Man is a contrary sort, driven by a desire to eat his cake and have it too. He wants incompatible things, and although this gets him into all kinds of trouble it may be the source of his strength. His desire for opposite extremes leads him into life-saving compromises, and the simple fact that no compromise lasts very long compels him to keep on tinkering. Because he never can get what he wants he keeps on trying. This often costs him more than he can afford to pay, but it may be good for him; at the very least it keeps him from getting stagnant.
Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century political philosopher, noted that mankind wants both liberty and dominance. He wants to be free to do as he pleases, but he also wants to live under the controls that will give him some sort of security, especially security against war, riot, and rebellion—matters which are usually brought on by people’s insistence on full liberty of action. So, said Hobbes, men created government, the commonwealth, the “great Leviathan” set up to “tye them by fear of punishment to the performance of their Covenants and observation of [the] Laws of Nature.”
Of all of the Leviathans which mankind has devised, the one set up in America is in many ways the most unusual, and Roy F. Nichols, the distinguished historian from the University of Pennsylvania, examines this country’s experience in a thoughtful new book, Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style, which strikes this reviewer as an exceptionally stimulating discussion of the way we govern ourselves.
Until the Founding Fathers got down to work after the American Revolution, governments had come into being more or less by haphazard. Bodies of law, custom, and observance grew up around a strong central power, usually without any basic plan except for recognition of the fact that the will of the strongest is likely to prevail; men adapted themselves to a Leviathan, made the best of it, and now and then had to resort to violence in order to modify it to meet their most pressing needs. But in America, Leviathan—that is, the whole structure of government—was specifically contrived. Men found themselves in a vast geographical area, remote from all the rest of the world, with nothing much to go on except the undeniable necessity of creating a body politic which could function in a country that was like no other country that had ever existed.
Not only was this country remote from the other nations of the earth; its separate parts were remote from each other, and the sort of centralization that was common elsewhere was obviously out of the question. Furthermore, the Founding Fathers were starting from scratch. In sheer self-defense—to avoid the confusion and misunderstanding which would have caused the whole organism to fall apart—it was necessary to put everything down in writing. Elsewhere, if a constitution existed at all it was devised long after government itself had been created; here the constitution had to come first.
Blueprints for Leviathan: American Style, by Roy F. Nichols. Atheneum Press. 333 pp. $6.50.
Thus a whole series of constitutions, compacts, and charters came into being. As Mr. Nichols remarks, “No move of significance in the developing republic has been made without a written manifestation of purpose and authority.” The most individualistic and independent human beings on earth found themselves making a comprehensive effort to substitute the rule of law for the rule of force, to encompass all of the activities of a society of free men in the framework of an interlocked series of formal collective agreements.
This, when you stop to think about it, was slightly singular. Americans have always been noted for a tendency to lawlessness, an impatience with restraint, a mood that exalts the right of each man to act as he sees fit. Yet they found themselves, at the very beginning of their experience as a nation, attaching supreme importance to the law-making function. If men are going to live by laws, the power to draft and enact those laws is of vast consequence. One consequence of this is that from the adoption of the Constitution down to the present day the structure of government has needed constant attention and frequent overhaul. Mr. Nichols points out that the American people, who have this structure in their care, “must be men capable of complex intellectual activity, able to adjust the mechanism, to change the specifications as time changes and to be ingenious in supplying new parts.” This is an unending challenge, and it led Abraham Lincoln—at a time when adjustments and changes were being made at enormous expense—to pose the haunting question: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
The problem was recognized from the beginning. The men who established this republic were largely of English background, and at the time they were going about their labors England was fully dedicated to the rule of law. But the whole point of the English operation was that the underlying constitution was unwritten. This could not be the American pattern; blueprints and specifications had to be drawn up in advance. Furthermore, government in this far-flung land had to operate on two levels. The newly independent colonies had to devise their individual state constitutions at the same time that they were putting together a central government; and the men who were doing all of this, even though they were showing a remarkable respect for formal codes of government, were also men who strongly distrusted centralized authority and believed that as much power as possible ought to be held close to the grass-roots level. Thus, says Mr. Nichols, “Instead of continuing the loose league of independent republics or creating an allpowerful centralized national government, the daring innovators created a novelty in political construction, a federal system embracing thirteen units, including four million people, and extending over a region that had a’meteorological variety marked by such contrasts as Maine winters and Georgia summers.”
