Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 by Various

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ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. III.--APRIL, 1859.--NO. XVIII.

AGRARIANISM.

If we can believe an eminent authority, in which we are disposed to
place great trust, the oldest contest that has divided society is that
which has so long been waged between the House of HAVE and the House of
WANT. It began before the bramble was chosen king of the trees, and it
has outlasted the cedars of Lebanon. We find it going on when Herodotus
wrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth century will
have to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it. There
seems never to have been a time when it was not old, or a race that
was not engaged in it, from the Tartars, who cook their meat by
making saddle-cloths of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpled
rose-leaves. Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patricians
and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine _ciompi_, Norman
nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanish
hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New England
farmers,--these and a hundred other races or orders have all been
parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its object
the acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against the
ever-threatening fiend which we call WANT. Property once obtained, the
possessor's next aim is to keep it. The very fact, that the mode of
acquisition may have been wrong, and subversive of property-rights, if
suffered to be imitated, naturally makes its possessor suspicious and
cruel. He fears that the measure he has meted to others may be meted to
him again. Hence severe laws, the monopoly of political power and of
political offices by property-holders, the domination of conquering
races, and the practice of attributing to all reformers designs against
property and its owners, though the changes they recommend may really be
of a nature calculated to make the tenure of property more secure than
ever. Even the charge of irreligion has not been found more effective
against the advocates of improvement or change than that of
Agrarianism,--by which is meant hostility to existing property
institutions, and a determination, if possible, to subvert them. Of the
two, the charge of Agrarianism is the more serious, as it implies the
other. A man may be irreligious, and yet a great stickler for property,
because a great owner of it,--or because he is by nature stanchly
conservative, and his infidelity merely a matter of logic. But if there
be any reason for charging a man with Agrarianism, though it be never so
unreasonable a reason, his infidelity is taken for granted, and it would
be labor lost to attempt to show the contrary. Nor is this conclusion so
altogether irrational as it appears at the first sight. Religion is
an ordinance of God, and so is property; and if a man be suspected of
hostility to the latter, why should he not be held positively guilty
towards the former? Every man is religious, though but few men govern
their lives according to religious precepts; but every man not only
loves property and desires to possess it, but allows considerations
growing out of its rights to have a weight on his mind far more grave,
far more productive of positive results, than religion has on the common
person. If there be such a thing as an Agrarian on earth, he would fight
bravely for his land, though it should be of no greater extent than
would suffice him for a grave, according to the strictest measurement
of the potter's field. Would every honest believer do as much for his
religion?

