“[W]ho has seen clearest the nature of the new Union for which we are fighting?” Charles Eliot Norton asked a friend in early 1863.Footnote ¹ Norton, who was then preparing a series of lectures at Harvard “On some Characteristics of the Medieval Revival of Learning,” was no one's idea of a politician.Footnote ² Yet in the final years of the war he emerged at the center of a small circle of intellectuals, journalists, and editors who subtly adapted the nation's political principles to the carnage and chaos of the sectional conflict. Though derided by later generations as the so-called “genteel tradition” – as effete, ineffectual elitists – the formative experience of that tradition was in helping to transform the war for the Union into a revolutionary moral crusade.Footnote ³

To list Norton's organizational and literary efforts from 1863 to 1868 is to identify several of the most influential voices of elite public opinion during those crucial years. Norton served as the editor of the New England Loyal Publication Society, one of most important disseminators of pro-Union propaganda organized during the war. And in October 1863 he became the coeditor, along with James Russell Lowell, of the North American Review, the most prominent quarterly in America.

But it was in organizing an entirely new weekly journal in 1865, significantly titled The Nation, that Norton came closest to identifying the answer to his question. The editor he chose for the project, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, quickly established himself as the most influential journalist in the country. “An Irishman of English ancestry,” as he liked to describe himself, Godkin had lived in America for less than a decade when he was hired, a relatively unknown figure, as editor of The Nation and began building it into the preeminent political journal in the country. “To my generation,” William James wrote, “Godkin's was certainly the towering influence in all thought concerning public affairs, and indirectly his influence has certainly been more pervasive than that of any other writer of the generation, for he influenced other writers who never quoted him, and determined the whole current of discussion.”Footnote ⁴ A profound irony, however, marked the beginning of this happy marriage of man and magazine, for Norton, as the priest who presided over the ceremony, knew full well that Godkin did not fully share his conviction on the fundamental question The Nation was established to promote – the enfranchisement of black Americans.

Initially financed by abolitionists, The Nation was envisioned by its original backers as a successor to The Liberator, a high-minded journal devoted to rethinking what the northern abolitionist movement should become in the aftermath of emancipation. The problem was a serious one, for the war destroyed not only slavery, but also the political framework in which the abolitionists had operated. Disunion, uncompromising moral suasion, and even insurrection were the only viable instruments of emancipation available in the antebellum polity, and it was their willingness to embrace these means that distinguished abolitionists from all other anti-slavery northerners. After the war, however, the next logical step in the abolitionist cause was inescapably embedded in the larger project of redefining the American polity as a whole. As Norton recognized, the effort to incorporate black citizens fully into “the American system of democracy” required a clear understanding of what that system would become as it emerged from a revolutionary civil war. The sharp moral thrust of the abolitionist agenda needed to broaden its intellectual focus to cover all aspects of postwar national politics. And it was for this reason that Norton, who was not associated with the antebellum abolitionist movement, was entrusted with organizing the editorial talent for the postwar abolitionist journal.Footnote ⁵

In promoting Godkin as editor, Norton did not deliberately betray the original mission of The Nation, but he was guilty of willfully deceiving his financial backers, who expected the journal to champion the political rights of black Americans above all else. Having edited a few of Godkin's essays for the North American Review, Norton knew that passages he had refused to publish – and over which the two men had privately argued – would have made Godkin totally unacceptable to his abolitionist backers. At the same time, Godkin's talents as an editor were truly exceptional, and his willingness to advocate for the political and civil rights of the freedmen was sincere, even though his personal commitment to that cause was not. “It is well known that we go as far as the farthest in claiming for the black men of the South equality as citizens with the white men, subject to no other conditions or restrictions than such as apply impartially to all, white and black,” read one entirely characteristic editorial in 1865.Footnote ⁶

But careful readers noticed, right from the beginning, that Godkin was not quite espousing the same political ideals that so many high-minded northerners believed the war had vindicated, much as he might camouflage the difference. He diminished the traditional preoccupations of republicanism – of communal self-government – and gave utilitarian liberalism – of an impersonal state protecting the private rights of individual persons and property – a greater emphasis than ever before at the national level. In a sense, the difference was a small matter of emphasis. But in the swift current of a revolution, crowded with competing principles, small differences can move the whole stream of history.

Emancipation and racial equality were, of course, the central issues – the fulcrum on which the politics of the era turned. But American ideas on race and equality – whether Norton's, Godkin's, or anyone else's – are only intelligible in relation to the broader system of cultural values and institutions that defined the polity as a whole. The story of northern reformers’ and intellectuals’ evolving attitude toward Reconstruction has been told many times, and the original version was articulated more fully in the pages of The Nation than anywhere else. It has been interpreted and reinterpreted as a disillusionment with a cause grossly undermined by corruption and incompetence, as a craven abandonment of hard-won ideals and a betrayal of the men and women struggling to make those ideals a reality, as a pragmatic acceptance of the political limitations in any violent revolution, and as an inevitable adjustment to the mounting crises of the northern industrial order.

There is, of course, some truth in all of these interpretations.Footnote ⁷ The careers of Norton and Godkin, however, are especially striking examples of how all of these intellectual currents moved in relation to one another, channeled by a particular vision of the American polity, as events swept them along and dispersed them in the muddled terrain of the Gilded Age. Americans believed their republic was a uniquely successful embodiment of the principle that all legitimate power is derived from, and exercised by, the people constituting a sovereign political community.Footnote ⁸ The Civil War and Reconstruction culminated and, ultimately, discredited that faith among intellectuals as they confronted a dilemma that their democratic ideals could not resolve. A commitment to democratic self-government, in an overwhelmingly racist society, unavoidably empowered the prejudice that excluded black Americans from participating in it, just as a viable commitment to racial equality unavoidably required at least a partial rejection of the ideal of democratic self-government. As the ideal of political freedom, rooted in the antebellum era, proved self-defeating, American intellectuals gave up on the promise of the old Union perfected and turned, increasingly, toward Europe as a model to emulate rather than scorn.Footnote ⁹

Norton's and Godkin's friendship, their private correspondence and published writings, provide a fascinating window into a set of ideas in motion during a pivotal era in American political thought, as an entirely new conception of the American republic emerged from the failure of the old.

