George Kateb: Lincoln’s Political Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

 

Before and during the American Civil War, “political theory came to life too vividly,” Kateb remarks, as principles were written, so to speak, in blood. Identifying “the underlying causes of the war” as “the integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status,” he wonders why Lincoln seemed to hold the survival of the former dearer than the firm recognition of the latter. He is inclined to wish Lincoln more Garrisonian—more the impassioned moral absolutist—than he was, and even tries to help him along in that direction, calling Lincoln’s devotion to the Declaration and the Constitution a “political religion.” Like William Lloyd Garrison, he criticizes the Founders harshly (as Lincoln did not). He applauds Lincoln’s eventual moves to abolish slavery but deplores the suspension of constitutional rights Lincoln judged necessary to win the war that made abolition possible. In sum, Kateb may be said to lack sufficient appreciation for the moral status of prudential reasoning. Accordingly, this is not the first book to read on Lincoln’s political thought. Harry V. Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2001) still tower over their rivals. But readers who have equipped themselves by studying Lincoln’s writings will find themselves challenged if not persuaded by Kateb’s probing intelligence.

Although Kateb refers to Lincoln’s political thought, he mostly means Lincoln’s moral and political passion. He often writes as if he agrees with Marx’s claim that thought is not a passion of the head (as in Plato) but the head of a passion. Unlike Marx, however, he wants Lincoln to have been more passionate, more passionately opposed to slavery. He describes Lincoln as motivated by two passions, one for saving the Union and the other for ending slavery. “Both passions came from his moral commitment to human equality,” but where did that moral commitment itself come from? Kateb will struggle to find an answer.

He begins by addressing Lincoln’s political circumstance. “Who else electable in the North could have had his will?” he asks, quite sensibly implying that there was no one. And in order to be electable, he remarks, Lincoln couldn’t simply lay his cards on the table, when it came to slavery abolition. “His whole political life illustrates the generalization that in democratic politics, perhaps in all politics, it is nearly impossible to do the right thing for the right reasons, actually held and honestly stated.” This held true particularly in the years between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, legalizing slavery in the territories claimed and settled by Americans but not yet states, and the end of the Civil War. “Group ferocities” prevailed throughout, although Kateb is careful not to claim, nor to ascribe to Lincoln the claim, that these were the furies of Greek tragedy—somehow fated, entirely out of human control. Although Lincoln speaks of Providence, he does so in the manner of the Bible; according to Kateb, he uses Providence as an excuse “to blot out human responsibility.” Slavery was introduced to American society by choice. Therefore, “The people cursed themselves; they brought their suffering on themselves.” Kateb nonetheless errs in denying that “the integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status” amounted to “some high worldly value of the sort that tragic individual heroes contend for, like position or influence or honor or successful revenge.” The integrity of the Union and the slaves’ human status were if anything of higher worldly value than those things, and made higher still for having been political, for bearing upon the ‘fate’ of the American Founders’ effort to frame a government that secured the natural rights of human beings as such.

At the same time, Kateb unjustly minimizes the slaveholders’ dilemma. Their fears of slave rebellion proved overblown—”there was no imitation of the Haitian revolution”—but how could they know that at the time? Thomas Jefferson’s image of slaveholders having a wolf by the ears, fearing to let go, registered an understandable fear and a serious dilemma. “Perhaps Jefferson could not imagine himself as a slave who would not try to kill his master before or after manumission.” Then again, perhaps not. What he could imagine was that this might happen, and had happened elsewhere, whatever his imagination might conjure. Moreover, Jefferson’s generation of slaveholders lived before claims of ‘scientific racism’ had taken hold of Southerners, as it most assuredly had done by the 1850s. Kateb needs this claim because he wants to show that Lincoln gave too much credence to Southern fears. When Lincoln says that Southerners “are just what we [Northerners] would be in their situation,” he is warning his political friends against self-righteousness—a trait not absent in Abolitionist circles, and hardly conducive to reunion after the war.

Similarly, Kateb downplays arguments from moral and cultural relativism, arguments tending to excuse Southern behavior. While citing Lincoln’s 1859 statement that “Questions of abstract right and wrong cannot be questions of locality,” he denies that those who thought slavery permissible made such an argument. But in fact one did: Lincoln’s opponent in the Illinois Senate election the year before, Stephen A. Douglas. “The essence of the struggle over the rightness of slavery was not between moral absolutism and cultural relativism, the obsessive theme of some of Leo Strauss’s followers.” Leaving aside who those followers might be, and why such concern might be “obsessive” (Kateb offers us no further information on either point), one must recall that Douglas had in fact argued that (to use his word) “diversity” was one of America’s strengths, and diversity of climate made diversity of socioeconomic relations useful in service of America’s cross-continent march to greatness and prosperity. “In any event you do not need moral absolutism to condemn slavery, because if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. All you need is decency extended by enlightenment to include people not of your color.” But from what does “decency” derive? And what does enlightenment illuminate? Lincoln knew: it was natural right. Does Kateb? It seems not. Of course, Douglas’s talk of “diversity” might make a man of the Left a bit nervous, given the valorization of that term in contemporary political discourse, but, as Lincoln would say, let us not judge, lest we be judged.

