The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, Part VI: The Lincoln Fallacy

    Earnest though Abraham Lincoln most definitely was in his desire – circa 1838 – to aid in the preservation of his homeland’s political institutions, and insightful though he was to pinpoint the growing disparity between law in theory and law as practically applied as a fundamental threat to the integrity of American republicanism, his understanding of the problem at hand and the nature of his solution were in neither case entirely without fault. He had claimed, for example, that one of the factors which had historically kept certain Americans from completely giving way to their personal ambitions – but which had since abated – was the omnipresent threat represented by Great Britain and its global empire. With the British ever ready to pounce on any internal weakness that the United States might have shown, he argued, generations of Americans had learned to subsume their selfish desires for the sake of preserving their nation’s liberty and integrity. But was this strictly true? Were there no cases one could point to from the period in which Britain represented the greatest threat to the American republic’s existence of ambitious Americans offering to undermine their nation’s security in exchange for wealth, prestige, or power? Lincoln had also asserted that the living presence of the Founders served a similar stabilizing function – which had likewise since abated – throughout the first several decades of the American republic’s existence. The affection and respect which the various members of the Founding Generation enjoyed, he claimed, prevented their countrymen from acting strictly out of self interest for fear of besmirching the former’s legacy and thus earning their opprobrium. But was this any truer? Did no one across the length of this entire era ever allow their ambitions to get the better of them? And were the Founders, to a man, as unimpeachable as Lincoln seemed to think?

    And then, of course, there was Lincoln’s purported solution. With Britain having shifted into the role of begrudging equal, and the Founders having almost completely died off, he believed that the United States of America had accordingly lost two of the essential pillars of its internal cohesion and stability. And if casual disrespect for the law was a symptom of this development – as Lincoln seemed to think it was – then the only logical solution must have been a scrupulous obedience of the law on the part of all Americans. “While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or even very generally prevail throughout the nation,” he thus affirmed, “Vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert out national freedom.” Sound though this may have been in theory, however, it was bound to run into certain complications in practice. While still urging his countrymen not to judge for themselves which statutes to follow and which to disregard, Lincoln did show insight enough to acknowledge that not every law was necessarily good or just. But what about laws that were manifestly unjust? Laws whose continued enforcement would inevitably lead to the suffering of potentially millions of human beings? Laws for which there existed no moral justification whatsoever? Were these to be followed scrupulously as well? Was it as inadmissible as Lincoln claimed for laws such as these to be violated or ignored? The man who would at length become the 16^th President of the United States seemingly had no answers to these questions as of 1838. And while he can surely be forgiven for being a little shortsighted at the tender age of twenty-eight, the implications of his basic argument should nevertheless be explored in full.

    But let us first step back for a moment to address some of the holes in Lincoln’s other claims. The ongoing presence of a shared enemy in Britain, he said, served the function throughout the first decades of the American republic’s existence of stifling the ambitions of individual Americans. But how true was this, really? Were there no examples one could point to from this period of ambitious Americans seeking to enrich themselves by effectively selling their services to their homeland’s enemies? The answer to the latter question, in point of fact, is that there absolutely were. Two names in particular come to mind, one well known, the other less so. James Wilkinson (1757-1825) was the latter, being an American military officer who served during the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the War of 1812 (1812-1815), was the appointed Governor of the Louisiana Territory between 1805 and 1807, and who became an agent of the Spanish Crown in 1787. And the former, of course, was that most infamous traitor; the man whose name continues to be spoken with the utmost disdain; who has become synonymous in the American cultural lexicon with the very concept of betrayal; none other than Benedict Arnold (1741-1801).

    Arnold, recall, was a merchant by trade from Norwich, Connecticut whose business interests suffered over the course of the 1760s as a direct result of the British tax regulations embodied by the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765). It was for this reason that he joined the local New Haven chapter of the Sons of Liberty, began engaging in smuggling, and responded avidly when hostilities between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies finally commenced in 1775. He participated in the Siege of Boston (April 1775 – March 1776) as a member of the Connecticut militia, petitioned for and received a colonel’s commission in the Massachusetts militia in time enough to help lead the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga (May, 1775), proposed and then led one half of the ultimately fruitless Invasion of Quebec (June 1775 – October 1776), and fought with marked cunning and aplomb at the Siege of Fort Stanwix (August 1777) and the Battle of Saratoga (September/October 1777). During the disastrous Battle of Quebec (December, 1775), it bears noting, his left leg was partly shattered by a British musket ball. This same leg was struck again at the Battle of Ridgefield (April 1777), and then for a third time at Saratoga. Rather than have his battered limb amputated, however, he instead opted to have it rather crudely set, leaving his left leg significantly shorter than his right. The result for the already gout-prone Arnold was that he spent the rest of life in some degree of physical pain. But while the cost of his service on behalf of the American cause might accordingly have been characterized as somewhat severe, he certainly received his share of plaudits and rewards. When he arrived at the Continental Army’s winter camp at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in May of 1778, for example, after having mostly recovered from his most recent wounding, he was heralded as a hero by those who had served under him at Saratoga. And when the British finally abandoned their occupation of Philadelphia the following June, George Washington opted to make Arnold the city’s military governor. The capital of Pennsylvania was a wealthy, bustling, cosmopolitan town; seemingly the perfect assignment for man of mercantile leanings who was still recovering from serious injury. As it happened, however, Philadelphia would ultimately prove to be the site of Arnold’s undoing.

    No one can know for certain why Arnold chose to betray his oath of service to the Continental Congress, of course. His thoughts were his own, and remain so, notwithstanding whatever his told those closest to him or recorded in his own hand. But there were certain things about the man – his personality and his experiences – that do rather serve to put things in perspective. He had been a merchant, as aforementioned, before joining the war effort, and always seemed to have about him a certain grasping entrepreneurialism. Personal wealth was important to him, and status, and public recognition. He wanted to do well, in short, and wanted others to see him do well. And he was also – perhaps as a result – something of a grumbler. He got into disagreements with business partners more than once, and easily challenged those whom he believed had slighted him personally or professionally. He got on very poorly with Ethan Allen (1738-1789), one of the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys militia and his nominal collaborator during the Capture of Fort Ticonderoga. Arnold apparently resented the fact that he possessed no formal authority over Allen or his men, and the two submitted rival claims to Congress as to which of them deserved credit for the victory. Later, during his governorship in Philadelphia, he became embroiled in a feud with local politician Joseph Reed over repeated efforts to use his knowledge of war-related supply contracts to turn a quick profit. Most of the charges which Reed brought against him were ultimately dismissed following the court martial which he himself demanded, but Arnold nevertheless rankled at the relatively slight reprimand which he received from Washington as a result of his business dealings. Indeed, by the spring of 1779, he was feeling particularly bitter and dejected. “Having become a cripple in the service of my country,” he wrote to his commander, “I little expected to meet ungrateful returns.”

    Now, at this point, according to Lincoln’s purported theory of American history between the 1770s and the 1820s, what Benedict Arnold logically should have done is stifle his personal ambitions, swallow his resentments, and acknowledge the fact that his country was engaged in a war for its very survival. Yes, his professional fortunes had suffered as a result of his military career. And yes, he had nearly lost his leg in service to a cause which it as yet wasn’t clear was actually going to succeed. But the British were really the ones who were responsible for his misfortunes. It had been the heavy-handed application of British commercial policies which prompted him to become involved in the colonial opposition movement to begin with, and Britain’s intransigent response to American petitions for redress that thrust him into the role of serving military officer. British troops had tried to kill him more than once, had they not? And had they not been British musket balls which repeatedly shattered the bones in his leg? Granted, Arnold had reason enough – in his own mind, if nowhere else – to feel a certain amount of resentment towards some of his countrymen as a result of his business dealings or the events of his military career. But he arguably had even more reason to feel poorly disposed towards the whole of the British nation. On top of threatening the essential liberties of the community to which he belonged, Britain had done injury to his professional prospects, exposed him to repeated near-death experiences, and effectively sentenced him to a life of severe and chronic pain. Why should he have regarded them with anything other than suspicion and hatred? Why should Benedict Arnold have gone down in history as anything other than an ardent Patriot?

    The answer, as aforementioned, is a complicated one, though some few things may be said for certain. Clearly, Arnold neither hated the British nor feared them enough to discount the idea of rendering them his services. His personal ambitions, it seemed – or else his petty, personal hatreds – were evidently stronger than his sense of loyalty to the United States of America. He quarreled often with his fellow officers over tactics and authority, credit for victories and blame for defeats. He worked well with George Washington, it seemed, but poorly with the aforementioned Ethan Allen and his followers, and poorer still with a number of his nominal collaborators during the disastrous campaign in Quebec. One of them, a lawyer from Massachusetts named John Brown (1744-1780), notably remarked of him in a handbill which he had printed following Arnold’s public conflict with another officer that, “Money is this man's God, and to get enough of it he would sacrifice his country [.]” At the same time, Arnold also showed a pronounced streak of jealously regarding certain of his ostensible compatriots. He may have formed decent working relationships with the likes of Philip Schuyler (1733-1804) and Horatio Gates (1727-1806), but he also bitterly and publicly complained when those he felt hadn’t warranted the recognition were promoted by Congress ahead of him. Indeed, the reason he participated in the Battle of Ridgefield at all – during which he was wounded in the leg for the second time – was that he was on his way from Boston to Philadelphia to petition Congress after he was passed over for a promotion to major general. His first reaction had actually been to resign his commission, and it was only Washington’s refusal to accept that sent him to Philadelphia to plead his case. When his finally did arrive before Congress and received his desired promotion, however – largely in respect to his recent service and his fresh wounds – he still found reason for discontent. Though now, as he had long wished, a full major general, he nonetheless found it distasteful that those promoted to the same rank before him were still technically his superiors.

