Reflective Wanderer

  Feudalism was a social and political system that arose principally in the wake of the fall of Rome. It provided structure and stability for a millennium across Europe, taking many different forms but binding families and tying them together for protection and economic advancement with a distinct sense of place and class roles. With the growing power of the central monarch, which exploded during the Renaissance, and the religious disorientation resulting from the Protestant Reformation, the old localized feudal system broke down, making its last stand in the English Civil War against the tyranny of Charles I. This system of feudalism found its way, albeit in a softer form, into colonial America but was lost in the Northern States by its rapid industrialization. In the antebellum South, the old feudal practices can best be seen in the new world; it was during the War Between the States and subsequent reconstruction that the last stand of the old feudal spirit received its death wound.

  In medieval England, as with much of Europe, a system arose known today as feudalism. According to historian Will Durant, it cannot be rigidly defined because many variations, across time and place, existed. Properly speaking, “Feudalism was a system in which people were given land and protection by people of higher rank and worked and fought for them in return.” (Collins Dictionary). With the fall of Rome, the centrality of the ancient world was in ruins. Raiding and pillaging Barbarians posed threats to local inhabitants, and the transportation of goods was much less possible. This forced local people to band together, living with self-government and self-sufficiency. Local monasteries played into this as well. They provided education, centrality, and, in the early years, medical care and food. The pattern of later fiefs can be seen in the communal system of early monasteries with their local governments (they did not come under the direct control of the pope until the 12th century), self-sufficiency, and ordered life. In time, these naturally growing systems picked up the pieces of government and culture and created the Middle Ages. As Dr. Rushdoony observed, “the unity of most of Europe under Roman rule gave way to a process of decentralization, which we now call feudalism.” (A Christian Survey of World History, Rushdoony). In time, this produced some rigid customs where the lord owned the lands, and peasants were given land in exchange for working the lord’s lands and paying certain taxes. A warrior class, which the lord paid, was amassed to protect the lands and be at the king’s disposal. Add to this a yeoman peasantry (those who owned or rented their lands), the priests, the local craftsmen (typically attached to a feudal manor), and a small group of tradesmen, and those were the basic classes of Western civilization. There was very little upward mobility, which provided excellent stability. Work stayed within and close to the family, and a sense of localism prevented centralized tyrants. As Durant mentions, most medieval kings were seen as little more than first among equals with their lords. It is folly to ascribe to this epoch an idyllic gloss; times were very tough for many due to famine, unjust lords, or high mortality rates. It is, however, equally foolish to presume that the peasants were beaten and mistreated and that darkness and ignorance reigned. On the contrary, according to Durant, many of the conditions favored the serfs, and despite his dirt and roughness, he was not an “oppressed and beaten man, but a strong and patient hero of the plow.” He received many holidays from the church, beer and sports were common, and the taxes the serf was required to pay were “probably…a smaller proportion to his income than…our(s)…today.” (The Age of Faith, Durant). Many advances in architecture and literature took place, from the cathedral to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was, on the whole, a time of great stability, despite its many local wars. This was due in large part to its well-defined economic work and the interdependent relations between classes; nine-tenths of the economy was based on agriculture, and a sense of local place and family heritage prevailed.

  With the thirteenth-century crusades, power shifted from the feudal lord to the professional warrior. More routes were opened, and trade increased. The rise of the city-state consolidated power in the court as opposed to the local hamlets. In the Renaissance, the ideal of the divine right of kings arose, as can be seen in the sixteenth-century text, The Prince by Machiavelli. The seventeenth-century Wars of Religion that ravaged Europe did much to unify central power and destroyed much of the European countryside. The Reformation of the Church, though much needed, caused division and made a once unifying thing—the church—into a ploy for greater disunity.

  With the rise of centralized power, tyranny increased, causing peasant revolts across Europe as taxes rose. The Burecreate state, beginning with Louis XIV, grew greatly. The Industrial Revolution, which began about 1750, was the death knell to the old, agricultural-based systems of the past. Families flocked to the cities to work in the factories. This divorced industry from home; it also created low-skilled laborers with no means of production under their control. A no longer needed landed class was then in the crosshairs for revolutionaries, as can be seen in the bloody French Revolution. Good things resulted as well; necessities were cheaply mass-produced, and greater education was a boon to mankind, yet the price was high, arguably too high. The last stand for localized government, as opposed to the great, centralized powers growing in Europe, can be seen in the English Civil War, at the end of which the king lost his head to the parliamentary forces, but the power of the king was restored with Charles the II. The American Civil War can be seen as part two of the English version. A centralized power seeking to rule the localized governmental structures of free Englishmen and later of the Independent American States. Stonewall Jackson, the great Confederate general, was even commonly referred to as “the Cromwell of the South.”

  The covenantal character of early America was implanted from the old world. From the Mayflower Compact of 1696, the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and the United States Constitution, or the Articles of Confederation in the South, there has been a long tradition of local self-government, with limited central powers and the countries having mostly independent, local sovereignty. This was akin to the limited central powers of the king and the local powers of the nobility, not in the Hobbesian tradition of a strong central power. In terms of class distinctions, a North/South divide slowly began to grow. As historian Paul Johnson writes, “The New England North has an all-class, mobile, and fluctuating society, with an irresistible upward movement pushed by an ethic of hard work… In the South, there is, by contrast, a gentry-leisure class with hereditary longings.” (A History of the American People, Johnson). According to Southern cultural historian Richard Weaver, “the type of society it (the South) was patterned on was an order then declining in Europe.” (Southern Traditions at Bay, Weaver). As Weaver notes, the number of plantations was never great, but the structure of the entire Southern world was mirrored upon them. The typical plantation was a little cosmos, giving coherence to the whole community. This produced a strong attachment to a man’s particular land and class stability built on ancestry. It was a much softer form of feudalism than in Merry Old England, but still, an agricultural-based, strong class structure existed, with the large holding landed gentleman at the top, the masses of the small holding, independent, landed “yeomen” in the middle, and at the bottom the indentured servants and slaves. One of the strengths of this system was the interdependence of partnerships between classes, which was severely lacking in the major centers of industrial work. The one great weakness and fatal flaw was its use of racial slavery. However, its deep-seated traditions and land-based economy produced a beautiful culture. The antebellum South was, in Weaver’s words, “the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world.” Both the North and South received their medieval birthright to local government, but the South, by and large, also retained more of the class- and feudal land-based systems found across Europe in the Middle Ages. In time, the North would forsake the sovereignty of the local states and counties by giving more central powers to the federal government, sparking the Civil War.

  The last struggle and death wound of the Old South was fought on the battlefields of the War Between the States and the subsequent Reconstruction of Southern society. As Weaver notes, “‘Union” and “Abolition” were political cries, innocent-seeming, but the policies they entailed meant political centralization, a parallel to the destruction of feudalism; the ending of fixed relationships, a parallel to the French Revolution; and the substitution of pecuniary standards of conduct for the old code of chivalry, a parallel to the rise of industrialism and the money economy in Europe.” The debate centered on the state’s rights to determine if they were to be slave-owning or not, which would be a blow to the Southern economy. The political sovereignty of the central powers versus local states’ rights was at stake. The succession of the South, which was never recognized by Abraham Lincoln, flew in the face of the greater demand for centralized powers by Northern industrialism. Hence the bloody Civil War. Positively, the injustice of racially based slavery was destroyed, but at the cost of thousands of lives and the Southern way of life. Was this a price worth paying? The stain of racial slavery needed to be done away with, and yet, a more gradual and nonviolent abolition might have enabled the Old South to continue, albeit on a modified premise. According to Durant, slavery mostly disappeared during the early Middle Ages because the symbiotic nature of lord and serf was more economically satisfactory. If some similar form had been allowed to develop in the South, war and destruction might have been avoided. The Civil War was a struggle for an older, decentralized, class-based way of life against the fast-paced, federalist, and post-industrial individualism. With the death of the South at Appomattox and the radical measures of Reconstructionists to control the South by petty Northern politicians, this way of life disappeared from the Western world.

  From the fall of Rome to the destruction of the agrarian antebellum South, a system of locally based business and government existed in various forms and with numerous strengths and weaknesses. With various social roles well defined, an emphasis on the land, and the old chivalry codes of honor and family heraldry, came a relatively stable, traditionalist culture. It is not fair to place all the shortcomings of the modern era on the fall of this traditional system; the heart of man is ever prone to baseness, but it is equally unjust to vilify this past to justify the present way of life; there is much to be gleaned from and admired in it.

(Property of Whitefield College)