Kateb’s impatience with Lincoln’s supposed waffling on the slavery issue is thankfully not untinctured by an appreciation for a statesmanlike need for rhetorical caution. Lincoln “had to face the fact that his own side was divided not only between slave states and free state” (several slave states remained in the Union) “but also between Unionist citizens, whatever their state, who favored or opposed emancipation as a tactic of war and abolition as a war aim.” Kateb doubts that Lincoln had intended to end slavery all along, although he does acknowledge that on “at least one occasion”—the “House Divided” speech of 1858—Lincoln did indicate such an intention, indirectly. “He came to see perhaps that only the election of a Republican president would impel the South to initiate a war that would provide the chance for the stronger North to win and then abolish slavery, somehow.” And he could hardly have come to this conclusion happily, being “keenly aware of the cost in human life that a war between the sections would exact.” Still, Lincoln’s “moral outrage before the war was not a dominating passion that made every other consideration secondary to abolishing slavery.” True enough, but Kateb’s passion for moral passion does not necessarily constitute a morality superior to one that derives both moral principles and moral conduct from reason.

Here is where Lincoln’s “political religion” comes in. Lincoln himself used the term in his speech to the Springfield Lyceum, long before his presidency; he wanted the boys to respect the rule of law, to revere the Constitution, to maintain the Founders’ republicanism in their generation. By “religion” Kateb means the “master principle” of one’s life, and for Lincoln that was the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence, as instantiated in the Constitution, itself undergirded by the Union. As he well says, for Lincoln “the substantive principle of human equality determines the fundamental law that establishes government as the means to the protection and advancement of a society that practices human equality” by means of the republican form of government guaranteed by Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution.

In answer to those who criticize Lincoln for advocating voluntary African-American colonization, he replies, “The best that could be said is that he sincerely thought that whites would never accept blacks as equal citizens and that it would be good for blacks to emigrate”—a policy, it might be added, that whites themselves had followed, first in leaving Europe and then in settling the West. The constitution of the Confederate States of America amounted to a revolution or regime change “against the principle of the equality of all races,” a new regime based squarely on ‘race theory.’ Kateb struggles more with Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and other wartime measure violative of some Constitutional provisions, over-dramatically claiming that the president “destroyed the Constitution temporarily in order to save it.” His real problem is with the Constitution itself, which was “unworthy of reverence just because it was a Constitution of slavery”—a pact with the devil, as more than one Abolitionist had said. But of course the Constitution didn’t constitute slavery; it limited its influence to the degree politically possible at the time. Lincoln “knew the bald truth that the Constitution established slavery in the United States”—an assertion that is indeed bald, without being true. Kateb claims that Taney’s decision in the Dred Scott case was “constitutionally plausible,” but it wasn’t: There is nothing in the Constitution saying that the black man has no rights that the white man must respect.

Kateb doesn’t much like the Declaration of Independence, either. “When we look at the Declaration of Independence we barely see theoretical backing for human equality; even though we see a few dramatic assertions about the divine endowment of human beings with certain inalienable rights.” This means that the Declaration denounces “the colonists’ political slavery, but not black chattel slavery.” Such an interpretation overlooks the phrase, “all men are created equal,” equal in the sense that they are endowed with those unalienable right Kateb does acknowledge. “We should notice that the discourse of the Declaration did not build up to the conclusion that all persons are created equal but rather to the conclusion that all peoples are equal and therefore the American people were equal to all other peoples.” He should notice that the conclusion of the syllogism rests on the premise that all men are created equal. He goes on to blame Jefferson for failing to condemn slavery in the Declaration, when in fact he did; his colleagues removed that condemnation because they wanted to keep South Carolina and Georgia in the Union. Once South Carolina and Georgia tried to get out of the Union, no such worries prevailed and slavery was placed not just on the road to extinction but on the fast track, at the cost of a brutal civil war.

Kateb wants to establish that Lincoln’s “political religion” entailed not only a master commitment but a mythology. Needing “a stainless American source of devotion to human equality,” Lincoln fixed upon the Declaration. “The distortion of truth”—as Kateb mistakenly calls it—”came from Lincoln’s insistence that the Declaration and the man who wrote it were single-minded in their commitment to the human equality of all persons and races and made that commitment uppermost.” But Lincoln never called Jefferson single-minded in any “commitment.” Like Lincoln himself, Jefferson understood political life as uncongenial to the single-minded. Lincoln finds the principle of human equality in the Declaration because it is there. “One of the meanings of the very word religion among Christians—not that Lincoln was one—is going beyond the evidence (that is, having faith) and turning away from evidence that might threaten the religion’s solidity (that is, having faith)”—a hope resting on the evidence of things unseen, as the Apostle Paul puts it in his Letter to the Hebrews. If so, then Lincoln’s adherence to the Declaration was entirely rational, resting on the plain words of the document, and not religious at all.

Prior to the war, Kateb asserts, “Lincoln’s commitment to human equality was seriously flawed” because he “was not an abolitionist.” Nothing more dramatically illustrates Kateb’s moralizing incapacity to think prudentially, that is, with moral seriousness. Had Lincoln announced a “commitment” to abolitionism before the war, thereby disqualifying himself for the presidency, he never would have attained a position from which he could have made abolition happen. Similarly, on Lincoln August 1862 meeting with a delegation of freemen, in which he suggested that they consider emigration, he calls this “a slap on the face meant to resound throughout the country.” “Lincoln calmly said that the white race suffered from the black presence,” and vice-versa; therefore, black colonization in some other part of the world would remove the trouble. Kateb waxes indignant, but as a matter of fact the white race was suffering at the time of the meeting: the Civil War was less than halfway done. Kateb detests the way in which Lincoln often makes the existence of slavery to be ‘about’ American whites—slavery fosters habits of despotism antithetical to the perpetuation of republicanism—but in view of the fact that the future of slavery depended primarily upon what the white majority did, why would he not address that majority in terms of their moral self-interest?

