­ ature of the American South (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1972), p. 39. 11. The half-breed " Goggle" Blonay appears in Mellichampe (1836); he fights on the Tory side but cares only for revenge. Major Will Sinclair appears in The Forayers (1855); he is a leader of American partisans . Ernest Mellichampe is a choleric young aristocrat whose father has been killed by the British (Mellichampe). Captain Porgy is of course Simms's most impor­ tant creation-a character central in Woodcraft (1852) who also appears in The Partisan (1835), Katherine Walton (1851), The Forayers, Eutaw (1956), and Mellichampe. He is Simms's portrait of a portly and likable Whig planter­ soldier. Major Archibald Campbell is a temperamental British officer in Katherine Walton. Supple Jack Bannister appears in The Scout (1841); he is a frontiersman and a normative figure . Harricane Nell Floyd and her swamp pony play a role in both The Forayers and Eutaw. Jim Ballou is a scout in The Forayers. Hellfire Dick, in Eutaw, is an outlaw leader who reforms and is then killed. These characters, taken together, are a lively sample of Simms's world. 12. Hugh Holman, The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), p. 36. 13. Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 240. 14. Concerning the sacrament of ordinary activities, see also Davidson, " Gradual of the Northern Summer, " in Poems: 1922-1961, pp. 8-11. 15. Yeats, "The Second Coming" and "A Prayer for My Daughter, " in Collected Poems, pp. 184-87. 16. Donald Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays, with an

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Introduction by Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer­ sity Press, 1972), pp. xii, 15. 17. The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 1 :pp. xliv, lxv. 18. Davidson, "The Center That Holds," p. 18. 19. Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees, p. xii. 20. Lewis P. Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 53. 21. Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees, p. xii. 22. Rubin, The Wary Fugitives, p. 265. 23. Davidson, "Meditation on Literary Fame, " in Poems: 1 922-1 961, p. 24.

7. Addie Bundren and the Design of As I Lay Dying 1 . Page citations refer to the Random House, 1964 edition of As I Lay Dying. This essay is the result of a suggestion to the author by Mr. Andrew Lytle.

8. The Authoritative Constitution 1 . I refer in particular to the August 1775 "Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition" as issued by George III, and the Prohibitory Act of September 21, 1775, as adopted by Parliament. For discussion see M. E. Bradford, Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 41-42; Eric Robson's The American Revolution, 1 763-1 783 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), pp. 7374; M. E. Bradford, The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political (Peru, Illinois : Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1990), p. 122. 2. Letter to Thomas Ritchie, September 15, 1821, The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols . (New York: G . P. Putnam Sons, 19001910), 9:72. 3. See Elizabeth Fleet, ed., "Madison's 'Detached Memoranda', " William and Mary Quarterly 3 (1946):534; also Letter to Major Henry Lee, June 1824, The Writings of James Madison, 9 : 191 for the passage quoted. 4. The case for the general point made in this paragraph appears in the remainder of this essay. In the North Carolina ratification convention, which began in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on July 2, 1788, the Rever­ end David Cald\vell suggested that a theoretical statement of "Fundamen­ tal principles of every free government be drawn up"-maxims concerning the rights of man-and then compared with what appears in the instru­ ment of government under consideration. Both sides in the North Carolina convention joined together in irritation and impatience to defeat this pro­ posal by a margin of 163 to 90. Speaking for the judgment of the house, General William Richardson Davie observed that attempts to agree on political theory went against "the nature of things" and that success in that

250

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enterprise was "highly improbable ." Theoretical discussion of the "in­ alienable rights" of man would actually prevent a judgment on its merits of the proposed Constitution. James Iredell agreed with Davie as did at least one half of the Antifederalists . See The Debates of the Several State Conven­ tions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia, ed. Jonathan Elliot, 5 vols . (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974), 4 : 7-13; for Madison on the limitation of the powers of government to what is granted explicitly in the text of the Constitution, see 3: 259, 620. The basic argument of the Federalists for ratification as pre­ served in Elliot's Debates is that powers of the general government under the Constitution will not be large or elastic. Also for James Iredell on the same subject, 4: 171 . 5. See Michael Allen Gillespie and Michael Lienesch, eds ., Ratifying the Constitution (Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 1989), p. 392. 6 . See James McHenry's notes for May 29, 1789 in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1 787, ed . Max Farrand, 4 vols . (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 1 : pp. 26-27. 7. Charles Warren, The Making of the Constitution (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 392-93. 8 . Ibid. 9. Elliot, Debates, 2:78 . 10 . Ibid., pp. 161-62. 11. Ibid., pp. 267-68 . 12. Robert C. Cotner, ed., Theodore Foster's Minutes of the Convention Held at South Kingston, Rhode Island, in March 1 790, Which Failed to Adopt the Constitution of the United States (Providence : Rhode Island Historical Soci­ ety, 1929), p. 49. 13. Calder v. Bull, 3 US (3 Dallas) 186 (1793). In a passage of this opinion, Iredell observed that the only proper question for judges is whether Con­ gress or a state legislature has the authority which they have exercised or do they " transgress the boundaries of that authority" (p. 399). His remark assumed a strict division of powers, of which he speaks further in Chisholm v. Georgia, 2 US (2 Dallas) 419 (1793). That- division of powers left most questions of rights with the states . Iredell's point here, as it was in much of his work, is that the court should not disallow positive law on principles of natural justice" since such ideas are "regulated by no fixed standard" and are the causes of disagreement among " the ablest and purest of men." He affirms the letter of the law and nothing more . Surely the Framers in giving us a fundamental law were concerned with the justice provided by the Constitution. But since they were (like other men) unable to agree on what such justice would require, it follows that, in deciding on a Constitution, they compromised their private "principles of natural justice" to create a more perfect union." Iredell, as a conscious disciple of Edmund Burke, inclined to circumstantial arguments . He was a II

