Civil War and Reconstruction

How and to what extent did the Civil War and Reconstruction refound the United States?
- Civil War: talk about: federalism and anti-federalism, reasons for secession (legal or moral?), Confederacy
- Reconstruction: talk about: First Founding vs Second Founding, Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendment, states rights vs federal rights as a zero sum game

Reconfiguration of constitutional compact
- Transference of authority from the states to the federal government on the matter of master-slave relationships by virtue of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment
- Civil rights are rarely self-activating but come by way of federal powers, which explains the need to reconfigure this relationship
- Expanded federal powers to every individual in the Union, including those not previously protected
- Lives of newly freed people were not so radicaly changed, because of the failure to push through land reform, large numbers of freedmen tenants remained under explotative sharecropping arrangements in the same plantations where they once worked as slaves

Positive rights are granted by the federal government instead of the state
- From start to finish in the Civil War, participants on either side wrestled with the constitutional meaning of states' rights in the context of federal power. These rights were immunities operating at the vertical distribution of power; as opposed to the modern idea of rights as a horizontal set of claims of citizens against fellow citizens.
- These rights are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, as concluded in the invalidation of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
- Justice Joseph Bradley on the Fourteenth Amendment: "it is only state action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject matter of the amendment." Thus the Court did not stymie the moral vision of the Radical Republicans, but merely clarified their developmental goals

Exceptionalism in Revolutionary thought

Was the American Revolution radical or conservative? What was “first” in the “First New Nation?”

A conservative, "consensus" interpretation looks for revolutionary causation in the distant past, whereby revolutionaries adapted English institutions to novel American conditions. In this view Americans were pragmatic conservatives who mobilized against change to defend their liberty and property against the imposition of imperial reform, and identified themselves with the progress of European civilization more generally. On the other hand, the ideological interpretation situated revolutionaries at the "cusp of modernity", simultaneously looking backward at an idealized past and forward to an enlightened future, focusing instead on questions of nation-defining ideals and questions of identity that emerged with the imperial crisis. Either way, exceptionalists assume a fundamental opposition between empire and nation, old world from new. However the break with Britain took place, the new nation is defined against the mother country.

As much as founders exaggerated differences between monarchical and republican America, there were obscured fundamental continuities between old regime and new. Under open assertions of anglophobia in the tedious litany of the king's crimes, there is an undercurrent of anglophilia: similarities in British and American conceptions of national identity, similar desires for exploiting the boundless potential of the new world (and hence the conception of America as a "still greater Britain"). In terms of national identity, there lies the same tensions between inclusiveness and essentialist exclusivity, similar to the way the "little English" popular patriotism demonized Scots and Catholics. There was a growing cultural and demographic divergence between English center and British periphery; provincial Americans might have imagined a transatlantic British people united by interdependent transatlantic economy and consumer revolution, but condescending metropolitans could not imagine reciprocating. 

Revolutionaries had to convince themselves that the distinction between servile subject and free citizen was absolute, with the future of a newly self-proclaimed people and of mankind generally hanging in the balance. The choice to become American might not be so clear after all, merely the shifting loyalties of Americans during the revolutionary war and beyond. Coupled with the uncertainty about the character and prospects of the federal republican experiment which obscured ideological clarity, Americans' loyalties were constantly being tested. There was no escaping British influence, either in the real world or in the development of a distinctively American national culture. National Republicans and their Whig and Republican successors sought to emulate Britain in order to rival its power, by opportunistically exploiting the resources and markets of Britain's free trade empire. Britain was either a model or the partner in the drive to reach the goal of eventually supplanting Britain and becoming the world's dominant superpower.

By the late nineteenth century, with Union victory in the Civil War and the consolidation of federal authority across the continent, Americans and foreign observers alike were convinced that American constitutionalism was a viable alternative to metropolitan model, juxtaposing republican self-government to monarchical rule of subjects. The rise of US to world power enabled Americans to finally overcome the post-colonial obsessions with mother country, no longer displaced into the future as manifest destiny but became an irrefutable geopolitical fact. 

