Conservatism and Southern Intellectuals, 1789–1861: Liberty, Tradition, and the Good Society (review)

Tate's approach is to examine in depth the political and social thought of six Southern intellectuals, conveniently grouped into three pairs: Old Republicans John Randolph and John Taylor, proslavery advocates William Gilmore Simms and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and Whig humorists Joseph Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper. Three chapters are devoted to each pair: one, a brief biographical sketch of both figures, another on their views about politics, and the third on their social thought. The principal topics examined under these rubrics are states' rights, republicanism, slavery, sectionalism, religion, and western expansion and migration. Tate acknowledges the risk that he may be sacrificing representativeness for depth of coverage. The risk is worth taking for what the exercise reveals about these six thinkers' approaches to conservatism. The only downside is that the book's title might be overly broad.

Old Republicanism is the intellectual descendant of antifederalism in the constitutional ratification debates, but Tate finds that it emerged as a political force during Thomas Jefferson's second term when, supposedly, the president abandoned his own heritage and pursued centralizing policies. John Taylor, for instance, believed that Hamilton and his allies had effectively changed the Constitution through interpretation, that Jefferson failed to roll back these dangerous trends, and that the people lazily went along, even though "a secret aristocracy based on 'paper and patronage' was plotting to take away their freedom" (14). Taylor came to his conservatism as an antidote to corruption; John Randolph, by his conversion to Anglicanism. They both believed that since the Constitution had been misconstrued, Americans had to revert to "fundamental principles" and that secession was their ultimate political remedy. As important as warding off the threats of governmental encroachment was promoting individual virtue. Taylor gave more emphasis to ideology; Randolph, to the culture of the gentleman. The differences in their social views, Tate maintains, prevented them from achieving a united front.

The linchpin of the Old Republican argument was states' rights: the states would be the instrument for protecting the people against the consolidating tendencies of the central government. Tate argues, plausibly if not compellingly, that states' rights was a political principle in itself, the means to reconcile appeals to tradition and liberty, and not merely a pretext for proslavery arguments. For Taylor and Randolph, slavery was part of their vision of the good society, but it was not an overarching political issue. In fact, Tate challenges the belief that slavery became the consuming interest of Southern politics even by the 1830s. Rather, he maintains that intellectuals turned to the subject in the belief that doing so would stabilize society.

Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and William Gilmore Simms, Tate's choices of proslavery intellectuals, argued that slavery protected the South against European radicalism with its demands for equality. These demands threatened the traditional hierarchical society of the South, of which the family was the model. Simms and Tucker denied that the people were sovereign under the Constitution, since that document had been ratified by the states. Both Tucker and Simms shared Taylor's earlier ambivalence about the West, welcoming the economic possibilities it offered but fearing the social dislocation that widespread migration threatened. Interestingly, though, Tucker departed from the states' rights philosophy on the issue of Texas annexation. He justified his course on purely pragmatic grounds: Since the North had already abandoned the Constitution, the South should no longer feel bound by its restraints, but should pursue whatever policy was to the advantage of the region. Here is an early case in which sectional loyalty trumps ideology and party.

The triumph of region over party was the main story of the Southern Whigs. Rather than focusing on mainstream Whig politicians, however, Tate considers two humorists, Joseph Baldwin and Johnson Hooper. He does so in order to examine satirical discourses, which were popular in the antebellum period and often used to address the issue of the West. Like other Whigs, Baldwin and...