Chapter 1: Guiding the Whirlwind A wag might argue that the origins of the Confederacy dated to the philosophy of Aristotle, who proposed that differences arising from race and regional origin and birth created natural distinctions between peoples and their inherent abilities. Yet there is substance in the case beyond Aristotle's speculations on human variations. Writing twenty-two centuries before the breakup of the Union, the Greek philosopher penned in his Politics a discussion of what he called "one of the true forms of government," a limited monarchy. There were four varieties, he suggested. The first was that of the Spartans, wherein the king held office, but not absolute power, by birth or election. The second more closely resembled tyranny, yet it was legal and hereditary, established by ancient ancestry, and unchallenged by the people, indeed willingly accepted by them. A third was the dictatorship elected by the people, and thus willingly imposed upon themselves, an office held sometimes for life or else only for a stated term of years. The dictator's power might be despotic, even absolute, yet still he held it at the will of the people. The last form of limited monarch was the hereditary "heroic" king, who held office by virtue of his being able to provide for the people what they could not provide for themselves: organization, land perhaps, leadership in war, community, and more.
The only difference among them was in their degree of sovereignty. All fit in with most of the ideas of the new democracy that appeared in Greece 150 years earlier. No king wielded unlimited power, yet each ruled by some democratic acknowledgment of his superior skills or accomplishments. All were elected (or at least popularly accepted) and in three of Aristotle's scenarios the kingship was hereditary, suggesting that certain families were destined to rule by bloodline and natural gifts. All of the philosopher's leaders, in short, were elective dictators either for set terms or for life, yet under their rule the people had some rights, could speak out, even remove their king if they so chose, and by legal rather than revolutionary means. Authority was questionable, and kings needed to persuade or demonstrate to their subjects that they deserved to rule. Of the four, the last, the heroic monarchs, seemed clearly Aristotle's preference, for they were benefactors of the people in return for their high status. They took command in war, and presided over the sectarian ceremonies as their societies worshipped their own household gods. "They also decided causes," said Aristotle, and "their power extended continuously to all things whatsoever, in city and country." Yet with the passage of time, the ancient heroic kings had voluntarily relinquished some of their prerogatives, while their people gradually took away others, "until in some states nothing was left to them but the sacrifices."
Virtually every founding father of the Confederacy who was educated spent his formative years poring over Aristotle's Politics, and by 1861 would have recognized the philosopher's fourth monarch as the model of the oligarchs who wielded acknowledged social and political rule in the South, elected and given power in recognition of their superior blood and ability. Four years later their power would be gone, some of it willingly ceded to their new government in the interest of its survival, and some wrested from them by an electorate no longer willing to be led by an elite who had brought them to disaster. In the end, for those "heroic monarchs" of the Confederacy, as for Aristotle's elective dictator, "nothing was left to them but the sacrifices."
A cynic would look for premonitions of the Confederacy at a slightly less distant date in antiquity, when the Roman statesman Cicero decried the civil war that broke out in 48 B.C. He blamed the rivals Pompey and Caesar as men who "put personal power and private advantage before the safety and honour of their country." After his success Caesar paid due service to the forms of republicanism, but in fact chose to rule as an autocrat. Yet he so persuaded the citizens that he was a democrat that they all but begged him to take more power as their champion. He quite happily obliged. Caesar exemplified Aristotle's fourth king, but it is more to the point that Rome tested the philosopher's musings on human inequality. Virtually all Roman citizens were members of one of thirty-five extended families or tribes, each originally the equal of the other in political decisions. But before long the wealthy and landed tribes acquired greater influence and power than the others, and soon their "colleges," the divisions whereby they voted for their consuls, were redistributed into so-called classis, literally "classes." Quickly the wealthier classes aggrandized their power, so the top two classes, though less than 46 percent of the colleges, controlled a majority of the votes in an election. At the other end of the economic spectrum, those with no property at all constituted the bottom class, the proletarii, and when it came time for their votes to be counted, they no longer mattered as the upper classes had already decided who the consuls should be. In time the proletarii simply became accustomed to following the minority upper classes without their voices even being heard. As Cicero himself argued, "when both the best and worst are given equal honours, equality itself is most unequal," something that could not happen "in states which are governed by the best people." The will of the majority was dying, and the oligarchy was born.
The most bitter observer of the Confederacy might advance half a millennium to the fifth century A.D., when Rome realized that it could no longer administer its empire in the West in the face of barbarian advances, and pulled back, leaving the bulk of a once united Europe to be divided and ruled by local chieftains whose allegiances had traditionally been tribal rather than political, and to kings rather than senates. To them power came by heredity and natural right, not from a popular mandate, and the place in society of the king and the nobles he sustained was unquestioned. No one could hold them to account. Aristotle's monarchs were dead.
The true family tree of the Confederacy, however, fed from much shallower tendrils, and shared a common taproot with conservatism as a political movement and philosophical idea. In Western democracies, potent political parties and ideologies emerged only in the wake of the collapse of the absolute monarchies beginning in the seventeenth century, a collapse that restless, disfranchised populations helped to bring about. Of course the shift to constitutional monarchies, especially in England, did not suddenly give real power to any more than a small percentage of the people, chiefly white male landowners. But far more important, it did remove the protection afforded by an absolute crown to an aristocracy of birth, making it vulnerable for the first time to social inroads and economic competition from the now-franchised middle class, and to the erosion of its hereditary rights to position and power. The ballot box and the suppressed aspirations of commoners posed a greater threat to the security of the landed aristocracy than anything in its history, and the further the franchise spread among the population at large, the more it endangered the rights and privileges of the upper class.
Denied the protection once afforded by an all-powerful monarch, that elite had no choice but to fight back in the same political arena that threatened its position if not its extinction. Thus was born conservatism as an active political idea, though adherents actually referred to themselves as "conservatory" until the early nineteenth century. Conservative or conservatory, the only syllable that really mattered in both was