Lord Acton and the Lost Cause

Date: January 1, 2000 Publication: American Scholar Author: Christopher Clausen

Photographs of John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, first Baron Acton, show a severe, imposing man dressed in black, with a beard that was extravagant even for a Victorian sage: an incurably dusty figure who would speak to us today, if at all, in a forgotten tongue. In appearance and sometimes in style, he resembles nothing so much as the stereotype of the comically shocked father of the bride in a Hollywood bust-and-bustle drama. Although historians of Victorian England know him as a leading theorist of liberty and liberalism, Lord Acton is at best dimly remembered by most readers for the aphorism that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unlike his older contemporary John Smart Mill, he made no name for himself as a crusader for women's rights, for the abolition of the death penalty, or for other social causes that were to come into their own in the twentieth century. The major conflict of his career was with the Vatican over papal infallibility and religious freedom, for Acton was a dissident but devout Roman Catholic. Otherwise, his life--the life of a comfortable member of the gentry, briefly a Liberal member of Parliament, who was later raised to the lowest rung of the peerage--mostly lacked external drama. A historian of great erudition who was eventually appointed Regius Professor at Cambridge, Acton failed to write any of the books for which he took extensive notes. He published essays and reviews prolifically, but at his death in 1902 he left no sizable monument as a politician, ideologist, or historian.

Worse still for his reputation today, this political moralist, who described himself early in life as "a partisan of sinking ships," passionately supported the South during the American Civil War. Although he was a lifelong opponent of slavery, he published a succession of influential articles embracing the Southern struggle for independence, and his partiality did not alter when the North won. "I deemed," he wrote to the defeated General Robert E. Lee in 1866, "that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." For the rest of his career, Acton wrote favorably and at length about the Southern cause. Looking backward in 1881, he recalled that "I broke my heart over the surrender of Lee." He was still avowing what he called "Rebel sympathies" thirty years after Appomattox. His reasons for those sympathies shed light on the Civil War from an unfamiliar and surprising angle. Conversely, the distant flames of Richmond and Atlanta illuminate some of twentieth-century Europe's deepest shadows.

Judged on the basis of its treatment in the news media, in most recent books about the Civil War, and in such films as Glory and Amistad, support for the Confederate cause is less respectable today, at least among the cultural elite, than at any time since the turn of the last century. "We are careful that the lion should tell his story," Acton wrote in his notes, and the Northern story has been told more fully and frequently of late than ever before. The pro-Southern romanticism whose most potent symbol was Gone with the Wind finally ran aground, for perfectly obvious reasons, on the civil rights movement. To uphold the Lost Cause was no longer merely to sympathize with a gallant, picturesque underdog, but tacitly to support slavery and its persistent evil effects. For decades segregationists made twin fetishes of the Confederate battle flag and the venerable political doctrine of states' rights on which the Confederacy was based, ultimately discrediting both among people who believed in racial equality and the righting of ancient wrongs.

"As time goes on, fig-leaves wear off," Acton wrote in another context. Except on the farthest fringes of the right, nobody now uses the phrase "states' rights" as if it represented a constitutional theory unblemished by history. As for the Southern Cross, although it appears in one form or another on the flags of four Southern states, its advocates find themselves more on the defensive with each passing year, while the official celebrations of Confederate Memorial Day and other explicitly Southern holidays grow ever more perfunctory and embarrassed. Southern schoolchildren no longer memorize the masses of commemorative poetry--"The Conquered Banner," "Little Giffen of Tennessee," "Ode at Magnolia Cemetery"--that my Kentucky mother-in-law and many of her shrinking generation can still recite. Even the singing of "Dixie" has become a controversial act. A portrait of Lee himself was recently removed from a temporary exhibition of famous residents in Richmond, the Confederate capital, after threats of a black boycott.