The inadequacy of Kateb’s moral theorizing reappears as he considers Lincoln’s relation to the Constitution. He recognizes that “the defense of the compromise by which the Framers accepted the incorporation of slavery in order to be able to get a constitution approved and then ratified must be subjected to moral questioning.” Very well then, what is the question? Kateb claims that by this incorporation “declared rights were mocked and denatured by their context,” that is, by the continued existence of slavery and the allowance of that continuation in the Constitution. But no political institution can “denature” a natural right. Natural rights exist, whatever men may say or do. As for Lincoln, he “reasoned that incorporating slavery into the Constitution was a necessary price to pay to secure the great good of the Constitution.” Not quite: the great good of the Constitution was subservient to the greater good of the Union, and the greater good of the Union was subservient to the greatest good of securing natural rights. This is “doing evil to secure good,” Kateb avers, but the evil already existed; if the Union was indispensable to abolishing slavery sooner than later, as indeed it proved to be, then Lincoln was in fact “doing the lesser evil for the sake of preventing or remedying a greater evil,” a possibility Kateb states only to deny immediately. Peaceful disunion with abolition was not going to occur in 1787 or the 1850s. And Kateb never gets around to saying why disunion would have been a greater evil than the failure to abolish slavery had been, in the minds of the Founders and Lincoln, although the refusal to allow North America to become a Europe-like continent of perpetual war among small and medium-sized sovereign states was clearly stated by the Founders, and therefore well known to Lincoln.

On slavery and the Constitution, “the South’s appeal to social necessity”—their fear of a slave uprising—”was finally countered by Lincoln’s appeal to military necessity”—that slave emancipation was a necessary wartime measure—”even as secession had made the idea of constitutional necessity otiose on both sides”—the South having rejected constitutional union altogether, Lincoln having suspended certain provisions of the Constitution. Kateb very much dislikes claims of military necessity, as seen in “the surplus violence of Sherman’s march through Georgia and South Carolina to the sea.” He ignores the purpose of that supposedly “surplus” violence, which was not only to get to Savannah in order to move north to Richmond and assist Grant in breaking Lee’s army, but to crush the political regime of the Confederacy by ruining the planter oligarchy of the deep South—the ruling class which had forced the slavery-compromise clauses into the Constitution in the first place, and which had led the secessionist movement. In countenancing this action, and in taking his other actions to suspend elements of the Constitution, Lincoln did not merely violate but “destroyed” the Constitution. “To be sure, elections in the North were never canceled. The structure of the government was not touched.” But Lincoln “became a dictator in his dealings with some citizens.” True enough, but who were those citizens if not traitors?

In effect, secession was a declaration of independence from the constitutional Union, and therefore a declaration of war, once the Southern independence movement asserted itself in the seizure of United States property at Fort Sumter and elsewhere. The Confederate States of American was thence targeted by the United States for military defeat and political revolution, regime change. Regarding treacherous individuals within the states still in the Union, the war entailed suspension of some ordinary legal procedures for the duration of the war. “I do not know which is more troubling: to think that the Constitution allows its own suspension or that the Constitution in an emergency needs to be supplemented by a doctrine external to it and contradictory to it.” But what if the doctrine external to the Constitution isn’t contradictory to it? Kateb cites Ulysses S. Grant on this point: “the right to resist or suppress the rebellion is as inherent as the right of self-defense, and as natural as the right of an individual to preserve his life when in jeopardy. The Constitution was therefore in abeyance for the time being, so far as it in any way affected the progress and termination of the war.” To which Kateb replies: “My conceptual claim is that if rights are treated as provisional entitlements, they cease being rights and become mere privileges.” The reply to this is obvious. Constitutional rights are indeed provisional if natural rights are at stake. All men are created equal, but not all rights are. Legal or conventional rights must give way to natural rights, if defense of the former would sacrifice defense of the latter, given the principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are instituted to secure unalienable, natural rights. Similarly, if, within civil society, somebody comes at me with a knife, I am entitled to ‘suspend’ my attackers civil and natural right to life in the course of defending myself. This hardly “destroys” either civil or natural right.

In his concluding chapter Kateb addresses the difficult question of Lincoln’s “metaphysical outlook,” an outlook he made difficult to discern because he left no extended record of his thoughts on God and because he was a politic as well as a political man. Kateb accepts the claim of Lincoln’s old friend William Herndon, who describes Lincoln as a materialist and indeed a Darwinian, and also a thoroughgoing determinist. Kateb regards Lincoln’s references to Providence and to “the idea of personal responsibility” as “rhetorically expedient” tropes.

However, Kateb immediately begins to hedge. We should not assume that Lincoln’s “sincere metaphysics was only and always remained Enlightenment materialism, with no purpose in the world and where necessitous bodies constantly pushed against each other in inevitable conflict.” Lincoln’s thought was unconventional, evincing “the willingness to believe that providential purpose and enlightened human judgment (including the best moral judgment) might not coincide.” The best human moral judgment was neither omniscient nor pure. God’s intentions “were not understandable,” and not necessarily “in conformity with moral judgment”; “God is beyond good and evil.”

