Such talk of and demand for “rights” incurred some of Dabney harshest and most withering fire, including his criticism of the clamor for women’s suffrage.
There is a long passage from Dabney’s essay on equality and women’s suffrage (included in the volume) which deserves to be fully quoted:
The very axioms of American politics now are, that ‘all men are by nature equal,’ that all are inalienably ‘entitled to liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ and that ‘the only just foundation of government is in the consent of the governed.’ There was a sense in which our fathers propounded these statements; but it is not the one in which they are now held by Americans. Our recent doctors of political science have retained these formularies of words as convenient masks under which to circulate a set of totally different, and indeed antagonistic notions; and they have succeeded perfectly. The new meanings of which the ‘Whigs’ of 1776 never dreamed are now the current ones. Those wise statesmen meant to teach that all men are morally equal in the sense of the Golden Rule: that while individual traits, rights, and duties vary widely in the different orders of political society, these different rights all have some moral basis; that the inferior has the same moral title (that of a common humanity and common relation to a benignant Heavenly Father) to have his rights—the rights of an inferior—duly respected, which the superior has to claim that his very different rights shall be respected.
The modern version is that there are no superiors or inferiors in society; that there is a mechanical equality; that all have specifically all the same rights; and that any other constitution is against natural justice. Next: when our wise fathers said that liberty is an inalienable, natural right, they meant by each one’s liberty the privilege to do such things as he, with his particular relations, ought to have a moral title to do; the particular things having righteous, natural limitations in every case, and much narrower limits in some cases than in others.
Radical America now means by natural liberty each one’s privilege to do what he chooses to do. By the consent of the governed our forefathers meant each Sovereign Commonwealth’s consenting to the constitution under which it should be governed: they meant that it was unjust for Britain to govern America without America’s consent. Which part of the human beings living in a given American State should constitute the State potentially, the populus whose franchise it was to express the will of the commonwealth for all—that was in their eyes wholly another question, to be wisely decided in different States according to the structure which Providence had given them. By ‘the consent of the governed’ it would appear that Radicalism means it is entirely just for Yankeedom to govern Virginia against Virginia’s consent, and that it is not just to govern any individual human being without letting him vote for his governors. The utter inconsistency of the two parts of this creed, is not ours to reconcile. It is certain that, both parts (consistent or not) are firmly held as the American creed…
To these errors the American people are too deeply committed to evade any of their logical applications.
In addition to a basic misunderstanding of the American Founding, such modern views on equality fundamentally violated the teaching of Holy Scripture and the laws of nature and the roles assigned by it to the different sexes. Thus, it had been the near unanimous teaching of the Christian tradition since Apostolic days. And more, although not venturing deeply into the topic, Dabney inferred that both physiological and genetic conditions militated against sexual equality.
Yet, in his battle with the feminists and egalitarians, Dabney despaired. For other than a few conservative Southern writers and churchmen, what he termed “Northern conservatism”—the “conservative movement” of his time—was weak, vacillating, and compromising. Here he is, again, painting a picture of contemporary conservatism, a picture that has not changed much in over a century:
It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights, will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
The final essay Garris includes, “Civic Ethics,” comes from the third volume of Dabney’s Discussions. It addresses not only the moral basis for obedience to civil authority, but is an excursion into the different theories about the origin of society and the authority of government. Dabney is harshly critical of such writers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he lumps together as proponents of the “social contract” theory of society: that we are somehow created as autonomous individuals who then come together voluntarily to form a society and create a government. Not only in logic, but in historical fact, this view is erroneous. Man is born within a society and under some form of government, which, in some way, is ordained by God. As Dabney points out, given the fallen nature of man and the existence of evil in the world, the rule of law and the operation of governments and obedience thereto are absolutely requisite to a well-ordered commonwealth, just as the family forms the natural and basic unit of the society, and in microcosm forms a kind of mini-government over its members.
The one slight difference I have with Dabney comes in this last essay, his critique of what he calls “Legitimism,” which he identifies with the Divine Right of Kings. Rightly, as he defines it, he opposes it—and given his Old Republicanism, that is to be expected. Yet, I would distinguish between most true Legitimist (mostly royalist) movements in Europe during the nineteenth century, and the theories of Divine Right. Traditionally in Christendom, kingship was not considered absolute, as certainly as it evolved during the Enlightenment. Traditional monarchies generally practiced a form of subsidiarity, even a broad form of “states’ rights,” in which local and regional bodies, communities, guilds, regions, and other subdivisions within society exercised a considerable degree of authority and autonomy, even at times a veto, within a commonwealth, even when that commonwealth was headed by a king or emperor. The examples from history are manifold, and I would cite my own experience and studies in Spanish Traditionalism: those Legitimist defenders of the old Spanish monarchy termed “Carlists” who fought several civil wars for “King, Country, Our Local and Regional Rights, and the King,” emphasis emphatically on “our local and regional rights”: their unbreachable “fueros.”
Robert Lewis Dabney was also a staunch opponent of crony capitalism and the mass industrialization of the South. He saw the destruction of our agricultural society and the rapid growth of industrialization with alarm. In his essay, “The New South,” Dabney drew a comparison between the United States of 1789 and ninety-three years later, in the 1882. In the former year no one city, no one or two states, no handful of corporate giants controlled the nation’s wealth. But in 1882 New York City had become “the commercial mistress” of the whole nation and a handful of industrial barons dictated policies to presidents. Asked Dabney: “Can a sensible man persuade himself that political independence and individual initiative shall remain in a land where financial despotism has become established?”
And he continued: “the transfer of wealth and power into the hands of a few, and the marvelous applications of science and mechanic art to cheapen transportation and production” were causing not just the transformation of the South, but a massive change in all of American society. Centralization and monopolization in industry meant a vast reorientation in manufacturing, with far-reaching effects socially and culturally. What happened to independent small businessmen and craftsmen who were now overwhelmed by monopolies, mergers, and crushing competition? When capital was controlled by the few, and the powerful barons of industry commanded the masses at their bidding, individual liberty soon disappeared.
Although not covered in the four chapters in this book, such prescient commentary on post-War America and what was happening to his beloved Southland merit perhaps another volume of selections.
It was Dabney’s role, holding fast to his firm Presbyterian orthodox theology and his understanding of the principles of the American Founders, to offer a roadmap for a righteous citizenry and for the survival of a nation. And he did so as one of the most notable thinkers that the South—and America—produced in the nineteenth century. Yet, he exclaimed with melancholy late in his life in 1894, “I am the Cassandra of Yankeedom, predestined to prophesy truth and never to be believed until too late.”
Zachary Garris’ new volume of some of Dabney’s best writing offers an opportunity to re-discover this prophet and to begin to comprehend his thought, based in the traditions of Christian theology. Dabney has much to teach us today, and Garris’
Dabney on Fire is an excellent way to begin that process.