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- Author: Edmund Wilson
- Full Title: Patriotic Gore
- Category: #books
- It is evident that this reckless hot-headedness, this readiness to call people out, was a very important element in the action of South Carolina itself in seceding from the Union and firing on Fort Sumter.
- For in this atmosphere of patriarchal good feeling we are safe from the inhumanities of what Fitzhugh calls “political economy” — by which he means the school of Adam Smith, whose doctrines, so contrary to the Christian ones, he wants to see “banished from our schools.” “It is pleasing … to turn from the world” in which this political economy prevails, and “in which ‘might makes right,’ and strength of mind and of body are employed to oppress and exact from the weak, to that other and better, and far more luminous world, in which weakness rules, clad in the armor of affection and benevolence. It is delightful to retire from the outer world, with its competitions, rivalries, envyings, jealousies, and selfish war of the wits, to the bosom of the family, where the only tyrant is the infant — the greatest slave the master of the household. You feel at once that you have exchanged the keen air of selfishness, for the mild atmosphere of benevolence. Each one prefers the good of others to his own, and finds most happiness in sacrificing selfish pleasures, and ministering to others’ enjoyments.
- But the owning class in Free Society get their labor at cheaper rates since they need not maintain their hands in the periods when business has slumped; and thus they are “cannibals all,” and the laborers are “slaves without masters.”
- William A. Caruthers, who wrote romantic novels about old Virginia, thought that slavery was not so bad in his native state, where the slaves were “more in the tradition of tenants to their landlords” but that it had become “intolerable” in the Carolinas, where the Negroes were “plantation livestock,” and that the institution ought to be got rid of — though not, to be sure, by simply freeing the slaves, since this “would set at defiance all laws for the protection of life, liberty and property, either among them or the whites.”
- In regard to the question of tariff — which had also become a sore issue between the South and the North — his position was quite at variance with the orthodox Southern one. It was held in the South that the Northerners, in maintaining a high tariff on imports from abroad, put the Southerners at a disadvantage by making it difficult for them to buy foreign products and thus keeping them dependent on the goods of the North. The ideal of Fitzhugh, on the contrary, was for the South to develop its own industries, in which event it would have to protect its own products by tariff. It ought not to be dependent upon England any more than upon the North.
- Note: The effect of cheap imports eg China
- When farms are too large, they occasion a sparse population, absenteeism of the rich, and a sort of colonial or plantation life.” But it must not be supposed, on the other hand, that small farms are a desirable alternative to these: small farms do not promote civilization. “Lands divided minutely, depress all pursuits; for small farms want only coarse and cheap articles, quack doctors, illiterate parsons, and ignorant attorneys.”
- In the South, it was made a penal offense to read or to circulate the Crisis. In Washington, a boat club requested the withdrawal of a member who had endorsed the book; in Baltimore, no “Black Republican or indorser or supporter of the Helper book” was allowed to be a policeman or to work on the new street railroad; in Virginia, a farmer was sent to jail for having purchased four copies of the Crisis; in Helpers own North Carolina, ten copies were publicly burned, one minister was sent to jail and three others were driven out of their churches for having the book in their possession; in Arkansas, three men were hanged.
- “It is almost impossible here,” says Higginson in his Cheerful Yesterdays, “to reproduce the emotions of that period of early war enlistments…. To call it a sense of novelty was nothing; it was as if one had learned to swim in air, and were striking out for some new planet. All the methods, standards, habits, and aims of ordinary life were reversed, and the intrinsic and traditional charm of the soldier’s life was mingled in my own case with the firm faith that the death-knell of slavery itself was being sounded.”
- But Holmes, who was later deliberately to make a practice of not reading the newspapers, seems already to have adopted the policy of dissociating himself from current events.
- The question of the dulness of Jane Austen leads him to argue his pragmatic position, and this pragmatic position implies his attitude toward the Civil War. The Unionists and the Southern secessionists had had, from Holmes’s point of view, a serious difference of opinion about matters sufficiently important to warrant their resorting to arms. The Northerners had had to kill the Southerners in order to keep the South in the Union. And thus, at least, Holmes is never misleading. He does not idealize Lincoln; he does not shed tears about slavery. He does not call the planters wicked; he merely says that they are not truly “civilized.” In his opinions on cases in the South in which the court has been intimidated by a mob, he will censure its legal procedure, but he never, even off the bench, gives way to moral indignation.
- Holmes’s interest in the law, as he often says, is anthropological and sociological as well as philosophical. He likes to treat tradition lightly, to insist that a law’s long existence is no reason for not repealing it tomorrow; yet, skeptical though he is, he believes in the general validity of any corpus of law as the expression of the dominant will of any considerable social group.
- It strikes me that these philosophers [such as Ralph Barton Perry of Harvard] have gone round the globe to get to the spot close to which they stood before they began to philosophise