With this Nietzschean notion in mind, Kateb considers Lincoln’s unpublished “Meditation on the Divine Will,” which he wrote in September 1862, while considering the Emancipation Proclamation. The Meditation is a note preparatory to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, itself explained more fully in Lincoln’s “Reply to Emancipation Memorial Presented by Chicago Christians of All Denominations” of September 13. Lincoln begins the Meditation by noting: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” Kateb finds this puzzling. “If one side must be wrong, can the other and radically opposite side be wrong at all?” He admits, “There is a tangle here that I cannot straighten out.” The tangle exists only if one thinks of the syllogism in simple and abstract terms. If I say ‘x’ and you say ‘not-x,’ then one of us must be wrong but both of us cannot be. However, if I say, ‘x, y, and z’ and you say ‘not-x, a, and b,’ then we could both be wrong. Further, if, as Lincoln goes on to say, “in the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party”—if God is thinking ‘m, n, and o’—then of course both sides could be wrong. In his Reply to the Chicago Christians Lincoln makes the latter point, that we don’t know what God is thinking. Hence his famous formula: “With firmness in the right, as God grants us to see the right.” That is the best a human being can do. Or, as he puts it in the Reply, “I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right.” It isn’t that “God is beyond good and evil,” as Kateb would have it, but that His thoughts are not our thoughts, necessarily.

Kateb similarly botches his interpretation of the Second Inaugural. Lincoln doesn’t “blame providence or God for ordaining moral evil in the form of slavery and bringing about moral evil in the form of atrocious war to end slavery.” As he did consistently throughout the war, he wants the North, especially in victory, to avoid self-righteousness—the besetting vice not only of the Abolitionists but of moralists generally. Lincoln’s call for “charity for all” at the end of the speech is not “hatred of God or his providence,” and “the only hope for the future” in Lincoln’s view could not be “that human solidarity would prevail over attachment to incomprehensible providence and the accompanying theology of merciless retaliation and punishment”—a claim that encapsulates Kateb’s own materialist democratic socialism, and has nothing to do with Lincoln. As for self-righteousness, Kateb provides his readers with an excellent example of it, when he comments on Lincoln’s “single greatest sentence”: “Yet if God wills that [the war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'” This, Kateb claims, means that Lincoln admits that the “apocalypse of extermination” of America’s “living white population” would be just, meaning, “his outrage at the white race’s prolonged and remorseless violation of human equality, which the white race defended tenaciously, was so great that he contemplated the possibility that God’s mercy or grace alone could be an adequate basis for pardon.” But of course this is absurd. What race was not guilty of prolonged and remorseless violation of human equality? And what country was “the last, best hope of mankind” for abjuring that violation? And what regime had upheld equal natural rights as its fundamental principle, even as it failed to enact that principle for a substantial portion of its population? What regime was even then correcting that failure, precisely at the cost of all that blood?

 

 

Malcolm Gaskill: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, November 25, 2015. Republished with permission.

 

English settlers in America might have intended to transmit the traditions of the mother country to subsequent generations. This didn’t exactly happen—partly because the settlers disagreed amongst themselves about which of those traditions deserved preservation, and partly because the experience of life in North America challenged many of the traditions they did want to preserve. The disagreement and the adaptation together led, eventually, to a political revolution.

Malcolm Gaskill puts it bluntly: “Migrants did have one thing in common: they were no longer in England, and they had to get used to it.” His new book tracks what happened to the English in their three (very different) principal areas of settlement: Virginia, New England, and the Caribbean. He also keeps an eye on what the English who stayed at home—financing these expeditions and attempting to rule them from afar—thought and did, especially in competition with the Spanish, who had settled large swaths of the New World a long time before their geopolitical rivals in London really got started. This gives Between Two Worlds a lot to do, but the author, a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia, manages his unruly topic by considering each of the first three settler generations in turn.

Gaskill deals in his prologue with the inauspicious sixteenth-century beginnings of the project, remarking that the English understandably modeled their efforts on the recent conquest of Ireland, the wild tribes of which reminded them of their own pre-Roman-conquest ancestors and of the North American peoples. the first settlement, at Roanoke, “Virginia” in 1585—named for Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, of course—vanished from the earth like Prospero’s insubstantial pageant. To this day, we don’t know what happened to its more than 100 inhabitants.

The years 1607 to 1640 mark Gaskill’s first generation of permanent settlers. Of the four million English in 1600, thousands would journey to the New World during this period, Half of them went to the West Indies, slightly more than a third to the Virginia/Chesapeake area, only fifteen percent to New England. Motives varied, but as the ‘southerly’ movement of the new arrivals suggests, the prospect of a mild climate fit for rich plantations and an interest in “resisting Spanish Catholics—the dark lords of an American empire”—figured prominently in English ambitions. To wrest land from the infidels of Spain and from pagan indigenes—better still, while converting the latter to Protestant Christianity—reconciled, at least to the satisfaction of the English, desires for both liberty and empire. (Two centuries later, Thomas Jefferson’s formula, ‘the empire of liberty,” would address the same paradox, albeit in very different terms.)

Upon ascending to the throne in 1603, James I followed a two-track strategy regarding Spain. He made peace while endorsing some New World plantations. King James’ restraint in New World settlement bespoke not only diplomatic caution but also the worry (prescient, as it would happen) that large English settlements in the New world might upset England’s place “in the hierarchy of nations.” The New World tail might someday wag the Old World dog. He took care not to use the Crown’s money for investment, leaving colonization to private speculators who nonetheless remained under royal control. Hence the Virginia company and the Plymouth Adventurers, both established in 1606.

