What is American Democracy?
American Democracy = Country + Liberty + God + Freedom.
The year was 1862. Exactly one year after the Civil War started. In Brooklyn, NY at Plymouth Church, the abolitionist preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, was helping Americans understand what made our American Democracy worth fighting for!
This Fourth of July I bring to you these words of Freedom, Liberty, and American history, which now with the publication of this article is the first time these words have been published online! The following adapted passage is from Henry Ward Beecher’s sermon, “Success of American Democracy.”
The history of this year is the history of the common people of America. It is memorable on account of the light that it throws upon them. We are fond of talking of American ideas. There are such things as American ideas, distinctive, peculiar, national. Not that they were first discovered here, or that they are only entertained here; but because more than anywhere else they lie at the root of the institutions, and are working out the laws and the policies of this people.
The root idea is this: that man is the most sacred trust of God to the world; that his value is derived from his moral relations, from his divinity. Looked at in his relations to God and the eternal world, every man is so valuable that you cannot make distinction between one and another. If you measure a man by the skill that he can exhibit, and the fruit of it, there is great distinction between one and another. Men are not each worth the same thing to society. All men cannot think with a like value, nor work with a like product. And if you measure man as a producing creature — that is, in his secular relations — men are not alike valuable. But when you measure men on their spiritual side, and in their affectional relations to God and the eternal world, the lowest man is so priceless that you cannot make any practical difference between one man and another. Although, doubtless, some are vastly above others, the lowest and least goes beyond your power of conceiving, and your power of measuring. This is the root idea, which, if not recognized, still operates in the background. It is the fundamental principle of our American scheme, that man is above nature. Man, by virtue of his original endowment and affiliation to the Eternal Father, is superior to every other created thing. There is nothing to be compared with man.
All governments are from him and for him, and not over him and upon him. All institutions are not his masters, but his servants. All days, all ordinances, all usages, come to minister to the chief and the king, God’s son, man, of whom God only is master. Therefore he is to be thoroughly enlarged, thoroughly empowered by development, and then thoroughly trusted. This is the American idea, — for we stand in contrast with the world in holding and teaching it; that men, having been once thoroughly educated, are to be absolutely trusted.
The education of the common people then becomes a necessity. They need to be fitted to govern. Since all things are from them and for them, they must be educated to their function, to their destiny. No pains are spared in Europe when they educate their princes and nobles who are to govern. No expense is counted too great, in Europe, to prepare the governing classes for their function. America has her governing class, too; and that governing class is the whole people. It is a slower work, because it is so much larger. It is never carried so high, because there is so much more of it. It is easy to lift up a crowned class. It is not easy to lift up society from the very foundation. That is the work of centuries.
We have learned that for ordinary affairs intelligence among the common people is better than treasures of knowledge among particular classes of the people. School-books do more for this country than encyclopedias.
And so there comes up the American conception of a common people as an order of nobility, or as standing in the same place to us that orders of nobility stand to other peoples. Not only the educated men and men of genius get participate but we call all that remain of the common people. The whole community, top and bottom and intermediate, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the leaders and the followers, constitute with us the commonwealth; in which laws spring from the people, administration conforms to their wishes, and they are made the final judges of every interest of the State. In America there is not one single element of civilization that is not made to depend, in the end, upon public opinion. Art, law, administration, policy, reformations of morals, religious teaching, all derive, in our form of society, the most potent influence from the common people. For although the common people are educated in preconceived notions of religion, the great intuitions and instincts of the heart of man rise up afterwards, and in their turn influence back. So there is action and reaction.
It is this very thing that has led educated people from foreign nations to doubt the stability of our nation. Owing to a strange ignorance on their part, our glory has seemed to them our shame, and our strength has seemed to them our weakness, and our invincibility has seemed to them our disaster and defeat.
It is impossible that nations educated into sympathy with strong governments should sympathize with the governed. In this country the sympathy goes with the governed, and not with the governing, as much as in other countries it goes with the governing, and not with the governed. And abroad they are measuring us with false rules, which are homebred and one-sided sympathy.
It is impossible for men who have not seen it to understand that there is no society possible that will bear such expansion and contraction, such strains and burdens, as a society made up of free educated, common people, with democratic institutions. It has been supposed that such a society was the most unsafe, and the least capable of control of any. But whether tested by external pressure, or, as now, by the most wondrous internal evils, an educated democratic people are the strongest government that can be made on the face of the earth. In no other form of society is it so safe to set discussion at large. Nowhere else is there such safety in the midst of apparent conflagration. Nowhere else is there such a rule, when there seems to be such anarchy.
A foreigner would think, pending a presidential election, that the end of the world had come. The people roar and dash like an ocean. “No government,” he would say, “was ever strong enough to hold such wild and tumultuous enthusiasm, zeal, and rage.” True, there is not a government strong enough to hold them. Only self-government will educate men to take care of themselves, individually and in masses. Then let the winds blow. Then let the storms fall. Then let excitements burn. The people will learn to move freely upon each other, as do drops of water in the ocean.
Our experience from generation to generation has shown that, though we may have fantastic excitements and even though the whole land may seem to have drifted from its dock’s safety into a sea of wild agitation, we only have to let the silent dropping paper go into the box, and that is the end of the commotion. Today, the flames mount to heaven and on every side you hear the most extravagant prophecies and the fiercest denunciations, and both sides know that, if they do not succeed, the end of the world will come. But tomorrow the vote is declared, and each side goes home laughing, takes hold of the plough and the spade; and they are satisfied that the nation is safe after all.
And we have come to ridicule the idea of danger from excitements. Where else was there ever a nation that could bear to have every question, no matter how fiery or how fierce, let loose to go up and down, over hill and through a valley, without police or government restraint upon the absolute liberty of the common people? Where else was ever a government that could bear to allow entire free discussion? We grow strong under it. Voting is the cure of evil with us. Liberty, that is dangerous abroad, is our very safety. And since our whole future depends upon our rightly understanding this matter,- the liberty of the common people, and the glory of the common people, — and since this government of our educated common people is to be the death of racism, and to spread over this continent an order of things for which in past experience there is no parallel, and for which men’s ideas are not prepared,-we do well to take heed of this memorable year of the common people. For histories will register this year of 1861–62 as the year of the common people of America.
