Nathaniel Macon and The Way Things Should Be
Nathaniel Macon, whose 250th birthday is December 16, 2008, is an important Founding Father almost unknown these days. Comparing Macon with the politicians of today gives us a benchmark as to how dreadfully far America has degenerated from the principles on which it was founded.
In his time Macon was widely admired by Americans as the perfect model of a republican statesman. By republican I mean republican with a small r. I definitely do not mean the Republican Party, which, from its very beginning, when it stole the name from better people, right up to this minute, has stood for the exact opposite of what Nathaniel Macon meant by republican government.
When North Carolina had occasion in the early 20th century to pick two figures to represent us in the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, we chose Zeb Vance and Charles Aycock. At the time it was natural to honour Vance who had seen us through the horrible war of conquest waged against us, and Aycock, who removed the last vestiges of Reconstruction. That's understandable, although it overlooked Macon, who might easily qualify as the greatest Tar Heel of all.
Macon was born in 1758 on a plantation in Warren County, where he lived his entire life. He was a student at what is now Princeton when the War of Independence broke out in 1775. He left school and joined the New Jersey militia on active service, and then went home and joined the North Carolina troops. He was offered but refused a commission and he refused also the bounty that was paid for enlisting. He served in the Southern campaigns until he was elected to the General Assembly near the end of the war while he was still in his 20s. In the next few years he was offered a place in the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress which he declined. It is noteworthy that his brother John voted against ratification of the new U.S. Constitution in both conventions of the sovereign people of North Carolina to consider that question; and that our State did not ratify until the first ten amendments, especially the Ninth and Tenth, were in place to limit the federal government.
As soon as the U.S. government went into operation, Hamilton and his Yankee friends, claiming that they were acting in behalf of "good government," began to turn the government into a centralised power and a money-making machine for themselves by banks, tariffs, government bonds, and other paper swindles that would be paid for out of the pockets of the farmers, who produced the tangible wealth of the country. To oppose this Macon accepted election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Second Congress. He served in the House 24 years and the Senate 13 years—representing North Carolina in congress from 1791 to 1828, from the age of 33 to the age of 70 when he retired voluntarily. He was Speaker for six years, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in both the House and Senate, and finally President Pro Tem of the Senate. He received numerous overtures to be a candidate for Vice-President and was twice offered appointments to the Cabinet, all of which he turned down. During all this time he never neglected his duties as justice of the peace and militia officer in Warren County. His last public service was to preside over the North Carolina constitutional convention of 1835, and he died two years later. The city of Macon, Georgia, Randolph-Macon College, and counties in AL, TN, and IL as well as NC were named for him.
During all this time Macon was admired because he never changed from the principles with which he began. What were these principles? The federal government should be tightly bound by the Constitution. It should not tax the people and spend money any more than was absolutely necessary for the things it was entitled to do, nor go into debt, which was just a way to make the taxpayers pay interest to the rich. Eternal vigilance was the price of liberty. Power was always stealing from the many to the few. Office-holders were to be watched closely and kept as directly responsible to the citizens as possible. A few words from Macon in Congress often stopped bills that proposed supposedly attractive measures. It might be nice to pay for everybody to go to college, or to build a fancy temple for the Supreme Court, or to issue bonds for rich people to invest in, or overturn a dictator 5,000 miles away. But the politicians had no right to take away the citizens' earnings for whatever they thought was good. The Constitution told them what they could do.
History showed that the stronger and more centralised a government became the less free were the people. And the richer the government and its politicians and beneficiaries became, the poorer were the people. That was what had always happened, but America, with governments created by the people, had a chance to avoid the bad tendencies of government of the past. As time went on, Macon realised more and more that preserving true republican principles was a losing cause, but in the company of John Randolph and John Taylor he never wavered even when most of his fellow Jeffersonians were willing to yield some ground.
The offices Macon held are not the important thing. Today politicians scramble to get into office so they can have honour and importance as well as make money and flatter their vanity. But Macon, like Washington and Jefferson, was not important and respected because he was elected to office. He was elected to office because he was important and respected. He never campaigned for an office. He never attended a party caucus. He never promised anyone patronage to support him. Macon was elected over and over and revered because of what he was.
John Randolph of Roanoke, literally on his death bed referred to Macon as the wisest man he ever knew. Thomas Jefferson called him "the last of the Romans," and he meant that as a high compliment—that Macon was the model of a selfless patriot and a principled republican. In fact, Macon was more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself.
