Tocqueville saw in this an irresistible movement: “Once a people begins to interfere with the voting qualification, one can be sure that sooner or later it will abolish it altogether. . . . The further the limit of voting rights is extended, the stronger is the need felt to spread them still wider; for after each new concession the forces of democracy are strengthened, and its demands increase with its augmented power. The ambition of those left below the qualifying limit increases in proportion to the number of those above it” (59-60). Obviously, the barriers to extending the franchise to women and to African-Americans proved far more formidable than this passage suggests. It is remarkable, moreover, that Tocqueville did not appreciate the opposite line of reasoning, according to which those who held the franchise would jealously defend the status, if not also the power, it conferred on them.
The imperialism of this democracy was certainly not confined to its elites, not all of whom even supported it, but unquestionably had a substantial popular base. The rapidly growing numbers of settlers were among the most vociferous of these. They depended on the national government to defeat and remove the Indians and through purchase or war to gain control of continental territories held by other European nations. They included, besides the million or more who poured into the old northwest territory (Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana), Southern planters who moved westward as cotton cultivation exhausted farm land in the Piedmont region. Beyond this, however, the whole structure and flow of the economy was reoriented westward in the early 1800s. Great canals such as the Erie Canal were constructed to link western producers with eastern market and shipping centers. By 1840 there were 3,328 miles of railroad to accompany about the same mileage of canals. Wheat and other farm products, notably “king cotton,” were the country’s chief exports. Thus both slavery and westward expansion came to be integral parts of the earliest formation of a national economy.
Imperialism was, so to speak, democratic in another sense. It was essential to the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic of dispersed settlements governed by its farmer citizens. Jefferson himself was a strong proponent of national expansion, though his reasons for supporting the Louisiana Purchase blended a desire to increase the agrarian land base with alarm at French control of the port of New Orleans, essential outlet for Midwestern commerce at the time.
Of course, it is not difficult to see that national expansion was linked with liberal values as well. Liberalism’s emphasis on economic individualism required, in a agrarian society where virtually all adult white males were citizens, that territory expand with population. Sean Wilentz, a contemporary historian, describes how the liberal ideology of private property and the republican dream of self-sufficient community combined with economic hardships to propel Americans westward:
Studies of migration suggest that rural northeasterners who could not make a go of it tried to avoid entering the urban wage-labor market; the largest single supply of urban workers . . . consisted of immigrants and their children . . . Native-born rural northeasterners, joined by migrants from the South, headed west instead, most of them hoping to reconstruct the independent yeoman communities that had crumbled back home (in Eric Foner, editor, The New American History, 55-56).
They faced numerous obstacles according to Wilentz: removal of Native Americans, chiefly accomplished by state and federal authorities; conflict with land speculators “eager to convert the virgin land to capitalist development,” and risky but usually unavoidable economic relations with speculators or bankers. Wilentz concludes that the republican dream of rural self-sufficiency quickly collapsed--the successful ones became large commercial farmers, while the others either moved on or became agricultural wage-laborers.
Before looking at these works individually, I want to emphasize a few common themes and contrasts. They express radical tendencies within liberal and republican thought, among them the impetus towards truly universal human and civil rights, the autonomy of the individual’s conscience vis-a-vis the state and society, and the priority which ethical claims and non-material satisfactions should have over commercial expediency, power and customs.
They also express ideas which lay outside the horizons of mainstream liberal (and republican) discourse at that time. Two examples of this are the critique of masculine power and Thoreau’s indictment of the state.
The critique of masculine power introduces the idea that gender is socially constructed. Natural differences do not underlie and justify social distinctions between male and female virtues (and roles) nor the exclusion of women from politics. It is worth noting here that feminists then and now divide over whether the fundamental sameness of men and women or their cultural (or even biological) differences make a better ground for women’s liberation arguments. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, thought that women’s greater inclination toward peace and the care of others could transform government and society once women entered politics.
Thoreau’s indictment of both the liberal democratic state and the society that it serves is a classic statement of the primacy of conscience over the law and of justice over expediency. Thoreau takes aim at one of the great dilemmas of liberal doctrine: if government is basically a social agreement, a convention, how can it claim any pre-eminent moral authority? And how can citizens possibly be justified in submitting to its laws when those laws conflict with higher principles? As Thoreau puts it,
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. . . . It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner [of war?] on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them . . . [prison is] the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor” (235).
