Walter Bagehot’s Palinode

palinode, n: 1. An ode or poem that recants or retracts something said in an earlier poem, 2. a recantation

By a stroke of good luck for students of the Civil War, Walter Bagehot, one of Victorian England’s most brilliant economists, essayists, and political thinkers, became editor of the London business journal The Economist in the autumn of 1860. Bagehot would also become one of the Economist’s regular contributors, writing frequently about American affairs – necessarily so because even then the English and Americans were joined by many important political and economic interests. Bagehot’s commentaries provide a valuable historical record — a record of the evolution of the views of a first rate mind on the momentous events in America and on the statesmanship of the chief actor in those events, Abraham Lincoln.

Walter Bagehot was born in 1826, into a wealthy family with interests in banking and shipping. After completing his education, he worked in the family business for several years, while at the same time writing articles on history and economics that attracted the attention of James Wilson, an influential member of parliament; Wilson asked him to become editor of The Economist, which he had founded in 1843. Bagehot agreed and would be the editor of The Economist until he died in 1877, of complications from pneumonia. Bagehot also married Wilson’s daughter Eliza; the marriage was by all accounts happy.

Bagehot also wrote books — remember, he was a Victorian — two of which were of special importance. One is “The English Constitution” a brief overview of the subject that is said to be required reading for the Prince of Wales. The other is “Lombard Street”, about the Bank of England and central banking; in this book, he expounds the rule, known as “Bagehot’s dictum”, that in times of financial crisis, the central banks should provide unlimited amounts of credit to solvent institutions in order to quell panic and prevent a disastrous contraction of the economy. During the financial crisis of 2008, officials at the federal reserve bank frequently referred to Bagehot’s dictum and claimed to be following it in practice.

Bagehot’s elegant prose and his insights into things political, economic, and literary were widely admired, by no one more than Woodrow Wilson, who modeled his book “Congressional Government” on Bagehot’s book about the English constitution and who, on a visit to England, made a point of visiting Bagehot’s grave.

By another stroke of good luck, I once found an odd volume of the complete works of Walter Bagehot on the $1 table at the Brattle Bookstore in Boston. This particular odd volume contains all the articles about American affairs that Bagehot wrote and published in The Economist. I had a dollar and the odd volume went home with me.

During in the course of the war, Bagehot often wrote about the difficulty of learning what was happening in America and why. But however baffling and obscure American affairs may have been to Bagehot and his readers, they were of too much consequence to England to be ignored. Lancashire depended for its prosperity on American cotton, and the north’s embargo on the export of cotton was causing great hardship there.

Another casualty of the embargo was the principle of free trade, which was of great importance to Bagehot and other English liberals. And for Bagehot in particular— a student of the forms of government who in 1867 would publish his classic work “The English Constitution” — the functioning of the United States Constitution provided almost endless matter for reflection.

Despite his doubts about the quality of his information about America, he had strong convictions on several fundamental matters:

The south was responsible for the crisis. The election of Lincoln was not the cause of the war, but the long awaited pretext for seccession.

The war would be immensely destructive, and for this reason, he frequently called for a quick end to the war through negotiation.

The North in any case would be better off if it were free to go its own way, without the south. It would no longer have a share in the moral shame of slavery. It would be better able to attend to its own business. It would be less feared, but more respected by the countries of Europe, and it would still be destined to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

If the south could be prevented from extending slavery into the territories, the continued cultivation of cotton in the current slave states would eventually exhaust the soil there, making cotton unprofitable to grow and so leading to a gradual and voluntary abolition of slavery. On this point Bagehot seems less impressive than when touching on other matters. Conflict over the extension of slavery into the territories would certainly not have ceased with the independence of the slaveholding states; the example of bleeding Kansas suggested just how violent any such conflict was likely to be.

