at first lowest. ‘The President is unequal to the situation in which he is placed’, judged the Economist flatly at the end of 1861. ‘He has received the training of a rural attorney, and a fortuitous concurrence of electioneering elements have placed him at the head of a nation.’109 The federal government had ‘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 epoch of its affairs.’ Their collective wisdom was a ‘concatenation of paltry arts which their own word “dodge” and no other will describe’.110 By the time of his re-election in 1864 Bagehot considered Lincoln the best candidate but made it clear this was not saying much. ‘It is not even contended that Mr. Lincoln is a man of eminent ability. It is only said that he is a man of common honesty, and it seems, this is so rare a virtue at Washington that at their utmost need no other man can be picked out to possess it and true ability also.’111 Bagehot did not even value his literary style, the ultimate insult, comparing ‘the dignified and able State Papers of Jefferson Davis to the feeble and ungrammatical prolixity of Abraham Lincoln’.112
Bagehot looked down his nose at Lincoln, but it was the American Constitution he blamed for putting him in charge, and for the seeming inability of the more prosperous and populous North to suppress a rebellion of eight million backward Southerners.113 The contrast with the efficient political reflexes of the English system was constant in his leaders for the Economist, and formed a considered corpus of work beyond it. ‘The American Constitution has puzzled most persons in this country since the remarkable course of recent events has attracted a real attention to American affairs.’114 Bagehot would explain its mysteries. Indeed, his disclosure of the efficient secret of English parliamentarianism depended on a prior act of exposure in America, where the Civil War revealed the horrific administrative, military, and financial consequences of wrong constitutional theories.
The US founding fathers had built upon an interpretation of the English Constitution that Bagehot would attack as false – with the perverse result that, here, checks and balances were real, limiting efficient government without restricting the suffrage. Americans had trusted to ‘paper checks and constitutional devices’ to ‘resist the force of democracy’ but ‘either could not or did not take the one effectual means of so doing; they did not place the substantial power in the hands of men of education and of property’.115 Congress, meanwhile, lacked the dynamic powers that might have made it an effective check either on the people or the president. With respect to the latter, it had an ‘extreme remedy’ only, ‘the power of refusing supplies’. The Founders had misunderstood their model. For ‘the framers of this clause in the American Constitution copied it from the traditional theory of the English Constitution.’ They had not understood that though it was ‘a deadly sleeping weapon’, in practice ‘a lesser instrument had been annexed to it, and was always used instead of it – that of choosing the executive’.116 Their mistaken reading meant the president had a ‘lease for years’ and stayed for all four no matter how ‘unfit, incompetent, and ignorant’.117
Congress, with a power almost ‘too terrible to use’, put America at a disadvantage in the new age of global capitalism. ‘The use of it stops the whole machinery of government, and the mere fear of its use annihilates public credit. Since the creation of large national debts, which did not exist in the times when the English House of Commons acquired its power, it is questionable whether a successful use of the power of withholding supplies could be effectually made with safety to the state.’118 The evils were legion: presidential impunity, the poor quality and limited ‘educating capacity’ of Congress, and apathy even among those supposed to be leading citizens.119 To Englishmen this was the most astonishing facet of the Northern character. ‘They bear defeat in their armies, fraud in their contractors, incompetence in their generals and statesmen, with a stoicism which would be admirable if it rested on philosophy or reason, if it were anything but ignorant patience.’120
Given this barrage of bad press, readers must have been stunned to open the Economist at the end of April in 1865 and find an encomium to Lincoln, after he was shot by an assassin during a performance in Washington, D.C. ‘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.’ In taking a second look at the dead president Bagehot found his hidden greatness to have been his ability to make the constitution work – a document even more wretched than he had imagined at the outset of the Civil War.
‘The difficulty of creating a strong government in America’, able ‘to do great acts very quickly, is almost insuperable.’ The national character was dead set against both efficiency and dignity. ‘The people in the first place dislike government, not this or that administration, but government in the abstract, to such a degree that they have invented a quasi philosophical theory, proving that government, like war or harlotry, is a “necessary evil.”’ States impeded any central initiative. ‘To make this weakness permanent they have deprived even themselves of absolute power, have first forbidden themselves to change the Constitution, except under circumstances which never occur, and have then, through the machinery of the common schools, given to that Constitution the moral weight of a religious document.’ Lincoln seemed the one man, ‘by infinitesimal chance’, capable of managing this infernal machine. ‘The President had, in fact, attained to the very position – the dictatorship – to use a bad description, required by revolutionary times.’121
The Economist made a post-mortem exception for Lincoln, but it entertained few doubts about the low character of his compatriots and hoped that one outcome of the Civil War would be to humble them. Above all it had called for a speedy end to the conflict, and resumption of cheap and unrestricted flows of raw cotton to the shuttered mills of Lancashire, cut off from their supplies by the blockade of Southern ports. While Bagehot stopped just short of calling for Britain’s Royal Navy to reopen them, he had welcomed the dissolution of the Union in 1861 and looked forward to a future with two ‘less aggressive, less insolent, and less irritable’ trading partners.122 In many ways a lucid critic of American politics, he was less perceptive about the impact of the ultimate victory of the North, in part because the Economist had a profound interest in the economic and imperial consequences of the outcome for Britain.
Bagehot had personally sympathized with the Confederacy and maintained it could not be defeated, scoffing at the idea that ‘5 or 6 millions of resolute and virulent Anglo-Saxons can be forcibly retained as citizens’.123 He urged Russian or French or English mediation, for ‘there is not the slightest prospect of their forcible subjugation’. The brilliant victories of the South had earned it ‘the right to be admitted into the society of the world as a substantive and sovereign State. Certainly, neither Belgium, nor Greece, nor the Spanish colonies of the New World, manifested in anything like the same degree the qualities and resources which enable nations to maintain freedom and command respect.’124 With the Confederate capital of Richmond in flames, he saluted its ‘vanquished gallantry which appeals to the good side of human nature’.125
Southern courage contrasted with Northern cowardice. ‘They are a wholly untried people, they have never yet faced a really formidable foe.’ In the war of American independence, it was true, they had shown ‘pluck’, but ‘the indescribable imbecility of their enemies was yet more wonderful than their own vigour’. The only triumph since 1783 had been in the War of 1812, a short conflict in a minor theatre of Britain’s war against Napoleonic France, when the future president Andrew Jackson ‘defended a walled city against an inadequately-provided invading force lodged in an unhealthy swamp’ outside New Orleans – not exactly bad odds. ‘All their other contests have been against naked Indians and degenerate and undisciplined Mexicans: these were raids rather than wars.’126 The Economist flew into a rage at US interference with British shipping, which was ‘very like insanity’ for Northern officials to condone.127 When two Confederate diplomats aboard the Trent were taken prisoner
