¹ Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), Volume I, 261.

² Turner, James, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 180Google Scholar.

³ Santayana, George, The Genteel Tradition at Bay (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1931)Google Scholar. George Santayana first identified this tradition in a lecture originally delivered at Berkeley in 1911. But the characterization persisted in influential historians and literary critics, including, among many others, Brooks, Van Wyck, The Flowering of New England: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Beginnings of American Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), esp. 452–59Google Scholar.

⁴ James, Henry, ed., Letters of William James, Volume II (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. “Our two great journalists of the nineteenth century were Greeley and Godkin,” Rhodes wrote. Rhodes, James Ford, “Edwin Lawrence Godkin,” in Rhodes, Historical Essays (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1909), 267–97Google Scholar, 267.

⁵ The fullest scholarly account of the early founding of The Nation can be found in Armstrong, William A., E. L. Godkin: A Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), 75–88Google Scholar. Armstrong's account grossly understates Norton's role in organizing The Nation, which is perhaps understandable in a biography. But Godkin himself, both publicly and privately, credited Norton as the most important influence behind The Nation’s early survival and success. The best scholarly account of the intellectual friendship between Norton and Godkin during the 1860s is provided in James Turner's biography of Norton. A fine study of the wider circle to which Norton and Godkin belonged is Butler, Leslie, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ “National Protection for Whites and Blacks” The Nation, 7 Dec. 1865, 711.

⁷ Eric Foner's history of Reconstruction, still the standard synthetic history of the era, skillfully includes elements of all these interpretations. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁸ I have labelled the commitment to this principle “communal republicanism,” and contrasted it with the commitment to an impartial state enforcing the equal rights of individuals, which I have labeled “liberal individualism.” The distinction, blurry among political philosophers, dissolves entirely in the discourse surrounding concrete political questions. Regardless of what they called themselves, Americans invoked both intellectual traditions and saw no contradiction in doing so. But the distinction was real and important. Freedom to build a community of common purpose can only exist in tension with the freedom of individuals to live as they choose. My purpose here is not to revive an old debate on the relative influence of these traditions on American political thought. I merely wish to emphasize a conceptual distinction that can be formulated in any number of ways: positive versus negative freedom, public versus private liberty, freedom as a virtue that is asserted versus freedom as a right that is protected, or even individualism versus collectivism. For an overview of the debate on republicanism in American political thought see Rodgers, Daniel T., “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History, 79, 1 (June 1992), 11–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ This interpretation of American political thought during the mid-nineteenth century is widely accepted among intellectual historians. Dorothy Ross and Robert Adcock have advanced compelling versions of it in their work on the academy. But the Civil War and Reconstruction are in the background of these interpretations, which emphasize the sudden departure from an exceptionalism framework and the transatlantic emergence of the social sciences as an academic discipline. Industrialization and class conflict are the central social events in these interpretations. Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Adcock, Robert, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For an overview of the welter of overlapping and contradictory meanings attached to the concept “civilization” see Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹¹ The narrow focus of this essay will not support much critical engagement with a historiography as vast as that concerning Reconstruction. But I would suggest that historians have underestimated the extent to which the democratic ideals that flourished during Reconstruction were undermined by their own internal contradictions. These ideals were imposed on the South by force and they could only be maintained by force. When a substantial part of any political community refuses to obey the procedural rules of free government, when they are unwilling to substitute ballots for bullets, the question isn't whether that community will be despotically governed but only who will despotically govern whom. As Gregory Downs has observed in his terrific study, scholars have generally slighted the overwhelming importance of the military in Reconstruction. Downs, Gregory, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is, indeed, hard to reconcile the ideal of American democracy with the gritty details of a military occupation, but the military was the only federal instrument capable of enforcing black civil rights in the South. Many advocates for black suffrage presented it as an alternative to military force, and this illusion almost guaranteed that the experiment would end in violence, disillusion, and failure. See, for example, Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1866, 761–65.

¹² Turner, 6.

¹³ This claim is likely to seem implausible until one considers the alternatives.

¹⁴ Charles Eliot Norton to George Woodbury, 11 Oct. 1877, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume II, 73–74.

¹⁵ Under Norton's editorship, the North American Review of January 1868 published an essay considering the sharp decline in Boston's relative importance from what it had been 30 years earlier.

¹⁶ Norton, Charles Eliot, Considerations on Some Recent Social Theories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), 47Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For example, it was “the definitive statement of the elitism of ‘New England's Brahmin caste,’ looking backward nostalgically to the days of Federalism.” Fredrickson, George, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 31–32Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume I, 197–98.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ “The Advantages of Defeat,” Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1861, 360–65.

²¹ Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, 13 April 1863, George William Curtis Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

²² Charles Eliot Norton, “American Political Ideas,” North American Review, Oct. 1865, 550–66.