With his gift for memorable phrases, Lord Acton expressed the central conviction of nineteenth-century liberalism more pithily than Mill or any other thinker: "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end." He denounced slavery with increasing intensity wherever he encountered it, whether in his study of the ancient world or in those backwaters of the nineteenth century where it still survived. (Its vestiges throughout the British Empire had been abolished in 1833, the year before his birth.) Nonetheless, in her excellent biography of Acton, Gertrude Himmelfarb complains that he evaded the moral issue of Southern slavery. George Watson, the editor of Acton's notes for his unwritten history of liberty, considers his support for the South "astounding" and adds disapprovingly that "Acton's mind was wayward in its genius, beyond all doubt, and ultimately conscious of the fact."

This observation, though in some respects well taken, merely emphasizes the anomaly; we still have to explain it as best we can. Did Acton the liberal accept at face value the South's claim to be a traditional agrarian society defending itself against the worldwide onslaught of brutal capitalism? Did he, like many romantic conservatives drunk on Sir Walter Scott, delight in seeing American democracy fall apart at the hands of dashing, chivalric Southern gentlemen? Or did he have better reasons?

Reviewing a German history of the Civil War four years after it ended, Acton remarked on "that strange combination of opposite motives which made extreme Toiles and the most consistent Liberals unite in the same opinion." A sufficiently ignorant Tory in 1861 might rejoice that secession had apparently reversed the democratic threat to aristocratic privileges, gullibly accepting at face value the fantasies whereby Carolinians and Mississippians christened their wilderness plantations Waverly or Windsor and invented for themselves bluer blood than Queen Victoria's. Acton certainly admired the blue-blooded Lee, whom he hailed as a fellow opponent of slavery. But he took pleasure in pointing out to Lee that much English support for the Southern cause "was neither unselfish nor sincere. It sprang partly from an exultant belief in the imminent decline and ruin of Democratic institutions, partly from the hope that America would be weakened by the separation, and from terror at the remote prospect of Farragut appearing in the channel and Sherman landing in Ireland."

Acton himself, who sat in Parliament for an Irish borough, admired the American system of government. He had even visited the northeastern United States in 1853 on a sort of reverse Grand Tour, and despite an intellectual crudity that struck him particularly at Harvard, he came to share Tocqueville's general conclusions of twenty years earlier. Notwithstanding its imperfections, of which a conformist tendency toward the tyranny of the majority was the most threatening, he considered democracy both a hopeful and an irresistible development for Europe. As a historian, he wrote a good deal about the American Revolution, the political institutions it established, and the fate of those institutions during the Civil War. Much of what he published is dated and legalistic, but in the notes made long after the war for the never-written history of liberty, he often achieved a laconic lyricism.

 Europe incapable, America virgin soil, escaping from traditions, authority, 
 There the Quakers and Independents, between Episcopalians and 
 Presbyterians, were able to work out their ideas. Idealism, escape from 
 custom, from the influence of surroundings, from the clutch of the dead. 
 Their inward light resisted external influences. 

There are even moments when Acton sounds like William Faulkner in "The Bear":

 Upon the ruins which, from the soil of Europe, among the tombs and the 
 ruins, none could start fair. The past was too strong. They dragged a 
 lengthening chain, worshipping ancestors--the weary nations of the old 
 world. The new plant was reared on virgin soil. And this was the effect of 
 American independence--to offer an example of a new society casting off 
 authority, repudiating the past, built up on ideas. It worked by being 
 unlike, separate and new. 

Separate and new in what ways? That is, what did Acton particularly admire about the American experiment, either for its own sake or as an "example" for Europe? Its earliest advantages preceded independence, for Anglo-America began as a scattering of colonies; and colonies, the subject of a lengthy letter to the press in 1862, "are naturally liberal." Their liberalism arises from two causes. First, "No awe surrounds institutions of which all the colonists have seen the beginning, and which many helped to make." Laws that lack antiquity tend to be more rational and practical than those that have ancient superstition on their side. Second and more striking, colonies encourage "the mixture of races," another factor that breaks down old orthodoxies and leads to new nations. At this stage of his career an ambivalent Acton was quite capable, like most mid-Victorians, of referring to non-white inhabitants of European empires as "barbarous races." Nevertheless, he argued strongly for the equal rights of all races and saw their merging through intermarriage as a prerequisite to the ability of former colonies to "put forth all the natural forms of national and political life." Although still in its initial stages, that merging, Acton thought, was an essential element in the process by which formerly colonial societies became--would increasingly become--"separate and new." Imperialism, though an evil in itself, could sometimes lead through the crooked tunnels of history to beneficial results.