The former reached the Chesapeake Bay under the command of Captain John Smith the following year, founding Jamestown and meeting resistance above all from the Indian chiefs or Paw-Paws, who recognized a rival form of worship when they saw one. As Gaskill puts it, “Indian suspicion on one side, and a haughty sense of entitlement on the other, guaranteed an Anglo-Indian future steeped in misery and bloodshed.” And this notwithstanding the marriage of the entrepreneur John Rolfe to “Pocahontas” (her real name, Mataoka, concealed from the English), optimistically renamed “Rebecca,” after the Biblical mother of two nations. She died less than a decade later, after a publicity tour of England, taking the rather faint hope of peaceful intermarriage and Christina conversion of the Indians with her.

The real answer to lasting English settlement in America was found in political thought—specifically, in what political scientists now call ‘comparative politics.’ “Adventurers had to learn that merely installing English settlements in America was not enough,” Gaskill writes. “They had to identify things that made England work socially, politically, and economically and reproduce them. Peopling the land was the key.” If ever a people were, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous phrase, forced to be free, it was the English in North America. More specifically, they were force to think, and to think politically. It was a habit that would eventuate in independence and republicanism, early two centuries later.

Having been engaged in fierce geopolitical struggles amongst themselves for centuries, the Indian nations and tribes quickly saw the danger of any substantial territorial encroachments by the newcomers. At best, the white strangers might be deployed against traditional enemies. Incidentally, one of the merits of Between Two Worlds is its treatment of the Indians—a treatment free of the American triumphalism of the old accounts, and also of the condescending sympathy for ‘Native Americans’ fashionable in the past half-century. Gaskill describes but makes no attempt to justify the sudden attack on Jamestown masterminded by the apparently friendly Powhatan chief Opechancanough, whose men murdered 387 unsuspecting settlers in March 1622, then mangled the carcasses. After that, “Throughout the Atlantic world, men decided that Indians could not be trusted.” Settler eminences now began to speak not of intermarriage, peaceful trade, and conversion but of the right of war and the law of nations exercised against savages. This means that one should be cautious with the term ‘racism’ when thinking about the settlers. There was no trace of biologically-based racism in them. Their suspicion of ‘the Indians’ rather arose from what logicians would call a ‘hasty generalization,’ imputing the savagery exhibited by the Powhatan chief to all Indians or, at a minimum (and this would be more reasonable), keeping their guard up when dealing with any Indian group. The latter policy was already well in place among European nations in dealing with one another.

As for the Plymouth Adventurers and their descendants, the New Englanders faced analogous circumstances but with a different set of Indian nations, in a harsher climate; and they arrived with more intense religious aspirations. A band of Protestant dissidents landed at “New Plymouth” in 1620, settling in territory where the local tribe had been eradicated by disease. Gaskill notes that the Mayflower Compact was no “democratic constitution but a company contract to bind the strangers to order upon landing, a quick fix before formal authority was established.” (Many of the Pilgrims were Dutch, with no habitual allegiance to English ‘bosses.’) In the same vein, he points out that this and similar settlements in New England didn’t establish beachheads for political liberty; John Winthrop’s 1630 Salem founding was a theocracy supervised by God’s vicegerent, Mr. Winthrop. The settlements were democratic only in Tocqueville’s social sense: No titled aristocrats made the trip. By ‘liberty’ the settlers meant, in the frank words of one, a world free of bishops.

As for the West Indies, settlers worried less about Indians than about the heat, the hurricanes, and the disease-carrying mosquitoes. There, a new aristocracy began to take shape, based on slaves who were imported from Africa to work in a climate Europeans could not bear to work in. By the 1630s the Virginia settlers were beginning to do the same thing. The portentous social distinction between South and North had begun to take shape.

Having made his peace with Spain, James I faced increasingly sharp resistance to his rule from Protestants at home, their suspicions roused especially by the king’s attempts to marry his eldest son to one Catholic princess after another (success came in 1625, when the future Charles I wedded Henrietta Maria of France). By the time the second generation of English Americans took charge, relations with Indians had become foreign relations, slavery was giving rise to a set of New World aristocrats, and civil war loomed in England itself.

With the war, second-generation colonists “were forced to examine their consciences and allegiances to decide what being English meant” and what it meant to belong physically and spiritually to America. The First English Civil War—which pitted a new and more absolutist monarch, Charles I, against Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan “Roundheads”—stirred existing factions in North America, engaging them not only in the political thought forced upon the first generation but in regime-changing political thought. Passions associated with political revolution and religious conflict mixed with passions aroused by the already worsening settler-Indian relations.

Puritan victory in England meant that it became, briefly, more like New England. A new Reformation was imposed, this one described as a “Reformation of manners,” including capital punishment for adultery and what Gaskill calls “a united front against popery.” (The draconian law against adultery never saw rigorous enforcement—probably a good thing for the sake of continued English population growth. One emigrant to Virginia wrote that the deer in his new country were as numerous as cuckolds in England.) Puritan victory did not bring dismantlement of the king’s wartime bureaucracy, which the Puritans simply took over, continuing extralegal absolutism but in clerical garb. The new republic saw the abolition of the House of Lords, the established church, and the monarchy, but the empowered Cromwell and Parliament had no more intention to frame a liberal republic than had the Puritan fathers of New England. Although a bit lax in enforcing the adultery laws, both England and New England went after suspected witches, with England initiating the attacks and (surprisingly, given subsequent accounts) surpassing the New England courts in handing down convictions. At least New England magistrates “insisted on proof of a satanic pact,” unlike their more ardent English-Puritan counterparts.