    In the end, it seemed, Arnold was not content merely to serve as an apostle of the liberties of his countrymen and their progeny. He had elected to join the military, it was true, because he felt that the rights of the American people demanded nothing less of those who possessed them then that they rise unquestioningly to their defense. But the flush of patriotic fervor which first motivated him to risk his life in service of his country faded fairly quickly in the face of repeated hardship. When push came to shove, it seemed, what Benedict Arnold wanted even more than for Parliament and the Crown to recognize and respect the fundamental liberties of the American people was promotion, recognition, wealth, and status. He did not want to serve under those whom he believed to be his inferiors or risk his life at the behest of a body of men who had to be cajoled into granting him the rewards he was due. He had done great things on behalf of his countrymen; fought well, scored key victories. But the knowledge that the cause for which he labored and bled was a just one was apparently not enough. Arnold wanted more. Tellingly, when he finally began to communicate with British authorities about the possibility of his rendering service to the Crown in the summer of 1779 – a process facilitated by his young, ambitious, and decidedly Tory wife, Peggy Shippen (1760-1804) – his demands included a sizeable cash payment and a general officer’s commission in the British Army. The specific sum he requested, for the record, was ten thousand pounds sterling, the same amount which Congress had agreed to pay for the services of Arnold’s fellow officer Charles Lee (1732-1782). Envy clearly ruled the man’s heart far more than love of country. Britain may have threatened his business, threatened his life, and even crippled him bodily, but as far as he was concerned, the British could have America if they wanted it. So long as he got paid and petted, it made not one jot of difference to him.

    James Wilkinson, to be sure, did not betray his country to its most hated enemy like Arnold did during the Revolutionary War. His service during that selfsame conflict might not have been particularly impressive – indeed, he was compelled to resign amidst a furor in 1778 after his boastful account to Congress of the Battle of Saratoga garnered him a promotion to the rank of brigadier general at the age of only twenty – but he never showed himself to have the makings of a traitor. And in the end, the foreign power for which he ultimately abjured his oath of loyalty to the United States was Spain and not Great Britain. But in light of Abraham Lincoln’s aforementioned claim that the threat posed by Britain between the 1770s and the 1820s served to unite all Americans in service to their country, Wilkinson’s case would seem nevertheless to stand out.

    Having settled in what was then the Kentucky region of Virginia in 1784 following a brief stint in Pennsylvania, Wilkinson became deeply invested in the fortunes of his adopted community, particularly as they stood to impact on his own fortunes as a prominent local landowner. On the one hand, there was the growing movement in favor of separating Kentucky from Virginia and acclaiming it as a separate state, a cause for which Wilkinson began to actively campaign. And on the other hand, there was the somewhat tenuous trading relationship which existed between the western territories of the nascent United States – Kentucky chief among them – and the Spanish authorities which at that point controlled the territory of Louisiana. American, as of the late 1780s, were permitted to trade on the Mississippi River, but significant tariffs were levied on their cargoes by Spanish officials. In an effort to alleviate the resulting economic burden – as much for his own sake as on behalf of his neighbors – Wilkinson accordingly travelled to the territorial capital at New Orleans in April of 1787, there to meet with Louisiana’s governor, Esteban Rodriguez Miro (1744-1795). The resulting discussions proved fruitful, if rather more for Wilkinson than for Kentucky. The latter was granted a monopoly on American trade on the Mississippi. The former became an agent of the Spanish Crown in return for financial compensation.                             

    Granting that Wilkinson’s subsequent service to Spain hardly served to bring about the collapse of the United States of America, the mere fact of his active collaboration with a nation actively hostile to American interests would nevertheless seem to cast doubt on the validity of Lincoln’s aforementioned argument. According to Lincoln, Wilkinson should have been too conscious of the fact that Britain stood ready to seize on American weakness to place his personal ambitions ahead of the welfare of his country. In point of fact, however, the man did precisely the opposite. Pursuant to his oath of allegiance to Spain, Wilkinson attempted to manipulate the ongoing debate in Kentucky over the prospect of statehood in such a way as to fracture the nascent American republic. Specifically, he floated the idea that the region should first gain its independence before deciding whether or not to join the union of states, encouraged his fellow Kentuckians to make their support for said union conditional on Congress negotiating a comprehensive trade agreement with the Spanish in Louisiana, and at length even ventured to introduce the notion that Kentucky might be better off becoming a province of the Spanish Empire. And in return, he devised a plan by which Spanish authorities could both compensate him for his services and provide a safe haven if his true purpose were ever discovered. By way of Spanish funding, Wilkinson proposed to buy a parcel of sixty thousand acres in what is now the state of Mississippi which would serve as his payment, his pension, and a potential refuge for himself and his supporters. While this arrangement was being discussed, Wilkinson also received a payment of seven thousand dollars for himself and requested assorted amounts for various prominent Kentuckians whose favor he felt it important to gain.

    In the end, the land purchases never went forward and the assorted sums were never paid out. By the end of 1788, the Spanish evidently no longer considered Wilkinson to be a particularly useful asset. At this point, all things being equal, he would have been well-served if had he simply put the whole “Spanish venture” out of his mind. He had betrayed his country, to be sure, by taking an oath to a foreign power and then plotting on their behalf to help dismember the United States. But little actual harm had been done, he’d been paid for what little he’d actually been able to achieve, and he somehow managed not to be found out. Arguably, from the perspective of a traitor, this represents something of a best-case scenario. The years that followed, it bears noting, were also exceptionally kind. Wilkinson’s military career resumed in the 1790s as a result of a sudden demand for experienced officers to lead a punitive expedition into the Northwest Territory. He quarreled, much like Arnold had done, with his superiors, and in particular with the expedition’s commander, Anthony Wayne (1745-1796). But on Wayne’s sudden death in December of 1796, he found himself thrust into the position of Senior Officer of the United States Army. During the Quasi-War with France (1798-1800), this entitled Wilkinson to the third rank overall behind only the re-activated George Washington and his erstwhile deputy Alexander Hamilton. And upon Washington’s death in 1799 and Hamilton’s departure in 1800, he was again granted overall command. This latter tenure lasted the better part of twelve years, during which time Wilkinson served under two presidents, presided over the completion of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and helped organize and launch the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-1806). But in spite of the prestige which he undeniably enjoyed during this time – made doubly precious for his having previously betrayed his country – Wilkinson just couldn’t leave well-enough alone. Notwithstanding his own professional success, the extent to which he had helped to advance his homeland’s various political interests, and the threats which empires like that of Spain and Britain still presented, the man somehow found it in himself to place greed above all else.

    Though the Spanish had attempted to dispense with his services not long after first securing them at the end of the 1780s – and though his life and career proceeded quite satisfactorily thereafter without any Spanish assistance – Wilkinson nevertheless sought to renew his role as an agent of the Spanish Crown on several occasions over the course of the 1790s and 1800s. At the time of his service under Anthony Wayne during the aforementioned Northwest Indian War (1785-1795), for example, he reached out to Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet (1748-1807), Miro’s replacement as Governor of Louisiana, in an attempt to exchange information on American troop movements for further compensation. Then, after narrowly avoiding a court martial brought about by Wayne’s discovery of his Spanish payments – an outcome made possible only by Wayne’s sudden, opportune death – Wilkinson proceeded to funnel yet more information to Spanish authorities using his newfound position as Senior Officers of the United States Army. He renewed this relationship again after regaining the office in 1800, providing Spain with insight into America’s territorial ambitions and giving Spanish negotiators privileged information during the settlement of the Texas-Louisiana border. Then, in 1804 he became involved with the so-called “Burr Conspiracy.”

    The details of this latter plot are sketchy at best. Its nominal instigator, former Vice-President Aaron Burr (1756-1836), claimed his intention was only to lead a group of settlers to a parcel of land which he had agreed to purchase from Spanish authorities in Mexico. Burr’s political career was in shambles following his duel with Alexander Hamilton in 1804, and there would seem to be a certain amount of sense in his desiring a kind of self-imposed exile. But when news of Burr’s efforts reached the ears of the Jefferson Administration, this planned migration was transformed into a military expedition intended to separate the western states from the Union and establish an independent nation with Burr at its head. In his capacity as Governor of the Louisiana Territory, Wilkinson would have been a useful contact for whatever it was that Burr had actually intended – be it emigration or conquest – and the two apparently consulted with each other on several occasions. Likely as not, Wilkinson saw in Burr and his plans yet another opportunity to either fracture the union of states on behalf of his Spanish masters or at the very least facilitate a gradual shift in population and loyalty away from the America republic’s western frontier and into the orbit of the Spanish Empire’s American provinces. Whatever plan Wilkinson ultimately concocted may not have much chance of success, but Spanish authorities in Mexico would doubtless have paid him well for keeping them appraised.