²³ Charles Eliot Norton, “Sir Alexander Grant's Ethics of Aristotle” The Nation, 6 Aug. 1866, 106–7.

²⁴ Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, 3 Sept. 1863, Curtis Papers.

²⁵ Charles Eliot Norton to Curtis, 1 March 1862, Curtis Papers.

²⁶ John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 10 Feb. 1863, in Bradley, John and Ousby, Ian, eds., The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), 75Google Scholar.

²⁷ Ruskin to Norton, 6 Aug. 1864, in Bradley and Ousby, 80.

²⁸ Norton, “American Political Ideas.”

²⁹ Norton, “American Political Ideas.”

³⁰ “[N]o man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle – the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” In The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume II, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 266. Lincoln's whole point, and he was hardly alone in making it, is that claims of superiority – moral, intellectual or otherwise – even if true, are not a valid justification for governing others without their consent.

³¹ Norton, Considerations on Some Recent Social Theories, 126.

³² For a different interpretation of Norton's essay, see Kloppenberg, James, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar, esp. 702–8.

³³ James Russell Lowell was technically coeditor but all the real work fell to Norton.

³⁴ Norton to Godkin, 11 March 1864, Godkin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ E. L. Godkin, “The Constitution, and its Defects,” North American Review, July 1864, 117–45, 119–20.

³⁷ Ibid., 139. Norton, a Dante scholar and translator, likely thought of his favorite poet's criticism of his own commune in the Divine Comedy: “What you weave in October doesn't last to mid-November. How often you have changed laws, coinage, offices, usage and renovated every part!” Cited in Martines, Lauro, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 129Google Scholar.

³⁸ E. L. Godkin, “The Democratic View of Democracy,” North American Review, July 1865, 103–33.

³⁹ See, for example, Lincoln, Collected Works, Volume III, 315, 96.

⁴⁰ Godkin, “The Democratic View of Democracy,” 112.

⁴¹ As will be seen below, Godkin intended the original passage as the beginning of an argument justifying the very distinctions Norton's addition clause expressly denounced.

⁴² Manuscript of “The Democratic View of Democracy,” North American Review papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁴³ Norton to Godkin, 24 Feb. 1865, Godkin papers.

⁴⁴ Norton to Godkin, 24 Feb. 1865, Godkin papers.

⁴⁵ Norton to Godkin, 20 July 1865, Godkin papers.

⁴⁶ Norton to Godkin, 5 April 1865, Godkin papers.

⁴⁷ Godkin to Norton, 13 April 1865, in Gilded Age Letters of E. L. Godkin, ed. William Armstrong (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 28.

⁴⁸ Godkin to Norton, 28 Feb. 1865, in Gilded Age Letters of E. L. Godkin, 21–22.

⁴⁹ Norton to Godkin, 5 March 1865, Godkin papers.

⁵⁰ Evening Post, 20 Dec. 1899. Cited in James Ford Rhodes, “Edwin Lawrence Godkin,” in Rhodes, Historical Essays (New York: MacMillan,1909), 274.

⁵¹ Godkin to Norton, 13 April 1865, in Gilded Age Letters of E. L. Godkin, 27.

⁵² The most remarkable example of this is George Fredrickson. “Charlies Eliot Norton and others claimed that their wavering belief in democracy had been revived by the proofs of obedience and endurance shown by the common people and by the Negroes in the struggle. This commitment to equality, however, was obviously conditional … If the ‘inferior elements’ whether Negro or white, consented to be led by the ‘best culture,’ then their rights were assured.” The rhetoric here disguises a problem that ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone familiar with mid-century America, namely that democracy and equality were not in fact complimentary or even wholly compatible. Fredrickson, George, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 165Google Scholar.

⁵³ Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (London: John R. Parker and Sons, 1974), 68Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Godkin, E. L., “John Stuart Mill,” in Godkin, Reflections and Comments (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1895), 67–79Google Scholar, 76.

⁵⁵ Mill, 161.

⁵⁶ The Nation, 12 July 1865, 31.

⁵⁷ Bagehot, Walter, Physics and Politics (London: Henry S. King & Co. 1948), 214Google Scholar. The book was originally published in 1872. Bagehot went on to identify and endorse several other English claims to superiority, including cultural attainments promoting happiness, comfort, and knowledge. But all these additional claims, in Bagehot's theory, rest on the essential one of superior force. But for that, the others would prove mere pretentions. Bagehot was fond of paradox, and the central paradox of his study is that a nation becomes less warlike as its capacity for warfare increases.