The American Founders much admired the heroes of republican Rome—which is why George Washington has a statue in a toga—Roman heroes like Cincinnatus, who was plowing his fields when they came to him and said the republic was in peril. He left, took command of the army, defeated the enemy, and then returned to continue plowing his fields. He sought nothing for himself, only to serve his country and maintain its principles. This was the kind of republican hero that Macon represented to Americans. He valued the respect of his countrymen but had no ambition for profit or glory for himself. It was men ambitious for glory and profit who had subverted freedom throughout history.
A negative opinion of Macon was expressed by President John Quincy Adams in his secret diary. He excoriated Macon for being responsible for defeating many of Adams's schemes for a stronger and more meddlesome federal government. Adams, in the typical Yankee way, thought Macon opposed him only because he was not as smart as Adams himself. This even was written in secret at the same time Adams was trying to persuade Macon to be his Vice President.
Good Americans of the Founding and for several generations thereafter praised the idea of "republican simplicity." A free government of the people did not need the fancy costumes and ceremonies of European courts. This is why Jefferson walked to his inauguration in a plain suit, delivered his state of the Union message in writing rather than preaching to the assembled congressmen like a monarch on a throne, and made his White House social events as informal as possible.
Here is something else important to note about early American history. Genuine Southern aristocrats like Jefferson and Macon believed in government responsible to the people. The Northerners, who had no claim to aristocracy, wanted to use the government to aggrandize themselves. President John Adams rode around in a coach with white horses and insisted on being addressed as "Your Excellency." When Macon was living at ease among his 70 slaves, John Adams was fortifying his house in fear that American mobs might attack him like they were doing in France. Of course, Macon, like all the other Jeffersonians, knew without doubt that Northern attacks on slavery were malicious, counter-productive, and driven by lust for power rather than benevolence.
Here is another interesting fact about the North and the South that never gets into the history books. The history of the Revolution is written as if those who were fighting it were striving to achieve a strong central government for Americans. This is a lie promoted during the 19th century. It was true of some Revolutionary soldiers like Hamilton and Marshall. But it was not true of John Taylor, James Monroe, and St. George Tucker of Virginia, Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens of South Carolina, or James Jackson of Georgia. These and many others had fought the Revolution to get out from under a government that was levying taxes and sending troops and bureaucrats to restrict the liberty and prey on the property of Americans. That did not want to establish a government that had too much power and was too remote from the people. even if it was an American government. And, while New Englanders who had served three inactive months in the militia lined up to claim federal pensions for Revolutionary War service, the Southerners refused to accept money taxed from the people for doing their duty.
Government had to be kept as close to the people as possible. North Carolina in the beginning elected the General Assembly anew each year, and the General Assembly chose the governor for a one-year term. Macon opposed the change to longer terms in the constitutional revision of 1835. You can imagine what he thought about U.S. Senators serving six years and federal judges serving for life. These were no longer responsible to the people. Officials had to be known to the people and reviewed frequently to make sure they were behaving and not exceeding their powers. Politics should not be a profession. Politicians should make their own living just like everyone else. They were just citizens performing temporarily a service who would soon return to private life and live under the laws they had made.
Macon owned much land and many slaves and was a national hero. Yet he lived very simply in a rather remote location—so remote that I confess I once spent half a day driving around Warren County with three different sets of directions and never found it. He attended the Baptist Church accompanied by his slaves. He was buried very unostentatiously. As far as I can find only one portrait was ever painted of him, the one that was customarily made of Speakers of the House.
Nathaniel Macon summed up his philosophy in advice to a young Tar Heel: "Remember, you belong to a meek state and a just people, who want nothing but to enjoy the fruits of their labour honestly and lay out the profits in their own way."
By the end of his life Macon had realised that the cause of republicanism was lost at the federal level, and also that the North was determined to exploit and rule the South. South Carolina tried in 1832 to use "nullification," state interposition, to force the federal government back within the limits of the Constitution. After he read Andrew Jackson's proclamation against South Carolina, Macon told friends that it was too late for nullification. The Constitution was dead. The only recourse was secession—there was nothing left but for the South to get out from under the "Union" and govern itself.
Thirty years later, in the spring of 1861, the North Carolina convention met to ratify secession unanimously. Nathaniel Macon's son-in-law, Weldon N. Edwards, was in the president's chair.
