Quest for Liberty: America in Acton's Thought

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, as you probably all know, was born on January 10, 1834. You are less apt to know that he was born not in England as becomes a proper English Lord, but in Naples. The fact that he was born in the Palazoo Acton all'chiaja in Naples is not without significance, nor is the fact that he died and was buried in Tergensee, just south of Munich in Bavaria; for surely aside from Prince Albert, Acton must have been the most un-English of any prominent Englishman in the nineteenth century.

Lord Acton's grandfather, Sir John Francis Acton, whose name "Johnny" Acton bore, had been an eighteenth-century English soldier of fortune on a grand scale and had become "General Acton" and prime minister of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Ferdinand, King of Naples, was a dullard and a buffoon who spent his time hunting and amused himself by playing the hurdy-gurdy. His queen, Maria Carolina, daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria and sister of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, had an eye both for power and powerful men. Sir John Acton struck her fancy and rumor had it that John Acton became her paramour. It was unsubstantiated rumor, however, for John Acton's steely nature knew enough not to mix the pursuit of power with the pursuit of pleasure. Together John Acton and Maria Carolina ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, insuring its survival through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Our Lord Acton did not approve of his grandfather, and regarded the Neapolitan inheritance as "blood money." It is only fair to say that in all likelihood General John Acton would not have approved of his grandson, for he was an eighteenth century authoritarian who had nothing but contempt for liberty.

Those who would like to explore the Neapolitan world into which our Lord Acton was born in 1834 can not do better than read the magnificent novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Pantheon Press, 1960).

Lord Acton's paternal uncle was a saintly cardinal, promoted to that position in 1842 when he was only thirty-nine by Gregory XVI. He died in 1847 in the Jesuit house in Naples. His name, Charles Edward Januarius, reveals the Neapolitan Acton connections. Harold Acton has given us a vibrant picture of the activities of General John Acton in The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825 (London: Methnen & Co., 1956).

Yes, it's an unlikely beginning for the historian of liberty and the passionate friend of the United States. His mother, moreover, brought an ancestry which was perhaps even less inclined to a devotion to freedom. Acton's mother was the daughter of the Duke of Dalberg. The Dalbergs were Electors of the Holy Roman Emperors, and in the imperial coronation ceremony at Frankfurt, a herald sounded a trumpet at the beginning of the coronation rite and called out, "Is there a Dalberg present?" at which point a Dalberg stood and identified himself and the ceremony was then able to proceed. Lord Acton's paternal grandmother belonged to a great Rhineland family. When Lord Acton's mother died in 1860 he inherited the Dalberg schloss at Herrnsheim in the Rhineland. In 1865 Acton married his cousin, the Countess Marie Ann Arco-Valley, a marriage which reinforced his German, in this case, Bavarian connections. Add to these bonds of birth and marriage the fact that Acton studied for six years at the University of Munich and it becomes clear that Acton's Englishness was extremely attenuated. Acton was, in fact, a member of the Continental imperial aristocracy compared to which the Whig aristocracy which dominated nineteenth-century England (so brilliantly depicted in the Palliser novels of Antony Trollope) were the merest upstarts.

Still, Acton had Whig connections. When Lord Acton was three his father died and in 1840, when Acton was six, his mother married Lord Leveson, later the 2nd Earl Granville, one of the great Whig magnates of the nineteenth century. Lord Leveson's uncle was the Duke of Devonshire, one of the wealthiest men in England in the nineteenth century. In short, Acton moved in circles characterized by wealth, power and privilege; never mind that he did not ride and shoot and that his relationship to his step-father was cool.

How, having been reared in such an atmosphere, are we to explain Acton's passionate commitment to liberty and his intense interest in and high estimate of the American experiment? In 1901, the year before his death, in his last lecture at Cambridge University, Acton concludes, "And yet, by the development of the principle of Federalism, [America] has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the world has seen." Lectures on Modern History, edited with an introduction by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan and Co., 1952).

It is the contention of this lecture that if we understand the development of Acton's attitude towards the United States we will find ourselves in possession of the key to Acton's thought in general.

Acton placed liberty in the forefront of all goods, moral and political. You are all aware that the great uncompleted project of his life was the writing of a history of freedom. He saw the evolution of liberty as the work of Providence, as the consequence as he put it of Christ's being "risen on the world." Achieved liberty is the fulfillment of the divine plan. It is for this reason above all others that Acton so valued the American experiment.