The north had little chance of bringing the south back into the union. “The Americans have never faced any great difficulties, he wrote. “We do not know how they will come out under trial.” Despite this profession of ignorance, he seemed fairly certain that the Americans would not come out well. They had won their independence from England, not by strength or courage, but only due to the “imbecility” of the Lord North government. Northerners prized the union only because it bolstered their sense of prosperity and power, which “swelled so flatulently and disturbingly in the breast of every citizen of the Atlantic Republic.” Of the northerners’ deep attachment to the union as the realization of the ideals of the founders, Bagehot appears to have had little appreciation.

Adding to the difficulties of the north was its lack of capable leadership. Here the south had the advantage of being led by so capable and experienced men as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. The government of the federal states, Bagehot wrote, “has fallen into the hands of the smallest weakest and meanest set of men who ever presided over the policy of a great nation at the critical epic of its affairs. The president means well, but he does nothing else well. The inexplicable caprice of a forgotten caucus selected Mr. Lincoln as a candidate because no one knew much about him, and therefore scarce anyone could object to him.”

Bagehot further deplored the ungrammatical prolixity of Lincoln’s writing style, saying “There is no greater misfortune than for a great nation to be exclusively represented at a crisis far beyond previous example by a person whose words are mean even as his actions are important.”

The blame for the rise of such a person as Lincoln belong to the constitution’s gift of unchecked influence to obscure political caucuses and the uninstructed outdoor multitudes. Bagehot wrote:

“The constitution of the United States was framed upon a vicious principle . . . under the growing influence of democracy, the electoral college had lost its power of independent choice, and now simply ratified the choice of the people,” and this was frequently a bombastic vulgarian.

But Bagehot was a student of the actual who never tried to explain away what he saw happening, however unexpected and inexplicable that might be. In the third year of America’s terrible war, the North looked more and more like it might win; the American people unexpectedly showed powers of endurance and a gift for mastering difficulties; and Lincoln appeared more and more to be the leader that the crisis demanded. Bagehot changed his views accordingly. He wrote:

“The head of the Executive may, by an infinitesimal chance, be a man so exactly representative of the people, that his acts always represent their thoughts, so shrewd that he can steer his way amidst the legal difficulties piled deliberately in his path, and so good that he desires power only for the national ends. The chance of obtaining such a man was, as we say, infinitesimal; but the United States, by a good fortune, of which they will one day be cruelly sensible, had obtained him. Mr. Lincoln, by a rare combination of qualities—patience, sagacity, and honesty—by a still more rare sympathy, not with the best of his nation but the best average of his nation, and by a moderation rarest of all, had attained such vast moral authority that he could make all the hundred wheels of the Constitution move in one direction without exerting any physical force. . .

“. . . The President had, in fact, attained to the very position — the dictatorship — required by revolutionary times. At the same time, this vast authority, not having been seized illegally, and being wielded by a man radically good—who for example really reverenced civil liberty and could tolerate venomous opposition—could never bedirected to ends wholly disapproved by the ways of those who conferred it.”

“. . . We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character. Difficulties, instead of irritating him as they do most men, only increased his reliance on patience; opposition, instead of ulcerating, only made him more tolerant and determined. The very style of his public papers altered, till the very man who had written in an official despatch about “Uncle Sam’s web feet,” drew up his final inaugural in a style which extorted from critics so hostile as the Saturday Reviewers, a burst of involuntary admiration. A good but benevolent temporary despotism, wielded by a wise man, was the very instrument the wisest would have desired for the United States; and in losing Mr. Lincoln, the Union has lost it. The great authority attached by law to the President’s office reverts to Mr. Johnson, but the far greater moral authority belonging to Mr. Lincoln disappears.”

At the end of the war, the nation was in fact exhausted — physically, emotionally, morally. It did not want to hear about the rights of man, or justice, or freedom. For another 80 years, black Americans would be oppressed and abused in ways hardly preferable to what they had experienced as slaves. But Lincoln’s words and example of faithfulness to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, if they did not make us just, lingered in our minds, keeping us from being more unjust than we became.