II

NOTES TO PAGES 62-68

251

Whig legalist and very uneasy with appeals reaching back to a state of nature . In the North Carolina ratification debates, Iredell reasoned about the protections for civil rights as being state concerns-with each state "left to the operation of its own principles" in matters Congress has "nothing to do with." See Elliot, Debates, 4: 195. 14. Ibid., 3:301. 15. See n. 13. 16. See Willmoore Kendall, "Equality: Commitment or Ideal?," Inter­ collegiate Review 24 (Spring, 1989): 25-33. Kendall writes, "In a word, the Declaration's credentials as a solemn act and expression of the deliberative sense of the American people, leave much to be desired, and far too much to support the claim that it is a national commitment" (p. 31). lZ Mortimer J. Adler, We Hold These Truths: Understanding the Ideas and Ideals of the Constitution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987). 18. James Wilson, "Speech in the State House Yard, " Philadelphia, Oc­ tober 6, 1788, in Merrill Jensen, ed., The Documentary History of the Ratifica­ tion of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, 2: Pennsyl­ vania (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), pp. 167-72. 19. Charles Callan Tansil!, ed., The Making of the American Republic: The G reat Documents, 1 774-1 789 (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1972), p. 1023. 20. Elliot, Debates, 4: 171 . 21. Ibid ., p. 148. 22. Ibid., pp. 315-16. 23. Ibid ., 3 : 131 . See also Chris Collier, "Sovereignty Finessed: Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth and the Ratification of the Constitution in Con­ necticut" in The Constitution and the States: The Role of the Original Thirteen in the Framing and Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski (Madison, Wisconsin: Madison House, 1988), p. 107, where he maintains that Sherman and Ellsworth of Connecticut sold an Antifederalist version of the Constitution in their state's ratifying conven­ tion. He is correct but misleading since that 1.s what Federalists did every­ where . And we are obliged to take their language as an indication of their intentions-without pretending that we read the text better than they did, or that we can read their minds . For their opinion has the force of law. 24. See James McClellan and M. E. Bradford, eds., Debates in the Federal Convention of 1 787 as Reported by James Madison (Richmond, Virginia: James River Press, 1989), p. 74. 25. Elliot, Debates, 4: 195. 26. 268 us 652 (1925). 27. Richard E. Welch, Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist (Middleton, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1966), p. 60. 28. Elliot, Debates, 2:241. 29. Ibid., p. 187.

252

NOTES TO PAGES 69-77

30. Generally, radical or "new" Whigs stressed the natural rights of men while Old Whigs spoke of prescriptive or historic rights. Thomas Paine, Melancton Smith, and James Wilson were true Whigs; John Dickinson, Patrick Henr y, James Iredell, and Rawlins Lowndes were Whig legalists, advocates of right by inheritance and the politics of experience . 31 . Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1981). Many of these eccentrics were radical Whigs, concerned more with natural rights than with group rights. 32. See Robert Allen Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution: The Anti­ federalists and the Ratification Struggle of 1 787-1 788 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), p. 313. Also Stephen R. Boyd, The Politics of Opposi­ tion: Antifederalists and the Acceptance of the Constitution (Millwood, New Jersey: KTO Press, 1979), pp. 19-45. 33. For further observations on how the Constitution might have been defeated in the ratification conventions, see M. E . Bradford, "The Process of Ratification: A Study in Political Dynamics, " Chronicles 15 (February 1991): 18-20. See also the "Introduction" to Ratifying the Constitution, pp. 1-26, in which Gillespie and Lienesch insist that at "no point" could an easy victory for the Federalists "be taken for granted." Neither was "the course of ratification . . . preordained." What occurred in one convention very much influenced Federalist prospects in others. See M. E . Bradford, ''A Dike to Fence Out the Flood: The Ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts, " Chronicles 11 (December 1987): 16-18, 20-23; also M. E . Bradford, "Preserving the Birthright: The Intent of South Carolina in Adopting the United States Constitution, " South Carolina Historical Maga­ zine 89 (Spring, 1988): 90-101 . John P. Kaminski in his essay on ratification in New York also describes the bandwagon effect as it influenced events in Poughkeepsie; see The Constitution and the States, p. 246. 34. See Bradford, ''A Dike to Fence Out the Flood." See also James M. Banner, Jr., To The Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origin of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1 789-1815 (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1970). 35. On Virginia Antifederalism see M. E . Bradford, ''According to Their Genius: American Politics and the Example of Patrick Henry" in A Better Guide-Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (LaSalle, Illinois: Sher­ wood Sugden & Co ., 1979), pp. 97-110; see also M. E . Bradford, "The Trumpet Voice of Freedom: Patrick Henry and the Southern Political Tradi­ tion, " Southern Partisan 8 (Summer, 1988): 16-22. Also Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), where he distinguishes between Vir­ ginia and New England republicanism. Other useful commentary is contained in J. Thomas Wren, "The Ideology of Court and Country in the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, " The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93 (October 1985):389-408. 36. James Madison, "Federalist, No. 45" in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clin­ ton Rossiter (New York: Mentor Books, 1961), p. 292. 3Z 330 U. S . 1 (1946).

NOTES TO PAGES 78-99

253

38. Elliot, Debates, 2:202. 39. Ibid., p. 107. See also Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913), p. 110. 40. Elliot, Debates, 2: 115. See also Benjamin Randall, Debates and Proceed­ ings in the Convention of Massachusetts Held in the Year of 1 788, and Which Finally Ratified the Constitution of the United States (Boston: William White, 1856), p. 217. 41 . Elliot, Debates, 4: 160. 42. Ibid ., p. 163. 43. Ibid ., pp. 145, 147, 172. 44. Charles P. Whittemore, A General of the Revolution: John Sullivan of New Hampshire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 212. 45. See Don Lutz, Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political The­ ory in Early State Constitutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 237, in which he observes that Federalists had no idea the Supreme Court "would become so powerful"; see also Elliot, Debates, 4: 139141, in which Archibald Maclaine of North Carolina speaks of limitations on the federal courts which Congress may impose when necessary. 46. Elliot, Debates, 3:560; also, for Edmund Pendleton on the same sub­ ject, 3:520.