    As it happened, however, Wilkinson’s priorities underwent a sudden and dramatic shift. When news of Burr’s activities finally reached Washington and charges of treason were levied against him, Spain’s “Agent 13” – so-called because of the numbered cipher he used to write his coded dispatches – became in an instant the most ardent and tireless of patriots. Burr, he wrote to President Jefferson, was indeed a traitor of the highest order who had attempted to entice him into betraying his oath of office and helping bring about the dismemberment of the American republic. He had appeared to indulge the man, it was true, in meeting with him and corresponding with him, but this was all a ruse intended to ferret out such details as could be used to charge Burr with treason. Arrest Burr, and Wilkinson would testify against him. Ask for evidence, and Wilkinson would produce it. A coded letter; details of conversations; a self-serving account of his involvement in the plot. Wilkinson, suddenly, became a font of information, and all to the end of seeing Burr successfully convicted. He even went so far as declaring martial law in New Orleans and issuing arrest orders for certain individuals whom he believed might come to Burr’s aid. His true object, of course, was to allay any doubts as to his own personal allegiances.

    Though he had escaped investigation during his service in the Northwest in the 1790s, Wilkinson had nevertheless – or, indeed, consequently – developed something of a reputation for unreliability. His service record was a lengthy one, for which reason he seemed to enjoy the benefit of his superiors’ doubts. But his association with Spanish authorities in Louisiana and in Mexico were the subject of some suspicion. His colleagues did not necessarily believe him to be a paid agent in Spanish service, or else he would not have repeatedly been appointed to positions of respect and authority. But if evidence presented itself that he been engaged in certain suspect activities, doubtless a number of his contemporaries’ lingering misgivings would have neatly clicked into place. For that reason, from Wilkinson’s perspective, it was imperative that he do everything in his power to ensure that Burr appeared the villain. By throwing his entire weight behind securing Burr’s conviction, however, Wilkinson really only succeeded in drawing attention to himself. The coded latter which he produced as evidence of Burr’s supposedly perfidious intentions, while authentic in itself, had plainly been altered in order to reduce Wilkinson’s apparent involvement in the proceedings at hand. His testimony at Burr’s trial, as aforementioned, was also nakedly self-serving, and his actions in New Orleans were patently excessive. Indeed, his efforts succeeded only in making Burr appear to be the sympathetic victim of an overzealous government, the result of which was the supposed traitor’s acquittal in the late summer of 1807. Wilkinson, meanwhile, was removed from his post as Governor of the Louisiana Territory, twice investigated by Congress, and finally subjected to a court martial in 1811. He was cleared, somehow, of all the charges against him, and his career in the military continued more or less unharmed, but his actions on behalf of Spain largely ceased thereafter.

    James Wilkinson, as aforementioned, was rather unlike Benedict Arnold in certain key aspects. For one thing, he was obviously far more adept as a double agent. Arnold first began funneling information to the British in the summer of 1779, and by the fall of 1780 he had been exposed and forced to flee to the safety of the British lines. Wilkinson, by way of comparison, gave his oath of allegiance to Spain in 1786 and apparently continued to receive a pension from the Spanish until his death in 1825. Arnold’s betrayal also seemed to speak more powerfully to the man’s sense of avarice. Over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, he suffered financial losses at the hands of the British Parliament, was nearly killed numerous times by British soldiers, and was left crippled and in chronic pain by British musket balls. And yet, in spite of all of this, he still saw his way clear to selling his allegiances for British coin. Wilkinson conversely had no particular reason to dislike the Spanish. They stood in the way of Kentucky’s economic viability, it was true – for which reason he sought of their representative in Louisiana to begin with – but they have never injured him personally or professionally. His betrayal on their behalf, therefore, while most definitely treasonous, arguably spoke less to his overwhelming greed than to a sense of unprincipled opportunism. What these two men did have in common, however, was the essence, timing, and significance of their actions. They were both traitors, they both became so during the period when Britain represented the single greatest threat to the existence of the United States of America, and they were both apparently unmoved by any fear that their actions might ultimately result in the dissolution of the same.

    As argued by Abraham Lincoln in 1838, this kind of behavior should have been prevented at the outset. “The jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature,” he said,

And so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were for the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of causes [.]

But clearly, as the actions of Arnold and Wilkinson show, this was not always the case in practice. Their “jealousy, envy, and avarice” were plainly neither smothered nor rendered inactive. Arnold had more reason than most people of his generation to feel a deep and personal sense of enmity against the whole of the British nation, and even this did not stop him from swearing an oath to the British Crown. Nor were the “basest principles” of Wilkinson’s nature “made to lie dormant” by the sheer presence of Great Britain as a threat to the American republic’s existence. On the contrary, Wilkinson seemed to view the emerging competition between Britain, Spain, and the United States over regional dominance in North America as an opportunity for personal enrichment. If the Spanish were willing to pay him, he would tell them whatever they wanted to know. He’d betray his fellow officers, his co-conspirators, the political leaders who appointed him to positions of authority, and the Constitution itself, all for the promise of personal wealth. Wilkinson would doubtless have avowed that this was a noble cause indeed, but not Lincoln. It was his stated conviction that the presence of a common enemy between the 1770s and 1820s acted as a cohesive force upon the American republic and its inhabitants, bending the restless energies of the latter towards promoting stability and general prosperity. Granted, the existence of two prominent exceptions across a span of several decades may not seem like a very damning counterpoint. But the mere fact that men like Arnold and Wilkinson, who behaved entirely contrary to what Lincoln described, did exist would seem to indicate that his conception of how and why the United States of American had theretofore functioned was less comprehensive than he made it out to be. 

The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, Part V: The Lincoln Formula, contd.

     At this point in the proceedings at hand, having discussed Lincoln’s alarm at the frequency of mass violence in contemporary America, along with his observations on the effects which the absence of a common foe and a set of positive exemplars was likely to have on American political culture going forward, one might fairly be given to ask how the lot of it all fits together. What, to put it simply, was Lincoln trying to say with all this? The answer, in this writer’s estimation, is what we shall call “the Lincoln Formula.” It was the mix of causes and effects, trends and implications which Lincoln described and diagnosed for his audience at the Young Men’s Lyceum in January of 1838, all for the purpose of reinforcing and affirming the republican form of government in America. How, precisely, Lincoln came to develop this prescription, he did not say. By way of observation, one assumes, and research, and a great deal of penetrating thought. But the thing itself, upon consideration, would seem to be transparent enough.

    As of 1838, scarcely sixty years into its existence as a free and sovereign nation, the United States of America stood at something of a crossroads. Relations with the British had become about as cordial as they had been since before the Revolution, thus robbing the American people of their most persistent common enemy. And the once great influence of the Founding Generation had faded into something like a pale wisp of its former self, thus removing a source of stability and cohesion from the American socio-political dynamic. Mass violence was becoming increasingly normalized in every quarter of the American republic, respect for the law seemed accordingly to be on the wane, and it appeared to a young lawmaker from Springfield, Illinois that the disintegration of the United States was well and truly in the offing. And why not? The American people were no better than any other. No more righteous, or pure. They had shown this plainly enough in the ways that they lately perpetrated or ignored certain acts of brutal violence upon ostensibly innocent individuals. People had been killed because of their profession, the color of their skin, and for voicing unpopular opinions. And what had the law done to restrain or to punish them? Nothing. And what was bound to be the result of this abdication of responsibility? Lincoln’s answer was twofold. Those who had succeeded in taking the law into their own hands would come to believe they had license to do so again. And those who had watched as the law was ignored would come to understand that the very concept no longer served any purpose. The lack of a common foe or some kind of supervisory influence would hasten these developments, effectively opening the way for those whose ambition equaled their audacity to cast aside all pretense of decency and simply seize what they believed to be theirs by right of force. The law would not restrain them. Fear would not restrain them. The judgement of others would not restrain them. They would make of themselves a Caesar and people would flock to their banner. This is what Lincoln dreaded, and why he felt the need to speak out.

    But anxious though he was, Lincoln did not seek to address his chosen audience without some manner of solution in hand. His speech, after all, was titled, “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions.” So what was his plan? How were the American people supposed to perpetuate their institutions? “The answer [,]” Lincoln declared,

Is simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor—let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty.

