A Letter to Thomas Carlyle

SIR, — You on have Homered it of late in a small way, one sees. You profess to sing the purport of our national struggle. “ South chooses to hire its servants for life, rather than by the day, month, or year ; North bludgeons the Southern brain to prevent the same”: that, you say, is the American Iliad in a Nutshell. In a certain sense, more ’s the pity, it must be supposed that you speak correctly ; but be assured that this is the American Iliad in no other nutshell than your private one, — in those too contracted cerebral quarters to which, with respect to our matters, your powerful intelligence, under such prolonged and pitiless extremes of dogmatic compression, has at last got reduced.

Seriously, not in any trivial wilfulness of retort, I accuse you of a narrowness and pettiness of understanding with regard to America. Give me leave to “ wrestle a tall ” with you on this theme. And as I can with but twoscore years match your threescore and five, let me entreat of your courtesy to set that circumstance aside, and to constitute me, for the nonce, your equal in age and privilege of speech. For I must wrestle to-day in earnest ! You are a great nature, a great writer, and a man of piercing intellect: he is a jack or a dunce that denies it. But of you, more than of most men at all your equals in intellectual resource, it may be said that yours is not a spherical or universal, but a special and linear intelligence,—of great human depth and richness, but special nevertheless. Of a particular order of truths you are an incomparable champion ; but always you are the champion and on the field, always your genius has its visor down, and glares through a loop-hole with straitened intentness of vision. A particular sort of errors and falsities you can track with the scent of a blood-hound, and with a speed and bottom not surpassed, if equalled ; but the Destinies have put the nose of your genius to the ground, and sent it off for good and all upon a particular trail. You sound, indeed, before your encounter, such a thrilling war-note as turns the cripple’s crutch to an imaginary lance ; you open on your quarry with such a cry as kindles a huntsman’s heart beneath the bosoms of nursing mothers. No living writer possesses the like fascination. Yet, in truth, we should all have tired of your narrow stringency long ago, did there not run in the veins of your genius so rich and ruddy a human blood. The profoundness of your interest in man, and the masterly way in which you grasp character, give to your thought an inner quality of centrality and wholeness, despite the dogmatic partiality of its shaping at your hands. And so your enticement continues, intensely partial though it be.

Continues,—but with growing protest, and growing ground for it. For, to speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are beginning to suffer from yourself. You are threatening to perish of too much Thomas Carlyle. I venture to caution you against that tremendous individual. He is subduing your genius to his own special humors ; he is alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic prepossession ; he is making you an intellectual routinier, causing thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last dies. For years we that love you most have seen that you were ceasing more and more to hold open, fresh relations with truth, — that you were straitening and hardening into the linear, rigid eagerness of the mere propagandist. You have, if I may so speak, been turning all your front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum. It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable, machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,— your brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot but admire ; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those with which you are established in organic connection ; nor could the products of Manchester mills be bargained for beforehand with more certainty than the results of your intellectual activity. You can be silent, — I venture to assert so much; but if you speak at all, we know perfectly well what description of fabric must come from your loom.

It does not, therefore, surprise us, does not clash with our sense of your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very nutshell Homer indeed. For I must not disguise it from you that this is exactly the case. It was Homerus in nuce first; and the pitiful purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than a pint, though you dip it full from the ocean itself.

You are great, but not towards us Americans. Towards us you are little and insignificant and superfluous. Your eyes, though of wondrous efficacy in their way, blink in our atmosphere like those of an owl in broad sunlight; and if you come flying here, it is the privilege of the smallest birds — of which you are quite at liberty to esteem me one — to pester you back into your mediaeval twilight.

Shall I try to tell you why you can have no right to judge us and our affairs ? By your leave, then, and briefly.

There is a spiritual nature of man, which is ever and everywhere the same ; and, through the necessary presence of this in every human being, there is a common sense and a common conscience, which make each man one with all others. Here in America we are seeking to give the force of political sovereignty to this common and unitive nature, —assuming that all political problems are at last questions of simple justice, courage, good sense, and fellow-feeling, which any sound heart and healthy intelligence may appreciate.