But what is Agrarianism, and who are Agrarians? Though the words are
used as glibly as the luring party-terms of the passing year, it is no
very easy matter to define them. Indeed, it is by no means an easy thing
to affix a precise and definite meaning to any political terms, living
or dead. Let the reader endeavor to give a clear and intelligible
definition of Whig and Tory, Democrat and Republican, Guelph and
Ghibelline, Cordelier and Jacobin, and he will soon find that he has a
task before him calculated to test his powers very severely. How much
more difficult, then, must it be to give the meaning of words that are
never used save in a reproachful sense, which originated in political
battles that were fought nearly two thousand years ago, and in a state
of society having small resemblance to anything that has ever been known
to Christendom! With some few exceptions, party-names continue to have
their champions long after the parties they belonged to are as dead
as the Jacobites. Many Americans would not hesitate to defend the
Federalists, or to eulogize the Federal party, though Federalism long
ago ceased even to cast a shadow. The prostitution of the Democratic
name has lessened in but a slight degree the charm that has attached to
it ever since Jefferson's sweeping reelection had the effect of coupling
with it the charming idea of success. But who can be expected to say a
word for Agrarian? One might as well look to find a sane man ready to
do battle for the Jacobin, which is all but a convertible term for
Agrarian, though in its proper sense the latter word is of exactly the
opposite meaning to the former. Under the term Agrarians is included,
in common usage, all that class of men who exhibit a desire to remove
social ills by a resort to means which are considered irregular and
dangerous by the great majority of mankind. Of late years we have heard
much of Socialists, Communists, Fourierites, and so forth; but the word
Agrarians comprehends all these, and is often made to include men who
have no more idea of engaging in social reforms than they have of
pilgrimizing to the Fountains of the Nile. It is a not uncommon thing
for our political parties to charge one another with Agrarianism; and if
they used the term in its proper sense, it would be found that they had
both been occasionally right, for Agrarian laws have been supported by
all American parties, and will continue to be so supported, we presume,
so long as we shall have a public domain; but in its reproachful
sense Agrarianism can never be charged against any one of the party
organizations which have been known in the United States. A quarter of
a century ago, one of the cleverest of those English tourists who then
used to contrive to go through--or, rather, over--the Republic, seeing
but little, and not understanding that little, proclaimed to his
countrymen, who had not then recovered from the agitation consequent on
the Reform contest, that there existed here a regular Agrarian party,
forming "the _extreme gauche_ of the Worky Parliament," and which
"boldly advocated the introduction of an AGRARIAN LAW, and a periodical
division of property." He represented these men as only following out
the principles of their less violent neighbors, and as eloquently
dilating "on the justice and propriety of every individual being equally
supplied with food and clothing,--on the monstrous iniquity of one man
riding in his carriage while another walks on foot, [there would have
been more reason in the complaint, had the gigless individual objected
to walking on his head,] and after his drive discussing a bottle of
Champagne, while many of his neighbors are shamefully compelled to be
content with the pure element. Only equalize property, they say, and
neither would drink Champagne or water, but both would have brandy, a
consummation worthy of centuries of struggle to attain." He had the
sense to declare that all this was nonsense, but added, that the
Agrarians, though not so numerous or so widely diffused as to create
immediate alarm, were numerous in New York, where their influence was
strongly felt in the civic elections. Elsewhere he predicted the coming
of a "panic" time, when workingmen would be thrown out of employment,
while possessed of the whole political power of the state, with no
military force to maintain civil order and protect property; "and to
what quarter," he mournfully asked, "I shall be glad to know, is the
rich man to look for security, either of person or fortune?"

Twenty-five years have elapsed since Mr. Hamilton put forth this
alarming question, and some recent events have brought it to men's
minds, who had laughed at it in the year of grace 1833. We have seen
Agrarian movements in New York, demonstrations of "Workies," but nothing
was said by those engaged in them of that great leveller, brandy, though
its properties are probably better known to them than those of water.
They have been dignified with the name of "bread riots," and the great
English journal that exercises a sort of censorship over governments and
nations has gravely complimented us on the national progress we have
made, as evidenced in the existence here of a starving population! One
hardly knows whether to fret or to smile over so provoking a specimen of
congratulation. Certainly, if a nation cannot grow old without bringing
the producing classes to beggary, the best thing that could happen to
it would be to die young, like men loved of the gods, according to the
ancient idea. Whether such is the inevitable course of national life or
not, we are confident that what took place a few months ago in New York
had nothing to do with Agrarianism in reality,--using the word after
the manner of the alarmists. It belonged to the ordinary bald humbug of
American politics. It so happened that one of those "crises" which come
to pass occasionally in all business communities occurred at precisely
the time when a desperate political adventurer was making desperate
efforts to save himself from that destruction to which he had been
doomed by all good men in the city that he had misgoverned. What more
natural than that he should seek to avail himself of the distress of the
people? The trick is an old one,--as old as political contention itself.
Was it not Napoleon who attributed revolutions to the belly?--and he
knew something of the matter. The "bread riots" were neither more nor
less than "political demonstrations," got up for the purpose of aiding
Mr. Wood, and did not originate in any hostility to property on the part
of the people. It is not improbable that some of those who were engaged
in them were really anxious to obtain work,--were moved by fear of
starvation; but such was not the case with the leaders, who were
"well-dressed, gentlemanly men," according to an eye-witness, with
excellent cigars in their mouths to create a thirst that Champagne alone
could cure. The _juste milieu_ of brandy, so favored in 1832, if we can
believe Mr. Hamilton, was not thought of in 1857. A quarter of a
century had made a change in the popular taste. Perhaps the temperance
reformation had had something to do with it. The whole thing was as
complete a farce as ever was seen at an American or an English election,
and those who were engaged in it are now sincerely ashamed of their
failure. If foreigners will have it that it was an outbreak of
Agrarianism, the first in a series of outrages against property, so
be it. Let them live in the enjoyment of the delusion. Nations, like
individuals, seem to find pleasure in the belief that others are as
miserable as themselves.