The American Revolution, naturally, had been led by revolutionaries. A decade later the Constitutional Convention was dominated by conservatives. Institutionally speaking, Acton the historian found the United States Constitution less perfect than its worshipers then or now would admit:

 The rules for the election of the president and for that of the 
 vice-president proved a failure. Slavery was deplored, was denounced, and 
 was retained. The absence of a definition of State Rights led to the most 
 sanguinary civil war of modern times. Weighed in the scales of Liberalism 
 the instrument, as it stood, was a monstrous fraud. 

Yet the American constitutional system had one enormous virtue that made up for all its deficiencies: federalism. "By the development of the principle of Federalism," Acton went on in the same Cambridge lecture, "it has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the world has seen." Even after Northern victory permanently weakened it, federalism was still the salient feature of the American system. In another lecture he again pays tribute to "the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded. It is the one immortal tribute of America to political science, for state rights are at the same time the consummation and the guard of democracy."

Why was the federal system so important to Acton? Identifying it with discredited racial policies, we forget how it might look to a European who had studied, among other events, the French Revolution. That revolution, in contrast to the American, institutionalized "the crushing preponderance of Paris and the Parisian populace" and quickly led to the insatiable imperialism of Napoleon, who was not finally defeated until Waterloo. The notorious instability of French politics, the fact that since 1793 two unsuccessful republics had been interspersed with four separate monarchies, in Acton's opinion owed a great deal to overcentralization. (Since his death, he would happily point out if he could, France has undergone three more republics interrupted by the Vichy dictatorship.) Britain, though freer and more stable than France, was likewise overcentralized--all power emanating from London. Home rule for Catholic Ireland, another cause near to Acton's heart, was perennially discussed and perennially deferred.

Once countries achieved democracy, whether it happened gradually or through revolution, the dangers of centralization were all the greater. In monarchies and oligarchies, a minority or an individual could often find support in tradition or public opinion, and sometimes in law, for resisting the most arbitrary expressions of political power, which after all did not represent the popular will. In democracies, where government can claim majority support, resistance is far more difficult. Who can stand up against the voice of the people? "The true democratic principle," Acton wrote, "that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power.... The true democratic principle, that every man's free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing." Absolute power corrupts democracy just as surely as any other form of government.

Acton was under no illusion that civil or religious liberty was the chief desire of most people, especially those who were not well off. The aristocratic liberalism of early-nineteenth-century Europe, like the laissez-faire economics that accompanied it, had done little for the poor, for laboring people, for education or public health. Oppression by a class was no better than oppression by a race. Democracy's ability and inclination to deal with such problems was "its purpose and its strength," he wrote in 1878, but at the same time its "notorious danger." Through the systematic dispensing of benefits to particular groups or industries, a well-financed democratic government could buy support and extend its reach indefinitely.

Hence the overriding necessity in a democracy for institutional limitations on government authority. Proportional representation, in Parliament would help somewhat by enabling geographically dispersed minorities to elect members, Acton thought, but a federal system of separated powers was the most effective solution yet proposed to the problem of democratic despotism. In the American system, states and localities had certain powers; the federal government had other, more or less clearly defined powers, which in turn were parceled out among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. America during its first decades under the Constitution was not yet democratic in the modern sense; Acton agreed with later historians who traced that development from the Jackson administration. But the federal system of divided sovereignty offered effective checks against an ambitious, threatening national government that might arise once the representatives of the people discovered unlimited power in their hands.

 No party had inscribed pure liberty on its flag, not even the Americans. 
 Toleration, trade, slavery. But they made immense strides in the process of 
 revolution. Resistance to prospective evil--speculative revolution. 
 Division of powers in the Supreme Court. Federalism. No primogeniture, no 
 established Church; no crown, church, aristocratic army. 