Republicanism and its liberal discontents

Besides the threats to individual liberty, another well-known discontent with state-run liberalism is the threat of factions. The Federalists supported the idea of central government and the Constitution, i.e. a government of laws, because that is what a large union needs for order and stability, while the Anti-Federalists wanted 'authentic', classical republican virtue and vesting power in capable men, which Federalists argued was only feasible in small republics. Anti-Federalist sentiment for the loss of these small representative republics could be seen in a letter written by Samuel Adams to Richard Henry Lee, where he says a union is dangerous insofar as states and the people living in them are "diverse" and "remote"; but this is the very premise James Madison conquers in Federalist 10, because he argues that this threat was already present within a homogenous state through faction. I think people of the time actually perceived the Federalist ideology as being more liberal than the Anti-Federalists because the union of a large republic was not the perceived traditional role of government at the time, many thought it unconstitutional that Alexander Hamilton placed the needs of a successful economy above the individual interests within society, particularly the need for a national bank, for example. 
James Madison went to some length to distinguish between a democracy and republic in Federalist 10, which suggests to me that his ideology is still rooted in republicanism, but that it differs pointedly from the traditional republicanism of the conservative Anti-Feds. One way in which it differs so is in the Feds' belief that man is ultimatly self-interested, as was mentioned earlier, such that virtue does not manifest itself at the individual level but by pitting the individual against a sea of self-interested individuals, this 'fair playing field' is now the temperance of large republics, the virtue of diversity of interests. One can say he reconstrued the notion of virtue because such was the main virtue, perhaps the only virtue, present in large, diverse republics, with their multitude of factions. 

John Rawls and the Liberal Tradition

The republican experiment was both a government model with a distinct set of conditions and principles, and a fledgling form of a liberal tradition with a moral dimension towards civic duty and social justice. This tradition is reminiscent of the liberal thought of John Rawls, who states in A Theory of Justice, that the duties of individuals be defined simply and clearly in order to ensure the prevalence and stability of “just contracts” in society. In fact this never occurred in practice, and was later on challenged by new liberal movements that have either sought to replace it (such as the New Deal and later on, post-liberalism), or to improve it through the creation of institutional safeguards that protected individuals from leaders’ usurpation or misuse of the public good justification (federalism, the Constitution). Indeed one of the most illustrative examples of such misuse was brought to the fore by Louis Hartz and the Handlins in their studies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where states expanded powers to regulate not just public but private behaviours such as drinking and gambling on the common law grounds of “nuisance”. Despite this “dark side of government power”, the people themselves were partly accountable for the widespread support of increased latitude of state punishment and surveillance through the sheer, powerful force of public opinion. Whereas Americans were well aware of their rights, the scope of liberty implicit in the protection and provision of those rights remained implicit in state power.

How the opposition whigs influenced revolutionary thought... exactly

However, looking into great detail at Opposition Whig writings, in particular at Bolingbroke's arguments, which inspired the likes of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, one does not actually find a cheery endorsement of "deriving [governments'] just powers from the consent of the governed". From reading Idea of the Patriot King it seems Bolingbroke's driving point was that power was to be placed in the hands of a just and honest ruler, with no involvement by the people nor parties nor parliament, reflecting an almost Machiavellian anti-populism and staunch pro-monarchical stance. In my view, Ketcham's analysis reveals that Bolingbroke was used, somewhat paradoxically, via a selective re-interpretation by the radical Whigs and founding fathers to criticize the failings of both Lord North, the "king" in the colonies, and George III himself, thus mobilizing the revolution. I find that two sentient points about his influence on revolutionary republican thought emerge from this analysis, firstly, that only in America, and not England, can the population entire, not just the king, cultivate a morality and disinterest worthy of good government, purged of cunningness, party factiousness and greed for commercial profit. Secondly, that securing the public good, "vastly more than the sum of private goods", is the greatest guarantee of liberty and rights for the people. The founding fathers agreed that the manifestation of true liberty and equality lay in honoring the public good, the consequence of republican power rightly exercised. In the spirit of the founding fathers, then, I clarify that where power and rights are not mutually exclusive, we mean that rights follow from power, but only when it is exercised with virtue. Indeed John Adams echoes such sentiments; of the qualities he admires in leadership, he writes that "the subjects Rights, Liberty, Commerce, military Merit" are "sentiments worthy of a Patriot King". This is the same John Adams who extolls civilian liberty, whose brand of populism is a mix of republican civic responsibility and self-evident Jeffersonian rights. The revolution was thus conservative in its intellectual traditions, but yet also radical in the sense that both the American Whigs' ideal of a classical Greek republic, where every citizen participated actively in politics, the Opposition Whigs' patriot king ideals, and the concept of inalienable rights, were combined in justification of a new republican model of government. And thus, a republican liberal tradition, where the citizens elected representatives to secure the rights of liberty and equality for all, was born.

Sources and traditions of the American Revolution

Of the spheres of power and liberty, or rights, Bernard Bailyn claims, " The one must be resisted, the other defended and the two must never be confused." Is this truly the American revolutionaries' conception of power and rights? Of rights, John Dickinson writes, "they are born with us, exist with us." Yet this notion of natural rights, to which Dickinson alluded, barely existed within English law and constitution before the American revolution. Instead, according to Bailyn, the British relied mainly on a complex system of social and political customs to prevent their oppression, notably in the creation of the parliamentary system, and which required an "utmost vigilance to maintain". In this context, Bolingbroke and other Whig opposition writers rised up to challenge the messy and ineffective state of liberty in England. Bailyn's principle argument, in writing about the true source of the American revolutionary tradition, was that the American revolutionaries relied on major works of English Whig opposition thought, such as Cato's Letters, The Independent Whig and the writings of Trenchard and Gordon, to bring about the argument that America was destined as a birthplace for a purer and freer form of liberalism. In so doing, Bailyn equates the rebirth of liberal idealism with the early American liberal tradition, distilling it from the confusing, much-disputed and struggling tradition of liberty in the English political tradition.