Of that feeling which is known as Agrarianism we believe there is far
less in the United States now than there was at the time when Mr.
Hamilton was here, and for a few years after that time. From about
the year 1829 to 1841, there was in our politics a large infusion of
Socialism. We then had parties, or factions, based on the distinctions
that exist in the social state, and those organizations had considerable
influence in our elections. The Workingmen's party was a powerful body
in several Northern States, and, to an observer who was not familiar
with our condition, it well might wear the appearance of an Agrarian
body. No intelligent American, however, fell into such an error. It
was evident to the native observer, that the Workingmen's party, while
aiming at certain reforms which it deemed necessary for the welfare of
the laboring classes, had no felonious purposes in view to the prejudice
of property,--and this for the plain reason, that most workingmen were
property-owners themselves. Few of them had much, but still fewer had
nothing, and the aggregate of their possessions was immense. They would
have been the greatest losers, had there been a social convulsion, for
they would have lost everything. Then they were intelligent men in the
ordinary affairs of life, and knew that the occurrence of any such
convulsion would, first of all, cut off, not only their means of
acquisition, but the very sources of their livelihood. Industry wilts
under revolutionary movement, as vegetation under the sirocco, and they
bring to the multitude anything but a realization of Utopian dreams. In
the long run, there has rarely been a revolution which has not worked
beneficially for the mass of mankind; but the earliest effects of every
revolution are to them bad, and eminently so. It is to this fact that we
must look for an explanation of the slowness with which the masses move
against any existing order of things, even when they are well aware
that it treats them with singular injustice. For nothing can be better
established than that no revolution was ever the work of the body of the
people,--of the majority. Revolutions are made by minorities, by orders,
by classes, by individuals, but never by the people. The people may be
dragged into them, but they never take the initiative even in those
movements which are called popular, and which are supposed to have only
popular ends in view. That very portion of mankind who are most feared
by timid men of property are those who are the last to act in any of the
great games which mark the onward course of the world. Complain they do,
and often bitterly, of the inequalities of society, but action is not
their strong point.

The American observer of 1829-41 would have seen, too, in the
Workingmen's party, and in other similar organizations, only sections of
the Democratic party. They were the light troops of the grand army of
Democracy, the _velites_ who skirmished in front of the legions. They
never controlled the Democratic party; but it is undeniable that they
did color its policy, and give a certain tone to its sentiment, at a
very important period of American history. The success of President
Jackson, in that political contest which is known as "the Bank War," was
entirely owing to the support which he received from the workingmen of
some two or three States; and it is quite probable that the shrewd men
who then managed the Democratic party were induced to enter upon that
war by their knowledge of the exalted condition of political opinion in
those States. For their own purposes, they turned to account sentiments
that might have worked dangerously, if they had not been directed
against the Bank. One effect of this was, that the Democratic party was
compelled to make use of more popular language, which caused it to lose
some of its influential members, who were easily alarmed by words,
though they had borne philosophically with violent things. For five
years after the veto of the Bank Bill, in 1832, the Democratic party
was essentially radical in its tone, without doing much of a radical
character. In 1837, the monetary troubles came to a head, and then it
was seen how little reliance could be placed on men who were supposed to
be attached to extreme popular opinions. It was in the very States which
were thought to abound with radicals that the Democracy lost ground, and
the way was prepared for their entire overthrow in the memorable year
1840. That year saw American politics debauched, and from that time
we find no radical element in any of our parties. The contest was
so intense, that the two parties swallowed and digested all lesser
factions. Since then, a variety of causes have combined to prevent the
development of what is termed Agrarianism. The struggle of the Democracy
to regain power; the Mexican war, and the extension of our dominion,
consequent on that war, bringing up again, in full force, the slavery
question; and the discovery of gold in California, which led myriads
of energetic men to a remote quarter of the nation;--these are the
principal causes of the freedom of our later party-struggles from
radical theories. From radical practices we have always been free, and
it is improbable that our country will know them for generations.

