Liberty or Justice for All?: A Conversation across the American Centuries

Liberty or Justice for All?

Also by Philip F. Gura

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The Life of William Apess, Pequot

Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel

The American Antiquarian Society, 1812–2012: A Bicentennial History

American Transcendentalism: A History

Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical

C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796–1873

Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829–1831

America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (with James Bollman)

The Crossroads of American History and Literature

A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660

Critical Essays in American Transcendentalism (with Joel Myerson)

The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance

Liberty or Justice for All?

A CONVERSATION ACROSS THE AMERICAN CENTURIES

Philip F. Gura

The University of Georgia Press

Athens

© 2023 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948284

ISBN: 9780820363127 (hardback)

ISBN: 9780820363110 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780820363103 (ebook)

For David D. Hall

He had an uncommon thirst for knowledge, in the pursuit of which he spared no Cost or Pains. . . . Tho’ his Principles were Calvinistic, yet he called no Man, Father. He thought and judged for himself and was truly very much of an Original.

SAMUEL HOPKINS ON JONATHAN EDWARDS (1765)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Jonathan Edwards: Heaven Is a World of Love

CHAPTER TWO

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Infinitude of the Common Man

CHAPTER THREE

William James: The Active Life

CHAPTER FOUR

John Rawls: The Search for Twentieth-Century Justice

Coda

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has had a long gestation, for most of its history massaged and polished by Thomas Lebien, who has edited several of my books. I thank him for having confidence in the importance of writing about this group of thinkers, particularly at this stage of our nation’s history.

I also note my indebtedness to those scholars who most recently have themselves stressed the significance of Edwards, Emerson, James, and Rawls, particularly the late Robert D. Richardson Jr., whose conversation and scholarship long has been an inspiration. And the same with this volume’s dedicatee, David D. Hall, each of whose many works exemplifies the nature of dedicated and uncompromising scholarship, inoculated as it is against the latest academic fever.

Finally, I have much appreciated the continuing support of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and particularly of its most recent chair, Mary Floyd-Wilson, who always has appreciated and expedited my work.

Liberty or Justice for All?

Introduction

This book focuses on four thinkers—the theologian Jonathan Edwards, the author Ralph Waldo Emerson, the psychologist William James, and the moral philosopher John Rawls—who indelibly marked American history through their publication of large-scale theoretical works that offer blueprints for the realization of a just society. In particular, their works illustrate the nation’s struggles to guarantee a modicum of freedom for each individual, as well as of justice for all of its citizens.

Many others—Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and W. E. B. Du Bois, to name but a few of the most obvious—also spoke to this issue but not with both the immediate and lasting effects of the above quartet’s works. With their focus on the creation of a free and just society, these individuals, though separated in time, seem almost in imaginary conversation with each other.

My purpose is to follow a prominent thread in an elaborate braided fabric, from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. As this thread was woven through the emerging American tapestry, four concerns, often in conflict, gave it texture: God, self, community, and the state. How these four concepts connect or intersect composes a distinct and gripping narrative of people, places, and ideas. The arc of this history moves from the presence and then gradual receding of an imminent God; to a reliance first on the individual, then on democratic community; and finally, in the twentieth century, on the accelerating growth of an ever more present and intrusive state. The chief question becomes, if once America was conceived as one nation under God, how did it change as its citizens learned that belief in both the divine and the divinely inspired individual was becoming less and less determinative in their lives, superseded by the nation-state?

If every American is guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should this be a nation where the individual reigns supreme? Or, if all people are created equal, is it one in which everyone should always look out for the other? In the Pledge of Allegiance, a version of which was first formulated during the Civil War but did not reach its final form until 1954, Americans speak of a nation with liberty and justice for all, but when has this ever been more than an unrealized ideal?

Historians have often described this choice between self or society as that between classical liberalism, which champions the rights of individuals in a laissez-faire, market economy, or civic republicanism, with its emphasis on placing the good of the commonwealth ahead of personal interest. At least since Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay’s heroic attempt in the Federalist Papers (1788), the nation has attempted to hold these opposing value systems in delicate balance, trying to realize the promise of both liberty and justice for all (and in the mid-twentieth-century’s version, even adding, as though trying to return to its earliest incarnation, that it was "one nation under God"). But when things go awry—as, say, in the constitutional scrum following the Declaration of Independence; in the 1850s, when slavery threatened national cataclysm; in the 1890s, when eastern European immigrants flooded in, challenging their neighbors with strange religions and folkways; in the 1960s, when battles over civil rights and the Vietnam War rocked the nation from coast to coast; or again in 2016, when the presidential race divided the nation as it had not been since the Civil War—how would Americans accommodate the necessary redefinition of their national ideals?