Nathaniel Macon left us a invaluable legacy from which we can learn much about the way things should be.
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@197 PcH
I would be indebted to you if you could explain how any of what you posted is germane to this discussion, and how any of it refutes anything I've said, or answers any of my questions. Did you mean to post this in a different section? Or do you have me confused with someone who claimed that every New Englander was an abolitionist and that no New Englanders profited from the slave trade?
If this were indeed a junior high debate club you would be taken to task for this lengthy non-sequitur.
S.L. Toddard,
Abolitionists' willingness to use the federal government to impose a type of lifestyle on a nation of people who had declared independence from it, by way of expanding the government's power and turning it into an empire, is the evidence you are probably ignoring that abolitionists were power-hungry politicians rather than morally outraged humanitarians.
Mr. Meng @ 198
Is your question indeed merely academic? Your the answer to your question, "...who bought the slaves...?" would depend on what part of the antebellum period one was focusing on. For parts of that period, fresh slaves from Africa were bought by good folks from all across North America, the Caribbean and South America, including those in all of the thirteen British colonies which would eventually secede from the Crown. By 1860, in the union of constitutionally federated republics known as the United States, the vast majority of slaves held were in those states commonly called the Cotton States and the Border States, although most of the slaves by that time, with exception, were not freshly imported from Africa or even from the Caribbean as had been the case earlier in the 19th century. I am sure that Dr. Wilson can add greater detail and/or correct may narrative where necessary.
Any of us can be exploited for personal profit. I believe that Marx was fond of using that statement when referring to the capitalist/proletariat relationship. Among those who held slaves in the South were no few Northerners who had their cake, i.e. slave labor, and who could also eat it, i.e. no Africans to "taint" their households, local polities and states. There were, here in Louisiana, notable plantations spared the plundering and burning which was SOP for most plantations and yeoman farms, namely those owned by Northern interests.
Mr. Toddard @ 199
You likely have the course of this thread in the woof and the warp of this discussion better in mind than do I; however, I is not clear to me that PcH was directly addressing you. There is, I would note, the difference between a discussion and a debate. The "subtle" ad hominem in regard to "debate" could not be missed. I could have well missed it; however, I have not seen a response to the three scenarios which I gave you in response to one of your quires.
@201 - robert m. peters: Sir, if you will re-read my post carefully, you'll note that I used an adjective to mark the predominant market for slaves in the North American colonies: the adjective is "major". Everyone, who knows his American history, knows that slaves were a part of the New England colonies, but not to the degree they were in the South. My point, which I gather you didn't understand, was to emphasize that for the slave trade to be profitable or successful for those Northerners involved, there had to be a major Buyer.
@ 202
Mr Peters, PcH said: "Maybe Toddard should pull out a junior high history book and read up on the Triangular Trade", the implication being clear enough, I think.
@201 - robert m. peters,
Or to put it another way, Mr. Peters, in what region of the British colonies in North America was the greatest number of slaves kept?
Mr. Meng @ 203 and 204
I do not believe that I misunderstood. I provided a quick summary narrative in which I included the answer. I believe that the 1860 census reveals that approximately 95% of Africa in the U.S. resided in the South. If I recall correctly, about twelve million Africans came to the New World between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Of those, 645,000 to 650,000 were brought to the territories which would later become the U.S. Since there were about 4 million slaves according to the 1860 census, most slaves by that date had been born here and were not direct results of the triangular slave trade, although their ancestors had obviously been so brought here.
Perhaps I am wrong, but there seems to hid an agenda behind your question. We Southerners have never denied the obvious, i.e. most slaves in 1860 in the union of constitutionally federated republics lived in and worked in the Cotton States and Border States. Those who have denied the obvious are those sections of the country which have buried their own slave-owning past, have denied their profits from the work of slaves and their profits from the slave trade which went well beyond 1866. It seems that when such facts are pointed out, their only retort is to say, "But where did the majority of slaves work in 1860?" It is certainly not a moral argument and not even a good quid pro quo argument.
Mr. Toddard @ 204
Your reference at 199 was a reference to PcH at 197. There, in the post which you referenced, he did not seem to be addressing you. As you will note, I ceded that you may well know the thread pursuant to those who had addressed you better than I. Thank you for the actual PcH reference which elicited your response.
The most important thing to understand about slavery is who brought them. Who waged it and perpetuated it?