To preview the argument that follows: the concept of civilization was the key to the intellectual collaboration between Norton and Godkin, and, more broadly, an important link that allowed American intellectuals to move seamlessly in abandoning one set of ideals for another. Norton and Godkin were allies in the cause of “civilization,” even as ambiguities contained in that lofty word softened essential differences between them. “Civilization” referred to both internalized and external conditions – to a culture defined by its moral and spiritual commitments and to a set of technological and organizational capacities that mark a particular stage of economic and social development; it referred to the entirety of a human community and to its essence – to the collaboration of all members and to the rarefied achievements of only a few; it implied an impartial commitment to human dignity as the basic measure of a civilization – hence “the barbarism of slavery” – and a justification for exploitation and even extermination – hence the “triumph of civilization over barbarism.” More than any other concept in this era, “civilization” was both thoroughly racialized even as it served as a critique of racial chauvinism.Footnote ¹⁰

The Civil War enlivened Norton's faith in the American republic, renewing a belief that its defining principles, unfettered by the galling inconsistency of slavery, offered the greatest possible hope for the onward moral advancement of civilization. Godkin initially deferred to these aspirations without fully sharing them. No sudden reversal or abrupt change of principle marked their political outlook. But their relationship quickly shifted. Norton's public influence waned and his expansive democratic vision came to seem increasingly irrelevant; eventually, it was derided and dismissed as a genteel form of reactionary croaking. And Godkin, while deferring to his friend's fondest hopes without sharing them, helped turn an entire generation of American intellectuals away from the earnest republicanism of the Civil War and toward the blinkered liberalism of the Gilded Age – of genteel opinions and stunted politics.Footnote ¹¹

Born in 1827, Charles Eliot Norton was the son of Andrews Norton, a Unitarian minister and Harvard theology professor, who was also the most formidable critic of the Transcendentalist movement, along with its inspiration in German idealism, in favor of Lockean empiricism. Norton's maternal grandfather, Samuel Eliot, was a merchant who amassed a fortune after the Revolution and, at his passing in 1820, was rumored to have been “the richest man who has ever died in Boston.” This double inheritance of shrewd business sense and brilliant erudition made Norton eminently typical of his class, for “the distinguishing characteristic of Boston's elite,” as Norton's biographer has written, “was the melding, achieved to perhaps a unique degree in American history, of the lives of the mind and of the counting-house.”Footnote ¹² One might add that never before or since in American history has such an exacting sense of social responsibility been shown by elites enjoying such a modest degree of privilege.Footnote ¹³

Upon graduating from Harvard at eighteen, Norton went to work as a clerk in the countinghouse of the firm Bullard and Lee, where, as he later recalled, he “used to freeze in winter and to roast in summer overseeing the warehousing of thousands of bags of Rio coffee, or thousands of bales of Calcutta hides.”Footnote ¹⁴ His merchant career lasted a total of nine years, from 1846 to 1855. It coincided with the beginning of an economic boom that transformed global commerce, along with the role of both Boston's and Norton's social class in that commerce. Railroads to the West and steamships on the Atlantic both undermined Boston's position in global trade. And the increased pace of travel and communication shattered the thick cultural framework that made a business career seem attractive to a man like Norton. A more energetic, frenetic pace of capitalism began to overwhelm the steady discipline of the countinghouse, and Boston's resistance to the change was measured by its declining significance relative to the heady economic growth of the country. Men like Norton were pushed aside.Footnote ¹⁵ Though Norton himself was indelibly marked by the social and cultural traditions that began to unravel in his youth, his outlook was simultaneously molded by his experience with the forces transforming his world in the very moment that he adopted its ideals as his own. And his perception of Boston was a microcosm for what he saw happening to the antebellum polity as a whole.

What Lincoln experienced in anguish, the horrifying corruption of the republic he revered as sacred, Norton encountered with the sense of normalcy that usually accompanies one's first mature impressions of the world. “Our Republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust,” Lincoln said in 1854, but Norton had never been in awe of the supposedly pristine version; the garment had always seemed a little shabby to his eyes. Norton was still in his teens when the United States invaded Mexico, which brought the first great tear in the fabric of antebellum nationalism. But that war, and the controversy around it, were just one example of tendencies that seemed to grow more and more glaring in the decade before the Civil War, a period of tremendous material prosperity and appalling moral and political decay. As a result, the perceived economic threat of democracy receded almost to the vanishing point as moral critiques acquired a visceral urgency from events. The majority in America did not threaten the wealthy, but it did threaten anyone who criticized slavery too harshly or, in the South, treated the institution as anything less than sacrosanct, while also bullying weaker countries and failing to address the alarming growth of poverty in Northern cities.

“It was the act of the majority which doomed Socrates to death,” Norton wrote in a youthful attack on the democratic theories of the early 1850s. “It was the act of the majority which has established the present arbitrary ruler in France. Of all tyranny, that of the majority has been the most fearful.”Footnote ¹⁶ Among political philosophers, this was a simple truism when Norton wrote it. But its precise meaning inevitably changes with the intent of the author at a particular moment in time – on the nature of the majority he or she fears. Norton's book has often been wrongly interpreted as a reactionary polemic against democratic government.Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, however, Norton's essay was a vigorous defense of American Whig principles then in danger of being abandoned, principles that were perfectly compatible with a faithful commitment to the nation's democratic experiment. His target was not democracy per se but the faith in democracy as an automatic solution the problem of political morality.

Slavery, Norton believed, was a symptom, not a cause, of the more fundamental problem of immorality in a political system accountable to no external authority except the moral sense of the community. But Norton also distrusted the abolitionists’ emphasis on individual moral catharsis, the spontaneous, ecstatic conversion, that he believed was as fickle in religion as in politics. To proclaim a moral truth is easy, but to realize it as a durable achievement over the selfish nature of man meant advancing civilization in the broadest sense. His response to John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry was telling. “There has been no rhetoric or mere words in his talk,” Norton wrote admiringly.

Brown's example, he predicted, would do more “than all the anti-slavery tracts and novels that ever were written.”Footnote ¹⁹ And the glimmer of hope he found in Brown's example expanded into a sublime faith during the war that followed.

“We are not making war to reestablish an old order of things, but to set up a new one,” Norton wrote in September of 1861.Footnote ²⁰ Military victory, he believed, would be hollow unless achieved as the fruit of a long, grinding struggle through which the nation would come to a new sense of itself:

Each military defeat seemed to strengthen Norton's faith. “The harder the war is for us the better it is for the negro. We are not yet worthy of peace,” he wrote privately during the bleakest phase of the Union war effort in the spring of 1863.Footnote ²¹

Norton believed the war represented a repudiation of the heedless individualism that had diminished the American ideal of liberty until it meant little more than the mere animal aspiration for comfort, security, and survival. The great struggle was bringing Americans to “a juster sense than they before possessed of the value of individual life … Men are nothing in the count – man is everything.” The great advantage America enjoyed over Europe – its material abundance – Norton counted as a curse, fostering a narrow selfishness and crude materialism that had all but blinded the country to the higher obligations of justice. The horrendous suffering of the war, however, proved

The war, in other words, had proven that the doctrine “all men are created equal” could be extended from the realm of religion and morals into a workable system of politics. Equality, in this sense, did not mean all men have an equal right to be protected by a liberal state. Indeed, it meant precisely the opposite – that all men have an equal capacity to govern in accordance with the highest ideals of their civilization. “Our ideal commonwealth” Norton wrote, “rests upon the foundation of individual morality, and its form is determined not by external authority or theoretical considerations, but by the moral sense of its members, and their capacity for self-control as determined by their moral civilization.”Footnote ²³

