What Hath God Wrought (66 page)

The most interesting of Taney’s opinions as attorney general is probably one he delivered on May 28, 1832, regarding South Carolina’s law authorizing imprisonment of any free Negro sailors who came ashore while their ships were in port. Adams’s attorney general, William Wirt, had found South Carolina’s conduct unconstitutional, but Jackson’s previous attorney general, John Berrien, had countenanced it. Taney agreed with Berrien. His reasoning is revealing:

Excluding African Americans from the sovereign people of the United States, this argument does not address the issue of black foreigners penalized by the law in question. What makes the attorney general’s opinion interesting is the way it prefigures a judgment he rendered twenty-five years later as chief justice. In his infamous
Dred Scott
decision of 1857, Taney would rule that, under the Constitution, African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Roger Taney quietly supported the colonization movement and had manumitted his own slaves. Yet, like most southern critics of slavery including Thomas Jefferson, he was determined that neither national majorities nor black people themselves should ever infringe on the absolute power of masters or the sovereign supremacy of the white race.
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On the Supreme Court, Taney did not implement an antimarket agenda. Opportunities for him to put his views into the law books came as early as January 1837, while Jackson was still in office. In
Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky
the former state bank director joined a majority in support of an opinion written by Justice McLean vindicating the right of state banks to issue paper money. The U.S. Constitution declares emphatically that “no state may issue bills of credit,” but the Court ruled that states could charter banks to do so, even if the bank in question was wholly owned by the state! The decision represented a huge victory for “soft money.”
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In the same Court term, Taney struck another legal blow in favor of the entrepreneurial wing of the Jacksonian movement in
Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge
, and this time delivered the opinion himself.

In 1786, a bridge had been built over the Charles River to link Boston with Charlestown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had granted the company that built and operated the bridge the right to collect tolls for seventy years. Although the Charles River Bridge represented an improvement over the old ferry, by 1828 Charlestown had grown considerably, and its businessmen felt the tolls as a constriction on further growth. They successfully lobbied the legislature to charter another bridge company. The new Warren Bridge would charge tolls only until 1836 and then become free. No compensation was offered the proprietors of the Charles River Bridge for infringing on their franchise. They brought a lawsuit charging the legislature had violated the provision in the federal Constitution against states “impairing the obligation of contracts.” After losing in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the Charles River Bridge company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Delivering the Court’s judgment in favor of the new Warren Bridge, Chief Justice Taney cast his opinion as a vindication of both state sovereignty and economic development. Sovereign states could not be assumed to yield “any portion of that power over their own internal police and improvement, which is so necessary to their well-being and prosperity.” Since Massachusetts had made no explicit promise in the Charles River Bridge Company’s charter not to charter other bridges, no contract had been impaired. The pressing needs of economic expansion and technological improvement dictated that vested interests might sometimes have to make room for progress. If the Charles River Bridge claims prevailed, Taney warned, who could predict how many old turnpike companies might sue the canals and railroads that had replaced them?

Most contemporaries hailed Taney’s decision as legitimating strong state government and active state intervention to promote economic growth. Justice Story dissented, writing on behalf of himself and Smith Thompson (the only remaining pre-Jackson members of the Court). Of course, he did not wish to stand in the way of progress either. Story claimed that Taney had compromised the rights of property, without which neither justice nor economic development would prevail. Taney’s argument won out, not only on this occasion but on countless others, for state as well as federal courts embraced his point of view. Taney’s opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case became a major policy document of its age.
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Local Democratic leaders in places like the Alabama hill country could exploit the fears subsistence farmers sometimes entertained about entering the market economy. Nevertheless in Washington, the Democratic-dominated Supreme Court promoted the expansion of commerce, as indeed the Jackson administration itself often did. In
Bank of Augusta v. Earle
(1839), Taney and his Court upheld the right of state-chartered banks to do business outside their home state unless specifically excluded; Whigs welcomed the decision. And though westerners who mortgaged their farms often supported the Democratic Party, they got little sympathy from Taney’s Court. Two Illinois laws attempting to protect debtors whose creditors put their farms up for auction were struck down by the Court as impairments of the obligation of contracts.