The American revolution was justified by appealing to the higher principles of the natural equality and natural rights of individuals, but it was, after all, a collective effort united by the goal of independence. The Declaration of Independence formulated the terms of this unity. Thoreau, by contrast, pits the moral and aesthetic authority of the individual against that of state and society. Resistance to Civil Government is often cited as a founding text for the concept of civil disobedience. But where civil disobedience constitutes a reconciliation, however uneasy, of the claims of the state versus those of the individual’s conscience, Thoreau’s later defense of John Brown after Brown’s attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry showed his willingness to countenance violent resistance to slavery. Whether or not Thoreau should be called a libertarian anarchist, he certainly influenced anarchist thinking.
One other common theme in these works deserves mention: the appeal to Christian values. The likeness of all people before God, made in His image and obliged to abide by His will as each understands it, becomes a fundamental justification for granting women full citizenship in the hands of Martineau and the suffragettes. Women are moral beings whose right to live according to their beliefs must not be denied or abridged. Thoreau wants to awaken the moral being in each person, and like revivalist preachers before and since, warns them that merely abiding by the forms of Christianity is not enough. His neighbors hoped, he wrote, “by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls” (240). The reduction of religion to a set of empty formalities complements their preoccupation with material gain and explains how mere convenience is enough to persuade them to abide by unjust laws.
In sum, then, these works articulate radical potentials in liberal thought while bringing into American political discourse ideas marginal or foreign to it. They also show how important religious, political and intellectual subcultures have been in America, since their authors were deeply indebted to such subcultures. The abolitionist movement and such liberal Protestant sects as the Quakers and Unitarians were vital sources of support and practical experience for the early suffragettes, while Thoreau benefitted from his ties with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other New England Transcendentalists. The determined pursuit of public dialogue by Thoreau, Martineau, and the suffragettes, though it certainly bore fruit, revealed how sometimes great a distance, measured in values and beliefs (and conditioned by social circumstances), lay between these subcultures and many other Americans.
She found that women in America were trained “to consider marriage the sole object in life” (127), and that within marriage they were subservient and dependent. Martineau herself never married, a decision she considered wise given “the evils and disadvantages of married life as it exists among us at this time” (121).
Martineau deplored the way in which women were educated. Its content, she wrote, is designed “to improve conversation, and to make women something like companions to their husbands, and able to teach their children somewhat” (126). But while “religious excitements” are encouraged, no effort was made to educate women in philosophy, politics or morals (125). In addition, their learning is passive, largely a matter of memorization. “There is rarely or never a careful ordering of influences for the promotion of clear intellectual activity” (126). This unjustified restriction of women’s intellects was deliberate in Martineau’s judgment: “While there are natural rights which women may not use, just claims which are not to be listened to, large objects which may not be approached, even in imagination, intellectual activity is dangerous: or, as the phrase is, unfit” (126).
Martineau herself received “a remarkably intensive education, even for the liberal Unitarian circles to which her family belonged” (121). Moreover, her decision to make a career of writing both enabled and required her to become an active learner and coherent thinker. And her economic independence, in turn, forms the basis for another contrast with the condition of American women. She thought that “the prosperity of America is a circumstance unfavourable to its women” because they had no chance to show “what they are capable of thinking and doing” (129).
Finally, Martineau felt that in America, “The morals of women are crushed.” The “discovery and adoption of the principle and laws of duty” is a universal human task. Everyone has a conscience, and each must develop it and attend to it him or herself. But in America, “the whole apparatus of public opinion is brought to bear offensively upon individuals among women who exercise freedom of mind in deciding upon what duty is, and the methods by which it is to be pursued” (127). Women are, in short, denied ethical autonomy. They may hold opinions but not act on them.
Martineau further argued that belief in different masculine and feminine virtues, such as women’s gentleness, delicacy, and nurturing abilities and men’s physical strength, capacity for political leadership, military valor and greater reasoning powers produced men who tyrannized and women who were “weak, ignorant and subservient. . .” Men needed to learn gentleness while women, in order to defy conventions, needed “the bravery of heroic men” (129).
Here as well, Martineau’s own conduct contrasted with what she thought typified American women. She created a “minor upheaval” by endorsing the abolitionists, and her book, published after her return to England, antagonized many of her American admirers with its outspoken criticisms of American society.
Of the convention’s dozen resolutions, we learn that only one generated controversy: the demand for the vote. Some delegates feared it would “make the whole movement [look] ridiculous” (97). In addition, the fact that it was the one of the few concrete institutional changes called for may have made it controversial.
