David Herbert Donald - Liberty and Union

Liberty and Union

David Herbert Donald

For

Ada,

Who Knows Why

Preface

This is a book about a people, a period, and a problem. It is a history of the American people during a period when their country was distracted by sectional strife, devastated by a civil war, and finally reunited only after decades of bitterness. The problem is one central to any democratic society: how to reconcile the principle of majority rule with the guarantee of minority rights.

In offering another study of the Civil War era, I suppose I ought to begin with an apology, for surely more books have been written on this subject than on any other topic in American history. Yet there have been surprisingly few attempts to treat as a whole an era conventionally divided into the antebellum years, the Civil War epoch, and the Reconstruction decades. That periodization has led some historians to lose sight of the central issues of the whole era. For instance, an author who writes only of the pre-Civil War years can plausibly develop the theme of a conflict between capitalism and a form of feudalism. If he carries his story through the following three decades, however, he is obliged to explain why the seemingly antithetical Union and Confederacy followed pretty much the same policies during the Civil War and why the victory of the Union brought about so few changes in the Southern plantation economy. A narrative that ends in 1861 can emphasize the conflict between North and South; but a continuation of the story requires discussion of the deep divisions within both the Union and the Confederacy and an examination of serious postwar rivalries between East and West. A study that treats the Civil War as the culmination of a struggle between freedom and slavery had best end with 1865, or perhaps 1867; otherwise its author faces the uncomfortable task of explaining why white Northerners so promptly abandoned the Negroes for whose rights they had presumably fought.

In studying the years from 1845 to about 1890 as a whole, I have become convinced that these important economic, social, and ideological conflicts can best be understood as special instances of a more general problem that nineteenth-century Americans confronted. Nearly all of them accepted Abraham Lincolns pronouncement: A majority is the only true sovereign of a free people. At the same time they believed in the sacred principle Thomas Jefferson announced in his inaugural address: that the minority possess their equal rights which equal law must protect, and to violate which would be oppression. In short, as Mr. Justice Frankfurter was later to observe, the central dilemma of a democratic society was to reconcile the conflicting claims of liberty and authority.

Throughout the nineteenth century, these two principles were in unstable equilibrium. During the decades before the Civil War, minority rights were protected to the detriment of the national interest. In the war years central authority, in both the Union and the Confederacy, flourished at the expense of local and parochial interests. Postwar nationalism was checked by the reemergence of powerful minorities, so that only modest changes, not a social and economic revolution, were the outcome of Union victory. By the end of the century a new balance had been achieved. It assured what none of the compromises proposed before the Civil War had been able to guarantee. The federal government retained enough strength and continuity to carry out the will of the majority of the American people, and at the same time local and minority interests won enough latitude so that they, too, could survive.

In presenting this version of nineteenth-century American history, I write with several preconceptions, of which a reader should be aware. First, I am an unabashed American nationalist, proud of my country, and happy that it was able to maintain its unity. I cannot see that the successful separation of the Confederacy from the United States would have benefited either North or South or that it would have helped either the white or the black race. To the contrary, I am convinced that division of the United States would have had disastrous consequences in later decades when America (or, had the Confederates succeeded, two Americas) became a world power.

Second, as a nationalist, I am not much impressed by the importance of sectional, or ethnic, or racial, or religious differences in the United States. I know that it is presently fashionable among historians to stress such matterspossibly because they are more readily quantified than ideas, beliefs, and values. But I was born and raised in the South, was educated in the West, and have spent most of my adult years in the East; and I have discovered that Americans of all sections, races, and creeds are much alike. Taken as a whole, they are far more different from Europeans, Africans, or Asians than they are from each other. In holding this position, I am not subscribing to a saccharine consensus view that there have been no real conflicts in American history. We have quarreled among ourselves vigorously and at times viciously; but I insist that our quarrels have been family quarrels.

Third, as a conservative I have little faith in legislated solutions or constitutional mechanisms to solve a nations problems. For this reason my hero in nineteenth-century American history is Daniel Webster, that flawed giant, admirable even in his imperfections, who had a conservatives understanding that society is held together by shared sentiments, institutions, and history. For Websters great rival, John C. Calhoun, who was his superior in logic, I have respect but not admiration; for in the end Calhoun tried to invent governmental machinerya process of nullification, a system of dual Presidentsto deal with what was necessarily a matter of feeling and emotion.

Finally, in writing a book that deals with majority rule and minority rights in nineteenth-century America, I am necessarily influenced by the fact that I am living in the twentieth century, where this same problem, though in different forms, is still very much with us. Today, to be sure, no disaffected group proposes to secede or, except perhaps for a few anarchists, to destroy the Union. But we do face choices that are much like those that confronted our ancestors: Do we put the interests of one group or state or section ahead of those of the nation as a whole? Do we adopt affirmative-action policies to give special advantages to our long neglected minorities even at the expense of the majority of our citizens? Do we promote the advancement of women in education, business, and government, even if equally qualified men are held back?

On all these questionsas on the similar questions that vexed nineteenth-century Americansmy attitudes are ambivalent. Perhaps they are shaped by the fact that I have some experience of what it is like to be a member both of the majority and of a minority. I grew up, a white Southerner, in Mississippi, a state where the dominant white majority gave not the least attention to the rights of the numerous black minority. But as an adult I have been part of the Southern minority in the United States that has, whether willingly or under duress, been obliged to accept drastic social changes decreed by the national majority. As a consequence of this dual experience, I have not much faith in those who claim they possess magic formulas that will protect minorities, and I have even less faith in those who assert that the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail. If the story of the troubled decades of the nineteenth century has any message for us today, it is that compromise is better than conflict, that pragmatic adjustments are more lasting than programmatic solutions, and that the power of an individual, a group, or even a generation to effect drastic changes in the course of history is minuscule.