Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To supply the labor for steam-powered production, the British economy moved large segments of its population out of agriculture and into factory production. Since the factory worker did nothing but work in the factory, British capitalists needed new sources for feeding and clothing that new workforce, and they found those sources in American agriculture. Only a few Americans were prepared for this. Before 1800 in the United States, only farmers in the hinterlands of the major ports, such as Philadelphia, Charleston, and Chesapeake Bay, were seriously committed to raising crops to sell for cash on foreign markets, if only because for others the costs of getting those products to markets for sale was greater than any profit that could be reaped from the selling. An ordinary stagecoach ride from Boston to New York cost between $10 and $11 in 1820—two weeks’ wages—and that said nothing about the cost of shipping produce or driving cattle to market; five weeks were needed to move that stagecoach from Nashville to Washington. Most American farmers were still organized around a household economy that sold little except small surpluses off the farm and which relied on barter and extended loans for the few manufactured goods it needed.
¹⁷

But by the 1830s, the allurements of selling agricultural produce to British and foreign markets had become too great to resist, largely because access to those markets had become too easy to ignore. The steam engine, which had made large-scale manufacturing possible among England’s “dark, satanic mills,” produced an unlooked-for by-product when inventors such as John Fitch and Robert Fulton bolted steam
engines onto riverboats to push them up and down rivers; and then bolted steam engines onto platforms that rolled on iron tram rails. The steamboats and the railroads became the chief force in driving down the costs of access to markets, and slowly, American farmers moved away from multicrop farming and livestock raising for their own subsistence and toward single-crop agriculture, where their produce could be sold for cash, and the cash used to buy manufactured clothing or tools made in other people’s factories.
¹⁸