On the other hand, there is the truth of spiritual Rank or Degree, — that one man may be immensely superior in human quality to another. This is the truth that is most powerfully present to your mind, and you would constitute government strictly, if not solely, in the light of it. To this you are impelled by the peculiar quality of your genius, which is so purely biographical, so inevitably drawn to special personalities, that you can hardly conceive of history otherwise than as a record of personal influence.

We assume, then, as a basis, common sense ; you, uncommon sense. We assume Unity or Identity ; you assume Difference, and seek to reconstitute unity only through mastership on the one hand and reverent obedience on the other. We do not deny Difference: we recognize the truth of spiritual Degree ; we merely elect the common element as the material out of which to constitute, and the force by which to operate, the State.

Now my judgment is, that either the truth of a common Manhood or the truth of spiritual Rank may be made primary in a State, and that with admirable results, provided it be duly allied and tempered with its opposite. For these opposites I hold to be correlative and polaric, each required by the other. But chasm is worse than indistinction ; and he that breaks the circle of human fellowship is more mischievous than he who blurs the hues of gradation.

I affirm, then, that America has a grand spiritual fact at the base of her political system. But you are the prophet of an opposite order of truths. And you are so intensely the partisan of your pole, that you have not a moment’s patience with anything else, above all with an opposite partiality. And wanting sympathy and patience with it, you equally want apprehension of its meaning.

But this is not all. An awful shadow accompanies the brilliant day of your genius. That dark humor of yours, that woful demon from whose companionship, by the law of your existence, you cannot be free, tolls funeral-bells and chants the dirges of death in your ears forever. A hat your faith does not take with warmth to its bosom it must spurn violently away ; where you cannot hope strongly, you must vehemently despair; what your genius does not illumine to your heart it must bury as in shadows of eternal night. It being, therefore, of the nature of your mind to shine powerfully on the eminences of mankind, it became in consequence no less its nature to call up over the broad levels a black fog that even its own eye could not penetrate. Thus with you, if I understand you rightly, the common and the fateful are nearly one and the same; the Good is to you an exceptional energy which struggles up from the level forces of the universe. Is not your conception of human existence nearly this : a perpetual waste deluge, and here and there some Noah in his ark above it ?

There is noble truth to be seen from this point of view, — truth to which America also will have to attend. But being intensely limited to this sole point of view, you are utterly without eye for the whole significance of our national life. You are not only at the opposite pole from us, but your whole heart and intelligence are included in the currents of that polaric opposition.

Still further. I think, that, having made out its scheme of thought, your mind soon contracts a positive demand even for the evil conditions which, in your estimation, made that scheme necessary. To illustrate. A man is roused at night, and sent flying for a physician in some sudden and terrible emergency. He returns, broken - winded, to learn that it was altogether a false alarm. It is quite possible that his first emotion, on receiving this intelligence, will not be pleasure, but indignation ; he may feel that somebody ought to be sick, since he has been at such pains. Pardon me, if I think your position not wholly dissimilar. It seems to me to have become an imperative requisition of your mind that nine-tenths of mankind should be fools. They must be so; else you have no place for them in your system, and know not what to do with them. As fools, you have full arrangements made for their accommodation. Some hero, some born ruler of men, is to come forth (out of your books) and reduce them to obedience, and lord it over them in a most useful manner. But if they will not be fools, if they contumaciously refuse to be fools, they disturb the necessary conditions of kingship, and, of course, deserve much reprobation. I do not, therefore, feel myself unjust to you in saying, that, the better the American people behave, in consistency with their political traditions and customary modes of thought, the less you are able to be pleased with them. If they demean themselves as fools and incapables, (as they sometimes do,) they bring grist to your mill; but if they show wisdom, courage, and constancy, they leave you to stand at your mill-doors and grumble for want of toll, — as in the nutshell - epic aforesaid.

Well, there are many foolish and some wise, and I, for one, could heartily wish both classes more justly placed; for he who styles me an extreme intrepid democrat pays me a compliment to which I have no claim. While, then, by “ kingship ” you meant something human and noble, while I could deem the command you coveted for strong and wise men to be somewhat which should lift the weak and un wise above the range of their own force and intelligence, I held your prophesying in high esteem, and readily pardoned any excesses of expression into which your prophetic afflatus (being Scotch) might betray you.