Simplicity would indeed seem to have been the order of the day, for this was far from a radical prescription. Indeed, one might quite fairly describe it as an inherently conservative one. Obey the law, Lincoln said, in all things. Do not question its validity, or its wisdom, or who it may harm, or who it may benefit. Just follow it, and encourage others to do the same, and report those who do not. It was sound enough advice given the circumstances which Lincoln had described, if also a trifle naïve. If all that it took for people to stop taking the law into their hands was for someone to tell them that they really, really shouldn’t, there would scarcely have been any reason for Lincoln to raise any kind of alarm to begin with. But then it wasn’t just that Lincoln was asking his countrymen to be scrupulously lawful. He was asking them to comingle their feelings for the law with the respect which they still held for a very specific cohort of Americans.

    It is, granted, a little strange on its face that Lincoln should have attempted to invoke the example of the Founders in the same speech in which he later sought to argue that their influence over the American socio-political community had all but faded into nothingness. If the authority of the Founding Generation had, as he claimed, been so completely enfeebled by the passage of time, what purpose could it possibly have served to invoke them as a means of encouraging the faithful observance of the law? The answer, upon reflection, is that Lincoln more than likely did not think these two things were mutually exclusive. Yes, by dint of time, the Founders were no longer in a position to offer much active guidance to, or exercise much active restraint upon, their fellow countrymen. But they didn’t necessarily mean that their significance had entirely vanished. As Lincoln said himself, he did not think that, “The scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten [,]” and he further hoped that, “They will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read [.]” The likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison might indeed had passed from the earth, but the memory of these men yet still carried some weight. One could no longer appeal directly to their wisdom, perhaps, but an oath could be sworn by their deeds and on their legacy. And as their copious writings had survived beyond their own deaths, so could the American people still benefit from their example. A page of text was bound to be somewhat less useful in seeking to grapple with the exigencies of the present moment than a living, breathing individual, of course. But the deeds and thoughts which these pages each described could nevertheless function as a kind of moral ideal. The Founders may have faded into history, in short, but history in itself was not entirely without its uses. On that note, consider a famous phrase devised by one of the Founders themselves.

    John Adams – that dour and dependable New Englander who became the first one-term President in American history upon his defeat by Jefferson in 1800 – was, among other things, the principal architect of the first constitution of the state of Massachusetts, adopted in 1780. Although, “first” is something of a misnomer given that the document in question is still in force to this day. But in any case, Adams was its chief author, and the frame of government which he described therein was quite unlike those of Massachusetts’ sister states. Whereas most of the former Thirteen Colonies had gravitated towards administrative frameworks whereby the executive branch was almost wholly subservient to the legislature and the constitution itself was a simple act of law that could be altered or discarded at will, Adams’ construction of his home state’s new governing charter was centered on fairly robust conceptions of balance, stability, and popular sovereignty. Rather than allow the Massachusetts General Court – being the state’s legislative assembly – to choose a chief executive by way of a joint ballot its two houses, for example – a procedure which was adopted by most other states during this same period – the Governor of Massachusetts was to be elected by a statewide ballot of all those citizens otherwise qualified to vote for members of the upper and lower houses of the legislature. At the same time that this “separation of powers” would accordingly serve to create a popular counterweight to the power of the legislative branch, the constitution also contained language describing the specific procedures by which amendment thereto were to be submitted and approved. Alterations to the state constitution were to be considered by way of consultation at the county level, with a statewide convention being called for that purpose only as a result of an overwhelming popular vote. Not only did this construction further serve to circumscribe the authority of the General Court as compared to its counterparts in other states – wherein the relevant legislatures could and did choose the state’s chief executive and amend the state constitution at will – but it also placed the power of altering the terms of the constitution more fully in the hands of the citizens of Massachusetts. 

    These kinds of measures, it bears repeating, were quite unusual for the era. Owing to the widespread suspicions which most contemporary Americans had come to harbor for the very concept of executive authority, those state constitutions which made any mention of an executive branch – for not all of them did – tended to do so within a balance of power and responsibility that strongly favored the legislative branch. State legislatures were the bodies responsible for approving the relevant constitution, and for amending it, and for electing the state executive, and in some cases even for making certain political appointments. In comparison to these kinds of administrative arrangements, the form which the constitution of Massachusetts ultimately took might understandably have caught certain of the Bay State’s citizens off guard.  Doubtless with the intention of providing some degree of clarification, Adams helpfully included, in the form of the final article of the accompanying “Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” a kind of fundamental statement of intent.   “In the government of this commonwealth,” it read,

The legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.

As a description of the functional significance of the separation of powers, this declaration was undeniably a meaningful one. In order for his desired formulation of republican government to both function and garner the support of his fellow Bay Staters, Adams more or less needed to re-contextualize the purpose of executive power in a way that separated it from its less constructive connotations. Affirming that the executive authority would remain strictly confined to its own pre-determined sphere, and that the integrity of said sphere would be upheld and policed by the other branches of government, doubtless accomplished this recontextualization to a significant degree. But so, too, did the far simpler exhortation with which Adams concluded the clause in question. The purpose of providing for a strict separation of powers, he declared, was to ensure that the government of Massachusetts, “May be a government of laws and not of men.” A weightier statement of political purpose for the United States of America in the early 1780s, one would fairly struggle to conceive.

    Not only had the American Revolution itself arguably sprung from a disagreement over the primacy of certain fundamental laws – particularly as they grated against the desires of certain powerful men – but the enduring fate of the various American states in the event of their formal independence from Great Britain arguably pivoted on the question of where political authority would ultimately reside. Would the former colonies adopt written constitutions, or would they proceed ad hoc, more or less in the British fashion? Would they have strong executive? Weak executives? Executives of any kind? Standing armies? Volunteer militias? Frequent elections? Term limits on office holders? Clearly, there were a great many question which the American people had yet to answer even if they managed to secure British recognition of their independence, a task made harder still by the lack of any particularly desirable exemplars. Each of the states accordingly attempted to do craft a frame of government in their own specific way, some emphasizing the authority of the legislature, some maintaining the significance of executive power, and some few even attempting to devise novel forms of consultative administration. But in seeking to identify and answer what appeared to be some of the more urgent questions before them, the authors of these various individual frames of government sometimes lost sight of what arguably should have been their most fundamental concern. As John Adams stated in 1780, a republic like Massachusetts was supposed to be, “A governments of laws and not of men.” Not any laws, mind, but just laws. And not any men, mind, but all men.

    Certain American states, as of the promulgation of the Massachusetts constitution in the fall of 1780, had failed to live up to this very basic standard. Many of them, granted, had made a point of adopting constitutions which either severely weakened executive power or failed to describe an executive branch at all, thereby ostensibly prioritizing consultation and procedure over individual decision-making. But in practice, it turned out, legislative majorities could be just as arbitrary – and just as cavalier – as a singular executive. Beset with pleas from all sides to lower taxes, raise taxes, relieve debts, and print excessive amounts of cheap paper currency – all of which demand stemmed from the economic depression that followed immediately upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary War – legislators in a number of states learned very quickly over the course of the 1780s that the surest way to stay in power was simply to give the voters what they wanted. The results, to say the least, were chaotic. The overprinting of paper bills, intended to help farmers pay off their debts in states that lacked robust export markets, led to alarming levels of inflation that severely devalued the assets of property owners, bondholders, and even demobilized veterans who had yet to receive their promised back pay. In certain jurisdictions, pursuant to calls from their beleaguered constituents, state legislators even went so far as to cancel personal debts entirely, in the process calling into question the validity of any and all contracts entered into therein. The debt-holding voters who supported the relevant legislative majorities made out very well by these measures, of course. As did a certain class of risk-seeking speculator whose success depended in no small part on access to cheap property and the existence of unstable markets. But to those who were not in debt, who owned property, or were in possession of bonds or other promissory articles, these kinds of policies were potentially ruinous.

    As far as the relevant state government were concerned, however, the harm which the various debt-relief measures that they approved may have inflicted upon some portion of their constituents was neither here nor there. With few exceptions, most of the early state constitutions, if they mentioned private property at all, declared that it was perfectly acceptable for the state to seize said property if it did so by way of legislative mandate. So long as the legislature in question passed a law which duly authorized the erasure of debts, therefore, those whose property had effectively just been taken from them had no grounds upon which to petition for redress. Where this kind of arrangement became problematic, however neat it may have appeared on the surface, was in the manner in which it appeared to violate the long-established concept of private property which existed nowhere else but in the annals of the English common law. Legislators and reformers in certain states, it was true, had set out at the dawn of the 1780s to create a corpus of written law for their respective jurisdictions that substantially severed the American states from any further dependence on English common law jurisprudence. But certain core ideas – property, personal integrity, contracts, etc. – had become so intrinsic to life and law in the former Thirteen Colonies that it would have been exceptionally difficult to create codified definitions thereof. Most states, in consequence, did not do so, instead relying on the common understanding of things like property and contracts to form the basis of their laws and their legal procedures going forward.