Over three centuries, there evolved certain habits of thought used to address and resolve such conflicts. But even today the questions remain. Is it self or society that demands one’s allegiance? What are individuals’ obligations to their communities or to the state, and what does the state owe them? Most citizens, for example, pay taxes for local schools even when they have no students in them; but do they evince the same generosity when immigrants displaced by war need the basic necessities of life in their new homes? Should the rich be taxed at a higher rate to create new jobs for the poor in the ghettoized urban environment? How far do the rights of private ownership extend when one’s land is needed for the completion of a new interstate highway? Just which individual rights should a society guarantee, and what kinds of behavior should it encourage? And, as the United States moved from a concern with what people owed God to what citizens owed each other and themselves, what was religion’s role in an increasingly secularized, pluralistic state? At least since the seventeenth century, when English Puritans sought to create in the Massachusetts Bay Colony a New Jerusalem based on an ethic of Christian charity, Americans have sought to resolve the conflicts and contradictions arising from answers to such questions. How they have done so comprises an important part of America’s intellectual and cultural legacy. As we still grapple with them, we can do worse than reconsider four thinkers who understood what was at stake in their resolution.

Jonathan Edwards was a New England clergyman praised in Europe as well as British North America as one of the eighteenth century’s great minds. He was a product and supporter of extensive religious revivals that swept the continent from Nova Scotia to Georgia, championing a starkly Calvinist worldview, and worshipping an incomprehensible and omnipotent deity who controlled the work of redemption, even as Edwards encouraged hope for a renewed Christian community based in Gospel charity.

Beginning in the 1730s from his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, later as a missionary to Native Americans along the frontier, and then as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), Edwards encouraged, explained, and defended the Great Awakening. He even wondered if the recent revivals signaled the beginning of the Millennium, the prophesied thousand years of peace and joy that would precede Christ’s triumphant return.¹

To hasten efforts toward that glorious time, Edwards promulgated a social ethic based in universal love, regardless of gender, class, or race, for he believed that God’s saving grace knew no such distinctions. In 1746, in his Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, he outlined twelve signs of truly religious affections or emotions and considered the most important those that have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice. Some twenty years later, in his Nature of True Virtue, a text that English political philosopher and novelist William Godwin later cited admiringly in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Edwards went even further.² He declared that true virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to being in general, that is, in love to all of God’s creation. Through the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century to the Civil War, his theology remained the starting point for serious debates about peoples’ relation to God and both their and God’s relations to civil society.

Edwards’s ideas did not go unchallenged. In attempting to make his ideas more accessible, some of his disciples diluted the grand vision that he articulated, the better to meet the challenge from, and so to align it with, emergent utilitarianism. As early as the Revolutionary period, some began to measure virtue not as part of the distant logic of the Gospel plan but, as Benjamin Franklin put it in his Autobiography, by the nature of man alone considered.³ From here, it was a small step to the proposition that the general welfare should be considered not as the greatest good as God intends it but as the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people as one understands it. As the founders of the nation grappled with the proper balance of liberalism and civic republicanism to attain this goal, the pendulum swung back and forth, particularly through the influence of such utilitarian philosophers as Francis Hutcheson and Jeremy Bentham on James Madison and other of the Founding Fathers, and John Stuart Mill’s on the subsequent generation.

But even if Franklin’s and Jefferson’s deism pushed them to view the world as increasingly man- (and woman-) centered, the United States as a whole remained Christian. The new emphasis on each individual’s free will meant different things to different individuals for whom the spiritual life remained a vivid reality, be their faith conservative or liberal. To a Free Will Baptist or Methodist, for example, it engendered the thought that human effort itself was efficacious for one’s salvation; while, to others, the Calvinists’ (like Edwards’s) emphasis on God’s sovereign grace remained the only way to salvation.

Nowhere was this shift to the inherent worth—even the divinity—of the individual more visible than in the career and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a liberal Christian—he began in the Unitarian ministry—who by the end of the Civil War had been anointed the country’s representative philosopher. Writing a century after Edwards but aware and appreciative of his works—one of Emerson’s friends recalled that he was fond of acknowledging his spiritual affinity to Edwards—Emerson followed his father into Unitarianism, a liberal Protestant denomination with its center in the Northeast. (One wit termed it the brotherhood of man, under the Fatherhood of God, in the neighborhood of Boston!) Soon enough, however, Emerson realized that his faith too often lacked an affective, spiritual dimension. It was, he complained, corpse-cold. He began to read widely in English and European Romanticism, and by the mid-1830s grafted onto his liberal Christianity an empowering belief in each individual’s innate divinity.

When one understood that the currents of the universal being flowed through one and made one (as Emerson put it in his seminal book Nature) part or particle of God, one gained an inerrant moral compass. The deepest knowledge of spiritual reality is thus congenial to the mind of each individual. This proposition informed what became known as New England transcendentalism, a constellation of ideas that defined the nation’s first bona fide intellectual coterie, with among its members abolitionist Theodore Parker, feminist Margaret Fuller, champion of the laboring classes Orestes Brownson, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau.

