FORE

OREIGNERS complain that they cannot easily understand our political parties, and we do not wonder at it, because those parties do not always understand themselves. Their controversies like the old homoousian disputes of the church, often turn upon such niceties of distinction, that to discern their differences requires optics as sharp as those of Butler's hero, who could

"Sever and divide

Betwixt north-west and north-west side."

What with whigs, democratic whigs, democrats, true democrats, barnburners, hunkers, silver grays, woolly heads, soft shells, hard shells, national reformers, fire-eaters, and filibusteros, it is not difficult to imagine how the exotic intellect should get perplexed! Even to our native and readier apprehensions, the diversity of principle hidden under the diversity of names, is not always palpable; while it must be confessed, that our parties are not universally so consistent with themselves as to enable us to write their distinctive creeds in a horn-book.

Yet, on a closer survey, it is found that parties here are very much the same, in their characteristic tendencies and aims, as parties elsewhere. They originate in that human nature, which is the same everywhere (modified by local circumstances only), and they exhibit under the various influences of personal constitution, ambition, interest, &c., the same contrasts of selfishness and virtue, of craft, audacity, genius, falsehood, wisdom and folly. It is true that our differences are not seemingly so fundamental and well-pronounced as those of older VOL. IV.-16.

nations. We have no contests here as the elementary principles of government. A monarchist is perhaps not to be found from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande, any more than a rhinoceros or lammergeyer. We are all republicans; we all believe in the supremacy of the people; and our convictions, as to the general nature and sphere of legislation, are as uniform as if they had been produced by a process of mental stereotype.

But within the range prescribed by this more general unanimity, there has been ample room and verge enough, for the evolution of many heated and distempered antagonisms. We have agreed that our governments should be republican, but as to what functions they should exercise and what they should leave to the people, we have not always agreed; we have agreed that the separate States should be sovereign and independent, but to what extent they might carry that sovereignty and independence we have not agreed; we have agreed that the benefits of the federal union should be, from time to time, extended to new territories, but on what terms they should be extended, we have not agreed; we have agreed to keep aloof from the domestic affairs of other nations, but as to the details of foreign policy inside of this salutary rule, we have not agreed. There has been among us always, there-fore, radical dissents and oppositions. We have had parties of many stripes and calibres, some which favored, and some which opposed a large concentration of power in the federal government; some which have proposed to accomplish their social objects by legislative and others by voluntary action; some which have

desired to restrict the elective franchise, and others to extend it; some which have opposed the acquisition of more territory, and others willing to run the risk of war for its sake; some which have aimed at the destruction of the Union, and others eager to sacrifice honor and liberty itself, to the preservation of the Union. In short, there has been an endless scope for parties.

It is a common saying, we know, that there can be but two parties in any nation, the movement and the stationary parties,—and this is true as a philosophical generalisation, deduced from the changes of a certain period of time, but it is not true always as a contemporary and actual fact. In the long run, of course, all parties will be found to have advanced or retarded the progress of society, but in the immediate and present aspect of things, parties are more than two, are half a dozen at least, and they never lose their distinctions. Look where we will, provided free political discussion is allowed, and we shall find at least, to use the French mode of marking their relations, a centre, a right, a left, a right centre, and a left centre, besides a miscellaneous herd of eccentrics, all representing some contrast or gradation of opinion. In France, for instance, before France was reduced by the bayonet to a single man, there were the several branches of the legitimists, the Napoleonites, the republicans, the mountain, and the socialists; and in Great Britian, there are the tories, the whigs, the radicals, the chartists, &c. In the same way, in this country, we : possess the several combinations to which we referred in the opening paragraph; and though their differences as we have said are not so marked, as those which prevail between the legitimists and the republicans of Europe, they are still as we shall see, valid, positive and important.