European countries were in transition, Acton feared, from archaic absolute monarchies to much more powerful, efficiently organized modern states that, accurately or not, claimed to act in the name of the people. To some degree the Americans had inoculated themselves against the tyranny of the majority before it ever became a reality.

The danger of centralized, illiberal mass politics in Europe was greatly increased by the rise of nationalism. Here again we encounter Acton's almost American concern with race, although we should remember that nineteenth-century authors used the term more broadly than writers today. Nationalism was bad for two related reasons: because it subordinated the state to the will of one race, excluding all others; and because the deification of the nation was one more pretext for suppressing human rights. The nation should be not an idol demanding sacrifices, but a collective name for the diversity of individuals whose freedom and well-being constitute its goals. The pessimistic Acton was among the few thinkers of his time who warned against the poisonous nationalism that blighted twentieth-century Europe from beginning to end. In "Nationality," another essay of 1862, he roundly declared:

 Those [countries] in which no mixture of races has occurred are imperfect; 
 and those in which its effects have disappeared are decrepit. A State which 
 is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which 
 labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own 
 vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief 
 basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a 
 retrograde step in history. 

Acton made it clear early in the Civil War that his interest in American political events was based on "the constant analogy they present to the theories and the events which are at the same time disturbing Europe." While the war was going on, France was ruled by Napoleon III, whom some historians regard as the first modern dictator because he perverted the machinery of democracy so effectively. Italy was completing its messy process of national unification. The most powerful German state, Prussia, was a militaristic autocracy in the early stages, under Bismarck's leadership, of unifying Germany through a succession of wars. (Not surprisingly, Acton pointed out, Prussia supported the North in the Civil War.) Austria, the only large multi-ethnic state in Europe, was under increasing attack from German, Italian, Hungarian, and Slavic nationalists. Nationalism embodied in the centralized bureaucratic state, so efficient that it could control all the complexities of modern life, was the chief danger Acton saw in the European future.

Democracy, though good in itself, was little protection against these malign forces. Both nationalism and bureaucracy could flourish as well in a democratic state as in a monarchy. Maybe they would even flourish better, because nationalism, like democracy itself, was a popular, leveling force, while military and civil bureaucracy achieved its greatest power in a state where the principle of sovereign authority--in a democracy, nominally the people--had no countervailing force or limits. As early as 1860, before Max Weber was born, Acton wrote about the danger of "bureaucratic centralization [taking] the place of self-government, and the State instead of an organism [becoming] a machine." Dissident individuals or minorities--religious, political, or regional--were relics that such a machine would soon grind into atoms.

As a liberal Catholic in Victorian England, Acton knew all there was to know about holding minority opinions. As an Englishman who had been born in Naples to an aristocratic German mother and educated in Munich, he was politically and culturally far more cosmopolitan, more connected with the centers of Europe, than all but a few of his English contemporaries. These experiences help explain why he hailed so enthusiastically

 The American notion that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, 
 or prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or 
 the adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of 
 enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; that the private individual 
 should not feel the pressure of public authority, and should direct his 
 life by the influences that are within him, not around him. 

The Northern cause, he thought, represented the same centralizing, nationalistic tendencies he so disapproved in Prussia, joined with a messianic style of democracy that derived from the French Revolution.

In order to overpower its political adversaries, he concluded in 1866, the North "used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government," drastically strengthening the executive branch at the expense of the federalism and balance of powers that had been the glories of the American system. The South, in this somewhat idealized scheme, represented an English moderation, "a protest and reaction against revolutionary doctrines ... a move in the opposite direction to that which prevails in Europe." The Confederate Constitution, which repaired some of the defects and ambiguities of the United States Constitution, further aroused Acton's admiration. As he wrote to Lee, "I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy."