The English opposition's criticisms of power, particularly reflecting the failings of parliament, court corruption and the constant need for checks and balances on government, from which the American liberal tradition inherited its theoretical foundations, seemed to fit poorly with the ideals of American Whigs like Charles Lee, who wrote of a "spartan egalitarian society where every man was a soldier of his own soul and land". Gordon Wood may have provided a reconciliation: in the new nation, there is no place for fear and coercion because in their vision of the ideal American society, there is submission to government out of love, not fear. In other words, power derived from willing consent is not dangerous and is actually compatible with civilian liberties, not hostile to it. Wood claims that in the republican society, "power held by the people was liberty", a statement which rejected Bailyn's distinction by making power and liberty one and the same, in the individual. John Adams' statement, "a democratical despotism is a contradiction in terms", provides another clue to the true conception of liberty in revolutionary thought: public liberty cannot be thought of as tyrannical because in the new nation, the interests of the people should rule supreme. Therefore the spirit of the revolution, in its original context, is that government is subject to the will of the people and places a duty upon individuals to elect wise representatives that can protect the rights with which they were endowed, out of virtue and in the interest of the public good. And where representative government is needed to make decisions on behalf of the community, it came out of consent and proper electorial measures, not out of forced necessity due to a deep pessimism (as was the case in England) in the ability of the public to make good decisions. One could say that the revolution marked for Americans a hopeful start, where a republican society could be nurtured with pervasive "simplicity of life" and "lack of enervating luxury".

Of the aftermath of revolutions, Hannah Arendt writes, "the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide."

essay outlines

Prompt 1:
What is American exceptionalism and how might one go about defending its claims?

What does exceptionalism entail?
- That the American revolution was the first of its kind (Hannah Arrent's synthesis)
- That America is a great nation today because of its staunchly liberal roots (Hartz)
- Did not have a long history of violent uprisings and did not have to endure a class struggle. Relatively homogenous population and largely living in conformity to Protestant ideals

How would one attack exceptionalism?
- The American revolution was largely conservative and nothing new to the world (Jefferson's admission that those were common sense)
- Americans do not realize they are not truly free but are living an illusion of it (Gerstle? Or Kloppenberg)
- A lack of a violent past does not a nation make.
- A homogenous population is the source of factions and strife

How would one defend these claims?
- Even in its conservative roots, the revolutionaries were envisioning a new nation free of monarchy, and this exceptionalism manifests itself in the great revolt against the UK
- Regardless of whether they are truly free or not, liberty is a quality of nationhood that is created over time
- This claim needs more unpacking
- Pitting traditional liberalism (right to property, life etc) vs socialist liberalism is not the end of the story, here lies a government for the collective good of the people, with all the necessary institutions in place (party politics, Jacksonian checks and balances???, progressives' emphasis on states rights)

Prompt 2: 
Is it compatible that the American revolutionaries fought for Republican ideals and that the US today remains solidly entrenched in a liberal tradition?

Certain characteristics of the founders' republicanism are compatible with Louis Hartz's liberalism but looking beyond Hartz, liberalism also encompasses conflicting strains of thought, based on differing start-state assumptions like how one views the fundamental state of human nature, power, and the events surrounding the revolution itself. How one conceives of the American liberal tradition therefore determines its affinity to Republican ideals.

Characteristics of Republicanism:
Republicanism has many core tenets. One is the virtuous representative leader to whom we must submit. How do liberals reconcile with this if their goal is to be suspicious of all authority? If they argue that everyone is capable of self-rule, if they reject even representative authority, then they must accept the other premise of republicanism, the idea that self-virtue is necessary for a populist state to survive. Citizens must be virtuous and capable of limiting their own excessions to be truly free. Only when this state is achieved will citizens achieve the "true liberty" that Wood claimed.

Start-state conditions:
The tradition of revolutionary thought derived from Locke claims all men are endowed with a divine right to liberty. Thus endowed, in a diverse society they would have to fight for that right and, following the Marxist tradition, eventually progress beyond class warfare to a virtuous, socialist and very much Republican way of life. Hartz argues that Americans were born free and without class struggle, and in my view, the implications of his theory is that the new nation's ideal form of government would then have ensure this continued preservation of liberty in such a unique state of nature. To this end, staunch republicans may claim to provide the very infrastructure that gives them the ability to exercise these freedoms. Without virtue at the helm, men would exist in a state of "war, rapine and murder". Yet what follows from these ideas, has to be the purest form of republicanism, which is that all life in the state is public property and belongs to the country(Samuel Adams), i.e. the obliteration of the individual(Gordon Wood), as the ideal state of society.