The earliest parties known to our history were those of the colonial times, when the grand debate as to the rights of the colonies was getting under way, and all men took sides, either as whigs or tories. They had imported their distinctive names, and to some extent their distinctive principles, from the mother country, from the iron times of Cromwell and the Puritans; but, in the progress of the controversy, as it often happens, they were led upon wholly new and vastly broader grounds of dispute than they had at first dreamed. The

little squabble as to the limits and reaches of the imperial jurisdiction expanded into a war for national existence, nay, for the rights of humanity; and what was at the outset a violent talk only about stamp duties, and taxes on tea-mean and trivial even in its superficial aspectsconcealed the noblest political theories, the sublimest political experiments, that had yet been recorded in the annals of our race. The whigs of the revolution, in crushing the,tories of that day, touched the secret spring of a new creation. They gave to the world a new idea, the Ainerican idea, the conception of a state, founded upon the inherent freedom and dignity of the individual man. It seemed as if, gathering out of the ages all the aspirations of great and noble souls, all the yearnings of oppressed peoples, they had concentrated them into one grand act of emancipation. They actualised the dreams of Time, and in the latest age of the world, and on a new continent, introduced, as they fondly supposed, that reign of heavenly justice which the primitive golden ages had faintly foreshadowed, which patriots had so long struggled and sighed for in vain, which the political martyrs of every clime had welcomed only in beatific vision.

It was this patriot party of the revolution which gave the inspiration and impulse to the nation, which formed its character and sentiment, and erected the standard of opinion, destined, for some years, at least, to be the guide of all movements. It fused the national mind by the warmth of its convictions, or rather by the fiery earnestness with which it fought its way to success, into that single thought of democratic freedom, which has been the ground and substance of our national unity. The medley of settlers, chance-wafted bitherward, from the several corners of Europe, like seeds borne by the winds, were nourished by it into an organic whole, and have since been retained by its original influences, under all diversities of constitution, climate, and interest, in the coherence and uniformity of a national being. We are therefore infinitely indebted to our fathers, who were so not merely after the flesh, but after the spirit, who generated our minds as well as our bodies, and whose sublime thought of a free state, an inspiration greater than their knowledge, has been the fruitful germ of our best inward and outward life. No other people have had so grand a national origin, for we were born in

a disinterested war for rights, and not for territory, and under the stimulus of an idea, which still transcends the highest practical achievements of our race.

It has been the greatness, the predominance, the profound inherency of this original American idea, which, forcing general conviction, has produced the uniformity of our later parties (to which we have alluded), and confined their divisions to transient or trivial and personal differences. But there is also another cause for that uniformity, in the fact that as societies advance in the career of civilization, their political divisions are less marked, but more subtle in principle, and less gross, but more indirect in the display of animosity and feeling. The rival chiefs of two factions of savages, who quarrel as to which shall eat the other, settle the matter with a blow of the tomahawk; but in a more refined community, the entire population may get at loggerheads, over the construction of a phrase in some dubious document, which they determine by vociferous clamours at a public meeting, or in able leading articles. One is sometimes amused, therefore, when a foreigner in the United States, an Englishman, for instance, complacently remarks that we have no great parties, no profound, radical, comprehensive questions, about which we may beat out each other's brains.

"You

have no question of church and state," he says; แ no immense projects for parliamentary reform; no tremendous interests hanging upon some old law; no widely separated and powerful classes to be plunged into fierce and terrific conflicts. All that you quarrel about is summed up in the per centage of a tariff, the building of a 1oad, or the possession of a few offices." In saying this, John imagines that he has reduced us to a lilliputian insignificance and littleness, especially by the side of his obese and ponderous magnitude. But we answer him, that those " great questions," about which he and his fellows, all the world over, are pummelling each other, or, at least, tearing their passions to tatters, were settled for us before we were born, and that we esteem it a happiness and glory to have got rid of them, even though they have left us little more to quarrel about than the cut of a neighbor's coat or the shape of his nose.

We also

hint to him, further, that the progress of nations, as we conceive it, consists in the gradual decay of political, and the growth of social questions, or, in other

words, in the simplification and reduction of the machinery of government, with which politics has chiefly to do, and the consequent extinction of politicians, who become more and more a pernicious class, with, at the same time, a continuous aggrandizement of society itself, of its industry, its arts, its local improvements, and its freedom, as well as order. We are rather glad, then, on the whole, that our politics do not possess, in foreign estimation, the importance, the dignity, and the vital sensibility, of those of other nations, and that our politicians, for the most part, are puny and contemptible specimens as statesmen. But we shall show in the sequel that we have our own difficulties nevertheless, some of them vital enough, and requiring for their adjustment the largest capacities and noblest impulses of great minds.