    State laws passed during the tumultuous 1780s which treated property in somewhat novel ways accordingly found themselves substantially at odds with many of the basic common law precedents which continued to underpin contemporary American jurisprudence. Taxation, though in reality a kind of seizure of private property, had long since become an accepted practice in English common law jurisdictions. And while the overprinting of paper bills which certain state governments authorized in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War may have been somewhat unwise, there were no injunctions lodged in the common law tradition against a duly recognized government choosing to produce and distribute some form of circulating currency. But there were no precedents in place which would have excused the effective seizure of private property at will. A person could be fined if found guilty at trial, or had their assets seized, or been deprived of their land in exchange for a reasonable financial settlement. But to have a piece of property simply taken from them? Even if it was only taken in the sense that its value was erased, and even if the taking was authorized by the relevant legislative assembly, such an action fell wholly outside the existing common law conception of private property rights. Certain state constitution may have asserted that such things were acceptable, but the relevant state courts – armed with nothing more upon which to base their judgments than common law principles and common law precedents – would have been hard-pressed to justify such actions if the injured parties were determined to file suit.

    This dynamic – between law as a product of the moment and law as a product of precedent and principle – was arguably what Adams was attempting to illuminate with his aforementioned statement of purpose at the end of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. It wasn’t his intention simply to affirm the primacy of collective, legislative authority over singular, executive authority, but rather to assert the importance of established definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal over those devised in response to either personal whim or popular clamor. Government, it was true, did not exist solely to serve and perpetuate the interests of influential or ambitious individuals. But nor was its purpose to give effect to the desires of a popular majority if those desires ran counter to established concepts of justice. A legislative majority may have been able to claim a stronger moral justification for its actions than a hereditary monarch or a self-appointed tyrant, say, but claims to moral superiority did not give a majority license to do as it pleased, take what it pleased, imprison whom it pleased, and generally disregard the rights and the liberties of the minority. In this sense, when Adams declared that Massachusetts was to be, “A government of laws and not of men [,]” he meant specifically that the state should not have been prey to arbitrary whims of any kind. “Laws,” in this context referred to those derived from established principles, and “men” referred to any men who would place their own desires – whether for material comfort or for reelection – ahead of the basic principles upon which the community at large functioned.

    Though speaking some almost sixty years later and in another part of the country entirely, Abraham Lincoln seemed intent on drawing the attention of his countrymen to much the same basic conflict as John Adams had all the way back in 1780. Consider, to that end, the examples of recent mob activity which he cited as evidence of his belief that the American people were steadily losing respect for the law. In all three cases – the Murrell Excitement in 1835, the lynching of Francis McIntosh in 1836, and the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 – the relevant appendages of the American criminal justice system ruled that no charges were to be laid because no crime could be conclusively attributed. In all three jurisdictions – Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois, respectively – the inhabitants thereof would surely have continued to affirm that murder was a sin in principle and a crime in fact. And it wasn’t as though, in any of these cases, the law had simply failed to respond. But notwithstanding the inquiries that were conducted and the trials that were held, extrajudicial murder was in each instance functionally validated by the relevant legal authorities. Did this not represent a contradiction in terms? Murder was illegal, still, and yet the legal authorities in three different states had ruled that the killing of certain people in certain ways was not subject to punishment. What kind of sense was this arrangement supposed to make? How was American society supposed to function if the members thereof were forced to reconcile the idea that murder was illegal with the fact that it was also, in certain circumstances, entirely permissible?  What made it permissible? Who could commit murder, and whom could they target? Were these set categories, or were they subject to change?

    These kinds of questions naturally bring us back to John Adams. He said, in 1780, that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was intended to function as a government, “Of laws and not of men.” Granted, he made this claim at a time when many of Massachusetts’ sister states had gone rather overboard in empowering their legislatures, granting them powers which the basic precepts of the common law would have had difficulty trying to justify. The sixty years which elapsed between that point in time and the delivery of Abraham Lincoln’s speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield did much to clarify and to stabilize the relationship between statutory law and common law in the United States of America. That being said, Adams’ core contention remained a cogent one even in 1838. What particularly concerned Lincoln at that point in time was the apparent gulf which he perceived between American statutory law in itself and its practical application. Regardless of what the law had to say on the subject of murder, people were being killed in certain American jurisdictions without their killers being in the least bit harried or waylaid. The law had not changed, nor its fundamental moral backing, but certain men were being permitted to violate it at will. Lincoln may not have quoted from Adams directly in his response to this worrying state of affairs, but his prescription was absolutely in keeping with what Adams had famously declared. Obey the law, he said. Do not take matters into your own hands, or follow those who do, for America is not a nation where men may simply do as they please. On the contrary, the government of America, like that of Massachusetts, is a government of laws. Again, Lincoln did not say these words exactly, but his invocation of the, “Patriots of seventy-six” would nevertheless seem to indicate that Founders and their legacy were at the very front of his mind.

The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, Part IV: The Lincoln Formula, contd.

     Aside from the absence of a unifying British threat, the other major factor which Abraham Lincoln identified in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois as contributing to the erosion of the American republic’s internal cohesion was the distance which was steadily increasing between the present moment of the late 1830s and the country’s glorious foundation in the 1770s and 1780s. “I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever will be entirely forgotten,” he accordingly declared, “But that, like everything else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more dim by the lapse of time.” This “fading,” Lincoln went on to explain, represented an exceptionally significant alteration to the basic makeup of contemporary American society. By the time that the Revolution had run its course, he asserted,

Nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.

But by the late 1830s this was no longer the case. The living histories which these men had supposedly embodied,

Can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foremen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink and be no more.

A poetic epitaph, to be sure, for an exceptionally influential generation of Americans. But also, notwithstanding its lyricism, a very telling one as well.

    As important as it is to understand that the Founders were, to a person, as human and as fallible as anyone else – a point which this series has attempted to make time and time again – it is equally important to appreciate how and why the generations that succeeded them came to view and to remember the architects of the Revolution. Though Abraham Lincoln never gave much cause to doubt, over the course of his long public career, that he was capable of seeing people – himself included – inclusive of their faults, the passages cited above would seem to make it equally apparent that he was perhaps a bit less clear-eyed when it came to the Founding Generation. This isn’t to say that he was a doe-eyed fool when it came to the likes of Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton, or that he didn’t ever see reason to disagree with the policies which these men and their cohort variously pursued. But the language with which he collectively referred to them in his speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum was inarguably adulatory. The Founders, it seemed, were more than men is his eyes. They were, “A fortress of strength [.]” They were, “A forest of giant oaks [.]” And it was his hope, he declared, that, “They will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read [.]” A less grounded conception of the Founders, one would be hard-pressed to find. But this fact, upon consideration, would rather seem to validate Lincoln’s broader argument.

    The Founding Generation, he asserted – at first by their acts, and then their very existence – acted as a kind of binding agent within the fledgling American political community. “They were the pillars of the temple of liberty [,]” he affirmed. Not only did they create the basic institutions of American republicanism, but they ran them through their paces, established how and to what extent they would function, and defined the basic norms and attitudes for all those who would follow. Their collective service during the Revolution gave them the moral authority to do these things, and their longevity – as a group – ensured that their influence did not decline once the moment of the Revolution had passed. George Washington, for example, would assuredly not have enjoyed the near-universal approbation of his countrymen over the course of his two terms as President – indeed, would not have been elected to the post in the first place – had he not previously established a reputation for honesty and selflessness during his years as the commanding officer of the Continental Army. Just so, the extent to which Thomas Jefferson became the single figure who most emphatically defined American political life over the course of the 1790s and 1800s must be in large part be attributed to his association with the Declaration of Independence. There was more to both of these men than their most famous accomplishments, and they undeniably committed their share of sins. But the cultural memory of the Revolution was bound up with everything they did. So long as they continued to play a role in the public life of the American republic, the American people would continue to hang on their every word, see “the spirit of ‘76” emanating from their every action, and hold themselves to whatever standard that these men set.

    Even those among the Founding Generation whose accomplishments were less public or less obvious befitted from their association with the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. James Madison, for example, while deservedly lauded by later historians and scholars for his efforts during the Philadelphia Convention (1787) and the role which he played in the passage of the Bill of Rights, was not someone possessed of particularly heroic credentials at the time of his election to the office of President in 1808. The proceedings of the aforementioned convention were at that point still secret, as was his co-authorship of the accompanying Federalist Papers. And while he had a decent record of public service under his belt, between Virginia’s General Assembly, the Continental Congress, and the Jefferson State Department, these experiences could hardly have compared to the epoch-making accomplishments of men like Jefferson and Washington. What Madison did have going for him, however, was his close association with the aforementioned Jefferson. Having been a political ally and a personal confidant since as early as the late 1770s, Madison arguably rose to a position of prominence in Virginia in the first place as a direct result of Jefferson’s influence. He also helped co-found what would at length become the Democratic-Republican Party with Jefferson, functioned as one of its most ardent supporters in the United States Congress, and served for the length of Jefferson’s two terms in office as his Secretary of State. During this latter period, to be sure, Madison was personally responsible for overseeing a number of diplomatic initiatives of tremendous importance to the peace and prosperity of the nascent American republic, the Louisiana Purchase (1803) being far from the least of them. But when it came time for Jefferson to retire from politics at the end of his second term in 1808, it was not necessarily Madison’s individual accomplishments which won him his party’s nomination for President. The more doctrinaire Democratic-Republicans favored fellow Virginian James Monroe, while the pro-commerce northern wing backed the candidacy of New York’s long-serving governor, George Clinton. But Madison was the one known to have worked closely with a great hero of the Revolution. And as Jefferson continued to exert a tremendous amount of influence over the Democratic-Republicans and the American public alike, it was his chosen protégé, Madison, who ultimately received the nomination.