⁵⁸ Significantly, Godkin eventually came to support “home rule” in the South with reasons that were identical to his support for “home rule” in his native Ireland. Because his Irish background was a favorite point of attack among Godkin's critics, he rarely dwelled on the analogy in The Nation, but he wrote an entire essay on the parallels for an English journal. In both instances, Godkin wrote, vicious criminality had acquired moral sanction within communities as expressions of “discontent with a government directed or controlled by the public of another indifferent or semi-hostile community.” E. L. Godkin, “American Home Rule,” Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, June 1886, 793–806.

⁵⁹ “The Freedmen of Port Royal,” North American Review, July 1865, 1–29, 1.

⁶⁰ Carole Emberton has insightfully shown how the depiction of blacks as helpless victims of white violence helped galvanize support for federal intervention at the long-term cost of reinforcing a perception of black passivity. Emberton, Carole, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Douglass, Frederick, “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves if Emancipated?” (Jan. 1862), in Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Foner, Philip, Volume III (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 188–8Google Scholar9, original emphasis.

⁶² Godkin to Norton, 26 Jan. 1866, in Gilded Age Letters of E. L. Godkin, 72.

⁶³ Frederick Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1866, 761–65.

⁶⁴ The Nation, 7 Dec. 1865.

⁶⁵ “The Reconstruction Discussion,” The Nation, 22 May 1866.

⁶⁶ “Expected War in Germany,” The Nation, 18 May 1866.

⁶⁷ Godkin's UK background surely made him more acutely conscious of this development. “As for America, we appeal to the twentieth century,” Lord Macaulay wrote in 1829. Economic developments did not, of course, discredit democracy, but did discredit the Jeffersonian vision of democratic self-government that prevailed in the early republic. Macaulay cited in Adcock, Robert, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 28Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Godkin, E. L., “Legislation and Social Science,” Journal of Social Science, 3 (Boston, 1871), 115–32Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ “Puritanism in Politics,” The Nation, 3 Oct. 1867, original emphasis.

⁷⁰ Godkin, E. L., Reflections and Comments, 1865–1895 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895), 255Google Scholar.

⁷¹ “Puritanism in Politics,” The Nation, 3 Oct. 1867.

⁷² “Good government is the end, and the ballot is worthless except so far as it helps reach this end,” Francis Parkman wrote in 1878. “Any reasonable man would willingly renounce his privilege of dropping a piece of paper into a box, provided that good government were assured to him and his descendants.” It would be tedious to pile up similar quotations. Francis Parkman, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” North American Review, Aug. 1878. This point is made implicitly or explicitly in most intellectual histories of the nineteenth century. The widespread belief that America's democratic republic represented a unique advance in the science of politics faded rapidly after the Civil War. Compare Tocqueville with Bryce, for example. Daniel Rodgers, to cite just one example, makes this point by way of a different argument. Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁷³ Godkin, E. L., Reflections and Comments, 1865–1895 (New York, 1895), 255Google Scholar. For a terrific study of the origins of American social sciences, which locates the development squarely in the “crisis of American exceptionalism” that followed the Civil War, see Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. Neither Godkin nor Norton are mentioned in Ross's book, or, for that matter, in Adcock, Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science, and neither fits in emerging mold of the academic specialist; quite the contrary. They are relevant to the story, however, as two of the most prominent public intellectuals who experienced this transition, and reflected on it, without belonging to it.

⁷⁴ Santayana, The Genteel Tradition at Bay, 3–4.

⁷⁵ George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” originally delivered as a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley in 1911.

⁷⁶ Charles Eliot Norton to George Baxter Harrison, 14 Dec. 1863, Norton Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁷⁷ Norton to Godkin, Godkin Papers, 20 Aug. 1868, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁷⁸ During this visit, Norton introduced Henry James to the social circles that loomed so large in the novelist's work.

⁷⁹ Charles Eliot Norton, “The Poverty of England,” North American Review, July 1869, 122–54.

⁸⁰ Charles Eliot Norton to Chauncey Wright, 5 Dec. 1869, cited in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume I, 372.

⁸¹ Charles Eliot Norton to Miss Gaskell, 21 Dec. 1869, cited in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume I, 372–73.

⁸² Kloppenberg, James, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 194Google Scholar.

⁸³ See, for example, his letter to John Baxter Harrison, 19 March 1865, Norton papers. “It is my firm conviction that we are just entering in this country on a new style of religious life and a new manner of religious faith. Forms and creeds are to hold less part in our religion, and the spirit is to be more sought and expressed. There is to be greatest independence in religious thought, and with the widest differences of speculative belief there is to be more harmony of feeling and of action, and a more general recognition of the duty as well of the right of freedom of personal inquiry and conviction.”

⁸⁴ Charles Eliot Norton, “Some Aspects of Civilization in America,” Forum, Feb. 1896, 641–51.