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Some historians have interpreted Taney’s chief justiceship as the taming of Jacksonian democracy, rendering its populist agrarianism relatively inoffensive to capitalism.
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Looked at another way, however, the Taney Court provided a logical fulfillment of Jacksonianism. Taney’s blend of state sovereignty, white racism, sympathy with commerce, and concern for social order was typical of Jacksonian jurisprudence. Under Taney the Court strengthened the police power of the states and helped facilitate the transportation revolution. The two issues were closely related, since following Jackson’s Maysville Veto the states more than ever exerted leadership over internal improvements. If Marshall embodied the legacy of the Federalists for thirty-five years, Taney did the same for the Democratic Party in the next generation. Ironically, his devotion to state sovereignty and white supremacy in the long run contributed to the dissolution of the Union Andrew Jackson loved. However, a Whig lawyer with an intellect disciplined through the study of Blackstone, Story, and Kent emerged from the Illinois frontier to save it. Abraham Lincoln would rise to the crisis and preserve the Union, invoking both the sovereignty of the nation and the common-law principle that no party to a compact can unilaterally withdraw from it.
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In April 1829, Cincinnati, the city Frances Trollope found so dull and unsophisticated, hosted a week of intellectual excitement. The famous British rationalist Robert Owen, back in the United States again following the failure of his Indiana utopia, had offered to prove in debate “that all the religions of the world have been founded on the ignorance of mankind.” The popular Irish-born postmillennial evangelist Alexander Campbell took up Owen’s challenge. For eight days the two debated before an audience averaging twelve hundred people. Each debater spoke for thirty minutes every morning and another thirty in the afternoon. Inveterate controversialists, both of them loved the publicity such events provided; they treated each other with courtesy. Owen argued that planned communities would undergird social morality more effectively than did religion. Campbell defended Christianity as essential to human dignity and social progress. At the end, Campbell asked everyone in the audience who believed in Christianity or wished it to “pervade the world” to stand up. All but three members of the audience rose. Campbell claimed victory and proceeded to publish the full text of the debate as a vindication of Christianity; he invited the reader to “reason, examine, and judge, like a rational being, for himself.” The historian Daniel Feller comments, “Owen and his freethinkers were left aside, prophets of a discarded future, as Americans by the thousands decided for a Christian destiny.” The episode sums up much about the Christianity characteristic of antebellum America: its commitment to social progress, its confidence in popular judgment, and, most of all, its faith in rational discourse.
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Alexander Campbell believed in the Bible—believed that it comprehended all religious truth and constituted a sufficient guide to Christian practice in the present. He also believed it perfectly compatible with reason, history, and science. “The Bible contains more real learning than all the volumes of men,” he declared. Although Campbell gave the scriptures his own distinctive interpretation, his attitude toward them typified the faith of evangelical Americans in general. The American Bible Society distributed 21 million copies of the Good Book during the fifty years after its founding in 1816 (in a country whose entire population in 1860 was 31 million). The Reformation principle of
sola scriptura
, that the Bible contained all things necessary for salvation and could be properly interpreted by any conscientious believer, lived on and heavily influenced American culture. It helped promote universal literacy, democratic politics, and art that emphasized verbal expression. Respect for the Bible conditioned national identity, social criticism, natural science, the educational system, and the interpretation of authoritative texts like the Constitution.
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The Owen-Campbell debate was not unique. Frequent public debates over religion, like those over politics, attracted large crowds and attention from the national press. Debaters addressed infant baptism, universal salvation, and many other theological subjects. Catholics debated Protestants. Religious issues, like political ones, aroused widespread interest in antebellum America. The young Abraham Lincoln enjoyed debating religious questions before he took up political ones. Historical inquirers have long wrangled about which doctrines he ultimately embraced; what is beyond dispute is that he, like so many other reflective Americans of his generation, thought, read, and argued about them a good deal.
