Give Me Liberty
VIII
Look at this phenomenon: The United States of America.
For two hundred and fifty years, Europe colonizes this continent. Then Spain holds the Gulf and the Floridas. Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Russia is in the north. France controls the Great Lakes and the waterways of the Mississippi valley, the fur trade and the Missouri mines. Along the Atlantic coast, between wilderness and sea, are scattered little English colonies.
Not all the colonies rebel against England. Canada remains loyal to the King, and among the others only Virginia and Massachusetts have any real heart for the fight. The war drags along, a little frontier war fought with valor by a few rebels and neglected by England, whose vital interests are elsewhere. An excursion of French gunboats helps decide the issue. Peace is signed, and thirteen colonies without a common interest do not know whether to unite or to be separate nations.
At this point, what would seem likely to be the future of this continent? Does it seem probable that these colonies, divided by religion, social structure and economic interests, quarreling with each other about overlapping claims to territory which threaten to break into wars, does it seem probable that they will prevail against the Great Powers already in possession of America’s soil? Does it not appear that, if they are merely to survive, they must be united under a most powerful government?
Precisely the opposite occurred. The men who met in Philadelphia to form a government believed that all men are born free. They founded this government on the principle: All power to the individual.
How can such a principle be embodied in government? There is no escape from the fact that any government must be a man, or a few men, in power over the multitude of men. How is it possible to transfer the power of the ruler to each man in this multitude? It is not possible.
This was not a problem merely of allowing common men some voice in the councils of their rulers, some power to stop their rulers in the act of using power to the injury or the robbery of common men. The intent was actually to give the governing power to each common man equally. So that in effect, the political result would be the same as in the Communist village, where each man has equal power and struggles for his own self-interest until a satisfactory balance is arrived at. The governing power of this new republic was actually to reside in the multitudes. Common men were to govern themselves.
But how is it possible to embody this intent in the mechanisms of government since any government of multitudes of men must be one man, or a few men, in power over the many? It is not possible.
The problem was solved by destroying power itself, so far as this could possibly be done. Power was diminished to an irreducible minimum.
Governing power was broken into three fragments so that never could any man possess whole power. The function of government was cut into three parts, each checked in action by the other two. Any ruler is a human being, and in a human being thinking, deciding, acting and judging are inseparable. In this government, no man was permitted to function as a whole human being. Congressmen were to think and decide; the executive was to act; the courts were to judge.
And over these three was set a written statement of political principles, to be the strongest check on them all, an impersonal restraint upon the fallible human beings who must be allowed to use these fragments of authority over the multitudes of individuals.
Not without reason, Europeans cried out that this government was anarchy let loose in the world. Not without reason, older governments refused to recognize it. Nearer to anarchy than this, no government can come and be a government. Never before had the multitudes of men been set free to do as they pleased.
Already a bribed Continental Congress had sold to speculators millions of acres of public lands, claimed by both Connecticut and Virginia. And the first Congress of the United States, with unscrupulous chicanery, robbed the Revolutionary common soldiers of their meager pay and put it in the pockets of Congressmen and New York bankers.
What future could be predicted for such a lack of government, in such a situation?
In seventy years, within a man’s lifetime, France and Russia had vanished from this continent. Spain had yielded the Floridas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. England had been pushed back on the north. The whole vast extent of this country had been covered by one nation, a tumultuous multitude of men under the weakest government in the world. How did this happen?
The characteristic of American history is that everything appears to happen by accident. Nothing seems planned or intended. Other nations adopt policies and pursue them; their history is formed by the clash of these policies with other planned policies elsewhere. But America moves by a kind of indirection. Always in these United States the unintended, the unplanned, has been done.
Consider the gain of that vast block of territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and the seacoast colonies. One man did that; George Rogers Clark. He borrowed the money and got most of his men from the Spanish governor and the French people of Missouri and Illinois; he made one of the most terrible winter marches in history, and captured in Vincennes the commander of British forces in the West. No one had planned to do it; no one but George Rogers Clark and his little band knew it was being done.
By that one independent stroke, a free and enterprising American destroyed a plan which had been carefully matured for two years in London and in Canada. He took the United States to the Mississippi. And neither the Virginia Assembly nor the Congress of the United States ever paid the drafts he had given in St. Louis for the military supplies he used. Those drafts were not paid; George Rogers Clark was ruined, the Spanish governor was ruined, the fur-traders of St. Louis took a frightful loss and one great fur-trading house collapsed, because they were not paid. But the United States had the Northwest Territory.
Consider the settlement of Kentucky. Henderson’s Land Company did that. The government wished to curb and restrain western settlement; it went too fast, it was too lawless, it threatened rebellion against the United States and trouble with Spain. Any intelligent man in power would have stopped it. But there there was no man in power, because there was no power that any man could use. And Judge Henderson saw a chance to make a fortune.
He sold Kentucky land to the settlers, on credit, and he would have made a fortune if they had paid for it. They didn’t; they drove off his installment collectors with guns. The Henderson Land Company failed in the depression of the 1790’s. But Kentucky was settled.
Consider the Louisiana Purchase which took the United States from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. No one had any intention of buying that land. Everyone saw the Mississippi as the permanent frontier of the United States. The great river was a natural geographical boundary.
As had been foreseen, however, Kentucky was making trouble. Those western settlers threatened to join Spain, which held the Gulf and kept them from a seaport. Jefferson saw that the whole West—that is to say, the eastern half of the Mississippi valley—would be lost unless the United States could get a port on the Gulf. All that he wanted was a port, just one little bay.
Two American commissioners in Paris, with no authority whatever to do so, bought the whole of Louisiana from Napoleon. It belonged to Spain, but Napoleon sold it, his armies could settle the matter with Spain. And two Americans bought it, paid fifteen million dollars for it. Jefferson was aghast when he heard the news. He came within an inch of repudiating the purchase.
Consider a question as vital as slavery. Everywhere else in the western world, slavery was abolished by deliberate, well-considered legislation or decree. Every time the question was submitted to Americans an overwhelming majority voted against abolishing slavery.
Then Lincoln was elected on a platform promising free land and a railroad to the Pacific. An old quarrel about division of power between State and Federal governments blazed at last into a war which had been narrowly averted for half a century, and, as a war measure, slavery was abolished.
No one intended to drive the Indians from the Middle West. Again and again, in good faith, United States treaties established Indian tribes forever as permanent buffer states. That was a rational policy, based upon all future probabilities that could be seen at the time. Again and again, Federal troops evicted white settlers from lands secured by treaty to the Indians. But there was no control over individualism, and the Indians vanished.
California was torn from Mexico as a surreptitious personal adventure of General Fremont’s, connived in by Senator Benton of Missouri who sent him word to move quickly before he was stopped. It was done at a time when no one dreamed there was gold in those foothills and thoughtful men knew that California’s soil was worthless because the United States already had far more land than Americans could use, and for centuries to come the population on the Pacific Coast would not be large enough to be a market for farm products.
Aroused by selfish, private propaganda and inspired by democratic ideals, Americans rushed to war to free Cuba from Spain’s imperial tyranny, and found that they were fighting the Filipinos to keep them from freeing themselves. Thus the United States became an empire and a world power.
Such instances are multiplied by hundreds, by thousands. Everywhere you look at American history you see them. There is no plan, no intention, no fixed policy anywhere; this is anarchy, this is chaos. It is individualism. In less than a century, it created our America.