9. Patrick Henry: The Trumpet Voice of Freedom 1 . See William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: J. Webster, 1818); Moses Coit Tyler, Patrick Henry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co ., 1887); Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder. Patrick Henry and the American Republic (New York: Franklin Watts, 1986); Robert Douthat Meade, Patrick Henry: Patriot in the Making (Philadelphia: J. B . Lippincott, 1957) and Patrick Henry: Practical Revolutionary (Philadelphia: J. B . Lippincott, 1969); Isaac Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1 740--1 790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina �ress, 1982); Norman K. Ris­ jord, Chesapeake Politics: 1 781-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974); William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches, 3 vols . (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1891); M. E. Bradford, "The Example of Patrick Henry, " in A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (La Salle, Illinois : Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1979), pp. 97-110; Richard R. Beeman, "The Democratic Faith of Patrick Henry, " Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95, no. 3 (July 1987) : 301-16; T. Thomas Wren, "The Ideology of Court and Country in the Virginia Ratify­ ing Convention of 1788, " Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93, no . 4 (October 1985) :389-408; Norine Dickson Campbell, Patrick Henry: Patriot and Statesman (Old Greenwich, Conn. : Devin-Adair, 1969); Jack P. Greene, "Character, Persona and Authority: A Study of Alternate Styles of Political Leadership in Revolutionary Virginia," in The Revolutionary War in the South:

254

NOTES TO PAGES 113-27

Power, Conflict and Leadership, ed. W. Robert Higgins (Durham: Duke Uni­ versity Press, 1979), pp. 3-42; Bernard Mayo, Myths and Men: Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1959), pp. 1-23; and Michael Bordelon, "Visions of Disorder: Patrick Henry and the American Founding," The Occasional Review, no . 4 (Winter, 1976): 99-120.

1 0. Samuel Chase: The Maryland Vesuvius

,

1 . See James Haw, et al., Stormy Patriot: The Life of Samuel Chase (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1980); Irving Dilliard, Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1 789-1969: Their Lives and Major Opinions, ed. Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel (New York: R. R. Bowker/Chelsea House, 1969), 1 : 185-98; John S . Elsmere, Justice Samuel Chase (Muncie, Indiana: Janevar Publishing Company, 1980); Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Antifederalist (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5 :3-4, 79-91, 92-100; Philip A . Crowl, Ma ryland During and After the Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943); L. Marx Renzulli, Maryland: The Federalist Years (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univer­ sity Press, 1972); Ronald A . Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and Revolution in Ma ryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Norman J. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1 781-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Report of the Trial of the Hon. Samuel Chase . . . Taken Shorthand by Charles Evans (Baltimore : Samuel Butler and George Keating, 1805); and Edmund Cody Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York: Norton, 1964).

1 1 . " Light Horse Harry" Lee: A Forgotten Forefather 1 . See Thomas Boyd, Light Horse Harry Lee (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931); Charles Royster, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the Ameriran Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); Philip A Crowl, "Henry Lee, 1756-1818: 'Light-Horse Harry', " in Lives of Eighteen from Princeton, ed. Willard Thorp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), pp. 111-36; Henry Lee, Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the United States, ed. R. E . Lee (New York: University Publication Company, 1869); Thomas Edwards Templin, "Henry 'Light Horse Harry' Lee: A Biog­ raphy, " Ph. D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1975; Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1 788-1801 (Lexington: University of Ken­ tucky Press, 1972); Noel B . Gerson, Light-Horse Harry : A Biography of Wash­ ington's Great Caval ryman, General Hen ry Lee (Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday and Company, 1966); Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), vol. 1; Lisle A . Rose, Prologue to Democracy, The Federalists in the South, 1 789-1900 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Burton J. Hendrick, The Lees of Virginia: Biography of

NOTES TO PAGES 138-45

255

a Family (New York : Halcyon House, 1935); Donald J. Hickey, "The Darker Side of Democracy: The Baltimore Riots of 1812, " Maryland Historian 7 (Summer, 1976) : 1-19; Ethel Armes, Stratford Hall: The Great House of the Lees (Richmond: Garrett and Music, 1936); Richard Buel, Jr., Securing the Revolu­ tion: Ideology in American Politics, 1 789-1815 (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1972).

1 2. Rawlins Lowndes: Southern Prophet 1 . See George P. Chase, Lowndes of South Carolina: An Historical and Gene­ alogical Memoir (Boston: A . Williams and Co ., 1876); George C. Rogers, " South Carolina Ratifies the Federal Constitution, " South Carolina Historical Society Proceedings (1961), pp. 41-62; Raymond G . Starr, "The Conservative Revolution: South Carolina Public Affairs, 1775-1790, " Ph.D. diss ., Uni­ versity of Texas, 1964; Carl J. Vipperman, The Rise of Rawlins Lowndes, 1 72 1-1800 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978); John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution, From Its Commencement to the Year 1 776, 2 vols . (Charleston: A . E . Miller, 1821); Walter B . Edgar and N. Louise Bailey, eds ., Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives: Vol. 2, The Commons House of Assembly, 1692- 1 775 (Colum­ bia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), pp. 415-418; Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 2 vols . (New York: The Macmillan Con1pany, 1901-1902); Robert M . Weir, 'a Most Important Epocha ": The Coming of the Revolution in South Carolina (Columbia: Univer­ sity of South Carolina Press, 1970); Hoyt Paul Canady, Jr., " Gentlemen of the Bar: Lawyers in Colonial South Carolina, " Ph .D. diss ., University of Tennessee, 1979; Lisle A . Rose, Prologue to Democracy: The Federalists in the South, 1 789-1800 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Jerome J. Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, Maine : University of Maine Press, 1981); Charles Gregg Singer, South Carolina in the Confederation (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976); Robert M . Weir, " 'The Harmony We Were Famous For' : An Interpretation of Pre­ Revolutionary South Carolina Politics, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 26 (October, 1969):473-501 .

1 3. Thomas Sumter: The Gamecock of South Carolina 1 . See Anne King Gregoric, Thomas Sumter (Columbia, S . C.: R. L. Bryan Co., 1931); Robert D. Bass, Gamecock: The Life and Campaigns of General Thomas Sumter (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961); N. Louise Bailey and Elizabeth Ivey Cooper, Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Volume 3, 1 775-1 790 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 693-697; Nat and Sam Hilborn, Battleground of Freedom: South Carolina in the Revolution (Columbia, S. C.: Sandlapper Press, Inc ., 1970); Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Reva-

256

NOTES TO PAGES 154-59

lution in the South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981); Edward McCrad y, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1 775-1 783, 2 vols . (New York: The Macmillan Co ., 1901-1902).