Hartz's critics can potentially expose the fallacies behind this "dilemma". One of their contentions were that America was not classless because it had a different kind of class struggle. The kinds of social antagonisms that threatened liberal traditions in Europe were different from the institutions of slavery and minority oppression that Americans actually took for granted. Taking the critics' views into account, the only way to reconcile this paradoxical liberal tradition and the thriving of state power under republican principles, is that Americans were living in an illusion of freedom propagated by a staunchly republican government claiming to be acting in accordance with the original intentions of the Founders. The people subconsciously associated such rhetoric with having successfully achieved an ideal state of liberty and equality, and never woke up from that dream.

Positive and negative liberty:
If liberty means licentiousness and right to revolution, then liberty enables power, and power, according to Samuel Adams, is "intoxicating in its nature", and corrupts. Negative liberty rests on the idea that preservation of liberty requires that we maintain checks on those in power. In this view, Republican idealists may feel that the virtuous leader is "tainted" by the need for checks and balances. If liberty were conceived as a source of power itself, then Republican institutions will be seen as institutions that keep checks on liberty and not as agents to achieve individual liberty.

Conclusion:
I argued that republican ideology was, in the founders' view, the ideal apparatus for preserving the American liberal tradition from the beginning, but involving a specific, idealistic conception of liberalism where virtue and self-restraint was exercised by the state to ensure equality and liberty for all. While the revolutionaries conceived of this tradition because they were mainly reacting against a power they thought was corrupt and unrepresentative of the American people's vital interests, it took writers like Bernard Bailyn who was looking at the factious history of England, and James Madison who was looking beyond this narrowly conceived tradition of liberty, to see the limits of antiquated notions of virtue and argue that the homogenous and disinterested populace that Republican ideology mandates are not possible in reality, and that as long as self-interest exists, the problem of factions always arises. Freedom for all is not always attainable; freedom must be fought for and to preserve that freedom, power vested in the hands of government must be constantly kept in check. Therefore in the real world, especially at the point when Americans put the revolution behind them and turned their attention to matters of nation building and identity, the main source of conflict of these Republican ideals with the unique liberal tradition that Americans had inherited, was their antiquity and their inapplicability to a nation fully embracing of a meritocratic and capitalist tradition, ie a large body politic of ultimately self-interested citizens. Despite this, I argue that however much the post-revolutionary liberal tradition has changed since Louis Hartz's interpretation, the fact that they put in place a comprehensive system of "un-Republican" checks and balances, and continue to do so, is to me a sign that they continue to have a healthy fear of not achieving Republican ideals rather than a sign of rejecting these ideals altogether.

Admin matters: Evernote experiment, some major theses to iron out

Evernote notebooks (experimental tool)
1. conservativism 
2. radicalism
3. exceptionalism
4. liberalism
5. stock political science phrases
6. historical facts about the revolution
7. republicanism
8. federalism 
9. anti-federalism

Major issues from first half of the semester:
1. Lipset vs Hartz
2. Bailyn vs Wood
2. British conservatism vs American conservatism
3. New deal liberalism vs founding liberalism
4. Start state conditions of the American revolution
5. Federalists vs anti-federalists
6. How do Americans reconcile with fed and state rights given their liberal roots?


Tutorial questions:
1. “The story of Anglo-American divergence must be told alongside the story of Anglo-American convergence; for every instance of Anglophobia there is an instance of Anglophilia. (They are two sides, according to Peter Onuf, of the same story. The dueling of competing claims to American exceptionalism might have something to do with the irony that the further Americans predicated their national identity in opposition to the Old World, the more they needed to establish their lineage from the motherland. Indeed, even the language of the Declaration of Independence seems to concede that the rights of Englishmen are not so different from the rights of the American.)“ Discuss.

2. Was the American Revolution radical or conservative? What was “first” in the “First New Nation?”

3. What are the key precepts of republicanism? Compare and contrast Bailyn and Wood's account of republicanism.

4. What, according to Hartz, is special about American liberalism? If Hartz is right, the American revolution was conservative; if Lipset and/or Wood are right, the American revolution was radical. Which is it?

5. Did the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists have the more sober view of human nature? To what extent is Madison's new republicanism still republicanism?

6. Can we square the idea that America was supposedly born liberal with the formidable reach of state authority in the long nineteenth century?

7. Is it possible to constitutionalize prerogative or must republics, in the end, still hope for virtue in the modern executive?

8. How does dualism reconcile rights foundationalism and democracy, Burkeanism and democracy, liberalism and republicanism?

9. How and to what extent did the Civil War and Reconstruction refound the United States?