Power Tends To Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty

7—The American Experience: Between the Union’s Founding and the Civil War

SEVEN The american experience Between the Union’s Founding and the Civil War self-government is the end of all government, and implies the right of self-defence. a degenerate republicanism terminates in the total loss of freedom. slavery was not the cause of secession, but the reason of its failure.1 t h e a M e r i C a N C i v i L Wa r (1861–1865) was the last phase of american history that acton considered important for the history of liberty. in this context, he pronounced some of his most remarkable (and controversial) thoughts on the nature of democracy, the perils of unrestricted rule by the majority, and the cost of disregarding minority rights and interests. he also explained his position on slavery in greater detail. Moreover, the Civil War gave acton occasion to take a more critical look at the american regime. The constitutional foundation of the New World that he so admired clearly must have had some hidden defects. For despite all its advantages over europe, america could not ultimately avoid a bloody civil war, one considered, in acton’s time as well as our own, to be the most sanguinary event in american history. in analyzing the defects that led to this conflict, acton also reveals his ideal of a free polity. he illuminates this ideal by presenting some alternative viewpoints on the possible growth of the american political order as put forward by the protagonists of states’ rights, in particular, John C. Calhoun (1782–1850). C h a P t e r 146 PoWer teNDs to CorrUPt acton deals with the topic of the american Civil mainly in two separate articles. The first, titled “Political Causes of the american revolution,” was published in May 1861, at the onset of the Civil War. The second, “The Civil War in america: its Place in history,” was actually a public lecture that he delivered and published in January 1866, soon after the end of the war. he also wrote several “reports on the Civil War,” published in Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review as part of a section called “Current events.” This publication typically contained journalistic news on the war, which is less valuable for our purposes. What acton wrote on the Civil War thus lacked a time distance from the events and a proper perspective. Moreover, he wrote it during what Gertrude himmelfarb and other acton scholars termed the “young acton” period. in his “mature” and “old” stages, acton revised some of his early opinions, often into a more radical direction. But he remained critical of pure democracy in his youth as well as in old age, while his harsh judgment of america in the 1860s had softened a great deal by the 1870s, when he published “sir erskine May’s Democracy in Europe” (1878). This critical judgment virtually disappeared at the end of his life, when he wrote both his Lectures on Modern History and Lectures on the French Revolution.2 on Democracy in General, and american Democracy in Particular acton observes that the most distinguished Founding Fathers were not pleased with the results of their work. on the contrary, they belonged to the severestcriticsoftheConstitution,fearingthatitsecuredneitherpermanence and stability for the american republic nor liberty for its citizens.3 For about three generations after the birth of the United states of america, their fears seemed unfounded. america remained united, prosperous, and free, and it rapidly grew in economic and political power. it increasingly served as an example of a successful democracy for the old World. acton describes the problem that democracy posed for his contemporaries as follows: The world had never yet beheld a Democracy combining a very advanced civilisation with a very extensive territory. Democracies coexisted with the highest social and intellectual refinement, but then they had not to overcome the difficulty of space. Those which extended their dominion perished between the cognate perils of anarchy and despotism. above all, a Democracy has never even attempted to adopt the system of representative government which is the supreme and characteristic invention of the British monarchy. The American Experience 147 Therefore it had become almost an axiom in political science that that which ancient rome and modern France attempted and failed to accomplish is really impossible; that Democracy, to be consistent with liberty, must subsist in solution and combination with other qualifying principles, and that complete equality is the...