1 4. James Iredell: An Old Whig in Edenton 1. See R. Don Higginbotham, ed., The Papers of James Iredell, 2 vols. (Raleigh : North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1976); Shelton Fred Koesy, " Continuity and Change in North Carolina 1775-17�9, " Ph . D. diss., Duke University, 1963; Samuel A . Ashe, ed., Biographical History of North Carolina, 8 vols . (Greensboro, N. C.: Charles L. Van Noppen, 19051917); R. Don Higginbotham, "James Iredell's Efforts to Preserve the First British Empire, " North Carolina Historical Review, 49 (1972) : 127-45; Alan D. Watson, "States' Rights and Agrarianism" in The Constitution and the States, ed. Patrick T. Conley and John P. Kaminski (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1988), pp. 251-68; John Charles Waldrup, "James Iredell and the Practice of Law in Revolutionary Era North Carolina," Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1985; R. Don Higginbotham, "James Iredell and the Revolution­ ary Politics of North Carolina, " in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The Revolutionary War in the South : Power, Conflict and Leadership (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979), pp. 79-97; Griffith J. McRee, ed., The Life and Correspondence of James Iredell, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1857-1858); Louise Irby Trenholme, The Ratification of the Federal Constitution in North Carolina (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932); J. Goebel, Jr., History of the Supreme Court: Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801, vol. 1 of Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Fred L. Israel, "James Iredell" in L. Friedman and Fred L. Israel, eds., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court 1 789-1969 (New York: R. R. Bowker/Chelsea House, 1969), 1: 121-45; R. Don Higginbotham, "James Iredell" in William S . Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biogra­ phy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 3:253-54; Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States Published During Its Discussion by the People, 1 787-1 788 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), pp. 333-70; Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Con­ ventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, as Recommended by the General Convention at Philadelphia in 1 787, 5 vols . (New York: Burt Franklin, 1974), 4: 1-251.

1 5. Benjamin Harrison : The Nabob as Antifederalist 1 . See Hugh Blair Grigsby, The History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1 788 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), pp. 183-85, 321-23; Robert G . Ferris, Signers of the Declaration (Washington, D. C.: U. S . Department of the Inte­ rior, 1975), pp. 70-71; Allan Nevins, The American States During and After the Revolution, 1 775- 1 789 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1924); John Sander-

NOTES TO PAGES 175-82

257

son, Biography of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence (Philadelphia: R. W. Pomeroy, 1827), 8: 127-72; Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1 781-1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

1 6. Samuel Adams : The Baleful Comet of Boston 1. See John C. Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Stanford : Stan­ ford University Press, 1960); Pauline Maier, ''A New Englander as Revolu­ tionary: Sam Adams, " in The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1980), pp. 3-50; Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols. (New York: G . P. Put­ nam's Sons, 1904-1908); James K. Hasner, Samuel Adams (Boston: Hough­ ton Mifflin Co., 1898); Kenneth B . Umbreit, "Samuel Adams," in Founding Fathers: Men Who Shaped Our Tradition (Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, Inc ., 1969), pp. 175-99; Clifford K. Shipton, "Samuel Adams," in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, Volume 1 0: Biographical Sketches of Those Who At­ tended Harvard College in the Classes 1 736- 1 740 (Boston: Massachusetts His­ torical Society, 1958), pp. 420-65; Norman K. Risjord, "Samuel Adams, Pure Republican, " in Representative Americans: The Revolutionary Generation (Lexington, Mass .: D. C. Heath and Co., 1980), pp. 19-36; Edmund S . and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Charles W. Akers, "Sam Adams­ and Much More, " New England Quarterly 47 (March 1974): 120-31; Stewart Beach, Samuel Adams: The Fateful Years, 1 764-1 776 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965); Ralph Volney Harlow, Samuel Adams: Promoter of the American Revolu­ tion (New York: Henry Holt and Co ., 1923); William V. Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co ., 1865); Rich­ ard 0. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1 772-1 774 (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1970); James M . O'Toole, "The Historical Interpretation of Samuel Adams, " New England Quarterly 49 (March 1976) :82-96; Stephen E. Patter­ son, Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973).

1 7. John Sullivan : New Hampshire Soldier-Statesman 1. See Charles P. Whittemore, A General of the Revolution: John Sullivan of New Hampshire (N. Y.: Columbia University Press, 1961); Jere R. Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolu­ tion, 1741-1 794 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Otis G. Ham­ mond, ed ., The Letters and the Papers of Major General John Sullivan, 3 vols. (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society Collections, 8-15, 1930-1939); Thomas C. Amory, The Military Services and Public Life of Major-General John

258

NOTES TO PAGE 191

Sullivan of the A merican Revolutionary A rmy (Boston: Wiggin and Lunt, 1868); Everett S . Stackpole, History of New Hampshire, 2 vols . (New York: The American Historical Society, 1916); Thomas C . Amory, General Sullivan Not a Pensioner of Luzerne (Boston: A . Williams and Co . , 1875); William Plumer, "John Sullivan, " in Early State Papers of New Hampshire, ed. Albert S . Batchellor (Concord, N. H . : Ira C . Evans, 1892), 21 : 818-26; Clifford K. Shipton, "John Sullivan, " in Sibley 's Harvard Graduates, 14: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1 756-1 760 (Bos­ ton : Massachusetts, 1968), pp. 318-38; Nathaniel Joseph Eiseman, "The Ratification of the Federal Constitution by the State of New Hampshire, " Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1937; Nancy Elaine Briggs Oliver, "Keystone of the Federal Arch : New Hampshire's Ratification of the United States' Constitution, " Ph . D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1972.

1 8. Eliphalet Dyer: An U ncertain Trumpet 1 . See William F. Willingham, Connecticut Revolutionary: Eliphalet Dyer (Hartford : The American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Con­ necticut, 1976); Oscar Zeichner, Connecticut's Years of Controversy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1949); George C. Groce, Jr., "Eliph­ alet Dyer: Connecticut Revolutionist, " in The Era of the Revolution, ed . Richard B . Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 290304; Clifford Shipton, "Eliphalet Dyer, " in Sibley 's Harvard G raduates, Vol­ ume 1 0: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes, 1 736-1 740 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1958), pp. 482-93; Edmund G . Burnett, The Continental Congress (New York: The Mac­ millan Company, 1941); Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman 's Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the A merican Revolution (Middleton, Conn . : Wesleyan University Press, 1971); Merrill Jensen, ed., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Volume 3 Ratification by the States: Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut (Madison: State Historical Society of Wis­ consin, 1978), pp. 331-32, 450-51, 584, 599; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1979); Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition, 1 775-1818, 2nd ed. (Middleton, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1963); H . James Henderson, Party Politics in the Continental Congress (New York : McGraw-Hill, 1974); Harvey Milton Wachtell, "The Conflict Between Lo­ calism and Nationalism in Connecticut, 1783-1788, " Ph . D. diss., Univer­ sity of Missouri-Columbia, 1971; Philip Harding Jordan, Jr., "Connecticut During the Revolution and Confederation, Ph . D. diss., Yale University, 1962; Bernard C. Steiner, " Connecticut's Ratification of the Federal Con­ stitution, " Proceedings of the A merican Antiquarian Society, 25, n . s . (April 1915) : 70-122; Franklin B . Dexter, "Eliphalet Dyer, " vol . 1, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History (New York: Henry Holt, 1855), pp. 644-47.