The crucial aspect of this ideal, the element that distinguished it from classical liberalism, was the denial of an external authority even to protect the individual. Personal freedom and political freedom were fundamentally related in Norton's thought. The state withered away among the voluntary collaboration of enlightened equals. The fear, which the antebellum experience almost seemed to confirm, was that this ideal was self-negating: the practice of equality contradicts the moral principle; a society devolves into a chaotic, selfish scramble as its members are absolved of any obligation to an external structure of authority. But the Civil War had presented the galvanizing spectacle of an egalitarian society voluntarily expending blood and treasure in defense of its own animating ideal. Though initially dismissive of President Lincoln, Norton gradually saw his public statements as one of the most hopeful signs of the new order coming into being. As “arguments seriously addressed by one in power to the conscience and reason of the citizens of the commonwealth,” Norton marveled, Lincoln's public statements were “permanent precedents – examples of the possibility of the co-existence of a strong government with entire and immediate dependence upon and direct appeal to the people.”Footnote ²⁴

Norton's optimism, however naive, did not rest on a willful obliviousness to the facts that complicated his hopeful view of the war effort. He himself worried occasionally whether “we are not going on too fast toward despotism?” as he wrote to a friend in 1862.Footnote ²⁵ One of Norton's closest confidants, the English cultural critic John Ruskin, whom he admired as much as any of his contemporaries, scolded him harshly about the war. “The miserable idiocy of the whole has been your mixing up a fight for dominion – (the most insolent and tyrannical – and the worst conducted, – in all history) – with a soi disant fight for liberty,” Ruskin wrote in 1863. “If you want the slaves to go free – let their masters go free first,” Ruskin suggested, and then fight the pure cause of emancipation untainted by the motive of conquest. “But you know perfectly well no fight could be got up on those terms.”Footnote ²⁶ A year later, during the most violent summer of the war, Ruskin wrote a short, bitter note ending his friendship with Norton in disgust over his support for the northern cause.

Such a letter – and such a cruel image – from a friend Norton had considered almost as a mentor must have cut as deep as any single letter could. But it did not change his view of the war.

In his most elaborate meditation on the historical significance of the war, published in the autumn of 1865, Norton observed that “the State” had acquired a new meaning in American politics:

Unlike European political institutions, American governments, according to Norton, made no claim to authority except as an expression of the people's right to govern themselves, a right they expressly maintained outside the legalized forms of established institutions. “The most vital fact of American politics, the great, and historically considered, the new result that we have reached, is the establishment of a political system in which the government is subordinate to the moral order of a civilized community.”Footnote ²⁸

This was, to put it mildly, not a particularly helpful point to emphasize at the onset of Reconstruction. Norton even identified “vigilance committees and lynch courts” as characteristic examples of “extra-governmental” institutions. Though admittedly crude and prone to abuse, “These courts and committees are empowered by an authority which is no other than the moral sense of the community, and their work is to carry this moral sense or opinion into effect.” Norton was not endorsing the Ku Klux Klan or racist lynch mobs, which were the expressions of an antithetical and immoral community. But these soon emerged as the most conspicuous examples of the phenomenon he naively celebrated.

“We have secured a territorial Union, we have secured a geographical unity of the States, but we have not secured as yet a moral Union, a civil unity; we have the harder part of our task before us,” he acknowledged. Having conquered the South, the North had the power, the right, and thus the obligation “to impose those conditions on the Southern people which are requisite for the preservation, continuance, and progress of the moral order of that community of which they and we form parts.” What the conquerors imposed, however, was not tyranny, but liberty:

The problem was that this forced Norton to affirm and deny the same principle in the same breath. The principle of political equality denies that any individual has the right or capacity to coerce another for his or their own welfare.Footnote ³⁰ Coercion is a legitimate means of self-defense but not of improvement. European despotism had proven so resilient, Norton observed, because it had taught the people “to rely upon another power than their own – to seek for aid from the state; instead of to help themselves; they had been taught dependence and cannot at once spring to independence.”Footnote ³¹ The promise of American society, Norton believed, was in placing civilization on the truer and more equitable basis of voluntary cooperation rather than the superior force of some over others. But the question of how to impose this blessing on the South by means of a military occupation involved an obvious paradox that he failed to confront.Footnote ³²

Norton was a cultural critic, perhaps the most erudite and influential America has ever produced. And though he thought deeply and profoundly on the relationship between culture and democracy, he was not a political theorist, much less a practical politician. All of his writings on American politics contain virtually nothing on the actual instruments of government. But he also had a critic's keen eye for talented writers on subjects about which he himself was not an expert. Never was this discernment more evident than in Norton's cultivation of E. L. Godkin.Footnote ³³

“It is plain that we are to have if not great changes to the Constitution itself, great changes in the interpretation of it, in the manner of regarding it,” Norton wrote to Godkin in early March 1864. A Constitution, he continued, could only persist if it showed “a power within itself of adaptation to the needs of the nation. The main question then is how to use and how to develop this intrinsic power – with least injury to the form of the instrument and with least shock to its authority.”Footnote ³⁴ The country faced no more momentous question in the spring of 1864. But legal scholars were of no use answering it because they “have assumed, and our people have consented to believe, that the Constitution was more sacred than the principles which gave worth to it.”Footnote ³⁵ And so he tasked Godkin with answering the question in the North American Review.

Godkin's immigrant background made him an unlikely but inspired choice for the assignment. Like most European liberals, he was intimately familiar with American political history without the entrenched convictions of a citizen rooted in the old order. His knowledge of antebellum Constitutional history was unclouded by the visceral passions of one who had lived it, and so he was able to expound a new nationalist outlook unencumbered by any personal stake in the order being swept away. He saw the situation with fresh eyes, undeluded by the exaggerated hopes and fears of those who felt their world being transformed.

Godkin began his essay by marveling at how quickly the Constitution, from its tumultuous and hotly contested origins, became sacrosanct, “held up to the gaze of the world as a final result, which required no modification, and to which coming generations would have to adapt themselves, not it to them.” Americans, he continued, had elevated the Constitution into “an artificial standard of right and wrong … allowing it to shut out from our gaze all the higher criteria of political conduct furnished by abstract justice and truth.”Footnote ³⁶

Significantly, Godkin did not limit his criticism of the Constitution to slavery – that, indeed, had been the shortcoming of the abolitionists. The effect of Constitution worship had also effectively prohibited “all vigorous exploration in the field of legislative science. For a half a century or more the study of it has been all but entirely neglected by the best minds at the North.” Only South Carolina, in John Calhoun, had produced a political leader willing and able to approach the Constitution in the same innovative, philosophical spirit as the men who had framed it. The rest of the country had produced only Constitutional lawyers, who, however brilliant at expounding the organic law, were not able to probe beyond it and think creatively about how to adapt the animating principles of their government to new circumstances.