Fleeing in defeat, Royalists went to the West Indies, sometimes to Virginia. When Parliament threatened to pursue them across the water, they allied themselves with local champions of self-government as putative advocates of—what else, if not the tradition of the English common law (for which the Stuarts and their allies had previously shown little regard). Meanwhile, Cromwell’s designation as “Emperor of the West Indies” put English republicanism, such as it was, on the side of statist centralization. Because the monarchy had sold off most of its lands under the Tudors, the new statists had no choice but to obtain revenues through taxation. Back along the Chesapeake, Catholics and Protestants fought each other in Maryland, with Protestants from as far away as Massachusetts joining the fight, which the Protestants eventually won at the Battle of Severn (near Annapolis) in 1655.

By the time of Cromwell’s assassination in 1658, New England and Virginia had established themselves economically. Trade began to eclipse religiosity in both places. As it did in England: Charles II, crowned in 1660, proved considerably more latitudinarian in doctrine and in morals than were the Puritans. Increased trade also brought greater demand for slaves, especially in the West Indies; not only Africans but English prisoners, Scottish rebels, and the ever-beleaguered Irish were “barbadosed.” Charles II did prove disappointing to merchants in one important respect: Needing revenues as much as his father and as much as Cromwell, he renewed the stiff regulation of trade. As Gaskill observes, the English civil/revolutionary wars proved to Americans that their difficulties with the mother country arose not simply as a result of defective regimes—monarchs and parliaments alike exacted revenues and demanded obedience—but as a result of the empowerment of the modern state, quite apart from its regime form. A century later, their descendants’ Declaration of Independence excoriated not only the monarch/tyrant but also the Parliament for, among other things, sending tax collectors to eat out their substance.

Increased trade also spelled trouble for the Indians The more prosperous the American English became, the more numerous they were; the more numerous they were, the more land they wanted. In Virginia, especially, where plantation owners locked up the best land, new settlers pressed westward. The British Empire set down its own grander, imperial policy. In the words of diarist John Evelyn, “Whoeover Commands the Ocean Commands the Trade of the World, and whoever Commands the Trade of the World Commands the Riches of the World, and whoever is Master of that Commands the World it self.” Charles II resumed the strategy that had been set down decades earlier by the disgraced Francis Bacon, that of “merg[ing] politics, profit, and natural philosophy”—the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, and particularly the British estate.

By now, about 60,000 English settlers lived in New England. Metacom, or “King Philip” of the Wampanoags, began a major war against them. “This was for the second generation what sea crossings and scratch-building had been for the first: a hardening, defining experience.” Using what we now call guerrilla tactics, the coalition of Indian tribes fought through the bitter winter of 1675-76, taunting their captives with the question, “Where is your God now?” Gaskill describes the “extravagant cruelty” of Indian and Englishman alike: “Indians tortured because martial ritual required it, the English to obtain intelligence.” Two thousand settlers died before the Indian coalition surrendered in July 1677. Sporadic Indian raids continued, and the colonists duly noted that their British brethren had offered no protective aid aside from parish collections, “which were mere gestures.” Nor did the British prove any more helpful to Maryland, where settlers put down a similar uprising.

By the third generation, writes Gaskill, “experience set the colonists apart, creating opposition internally and with England.” Struggles with Indians continued; in the north the tribes began to ally with the French, another Catholic enemy. Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685; after Charles II died, intensifying the worries of Anglo-American Protestants. West Indian and Virginian settlers added to their slave populations and simultaneously to their worries about slave rebellions. Along the Chesapeake, in the 1680s alone the slave population rose from 4,500 to 12,000. This increase also decreased incidences of manumission; a people engaged in demographically-based dominance of the Indians had no intention of being overwhelmed by emancipated African slaves.

No solution, even in theory, to any of these ethno-political or religio-political dilemmas was available to Americans until a writer of the time, John Locke, began publishing. A political regime founded upon the principle of equal natural rights could form the basis of racial and religious peace in a political community that actually framed laws to conform to that principle. Gaskill mentions Locke in passing but mistakes his natural rights philosophy for “pragmatism.” What made the third generation of Americans react against the excesses of the last witch-hunting spasm, in 1690s Salem, was not pragmatism but an understanding of Christianity that Americans in New England were the first to begin to integrate into their laws.

As Gaskill describes it, “Boston’s Brattle Street Church was founded in 1698 not upon scriptural literalism, the ‘New England way,’ or a covenant, but upon nature, reason, and inclusiveness”—in other words, upon a combination of Christianity and Lockean philosophy. What remained of the older generations, he concludes was a legacy of “extraordinary courage.” The commercial republic of the future would prove battle-ready, to the dismay of its enemies for centuries to come.

 

 

Greg Weiner: American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 52, Number 4, July/August 2015.

 

An American Burke sounds like a paradoxical fellow. America’s most prominent recent Burkean, Russell Kirk, enjoyed some success insofar as he espoused a traditionalism he judged prudent. But of course Burke’s traditionalism was European, not American, and therefore aristocratic. One may repair to the countryside and a rambling old home, essay the squire’s life, inveigh against all encroaching vulgarity, and yet not ever achieve what the United States denies one: aristocracy itself, with its lineages that stretch forward into the future, its servants, its governing responsibilities. In America, the aristocratic pose will never shake a wilting touch of twee—quite unlike the real thing, the man himself.