But your appetite for kingship seems to have gained in strength while it lost in delicacy and moral significance, till it has become an insatiable craving, which disdains not to batten on very vile garbage. If one rule, and another be ruled, and if the domination be open, frank, and vigorous, you seem to feast on the fact, be this domination as selfish in its nature and as brutal in its form as it may. Whether its aim be to uplift or to degrade its subjects, whether it be clean or filthy, of heaven or of hell, a stress of generous purpose or a mere emphasis of egotism, — what pause do you make to inquire concerning this ? The appearance is, that any sovereignty, in these democratic days, is over-welcome to your hunger to admit of pause; and a rule, whose undisguised aim is, not to supplement the strength of the weak, but to pillage them of its product, not to lend the ignorant a wisdom above their own, but to make their ignorance perpetual as a source of pecuniary profit to their masters, may reckon upon your succors whenever succors are needed.

Hence your patronage of our slavery. Hence your effort to commend it by a description so incomparably false, that, though one should laugh derision at it from Christmas to Candlemas, he would not laugh enough. “ Hiring servants for life,” — that is the most intrepid lucus a non lucendo of the century. It fairly takes one’s breath away. It is stunning, ravishing. One can but cry, on recovering his wind, — Hear, O Caucus, and give ear, O Mock-Auction ! ye railway Hudsons, tricksters, impostors, ye demagogues that love the people in stump-speeches at

$per year, ye hired bravos of the

bar that stab justice in the dark, ye Jesuit priests that “lie for God,” listen all, and learn how to do it! What are your timid devices, compared with this of benumbing your adversary at the start by an outright electric shock of untruth ? But a man must be supported by a powerful sense of sincerity to be capable of a statement so royally false that the truth itself shall look tame and rustic beside it.

You have spoken ill of a certain sort of German metaphysic ; but I perceive that you have now become a convert to it. The final arcanum of that, I think, is, Something = Nothing. You give this abstraction a concrete form ; your axiom is, No Hire = Hire for Life. To deny that laborers have any property in their own toil, and to allow them their poor peck of maize and pound of bacon per week, not at all as a wage for their work, but solely as a means of converting corn into cotton, and cotton into seats in Congress and summers at Saratoga,—that, according to the Chelsea metaphysic, is “ hiring them for life ” ! To deny laborers any legal status as persons, and any social status as human souls,—to give them fodder for food, and pens for homes,—to withhold from them the school, the table, and the sanctities of marriage, — if that is not “ hiring them for life,” what is it ? To affirm, by consistent practice, that no spiritual, no human value appertains to the life of laboring men and women,—to rate them in their very persons as commercial values, measuring the virtue of their existence with coin, as cloths are measured with a yardstick, —this, we all see, is “ hiring them for life ” ! To take from women the LEGAL RIGHT to be chaste,—to make it a capital offence for a woman of the laboring caste to defend her own person by blows, for any “ husband ” or father of the laboring caste to defend wife or daughter with blows, against the lust of another caste, and, having made them thus helpless before outrage, to close the judicial tribunals against their testimony, and refuse them the faintest show of redress, — truly, it is very kind of you to let us know that this is the simplest piece of “ hiring for life,” for without that charitable assistance the fact would surely have eluded our discovery. How could we have found it out without your assistance, when, after that aid has been rendered, the fact continues to seem so utterly otherwise as to reflect even upon your generous information the colors of an unexampled untruth ?

No - Hire + Dehumanization of the Laborer = Life-Hire ? We never should have dreamt of it!