The origin of the word Agrarianism, as an obnoxious political term, is
somewhat curious. It is one of the items of our inheritance from the
Romans, to whom we owe so much, both of good and evil, in politics and
in law.

The Agrarian contests of that people were among the most interesting
incidents in their wonderful career, and are full of instruction,
though, until recently, their true character was not understood; and
their explanation affords a capital warning against the effects of
partisan literature. The common belief was,--perhaps we should say
is,--that the supporters of the Agrarian laws were, to use a modern
term, _destructives_; that they aimed at formal divisions of all landed
property, if not of all property, among the whole body of the Roman
people. Nothing can be more unfounded than this view of the subject,
which is precisely the reverse of the truth. No Roman, whose name
is associated with Agrarian laws, ever thought of touching private
property, or of meddling with it, illegally, in any way. Neither Spurius
Cassius, nor Licinius Stolo, nor the Gracchi, nor any other Roman whose
name is identified with the Agrarian legislation of his country, was
a destructive, or leveller. Quite the contrary; they were all
conservatives,--using that word in its best sense,--and the friends of
property. The lands to which their laws applied, or were intended to
apply, were public lands, answering, in some sense, to those which are
owned by the United States. When Spurius Cassius, a quarter of a century
after that revolution which is known as the expulsion of the Tarquins,
proposed a division of a portion of the public land among the poor
commons, he did no more than had often been done by the Roman kings,
with good effect, and with strict legality. Much of the public land was
_occupied_ by wealthy men, as tenants of the state; and some of these
his law would have ousted from profitable spots, while the rest were to
be forced to pay their rents, which they had done very irregularly or
not at all. The operation of all Agrarian laws like that of Cassius was,
undoubtedly, a matter well to be considered; for, after a man has long
occupied a piece of land, he regards it as an act of injustice to be
peremptorily removed therefrom, and he ought to have, at least, the
privilege of buying it, if its possession be necessary to his support.
This feeling must have been the stronger in the bosom of the Roman
occupant in proportion to his poverty, but to legal possession he could
make no claim. The position he held was that of tenant at will to the
state, and he could be legally ejected at any moment. But it was not
from poor occupants of the public domain, whose number was necessarily
small, that opposition was experienced. It came from the rich, who had
all but monopolized the use of that domain; and, in the time of Spurius
Cassius, it was complicated with that quarrel of _caste_ which we
denominate the contest between the Patricians and the Plebeians.
Property and political power were both involved in the dispute. The
Patricians knew that the success of Cassius would make against them in
two ways:--it would strengthen the Plebeians, by lifting them out of the
degradation consequent on poverty, and so render them more dangerous
antagonists in political warfare; and it would render the Patricians
less able to contend with aspiring foes, by taking from them one of the
sources of their wealth. Cassius failed, and was executed, having been
tried and condemned by the Patricians, who then alone constituted the
Roman people.