Although colorful and by Washington standards even eccentric, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had nothing twee about him, and thus resembled the real Burke more than any literary/academic imitator could do. Like Burke himself, Moynihan was simply too Irish for twee-ness. The American Burke was a scholar and statesman, too, but he placed himself in the line of American liberalism, a line to which the well-born do not belong by right. Moynihan thought like an American; he figured he had the same rights as anybody else. A democrat and indeed a Democrat, his traditionalism came in with liberalism itself, which has as much of a pedigree as anything else in this country—even if this may not be saying much, as pedigrees go.

The character of American liberalism in Moynihan’s lifetime raises a different problem for a Burkean sensibility. While its advocates often trace their lineage back to Lincoln, to Jefferson, and even to Locke, they are inclined to esteem such worthies only insofar as their thoughts and actions can be made to appear to anticipate their own. Liberals of the twentieth-century or progressive stripe praise Lincoln as a strong president who ended slavery, Jefferson as a democrat (needing a good dose of Hamiltonianism to stiffen his spine), Locke as a man of enlightened modernity, and so on. More, they see themselves as representing one more step in this upward climb toward still greater social, political, and economic equality on the one hand, and maximal personal freedom on the other. But unlike traditionalists, who incline to look to origins, to the past, for moral and political authority, liberal progressives look to the future. And in so doing they mean to use the modern, centralized state as an indispensable trailblazer for getting there Burke didn’t do either of those things. Did Moynihan?

Here Professor Weiner steps in to help. He begins by observing that Moynihan endorsed the liberal-progressive aspiration for equality along with progressivism’s esteem for the modern state as a means for achieving a greater measure of equality than economic liberty alone seems likely to afford. However, Moynihan distinguished between a redistributionist state—seen, for example, in such New Deal programs as Social Security and unemployment relief—and a service-providing state that absorbed the traditional roles of family, church, neighbors, and the rich variety of civil associations so memorably described by Tocqueville (who, along with Burke, emerges as a Moynihanian hero). The state can encourage such personal relationships with tax policy and a variety of other strategies, but if the state itself provides services by employing paid professional social workers then it tends to transfer money not so much to the poor as to the middle-class service providers themselves, who have every reason to want to maintain and even expand their list of clients. In Moynihan’s thinking on this matter, Tocqueville meets the Catholic Church—specifically, its principle of subsidiarity, “the belief that a social problem should be addressed by the closest competent institution to it.” Burke is here, too—Moynihan loved his phrase, “the little platoons” within which we fight the battles of life.

This sensitivity to the strengths but also the limitations of government action explains Moynihan’s esteem for the New Deal but not the Great Society. “The New Deal offered amelioration, at which the government was good because government was good at raising revenue and cutting checks. The Great Society [by contrast] offered programs around which constituencies—often professional, middle-class groups with interests distinct from those of the people the programs were intended to help—accreted. They micromanaged; they agitated; they were envious of nonstate actors.”

And they were less than competent because trained as social scientists. A distinguished social scientist himself, Moynihan understood the limitations of his discipline. Social scientists know how to compile and ‘crunch’ numbers; neither they nor the social workers they train are adequate substitutes for parents, friends, pastors, or the guy at the bar who knows a good car repair shop. And the numbers social scientists compile and crunch tell them what worked, not what will work; they are retrospective, not prospective. They help us to cope, not to prophesy. Moynihan learned this the hard way, by experience, “arriv[ing] in John F. Kennedy’s Washington a political idealist and [leaving] Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration a chastened man”—among other things, ready for work in the Nixon administration and later as a United States Senator from New York. War on poverty, yes: but a guerrilla war, not a world war. “There were limits to the capacity of human beings to manipulate infinitely intricate social systems and limits to the ability of reason fully to comprehend them.” At this writing, in 2015, we’ve mapped the human genome but we still can’t cure diabetes or cancer; nature itself is a more complicated beast than the adepts of mechanistic science had supposed, and Moynihan would smile to see this acknowledged by practitioners of science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’

So, for example, social scientists can use statistics to show that family is the main—perhaps only—relevant ‘variable’ in educational ‘outcomes.’ It cannot show your mother how to read to you after dinner. Another Tocqueville apercu surfaces, here: In trying to persuade politicians and social scientists of this home truth, “the problem was the tendency of democratic peoples to insist on simplicity and to be willing to pay a high price to retain the illusion of it.” Moynihan admired what had become the old, but once had been the new science of politics, the political science of The Federalist, which stuck to the adaptation of social realities in securing our rights and, true to its name, structured a governmental system respectful of local self-government while strengthening central authority for well-defined purposes of self-defense and the regulation of interstate commerce. As a federalist, Publius turns out to be an advocate of the Protestant and Lockean form of Catholicism’s subsidiarity principle. Like Publius, and unlike contemporary libertarians and neo-Confederates, Moynihan did not propose federalism as a disguise for weaker government, but rather for more effective government at all levels.

Moynihan also doubted the progressives’ faith in the march of progress. Not only did he dislike the regimentation such a metaphor implies; he also doubted that something called ‘History’ is necessarily going anywhere in accordance with laws discernible by social scientists or anyone else on this earth. “He believed a high and sustained measure of happiness was possible, just not inevitable.” What human beings can do is to structure their environment better, from better constitutions (as Publius showed us) to better public architecture. Both political institutions and public spaces guide our movements without denying our liberty to think and to act; they channel human energies without stifling them. Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington—with the Capital Building, not the White House, as its center—reflected what Moynihan called “a certain political literacy” which that architect shared with the political architects of the United States Constitution.