The most natural and the most permanent of our past political divisions have arisen out of the peculiar structure of the federal government, the nature and extent of its jurisdiction, and its relations to the States. As soon as the federal Constitution went into effect, the differences which had almost defeated its ratification before the people-the counteracting centripetal and centrifugal forces as we may call them-were developed into strong and positive party hostilities. The federalists and the antifederalists took possession of the political field, and the noise of their conflicts sounded through many years, giving a sting not only to the debates of the Senate House, but embittering the intercourse of domestic life, and leaving deep scars of prejudice on the reputations of eminent men, as well as in the minds of their descendants. The mere disputes as to the authority of the general government might not, perhaps, have led to such earnest and envenomed battles, at the outset, if they had not been complicated, especially under the leadership of Jefferson and Hamilton, with the profounder questions of individual rights just then agitating the Old World, with an intensity of feeling which amounted to frenzy. Hamilton, a man of talent, bred in camps, distrustful of the masses, an admirer of the British constitution, and accustomed to rule, was disposed to rely upon the strong arm in government, and may be regarded as the representative of the sentiment of LAW; while Jefferson, on the other hand, a man of genius, selfconfident, generous, sanguine, tolerant of

theories, an acolyte, if not a teacher, of the French school of manners and thought, leaned to the spontaneous action of the people, and was the representative of Liberty. Thus, the party of State rights and the party of liberty came to be identified, and took the name, after a time, of the democratic Republican party, while federalism, or the doctrine of a strong central government, jumped in naturally with the doctrine of law and order. There was a double pressure of tendencies separating the two parties, and intensifying their hatreds, and, in the exacerbations of the times, inducing them to accuse each other respectively of tyranny and licentiousness. A federalist, in the opinions of the republicans of those days, was only a monarchist in disguise, watching his opportunity to strangle the infant liberties of his country in the cradle, and to restore the emancipated colonies to their dependence upon Great Britain, while the federalist retorted the generous imputation of his adversary, by calling him a jacobin, a scoundrel and a demagogue, eager to uproot the foundations of order, and let loose the lees and scum of French infidelity and French immorality upon society. We, at this day, looking through the serener atmosphere of history, know that they were both mistaken in their extreme opinions, and that they were both good patriots after all, necessary to each other, as it now appears, in tempering the dangerous excesses which might have followed the unchecked predominance of either, and in giving a more uniform and stable action to our untried political system. But we can not conceal the deep significance of the contest in which they were engaged.

In all the subsequent changes of parties, the distinction of federalist and antifederalist has been maintained, in theory at least, and sometimes in name, if not so rigidly in practice. It is a distinction that will only pass away with the final establishment of the truth, though it may often be obscured in the fluctuating movements of politics. During the war of 1812-15, the Federalists, as they were termed, were the most vigorous opponents of the use of power by the general government, and their most offensive acts, the proceedings of the Hartford Convention, were nothing worse than an attempt, as it was deemed, to arrest and restrain the encroachments of the central authority upon the rights and inte"ests of the separate States; whilst, on

the other hand, the most enormous exercise of that authority-the acquisition of Louisiana by Jefferson-the suppres sion of South Carolina nullification by Jackson-the annexation of Texas by Tyler-have been resorted to by the leaders of the so-called democratic or anti-federalist party. Indeed, so little consistency has been exhibited by parties in this respect, that it has been observed, that in general, whatever party was in possession of the federal government was disposed to push the use of its functions to the utmost practicable verge, while the party out of power has opposed this use, and assumed the virtue of continence. Under the administration of Jackson, when the struggle with the National Bank arose, the lines of demarcation between the principles of the federalists and anti-federalists were once more somewhat strictly drawn, and the shibboleths and rallying cries of that day have continued to be used by the politicians, for the most part impertinently, up to the present time. In the administrations of the States, too, there has been an undeniable line drawn, a gulf fixed, as we may say, between the friends of a strong and centralized government and the friends of social and popular freedom, but we may add, that as no party is now entitled to a monopoly of either class, this distinction has subsided. The feelings and convictions in which it originated have not passed away, and, they will not speedily pass away, but there has been a lull in the public mind, in respect to them, partly produced by the decided gravitation of opinion to the democratic theory both of Federal and State government, and partly by the emergence of new grounds of conflict. The debris of former convulsions is all that the older parties have left us.

