the exciting atmosphere of the “romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment,” the comparatively freewheeling nature of German intellectual debate, and the prominent role that scholars enjoyed in German public life at that time—but also for the financial inducements they offered and their relative profligacy with degrees. French universities required nine years of study with annual examinations. In Germany, however, matriculation was “a formality” and a student could return to the United States with a doctorate after studying for just two years and producing a brief thesis.35 In 1871, Burgess set off on the latter path, deepening his immersion in German idealism and social thought with courses in philosophy, political science, public law, and ethnology at the Universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Berlin.
During the course of his studies, Burgess observed firsthand both the return of the victorious imperial troops to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War and the ouster of President Adolphe Thiers that brought the conservative Patrice de Mac-Mahon into power in France. Burgess considered these political experiences to have been as educational as his studies. He thrilled to see “the power of the new Germany make its triumphal entrance into the new imperial capital” and felt privileged to have “practically [seen] the German Empire constructed, both militarily and civilly.”36 Moreover, despite some initial republican concern that France might be on course for a return to the monarchy, he soon saw that Mac-Mahon’s ascension “signified, happily for France … that the radical tendencies of the Revolution had been checked and that the Republic had been saved from threatened anarchy.”37
Burgess’s European sojourn lasted two years, after which he returned to the United States determined that the life’s mission he had glimpsed during “that awful winter’s night” in 1863 would be furthered by implementing German-style advanced academic training at home.38 A first attempt at Amherst College was rebuffed by the administration. Columbia offered better, if still not glowing, prospects. He found the place “a small old-fashioned college” and the student body mainly “rich loafers.”39 If the college itself was slight and old-fashioned, its law school, where Burgess also had an appointment, was “technical” with a “stiff, required course of study” useful only for “imparting a knowledge of existing law.”40 Columbia’s trustees, however, held the “promise of the future,” and allies on the board warmed to his vision of a school “for developing and improving the law as a science.”41 With their help, and after four years of strenuous politicking, the school was finally established in 1880.
Ultimately assuming a deanship, Burgess oversaw the institution of many now-typical aspects of modern PhD programs, including distinct academic departments and the predominance of the seminar.42 More important for present purposes, he created the conditions for an academic discipline of politics in the United States, supplying it with an institutional home and exemplary form, a “core” intellectual framework and standard of rigor, and a cohort of American-trained scholars qualified to teach it at the college and graduate levels.43
In many ways, then, the study of politics as it took shape in the university setting in the United States was an explicit attempt to meet the challenges of the Gilded Age with better ideas and a wider perspective than those that had seemingly failed antebellum America so spectacularly. Burgess, his colleagues, and his students were particularly focused on understanding the causes of the Civil War and the lessons of its aftermath. At a deeper level, avoiding the mistakes of previous generations appeared to require new answers to the urgent questions the conflict had raised: What binds a nation? Where does sovereignty lie? What does it mean to be self-governing? What are the limits of self-government?
Several things seemed clear: No fictitious social contract was capable of creating a solidary national community, and rights claims could be profoundly dangerous when asserted by parts against the whole of society. Moreover, grand statements of human equality and rights in the Declaration of Independence and abolitionist doctrine, however noble in the abstract, were not objective descriptions of reality but rather exemplified the sort of a priori reasoning and “mystical enthusiasm” that the late nineteenth century could ill afford.44 These articles of an earlier political faith needed to be tempered by a sober appreciation, based in historical experience and scientific advance, of the source and limits of rights, and of how human difference shaped historical development and political life.
It was an article of scientific consensus at the time that one way human difference mattered was in determining who could thrive in which parts of the world. Indeed, what Robert Vitalis has called the “first law of international relations theory” was the conviction, popularized in the antebellum period by Robert Knox’s The Races of Men, that whites could thrive only in temperate zones, and blacks only in the tropics.45 Gilded Age students of American history and politics placed this law, in Bryce’s phrase, “at the bottom” of the Civil War. Bryce, for example, saw the importation of slaves as a natural response to the fact that Southern winters were “cool enough to be reinvigorative, and to enable a race drawn from Northern Europe to thrive and multiply,” but the summers were “too hot for such a race.” Unfortunately, the “industrial and social conditions that were due to climate” had set up an irresoluble conflict with the North.46
Burgess held that American slavery had come to the North as one of many “social customs,” based originally on the “firmly and universally established opinion of the time.” However, like Bryce, he subscribed to the theory that the “chief causes” of its eventual concentration in the South and the sectional conflict that followed lay in the interplay of geography and biology. Slave labor was unproductive in the North, where it was “too cold for [negroes] to thrive” and where difficult farming conditions “required a great deal … of intelligence, thrift, and industry in the laborer.” The southern colonies, on the contrary, had “vast, level areas of good soil,” “warm, uniform climate,” and “simple crops.” These provided “conditions favorable to the employment of negro labor” and ultimately to the development of a society and an economy fatally incompatible with the northern system.47
Slavery had not been an unqualified error, however. Because Africans were “proof against” the malaria and hot climate that debilitated whites in the tropics, slave labor had in fact been necessary for the United States to realize its “manifest destiny.” As Burgess wrote in the second of a three-volume American history,
It is not easy to see how the rich-swamp lands of [the southern and southeastern] colonies could ever have been reclaimed and made tributary to the civilization of the world in any way but by the employment of negro labor. And it is not easier to see how the negro could then have been brought to do this great work save through slavery to the white race … under the direction of the superior intelligence of the white race, to the realization of objects determined by that superior intelligence…. And the pure negro would not at that period of his development labor voluntarily.
As Burgess saw it, slavery had served a useful dialectical function on the level of consciousness, as well. The “excessive nationalism” of the slave system called forth abolition, which, however misguided in his view, contained progressive elements that helped to shake the country out of its philosophical impasse.48
For Burgess, then, the problem was not simply the fact of slavery, or even that race and geography had combined to unleash dynamics that culminated in inevitable conflict. It was that natural rights theory had been inadequate to illuminate and direct those dynamics, with disastrous consequences. The correct course would have been for North and South to come together around a common understanding that, by the mid-nineteenth century, “the time had come for a modification of the existing form of negro slavery in the South.”49 However, because abolitionists clung to their abstract ideals, and Southern slaveholders to their material self-interest, progress had come too drastically and at far too high a price.
For Burgess, Reconstruction further showed that the Civil War had not broken the hold of misguided ideals or base materialism among those who controlled the nation’s destiny. Just as the fiction of a social contract had provided a rationale for secession, the fanatical passion of abolitionists for an (in Burgess’s mind) illusory ideal of equality had led the Republican Party to its “great mistake” of