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Learned theological reflection flourished in the antebellum United States. Its professional practitioners numbered among the leading American intellectuals of their day. The Protestant majority included Nathaniel William Taylor of Yale, Henry Ware of Harvard, Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary, Charles Hodge of Princeton (the theological seminary, not the university), John W. Nevin of Mercersburg Seminary, James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina College, and Horace Bushnell (who was based not in an academic institution but in a parish, the North Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut). All were philosophically sophisticated and determined to apply reason to religion. All save Nevin and Bushnell shared a commitment to religious individualism, the empirical basis of knowledge, the Scottish philosophy of common sense, and an understanding of the Bible as historically accurate, its claim to divine authority confirmed by miracles. Nevin and Bushnell embraced a more Germanic philosophical outlook, a more organic social theory, and a stronger sense of the evolution of Christianity through history. Like Henry Ware and his “liberal” party, they criticized revivalism and its demand for a conversion experience. All these theologians argued with each other over many issues, including freedom of the will, original sin, atonement, and even whether Catholics could be considered Christians.
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Among the Roman Catholic minority, the scholarly Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia (later archbishop of Baltimore), who translated the Bible, and the lay Protestant convert Orestes Brownson were noteworthy thinkers. Within the even smaller Jewish minority, Isaac Harby of Charleston sought to adapt Judaism to American life in ways that prefigured the growth of Reform after Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise arrived from Bohemia in 1846.
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Disputes over theology could have institutional consequences. The “Old School” of Hodge and Thornwell expelled the “New School” of Taylor from the Presbyterian Church in 1837, partly because the New School seemed too sympathetic to social reform. In Massachusetts, the “liberal” and “orthodox” Calvinist wings of the Congregational Church, theologically centered at Harvard and Andover Seminary respectively, split after decades of tension. Because Congregationalism had constituted a state religious establishment since Puritan times, often tax supported, this division entailed a legal controversy. In a case arising from the town of Dedham, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled in 1820 that the “parish”—that is, the congregation as a whole—had the right to name a clergyman for the town even against the wishes of most members of the “church”—that is, the (typically much smaller) group of persons who had experienced conversion and received communion. Since the parish paid the minister’s salary, the decision was just, but it also had theological implications. “Liberal” views prevailed more among parish members than among church members; indeed, many liberals did not believe in “conversion experiences” and took little interest in the sacrament of communion. The decision facilitated the takeover of about a hundred Massachusetts Congregational churches by the liberals (eventually named Unitarians because they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity). Disillusioned with this outcome, orthodox Congregationalists saw no reason to continue paying taxes for the support of parishes whose theology they no longer endorsed. They allied with religious dissenters (Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians) to separate church and state in Massachusetts in 1833, ending the last of the state religious establishments. Congregationalists and Unitarians continued as two different denominations.
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II

Writing to the lieutenant governor of Kentucky in 1822, James Madison had to admit that Virginia’s educational system did not constitute a fit model for the younger commonwealth to follow; instead, Kentuckians should look to the New England states.
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New England’s township-based system of primary schools was the daughter not of the Enlightenment but of the Reformation; it had been created in colonial times to comply with the precept that all good Christians should be able to read the Bible for themselves. In the early republic, Protestant religion remained an important spur to literacy and New England a leader in education.
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In principle, the American Enlightenment typified by Jefferson and Madison also endorsed universal literacy in the interest of an informed citizenry. Jefferson himself had drafted a plan in 1817 for Virginia to provide free white children with three years of primary education, but the state legislature rejected even this minimal proposal. In practice, Jefferson’s political followers generally made their top priority low taxes, and public education accordingly suffered, not only in Virginia but in many other states as well.
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The churches of the American republic stepped into the breach left by the states. One of their educational initiatives, the Sunday school, provided one day a week of instruction in basic literacy for 200,000 American children by 1827. Only after public primary education became more widespread did Sunday schools concentrate exclusively on religious instruction.
