Chapter 2
American Roots
“A Fig for the Constitution”
"Asking one of the States to surrender part of her sovereignty is like asking a lady to surrender part of her chastity."
For the conservative John Randolph of Roanoke nothing, absolutely nothing, was to stand in the way of the right of free men to determine their own destiny free from all outward encumbrances, most especially those imposed by government. Free men, that is, of property and standing. He served in Congress through the first decades of the 19th century, all but two years in the House of Representatives where, as champion of southern conservatism he was a fierce and vigilant advocate for the liberty of men and perhaps the most ardent defender of states rights of his era. He lived and breathed order, tradition, hierarchy, and most of the time, states rights, all of which comprised his bedrock political philosophy. He was rapier-sharp, not at all one to be trifled with and, as Clinton Rossiter wrote, “pointed out with mad eloquence the road of no return down which Jefferson’s [democratic] progressivism was leading old Virginia.”[1]
He was also a piece of work. Skinny, beardless, high-voiced, riding crop in hand, riding britches across his backside, spurred riding boots jingling on his tiny feet and, lazing by his legs, a brace of Russian Wolfhounds that, as historian Sean Wilentz put it, he treasured more than “most men and all women,” the baby-faced Randolph was an eccentric but powerful force in the United States House of Representatives in defense of his native Virginia against the evils of tyrannical government. As a young man, he was the victim of a serious illness, possibly syphilis or more likely scarlet fever, that unmanned him to the degree he never acquired the ability to reproduce or apparently the desire to go through the motions. Brilliant, acid-tongued and churlish, a loner who dwelt “next door to madness,” Randolph and his high voice would rise as tempestuously as his wit in defense of his world.[2]
Randolph was not alone atop the castle walls. Whether he trusted them or not, to the North he had allies, strange allies in his view. Through the 1960s the leading conservatives among the Founders were John Adams, in particular, and the Federalists in general with Alexander Hamilton, to whom America owes as much if not more than any other individual, occupying a curious position to the right of the founding conservatives. South of Mason and Dixon’s line, Randolph, John Taylor of Caroline, and soon the great John C. Calhoun of South Carolina along one or two others defended conservatism and were fairly convinced they had little in common with their Yankee brethren. Still, it amounted to government by the favored few, the primacy of community, reverence for the established order, aversion to change – just as nature and nature’s God intended. Indeed, it was reaction to an alteration of this arrangement by the British that touched off the revolution, in which its conservative impulse remains clear to this day despite the permutations of conservatism over the political generations.
Revered for their defense of American institutions as they had developed. Sounds odd to contemporary ears ringing with over-amped condemnations of government, almost as though Daniel Shays is finally getting his mass following. For their position of power and strong central authority wen the nation needed it, presumably to protect her from re-attachment to Monarchical England and succumbing to the Jacobin rabble represented by the republican faction under Thomas Jefferson.
The Articles of Confederation with its intentionally emasculated central government and consequent inability to raise taxes, regulate interstate commerce and almost all other matters within state borders represented a desire by patriots to maintain the status quo minus the British. The document seems these days a latter day conservative dream of localism led by the landed, well-educated elite. Except that in those chaotic times localized republicanism proved unworkable. Far from producing a rural utopia characterized by “farmer-citizens enjoying liberty and Arcadian virtue,” the revolutionary idea of government gave us “democratic despotism” that was short on virtue and long on licentiousness, drunkenness and selfishness.[3] Furthermore, republicanism could protect neither political order nor the propertied classes and threatened to allow Americans to decline into a cesspool of personal, moral and political debauchery. John Adams called it, the “universal gangrene of avarice,” cautioning that “commerce, luxury, and avarice have destroyed every republican government.” An elite must rule in order to impose order, which was why Adams and most of the Framers sought to curtail “effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice, and folly” by restricting voting to landowners. In that way the virtue of “the chosen people of God,” as Jefferson called America’s yeoman farmers, could elect leaders to rein in “the mobs of great cities” that were “sores” on the body politic.[4]
Why then did conservatives, until the 1960s at least, consider John Adams not John Randolph the leading conservative? Take a look again at the fundamentals; Adams exemplified them all. With roots in the land and the democratic modesty of the New England town, according to Rossiter, “Virtue, loyalty, reverence, moderation, self-discipline, traditionalism – these qualities were made real in the person of John Adams.” In addition Adams manifested “an austere opinion of the nature of man … strong faith in conservative education” and an understanding that “the science of government” must control the “ambition of citizens.” In addition Adams held “a realistic appraisal of natural inequalities among men” and “a belief in the natural aristocracy.” Both of which went and that went hand in velvet glove with “distrust of unchecked democracy” and “of unchecked aristocracy.”[5]
The trick was to preserve tradition and hierarchy, that is, American tradition and American hierarchy and American civil society, not some unworkable British version that denied their right to liberty and property. But we can see in the variations between Adams and Randolph twin directions that conservatism would take, coming together upon occasion, but more oscillating back and forth as situations and times changed.