NOTES TO PAGES 197-205

259

1 9. Josiah Bartlett: The Physician as Statesman 1 . See Frank C. Mevers, ed ., The Papers of Josiah Bartlett (Hanover: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1979); Elwin L . Page, "Josiah Bartlett and the Federation, " Historical New Hampshire, 2 (October 1947): 1-6; Frank C. Mevers, "Josiah Bartlett, " in Physician Signers of the Declaration of Indepen­ dence, ed. George E . Gifford (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), pp. 99-121; Nancy Elaine Briggs Oliver, "Keystone of the Federal Arch: New Hampshire's Ratification of the United States' Constitution, " Ph. D. diss ., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1972, pp. 153-60; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1979); William Plumer, "Josiah Bartlett, " in Early State Papers of New Hampshire, ed. Albert Stillman Batchellor (Concord, New Hampshire: Ira C. Evans, 1893), 22:824-29; Jere R. Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire and the American Revolution, 1 741- 1 794 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970); Pau­ line Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1980), pp. 139-62; Lynn Warren Turner, The Ninth State: New Hampshire's Formative Years (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Frank C. Mevers, ed., "The Papers of Josiah Bartlett, 1729-1795" (Concord, New Hampshire, New Hampshire Histor­ ical Society, 1976, microfilm); Nathaniel Joseph Eiseman, "The Ratification of the Federal Constitution by the State of New Hampshire," Master's thesis, Columbia University, 193Z

20. Theodore Sedgwick: Intrepid High Federalist 1 . See Richard E. Welch, Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist: A Political Por­ trait (Middletown, Conn . : Wesleyan University Press, 1965); James M. Banner, Jr., To The Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origin of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1 789-1815 (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1970); Richard D. Birdsall, Berkshire County: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Anson Ely Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachu­ setts to the Year 1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1903); James Morton Smith, Freedom's Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1956); F. B . Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1903), 3 : 146-50; Richard E. Welch, Jr., "The Parsons-Sedgwick Feud and the Reform of the Massachusetts Judiciary," Essex Institute Histor­ ical Collections (April 1956), pp. 171-87; Clifford K. Shipton, "Theodore Sedgwick, " in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 16: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes 1 764-1 767 (Boston: Massa­ chusetts Historical Society, 1972), pp. 214-29.

260

NOTES TO PAGES 208-30

21 . Samuel Livermore : The Sage of Holderness 1. See Charles R . Corning, Samuel Livermore (Concord, N. H . : Republi­ can Press Association, 1888); Joseph B . Walker, The Birth of the Federal Constitution: A History of the New Hampshire Convention for the Investigation, Discussion and Decision of the Federal Constitution . . . (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888); Jere R . Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1 741-1 794 (Cambridge : Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1970); Nathaniel Joseph Eiseman, "The Ratification of the Federal Constitution by the State of New Hampshire, " Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1937, pp. 42-44; George Hodges, Holderness: An Account of the Beginning of a New Hampshire Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co ., 1907); William Plumer, " Samuel Livermore, " in Early State Papers of New Hampshire, ed. Albert S . Batchellor (Concord : Ira C . Evans, 1892), 21 : 816-18; Nancy Elaine Briggs Oliver, "Keystone of the Federal Arch : New Hampshire's Ratification of the United States' Constitution, " Ph . D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1972, e_specially pp. 202-06 .

22 . James Duane : Conservative Peacemaker 1 . See Edward P. Alexander, A Revolutionary Conservative: James Duane of New York (N. Y. : Columbia University Press, 1938); Alfred Fabian Young, The Democratic-Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1 763- 1 797 (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (N. Y. : Alfred A . Knopf, 1979); Linda Grant De Pauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York State and the Federal Constitution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919); Edmund Bailey O 'Callaghan, ed ., Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co ., 1848-1851), 4 vols ., especially volume 4 .

24. Poisoned at the Source 1 . Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson : Means of Ascent (New York : ALfred A . Knopf, 1990).

25 . Lincoln and the Language of Hate and Fear 1. On the origins of the Republican Party, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). In 1856 Lincoln backed Fremont, not Millard Fill­ more . 2. Benjamin P. Thomas, Abrahatn Lincoln (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 143.

NOTES TO PAGES 230-33

261

3. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stan­ ford: Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 23. 4. See the comments of Albert Taylor Bledsoe quoted (p. 176) in Harry E. Pratt's "Albert Taylor Bledsoe: Critic of Lincoln, " Transactions of the Illinois Historical Society, 1934, pp. 153-83. 5. Thomas, Lincoln, p. 143; Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 18091858 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1928), 2:244, observes that this speech does not seem to have been written by the same man who authored Lin­ coln's earlier addresses and is "wholly unlike any before made by him." He adds that the "Peoria Speech" also anticipates almost everything Lincoln wrote before the Emancipation Proclamation. 6. Thomas, Lincoln, p. 146; Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 27, notes that Lincoln spoke mostly outside of Yates's district. See also Donald W. Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), pp. 248-49. Z Quoted from William Herndon's 1866 speech, "Facts Illustrative of Mr. Lincoln's Patriotism and Statesmanship," Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 3 (De­ cember 1944): 188. 8. Ibid. 9. Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co ., 1912), p. 429, quotation from the senator's letter to his son. 10. Riddle, Congressman Lincoln, pp. 249, 252. 11. The Liberty Party, the Know-Nothings, the Anti-Mason Party, the Free Soil Party, and many more we:r;e almost-parties . 12. See David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 152, for Stephen A . Douglas's 1853 speech on the coming empire of the Northwest: "There is a power in the nation greater than either the North or the South-a growing, increasing, swelling power that will be able to speak the law to this nation . . . . That power is the country known as the Great West-the Valley of the Mississippi, one and indivisible from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, and stretching . . . from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains. There, sir, is the hope of this nation­ the resting place of the power that is not only to control, but to save, the Union." Naturally, he concluded that this new combination would be di­ rected out of Illinois. 13. Although curiously enough at other times everyone behaved well and states entered the Union or were organized as territories with no dispute . 14. See David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 62-86. 15. See William Grayson, as quoted in a note to p. 198 of Hugh Blair Grigsby, The History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1 788 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969). Col. Grayson of Virginia presided over the Continental Congress when it voted on the Northwest Ordinance. 16 . See The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Mar­ tin Duberman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 231-32.