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As Yankees moved from New England into the Old Northwest, they replicated the publicly funded weekday primary schools with which they had been familiar. This project could be seen as hastening Christ’s Second Coming. The Connecticut state legislature issued a remarkable exhortation promising westward migrants who established schools a celestial reward. “How great will be your happiness,” it assured them, “to look down from heaven” in future centuries and behold your “enlightened and pious and happy” descendants, living under “the mild reign of the
PRINCE
of peace,” who will have returned and established his thousand-year kingdom.
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Much of the innovation in secondary education, too, came from religious impulses. In the absence of state-supported high schools, academies under religious auspices flourished. In the early days they hardly ever boarded students but drew them from their own vicinity. Usually coeducational, the academies played a role in opening up secondary education to girls. Of course, their students had to pay tuition. Only after 1840 did public high schools gradually supplant most of these academies.
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Secular authorities did not necessarily mind saving the taxpayers money by letting religious groups deal with educational needs. The educational goals of Christian and secular educators dovetailed conveniently. In traditional republican political thought, free institutions rested on the virtue of the citizenry, that is, on their devotion to the common good. Religious educators inculcated that respect for the social virtues which republicanism considered indispensable. Christian and Enlightenment moral philosophy alike taught that young people needed conscientious training to form a properly balanced character in which reason and the moral sense could prevail over baser motives. An educated Protestant laity provided the basis for an educated citizenry.
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Under the circumstances, public authorities sometimes granted religious educational institutions favors and subsidies to keep them functioning, rather than spend more money to create secular alternatives. Despite Jefferson’s famous allusion to a “wall of separation” (he used the phrase in a private letter, not a public document, and with reference to the federal government, not the states), strict separation of church and state, as later generations came to understand that principle, did not characterize the young republic.
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For African Americans, religion was even more important as a source of education than it was for the whites. The “invisible institution” of religion in the slave quarters profoundly influenced African American culture.
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What little interest the state took in the education of black people was mainly negative: In a number of states the law prohibited schools for slaves, intending to insulate them against abolitionist propaganda. However, individual masters were often allowed to teach their own slaves. In fact, between 5 and 10 percent of adult slaves must have possessed some informally taught literacy and numeracy, useful in the skilled and supervisory occupations performed by the top echelon of enslaved workers. Some masters and mistresses also felt a religious obligation to teach their slaves to read. As late as Reconstruction times, northern religious philanthropy worked in tandem with the Freedmen’s Bureau to support the newly established schools for southern black children.
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In the free Negro communities schools existed—almost always segregated, even in the North. These schools had usually been created by white religious philanthropy and/or black self-help, seldom by local public authorities. In Connecticut, the authorities actually opposed Prudence Crandall’s efforts to provide secondary education for black girls.
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Religious-sponsored education for Native Americans figured prominently in the Cherokee Removal crisis. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and other Christian missionaries had established schools in the Cherokee Nation, promoting knowledge of Western civilization. Sometimes such mission schools enjoyed a measure of federal support. Acting with the blessing of the Jackson administration, however, the state of Georgia determined to interrupt this educational process and expel the missionaries, provoking the Supreme Court case of
Worcester v. Georgia
. An educated Indian population, determined to retain their land and develop its resources, could have blocked white intruders more effectively.
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But schools are not the only vehicles for literacy. Many youngsters learned how to read at home. Beth Schweiger’s studies of literacy among the southern yeomanry show that while only 40 percent of southern white children went to school, 80 percent of southern white adults could read. That indicates a lot of people acquiring at least rudimentary literacy at home. Why did farm parents, tired at the end of a day’s work, make time to teach their children? The primary motive seems not to have been commercial or political, still less to facilitate the children’s upward social mobility. It was religious. Although Protestant piety did not produce free common schools in the rural and individualistic South, the way it did in the villages of New England, Protestantism still promoted literacy in the South.
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Unlike reading, the ability to write did not have religious significance. Reading was more widely taught than writing, and many people—especially females—who could read at least a little had no experience with writing.