Randolph was so adamantly conservative he founded an ultra-conservative group called the Tertium Quids (the Third Way) to oppose the policies of Thomas Jefferson, a man whom Randolph concluded had sold out to the Federalists for, among other things, failing to undo the statism of Washington and Adams. Later, he join fellow Virginian John Taylor to rail against the apostasy of James Madison in his embrace of neo-federalism.[6] For their part, the Federalists considered Jefferson a dangerous radical. Most of the time Randolph favored the strictest possible interpretation of the Constitution. But when the Constitution wasn’t strict enough, he had no trouble casting it aside in the name of a higher law, the nature of which he and his conservative fellows reserved the right to determine. Inveighing against the Tariff of 1824, he said, “If under a power to regulate trade you prevent exportation; if, with the most approved spring lancets, you draw the last drop of blood from our veins; if secundum artem you draw the last shilling from our pockets, what are the checks of the Constitution to us? A fig for the Constitution! When the scorpion's sting is probing us to the quick shall we stop to chop logic?”[7]
Chop logic, indeed. Randolph had no problem flip-flopping when it suited him. In 1803 many conservatives in Congress opposed President Jefferson’s plan to buy New France (for just 3¢ an acre) that would more than double the present size of what they cynically called “the American Empire”. Despite the lack of Constitutional authorization for acquiring new territory, Jefferson ended up shoving his ideological scruples aside. All the more interesting because he spent the 1790s excoriating Washington, Adams and the “federalists,” as the Hamiltonian faction was becoming known, for exceeding executive power. Only a fool or a strict constructionist so hide-bound as to close his eyes to the needs of governance would have passed up the Louisiana Purchase. The very idea seems too fanciful to be true today![8] Nevertheless, it was Jefferson’s own strict constructionism that slowed the deal, far more so than the conservative Federalist elements that opposed the deal. Madison sought to reassure the vacillating Jefferson the transaction was it was legal, not surprising given his argument in the Federalist, No. 10 that the larger the country the greater the dilution of divisive factions. Which was precisely the counter argument made by those New England conservatives lining up in vehement opposition that today seems as utterly bizarre as the Tea Party activists favoring Social Security and Medicare for themselves only.[9]
To finesse his relativism Jefferson toyed with the idea of annexing Louisiana and Florida through a constitutional amendment that would have also prohibited adding more territory. Absurd on the face of it and foreshadowing the “unamendable” amendment conservatives would seek to guarantee slavery in perpetuity on the eve of the Civil War. Such ad hoc fiddling with the Constitution would have established a vexatious precedent that could have made it impossible to govern the country during times of crisis or opportunity. Fear of Napoleon having second thoughts, forced Jefferson to drop his reckless scheme and urge rapid Senate approval of the treaty. Interestingly enough, especially since conservatives now hold Jefferson in the highest esteem, are the remarks of conservative Clinton Rossiter in 1962, “Jefferson was, in every sense of the word, a genuine liberal … so genuine, self-conscious, and inspiring that he will remain forever the First Source of American Liberalism. I would not dream of converting him to conservatism at this late date.” Others would, however.[10]
Strict adherence to the Constitution and the original intentions of the men who framed it was going to pose an impediment for conservatives if they intended to govern again. In addition, given its reactive nature, conservatism often failed to offer adequate explanations of and solutions for the problems facing the nation. The larger irony here is apotheosis in our own time of Thomas Jefferson, when for well over a century conservatives acclaimed the original conservatives to be the Federalists, with some help from southern conservatives.[11] The Federalists struggled to maintain order and tradition in the face of Jeffersonian radicalism, a job later assumed by the Whigs in the face of the Jacksonian rabble. Largely representing the northern (or at least non-southern) elite, these individuals sought to maintain the social hierarchy and class deference, protect private property, guarantee order and keep the masses at bay (by opposing democracy) while shaping conditions that were good for business and commerce, a particularly tall order given the nation’s tender age. They made a case against acquiring New France that ought to sound familiar. “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much … [for a] land unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians.” Indeed, Fisher Ames, reflected hierarchy and elitism when he complained that the Louisiana Purchase, would destroy the country by liberating the common man. “Safe in their solitudes, alike from the annoyances of enemies and government … it is infinitely more probable that they will settle into barbarism than rise to the dignity of national sentiments and characters.” Character that resided in those at the top of the social and political heap.[12]
New England Federalists, who normally cited Hamilton to defend an expansive view of the Constitution, now challenged the deal by invoking the narrowest reading of the constitution in order to beat southern conservatives at their own game. And while Jefferson agreed in principle with the Federalists but restrained his head in order to get the treaty passed quickly. He also dismissed as “metaphysical subtleties” complaints that his administration was violating the 10th Amendment to the Constitution which reserved all unspecified rights to the states and went right ahead with the purchase that, as was obvious even then, helped secure American freedom and independence from the French and British and helped lay the groundwork for the prosperity that enabled America’s rise to greatness. Such considerations mattered less to those conservatives who were more interested in conserving their own power. Self-interest has way of making hypocrites of even the most ideologically pure. Facts are stubborn things, indeed.