262

NOTES TO PAGES 234-37

The passage which I cite is from Staughton Lynd's essay, "The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution." In it he observes that most of the Fathers expected the South to outgrow and outpopulate the North . On the same subject see also Donald L . Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1 765-1820 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 445-46 . 17. Of the Framers, only James Wilson of Pennsylvania actually read the Constitution as implying the right of the national government to restrict the movement of slaves inside the United States . And he did so only for effect in order to secure ratification in his state-in a context where no one had the authority to deny his construction. See Robert R. Russel, " Con­ stitutional Doctrines with Regard to Slavery in the Territories, " Journal of Southern History 32 (Fall, 1966) :466-86 . Also useful is Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 181 9-1821 (Lexington : University of Kentucky Press, 1953). 18 . See Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, pp. 141, 529. See also John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York: The Free Press, 1977), pp. 234-42, for the Jeffersonian theory of "diffu­ sion." 19. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, p. 238 . 20 . For Madison's remarks, see The Records of the Federal Convention of 1 787, ed . Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 3 :436-37. 21 . George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond : A . Morris, 1854), pp. 182, 189. 22. Annals of Congress, 1st Cong ., 1st sess ., May 31, 1789, pp. 336-37. 23 . Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, p. 409. 24. William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 61 . 25. Ibid ., p. 59. 26 . Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, p. 244. 27. Ibid., pp. 389-91 . 28 . Ibid ., pp. 385-86, 527. 29. Ibid ., p. 385. 30. Ibid ., p. 38 . They entered in 1792 and 1796, after a few years under the Southwest Ordinance . 31 . Ibid ., pp. 413-14. 32. Ibid ., pp. 411, 430, 537. Rufus King of New York is Lincoln's prede­ cessor in these debates and he concludes, "The premise of both arguments was that blacks had no permanent, stable place in equalitarian America except as slaves in regions where white men refused to work" (p. 422). 33 . Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed . by Roy P. Basler, et al. 8 vols (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rugers University Press, 1953, 2 : 267, 33 . All subsequent citations are to this edition. (Citations to the Peoria speech are hereafter within the text . ) We are reminded of the words that one of the Framers, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, uttered dur­ ing the debates over Missouri. It was his opinion that Northern opposition

NOTES TO PAGES 238-42

263

to slavery in the new states was unrelated to " the love of liberty, humanity, or religion" but sprang rather from "the love of power, and the never­ ceasing wish to regain the honors and offices of the Government, which they know can never be done but by increasing the number of non-slave holding States ." (Charles S . Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectional­ ism, 1819-1848 [Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1948], p. 128 . ) Jefferson often spoke to the same effect . 34. David M . Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 345. 35. Ibid ., p. 346 . On the Illinois Black Codes, see Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1 : 163-64. As he notes, no Illinois politician challenged their justice, even though for the Negro they offered nothing better than a choice of emigration, serfdom, or reenslavement . 36 . Lincoln, Works, 2: 268, 498; 3: 312 . The emphasis is Lincoln's own . See also Thomas, Lincoln, p. 142, where he reports the anger of German immi­ grants with Stephen Douglas for ''Africanizing" their prospective "home­ land ." 37. According to Lincoln, one argument for emancipation was that it would foster racial purity. See Lincoln, Works, 2:409. 38 . Lincoln, Works, 2 : 255. The speech (pp. 247-283) is Lincoln's longest recorded address . References to its text are cited in the body of the rhetor­ ical analysis of the structure of the speech . 39. Lincoln, Works, 2 : 341, 385, 553; 3 : 95. 40. See Potter, Impending Crisis, pp. 145-76. See also Robert W. Johann­ sen, Stephen A . Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 394-98 . 41. Lincoln, Works, 2:261. 42 . Riddle, Congressman Lincoln, p. 248 . 43. Not even its apparent rambling from point to point is accidental . We are mistaken whenever we imagine that Lincoln is without purpose in what he does, for much of what Lincoln wrote for oral delivery he expected to be preserved in print . 44. Lincoln, Works, 2 : 248. A disclaimer made "wholly for political effect, " like the charges which follow it-recalling to us the 1842 difficulty with insults to James Shields . Yet he accuses Douglas of being party to a covert design and (by implication) of treason . Even though he elsewhere gives his own charge of collusion with the South the lie-admitting that Douglas "cares nothing for the South" and that the Little Giant's plan is to "hold on to his chances in Illinois ." See Lincoln, Works, 2:530. So much for the Slave Power. 45. Lincoln, Works, 3: 315. Lincoln's language here (in 1858) belongs to an order of millenarian rhetoric described by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 151 . I quote Voegelin's summary of the usual Puritan style of debate . 46 . Herndon, "Facts Illustrative of Mr. Lincoln's Patriotism, " p. 188 . 47. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, from his review of Ward H . Lamon's The Life of