    The later ascent of the aforementioned Monroe to the office of President in 1816 illustrates this same dynamic more clearly still. While the basic circumstances of Monroe’s presidency were undisputedly affected to a large extent by the recent conclusion of the War of 1812, his selection as the Democratic-Republican nominee for President arguably had more to do with the broad outlines of his life and career up to that point in time. His resume, to be sure, was more impressive than Madison’s had been some eight years prior. Between his entree into politics in the 1780s and his election to the office of President in 1816, Monroe had served as a Delegate to the Continental Congress, a United States Senator, Governor of Virginia, Minister to France and to the United Kingdom, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War. But the career of his principal rival for the Democratic-Republican nomination was similarly illustrious. Virginia-born and Georgia-raised, William H. Crawford (1772-1834) had served as a Senator, been the United States Minister to France, succeeded Monroe as Madison’s Secretary of War, and served out the end of Madison’s term as his final Secretary of the Treasury. He was also substantially younger than Monroe, and well-regarded by the leaders of the Democratic-Republican Party. Why, then, was it ultimately Monroe who succeeded? Monroe, who had no interest in legal theory and only became a lawyer because he thought it would be the easiest path to wealth and influence? Monroe, who had always been more politician than statesmen, and who subscribed to no particular political philosophy? There are many potential answers to this question, having to do with domestic politics, internal party politics, the influence of foreign policy, and just plain luck. But one which ought not to be discounted – ephemeral though it might seem – is that Monroe, unlike Crawford, had taken part in the Revolution.

    James Monroe might not have been a political theorist by any stretch. He may not have written any treatises of significance or delivered any orations that served to rally his otherwise dispirited countrymen at a key moment in their shared history. But he had, indisputably, participated in the Revolution itself. And he was, unquestionably, part of a cohort of Revolutionary leaders whose influence over the politics and administration of the nascent American republic in the earliest years of its existence was both obvious and substantial. During the Revolutionary War, Monroe dropped out of Virginia’s vaunted College of William & Mary to join the 3^rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army, and between his concomitant enlistment in the opening months of 1776 – before American independence had even formally been declared – and his mustering out in 1778, he participated in numerous pivotal engagements. He served under Washington during the New York and New Jersey campaign, even accompanying the Commander-in-Chief during his famous crossing of the Delaware River on the day after Christmas in 1776, spent the brutal winter of 1777/78 at Valley Forge during the Philadelphia campaign, and fought at the heat-scorched Battle of Monmouth in the summer of 1778. And while, despairing of a promotion in an army overstaffed with ambitious young officers, he opted at this point to cut his service short and begin his study of the law under fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, he still managed to make a meaningful contribution to the war effort when, as a colonel in the Virginia militia, he established a messenger network to help coordinate activities between the armed forces of his home state and those of its sister states and the Continental Congress.

    Thereafter – between 1778 and 1816 – Monroe maintained and reinforced his relationship with Jefferson and befriended fellow Jefferson protégé James Madison, all while serving in a variety of prominent public offices. In 1788, he was chosen as a delegate to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, in the 1790s he became one of the most prominent early members of the Democratic-Republicans, during the election of 1800 he threw his weight as Governor of Virginia behind the candidacy of his mentor Jefferson, and in 1803 he helped negotiate the purchase by the United States of the French Territory of Louisiana. In 1808, it was true, he briefly competed with Madison for the Democratic-Republican nomination for President, but Madison’s victory ultimately opened the door for a resumption of the friendship, the elevation of Monroe – by now an experienced diplomat with a proven record of success – as Secretary of State, and his own eventual succession to the presidency. And while there were a number of accomplishments upon which the voting public could have based their decision to support his candidacy for the highest office in the land, his unshakable status as a member of the Founding Generation was doubtless weighed on their minds in turn. The man had served under Washington, after all, and fought at Monmouth, and Brandywine, and Trenton. Artist John Trumbull (1756-1843) even went so far as to include Monroe in the painting of Trenton’s aftermath which he began work on in 1786. And in the years that followed, he added Jefferson to his list of key personal associates. He studied under him, supported him, befriended who he was told to befriend. By 1816, Monroe was accordingly in the enviable position of being able to claim both the departed Washington and the still-living Jefferson as his colleagues and contemporaries. Few other Democratic-Republicans could argue anything close. His election, therefore, while most definitely reflecting the particular circumstances and developments of American domestic politics in the late 1810s, also represented yet another opportunity whereby the American people could register their respect and admiration for the entire Revolutionary cohort.

    None of this is to say, mind you, that proximity to the Revolution was the only trait that mattered in the context of public service during the early existence of the United States of America. Indeed, it should be stated in no uncertain terms that this was emphatically not the case. Jefferson was not elected in 1800 over rival candidate John Adams because Jefferson possessed superior bona fides as a Founder. Nor was Madison elected in 1808 solely because of his association with Jefferson. Nor was Monroe elected in 1816 solely because of his war service and his connections to his Virginian predecessors. Other more specific factors played a far more consequential role in seeing each of these men elected to the highest office in the land. That being said, in light of the emotional weight with which the American public invested the Founding Generation even as early as the 1790s – in the form of Fourth of July celebrations, testimonial dinners, and laudatory biographies – it would nevertheless seem to follow that the ability of a candidate for public office to claim an association with the Founders and/or the Founding might potentially have made all the difference between victory and defeat. It need not even had been a spoken thing. The Democratic-Republicans who ended up supporting Monroe’s candidacy need not have drawn any explicit connections between their favored nominee and the key names and events of the American republic’s gloried past. And the voters need not have based their choice solely on Monroe having been wounded at Trenton or studied the law under Jefferson. Other factors, as aforementioned, had a much larger role to play. But if the final choice was a close one, and it seemed as though the contest might as soon go one way as another, would it not have been strange for the American people, even as late as the 1810s, to decide against a candidate for office whose record of public service had its origins in 1776?      

    Monroe’s candidacy, of course, represented probably the last time that the American people would be faced with such a choice. In the presidential election of 1824, none of the men who ultimately received some share of the Electoral Vote could rightfully claimed to have been members of the Founding Generation. Though the eventual victor, John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), had served between 1781 and 1783 as the personal secretary to Francis Dana (1743-1811), the first American Minister to Russia, he had been a child during the Revolution, and could scarcely boast of any significant accomplishments. The same could be said of the man who won the popular vote, one Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). The same age as Adams, Jackson had acted alongside his brother as a courier with the North Carolina militia beginning in the summer of 1780. But while the events that followed were certainly dramatic – his capture, his punishment by British soldiers, his near-death from smallpox, and his being orphaned at the age of fourteen – he was far more famous for his actions during the Battle of Louisiana (1815) and the First Seminole War (1816-1818) than for anything he might have accomplished during the Revolutionary War. That this was the case – that the American people were now in the position of nominating and electing men whose connections to the Founding were increasingly tenuous – would accordingly seem to mark out 1824 as a significant point of transition in American socio-cultural history. Prior to this point, some member or other of the Founding Generation had continuously occupied the office of President from the time of its inception in 1789. And after this point, no member of the Founding Generation would hold such high office ever again. 

    Numerous Founders had already died by the time of Monroe’s election in 1816, to be sure, and many more would die by the time of Lincoln’s address to the Young Men’s Lyceum. Benjamin Franklin was among the first to go, passing away in the spring of 1790 at the age of eighty-four. Washington followed in 1799, not long after the end of his second term as President. Then came Hamilton in 1804, perhaps the most famous victim ever of American dueling culture, while Jefferson and Adams died within hours of each other on July 4^th, 1826. By the late 1830s, there were virtually none of them left. Madison was among the last, surviving until the summer of 1836. But by that point, the Founders had already more or less faded from the living memory of their countrymen. John Quincy Adams was the first President who might fairly be described as “post-Revolutionary” in the most meaningful sense of the term, though he had served as Secretary of State in the cabinet of President Monroe. But then came the aforementioned Jackson, who connection to the Founders and the Founding was even less substantial. And then followed Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), who was the first chief executive of the United States to be born after the declaration of American independence. Some men still lived, it was true, who had served in the Continental Army, or who had represented their state in the Continental Congress. But by this late date, the political class of the contemporary American republic had more or less drained of its revolutionary element.