An anomaly in the social system of some of the States, however, not supposed to be so pregnant with consequences, as it has since proved, when the Federal Union was formed, has been developed into a chief cause of the complication of parties, and the principal incentive and danger of our more modern contests.

The primary idea of our institutions was, as we have seen, that of a free Democratic Republic. The liberty and equality of the people was the animating spirit of our revolution, and the inspiring genius of the constitutional structure to which it gave rise. But among the States, which form the elements of the

confederacy, there are some not strictly democratic, and scarcely republican. They are aristocracies or oligarchies, built upon a diversity of races. Their

political and social privileges are confined to a class, while all the rest of their inhabitants are slaves. The consequence has been a growing divergency, though it was not always apparent or even suspected, between the convictions, the interests and the tendencies of one half the Union, which was eminently free and democratic, and those of the other half, which was slave-holding and aristocratic. The reasons why this difference was not so strongly felt at the outset, were, because the slaves were few, and the great and good men who formed the Union, and helped to knit and bind together its primitive filaments, were alınost unanimous in the sentiment that the system of bondage in which these were held would be only temporary. Like a growing youth in the flush and impulse of his formative period, they were scarcely conscious of the cancer lurking in the blood. But the vice, contrary to their expectations, was nurtured into strength, the sentiment in regard to it has changed, it has become interwoven with vast and intricate interests, and it is now sustained by certain political and philosophical convictions, so that the question of slavery is the controlling question in our politics.

Another reason why the radical vices of the federal relation were not more speedily extruded and discovered, was this: The slave-holders have been, for the most part, in alliance with the democratic or popular party. Devoted sticklers for equality among themselves, fierce lovers of their own liberties, only secured from the molestation of others by a rigid maintenance of the internal independence of the separate States, they have naturally sympathized with the party which appeared to be most devoted to these ends. Their sentiment of personal independence and right was the same sentiment which animates the masses of the free States in their opposition to the encroachments of power, and their necessity for security dictated the same doctrine of State-rights, to which the people adhered in their instinct for local self-governinent. Thus, the democratic party of the north, and the State-rights' party of the south, have formed what was called the great Republican party of the Union. The model democrats of the nation, Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Madison, who was one of

the ablest expounders of the Constitution, Macon, who tolerated no injustice in legislation, were slave-holders in their local spheres; while the popular party of the north, clamoring against the pretensions of law and privilege for a larger liberty, were still, strange to say, their adherents and friends.

It was an alliance, however, which in the very nature of its components, could not endure for ever. An aristocracy is compelled by the exigencies of its position, to become defiant, aggressive, and prone to rule; while a democracy, on the other hand, is expansive, progressive, and no less apt to take the command. A league between them may be maintained, so long as they have certain objects in common, an enemy to repulse, or a conquest to achieve,-but when these common objects are attained, their radical incompatibility will begin to be developed. It is impossible for men who sincerely believe in the equal rights of men, to coalesce permanently with others whose practice is an habitual invasion of those rights; it is impossible for an order of society, founded upon the most unlimited freedom of labor, to co-exist long in intimate relations with a society founded upon bond or forced labor; and it is no less impossible for political leaders, the breath of whose nostrils is popular emancipation and progress, to combine with leaders whose life is an utter denia of emancipation and progress. We ha e seen, consequently, that so long as the Sith and the North, in the earlier periods o. national development, looked to the same ends,-to certain general organizing purposes,-to a strict construction of the Constitution, a denial of the schemes for enlarging the federal power -the independence of the States,-they have been able to act together, and the happiest results have been promoted by that unity; but when their mutual solici tude for these ends is ontgrown-when in the progress of empire, the question arises, whether the social system of the one or the other shall prevail, to the exclusion, which is unavoidable, of its opponent; their friendship grows sultry, and a strenuous grapple and fight immi

nent.

If we were called upon then to des-. cribe the political parties of this nation, as they are, or as they have been gradually formed, by its developing circumstances, we should say that they were 1st. The Pro-slavery, unjustly called the Southern party, which is the propagandist