If the doctrine of states' rights was at bottom no more than a fig leaf for slavery, then defending it on the ground that it enhanced liberty was misguided at best. Acton did not see it that way. Early in the war he had resisted the argument that immediate abolition was a moral necessity. By late 1863, after the Emancipation Proclamation finally made the abolition of slavery a Union war aim, his views had evolved to the point where he denounced the obstinacy of the South in clinging to an institution that discredited its cause morally and reduced the potential size of its armies. The elimination of slavery by white Southerners themselves, he asserted, would disarm abolitionist sentiment in the North and at the same time enable the Confederacy to recruit black soldiers. Acton declared hopefully that "we can hardly doubt that the Confederates will choose freedom at the price of emancipation."

Alternatively, at a stage in the war when the balance was shifting in favor of the North, emancipation by Southerners would make possible a compromise that might offer the best of both worlds--"a restored Union on their own political principles, by a victory of self-government over the absolutism of the majority, and of freedom over Slavery." Such a confederation, "without a popular despotism at Washington or slavery at Richmond, ... would redeem the American Democracy from both its supreme defects, and constitute the freest and most powerful nation in the world." The year after the war ended, Acton lamented that "slavery was not the cause of secession, but the reason of its failure." Taking strategic advantage of whites' refusal to make blacks "partners with them in the perils of war and in the fruits of victory," the North had abolished it overnight, with little planning or protection for the slaves' well-being, because it considered them mainly "an instrument for [slaveholders'] destruction."

"History," Acton wrote in 1888, "does not work with bottled essences, but with active combinations." In a tidier world, the defense of slavery would never have become entangled with the protection of some valuable structures of liberty--national self-determination, local autonomy, limited government, resistance to bureaucracy. By the same token, there was no logical reason for opposition to slavery in the nineteenth century, or support for racial equality in the twentieth, to be inseparable from the self-righteous nationalism of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," an all-powerful central government, the progressive weakening of federalism, and the abridgment of civil liberties that earlier (white) Americans took for granted. Matters turned out that way because history has careless habits.

With his European liberal's sense of the dangers of a centralized state whose power, because it was the power of the people, was in principle and effect absolute, Acton was perfectly accurate within his own frame of reference when he wrote in 1866: "If, then, slavery is to be the criterion which shall determine the significance of the civil war, our verdict ought, I think, to be, that by one part of the nation it was wickedly defended, and by the other as wickedly removed." Obviously, for Acton himself the immediate fate of slavery in America was not the most important criterion. If it had been, he would have chosen the other side. Whether he was wrong, in the context of American history, to weigh the issues as he did is beside the point. We must always remember that what concerned him most was the war's significance for a continent where slavery had vanished long ago. At a time when aggressive nationalism, centralization, and bureaucracy defined the modern state, Acton was a visionary who looked forward to a federal Europe that lay far in the future.

When the Western Allies reconstructed their shattered enemy after two world wars, they created the Federal Republic of Germany, citing many of the same reasons that Acton gave for preferring a decentralized system. In recent decades, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, the devolution of political power throughout Europe to smaller, more local units, either through federalism or by outright secession, has been effectively reversing three hundred years of centralization. Most of Ireland won its independence long ago. The United Kingdom itself radically decentralized in 1999, when Scotland and Wales acquired their own parliaments. Not all instances of devolution, of course, are benign or peaceful. The serial disintegration of Yugoslavia represents a horrific recurrence of nationalism and a regression from Acton's belief in multi-ethnic states. Among the tombs and the ruins, Europe's chains still sometimes rattle. At the same time, the European Union has been expanding and evolving rapidly toward a federal (though highly bureaucratic) superstate made up of former enemies. Once again history creates a disorderly and ambiguous spectacle.

Even so, some of Lord Acton's deepest convictions may finally be coming into their own. If a federal Europe freed from ethnic hatreds should take on mature life, it will be as much a monument to him as to any of its living creators. Far from being an unrecognizable creature of another age, he was in some admirable respects ahead of his time. His support for the Confederacy, anomalous as it may seem, was in fact consistent with the rest of his humane and liberal outlook. To Mary Gladstone, the daughter of the prime minister who was his political mentor, he wrote in 1881: "The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class."

Christopher Clausen, a frequent contributor to the SCHOLAR, is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. His latest book, Faded Mosaic: The Emergence of Post-Cultural America, will be published this spring by Ivan R. Dee.

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