    The result? It was as Lincoln said, by and large. The memory of the Revolution remained, and would remain, to be read, he hoped, “So long as the Bible shall be read [.]” But the Founders themselves were no longer there to offer their judgement. They had shaped the country, guided it, kept it on a certain path. But they were gone now, nearly to a man, and their successors did not always seem inclined to closely follow their example. The 1820s and 1830s were particularly tumultuous in this respect. At around the same time that Andrew Jackson became the dominant figure in contemporary American political life, many of the norms and mores that had previously been established under the auspices of the Founders began to rapidly drop away. In the name of “democracy,” property qualification on the franchise were steadily abolished, state legislatures turned over the choice of presidential electors to the people, and the office of President came to dominate the internal power dynamic of the federal government. And while Jackson and his supporters claimed that their goal was only to further advance the principles that had been set forth earlier in the century by Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans, the likes of Jefferson and his surviving contemporaries were often startled and dismayed by what they witnessed of the Jacksonian era and its immediate antecedents.

    Speaking to the implications which he perceived in the circumstances of the Missouri Compromise (1820), for example, an aged Jefferson lamented in a letter to Maine Senator John Holmes (1773-1843) that,

This momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union […] It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.

By willingly embracing sectionalism as a driving force in the federal political sphere, Jefferson believed that the party which he had helped found some thirty years prior had more or less made inevitable the disintegration of the American republic. His protégé and successor, James Madison, expressed a similar sense of dismay in the aftermath of the Nullification Crisis in 1833. In a letter to Virginia Senator William Cabell Rives (1793-1868) dated to March of that year, the former President expressed his ardent disagreement with the position adopted by the government of South Carolina. Speaking specifically of the connection between the doctrines of nullification and secession, he wrote that,

One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned, that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them [.]

Granted, the aforementioned Jackson had gone to significant lengths in 1832 to ensure that South Carolina did not attempt to separate itself from the larger American republic in the name of affirming the principle of nullification. That being said, nullification – by which a state attempts to assert its inalienable sovereignty in order to nullify a federal statute which it feels is obnoxious – was a concept very much in keeping with the tenor of the Jacksonian era.

    Jackson’s Democratic Party – formed in the aftermath of his loss to John Quincy Adams in 1824 – had loudly encouraged people to take power into their own hands, assert their political prerogatives against entrenched elites, and deny the legitimacy of those who lacked a popular mandate. And what were the South Carolina “Nullifiers” – led by none other than Jackson’s former Vice President, John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) – trying to do but assert their populist prerogatives against those of the contemporary Washington elite? Jackson may have denied the soundness of state sovereignty as South Carolina attempted to apply it in 1832, but the perpetrators were only seeking to apply a set of principles of which he had previously been the most ardent expounder. When Madison expressed his horror and dismay at some of the questions which the Nullifiers had raised, he was therefore arguably showing his discomfort with the essential character of political culture in contemporary America. Among the last of the Founding Generation who yet still drew breath, Madison thus lived long enough to effectively validate one of the essential claims which Abraham Lincoln would make in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum. Therein, Lincoln poignantly observed that the Founders, though once, “A forest of giant oaks [,]” had since been swept away by, “The all-restless hurricane” of time. And while, in their waning years, they might still attempt, “To combat with […] mutilated limbs a few more of the ruder storms,” they were ultimately doomed to, “Sink and be no more.” Events like the Missouri Compromise and the Nullification Crisis might well have been those “ruder storms,” which the likes of Jefferson and Madison had, in their mounting infirmity, feebly tried to resist. But it had been of little use in 1820 or in 1832, respectively. And it was doubly so at the time that Lincoln was speaking in 1838. The affection which the American people harbored for the Founders would remain in some form for centuries to come. But their influence? Their guidance? Their ability to restrain the excesses of their countrymen? That had well and truly faded into nothingness.               

The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, Part III: The Lincoln Formula

     Dire enough though Lincoln’s accounting of the state of contemporary law and society in America was in his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, there was, in fact, a somewhat more abstract argument into which his doom and gloom forecasts fitted in turn. In order to understand why the United States was so especially vulnerable to a kind of internal erosion – far more, he argued, than to an external invasion by the combined forces of half the world – Lincoln accordingly directed his audience to consider the peculiar circumstances which surrounded and described its basic existence. On the one hand, as he had previously asserted, the United States of America was entirely without peer. No other country, in his estimation, was as blessed in terms of, “Extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” And no other nation could boast of possessing, “A system of political institutions [,]” which were more conducive to, “The ends of civil and religious liberty [.]” The American republic was unique in these respects. Sui generis. In a class by itself. But, on the other hand, the American people were not so different from most others. The Founders, in Lincoln’s estimation, had been, “Hardy, brave, and patriotic,” but they were now almost wholly departed. The institutions which that greatest of generations had labored to construct were now in the hands of those who knew not what it meant to hazard their very lives in the name of liberty. Great things may yet have loomed in America’s future, of course, provided that the American people endeavored to remember their origins. But it was equally possible, so far as Lincoln was concerned, that a kind of forgetfulness might set in among the inhabitants of the American republic, and that the same petty ambitions and small-minded lust for power which caused Americans to cluck their tongues when gazing out upon the larger world might yet cause the beneficiaries of the same to spoil the American experiment.

    In seeking to explain in detail the precise cause of his anxiety – why it was he felt it possible that the greatest enemy which America might face going forward were her own citizens turned against her – Lincoln laid out what was essentially a kind of formula of American nationhood. The American republic, he explained, was indeed a strange a glorious thing. A group of lawyers, and merchants, and soldiers, and farmers living in the provincial backwater of one of the world’s most powerful empires had not only taken up arms against their colonial masters in an attempt to defend the liberties which the believed to be their collective birthright, but they then proceeded to establish a government grounded upon notions of individual sovereignty wholly unlike anything the world had yet seen. If these insurrectionaries succeeded, Lincoln, avowed,

They were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties, and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung, toasted though all time. If they failed [however], they were to be called knaves, and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be forgotten.

There was everything to lose, in short, and everything to gain. And while the cause of American liberty inarguably attracted some of the brightest minds and noblest spirits of the age, there existed no guarantee whatsoever of their success. The American experiment was truly that.

    Of course, Lincoln went on to explain, the efforts of the Founders indeed bore fruit. “The experiment is a success,” he stated, “And thousands have won their deathless names in making it so.” But while succeeding generations had thus been permitted to reap the benefits of the Founder’s accomplishments – both in terms of the Revolution itself and in forging the institutions and the norms of American republicanism – this triumph carried with it an unexpected downside. “The game is caught,” Lincoln explained, “And I believe it is true that with the catching end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated.” Why should this have been a problem? Why should anyone in America have despaired that the hard work of forging a nation had already been done? Lincoln’s answer was exceedingly simple. “New reapers will arise,” he asserted,

And they too will seek a field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have done before them. The question then is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot.

What this would seem to mean, in essence, was that while the American republic was wholly unique in its form and function, Americans themselves were just as human as anyone else. Some of them, to be sure, would find contentment enough in what Lincoln described as the essential duty of the American people. Namely, to transmit the, “Political edifice of liberty and equal rights,” which the Founders had wrought, “Unprofaned by the foot of an invader […] and undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.” Many people, he went on to observe, “May ever be found whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair [.]” But others, belonging to what Lincoln described as, “The family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle [,]” would not be satisfied so easily.

    Some people, Lincoln asserted, were bound to think so highly of their own abilities that they would ever fail to find satisfaction in, “Adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others.” An ego such as this, he continued, “Denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.” To be sure, it was exceptionally unfortunate that such personalities should have to exist at all. That some people, though all their needs are satisfied, should nevertheless lust after greater wealth, and power, and prestige is nothing less than a fundamental tragedy of the human condition. But it could also hardly be described as a fault of American society or American culture that such people should come to exist among the population of the American republic. This, as Lincoln astutely observed, was simply the way of the world. Where it fell to Americans to exert themselves was rather in recognizing this lamentable reality and then in taking such steps as might prevent its worst effects. It can happen here, he stressed to his audience. The operative question, therefore, was, are we going to let it?

    There were other questions, mind, that Lincoln sought to answer in turn, doubtless in anticipation of those who would call his argument flawed or faulty. If the United States was as vulnerable to internal corruption as Lincoln claimed, for example, why hadn’t it imploded at some earlier point in its existence? What was so different about the 1830s that hadn’t also been true of the 1810s and 1820s? There were, as far as Lincoln was concerned, two answers to these questions. The first, he explained, was essentially external in nature. For many years, it seemed, from the origins of the Revolution in the 1770s to the final years of the 1810s and the beginning of the 1820s,

The jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were […] in great measure smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest of causes—that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.

Nation-building, of course, often seeks to make use of common enemies and common threats in order to define and solidify shared identities and foster a sense of solidarity and community where none formerly existed. Lincoln’s identification of Britain as a common enemy by which otherwise disparate American communities knitted themselves together over the course of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries accordingly makes for a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. With Britain standing in as an omnipresent threat that was perfectly willing to exploit internal weaknesses and possessed of the resources necessary to make good on its ambitions, it indeed stood to reason that individual American who might otherwise have attempted to manipulate the communities to which they belonged in the name of personal gain instead either stifled their desires or actively aided in promoting the stability and security of the nascent the American republic. They did not do so out of charity, to be sure. The personal threat which they identified in Great Britain merely coincided with the threat that Britain posed to the United States as a whole. Nevertheless, their ostensibly self-serving efforts undeniably aided in, “Establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty.”