The slave trade was early on abolished by the European powers. Even long before then, it was almost exclusively dominated by New England shippers under the English flag. After then, it was exclusively New England's dominion.
Those who brought the trade to these shores, also bought them.
Because the Triangular Trade was exclusively in the hands of New England, slavery was a peculiarly New England institution.
New England forbade the South from abolishing the trafficking, as the South tried many times, because the whole of the New England economy was dependent on it. New England industry and finance were built exclusively on the returns of slavery, directly through the slave-trade and also through exclusive shipping rights over the agricultural products of the trade, enforced by tariff laws.
In other words, well-connected Northern abolitionists, whom history show were handsomely funded by New England elites beholden to slave-profits, were obviously gratuitous.
This is germane because it is clarifies what Dr. Wilson says:
New England was, in practice, hostile to the abolition of its slave-industry. As noted above, it had forbidden the South to abolish it and its whole economy depended upon it.
Indeed, after the war, New England elites made sure that things remained much as before, but with the South plunged into a hundred years of abject poverty. This is malicious. New England treated the South literally as conquered territory and overthrew the Constitution permanently in order to deny the continent its rights as free states. This too is malicious. It is also demonstrably a power-grab.
That Northern abolitionism (as opposed to Southern abolitionism, which was active and healthy) was insincere is clear: the New England elites who bankrolled abolitionism, were utterly dependent upon slavery, and imposed financial grey slavery on the whole continent with the power they had gained from ages of running the Triangular Trade. But I repeat myself.
Thus, Dr. Wilson made no sweeping generalization in the above quote, but made a pithy summary of what every man should know. There was no space nor was it germane to connect the dots as any knowledgeable man can do – "malice and lust for power" – is.
Further, a discussion of the slavery in the South (which the North imposed) is not germane, but a discussion of New England disingenousness and perfidy is.
In contrast to that despotism is the example of Southern republicanism:
Who exploited the slaves who were tortured and died in the holds of the slave-ships? Who changed the US from a treaty between free republics into an empire – from their profits in exploiting these slaves?
Mr. Toddard, you've kept this thread going for several days past it's prime. Am I the only one who forgot what the original argument was over?
S.L. Toddard @ 187
"I was merely commenting on what civilized persons in the 20th century (and now the 21st century) *do* believe."
So therefore anyone here who has expressed a contrary opinion to Mr. Toddard's on the question of slavery is uncivilized.
Toddard, this is a simon-pure example of what is called Whiggery. It's also a profound arrogance.
I also think slavery was wicked. But I'm not prepared to denounce everyone else here with a different opinion as "uncivilized."
Also, let everyone note that in this post at 187 Toddard falls back on religious authority as his last resort. Do we have a Bible-thumper in disguise here?
Since Mr/Ms Toddard can only argue by analogy and in the teeth of explicit Scriptural passages, and since he/she refuses to confront the fact that Christianity did not prohibit slavery, I can only conclude that he is either in agreement with Dr. Wilson or too dumb to take part in this discussion, which by the authority vested in me, I pronounce closed. Many people have disliked slavery and not always for bad reasons. It is an institution, like the drinking of distilled spirits or industrial capitalism, that lends itself to abuse.. In America, the fact that it produced a multi-racial society with a vast class of alien people who were utterly dependent on others, this certainly gave many sensible people pause. Mr. Jefferson would have liked to have found a way of eliminating slavery, but as he said during the Missouri agitation ginned up by John Adams's rotten son, "We have the wolf by the ears and dare not let him go." Jefferson knew that the Yankees were Hell-bent on breaking up union over the slavery issue, with the ultimate goal of putting it together under their control. JQ Adams says exactly that in a letter. Prof. Wilson knows vastly more about this than I do, but anyone who even skims the letters and documents of that era will gain some understanding of reality.
Someone must point out an obvious fact when a discussion includes slavery:
Slavery is an African tradition which predates the transatlantic slave trade and which is practiced to this day in Africa whereby African slaves are sold to willing buyers in Asia, particularly in the Islamic countries.
The American slavery era ended years ago and yankees are still flogging the South over it. As always, the yankees have a deep desire to rule over others and to control their fellow men. That may have been what prompted Hammond's remark about yankees changing the name of slavery without actually surrendering control over the enslaved.
I thought the discussion of slavery was "pronounced closed?"