More than a century after the failure of Cassius, the Agrarian question
was again brought before the Roman nation, on a large scale. This was
the time when the famous Licinian rogations, by the adoption of which
a civil revolution was effected in Rome, were brought forward. They
provided for the passage of an Agrarian law, for an equitable settlement
of debts, and that thereafter one of the two Consuls should always be
a Plebeian. It is something to be especially noted, that C. Licinius
Stolo, the man from whom these laws take their name, was not a needy
political adventurer, but a very wealthy man, his possessions being
mainly in land; and that he belonged to a _gens_ (the Licinii) who were
noted in after days for their immense wealth, among them being that
Crassus whose avarice became proverbial, and whose surname was _Dives_,
or _the Rich_. The Licinian Agrarian law provided, that no one should
_possess_ more than five hundred jugers of the public land, (_ager
publicus_,) that the state should resume lands that had been illegally
seized by individuals, that a rent should be paid by the occupants of
the public domain, that only freemen should be employed on that domain,
and that every Plebeian should receive seven jugers of the public land
in absolute property, to be taken from those lands which the state was
to resume from Patricians who _possessed_ (that is to say, who occupied)
more than five hundred jugers. Such were the main provisions of the law,
which did not touch private property of any kind. The state was merely
to assert its undisputed legal right over the public domain, and the
Plebeians became landholders, which was the best thing that could happen
to the republic, and which was what was aimed at in every community of
antiquity. Even the partial observance of this law was the cause of the
supremacy of Rome being established over the finest portions of the
ancient world. Had Licinius failed, Rome would have gone down in her
contest with the Samnites, and the latter people would have become
masters of Italy. As it was, his success created the Roman people; and
from the time of that success must be dated the formation of the Roman
constitution as it was recognized and acted on during the best period of
the Republic. True, the Agrarian law was but one of three measures which
he carried through in the face of all the opposition the Patricians
could make; but the other laws were of a kindred character, and they all
worked together for good. It was the triumph of the Plebeians for the
benefit of all. The revolution then effected was strictly conservative
in its nature, and whatever of internal evil Rome afterwards experienced
was owing, not to the adoption of the Licinian law, but to the
departure by the state from the practice under it which it was intended
permanently to establish.

The last great Agrarian contest which the Romans had was that which
takes its name from the Gracchi, and which began at the commencement of
the fourth generation before the birth of Christ. On the part of the
reformers, it was as strictly legal a movement as ever was known. Not
a single acre of private land was threatened by them; and whoever pays
attention to the details of their measures cannot fail to be struck with
the great concessions they were ready to make to their opponents,--the
men who had literally stolen the public property, and who pretended to
hold it as of right. Perhaps it was too late for any such reform as that
contemplated by the Gracchi to succeed, the condition of Rome then being
in no important respect like what it had been in the time of Licinius
Stolo; but one of the most interesting chapters in the history of things
which might have been is that which relates to the possible effect of
the Sempronian legislation. Had that legislation been fairly tried,
Roman history, and therefore human history, must have taken an entirely
different course, with an effect on the fortunes of every man born since
that time. Whether that effect would have been good or bad, who shall
say? But one thing is certain, and that is, that the Gracchi and their
supporters were not the enemies of property, and that their measures
were not intended to interfere with the private estate of any citizen of
the Roman Republic.

Such was the Agrarianism, and such were the Agrarian laws and the
Agrarian contests of Rome, which were so long misunderstood; and through
that misunderstanding has the word Agrarian, so proper in itself,
been made to furnish one of the most reproachful terms that violent
politicians have ever used when seeking to bespatter their foes. It will
be seen that the word has been applied in "the clean contrary way" to
that in which it should have been applied, and that, strictly speaking,
an Agrarian is a conservative, a man who asks for justice,--not a
destructive, who, in his desire to advance his own selfish ends or those
of his class, would trample on law and order alike. It is only within
the last seventy years that the world has been made to comprehend that
it had for fifty generations been guilty of gross injustice to some of
the purest men of antiquity; and it is not more than thirty years since
the labors of Niebuhr made the truth generally known,--if it can,
indeed, be said to be so known even now. The Gracchi long passed for a
couple of demagogues, who were engaged in seditious practices, and who
were so very anxious to propitiate "the forum populace" that they were
employed in perfecting plans for the division of all landed property
amongst its members, when they were cut off by a display of vigor on the
part of the government. "The Sedition of the Gracchi" was for ages one
of the common titles for a chapter in the history of Republican Rome;
yet it did not escape the observation of one writer of no great
learning, who published before Heyne's attention was drawn to the
subject, that, if there were sedition in the affair, it was quite as
much the sedition of the Senate against the Gracchi as it was the
sedition of the Gracchi against the Senate.[A]

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