British stateman Benjamin Disraeli viewed the United States as a “territorial democracy,” divided into a personal democracy in the South, and a socialistic and humanitarian democracy in the North. The latter was represented mainly by the abolitionists who saw their cause as transcending all laws or constitutions of state and had its counterpart in European Jacobinism or red republicanism.
At the end of the Civil War, Brownson emphasized that the general government “cannot itself reorganize a State; it has no authority to purge the electoral people and to say who may or may not vote, for the whole question of suffrage and qualifications is left to each State and can be settled neither by an act of Congress nor executive proclamation.”
Better to Emulate the Wise Romans
“[Brownson] maintained that neither the [Lincoln] administration nor Congress ever took, distinctly and decisively, a ground on which the war was defensible . . . for neither party understood where, under our system, the sovereign power is lodged.
But whatever the inner superior merit of the American Constitution, its interpretation is quite another thing altogether. If the [Southern] States had not held the States to be severally sovereign and maintained that the United States are only an agreement or compact, they would not have seceded; and had not the [Northern] States confounded the Union with the general government and manifested a tendency to make it the whole national government, the South would have had no occasion or excuse for secession.
[Brownson] expressed deep regrets over President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of May 29, 1865, disenfranchising the pars sanior of the whole white Southern society. Of that he wrote:
It exceeded anything ever issued in any age by the most barbarous chieftain. It virtually disenfranchised and outlawed nearly the whole Southern people, certainly every man who could render any efficient service in reorganizing Southern society, and in repairing the disasters of the war.”
This he proscribed as a wholly calamitous policy. What was most needed was to bring about a speedy restoration of the Southern people to citizenship and thus bring the North and South together in friendly and loyal cooperation in binding up the nation’s wounds. To inflict upon the Southern people unnecessary and ill-timed pains and penalties would only be to disgrace the whole American character . . .
“The wise Romans,” he reminded the Northern victors, “never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.”
(Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Thomas R. Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, p. 647; 649-650; 654; 659)