Within the past year, a document has come into my hands which they may thank their stars who are not required to see. It is the private diary of a most eminent and respectable slaveholder, recently dead. The chances of war threw it into the hands of our troops, and the virtue of a noble surgeon rescued it from defiling uses, and sent it to me, as one whose duty bound him to know the worst. Of its authenticity there is not a shadow of question. And such a record of pollution,— of wallowing, to which the foulness of swine is as the life of honey-bees harboring in the bosoms of roses, —I deliberately suppose can never have got into black and white before. Save in general terms, I can hardly speak of it; but one item I must have the courage to suggest more definitely. Having bidden a young slave-girl (whose name, age, color, etc., with the shameless precision that marks the entire document, are given) to attend upon his brutal pleasure, and she silently remaining away, he writes, — “Next morning ordered her a dozen lashes for disobedience.”¹ For disobedience, observe! She had been “hired for life”; the great Carlyle had witnessed the bargain; and behold, she has broken the contract! She must be punished; Mr. Carlyle and his co-cultivator of the virtue of obedience (par nobile fratrum) will see to it that she is duly punished. She shall go to the whipping-post, this disobedient virgin; she shall have twelve lashes, (for the Chelsea gods are severe, and know the use of “beneficent whip,”) — twelve lashes on the naked person,—blows with the terrible slave-whip, beneath which the skin purples in long, winding lines, then breaks and gushes into spirts of red blood, and afterwards cicatrizes into perpetual scars ; for disobedience is an immorality not to be overlooked !

Yes, Thomas Carlyle, I hold you a party to these crimes. You, YOU are the brutal old man who would flog virgins into prostitution. You approve the system; you volunteer your best varnish in its commendation ; and this is an inseparable and legal part of it. Legal, I say, — legal, and not destructive of respectability. That is the point. In ordering such lashes, that ancient miscreant (for old he already was) neither violated any syllable of the slave-code, nor forfeited his social position. He was punishing “ disobedience ” ; he was administering “ justice” ; he was illustrating the “ rights of property ” ; he was using the lawful New York they are infamous. In New York they are indeed done in dens, by felons who flee the eye of the policeman, —unless, to be sure, the police have been appointed by a certain alter ego of yours in negro-hatred, whilom chief magistrate and disgrace of that unfortunate city. But under your life-service régime things are managed in a more enlightened way. There they who have liberty—and sometimes use the liberty — to torture women into beastly submissions, do not hide from the laws, they make the laws. There such a personage as the one mentioned may be a gentleman, a man of high standing, “ one of the most respectable men in the State” (Florida).

privileges of gentlemen.”

No doubt, deeds of equal infamy are done in the dens of New York. But in

And this, just this,—for surely you will not be a coward, and dodge consequences,— you name a scheme of lifehire. This you esteem so much superior to our democratic way of holding each man and woman to be the shrine of rights which have an infinite sanctity, and of adjudging it the chief duty of the State to annex to these rights the requisite force for their practical assertion.

Is it, then, You, or is it some burglarious Devil that has broken into your bosom and stolen your soul, who is engaged in plastering over this infernal fester with smooth euphemisms ? Are You verily the mechanic who is engaged in veneering these out-houses of hell with rosewood ? Is it your very and proper Self that stands there sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on the accursed reek of that pit of putrescence, so to disguise and commend it to the nostrils of mankind ? Is it in very deed Thomas Carlyle, Thomas the Great, who now volunteers his services as male lady’s-maid to the queen-strumpet of modern history, and offers to her sceptred foulness the benefit of his skill at the literary rouge-pots? You? Yes? I give you joy of your avocations! Truly, it was worth the while, having such a cause, to defame a noble people in the very hour of their life-and-death struggle !

Well, you have made your election ; now I make mine. It is my deliberate belief that no man ever gave heartier love and homage to another than I to you; but while one woman in America may be lawfully sent to the whipping-post on such occasion, I will hold your existence and name, if they come between me and her rescue, but as the life of a stinging gnat! I love you,—but cannot quite sacrifice to you the sanctity of womanhood, and all the honor and all the high hopes of a great nation. Your scheme of “ lifehire ” will therefore have to undergo very essential modifications, such as will not only alter, but reverse, its most characteristic features, before I can esteem either it or the advocacy of it anything less than abominable.