Of the many features of the document which reveal its white, middle-class origins and concerns none does so as tellingly as something missing from it. Why is there no call for the abolition of slavery when half the slaves were women and when, moreover, the condition of women was compared with that of the slave? There was certainly abolitionist sentiment among the delegates, some if not many of whom were active in the cause of abolition. And the women’s rights movement could not, at this time, be characterized as a single-issue pressure group--the diversity of its demands alone attests to that. The most likely explanation is that slavery, while certainly considered an evil, was not seen as a women’s issue. Female slaves were not “women” as conceived of in this document. Try applying some its phrases to slave women. Were they required to show “virtue, delicacy, and refinement?” Were they deemed by men to possess “moral superiority?” Were the laws of divorce a pressing issue for them, or was it rather that the slavemasters refused to respect the sanctity of marriage and the bonds of family? Was their problem getting a “thorough education” or getting any education at all? The allegiance of the delegates to many forms of ascriptive privilege is alluded to by one passage: mankind “has withheld from . . . [women] rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men . . .”
The consequences of this universalization of the experiences and aspirations of white, middle-class women will become more apparent when we discuss race relations.
Nor is this an abstract question, for Thoreau regarded the federal government as guilty of the gravest injustices:
I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. . . . In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize (229).
It is illicit for the individual to pretend that the will of the state overrides the claims of her conscience. “Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right” (227).
Majority rule does not change this. The majority rules “not because they are most likely to be right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest” (227). While it is true that “progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. . . . Is a democracy, as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?” Thoreau answers this question by declaring that “there will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (245).
Thoreau sees government of his time tending rather to corrupt and subdue people than to respect them, though he holds citizens themselves responsible for this as well. Most men “serve the state . . . not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies, . . .[with] no free exercise whatever of the judgment or the moral sense.” Others, though they serve the state with their heads, “rarely make any moral distinctions, . . .[thus] are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God.” Those few who do strive to serve the state with their consciences “necessarily resist it for the most part” and are liable to be regarded by others as “useless and selfish” (228).
Most citizens are unwilling to bear the costs of moral responsibility. “There are thousands,” Thoreau writes, “ who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them . . . They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.” “[M]ore interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity,” they “are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may” (230).
Merely voting for what is right is not enough. If this is all I do, I show that I am not vitally concerned. I accept the choices offered to me, leave the outcome to the majority, and excuse myself from further exertions in order to return to the private pursuits that are my real concern (230-231).
Moreover, Thoreau argues, doing what is expedient--what is convenient, what is in my narrow self-interest, what best protects my personal security--is itself a form of enslavement. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that “men have become the tools of their tools.” They are enmeshed in the technologies and economic demands of modern society, seduced by its overblown and degraded conception of the good life. Their lives are full of stress and anxiety. Their wants are coarse, yet they are forced to devote the better part of the adult lives to endless, wearying, dulling labor to satisfy these wants. As a result, no higher intellectual or spiritual abilities can emerge, nor any finer sense of beauty or pleasure.
The government colludes with this devotion to expediency by relying on threats and punishments to get its way. It “never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength” (238). People “dread the consequences of disobedience to it to their property and families.” “This,” Thoreau admits, “is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again.” Yet Thoreau unhesitatingly counsels voluntary poverty in order to retain freedom of conscience and of conscientious action. “You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs” (236-237).
Nor is it enough to limit oneself to “the ways the State [itself] has provided for remedying the evil [that it does or countenances]” (233). “They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone.” Besides, “in this case [slavery] the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil.” And if the remedy should, as a result, be worse than the evil--in other words, if the consequences of defying the state are socially disruptive or lead to violence--this is the state’s fault. “Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority?” (233).
What is needed, what brings real change, is “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right . . .” Such action “is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist whole with anything which was. It not only divides state and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine” (232-233). This is, pre-eminently, the individual’s responsibility: “it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done for ever” (234-235). “A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight” (235).
For all this, Thoreau places a remarkable limit on the individual’s ethical obligations. “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support” (231-232). Consistent with this, Thoreau refused to pay his taxes since, as he put it, “I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with,--the dollar is innocent,--but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance” (241).
Thoreau compressed his view of government into a famous epigram: “That government is best which governs not at all” (226). But this in only possible “when men are prepared for it,” which they manifestly are not yet. They must, each individually, abandon the rule of expediency for that of conscience. The “wise minority” who have already done so show ethical leadership by their actions; they are, in effect, the genuinely “outstanding” men of a democratic society.