Thus, these conservatives managed to flip from loose to strict constructionism while, on the other hand, their conservative brethren to the south flopped from strict to loose. New England Federalists argued bitterly against territorial expansion that would just about guarantee their minority status.
They were right. Opposition to the Louisiana Purchase, one election loss after another, and a decade later, with their opposition to the War of 1812, their position had grown so precarious they met in Hartford, Connecticut, to consider secession, and not for the first time. Early in Jefferson’s first term, the so-called Essex Junto, the first in a line of conservative groups that put localism over nationalism and self-interest over the commonweal. These disgruntled ultra-Hamiltonian Federalists were so put off by the “democratic licentiousness” fostered by Jefferson’s presidency had been privately urging the union be dismantled. They managed to show up at Hartford, needless to say, and discussed openly the need for secession.
As historian Patrick Allit noted, secession during a war was “tiptoeing to the brink of treason.” True enough, except that it doesn’t always take a war to turn secession into treason.[13] The debate, when it was civil – and it was most of the time – began shortly after independence under the first American Republic, under the Articles of Confederation, and kept right on going under the United States Constitution. On grounds of strict adherence to the original intent of the framers, conservatives opposed federally funded “internal improvements” that included a rudimentary highway system to the West. Conservatives considered limiting governmental power far more important than the nation more closely together to help achieve “a more perfect union,” if that’s not too great a distortion of the original intent of the term.[14]
What developed in the post-federal period was a split between northern and southern conservatism induced more by differing regional that ideological outlooks. In the North what might be called the Adams faction defended the class hierarchy and enough government strength to maintain order and, where necessary, impose decency and shore up civil society. Conservatives below the Potomac faced “most of the problems of the Northern gentry and a few peculiarly its own.”[15] That peculiarity was slavery and it posed enormous difficulty. In order to preserve the agrarian hierarchy of the landed gentry, it was necessary to preserve slavery. Without slavery conservatives realized, quite correctly, that their way of life would dissolve in the same sort of Jacobin leveling that worried northern conservatives. However, for southern conservatives defense of slavery, i.e., their well-ordered world, meant opposition to any degree of strength in the federal government. A strong government might interfere with slavery and thereby bring their world with its clearly delineated inequalities crashing down. Both wings of conservatism adhered to what Rossiter called “a completely non-Jeffersonian theory of liberty.” Or, quoting John C. Calhoun, “It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty.”[16] Race, at least so far as this assertion went, was irrelevant.