Only the spirit of those sorts of architecture could address the socio-economic condition of poverty in a fair and intelligent way. Moynihan wanted the federal government to spend more money to alleviate poverty; only such a national policy would short-circuit the states’ practice of underbidding one another with respect to benefits in order to get rid of the poor. Going beyond material benefits, however, he emphasized that “the unit of analysis” in any discussion of poverty must be the family, not the individual, and that poor families need money not services. Without an adequate income for the “male bread-winner,” the family will disintegrate. But as experience accumulated, Moynihan saw that family disintegration among the poor, and especially among poor blacks, continued to rise even as unemployment fell. “We have lost a family structure capable of disciplining young males,” Moynihan wrote in 1965. Under the Nixon Administration he advocated the Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an annual income for poor families, but it didn’t survive Congressional scrutiny. Worse, local experiments with the guaranteed income showed that family breakup actually increased when families received this benefit. Years later toward the end of his Senate career, he wondered, plaintively, “Who indeed can tell us what happened to the American family?”

Moynihan became a senator largely on the strength not of his reputation on domestic policy but because he became an eloquent defender of the United States as ambassador to the United Nations during the late 1970s—the post-Vietnam War period when many Americans felt not only disheartened by the bitterness of domestic politics but much-abused by foreign spokesmen in the General Assembly. The ‘East-West’ confrontation had crystallized at the same time British and French imperialism had lost its grip. Consequently, the Cold War saw a ‘North-South’ struggle in addition to the struggle of ‘East and West,’ with each of the rival ‘super-power’ regimes competing for influence in the poverty-stricken, highly nationalistic ‘Third World.’ By the time Moynihan got to the U. N. the United States held what amounted to the position of a minority party in Congress. He implemented “a vigorous ideological and political defense of liberty,” “refus[ing] to indulge the self-flagellating rhetoric of the 1960s American Left”—still heard in his own Democratic Party. Arguing that many of the rulers of ex-colonial countries formed their political opinions under the auspices of democratic-socialist professors in the European universities they’d attended years ago, “he assumed a posture not unlike Burke’s in response to the French Revolution: one man standing before the seemingly inevitable tide of history and, in the very name of prudence and armed with ideas, insisting on heroic resistance.” In defending liberal as distinguished from social democracy, in refusing to concede any ground to Leftish demands, and in generally eschewing the unreciprocated courtesies previously extended by the United States to its adversaries, Moynihan demanded that member nations adhere to the Charter of the organization they had joined and abide by international law.

Moynihan’s rhetorical defense of liberal principle did not entail his abandonment of good judgment. He never got carried away with his own Irish eloquence, but coldly assessed the prospects of the Soviet Union and found them bleak. Although the Soviets seemed to be gaining on the battle-weary and uncertain Americans, as early as the late 1970s Moynihan saw that the Soviet empire was weakening. As a specialist in ethnicity, he saw the way many captive nations within the empire had begun to push against their captors; although Moynihan does not seem to have said so, he evidently regarded Russia as a new version of Austria-Hungary: the unwanted ruler of a polyglot empire without the economic resources to hold on. Needless to say, he hoped that it would not take a world war to push it into its collapse. This is why, as a senator, he opposed the Reagan Administration’s ‘rollback’ strategy—the attempt to accelerate Soviet decline. Rather than a too-precipitous imperial collapse he hoped that a gradual (thus Burkean) replacement of Soviet rule with international law and international institutions could be worked out. he worried that the Reagan administration’s impatience with international law—seen, for example, in the invasion of Grenada—would add fuel to a smoldering fire. He went so far as to define political right as international law—a move never countenance by another of his intellectual heroes, Hugo Grotius, who looked to natural law as the foundation of political rights and of the law of nations.

He did not object to the use of force to buttress international law. The 1990 military alliance against Iraq—which had violated international law by invading Kuwait—was justified because Saddam Hussein had committed a crime. Moynihan voted against Congressional authorization of the war nonetheless because he objected to President George H. W. Bush’s Kennedyesque language about no price being too heavy to pay for punishing that crime. Here is a feature of Moynihan’s thought and practice derived not so much from Burke or Tocqueville, or even Grotius, but from Lord Halifax, “The Trimmer.” Moynihan like to lean against the wind because he wanted to keep his country balanced, morally and intellectually capable of prudential reasoning. Even if his personality could be described as extravagant, larger-than-life, he tried very hard not to speak or act that way, and he kept to that resolution.

Like Burke, then, Moynihan emerges from Weiner’s fine study as a reasonable man unimpressed with the grander ambitions of Enlightenment rationalism. He had no truck with Burke’s regret for the lost aristocracy, and indeed became skeptical of what Tocqueville identified as a new aristocracy that had embedded itself into the modern state and entertained too-high esteem for its administrative expertise. His challenge to conservatives was to show how a dismantling of the contemporary American state would not severely disrupt civil society in its very attempt to revive it. His challenge to liberal progressives and conservatives alike was to point out, as Weiner phrases it, that moralizing—if “untethered to experience”—”may be especially prone to abuse.” For Moynihan, morality appears to have derived from Catholic principles which (he would have ben the first to say) are not everyone’s principles. But the core (as it were Noachide) moral principles shared by most Americans and indeed most people wherever they are, provide firm guidance, if our minds remain open to the lessons of experience.