The Republican Synthesis and Thaddeus Stevens

Abstract

THE REPUBLICAN SYNTHESIS AND THADDEUS STEVENS Donald K. Pickens THE REPUBLICAN SYNTHESIS has added rich insights and explanatory power to American historiography. Beginning with Caroline Robbin's work, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthmen (1959), scholars such as Bernard Bailyn, Trevor Colbourn, and Gordon Wood have explored the impact of republican thought upon American ideas and institutions. In 1972 Robert E. Shalhope named this school of interpretation republican synthesis. Three years later in a very significant study, J. G. A. Pocock traced this republican creed from Renaissance Florence to the eve of the American War of Independence. He called this republican tradition civic humanism, and stressed the classical and Renaissance origins. Other historians—Robbins, Bailyn, and Hatch for example—have emphasized the Protestant contributions. In a recent paper, Daniel Walker Howe has clearly demonstrated the intellectual complexity of this republicanism in his evaluation of recent scholarly attempts to extend this creed's influence beyond 1789. This republicanism consisted of Scottish common sense philosophy, Adam Smith's laissez-faire creed, John Locke's philosophy, and Puritan religious sentiments. In addition, this synthesis provided the basis for Robert Kelley's conception of cultural politics and for understanding the transformation of the American War of Independence into the American Revolution from 1776 to 1865 and beyond.1 1 The bibliography is vast; the following items are to the scholars cited in this paragraph. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthmen (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967); Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of theAmerican Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1965); Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Course of Liberty (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1 776-1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969); Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. , 29 (1972): 49-80; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Movement: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975); Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern in American Politics, The First Century (New York: Knopf, 1979). Daniel Walker Howe graciously shared his insights with me in his unpublished manuscript, "American Republicanism and Scottish Influence in the Age of Jefferson." 58CIVIL WAR HISTORY Republicanism—the creed of self-determination—was a vital ideological element in the rise of possessive individualism, that complex historical process by which the medieval idea of rank and order, of estates, changed into the modern ideal of the autonomous being capable of individual advancement and public improvement. An important element in the rise of individualism was the assumption that a natural order existed by which men could judge their individual efforts and successes. Men must be free—as citizens—to pursue their private and legal objectives. Under the rubric of liberty—equality of opportunity—each man would have his natural place in the order of things. As free agents their status was achieved by individual enterprise not acquired by the inherited circumstances of history. Little wonder, therefore, that the laissez-faire philosophy of the Enlightenment was a liberating force. As a community of citizens, men were equal in the political realm and free to define their status with free labor in the free market. Of course any study of Thaddeus Stevens's opinion about Reconstruction reveals serious institutional and ideological tensions in this Americanization of the ideals of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Essentially it was a question of defining the pale and who was in it and who was beyond it. The objective of pre-Reconstruction republicanism was the creation of a just society.2 Using Thaddeus Stevens's vision of a just society as a case in point, this essay demonstrates how this complex ideology provided a dynamic context and historic continuity for the Pennsylvania congressman 's program for Reconstruction; his Lancaster speech of September 1865, for example, was his affirmation of the eighteenth-century creed's validity for his time and the future. It reflects a turning point in the cultural evolution of republicanism. Much earlier, the English political philosopher James...