    Lincoln was also correct, it must be said, when he observed that the state of affairs engendered by the perception of an ongoing British threat, “Must fade, is fading, has faded, with the circumstances that produced it.” Great Britain had indeed represented perhaps the single greatest existential menace to the sovereignty and security of the United States of America during the earliest period of the latter’s existence. Not only had the British government of the day fought long and hard over the course of the 1770s and 1780s to prevent the Continental Congress from succeeding in its attempt to secure the formal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the larger British Empire, but subsequent British administrations thereafter attempted to destabilize the nascent American republic by a variety of means. Weapons, supplies, and shelter, for example, were provided by the British to many of the native communities either residing on the western frontier of the United States or who had been displaced by the Revolution and sought refuge in British Canada. These selfsame communities then used these resources to conduct a long-running harassment campaign against American settlements in what is now the Midwest, both for the purpose of revenging themselves upon those who forced them off of their ancestral lands and in service of a British desire to destabilize the security situation in territory which they had only recently been forced to cede to the United States. As this campaign was unambiguously being aided the ongoing presence of British military personnel at certain fortifications in the Great Lakes region – fortifications which had legally been ceded to the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) – there could be no uncertainty on the part of the American republic and its inhabitants whom it was they still had to fear. 

    During this same period in the 1780s and 1790s, while trade between Great Britain and the American republic had mostly resumed after the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), a number of significant economic and diplomatic disputes either lingered or emerged which made it abundantly clear that Britain was not yet wholly reconciled to the existence of an independent American polity. Disagreements, for one thing, were very common across the length of the newly established boundary between Britain’s remaining North American possessions and the nascent United States. Americans strayed into British territory, British strayed into American territory, and armed confrontation was at time only narrowly avoided. At the same time, Britain also continued to restrict American access to its possessions in the West Indies, continued to refuse compensation to Southerners whose slaves had been enlisted by the British and later transported to places like Nova Scotia and the British Caribbean, and continued to capture American sailors on the high seas whom it claimed were actually deserters from the Royal Navy. Some of these issues were settled with the signing of the Jay Treaty in 1795, to be sure, notwithstanding significant internal disagreements between competing factions within the domestic American political sphere. But even the shared desire on the part of British and American authorities to keep the United States out of what was at that point an ongoing conflict between Great Britain and Revolutionary France was not enough to fully settle relations between the world’s only English-speaking nations. Britain still seemed willing to dismiss certain American concerns, and this dismissal had the effect of both uniting Americans in a sense of shared outrage and prompting them to seek redress by whatever means they felt were necessary.

    The War of 1812 (1812-1815) inarguably represented the apotheosis of this drawn-out period of simmering national resentment. Though Anglo-American trade relations had more or less been settled by the terms of the aforementioned Jay Treaty, Britain continued to impress American sailors in an effort to shore up its navy as its war with the French Republic gave way to a war with the French Empire, it continued to arm and provide shelter to native tribes in the Great Lakes region, and it broadly continued to treat American sovereignty as something which it could respect or ignore as the circumstances seemed to demand. Following a number of naval engagements – one in 1807, another in 1811 – during which British and American vessels fired on one another and sailors on one or both sides were killed, political pressure within the United States Congress built to such a degree that war was finally declared at the behest of the outwardly anti-British and pro-French Democratic-Republican Party in June of 1812. As the demands which the incumbent Madison Administration sent to the contemporary British government had already been met by the time that the aforementioned war declaration was made, however, the resulting conflict was substantially purposeless from the outset. British troops seized Detroit; American troops razed the capital of Upper Canada at York; British troops put the city of Washington to the torch; American troops decisively defeated an attempted British invasion of Louisiana. Back and forth it went, month after month, for a full two and a half years. And when a peace treaty was finally signed in the city of Ghent in 1815, matters were settled almost exactly where they had previously stood. The British, it was true, did finally agree to compensate Southern slave holders for their lost property claims, and the United States did pledge to aide the British in stamping out the international slave trade. But no territory changed hands, the British made no explicit promises as to their position on impressment, and British Canada continued to offer safe haven to native peoples who had been forced out of the Midwest. The status quo, as they say, was more or less antebellum.

    And yet, for all that the War of 1812 had seemingly been fought for no purpose, something substantial did change as a result of this selfsame conflict. The American people, to be sure, did come away from the war newly encouraged by their ability to hold one of the most powerful empires in the world to a stalemate. They also seemed to derive no small amount of satisfaction from having pushed back against their former colonial overlords and emerged from the resulting tussle unscathed. The results of this buoyed sense of national wellbeing were significant, not the least of which was the beginning of the end of the two-party system that had existed since the middle 1790s. But as significant, arguably, was the change which the War of 1812 heralded in terms of the Anglo-American relationship. Great Britain and the United States did not immediately become allies, of course. Nor were all of the issues which had contributed to the heightened tensions of the 1790s and 1800s immediately resolved. But the mood on both sides had perceptibly shifted. While some Americans continued to regard Britain with suspicion and hostility, the American government’s approach to its British counterpart became decidedly less antagonistic in the years after 1815. Just so, while many sectors of British society continued to view the United States and its people as uncultured and provincial, successive British governments tended to approach the American republic with something more like respect than dismissal over the course of the 1820s and 1830s. Disputes most definitely still arose between the two, but arbitration soon emerged as the favored tool of resolution.

    In 1817, for example, at a time when the dust from the War of 1812 had only just settled, an exchange of letters between Richard Rush (1780-1859), Acting Secretary of State, and Sir Charles Bagot (1781-1843), British Minister to Washington, led to the signing of a disarmament treaty whereby both parties agreed to severely limit the number and size of military vessels stationed on the Great Lakes. This initial step towards establishing a demilitarized border between the United States and British Canada was expanded upon substantially by a second treaty signed the following year in London. As negotiated by American Minister to France Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), the aforementioned Richard Rush, President of the Board of Trade Frederick John Robinson (1782-1859), and Privy Councilor Henry Goulburn (1784-1856), the Treaty of 1818 – also known as the London Convention – at once settled a number of lingering disputes between the parties involved and sought to preempt cause for further disagreement by setting out a number of basic principles and guidelines. The United States was granted the right to fish off the coast of British Newfoundland, commerce regulations set in place in 1815 were ratified for a further decade, and an arbitration mechanism was even set up for the purpose of adjudicating any remaining property disputes that had not been addressed by the Treaty of Ghent. More important than any of these measures, however, were the terms of Article II and Article III. According to the former, the boundary between the United States and Britain’s various colonial possessions in North America west of Upper Canada was to run along the length of the 49^th parallel from the northwestern tip of Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. At which point, accordingly to the latter, sovereignty over the “Oregon Country” – comprising what is now southern British Columbia and the entire state of Oregon – was to be shared for a period of no less than ten years.

    The fact that the parties involved in the London Convention were able to agree to joint occupation of the Oregon Country is really nothing short of extraordinary. In 1814, recall, British troops sacked the city of Washington and set fire to both the White House and the United States Capitol. And yet somehow, by 1818, both governments believed it possible for British subjects and American citizens to live in the same jurisdiction without either nation claiming exclusive sovereignty over the lot. There were bound to be disagreements over land, over the fur trade, or just as a result of people being people. But for some reason, in spite of the fact that less than five years prior the two had been at war, American and British authorities mutually agreed that sharing this swath of potentially valuable territory was both possible and desirable. Granting that there would yet be further cause in the decades to come for the two sides to readdress certain aspects of their bilateral relations, 1818 ought to nevertheless be understood as a major turning point in the history of Anglo-American affairs. Having been antagonists for decades following the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the larger British Empire, the United States and the United Kingdom had by the 1820s become something more like respectful – if at times still slightly wary – collaborators.

    Indeed, when President James Monroe (1758-1831) went so far as to declare in his penultimate State of the Union Address in 1823 that the Americas were no longer to be the subject of European colonization efforts, the government of Lord Liverpool (1770-1828) reacted with quiet approval. Aimed, as the so-called “Monroe Doctrine” was, at preventing Spain from attempting to reassert its authority over the recently established republics of South and Central America, British authorities saw nothing but profit in the notion that the United States would endeavor to keep South American markets open to ongoing British trade. It had not been Monroe’s intention to speak or to act in such a way as to benefit the United Kingdom’s financial interests, most assuredly, but it would also seem eminently likely that he would not have been displeased at the prospect. Notwithstanding their long and often tumultuous relationship up to that point, the United States and the United Kingdom had by the 1820s arrived at a state of mutual respect and cooperation. This state of affairs continued with few interruptions well into the 1830s, thereby seeming to amply justify Abraham Lincoln’s aforementioned assertion in 1838 that Britain no longer served as a unifying threat in the eyes of the American people.