Territorial Experiment
By BRUCE CATTON
Yet that was not all of it. The new republic not only had thirteen separate subdivisions; it also had territories—first the untracked, almost wholly unsettled domain then known as the Northwest, a bit later the tremendous stretches of the Louisiana Purchase. The established communities along the seaboard were already beginning to throw off new communities in the open country beyond the Alleghenies, and this process obviously would continue. So while the new states were setting up their own governments and framing a central government to handle national affairs, it was also necessary to find the means by which entire new states could be created and brought into the national organization.
Thus with the unending westward expansion there was a steady creation of new, self-governing units. This went forward on what Mr. Nichols calls a do-ityourself basis, and it had profound effects on the whole national structure. What might have turned into “a unitary empire stretching endlessly westward and governed from the east” became instead a self-modifying system that was constantly expanding. There was a constant development of new patterns of democratic behavior, taking place not in Washington but in remote and scattered communities.
This put a high premium on the capacity to compromise. It also meant that there was unending experimentation; and indeed the whole concept of creating and operating frontier communities as a sort of training ground for the creation of new states was, as Mr. Nichols sees it, “one of the most inspired inventions of the American political genius.” It kept the American Leviathan from becoming ossified, and in the author’s words: “It was to be one of the important instruments that maintained experimentation in developing the capacity for self-government in the midst of the nation’s spectacular expansion in wealth and power. It gave elasticity to an organism that might otherwise have become rigid.”
Nevertheless, there were problems. Perhaps the country was growing too fast. Acquisition of Louisiana itself put an enormous strain on the machinery of government. When this was followed, a little more than a generation later, by the break-through to the Pacific and the swallowing of the immense land mass that ran from Texas to California, it began to be clear that the country had expanded more rapidly than its capacity to govern. The process of physical growth had, of course, brought the values that come from frequent self-renewal, but some sort of limit had been reached and passed. The Leviathan was becoming extraordinarily complex, and by the i86o’s the nation had somehow outgrown the pattern originally devised. A vast political reorganization was due. It was time to rebuild; and the tragedy was that very complex cultural and economic differences—following the great fault-line that divided the land between slavery and free-soil areas—made it impossible for men to get on with the rebuilding in a peaceable manner. The old genius for compromise had disappeared. What we got, at last, was the Civil War.
What the War Meant
By BRUCE CATTON
It would be hard to find a better concise examination of that terrible upheaval than Mr. Nichols provides. The conflict itself was brought on largely by the cultural limitations of the men on both sides—limitations “imposed by birth, environment, association and tradition.” Those limitations still exist, and all of us share in them; we are subject to them when we try to interpret and understand the enormous convulsion that took place in the i86o’s.
Here it is worth while to listen carefully to Mr. Nichols. He proceeds: “If the history of the conflict is to be written with even an approximation of truth, it is essential for those concerned to understand the nature of such cultural limitations. This is particularly important because those who were drawing Leviathan’s blueprints were circumscribed by these same limitations. These cultural determinants are emphasized because there is an almost irresistible impulse in the moralistic intellectual world in which so many Americans dwell to speak instinctively in terms of praise or blame, to condemn or to justify. The extent to which the balance is in favor of condemnation or commendation seems to depend largely upon the accident of who is making the analysis, upon his cultural definition. Do these limitations make inevitable a moral judgment, the casting up of an account? Is it not possible to accept the hypothesis that in the conduct of great masses of people there must, by some law of behavioral average, be as much to praise as to blame? In the long run, will not these judgments decree some sort of balance of virtue?”