264

NOTES TO PAGES 243-45

Abraham Lincoln: From His Birth to His Inauguration, Southern Review, no. 26 (April 1873):360-61 . 48. Pratt, ''Albert Taylor Bledsoe, " p. 178. 49. Potter, Impending Crisis, p. 3Z See also Foner, Free Soil, p. 316: "Much of the messianic zeal which characterized political anti-slavery derived from his faith in the superiority of the political, social and economic institu­ tions of the North, and a desire to spread these to their ultimate limits . " 50. Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, p. 41, and Clement Eaton's Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Boston: Little, Brown and Com­ pany, 1957), pp. 129-31 . Further evidence of Clay's contempt for hypocrites may be found in Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., September 15, 1819, pp. 1174-75. 51. Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (New York: W. W. Norton & Co ., 1978), p. 252. 52. Lincoln, Works, 2:272. 53. Ibid., p. 281. Nothing in the state laws of the Midwest indicates a view that Negroes had "natural rights" or that they had a full membership in the human family. Lincoln's claim that hostility to slavery in Illinois rested upon a higher regard for Negroes as men than the view expressed by Stephen Douglas cannot be supported by the evidence. It merely flat­ ters his audience into a sense of moral superiority that costs them nothing in charity or social inconvenience-a kind of superiority that has caused the Republic much trouble throughout its history. 54. We should recall that Illinois helped to get Missouri into the Union as a slave state. One of its senators in 1820 was Lincoln's brother-in-law. 55. Fon er, Free Soil, pp. 73-102, traces the origins of Lincoln's favorite arguments in the speeches or pamphlets of Chase, Seward, and Charles Sumner. 56. See untitled fragment comparing his career to that of Douglas in Lincoln, Works, 2:382-83. It is a self-righteous performance, concealing Lincoln's envy in unctuous reflections on his own rectitude, which was what he had for his trouble when in 1855 another man won away James Shields's seat in the United States Senate. We are reminded of the "family of the lion" and "tribe of the eagle" in his 1838 speculations on an Ameri­ can Caesar. 5Z See Lincoln, Works, 2: 259, 272. In this speech he had to !>e contradic­ tory.

I N DEX

Abbey, Edward, 24-25 Absalom, Absalom!, 34, 37 Adams, John, 156, 161, 169-70, 183, 204 Adams, John Quincy, 113 Adams, Samuel, 64, 74, 160-75 Address of the Minority in the Virginia Legislature to the People of That State, Contain ing a Vindication of the Alien and Sedition Laws, The, 123 Adler, Mortimer J., 62 Aeschylus, 14 Aesthetic judgment, 9, 10 Alienation, 11, 30-31 A merican Literature, 26 Ames, Fisher, 74, 173, 190 Annapolis Conference of 1786, 69 Arnold, Benedict, 92 Arnold, Matthew, 47 Articles of Confederation, 59, 65, 69, 104, 107, 135, 160, 170, 173, 192, 194-95 As I Lay Dying, 34, 51-56 Bartlett, Josiah, 182, 192-97 Bede, The Venerable, 5 Bibliographical Guide to Southern Liter­ ature, The, 27 Bill of Rights, U. S., 62-63, 68, 107-8, 159 Bill of Rights (1689), 67 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 125-26 Brennan, Justice William J., 60, 64 Brooks, David, 9 Burke, Edmund, 13, 108, 146, 151 Calder v. Bull, 61, 109 Caro, Robert A., 222-28 Cassique of Kiawah, 31 Champlin, George, 61 Charlemagne, 15 Chase, Salmon P., 245 Chase, Samuel, 74, 100-113, 138

Ch isholm v. Georgia, 121 Cicero, 14 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 23 Clay, C. C., 216-18 Clay, Henry, 229-31, 234, 242-43 Coke, Sir Edward, 85 Columbia Literary History of the United States, 17-18, 25 Constitution, U. S., 1, 62, 106-12, 114, 119-20, 128-29, 134-35, 138-39, 144-45, 147-48, 154, 180-81, 183-84, 195, 212, 215-21, 237-38, 241; ratifica­ tion, 1, 3, 59-80, 128-29, 134, 139, 143, 146, 151, 153, 158, 172-73, 190, 202-3 Cooper, James Fenimore, 20, 30, 32 Cornwallis, Lord Charles, 93, 95 Corporate myth of commerce, 19 Crane, Stephen, 20 Cromwell, Oliver, 86, 160, 170 Cursory Sketch of the Motives and Proceedings of the Party Which Sways the Affairs of the Union, A, 124 Davidson, Donald, 1, 4, 19, 32, 41-47 Davis, -Jefferson, 216-17, 220-21 Declaration of Independence, 3, 63, 100, 103-4, 118, 156, 187, 192, 220, 235, 240-41, 244 Deconstruction, 10-11 Demosthenes, 83, 100 Dickinson, John, 73 Dostoevski, Fyodor, 31 Douglas, Stephen A., 229-30, 235-36, 239-42, 244 Duane, James, 209-212 Dyer, Eliphalet, 183-91 Eagleton, Terry, 9 Edge of the Swamp, The, 27-31 Eliot, T. S., 12 Equality, 2, 8, 61-62, 100-101, 110-11,

265

266

INDEX

121, 138, 151, 171, 198, 201-2, 204, 209, 238, 245 Everson v. The Board of Education, 77 Experience : as guide, 3, 7-16, 83, 100-101, 130, 155 Faraway Country, The, 26 Faulkner, William, 1, 4, 34-40, 51-56 Fitzhugh, George, 28 Fitzpatrick, Benjamin, 216-17 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 48 Framers (of U. S . Constitution), 1, 3, 59-212 Franklin, Benjamin, 19, 104 Fussell, Paul, 46 Gage, General Thomas, 162, 169 Gallery of Southerners, A, 27 Gates, General Horatio, 116, 177 Generations of the Faithful Heart, 19 Genovese, Eugene, 27 George III, King of England, 59, 88, 96, 103-4, 131-32, 140, 146, 148-51, 186-87, 199, 210, 219 Georgics, The, 42 Gerry, Elbridge, 59-60, 70, 172 Gitlow v. New York, 67 Gordon, Caroline, 20, 42, 50 Graves, John, 24 Great Charter, 67, 131 Great Convention (1787), 3, 59, 62, 119, 136, 152, 173, 180, 220 Great Dismal Swamp Company, 124 Greene, Nathanael, 93, 116-17, 126, 142 Guilds, John, 31, 32 Guthrie, A . B., 21-23 Haley, J. Evetts, 22, 228 Hamilton, Alexander, 61, 105, 121, 204, 211 Hancock, John, 64, 74, 168-69, 170-73 Hanson, Alexander Contee, 75, 125 Harrison, Benjamin, 89, 138, 155-59 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 18, 31, 160 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 32 Henry, Patrick, 69, 72, 75-76, 83-99, 119, 121, 138, 156-57, 159 Herndon, William, 230-31 Herodotus, 14 History of Southern Literature, The, 27 Homer, 14, 36, 44, 142 Horace, 126 Hubbell, Jay B ., 26 Hutchinson, Thomas, 162, 167 I 'll Take My Stand, 49