Liberty, however, is seen as the end of history, achieved only in the fullness of time and only as a consequence of a long developmental process. Liberty, personal and political, could not come into existence until the way had been prepared for it by the development of conscience. Almost as important to Acton's thinking as tracing the history of freedom was his effort to describe the growth of the idea of conscience. In the 60,000 volumes of his personal library he searched for the historical stages in the development of the idea of conscience. It was not an easy task and I might add it is a task which has been all but abandoned by philosophers and intellectual historians in our own day. Acton saw clearly that liberty was predicated on the existence of conscience. But what was conscience? What were the powerful arguments against the existence of conscience? How did the idea of conscience develop historically? Should the promptings of conscience always be obeyed? Could the conscience err? Was there a universal voice of conscience or was the conscience of each man a unique and independent authority? How did conscience manifest itself in politics? These are some of the problems with which Acton wrestled. Is it any wonder that he did not write his history of freedom?

The autonomy of conscience was, Acton tells us, recognized by Socrates and the Greeks. As he notes in his Additional Manuscripts (Add. Mss.), the word "conscience" occurs in the New Testament 32 times (4901, p. 66). The Stoics believed that the voice of God dwells in our souls and that we must obey this voice. But Saint Thomas Aquinas is the source of the modern idea of conscience. Acton wrote in an extended note (Add. Mss. 4901), "S. Thomas. As to penal laws, he went with his generation. For half a century when he wrote, not a voice had been raised for toleration. He strengthened a view which could hardly be stranger. But in respect of conscience he innovated. He went farther than all his time in proclaiming its authority. This was peculiarly his own idea-set out by him, and gifted with power, in time to overcome the other." Acton further observed, (Add. Mss. 5395), "Conscience depends on, or is parallel with clear notions of ethics. Obscure ethics indicate imperfect conscience. Therefore obscure ethics imply imperfect liberty. For liberty comes not with any ethical system, but with a very developed one"

Not until the seventeenth century was conscience grounded in a universal natural law. In his essay (1877), "The History of Freedom in Christianity" Acton wrote:

Having established the primacy of conscience and rooted it in a universal natural law, Acton was ready to explore its political instantiation. He found that intersection of conscience, liberty and politics in America.

As early as 1858 Acton had observed in an essay which appeared in his journal, The Rambler,

Acton repeatedly noted that the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion led to the establishment of absolutism rather than toleration and freedom. Royal power and bureaucratic administration, whether Catholic or Protestant, was substituted for the imperatives of conscience. Established churches used the power of the state to coerce the consciences of the subject. The Puritan revolution in England appealed to the higher law of conscience but then sank back into intolerance and repression. It was the sectarians, at first in England and then in America who justified religious nonconformity by an appeal to conscience.

In Add. Mss. 4901, page 355, Acton wrote: "The theory of conscience was full grown. It had assumed in one of the sects, a very peculiar shape: the doctrine of inner light. The Quakers not originally liberals. But the inner light struggled vigorously for freedom. In the very days in which the theory of conscience reached its extreme terms, Penn proclaimed conscience as the teaching of his sect. And it became the basis of Pennsylvania-Voltaire's best government." He added in Add. Mss. 4960, p. 299, "Conscience understood in this way supplied a new basis for freedom. It carried further the range of Whiggism. The deeper Quakers perceived the consequences, Penn drew the consequences in the Constitution of Pennsylvania. It was the standard of a new party and a new world."

But not only the Protestant sects insisted on freedom of conscience and obedience to a higher law; Roman Catholics in Maryland pointed the way to the new world of freedom. In an essay, "The Protestant Theory of Persecution," published in The Rambler in March, 1862, Acton wrote:

In every case the appeal was to conscience, a conscience which defied the laws of man in order to obey the law of God. It was but a step from an appeal to liberty in religion to an appeal to liberty in politics. The appeal to the higher law made by the framers of the Declaration of Independence was only a more abstract and universal conception of liberty than the appeal to conscience made in the name of religion. In Add. Mss. 4897, p. 130, Acton noted, "America started with the habit of abstract ideas. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania. It came to them from religion and the Puritan struggle. So they went beyond conservation of national rights. The rights of man grew out of English toleration. It was the link between tradition and abstraction."

In his Cambridge University lecture (1901) on "The American Revolution," Acton put the revolutionary shift from rights based on the fact that the colonists were Englishmen to rights based on a universal appeal to a higher law in this way (Acton, Lectures on Modern History, p. 307):

Acton argued with great force that England's colonial rule in America had been one of the mildest and most beneficent colonial regimes in history. Americans were not rebelling against oppression. The American course was justified solely on the basis of our appeal to a higher law, justified solely by an appeal to the rights of political conscience. These were arguments Acton understood, approved and applauded.