Emotions, Mr. Nichols says, go in pairs, like negative and positive charges of electricity. None of us is all of one piece. We contain contrasts, and these contrasts were abundant in the i86o’s. Considering this fact, Mr. Nichols develops a thought which seems essential to any true understanding of the Civil War:
“These contrasts, operating in both sections, suggest the hypothesis that the North American ecology decreed the evolution of two different societies in an environment and a cultural organization that would encourage a mutual desire for union—something akin to matrimony—in which two obviously different individuals sought the satisfaction of a primal urge stronger than their individual wills in a union that in this instance was crowned with the fruits of their own creation: something new, a nation. This nationalism in the end proved stronger than their individual wills, and after an emotional crisis that drove them to the brink of destruction, the strength of their own creation, their nationalism, saved them from annihilation. When the historian applies the dry scientific concepts of the behavioral sciences to an analysis of this war, it becomes difficult to assign praise or blame or to award victory or defeat.
“The problem is further complicated by the puzzling possibility that the contestants were fighting for the same aim and that both achieved it. The war was a conflict to conserve the federal system and this end, which both sides really desired, was achieved. The Union forces were fighting for a federal system in which the principle was to govern that the rule of the majority should prevail. The South on its part was dedicated to a federal system in which the autonomy of a minority should be recognized. It fought primarily to ensure the South a veto in the system.”
We usually say that the Northern interpretation finally won, but Mr. Nichols is not sure that this is correct. Even in defeat, the South achieved much that it was fighting for. After Appomattox its states came back to positions of no small power; to this very day, as he sees it, the southern representation in Congress “can frequently exercise a veto and even control.” Power in the nation, he reminds us, is still divided, and the government remains a federal system. And he adds:
“The war at length came to its end when there was no reason for it to be fought any longer. It was perhaps a war that in a sense nobody won.”
If nobody won it, what then did it accomplish?
At the very least, says Mr. Nichols, it created a new Leviathan. Government was in fact remade. There was a vast new law-making program, begun while the war was still being fought and continued after the war was over. Merely to specify some of the points in this program—expanded use of subsidies, passage of the Homestead Act, development of the Pacific railroad, creation of the land-grant colleges, of a national banking system and of a protective tariff—set a pattern for the future development of the nation.
The Unending Task
By BRUCE CATTON
The point of all of which is that the development of this American Leviathan is a continuing process. The events of the 1860’s are interlocked with the events of the 1960’s; to understand one period is to understand the other. Hear Mr. Nichols:
“Is the republic in the throes of constructing, quite unconsciously perhaps, a new Leviathan, which no one has yet described? Is this a Leviathan of another sort, being designed by a people who are becoming preoccupied with such concepts as international insecurity, the welfare state, the new conservatism, social conformity, racial antagonism? In this period of mid-twentieth-century reconstruction it is well to remember that there are times in the history of men when they release force and accumulate energy that it seems beyond their intellectual power to control. Mankind today stands in all probability in such an age. Men have learned some of the secrets of genetic information, they have released the energy in the atom, they have created the atomic bomb and they are poised on the edge of space. It may well be questioned whether human intellectual power as at present developed is equal to the challenge. This does not mean that humanity does not have the intellectual potential; it does not mean that if society is to survive all concerned must work tirelessly to increase and mobilize it.
“A century ago Americans stood in a somewhat similar position. They had a vast continent largely unpossessed but very rich in unrealized resources and opportunities. They had new sources of power, new population and a new treasure. They had a neat but old-fashioned system of control. They had a newly released set of motions, driven wild by recently unbridled imaginations. This situation created a confusion almost certain to create conflict, which in Whitman’s phrase was ‘significant of a grand upheaval of ideas and reconstruction of many things on new bases.’ If people are truly to comprehend and account for the conflict of 1861-1865 and to apply their knowledge to the tasks of the twentieth century, they must do it in some such grand frame, summoning all they can of the available knowledge of why men behave as they do, as still a century later the process of adjusting Leviathan continues …
“The draftsmen who continue to work on the structure of the American Leviathan represent one of man’s most significant achievements. In seeking to solve such basic problems of human association as the prescription of government by the formulation of constitutions and statutes, they carry the ideal of rational thought to one of its highest culminations. By substituting writing for fighting, they have overcome one of the most destructive of human urges and have established the fact that the control of impulses dangerous to human welfare by scientific thought is possible. Such a capacity is one of the greatest achievements of the human race. May it always be cherished and perfected.”