But where are you now with relation to that Thomas Carlyle whose “ Sartor Resartus ” I read twenty years ago afoot and on horseback, sleeping with it under my pillow and wearing it in my pocket till pocket and it were worn out, — I alone there in the remote solitudes of Maine ? We have both travelled far since then ; but whither have you been travelling ? The whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then ; but now you can be jolly in your “nutshell.” Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially is? Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society, something better than a doctrine of personal rights, something more noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of powers and their consequent duties ; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest advocates. Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate to the spiritual possibilities of man ; now, social infidelity plus cotton and polite dining would seem to suffice for you. Ah, Heavcn ! is anything sadder than to see a grand imperial soul, long worthy and secure of all love and honor, at length committing suicide, not by dying, but by living ? Ill it is w hen they that do deepest homage to a great spirit can no longer pray for the increase of his days ; when there arises in their hearts a pleasure in the growing number of his years expressly as these constitute a deduction from the unknown sum total of those which have been appointed him; and when the utmost bravery of their affection must breathe, not Serus, but CITO in cœlum redeas ! O royal Lear of our literature, who have spurned from your love the dearest daughter of your thought, is it only left us to say, “How friendly is Death, — Death, who restores us to free relations with the whole, when our own fierce partialities have imprisoned and bound us hand and foot ” ?

Royal you are, royal in pity as in purpose; and you have done, nay, I trust may still be doing, imperishable work. If only you did not hate democracy so bitterly as to be perpetually prostrated by the recoil of your own gun ! Right or wrong in its inception, this aversion has now become a chronic ailment, which drains insatiably at the fountains of your spiritual force. I offer you the suggestion; I can do no more.

To have lost, in the hour of our trial, the fellowship of yourself, and of others in England whom we most delighted to honor, is a loss indeed. Yet we grieve a thousand times more for you than for ourselves; and are not absorbed in any grief. It is clear to us that the Eternal Providence has assigned us our tasks, not by your advice, nor by vote of Parliament, — astonishing to sundry as that may seem. Your opinion of the matter we hold, therefore, to be quite beside the matter; and drivel, like that of your nutshell-epic, by no means tends to make us wish that Providence had acted upon European counsel rather than upon His Own ! Moreover, we are very busy in these days, and can have small eye to the by-standers. We are busy, and are likely to be so long; for the peace that succeeds to such a war will be as dangerous and arduous as the war itself. We have as little time, therefore, to grieve as to brag or bluster ; we must work. We neither solicit nor repel your sympathy ; we must work, — work straight on, and let all that be as it can be.

We seek not to conceal even from you that our democracy has great weaknesses, as well as great strength. Mean, mercenary, and stolid men are not found in England alone; they are ominously abundant here also. We have lunatic radicalisms as well as sane, idiotic conservatisms as well as intelligent. Too much for safety, our politics are purulent, our good men over - apt to forget the objects of government in a besotted devotion to the form. It is possible we may yet discover that universal suffrage can be a trifle too universal, — that it should pause a little short of the stateprison. New York must see to it that the thief does not patronize the judge, and sit in the prisoner’s box as on the bench of a higher court. Our democracy has somewhat to learn ; it knows that it has somewhat to learn, and says cheerfully, “ What is the use of living without learning ? ”

What can we do but meet the future with an open intelligence and a stout heart ? And this I say, — I, who am almost an extreme dissenter from extreme democracy, — if our people bring to all future emergencies those qualities of earnestness, courage, and constancy which they have thus far contributed to the present, they will disgrace neither themselves nor their institutions; and it will be their honor more than once to extort some betrayal of dissatisfaction from those who, like yourself, are happiest to see a democracy behaving, not well, but ill.

“ Peter of the North,” then, has made up his mind. He is resolved on having three things : —

First, a government; a real government; a government not to be whistled down the wind by any jack (or jeff) who chooses to secede ; a government that will not dawdle with hands in pockets while this continent is converted into a maggotswarm of ten-acre empires;

Secondly, a government whose purpose, so far as it can act, shall be to forward every man on the path of his proper humanity;

Thirdly, a government constituted and operated, so far as shall finally prove possible, by the common intelligence and common conscience of the whole people.

This is Peter’s business at present: he is intently minding his business; and has been heard to mutter in his breast that “ it might be as well if others did the same.” What “others,” pray?