The foundation of the American republic was, Acton rightly understood, not completed with the successful termination of the American Revolution. The American Revolution created a political society in which the unchecked will of the people was paramount, state governments in which the tyranny of the majority would, sooner or later lead to anarchy. The second great act of the founding, the making of the Constitution, was a conservative act which made the creation of a republic possible. The creation of the Constitution had two great objects in view, the prevention of the tyranny of the majority and the dispersion of centralized power. The framers of the Constitution achieved these objectives not through the enunciation of any new principles but by compromising contending tendencies and forces. The structure of the Constitution was like the structure of a medieval cathedral in which counter-vailing forces were employed in such a way as to hold the whole structure aloft. None of the great questions were resolved: states rights, federal power, the tariff, slavery. American federalism, which Acton reckoned one of the great inventions of the age, was based upon compromise rather than principle. From the beginning this structure of republican liberty threatened to collapse. In spite of their great achievement, Acton viewed the work of the founders as incomplete and the Constitution as an imperfect instrument.

It is my considered judgment that Acton was the most knowledgeable foreign observer of American affairs in the nineteenth century. As a very young man he had made a trip to the United States and had traveled widely, but the mature Acton's knowledge of America was based upon books rather than direct personal experience. No American, with the exception of Henry Adams who was nearly his exact contemporary, knew American history more thoroughly than Acton. It is a pity that American historians so rarely read him.

They do not read him, I am convinced, because Acton espoused the Confederate cause in the Civil War, a struggle which Acton called "the Second American Revolution." In May of 1861 Acton published an enormously long essay in his journal, The Rambler, entitled, "Political Causes of the American Revolution." The "American Revolution" is Acton's designation for the Civil War. William Gladstone, later British prime minister, read Acton's essay and it became the most determinative element in Gladstone's thought toward the warring American States. Had not Charles Francis Adams, the father of Henry Adams and U.S. Ambassador to the court of St. James, exerted his diplomatic talents to the utmost, Gladstone would probably have secured British intervention on the Confederate behalf.

Acton's reasons for his pro-Southern stance were well taken. In 1860 the great federative polities of Europe and North America were all under attack. Nationalism, centralization and bureaucratic administration were dissolving and destroying the Germanic Confederation, the Austrian Empire, the patchwork of Italian states and the United States of America. For Acton the retreat from states' rights and federalism in the United States was the most important and catastrophic of these developments.

In a letter to Robert E. Lee written in November of 1866 after the surrender at Appomattox, Acton states clearly his reasons for his sympathy for the Southern cause. He wrote the defeated Lee:

Let there be no mistake about it, Acton was no defender or partisan of the institution of slavery. He abominated it as the very antithesis of the freedom which he saw as the supreme value of historical development and the very work of Providence. Still, Acton was no Northern abolitionist and he saw slavery in the context of historical, religious and ethical development; an institution rooted in the ideas and circumstances of a particular era in time. It strikes one as odd that Acton, who was an ethical absolutist, should, in the case of slavery, have been a moral relativist.

Perhaps Acton's attitudes were the consequence of a hierarchy of values in which absolute freedom is the end and final value contingent upon the possession of other values. Clearly the threat to freedom from centralized governmental absolutism, the tyranny of the majority, bureaucratic administration, democracy and socialism were all greater in Acton's estimate than the threat to freedom from slavery in 1860. It is only in this light that Acton's ambivalent attitudes toward slavery in the Southern States of the United States can be explained. That Acton shared this view with many others in Europe and America should not come as a surprise to us.

Was Acton mistaken? Were his political fears like his religious fears in the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870 exaggerated and groundless? The victory of centralization, governmental absolutism, the tyranny of the majority and bureaucracy were less complete in 1865 than Acton imagined they would be. Still, they remain the great threat to freedom in our own day and they have grown in importance and power since Acton's day. Statism is no less inimical to freedom than are democracy and socialism. We should not delude ourselves that because socialism has been defeated the enemies of freedom have been routed. In these matters Acton's concerns must prove to be our concerns.

In this brief discussion I have attempted to demonstrate that Lord Acton's fascination with the United States provides us with an insight into Acton's ethical and political philosophy. His concern with America was not one concern among many in a wide-ranging and expansive intellectual natural law and discerned by conscience. He believed this law higher than the power of churches or states and he taught that the Providence of God progressively enlarges human freedom and the ability to perform those acts which conscience dictates. These are the essential concerns of any Republican regime, our own included.

In 1889 in a review of James, Lord Bryce's The American Commonwealth in the English Historical Review, Acton summed up the American accomplishment:

Stephen Tonsor is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Tradition and Reform in Education(Open Court, 1974) and has published essays and reviews in such publications as Victorian Studies, Journal of Modern History, The Catholic Historical Review, Modern Age, and The Review of Politics.