Intruder in the Dust, 34, 37-38 Iredell, James, 61, 64, 66, 146-54 Jameson, Frederic, 9 Jefferson, Thomas, 13, 93, 111, 124, 160, 180, 205, 234 Johnson, Lyndon, 1, 3, 222-28 Jones, Madison, 20 Jonson, Ben, 29-30, 42 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 229-32, 239, 243 Karl, Frederick R., 34 Kelton, Elmer, 23 Kendall, Willmoore, 62 Knight: role of, 34-40 Lafayette, Marquis de, 121 Lansing, John, 59, 69 Lee, "Light Horse Harry, " 75, 97, 114-27, 142 Lee, Richard Henry, 70, 88, 115, 158 Lee, Robert E ., 118, 127, 218-19 Lentricchia, Frank, 8, 9, 38, 40 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 10 Liberal education, 7-16 Liberty, 3, 11, 13, 60-69, 75-77, 79, 89-90, 92, 95-97, 100, 102, 104, 115, 125-26, 128, 131-32, 146-47, 165-66, 168, 173, 189, 208-9 Lincoln, Abraham, 1-4, 118, 154, 239-45 Literary history, 3-4, 8-9 Literary History of the American West, A, 25 Literary theory, 7-16 Livermore, Samuel, 182, 206-8 Livy, 125 Long Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, 31 Lowndes, Rawlins, 69, 128-38 Lucan, 125 Lytle, Andrew Nelson, 1-3, 48-50 McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 61 Madison, James, 59, 63, 68, 75-76, 83-93, 96-98, 119, 121, 144, 234 Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, The, 31 Mallory, Stephen R., 216-17 Marshall, Chief Justice John, 79, 111, 113, 119 Martial, 42 Martin, Luther, 59, 107, 112 Marvell, Andrew, 30 Marx, Leo, 20 Marxism, 4, 9, 34

INDEX Mason, George, 59-60, 69, 75, 91, 95, 119-20, 158 Memoirs of the War in the Southern Departmen t of the Un ited States, 125 Mercer, John Francis, 59, 107 Meriwether, James B., 32 Miller, J. Hillis, 11 Missouri Compromise, 229, 237, 239-41, 244-45 Morris, Robert, 156 O'Daniel, Governor W. Lee "Pappy, " 223 Ohmann, Richard, 9 Oliphant, Mary Chevillette Simms, 41 Parsons, Theophilus, 61, 66, 74, 205 Paterson, William, 73, 111 Pendleton, Edmund, 62, 86, 89, 114, 119 Petition of Right, 67 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 64, 75, 136 Plain Tru th : Addressed to the People of Virgin ia, 123 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 28-29 Poet: role of, 30-31, 42-48 Polybius, 125 Potter, David, 238 Psychological criticism, 11 Randolph, Edmund, 59, 66, 76, 119, 158 Randolph, John (of Roanoke), 111, 141, 235 Randolph, Peyton, 86, 88 Ransom, John Crowe, 42 Reivers, The, 34, 38 Religion, 66-67, 77-78, 93-94, 98-100, 113, 126, 171 Revolution: American, 2-3, 32, 43, 69, 79, 88-95, 98, 115-18, 122, 125, 130, 139, 141-42, 145, 167, 174, 176, 199, 219, 232; French, 83, 98, 108, 121-22, 130, 173-74, 190-91, 204 Rhetoric, 1-4, 10, 70-72, 85-89, 94-99, 119-20, 152-53, 218, 239-44 Roosevelt, Franklin 0., 223-24 Rubin, Louis 0., Jr., 26-31, 33, 47 Schaefer, Jack, 23-25 Scott, Sir Walter, 46 Second Israel: myth of, 18-19 Second Troy: myth of, 19 Sedgwick, Theodore, 74, 198-205 Shakespeare, William, 31

267

Shays, Daniel, 73, 106, 118, 120-22, 171, 201 Sherman, Roger, 65, 183, 187-88 Simms, William Gilmore, 1, 30-33 Simpson, Lewis, 27, 46 Slavery, 28-29, 78, 135-36, 157, 201, 204, 232-43, 245 Smith, Adam, 19 Smith, Melancton, 69 Sophocles, 47 Sou th in American Literature, 1 607- 1 900, The, 26 Southern literature, 1, 3, 17, 19, 26-28, 33 Southern mind, 27-28 Southern Renascence, 26 Stamp Act, 86-87, 101-2, 131, 163, 168, 210 Stanton, General Joseph, 66 Stegner, Wallace, 24-25 Stephens, Alexander, 217, 221 Stevenson, Governor Coke, 222, 225-28 Story, Justice Joseph, 113 Sullivan, General James, 73, 176-82 Sumter, General Thomas, 75, 116, 139-45 Tarleton, Colonel Banastre, 44-45, 92 Tate, Allen, 12, 19, 27, 50 Texan Looks at Lyndon : A Study in Illegitimate Power, A, 228 Timrod, Henry, 1, 28-30 Toombs, Senator Robert, 215, 217 Trilling, Lionel, 11, 40 Trumbull, Lyman, 231 United States v. Worrall, 109 Unvanquished, Tlze, 34, 36, 38 Varnum, Joseph R., 61 Virgil, 31 Wake for the Living, A, 48 vVarren, Robert Penn, 20, 215 Washington, George, 83, 90, 95-96, 98-99, 104, 109, 116, 119, 123, 126, 156-58, 170, 182, 208, 212 Webster, Daniel, 229, 231, 242-43 Westering: myth of, 19-25 Western American literature, 1, 3, 17-25 Whiskey Rebellion, 122 Wigfall, Louis T., 216 William Elliot Shoots a Bear, 27 Wilson, James, 63, 72, 153

268

INDEX

Wimsatt, Mary Ann, 32-33 Wolcott, Oliver, 78 Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Fram­ ers of the United States Constitution, A, 2 Wythe, George, 76, 85, 114 Xenophon, 14, 36, 125

Years of Lyndon Joh nson: Means of Ascent, The, 222, 224 Years of Lyndon Joh nson : The Path to Power, The, 223 Yeats, William Butler, 10, 42, 44-47 Yulee, D. L., 216, 218