Having advanced so far in his critique of the Constitution, Godkin then pivoted to acknowledge that the country had, in fact, been rife with political innovations – some fruitful, some rash, and some downright dangerous. But all of this creative energy had been channeled into innovations at the state level. Godkin not only acknowledged this tendency but deplored its excesses. And so, in the same essay, he condemned his adopted country for its abject submission to inherited forms and for heedlessly overturning established institutions. “[T]he vast changes which have been made during the last forty years in the Constitutions of the great majority of the States” were all rough-hewn and poorly considered, he complained. Local democratic whims had made “the course of legislation as erratic as a butterfly,” and plainly he did not think these experiments had any value in teaching a people how to govern themselves. “The law of marriage and divorce, the law of inheritance, the law of debt, the law of real estate, the law of corporations, matters of the first importance to society, are changed and rechanged, as if a fixed policy were a thing neither to be expected nor desired.”Footnote ³⁷

Federalism allowed these extremes to coexist, and Godkin was not being inconsistent in condemning both federal torpor and local dynamism. The strict Constitutional limits on the authority of the general government, and the near universal respect for those limits, allowed local democracy to flourish, and Godkin was not impressed by the results. Politics in the northern states was driven by “the pressure of the democratic tide, which has been rising steadily here as in Europe, ever since the French Revolution.” The belief that sovereignty emanates upward from the people, and thus that every level of government ought to retain exclusive authority over its own affairs, had produced rampant corruption and licentiousness locally and disintegration nationally.

That the country had more to fear from centrifugal than from centripetal forces, from the chaos of disintegration than from the despotism of consolidation, was a hard conclusion for anyone loyal to the Union to avoid after 1861. But Godkin's essay was still a striking example of how the pressure of the war, and the immediate problems of secession and slavery, were transforming how Americans thought about their government as whole. Not just the organization and distribution of political power, but the animating ideals that the republic was meant to secure and express, the very meaning of freedom, were changing. Godkin anticipated and expressed these changes more clearly than almost anyone. His essay announced a dramatic shift in emphasis, signaling a new summum bonum by which the American republic would measure its progress in actualizing its ideals.

In two subsequent essays for the North American Review, Godkin broadened his critique of American democracy, brilliantly connecting his adopted country's political ideals to the influence of both the frontier and capitalism. The first essay almost exactly anticipated Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis – with the crucial difference that Godkin considered the egalitarian effects of the frontier wholly pernicious.

Godkin's writings inverted the traditional American attitude toward political participation as the most sacred prerogative of citizenship. Liberty, for Godkin, meant a government that protected the private rights of individuals. It was liberty defined by liberalism, not the political liberty of republican self-government. To vote is not an individual right; it is to assert a certain degree of power over the community. And all political power has no legitimate basis except the good of the public over which it is exercised. The natural right of the people to govern themselves was no different from the divine right of kings. Both elevated ultimate political power over the legitimate restraints of morality and law, transforming a public trust into a private right.Footnote ³⁸

This much of Godkin's argument was far from original. Lincoln had made the same point, again and again, in his debates with Stephen Douglas.Footnote ³⁹ And Norton had made the same argument no less forcefully. But Godkin then brilliantly connected this democratic excess to the intellectual transformation wrought by capitalism, and connected both developments to the uniquely oppressive character of American slavery. The “great sanctity with which modern jurisprudence has … clothed everything bearing the name of property,” Godkin wrote, has stripped “it of all conditions and qualifications, and knit it as closely as possible to the owner, as if it were an emanation from himself.” The absolute dominion over the soil and serf in ancient and medieval law had never equaled that of the modern era,

Here was the ideological link that united northern democrats and southern oligarchs in a system of mutual irresponsibility. Godkin's point is crucial to rescuing classical liberalism as a political philosophy. Man has an absolute right to his legitimate property. But the concept of property is too often abused to encompass privileges and powers that can only be justified as a public trust. Of course, to acknowledge the distinction between “legitimate” property in this sense, and property as defined by law and tradition, raises far more questions than it answers. But it also creates an intellectual vocabulary with which doctrinaire liberals can mount a radical critique of a social order that ostensibly conforms to their own principles. So it was significant that Godkin emphasized the distinction, though his point was simply that no one has a right to the ballot.

Having placed democratic principles on what he considered their proper basis – as a matter of public expediency rather than individual right – Godkin then considered the implications of his argument for the most urgent question confronting the nation: the reconstruction of the southern states. It was on this question that Norton, as editor of the North American Review, made his first significant revision of Godkin's work, changing his argument in a way that would have tremendous consequences for Godkin's later career and influence.

“It is more than probable that we shall witness before very long an agitation on the part of the friends of the negro for the immediate extension of the franchise to the liberated slaves,” Godkin noted in beginning his discussion of Reconstruction policy. Norton changed this sentence to: “By far the most important political problem before the nation at this moment is that concerning the immediate extension of the franchise to the liberated slaves.” The change partly reflects the changed circumstances from when the article was written (during the final months of the war) to when it was published (in July 1865). But Norton also altered the source of the issue, from a question raised by agitators to a moral problem that could not be honorably avoided. To Godkin's next sentence, a long one, Norton added a final clause that completely changed its whole meaning:

In Godkin's manuscript, the paragraph ended there. Norton, however, added the following clause, “and who believe that the reorganization of the Southern society, and the future peace of the nation, both require the abolition of all political distinctions drawn from color.”Footnote ⁴¹ Norton and Godkin both believed that a basic literacy test was a desirable condition to attach to the franchise, though for Norton it was only legitimate if applied impartially to all men. The ability to read the newspaper in a national republic, Godkin argued, was the modern equivalent of appearing physically in the agora of a Greek city-state. It was the basic precondition to participating in the politics of a democratic nation-state. Thus a literacy test served two purposes: it distinguished genuine self-government from a spurious pantomime of self-government, and it reinforced the principle that the vote was a public responsibility, not a possessive right that could be exercised selfishly or ignorantly, or even sold.

The next paragraph in Godkin's original manuscript has a big “X” through it, and does not appear in the published version:

In a letter to Godkin, Norton explained his objection to this paragraph. The question whether or not men have a natural right to vote is not the real question, Norton explained. The real question is, on what basis can one man exclude another from an equal say in the laws governing them both?

To place the political right of suffrage on the false and arbitrary basis of race or color, instead of on the “intrinsic capacity and efforts of the man, black or white,” would corrupt the first principle of the American system, Norton continued.

Here, then, is a significant riddle at the heart of the intellectual relationship between Norton and Godkin. The point in dispute between them was, in Norton's mind, the fundamental principle for which the Civil War had been fought. And yet within a few months he made Godkin editor of a weekly journal founded to advance that same principle. Even more astonishing, he zealously defended Godkin against those who accused him of being an unreliable advocate of black suffrage rights, a charge that he, Norton, was in a unique position to confirm as true. “I need hardly say that you may count not only on my friendly and affectionate sympathy, but on my most hearty support whenever you need it,” Norton wrote in July 1865, the same month in which the heavily edited version of Godkin's essay appeared in the North American Review. “Your and my opinions are so nearly the same on most important points, that it is hard for me to imagine a case in which I should fail to agree more with you than with anyone who might call your judgment and your views into question.”Footnote ⁴⁵ But Norton did not need to imagine such a case; he himself had just contradicted Godkin's judgment on the most significant question before the country.

To be sure, Godkin yielded to Norton's point of view on the question of black suffrage, though the careerist motives that led him to do so ought to have been obvious. After noting, diplomatically but unmistakably, that he would only publish Godkin's latest essay with the changes he had indicated, Norton then dropped his editorial stick and waved a very appealing carrot. “The antislavery Standard and the Liberator are soon probably to cease appearing and [Mr. McKim] desires to start a new paper devoted to the national questions and interests involved in the condition and position of the black race, on a broader ground than that of the old papers,” Norton noted. “He has a good scheme and will have plenty of support.”Footnote ⁴⁶ For two years, Godkin had been struggling unsuccessfully to raise money for a weekly journal of politics and culture, taking the English Spectator and Saturday Review as his ideal models. He had, in fact, first met Norton in pursuit of this goal. Not surprisingly, then, Godkin eagerly adapted his position. “I shall recast all that I have said about the negroes, and put it in a shape which will not clash with your own opinions and those of the Review,” Godkin wrote to Norton.Footnote ⁴⁷

In even his sharpest private disputes with Norton, however, Godkin argued from premises that Norton respected as legitimate. He expressly denied any presumption of biological differences between the races and carefully avoided resting any claim on that assumption. The degrading reality of slavery, not the arbitrary matter of skin color, was the basis for imposing additional requirements on the freedmen to qualify for the vote, Godkin insisted.Footnote ⁴⁸ With the starting premise, Norton agreed, though he noted that it did not contain even the slightest pretext for holding the victims of slavery to a higher standard than their oppressors. “No class of men have any political rights above those of any other class,” Norton insisted, “excepting always the criminal and the ignorant. Our future seems to me to depend on the most liberal application of this principle in our society.”Footnote ⁴⁹

And yet, as Godkin later acknowledged, “The Nation owed its continued existence to Charlies Eliot Norton. It was his calm and confidence amid the shrieks of combatants … which enabled me to do my work even with decency.”Footnote ⁵⁰ What ultimately united Godkin and Norton was a shared belief that the best political journalism ought to be oriented around a wider framework, one that looked toward advancing civilization as a whole. This is what both men, as editors and intellectuals, tried to accomplish. The quality of political discussion was inextricably related to the quality of the nation's historical scholarship, aesthetic arts, science, and economics – politics, in short, must be recognized as an integral part of a developing culture. At its best, their approach to politics resisted the relentless simplification that confuses the violence of partisan rhetoric with the depth of the reform being proposed. Superficial ideas have superficial consequences, even when the consequences are violent. They were both consistent in upholding the truth that political democracy is no guarantee of decency, justice, or any of the other human aspirations by which a whole civilization is measured. And this broadly similar outlook allowed Norton to dismiss their narrow disagreement on immediate priorities.

“The mistake which, in my eyes, the radical democrats make,” Godkin wrote to Norton,

This last point, ranking civilization ahead of liberty as a moral ideal, was the profound point on which they agreed. It is easy to sneer at this attitude as elitist or worse, but it has the advantage of honesty. Criticism, in any political regime, tends to shy away from targeting the real power in the system. In democracies as in monarchies, the selfishness or immorality of the sovereign is usually blamed on wily ministers and demagogues.

Historians have an odd habit of condemning the racism of American society in the nineteenth century in one moment and then condemning the undemocratic elitism of reformers, who were provoked by that same racism, in the next.Footnote ⁵² There were problems with Norton's and Godkin's conception of civilization, but it represented a good-faith effort to approach the problems of democratic politics philosophically, without any of the convenient disguises that allowed writers and intellectuals to separate immediate problems from the ultimate one, which is how to make men better than they are.

Norton and Godkin were heavily influenced by John Stuart Mill, whose famous essay On Liberty (1859) provided an elaborate defense of the principle that, in Mill's words,

Mill's essay remains the clearest and most consistent defense of the liberal concept of freedom ever written. But two ambiguities are worth stressing as particularly relevant to the problems that preoccupied American liberals during the Civil War and Reconstruction. To grant an individual his independence in that “which merely concerns himself” is almost a tautology. The realm of absolute independence is so narrow that even those who want to protect it cannot define its boundaries precisely. Mill compounded this ambiguity by making “civilized” a necessary qualification for civil liberty. “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end,” he wrote, creating a potentially limitless exception to his principle that the individual's moral or physical welfare “is not a sufficient warrant” for interfering with him – in civilized communities. But what communities are civilized? And, as if that question weren't difficult enough, what distinguishes members from nonmembers?

“Civilization” acquired a new meaning during the Enlightenment as Western culture became conscious of itself as the product of a long historical process from ignorance, slavery and squalor to knowledge, liberty and refinement. A richly detailed narrative of historical progress allowed Western intellectuals to see their own social customs and institutions both as the result of a particular history and as universal improvements on human nature. “Barbarism” was the antithesis of civilization – man frozen in the brutish, primordial condition of nature. And the dichotomy created by this historical process made plausible the liberal vision of a complex society in which men internalized the elaborate system of rules that made them civilized and, therefore, capable of collaborating in an ever-advancing standard of freedom, as opposed to the static, savage freedom of unrestrained, unimproved human nature.

Mill used the concepts of civilization and barbarism to avoid a problem that few have resolved to their satisfaction. Unwilling to remain agnostic about the content of men's aspirations and aversions – which ignores that both are subject to cultural, social, and institutional influences that can elevate or debase individual natures – Mill also refused to subordinate the individual's will to the communal ideals that ennoble freedom with a meaning beyond the mere absence of restraint. And so, for Mill, the freedom of the individual was both an end in itself and a means toward his moral development from a lower to a higher mode of existence. As The Nation later observed, Mill converted the materialistic concept of utility into a “religious principle,” and made it seem compatible with the highest moral aspirations of man.Footnote ⁵⁴ “Civilized” was the vague qualifier that allowed him to do so without abandoning his argument or accepting all human appetites and aspirations as equal.

Significantly, Norton and Godkin both acknowledged Mill's influence while noting his severe limitations as a guide to the political problem that most preoccupied them. How should a civilized community defend itself against the forces, internal or external, arresting its progress or threatening its very existence? “If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself,” Mill wrote, “it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Americans emerging from a life-and-death struggle with that “relic of barbarism,” however, were unlikely to be reassured by Mill's blithe confidence. Norton and Godkin both believed that the Civil War was, first and foremost, a test of northern civilization against the resurgent barbarism of the South.

“What the rebellion really was,” Godkin wrote in The Nation, “was the effort of a lower civilization, or, if you will, a barbarous society, to preserve itself and retain its peculiarities against the pressure of a more advanced and more civilized society.” The mixture of chauvinism and self-criticism in that sentence was inextricable, for the two elements were inherent in the concept of “barbarism” as Norton and Godkin understood it. “The southern gentlemen” embodied the threat of barbarism in a civilized community. Outward polish disguised inner degradation, as the material advantages conferred by an elevated civilization became an excuse for rapacity and plunder. “Having somebody always at hand to kick and cuff, and ‘paddle’ and rob, made the Southerner the turbulent, intractable visionary, pistol in one hand, Aristotle in the other, which we have for fifty years, to our sorrow, had to deal with,” Godkin wrote in The Nation.Footnote ⁵⁶ But southerners were not the only ones vulnerable to this deadly form of hubris.

Those who celebrated the Civil War as a vindication of grand moral principles could not ignore the fact that it had also been a test of material resources. A resort to war as the final arbiter in a conflict of principle inescapably placed a superior capacity for organized violence above all others as the ultimate test of a civilization. A barbarous society could be identified by the savagery with which it pillaged and plundered others – and by the helpless ferocity with which it resisted the overwhelming power of more civilized peoples. And in this sense, the Civil War catalyzed one of the most ominous developments of the nineteenth century, as the technological and organizational advantages that so easily engendered a false sense of superiority began to confer something frightfully close to omnipotence.

“Let us consider in what a village of English colonists is superior to a tribe of Australian natives who roam about them,” Walter Bagehot wrote in his influential political treatise Physics and Politics.

There is admirable candor in this appalling statement, for it proceeds from the admission that brute force is the only objective criterion by which one community can claim superiority over another. More importantly, those who rejected the criminal logic that stemmed from this premise still had to reckon with the overwhelming importance of the premise itself as a reality in the nineteenth century.

Racial ideologies emerged to justify the temporary but staggering power disparities that allowed Western European peoples to rule over the rest of the world with ever greater efficiency and impunity. But these ideologies did not create the reality they justified. And the rise and partial fall of these ideologies precisely coincide with the rise and partial fall of the power disparities they purported to explain. It is simply misleading to consider this intellectual trajectory purely in terms of ideology or moral progress.

The fact of white supremacy, meaning the power disparity that made possible a horrific system of racial oppression and exploitation, coexisted awkwardly with the philosophy of human equality that animated the efforts of northern intellectuals and philanthropists. The dilemma was inescapable, for they could not assume responsibility for the freedmen's welfare without falling into the paternalistic role of presuming to judge another's best interest. What Emerson called “self-reliance” and what Lincoln called “self-government” both pointed to a political ideal of manhood elevated above any corrupting dependency upon paternalistic institutions, however benevolently intended. This was far from the narrow economic doctrine of laissez-faire, and it was openly hostile to such a creed as a limitation on the political rights of citizens to participate as equals in the public life of their community. Man had possessed the freedom to work or starve from the primordial beginning, before there were masters or slaves. Civilized freedom was political freedom.

But the ideal of political equality posed the same dilemma in different terms. The contradiction was an inescapable result of seeing North and South as a single political community, yet starkly divided into civilized and uncivilized parts. And it did not require a prophet to foresee how this contradiction, unresolved, would be shifted ultimately onto the South alone, the burden of sectional domination relinquished, once again, by an ideology of racial domination. The logic was the same: two communities were inextricably linked, one powerful and advanced, the other weak and uncivilized. And thus the more advanced community would impose its will on the less advanced, not selfishly but benevolently, liberation by conquest, emancipation as subjugation.

Godkin and Norton witnessed the post-bellum South through the eyes of the soldiers, philanthropists, and journalists who were actually there – reading about the former slaves’ first experience of freedom in anecdotal evidence that varied almost as much as the biases of those who recorded them.Footnote ⁵⁸ In July of 1865, Norton published an essay on the freedmen at Port Royal by William Channing Gannett, who had been there as a teacher and minister for three years. “[I]n slavery,” Gannett began his essay,

Such a staggering view of the former slave's degradation, combined with the belief in the superiority of the civilization that enslaved him, made an ideology of scientific racism almost superfluous.Footnote ⁶⁰ But Gannett was wrestling with a problem that no northern philanthropist could honestly ignore. To the question, “what shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?” Frederick Douglass, early in the Civil War, had a sublimely simple answer: “Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your own business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune.”Footnote ⁶¹ This was an important and necessary point about where, exactly, the problem lay. But in the North, leaving the freedmen alone meant abandoning them to the vicious barbarism of their former masters. The alternative was to play the role of benevolent guardian, and American democracy was premised on the idea that such a role was profoundly corrupting. Noblesse oblige was the best that all past civilizations had offered the downtrodden, and all past civilizations proved that it was a delusion and a snare. These two alternatives did not exhaust all possibilities, but they did contain the essence of the dilemma confronting the North.There is a difference between a commitment to the abstract principle of human equality and to the cause of actual human beings who have been denied the most basic rights implied by that principle. The messy reality of politics, the inevitably of compromised alternatives, will ultimately paralyze those who care more for the pristine principle than for the particular cause they espouse. E. L. Godkin's astute grasp of this fact made him the most influential polemicist on Reconstruction politics throughout the postwar era, even though his influence at the end was exactly the opposite of what it had been in the beginning. The contrast between his forceful, often caustic style in The Nation and Norton's elegant prose neatly encapsulates why Godkin was so effective at carrying more philosophical minds into his more decisive orbit. “There is such a thing, my dear fellow,” Godkin once advised Norton, “as having too good a taste, and being too fastidious.”Footnote ⁶²

Godkin was more consistent in his pugnacity than in his principles, but the one unifying theme of his career was a distrust of popular government as a reliable pillar of a liberal state. His skepticism toward Americans’ faith in self-government made Godkin an astute critic of the belief that the problems of Reconstruction could be resolved by democratic principles alone. Charles Sumner and other radicals routinely and emphatically presented impartial suffrage as an alternative to an extended military occupation of the South. But the military was the only instrument the federal government possessed for enforcing the law. In an essay for the Atlantic Monthly, Frederick Douglass argued that impartial suffrage in the South was the only alternative to creating “a despotic central government, with power to control even the municipal regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own despotic will.”Footnote ⁶³ But impartial suffrage could not be attained without establishing a central government that Douglass himself characterized as despotic. Even then it would not have changed the fact that impartial suffrage – in an electorate composed of an overwhelmingly white majority – would not have been impartial at all. Douglass, like many others, refused to believe that incorporating black Americans into the American ideal of self-government required a fundamental alteration of the ideal. It is impossible to solve a problem without first grasping its full dimensions, and that was the weakness of most radicals.

Godkin was a rare exception, and his early writings in The Nation presented an unvarnished version of the task before the North. “Protection to persons and property of freedmen is the first duty of the Government, and this is to be afforded at any expense, any risk, and any amount of exasperation and mortification of the late masters and the ‘white trash’ worse than they,” he wrote in December 1865.

The passive construction of that last sentence was telling. Godkin was always deeply skeptical of suffrage as an instrument of liberal reform, but for professional reasons he was reluctant to express that skepticism with regard to Reconstruction. “There is not a single argument against negro suffrage which is not based on prejudice,” he declared in May of 1866, though he himself had written such an argument.Footnote ⁶⁵ But in the same week, The Nation denounced Otto von Bismarck for using universal suffrage as “a weapon by which old governments can be destroyed and old rights thrown to the wind … Where universal suffrage has not been heralded by universal education, it becomes the most powerful ally of force and despotism.”Footnote ⁶⁶ For Godkin, however, the difference in the two cases was obvious: the South deserved to be governed despotically – indeed, it could only be governed despotically – for it was an essentially barbarous society and political freedom had produced the cruelest tyranny imaginable.

Godkin's critique of American political culture contained a prophetic grasp of how the growing complexity of industrial society was gradually undermining the republican ideal of self-government.Footnote ⁶⁷ The increasing sophistication of the social sciences, he predicted, was initiating “a revolution in the art of government, and one that promises results no less fruitful for human happiness than those produced by the application of the experimental method to other sciences.” But the immense training necessary to master this wealth of information raised the question whether representative government “can ever be made an instrument of scientific legislation, that is, can ever be made to perform that nice adjustment and readjustment of men's legal relations which the peculiar nature of modern civilization constantly calls for.” Even the best elected assemblies were likely to blunder into ever more serious errors due to “ignorance, haste, want of training and the distractions of an infinite variety of details and of multifarious conflicting interests,” Godkin wrote. He then offered as a hopeful prediction what Tocqueville had anticipated as a nightmare:

This was very far from what Lincoln meant by self-government. One could hardly ask for a more cogent expression of the logic tending toward the establishment of an administrative state. Nevertheless, this expansive vision of scientific legislation in an industrial society was strictly negative. His essential point was the growing incapacity of the people to govern themselves in any meaningful sense. Godkin argued that the statesman ought to regard “the weaknesses of men, their follies, vices, passions, prejudices” as a chemist regards the compounds in his laboratory and their reactions to different elements.Footnote ⁶⁸ His point was not that the citizens of a democratic republic were as beyond the reach of moral suasion as inorganic matter; he was simply denying that this role was a legitimate function of the statesman.

The power of the state was not a moral instrument but a physical one; it had the power to coerce but not to instruct. “[M]en cannot be dragooned into morality … to make men moral, you must not legislate but teach,” Godkin wrote.Footnote ⁶⁹ When the state “lays its commands on a man he knows that obedience will, if necessary, be enforced by an agency of such tremendous power that he does not think of revolt.” To suppose that this blunt instrument succeeds by appealing to the moral sense of those on whom it operates is not only delusional but pernicious.Footnote ⁷⁰ It stifles the moral development of the individual by imposing through fear what ought to be taught through reason, and sanctions “an immense field for the most odious and mischievous tyranny.”Footnote ⁷¹ Naturally, this conception of the state discourages the idea of politics, going back to Aristotle, of a community united by a collective commitment to public ideals. Five years after Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Godkin's opinion had not become predominant. But its rapid acceptance among American intellectuals represents a significant change in the nation's political culture.Footnote ⁷²

The antebellum Union was a system of governing institutions, of course, but it was primarily a creative cultural collaboration. E pluribus unum was not a material phenomenon analogous to chemistry but a literary performance analogous to poetry. What Henry Clay or Daniel Webster did as Congressmen, Senators, and Secretaries of State amounted to laughably little next to the prestige they acquired as orators helping to define a national creed. The only national bureaucratic institution that had any tangible presence in the lives of most American citizens, the post office, functioned not to govern them to but knit them together into a common political discourse. The nation became a nation by creatively expressing and contesting what sort of nation it was going to be. Godkin did not so much reject this vision of government as recognize that it had been discredited by events. The republic ceased to be a work of art and became an engineering project, clumsily developing into a distinctly modern edifice of experts. “Trained men,” Godkin predicted, “all other things being equal, are pretty sure in the long run to be masters of the world.”Footnote ⁷³

“Old Harvard men will remember the sweet sadness of Professor Norton,” George Santayana wrote in recalling his former teacher. “He would tell his classes, shaking his head with a slight sigh, that the Greeks did not play football.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This gently mocking portrait of Norton was part of a more biting critique of the tradition he represented, a tradition that Santayana criticized for creating a division between the innovative spirit of American enterprise and the moribund traditionalism of American high culture. The division was symbolized, for Santayana, in architecture. “The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominately, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.”Footnote ⁷⁵ But it was precisely this cultural division that Norton struggled mightily to resist. The animating purpose of his life was to combine the rough energies of democratic society with the highest cultural aspirations of a young civilization, enriched by the fruits of the Old World but untrammeled by its ruins. The ambiguity at the heart of his outlook – American society was at once behind Europe in refinement and culture and yet also at the vanguard of human progress – was not unique to Norton, but it explains the peculiar mixture of conservative nostalgia and visionary hope that marked his politics.

“You speak of yourself as a radical,” Norton wrote to an editor in Indiana during the Civil War.

Norton's meaning in that last sentence was deliberately vague. He did not have a specific ideal in mind, only a means of attaining it. By recognizing and preserving what was good in their society – measured not by the fickle light of the present but by the accumulated wisdom of the ages – Americans had the opportunity to advance their collective imaginations to conceive of and then realize an ideal that would satisfy the inchoate aspirations and discontents animating the rude growth of the era.

And yet the growth soon proved overwhelming. Arriving in London in the summer of 1868, eleven years after his previous visit, Norton was appalled by the staggering increase in both luxury and squalor. “The gulf is wider between the lowest and the highest than human nature can bear,” he wrote to Godkin.Footnote ⁷⁷ The difference Norton found in Europe was almost certainly exaggerated by his own heightened idealism and by the perception, which had become far more obvious over the last decade, that American society was rapidly replicating these same social conditions. Indeed, the change in Europe was perhaps less striking than the increased presence of American wealth there. As the first generation of great American fortunes became conspicuous abroad, it was no longer possible to pretend that the republic in the New World offered an Arcadian refuge from the staggering inequities of the old.Footnote ⁷⁸

Norton wrote a long essay for the North American Review denouncing the selfish pretense that the “laws of political economy” were a viable substitute for morality in the intelligent contemplation of human social relations.Footnote ⁷⁹ His disgust for the short-sighted greed of the ruling classes did not, however, produce a sentimental reverence for the exploited poor. He considered the growing chorus of revolutionary talk “vague, wild and ignorant to the last degree – but not less dangerous for that.” And yet he occasionally wondered whether a merely destructive revolution might be better for civilization in the long run. “Whether our period of economical enterprise, unlimited competition, and unrestrained individualism, is the highest stage of human progress is to me very doubtful,” he wrote soon after traveling from America to Europe in 1869:

More significant even than the pessimism in this prognosis is the absence of a meaningful distinction in Norton's mind between the social order of America and that of Europe. The American political experiment that Norton had celebrated only a few years earlier receded, in his mind, as the false dawn of hopes he continued to cherish. “For my part, I should think poorly of mankind if they did not before long discover some better political arrangement than any that have yet been tried,” he wrote from Florence in December 1869.Footnote ⁸¹

“Victorian critics such as Arnold, Renouvier, and Godkin, simply lacked the intellectual tools to construct a new framework for politics in the emerging urban-industrial world of the late nineteenth century,” James Kloppenberg writes in his brilliant study of the origins of pragmatism in European and American thought, and his examples just as easily could have included Norton. “They disliked what they saw, but they were unable to offer constructive alternatives.”Footnote ⁸² As Kloppenberg's observation implies, the refusal to embrace the solution to a problem is not the same as dismissing the problem itself. But as Kloppenberg suggests elsewhere, the intellectual “progress” implied in this passage is misleading. Instead of new intellectual tools awaiting development, one could just as easily speak of old moral commitments waiting to be jettisoned, as changing circumstances led intellectuals to abandon inherited ideals as untenable, and then forget them altogether.

To follow Norton out of the bright enthusiasms of the Civil War is to witness the confusing vision, the shifting light of human possibilities, beheld by one born at the dusk of the Enlightenment and the dawn of the industrial age. To the philosophically minded American born in the early nineteenth century, the trajectory of human progress seemed to consist primarily of moral and intellectual advancements, accompanied by material improvements in the technological applications of scientific knowledge. And the advancement in moral perception, in the broadly recognized principles and mores that defined the fabric of social relationships, was the only movement Norton recognized in the history of civilization, which was marked by flashes of moral insight that left an indelible mark, even when overthrown by barbarism, and thus became the starting point for each new advance.

As Norton came of age in the 1840s, the material texture of life in America was not meaningfully different from what it had been in the more affluent pockets of antiquity. There were differences, obviously, but in access to clean water and food, the pace of travel and communication, the relative balance of urban and rural populations, in all these areas the structure of civilization was still essentially what it had been for Aristotle, Jesus, Dante and the American Founders. It was primarily in the realm of ideals and morals that these men had seen their worlds transformed. Norton simply projected this historical trajectory forward in his understanding of progress. Some of his expectations were fulfilled, either in his lifetime or shortly after – abolition of slavery and the political enfranchisement of women, for example. But these aspirations were fairly modest, amounting to little more than removing the most egregious inconsistencies to a moral and social ideal that was already widely accepted.

His optimism ran much deeper, harboring hopes that later generations would consider simply incredible. He imagined a society united by the most profound spiritual awareness of their relation to one another and their creator, allowing each individual the fullest expression of his or her own unique nature, without the bigotry or dogmatism of an externally imposed creed.Footnote ⁸³ He imagined a society in which the best, most rarified qualities of his own privileged class were as broadly shared as the suffrage. And once elites lost their monopoly on these fine qualities, they might cease to be accompanied by their characteristic vices – snobbery, affectation, and other expressions of artificial distinction – because the outer form of a gentleman would no longer suffice to impress those who had become acquainted with the inner substance. Shallow erudition, fancy clothes, and polite manners would count for little when most people could distinguish them from cultivated intelligence, good taste, and genuine decency.

However preposterous such optimism now seems, it was far more credible in the early nineteenth century than the possibility, since realized, that the average citizen of the American republic would enjoy a material standard of living then available to no one. The nineteenth century abruptly upended the earlier version of progress and the concept of civilization that went with it. As intellectuals shifted their attention to the material disparities and miseries that could, for the first time, be significantly ameliorated, they inevitably lost sight of the problem of how to effectively elevate the moral, spiritual, and intellectual tone of society as a whole. Because the former problems were so much easier to resolve than the latter, an emphasis on moral and spiritual shortcomings became associated with a common form of reactionary croaking, a defense of material privileges enjoyed by a shoddy aristocracy. And as the problem that democratic republicanism, or self-government, was meant to address – reconciling the principle of equality with the highest standards of civilization – the meaning of self-government was lost along with it. Noblesse oblige eventually returned in the form of the bureaucratic benevolence of an administrative state. And though this was a decided improvement over the increasingly hollow echo of the old idealism that had lost all plausibility, it represented a resounding defeat of all that was best in the hopes of an earlier era.

Exactly the opposite of Norton's hopeful vision occurred. Arrogance and wealth accumulated along with ignorance and helplessness. These tendencies first became obvious around mid-century, and the slave power symbolized the threat at its most malicious. And thus the Civil War seemed to justify even loftier hopes for American political idealism even as it accelerated the forces leading to its collapse. Norton embraced the best version of the Union ideal during its apotheosis. The selfless democratic crusade he saw in the Civil War was a sign of the same sublime spiritual upheaval that had preceded the age of Dante. But this time, instead of chivalrous knights seeking immortal fame in defense of a narrow creed, it was the crusade of nameless millions courageously sacrificing themselves on behalf of the great moral principle of human equality. That vision may have been delusional. But he refused to forget what he had hoped a democratic society could be as he accustomed himself to the disappointing reality of what it had become.

“Not even the wealth of Croesus was more extraordinary and unexampled, or more conducive to self-delusion, than our national prosperity has been during the century which is just coming to its close,” Norton wrote near the turn of the century. “History affords no other such splendid spectacle of material growth and well-being … Never before have such vast numbers of men enjoyed such wide-spread peace, comfort and freedom from fear.” But the gross materialism engendered by this prosperity was corrupting the moral fabric of all social classes. “The hoodlum of the street corner and the rough loafer of the village find their mates among the students of our colleges. The difference between them is only one of circumstances and degree.” And this coarsening of civilized manners raised

“The signs are dubious,” Norton continued. “No sure inference can be drawn from the evidence of material prosperity, for though this may afford assurance of industry, energy, and a certain (not the highest) grade of intelligence, it gives little in respect to the superior elements of civilization.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Unlike Henry Adams, for example, there was no cynicism in the alienated criticisms of his later years, only the recurring disappointment of one possessing an ineradicable faith. And the result was that this most hopeful apostle of democracy came to be seen as an elitist snob.