Unlike Edwards, who held that only some people were among God’s elect, Emerson proclaimed that the transformative religious experience that marked one’s election was an integral part of humanity’s moral constitution and so available to all. By his reading, the Gospels announced that every person is a son or daughter of God, connected to the Oversoul. And when one lives from the spirit—directs one’s behavior in accordance with conscience or intuition—one becomes truly self-reliant, a proposition that dovetailed with the political principles of the nation’s young democracy and is typified in Emerson’s most well-known essay, Self-Reliance.

In a period of transformative changes in notions of space and time that accompanied such inventions as the railroad, the telegraph, the steamboat, photography, as well as industrialization as a whole, Emerson’s essay struck a nerve. The awakened and transformed individual would innately know how to respond to these changes and how to go forward confidently as a citizen in the new nation, true both to him-or herself, as well as to the citizenry as a whole, the least of whom were as divine as she or he.

Edwards’s conception of the good society was based in social cooperation and cemented with love, but he doubted that such cooperation alone could improve people because it might sap what rapidly was becoming one’s treasured individuality. The less government we have the better, he proclaimed in his essay Politics. The antidote to the widespread social dissonance was the cultivation of private character in ways that then would spill over into good citizenship. If government did not encourage self-culture as its main goal, it would become corrupt, beholden primarily to property interests rather than to the country’s population as a whole.

The more one lived by conscience, Emerson believed, the less government would be necessary, a belief echoed by his friend and onetime disciple Henry David Thoreau in his now-famous essay on civil disobedience: There will never be, he wrote, a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.⁴

Beginning in the 1840s, however, when Emerson gave a celebrated antislavery address in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, he realized that in the general populace there was not strict nor widespread enough reliance on the moral sentiment to attain justice without some sort of artificial restraints on rampant self-centeredness, what Edwards understood as the most visible mark of humanity’s sinfulness. Unfortunately, conscience alone would not end the southerners’ devotion to and defense of slavery, nor the northern Cotton Whigs’ toleration of a southern economy whose chief product—cotton—they desperately needed. It took internecine warfare to destroy the horror of chattel slavery.

As Abraham Lincoln knew, the Civil War demanded unprecedented sacrifice for and unquestioning allegiance to the commonwealth, now defined as the Union. Emerson’s once self-sufficient and triumphant individual became only a tiny cog in a vast war machine. This diminution of what he once celebrated as an imperial self only accelerated after 1865 as the nation scrambled to recover from the war’s devastating consequences, for reconstruction of the Union was unfeasible without large-scale industrialization as well as federal intervention.

Even through these dark years, though, many Americans were loath to abandon Emerson’s promise that all was possible for those who strived for self-improvement. Impatient with his more abstruse philosophical principles, they simplified some of his ideas and simply ignored others. They applied his thought more to the material than to the spiritual realm and aligned it with the demands of the market economy. There his acolytes became less self-reliant individuals than champions of laissez-faire capitalism and participants in the rough-and-tumble of the increasingly divisive two-party political system. Many people twisted and turned his words, isolating single sentences from their complex context to support a myth of the American as a self-made individual who hitch[ed his] wagon to a star for his betterment, now more and more often defined, as it had been for Franklin, as economic success. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie put it this way: Aim for the highest . . . for, as Emerson says, ‘no one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourselves.’⁵

But proud of Emerson’s ever-growing international reputation and ignoring the larger implications of his vision, Americans touted him as a national institution, the veritable sage of Concord. They crowned him as the philosopher king of rugged individualism who counseled Americans to prevail, against all odds, particularly where their self-interest was concerned.

Eventually, Emerson’s idealism, tempered as it was by his growing sense that ethical engagement itself was the only means of spiritual fulfillment, became increasingly out of step in a world influenced less by the hand of God than by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, now applied to the social realm by sociologists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. In the late nineteenth century, visions of a just society based in love for perfectly equal, individual souls persisted here and there—among champions of cooperative ownership of factories, say; or proponents of a Social Gospel who sought to apply New Testament principles to the nation’s manifold social problems; or in utopian fiction like reformer Edward Bellamy’s immensely popular Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). But these efforts alone could not stay the robber barons who dominated what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner aptly dubbed the Gilded Age, rooted firmly in continued dilution of the nation’s once divinely ordained purpose as well as in diminution of the power and significance of the individual.

To understand and accommodate this brave new world from which God seemed gradually withdrawing if not was wholly absent, William James brought to bear ideas both from Edwards, whom he cited approvingly as a master psychologist of religious experience, and from his literal godfather, Emerson. James resituated Edwards’s Calvinism and Emerson’s transcendentalism within a new set of philosophical and psychological principles—grounded in pragmatism and radical empiricism (the belief that knowledge flows exclusively from experience)—and transformed how Americans understood individual and social responsibility, through acceptance and encouragement of pluralistic community.

From his father, a disciple of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the French socialist Charles Fourier, James inherited the belief that selfishness is the cardinal sin and, conversely, that man reaches his redeemed state not in isolation but only in society. James also treasured the cash-value or usefulness of each person’s experience, spiritual or otherwise, and heartily embraced Darwin’s understanding that life