In similar fashion southern conservatives argued that such things as internal improvements to help bind together our fragile nation fell outside the purview of the federal government. The bill for a federally-funded national highway from Buffalo to New Orleans came before Congress in 1830 and there it died. The 1500-mile road would have gone through Washington, DC, and facilitated commerce while further strengthening ties among the states. Southerners would have none of it and blocked the bill. More federal money being spent, more federal projects with unequal benefit. “National objects,” railed one Virginia politician. “Where is the criterion by which we are to decide?” How about commerce? The South would having nothing to do with it. To placate the restive South and to strike a blow at his enemy Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson vetoed the Maysville road, a national highway linking the hinterlands of Kentucky to Lexington.[17]
In his veto message, Jackson made it clear he would support some federal spending on internal improvements when it was clear they carried national importance. But the lines would become increasingly clear as time passed. Conservatives opposed Clay’s American System, a plan of protective tariffs to protect burgeoning manufacturing, internal improvement to facilitate political unity and economic growth and a central bank to stabilize the currency and put an end to the unregulated practices of Wildcat Banks, so called because they operated in places accessible only to wildcats and were about as sound as if very same animals ran them. It was an ambitious plan that depended upon the role of the central government for authorization, sponsorship, funding and administration. But Clay insisted his plan would strengthen and unify the nation.[18]
While it remains quite true that political personalities played a role — Andrew Jackson vetoed federal funding for the Maysville Road not because he was conservative but because he disliked Henry Clay — the larger truth is that the bulk of conservatives opposed such centralizing (and nationalizing) plans on the grounds it violated the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. Fortunately, Clay’s American System won out and began to weave an infrastructure that paved the way for federal facilitation of the private development of the railroad network that made industrial capitalism possible, to the delight, I might add, of post-Civil War conservatism that re-invented itself along an anomalous – when compared to conservatism before and after the Gilded Age – pro-business model. This was in essence a continuation of the Hamiltonian vision that opposed Jefferson’s America of confederated yeoman farmers led by patricians such as Randolph, John C. Calhoun and Jefferson himself, and eventually southern conservatives such as Jefferson Davis. Even in his own time, Jefferson’s notion of the role of government was impractical and outdated, as his own presidency demonstrated. Conservatives, whether southern Whigs or southern Democrats or their northern fellow travelers, Copperhead Democrats, had a difficult time switching away from this to embrace the emerging industrial nation with its demands for high tariffs and “laissez-faire” economics.[19]
We’ll come to the Gilded Age soon enough. For now though, it’s critical to our understanding of the shifting variables of conservatism to stick to its deeper consistencies. Regardless of party affiliation southern conservatives remained fairly constant in their opposition to federal involvement in any form that might somehow lead to interference with slavery. It didn’t matter if the issue was nationalizing through internal improvements or a stronger, better integrated economy via the National Bank or the use of high tariffs to protective America’s fledgling manufacturing base, conservatives harbored deep suspicions. Their logic was straight forward: any federal action not directly supportive of the institution of slavery was suspect and probably harmful. Slavery and the racial issues that stem from it, not only represent America’s single greatest failing but also remain a fundamental flaw for American conservatives and conservatism. For conservatism, denouncing slavery as wrong or a mistake or some sort of aberration is not enough. On many levels and in many ways, slavery was fundamental to American conservatism from the start and influences it still today. Slavery motivated conservatism, provided a sense of urgency to the point of existential crisis, and became the crucible by which it was tested.
[1] Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978), 61. Randolph added ‘of Roanoke’ to distinguish from another John Randolph. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: the Thankless Persuasion, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 125. In those days, Jefferson was not considered conservative, but a threat to conservatism.
[2] Kirk, John Randolph, 17. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: The Crisis of the New Order, 1787-1815, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 139.
[3] Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution, (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 92, 140.
[4] Thaddeus Russell, A Renegade History of the United States, (New York: Free Press, 2010), 37.
[5] Rossiter, 110 - 112.
[6] Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Democracy Ascendant, 1815—1840, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 2.
[7] Kirk, John Randolph, 61. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 141.
[8]. George F. Will, “A Cheerful Anachronism,” Newsweek Magazine, February 25, 2007.
[9] Allit, The Conservatives, 8. Clinton Rossiter, editor, The Federalist Papers, (New York: Mentor, 1961), 82 – 83.
[10] Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 88.
[11] Allit, 279.
[12] Allit, 7, 20-21. Columbian Centenial (Boston) quoted in Wilentz, 147.
[13] Allit, 21.
[14] E.J. Dionne, Our Divided Political Heart: the Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, (New York: 2012), pps 159 – 161. Columnist E.J. Dionne argues that 19th century Whigs and future Republicans (conservative according the standards of the day and modern interpretation) actually supported internal improvements as an aspect of their growing nationalism and in recognition of stronger internal unity. True, some did; however, these crossovers demonstrate more than anything the wide variety of chiefly politically and often contradictive actions taken by politicians of both the left and right. In this case, though, the larger point is that some leaders who would qualify as conservative by today’s definitions did support internal improvement for the good of their own region and for the good of the nation.
[15] Rossiter, 119-120
[16] IBID, 121.
[17] Wilentz, 206.
[18] IBID, 87, 204-06.
[19] Wilentz, 87. Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism.