American conservatives have often wrestled with ideological tensions within their political coalition. The following essay examines a division that opened up within American conservatism during the Gilded Age and recovers a different sort of conservative often ignored in conventional accounts. One can still hear echoes of the rift in our own day. In the wake of the conservative electoral success of the 1980s and 1990s, some commentators noted the friction within the Republican Party between religious social conservatives and market-oriented libertarians. Representative Dick Armey wondered aloud in 1994 whether the party's “potentially unstable coalition . . . could fly apart.” It could, reasoned Armey, turn into a more consistent free-market party dedicated to “keeping the government off our backs and out of our bedroom. Or it could become a party combining social conservatives and protectionist trade unionists—a Pat Buchanan party supporting traditional values and putting ‘America First.’”Footnote ¹ This tension had actually long been present within the New Right, clearly evident at its birth in the immediate post-World War II era. Then, religious traditionalists, such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, jousted with secularist libertarians, such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. These disparate groups were brought together by Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley under the aegis of the National Review, their alliance cemented by their shared antipathy to communism and to the liberal social agenda of an increasingly intrusive state apparatus.Footnote ²

Many of these and other related tensions also, however, pre-date the 1950s and represent a well-established part of the contested discourse that is American conservatism.Footnote ³ They are, in fact, evident in the late nineteenth century, when a portion of American conservatism redefined itself in laissez-faire and classical liberal terms. As Louis Hartz and others noted, American conservatives, compelled to defer to a received political order founded upon Enlightenment and classical liberal foundations, have long been a conflicted lot. Classical Burkean conservatism respects received traditions, prizes social order, and views human nature as profoundly flawed and human society as an organic entity, rather than merely a collection of autonomous individuals. This sort of conservatism has never, as J. David Hoeveler rightly observes, been truly “favored” in America. Given the underlying consensus about individual rights, private property, and representative institutions, American liberals and conservatives clearly did not differ as profoundly as did their European counterparts. Prior to the Civil War, liberalism stressed “the priority of liberty over authority” and championed limited government and the separation of church and state.Footnote ⁴ Jacksonian Democrats, though temperamentally conservative in many respects, embraced these principles. Conservative Whigs, to be sure, placed an organic spin on Lockean individualism by viewing the state as an important moral agent, emphasizing class interdependence, and advocating governmental stimulation of the economy through tariffs, a national bank, and aid to transportation systems. But Whigs were, even more than their Jacksonian opponents, forward-looking modernists, eager to stimulate rather than stem the forces of capitalist development and possessive individualism.Footnote ⁵

The Civil War marked a turning point, with massive economic changes, including a dramatic increase in the proportion of dependent wage-earners and the emergence of huge concentrations of corporate capital that were widely perceived to challenge republican institutions. This crisis presented a major challenge to all streams of political thought, both liberal and conservative. In response, some liberals steered toward a new reform liberalism that embraced an interventionist state to regulate private capital but which also accepted giant corporations as the unavoidable results of economic advancement.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, these rapid social and economic changes brought to the fore the long-standing tensions between change and continuity and between individualism and community within American conservatism. Some conservatives adopted a strict laissez-faire dogma (owing much to classical British political economy), though now often dressed in Darwinian garb. Clinton Rossiter described American conservatives' adoption of the individualistic language of classical liberalism as “the Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history.”Footnote ⁷ These conservatives opposed state intervention rigorously and became strong advocates of free trade. Champions of a laissez-faire conservatism, such as William Graham Sumner, David A. Wells, Charles F. Dunbar, and Justice Stephen J. Field, rejected most forms of state regulation. Although the nation's new economic realities challenged their opposition to state activism, they sought to preserve these tenets, albeit in modernized dress.Footnote ⁸ While often critical of monopolists who sought to undermine the competitive system, they welcomed much of the conglomerate capitalism that was thriving around them and transforming American life. Hofstadter argued that the new laissez-faire conservatism that arose and became dominant during the Gilded Age was remarkable in that it lacked many of the signal characteristics of conservatism as it is usually found:

But laissez-faire conservatism in the late nineteenth century was not the whole story. To some extent this fact has been recognized by conservative intellectuals and scholars alike,Footnote ¹⁰ although the most recent studies have focused on the emergence of neoconservatism after World War II and scholars have rarely examined the history of conservatism before the 1920s.Footnote ¹¹ Meanwhile, scholars who have focused more on the post-Civil War period (rather than on the subject of American conservatism) have complicated the overall picture but without locating their subjects in a larger American conservative tradition or giving sufficient recognition to the critical role that religious commitment played in constituting such a configuration. John Tomsich's exploration of several genteel Gilded Age writers and critics—George William Curtis, Richard Gilder, E. L. Godkin, and Charles Eliot Norton, among others—perceptively examines their cultural conservatism. Tomsich argues that their essentially conservative “preoccupation . . . was to safeguard social harmony and order,” and yet their lack of motivating religious convictions, and their reluctance to embrace a strong state, ultimately made them ineffective. More recently, Leslie Butler has helpfully situated some of Tomsich's same subjects within a broader Anglo-American liberal tradition, showing that they embraced a humane liberalism that transcended a blinkered concern for political economy and which engaged larger cultural and ethical concerns. Unlike most of the dissenting conservatives, however, Butler's subjects did not retain orthodox Christian beliefs.Footnote ¹² Wilfred McClay clarifies how pioneer political scientist John W. Burgess continued Francis Lieber's idealist conservatism at Columbia but without referencing American conservatism per se. Finally, Jeffrey Sklansky recognizes “orthodox Calvinism” as the most significant voice of dissent from an individualistic contractualism during the eighteenth century, but minimizes its role during the nineteenth century in his synthetic study of American social thought.Footnote ¹³

One crucial group of post-Civil War conservative intellectuals that in fact did constitute a coherent and effective challenge to laissez-faire conservatism is the chief subject of this essay. These chose to retain aspects of the old Whig conservatism, including its organic social vision, religiosity, and statist politics. As the following examination will demonstrate, these were the chief features that distinguished the dissidents from the innovators. Recovering these traditionalist dissenters' lost voices will facilitate a redrawing of the period's intellectual map and contribute to a clearer, more nuanced picture of the historical roots of contemporary tensions. This study focuses on some figures unfamiliar to students of American conservatism and delineates the boundaries of a contested discourse, the locus of a dissent from the soon dominant new conservatism. The following treatment focuses mostly on Northern and Southern Protestant clerical intellectuals who dissented from the new orthodoxy while attempting to maintain older conservative principles. Evangelical Protestantism still enjoyed a central, albeit gradually diminishing, place within Gilded Age culture, including academia. Yet the period's historiography has tended to exclude religious history from intellectual history in an artificial and sometimes anachronistic way.Footnote ¹⁴ Such a separation is especially ill-advised in the immediate post-Civil War era when religious leaders were very visible in the public square. George Fredrickson argues that “an exalted idea of the clerical role” in public discourse and the accompanying “quasi-theocratic statist ideology that went with it survived the [Civil] war . . . [and] offered middle class Christians who remained loyal to pre-industrial conceptions of order and community a basis for criticizing the emerging corporate order.”Footnote ¹⁵ Fredrickson rightly draws connections between this “theocratic” stream and the emerging Social Gospel and later Progressive movements. Yet, given its original context, it is important also to connect this element to the contested discourse that constituted late nineteenth-century American conservatism.

DEFINING THE DISSIDENTS

Who, then, were these dissident conservatives?

Perhaps the most helpful way to conceptualize this group is to view it as a composite, as the overlapping portion of several identifiable intellectual circles. Although the dissidents did not belong to a single coherent community of discourse, they were part of a few distinct communities defined by vocation, academic discipline, institutional affiliation, religious denomination, geography, and, to some degree, age. Many were college faculty or administrators who had taught moral philosophy but were involved in the creation of the new disciplines of political science and sociology. Many were affiliated with elite colleges and most were Congregational or Presbyterian clergy, often (though not always) with New England roots. All were born before the Civil War and most completed their college education prior to it.Footnote ¹⁶ Clearly the conservatism of antebellum postsecondary education and its fusion of evangelical piety and scholarship formed their thinking about the nature of intellectual endeavor in particular and of social ideals at large. With the possible exception of the two oldest individuals, the impact of the Civil War shaped their views in key respects, especially bolstering their confidence in an activist state. The conservatism of these dissidents can best be understood not as a single, neatly defined, monolithic platform but as a spectrum with some of the most traditionalist types at one end and others, more accepting of the new laissez-faire orthodoxy, stretched further along the continuum.

Three individuals are useful representatives of this loose connection. Two were presidents of Yale College, an academic bulwark of conservative Protestantism in nineteenth-century America. Theodore Dwight Woolsey served as president between 1846 and 1871 and Noah Porter between 1871 and 1886. Although Woolsey retired from the presidency in 1871, he continued to teach and write in the emerging field of political science, publishing its first American textbook in 1877.Footnote ¹⁷ Both Woolsey and his friend and successor Porter were ordained in the Congregational church and had taught moral philosophy. Both had pursued graduate studies in Europe, and had been exposed to German university culture, and both helped found the New Englander, a magazine addressed to “intelligent Christian men” and (because it avoided denominationally based doctrinal issues) a forerunner of modern academic journals. Louise Stevenson describes both Woolsey and Porter as “progressively conservative” when it came to collegiate reform and eager to preserve self-consciously Christian postsecondary education.Footnote ¹⁸ A third, more obscure but nevertheless representative, dissident was Robert Ellis Thompson (1844–1924).Footnote ¹⁹ A devotee of political economist and pro-Whig Henry C. Carey, Thompson was appointed professor of social science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1874 where he taught until he was asked to resign in 1892. He then served as principal of Central High School in Philadelphia almost until his death in 1924. A strong advocate of tariff protection, Thompson briefly edited the Penn Monthly and then a political weekly, the American, during the 1880s. Thompson was ordained in the Reformed Presbyterian Church and served as Penn's chaplain. He delivered lectures on protectionism at both Harvard and Yale as well as the Stone lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1891. The latter address, published as De Civitate Dei: The Divine Order of Human Society, argued for a thoroughly Christian political order in the United States. Unlike some other dissidents, Thompson did not pursue graduate study in Europe, but he embraced an even more robust statism than did Woolsey and Porter and celebrated even more the emphatically Christian character of the state. When Porter sought in 1886 to offer the case for protectionism at Yale, he naturally chose Thompson to teach the subject.Footnote ²⁰

While these three individuals are the best exemplars of the era's dissident conservatism, several others should also be included. Each can be located at different points along the conservative spectrum not only in economics but also theologically. Among the most traditionalist were those formed by Calvinist political thinking and by a theocratic stream within the Reformed tradition.Footnote ²¹ Most were also influenced by German idealism and the Union's victorious prosecution of the Civil War. Particularly significant here were the writings of German-born and -educated political theorist Francis Lieber (1798–1872) and one of his students, Elisha Mulford (1833–85). Lieber and Mulford were more theologically liberal than most of the dissident conservatives but their influence was significant, especially with regard to their statist political vision and their organic idealism.Footnote ²² Meanwhile, the Southern clergy among the dissidents were predominately Old School Presbyterians who had deep historical and confessional connections to their Princeton allies but were committed to a distinctively Southern social vision that sought to preserve democracy combined with paternalism and individualism allied with communitarianism.Footnote ²³ In some superficial ways, these Southerners sounded more like the new laissez-faire conservatives. Highly individualistic, they clung to an essentially libertarian view of the state. Nonetheless, they refused to embrace the new conservatives' faith in progress and vehemently rejected a modernizing corporate capitalism. Accordingly, their brand of conservatism owed more to eighteenth-century republican values than to European idealism, as did the thinking of their Northern counterparts.

Several of the dissidents hailed from that other bastion of conservative Protestantism, Princeton—both the college and the seminary. As Mark Noll has noted, Princeton Seminary had been founded in 1812 to “roll back . . . irreligion” in the young republic and to “fit clergy to meet” what its founders considered to be a profound “cultural crisis.”Footnote ²⁴ In addition to training thousands of clergy, seminary faculty became significant cultural authorities through contributing to a host of periodicals, including the influential Princeton Review. The Review had been Charles Hodge's chief organ, but his colleagues took up his mantle in the Review and other venues after his death in 1878. They included traditionalists such as Hodge's son, A. A. Hodge (1823–86), who taught systematic theology; Charles A. Aiken (1827–92), the Archibald Alexander Chair of Christian Ethics; and and William B. Greene (1854–1928) who held this chair after Aiken's death. Among the most prolific Princeton writers on secular topics was Lyman H. Atwater (1813–83), who served as co-editor of the Review for nearly a decade. In 1869 the college appointed Atwater professor of logic, metaphysics, ethics, economics, and politics. The Princeton traditionalists had Old School southern allies, most notably Robert L. Dabney (1820–98) and Arnold W. Miller (1822–92), the latter pastor of First Church (Presbyterian) in Charlotte, NC for nearly thirty years. Dabney addressed an impressive array of subjects in the Southern Presbyterian Review and taught at Union Seminary in Richmond until being appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of Texas in 1883.Footnote ²⁵

As noted above, these traditionalists differed both from the anti-statist and limited government political economy of the new laissez-faire conservatives treated by Hofstadter and also from the more moderate cultural conservatism of the late Victorian liberals identified by Tomsich and Butler. Among the most significant distinguishing factors here was religion, and not merely in terms of personal piety. Traditional Reformed theology shaped the social, political, and economic thinking of the dissidents in profound ways. The orthodox or conservative theology of many clearly separated them from a range of other intellectuals with socially conservative concerns but whose religious beliefs ranged from moderate Unitarianism to agnosticism. Moreover, the dissidents' religious beliefs were also rolled up with a cluster of related cultural concerns. Although both groups appear culturally elitist by later standards, dissidents like Woolsey, Porter and Thompson, for example, soon found themselves decidedly out of step with mainstream academe in their religiosity that other more moderate elites did not.Footnote ²⁶

This conservatism of the traditionalists was a distinctive mixture of communitarian Calvinism and idealist, Romantic organicism that had links (especially among the Southerners) to remnants of classical republican thought.Footnote ²⁷ Rejecting the laissez-faire conservatives' hyperindividualism, virtually all the traditionalists stressed a more organic view of the social order and the importance of mediating institutions, especially family and church. To counter secularism, they offered a social theory often suffused with evangelical Protestantism, or, at the very least, one that assumed basic Christian tenets. Some answered the apologetics for industrial capitalism and popular materialism with sharp criticism of the corporate form and of the pervasive acquisitiveness of American culture.

Having highlighted the key places where the traditionalists differed from their fellow conservatives, the following analysis explores those differences in depth and thereby elucidates their alternative conservative vision of the American republic.

A STATIST VISION

Among the most striking differences that distinguished these traditionalists from what ultimately became the dominant conservative position was their different view of the nature of the state and its proper sphere of activity. As Richard Hofstadter emphasized, the new laissez-faire conservatives refused to “reverence” the state as many conservatives had done in the past. Nearly all rejected the statism of the early Federalists. Their intense individualism now conceived of government as the primary threat to individual liberty. Revealingly, they dismissed schemes to augment the power and expand the role of the state in the private economy as “paternalism.” As one of his critics noted in the Andover Review, for William Graham Summer “the doctrine of a paternal government is to be rooted up utterly.”Footnote ²⁸

But other conservatives pursued a different path. Their thinking was formed by their Protestant theology, their interaction with Romantic idealism, and their experience of the crisis of the Union.Footnote ²⁹ At least for a season, the Civil War encouraged a conservative statism among some Northern intellectuals. George Fredrickson notes how both secularist elites and clerical intellectuals of middle-class backgrounds employed this statism to serve their different ends. A lofty view of the public function of the clergy undergirded by certain theocratic ideas outlived the war “to become,” notes Fredrickson, “the basis for an intellectual orientation that rivaled that of the patrician scientific-professionals during the Gilded Age.” Significantly, traditionalist conservatives appear to have come often from this clerical group and “mostly from evangelical or other essentially pietistic backgrounds.” Meanwhile, those who eventually became the new laissez-faire conservative mainstream were more often “Brahmin professionals . . . mostly secularized Unitarians.”Footnote ³⁰ The war definitely undermined Lockean contractualism in some circles and, in Fredrickson's words, “reinvigorated the traditional Calvinistic ideal of a coercive ‘Christian state.’ [Yet] this seemingly archaic emphasis on the divinity of the state and its instruments was not . . . a momentary product of wartime ‘conservatism’, but rather a vital current of thought.”Footnote ³¹ Both Yale and Princeton numbered champions of this sort of traditionalism among their faculty and administrations well into the 1880s. Theodore Woolsey was, for example, in Daniel T. Rodgers's words, “as erudite a champion of the notion of moral government as the century could boast.” Woolsey, Rodgers comments, “was a man whose every political instinct went out to the active, morally benevolent state.”Footnote ³²

The refusal of traditionalist conservatives to follow the new laissez-faire conservatism's movement toward libertarian conceptions of the state was rooted in their organic understanding of society and the critical importance of mediating institutions in their thinking. They continued to cherish a society composed of divinely ordained institutions, especially the family, the church, and the state.Footnote ³³ At Princeton, Lyman Atwater served as professor of logic, metaphysics, ethics, economics, and politics between 1869 and 1883. He also taught occasionally at the seminary and, with Charles Hodge, was among the leading apologists for traditional Calvinism during his lifetime. Atwater referred in his college lectures to “the great social Organisms[:] the Family—the Church—the State.”Footnote ³⁴ Yale's Noah Porter put it more bluntly:

For the traditionalists, then, society was a living, organic entity that existed and functioned as a unified whole. As inheritors of the social views of both the Federalists and the American Whigs, the traditionalists usually eschewed an atomistic individualism, while they saw the different elements of society cooperating as an integral whole.

Antebellum Whig conceptions of social unity and class cooperation continued to loom large in the thought of the traditionalists. Washington College's Henry Vethake summarized the “two fundamental principles” that characterized the political economy of nineteenth-century moral philosophers as “the harmony of interests” and national prosperity being dependent upon national “virtue and piety.”Footnote ³⁶ In the wake of the Civil War, traditionalists saw these old assumptions being assaulted. The University of Pennsylvania's Robert Ellis Thompson was troubled by the “the great industrial forces which fall into strife over the wages and the hours of labor.” His answer to this problem also echoed the economic mutuality long celebrated by antebellum Whigs. “The conflict between the two forces grows out,” he contended,

Similarly, G. J. A. Coulson argued in the Southern Presbyterian Review that this divinely ordained social cohesion was evident in Scripture. In the Old Testament, “the law that regulates the conduct of men in their lowest relation of ‘neighborhood’ is clearly based upon their mutual interdependence.” Based upon “this mutuality,” Coulson concluded, “society is therefore not a combination for the conservation of rights, but a combination rather for the enforcement of duties.”Footnote ³⁸

But some traditional conservatives moved beyond paeans to class cooperation and social unity. They articulated a thoroughly organic understanding of both society and the state that contrasted sharply with eighteenth-century contractualism. Liberal Congregationalist Horace Bushnell argued in an important Civil War sermon that American political culture had long been divided between what he termed the “historic” and the “abstract theoretic” schools.Footnote ³⁹ Jeffrey Sklansky has noted how, during the Revolutionary era, “the most thoroughgoing American dissent from the individualistic model of social contract came from orthodox Calvinism, which recalled the Puritan vision of a commonwealth of souls.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Though now bolstered by German idealism, conservative Calvinists still played a key dissenting role a century later during the Gilded Age. Some had imbibed the Germanic deification of the state directly during their graduate study in Europe, and nearly all had received it through American conduits such as the writings of Lieber and Mulford. Its characteristic portrait of the state as a single natural entity resonated with thinkers steeped in Whig organicism and in St Paul's organic metaphors for the church as the body of Christ. “A state is a body, [a] community, not merely a whole made up of parts each having a particular interest,” asserted Congregationalist political scientist Theodore Woolsey, “but a whole having one interest.”Footnote ⁴¹ Professor of apologetics and Christian ethics at Princeton Seminary Charles A. Aiken referred to civil society as

Even some Southern traditionalists, who were far less inclined to revere the state, accentuated social cohesion and viewed the state as a natural organism. Southern Presbyterian pastor A. W. Miller argued that “a state of individualism, could such exist, would be destructive of nature,” since human nature is “not an individual, isolated nature, but a relational, associative, civil, and political nature.”Footnote ⁴³ He therefore deduced that “man's nature, then, is the family, society, the state, and the Church.” The natural, God-ordained agent of the nation is the state. “God made society and government as much as he made man,” noted Miller in the same essay. “The state is a political person, moral, responsible; for to it pertain rights, duties, and obligations, which connect it directly with the government of God. It is indeed the organ through which that government is administered in its relation to man's highest earthly interests.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Apparently, for some southerners sectionalism and states–rights dogma did not always trump a statist nationalism.

Miller's argument sounds surprisingly similar to that of Elisha Mulford, a leading defender of the Northern cause. In The Nation: The Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States (1870), Mulford wrote that

Like many of his fellow Northerners, Mulford's views had been fashioned in part by an encounter with a historically rich Europe. When traveling in England during the 1850s, Mulford had written to a friend, “in the abbey and the tower, and in the streets themselves, all the old ballad poetry and the early literature, and the long drawn pages of Hume pass before you, and you realise [sic] what an organic growth and living unity the Nation is.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As both Mark Neely and Fredrickson have observed, this historicized nationalism was strengthened by the experience of the Civil War; during the 1860s Burke's critique of French radicalism found new appreciation. The nation was a natural and historical product and not something concocted by abstract theory.

Most traditionalist conservatives agreed that families were the essential building blocks of this organic society. For Mulford the family was the lynchpin. He argued, for instance, that “the Family is not the creation or invention of man. It is not something with which man can do without. It appears in the lowest phases of human existence, and in the highest.”Footnote ⁴⁷ History demonstrated that the family was not man-made. “Society is formed,” he wrote in 1885, “in the family and the Nation. These are integral. Its advance is in and with these.”Footnote ⁴⁸ He explained elsewhere that “the nation has not its origin in the family, but it exists in a necessary correlation with it, and in the development of each this relation must always have a deeper recognition.” Mulford warned

Convinced that the family was foundational to society, many traditionalists criticized forcefully one new feature of the changing social order—the increasing incidence of divorce. Robert Ellis Thompson viewed less stringent divorce laws as a serious social threat that reflected a misunderstanding of the true character of marriage. Complaining about the rise of hedonistic attitudes toward marriage, Thompson remarked,

Meanwhile, some saw the new corporate elites as the chief culprits in this development. Writing in the Southern Presbyterian Review, an anonymous author noted with sarcasm, “The rich are able to obtain divorce upon any pretext—why should not we abolish all marriage laws?”Footnote ⁵¹ Others, such as Princeton's A. A. Hodge, also stressed the threat to marriage but saw the institution primarily threatened by the radical Left: “religion and the holiness of the marriage bond are the great weapons with which to fight socialism.” The prescription for Hodge was simple: “Prohibit divorce, hold sacred the marriage tie.”Footnote ⁵²

This historically grounded belief that families were the irreducible constituent elements of political society had serious implications for liberal social-contract theory. Daniel Walker Howe's characterization of the prevalent organicism of the antebellum Whigs is also an apposite description of the views of many traditionalists.Footnote ⁵³ Some traditionalists in fact dismissed the social contract as hopelessly ahistorical. R. E. Thompson wrote in 1891 that

Yet “to-day,” Thompson concluded, “no sociologist would think of giving the sanction of his name to a theory so destitute of historic foundation. To-day the patriarchal theory [found in Genesis], with some modification from its old form and a rejection of the inference the Tories drew from it, is universally accepted.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Yale's Theodore Woolsey concurred. In one lecture, Woolsey described the “social compact . . . [as] a chimera.” Second, he argued that “it fails to account for the rights of a state; third, that it puts the obligation to obey the laws upon a wrong basis; fourth, that it is built on a false philosophy.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Woolsey explained that “the right [of the state] comes not from renounced power but from the state's being; in the natural order of things, God's method of helping men towards a perfect life.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Lyman Atwater echoed these views in his Princeton lectures on civil government.Footnote ⁵⁷ Dabney went further in his critique of this sort of contractual theory, even quoting approvingly Richard Hooker and Locke's nemesis, Filmer, in order to argue that political authority was derived ultimately from the patriarchal authority of fathers in families.Footnote ⁵⁸ As in many instances, the Southerner Dabney staked out the most extreme position, though notably not basing it on idealist foundations, but by drawing upon older republican strands of Anglo-American political thought.

This more organic conception of society and distinctive understanding of the state helped fashion unique public policies. Several of the traditionalists advocated measures to promote a characteristically Whig “alliance of Labor and Capital” and supported proposals to have workers own stock in the companies that employed them. Lyman Atwater commented upon such a program:

Because of their more positive view of the state, traditionalists refused to press laissez-faire as far as did many of their fellow conservatives. Criticizing William Graham Sumner, an editorial in the Congregationalist Christian Union argued that an activist “conception of the ‘province of government’ has always been believed in by the Conservative party.” It then concluded tersely: “The intellectual and moral mission of government can never be realized by a laissez faire. The government must and will interfere to prevent ignorance and intemperance.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Noah Porter agreed heartily.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, though criticizing socialism, R. E. Thompson also declared that “the functions of government cannot be resolved into those of the police officer. It has the responsibility of giving direction to the social movement, economically as well as politically.”Footnote ⁶² By no means did all of the traditionalists follow Thompson in embracing this sort of broad interventionism. Lyman Atwater and Southerners like R. L. Dabney definitely adhered to more minimalist views of state authority; significantly, both opposed the sort of protectionist policies that Thompson championed. Nevertheless, the war to preserve the Union clearly did bolster the state activism of some conservatives.

PRESERVING A RELIGIOUS RIGHT

After its minimalist view of the state's role, the second most conspicuous (and perhaps most remarkable) feature of the new laissez-faire conservatism was its secularism. While not unknown in Europe since the Enlightenment, such an agnostic conservatism had been comparatively rare in America. Those who dissented from this new secular conservatism tended to be Christians of varying shades of orthodoxy and, in many cases, evangelical Protestants. Some have explained this difference in religiosity mostly in generational terms, i.e. the younger generation was less religious than its predecessors had been. One can certainly recognize this sort of shift among academics. After the 1870s the older clerical intellectuals were gradually replaced by faculty drawn from a cosmopolitan, secular gentry. As Dorothy Ross observes about the writings of the new faculty, “the deity so much called upon in previous American [academic] texts disappeared from theirs.”Footnote ⁶³ Yet the transition was more complex than that; some of the traditionalists were born as late as the 1840s and continued to write and speak well into the 1890s.Footnote ⁶⁴

An incident that provides one of the most revealing glimpses into conservatism's secular turn is the disagreement that erupted in 1879 between Yale president Noah Porter and his young professor of sociology, William Graham Sumner. The dispute has often been cited to illustrate the struggle for academic freedom or disputes over Darwinism. Yet evolutionary theory was not a major concern for most of the dissident conservatives. By the 1880s biological evolution was accepted at Yale and even at the more conservative Princeton, where President McCosh took an irenic approach and the seminary's B. B. Warfield declined to continue Charles Hodge's hard line. The Porter–Sumner controversy better illustrates the deepening fissure between the new conservatives (represented by Sumner) and traditionalists like Porter. President Porter wrote in early December to express his concern about Sumner assigning Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology as the main text for an undergraduate course. Sumner defended his controversial choice but eventually dropped the book. As Marsden and others have pointed out, the debate did not center upon assigning non-Christian readings (Porter had himself assigned readings from Spencer's work) but upon whether such works would be taught from a Christian perspective.Footnote ⁶⁵ Clearly, Sumner's model of social science was unapologetically secular, whereas Porter continued to adhere to a self-consciously Christian scholarly ideal. Reading controversial naturalistic books at Yale was fine by Porter as long as they were studied from an explicitly Christian perspective. Using Spencer's book as the class's main textbook would make that very difficult. Traditionalist conservatives like Porter were, by the 1880s, scrambling to keep college teaching within traditional religious boundaries, as new conservatives began to move beyond those boundaries.Footnote ⁶⁶

More than infrequent invocations of the deity distinguished the new conservatives from traditionalists. The social and economic theory of most traditionalists was clearly built upon biblical models and Reformed Protestant presuppositions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Atwater told his Princeton students during the 1870s, “In a word—the Church and State alike are ordained of God, and in their true spheres, not discordant or belligerent, but harmonious, concentric, and mutually helpful.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The critics of the traditionalists well understood this fundamental feature of their work and targeted it in their critiques. For example, evaluating Theodore Woolsey's political-science text in the North American Review, one reviewer concluded that “the fundamental assumptions of Dr. Woolsey's system are strangely confused. The reason is, that he has at every stage introduced theological conceptions into his reasoning . . . Society he does not regard simply as an organized aggregation of individuals, but as existing for religious ends.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Among the most outspoken and emphatic of the traditionalists in this regard was R. E. Thompson. Thompson, although younger than Sumner and many of the other more secular academics, was explicitly Christian in many of his writings. Acknowledging the influence of Henry C. Carey and, significantly, Elisha Mulford, Thompson erected his sociology with Scriptural and Reformational building blocks.Footnote ⁷⁰ “The Hebrew nation,” he declared, “is the type of all national life . . . the Old Testament is as truly the text-book of national life for all time as the New is the text-book of church life.”Footnote ⁷¹ Thompson insisted that “the divine will was the basis of all human relationship in family, state and church, as it was the basis of all righteousness in man and of all freedom in society.”Footnote ⁷² Speaking to seminarians at Princeton in 1891, Thompson took pains to emphasize that recognizing this “social side” of Christian revelation was part of being authentically Reformed: “Calvinism in its heroic days was a social as well as a theological faith. It was theocratic to the core.” Nor did Thompson back away from this bold assertion. “Eliminate from the Calvinistic theology the theocratic element, the recognition of the divine will as expressed to us in human relationships and in the good order of society, the acknowledgment of God as the unseen king of nations and churches,” Thompson contended, “and you have destroyed the perspective and coherence of its teachings.”Footnote ⁷³ Thompson was a conservative Presbyterian (though, notably, he taught at a secular institution) but even many of those traditionalists who were less theologically conservative (such as Mulford) centered their social thought on Christian theology, bolstered by philosophical idealism.

The policy implications of a social theory shaped by religious belief were many and complex. Most of the traditionalists stressed an ethical perspective in the study of political or economic science and the ethical functioning of the state. Atwater extolled Woolsey's political science textbook because in it

They viewed government and religion as mutually reinforcing and believed legislators owed obedience to the Decalogue—and not only to the ‘second table’ (that focused on social responsibilities) but also to the first table that centered upon duties to God. Accordingly, Atwater argued for legislation that would protect Sabbath observance and proscribe profanity and blasphemy. He emphatically rejected the “very common assumption that natural morality furnishes all the principles required for right and necessary legislation, without any guidance from divine revelation, such as might show any national preference for the religion of the Bible.” Citing Washington's Farewell Address, Atwater warned about “the supposition that [public] morality can be maintained without religion.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Again, a publicly funded education system raised important policy questions for these religious traditionalists. Both Atwater and A. A. Hodge defended the maintenance of prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. “Some men may dehumanize themselves,” observed Atwater, “the fool may say in his heart there is no God; but is that a reason for the state's adopting a method of education for its children which discards or ignores the crown of their humanity?” Atwater agreed with Woolsey that it was still appropriate for the state “to punish certain offenses against God and religion.” From such traditional practices, Atwater concluded, “if the state cannot avoid some proper regard to the religious sentiment, in its legislation which defines and punishes crimes against God and religion, can it avoid recognition of these things when such crimes come into view in the school?”Footnote ⁷⁶ Atwater contended that the best policy was to teach a nonsectarian biblical morality in publicly funded elementary schools. Such schools would be “regulated by those principles of Christian morality which are the law of our social and civil life,” and they would admit “the use of the Bible as a reading-book, and of simple forms of prayer in worship, which should offend none but infidels and atheists.” The latter, Atwater quipped, “we cannot afford to regulate our education.”Footnote ⁷⁷ For some, the Christian morality that underlay civil government implied an activist state. In his notes, Mulford recorded with approval Bismarck's argument that the state, “penetrated through and through by Christianity,” was morally obliged to care for the poor.Footnote ⁷⁸

Although economists or sociologists identified natural laws to help people understand social forces, many traditionalists believed that ethical considerations trumped these laws. Congregationalist Rowland Hazard criticized Sumner's What Social Classes Owe to Each Other in part for its refusal to preserve a place for moral considerations in economic reasoning. Hazard first objected that Sumner “implies that the laws of sociology are capable of exact statement, like the laws of the physical sciences.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Sumner was guilty of failing “to give due weight to the moral forces,” and ignoring “all those higher spiritual influences, all the affections and sentiments, which sway man's action, and the impress of which can be found on human institutions.”Footnote ⁸⁰ But it was not just the neglect of the ethical forces in his calculations that riled Hazard; Sumner's conception of social science explicitly excluded ethical prescription. Hazard quoted Sumner as conceding that “there is no injunction, no ‘ought’ in political economy.” However, Hazard argued, “The fact that political economy fails to impose obligation is not conclusive that obligation does not exist. The question which is asked [by Sumner] is not a question of political economy. It is an ethical question.”Footnote ⁸¹

While certainly more deferential toward the laissez-faire Manchester School, some Princeton Presbyterians raised similar concerns about the relationship between Christian values and economic laws. “When men maintain that economics is a science or natural fact and law, from which all moral considerations are to be as rigorously excluded as from our study of the growth of the wool on a sheep's back,” Charles A. Aiken noted with alarm, then

Aiken's colleague Lyman Atwater agreed: some versions of the discipline “ignore man's moral nature,” he warned in the 1870s,

Southern churchmen like R. L. Dabney may have endorsed key features of classical political economy more than some of the Northern traditionalists, but they shared this concern about ethical principles. Though Dabney staunchly defended free trade and “the utility and necessity of these laws” of classical political economy, he conceded

Traditionalists believed that the new laissez-faire conservatives were, by detaching themselves from religious belief, effectively undermining their social conservatism. This danger was especially evident in their opponents' emphasis on individual advantage that served to break down the old-fashioned conservative celebration of community and the communal demands of duty on the individual. Competitive individualism could act as an acid dissolving the communal ties that bind. Moreover, the secularism of the new conservatives opened the door to a naturalistic social thought, one that might accept the sort of cultural relativism that Sumner would ultimately embrace in Folkways (1906).

STANDING UP FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRINCIPLESFootnote ⁸⁵

The new laissez-faire conservatives and the traditionalist dissenters pulled distinct parts of hybrid Jeffersonian republicanism in different directions. The former group ran with the individualistic emphases of the Lockean thread in Jefferson. Meanwhile, traditionalists were critical of the ways some new conservatives were applying or modifying classical political economy in the last third of the nineteenth century. Yet they still tenaciously adhered to some of its teachings. In this sense, one can rightly view eighteenth-century republicanism as a source for both sides, despite their deepening differences.Footnote ⁸⁶ The traditionalists' dogged adherence to the classical republican part of the eighteenth-century paradigm was especially true of the Southern clerics. Chief among these tenets were a producerist ethic, a small-scale proprietary ideal, hostility to the expanded and privatized corporate form, the idealization of a simple republican past, a concern about the widening gap between rich and poor, and a deep suspicion of ostentatious wealth and its attendant moral dangers.

Again, R. L. Dabney presses the argument farther than nearly all of his Northern conservative counterparts. To make his case, Dabney described how a group of entrepreneurs could now easily incorporate as a mining company:

Like his fellow traditionalists, Dabney sought to return the focus onto the productive community hurt by the speculative activity of a few aggressive entrepreneurs. Producerist thinkers viewed exchange value as derived solely from labor applied to natural resources. For such traditionalists, the ideal was still that of the independent yeoman farmer. Dabney reflected on the worrisome outcome of economic change in America: “Thus the centralization of capital leads at once to the centralization and degradation of population.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Pennsylvania state senator J. S. Hess concurred with Dabney that it was this championing of small-scale proprietary capitalism that made one's position authentically conservative. Hess advocated “the permanent division of the land into small possessions” mostly for its socially conservative results.Footnote ⁸⁹ Quoting the New York Tribune, he explained, “If the people have always been order-loving, just and in the best sense conservative; . . . it is because we have made it our national policy to give every man who wants it a stake in the country.” Hess concluded that “nothing contributes so much towards making a contented conservative citizen as the possession of a home.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Conservatives of this sort agreed that the vast expanse of virgin land had made the independent, small-scale producer a social reality in America, rather than merely a pastoral dream, as in much of the Old World. The abolition of entail and primogeniture was frequently praised for ensuring a large independent yeomanry and as evidence of the wisdom of the republic's founders.Footnote ⁹¹ Such larger considerations of community prompted Dabney to maintain that entails should be limited to two generations. Those who sought to extend inheritances beyond this boundary had suspect motives. “He who endeavors to do this for his later posterity, unknown to him [i.e. beyond two generations],” noted Dabney, “is personally actuated by an ambition and arrogance of family unfriendliness to the common welfare.”Footnote ⁹²

These concerns about the survival of the independent small-scale producer were part of a general idealization of a simple republican past. In many respects, the traditionalists were truly the party of the past. Like the Jacksonian Democrats (at least as characterized by Marvin Meyers), they sought to “recall agrarian republican innocence to a society drawn fatally to . . . the revolutionizing ways of acquisition, emulative consumption, promotion and speculation.”Footnote ⁹³ In describing his circle of genteel literary editors during the Gilded Age, Tomsich concludes with a description that could also be applied accurately to these traditionalist conservatives: “Despite criticisms of laissez-faire economics, genteel reservations about capitalism remained conservative, not radical, reservations. The nostalgic wishes of the group to revert to a golden age suggest this conservatism, as does the persistent gap between complaints and its proposals.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The religiously informed conservatism of Northern dissidents often made their reservations sound more radical than those of Tomsich's subjects, with Southerners like Dabney expressing their critique in the most far-reaching terms.

How did their traditionalist economic vision affect the positions these individuals took on public policy questions of their era? Notably, some traditionalists did accept the modern corporate form as legitimate. At Princeton, Lyman Atwater defended modern corporations and sharply attacked their critics as imprudent.Footnote ⁹⁵ But other traditionalists never seemed reconciled to the idea. Again, Southern conservatives were among the most hard-line critics. Dabney, for example, astutely recognized the fissure opening up within conservatism. He argued that his far more critical approach to corporations was an authentic “discriminating conservatism, which values and seeks to preserve the principle of old institutions, and which understands the conditions of their value.” This method he contrasted with “an unthinking conservatism, which by blind association of ideas, cleaves to the form of institutions once valuable, overlooking the conditions of their utility, and the principles which remain stable under changing forms . . . This conservatism seeks to keep the shell at the expense of the kernel.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The new conservatives had been fooled by superficial appearances and needed to think more deeply, beyond mere facades. He held as a fundamental assumption that “there is a sense in which ownership is, and must be, only personal.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Dabney thought it

Accordingly, Dabney rejected general incorporation laws as a dangerous innovation.Footnote ⁹⁹

Some traditionalists protested that giant corporations were artificial creations, isolated from the human touch and therefore lacking personhood or a soul. The impersonal, synthetic character of corporate structures insulated them from the moral considerations of the individual businessman. “Corporations,” Dabney complained,

Many expressed concerns that corporations were by their very nature secretive and corrupting entities. Woolsey argued that the corporations and giant banks were not open to community inspection and thus potentially hazardous to civil society.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The traditionalists' critique of the corporation was here suffused with the moral rhetoric of evangelicalism and of the political discourse of the Revolutionary and Early National eras. Among their chief charges was that contemporary corporations engendered dishonesty. Dabney was again among the most outspoken in this regard. “Corporations,” he contended, “will always incline to employ means much more corrupt than private men would venture, to seduce legislators to bestow further favors.” Dabney argued that

Some Northern dissident conservatives appeared to agree. Robert Ellis Thompson was a strong critic of socialistic measures of any sort, but he observed that the left had identified a serious problem with the emergent economic order which was at its base an ethical problem. “The loveless competitions of the business world, the unbrotherly relations of classes to each other, the low level of business morals as exemplified in adulterations, forestalling, stock-gambling, sham bankruptcies and the like, are things which shame our civilization.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Thompson eschewed fundamental structural changes because they assumed too much faith in the power of the environment to change human beings (a faith he associated with “Darwinism”) and argued instead that moral uplift and the salutary influence of the Church was needed to transform individuals.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even Lyman Atwater, rarely a critic of the corporate form, inveighed against some big business owners. “The breaches of trust,” he observed 1869, “committed by the directors of many of our great public corporations in administering the property, without regard to the interests of innocent stockholders, including many widows and orphans, intrusted [sic] to them, have been rarely paralleled in history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Like their classical republican forebears, the traditionalists laid special emphasis on the potential moral dangers of material prosperity. Woolsey cautioned that “the evil influences of unbridled prosperity are insidious; they paralyze and stupefy; earth is made more attractive, and heavenly realities kept further off.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ “Probably history affords no such example of gambling in stocks, and of fortunes suddenly made by it, as Wall Street during the last five years,” Atwater noted in 1869. Such speculation has “become a passion with a large mass of men, who are content with nothing short of sudden fortunes, acquired by a few adventurous and desperate moves, and spent faster than they are gained.” He concluded with an exhortation to readers:

Such a system encouraged the worst in American national character, observed Dabney and others. “There is no reason why private corporations should be causelessly multiplied . . . The spirit of industrial adventure does not need stimulus among us, but it needs prudent repression.” He declared (in words that would have warmed the heart of any Puritan) that “the community is not interested to have such spirit of enterprise stimulated in this form . . . [rather, men should] much more regularly stick to the callings in which they had been reared, and in which they were qualified and entitled to succeed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ When considering the disquieting changes wrought by the new corporate order, some conservatives thus returned to the republican language of virtue that had defined the political discourse of their grandparents.